Showing posts with label attraction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label attraction. Show all posts
Friday, 26 March 2021
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
Love Jihad - 'Attractive jihadists can lure UK girls to extremism'
Ref BBC 3 March 2015
Ayesha - a false name to protect her identity - told BBC Newsnight she was taught to see the UK as "our enemy".
She now rejects that ideology, but said her ex-allies would regard the militant known as "Jihadi John" as an "idol".
Three schoolgirls recently left the UK, apparently to join militants in Syria - leading to questions over why British girls would make that choice.
Ayesha, from the Midlands, is now in her early 20s and said she was first contacted by extremists when she was a student aged 16 or 17.
She said a man sent her a Facebook message saying she was "very attractive" and telling her: "Now's the time to cover that beauty because you're so precious."
Ayesha said the message was "bordering on harassment" but it was the "best way I could have been targeted" because it played on her religious beliefs and told her she would "end up in hell" if she did not obey.
'Exciting'
And she said there was glamour as well as fear in what she saw.
"As a teenager I wanted to get my piece of eye candy and I'd take a good look, and all the YouTube videos, for some reason, they [the militants] were all really, really attractive.
"It was glamorous in the sense it was like 'oh wow, I can get someone who practises the same religion as me, who's not necessarily from my ethnicity and that's exciting'."
Ayesha was attracted by groups including Somalian militants al-Shabab
She added: "It was like, get with him before he dies.
"And then when he dies as a martyr you'll join him in heaven."
Ayesha was radicalised before the rise of Islamic State (IS), which has taken control of parts of Iraq and Syria, and was attracted by al-Qaeda and al-Shabab.
'Don't trust Britain'
"In some of the sermons we were encouraged that we shouldn't identify ourselves as British," she said.
Ayesha said she was told to view Britain as a "kuffar [non-Muslim] nation" that had killed many Muslims and was "our enemy".
"You don't trust the state, you don't trust the police, you don't send your children to state schools," she said.
She said she was told to view British women as "disgusting" and "practically like men".
But Ayesha said she eventually rejected these ideas.
She said the two main things which drove her away from the ideology was that it did "no justice to women" and it said followers "have to go and kill someone that's non-Muslim".
Ayesha said her old associates would praise Mohammed Emwazi - known as "Jihadi John" - the British IS militant who has apparently featured in videos showing the beheading of several Western hostages.
"They'd definitely consider him a role model," she said.
"He is someone they would be really proud of."
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Not Every Adulterer is a Villain
Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain
A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.
No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.
"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."
Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.
A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.
The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.
Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.
Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.
With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.
These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.
Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.
As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.
A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.
No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.
"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."
Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.
A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.
The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.
Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.
Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.
With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.
These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.
Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.
As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.
Monday, 29 March 2010
Higher callings, base desires
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
The custodians of impossible morality turn into monstrous predators
The idea for this column comes today from a young man called Taher. He emails me often, asking for advice, commenting on what I have written and sometimes just to kick around thoughts. He is an American whose father hails from Pakistan and whose mum is Afghani, "one of those beautiful, green-eyed mountain people", he says. They divorced soon after moving to Ohio. His father told Taher it was his mother's fault, because too many people stared at her irresistible face, a face that aroused evil desires.
Taher, who is 24, wants to be a writer and is starting that long journey. His first novel is going to be about just such a woman, born too lovely and seen as witchy by conservative Afghani émigrés living in small-town America. And her son, abused by the local imam. It happened to Taher when he was 10.
Taher and I have been discussing the child sexual abuse within the Catholic church worldwide and complicit priests and popes. What paedophile priests have done to children - especially young boys, most of all vulnerable young boys - is horrifying. Far worse though is the cover-up, which appears to have been organised at the Vatican, at the HQ. The top brass ensured their reputation was kept clean. Suffocating silence was thrown over the dirty quilt.
The Catholic hierarchy seeks to monitor and completely control the sexual behaviour of their flocks - banning condoms, abortion, pleasure, damning those who refuse to obey. Millions of believers ignore the injunctions, but millions do not. That power is then abused, as we have seen. More is sure to tumble out in the weeks to come.
But Taher is interested in bigger questions: "Do you not think there are some similarities between 'true' Catholics and 'true' Muslims? Both have leaders who are obsessed with how dangerous sex is and both have really sick attitudes. If they could go easy and just accept sex is part of human life it would be better for them and the rest of us."
A number of Muslim bloggers have started up similar debates since the recent Catholic scandals broke. One asks: "Could it be that Muslims are more sexually repressed than members of other faiths? I guess it is a close call between us and Catholics." Several young Muslim women and men have also contacted me alleging sexual abuse by imams and mullahs.
These two world faiths have more rules, regulations, thought and behaviour police when it comes to carnal relations than any other. Catholicism casts human sensuality as Satanic, injects an overdose of guilt to kill pleasure and within its clergy imposes celibacy, a restriction that is clearly impossible for many men of that God. The custodians of impossible morality so turn into monstrous predators.
Strict Sunni and Shia Muslims also fear sexuality and try to contain it with ever increasing fervour. Young women must cover up completely; girls too are temptresses and so are made to wear scarves, cloaks and gloves. Young men must wait until marriage with a good Muslim woman before they can have sex. All else is haram - wicked, a sin. So consumed are some Muslims with this mission to tame the sexual drive that they live in a distorted universe, a swamp of imagined wickedness and some, like the Catholic priests, end up doing terrible things.
I have interviewed too many such Muslim men who find modern relationships between the sexes only corrupt and filthy. Abdullah, a prisoner who is doing time for raping his niece, tells me that veils cannot hide a woman's breasts and buttocks. He can see right through them which is why, in his view, women should not be in the public space, ever. He can't pray, he says, because provocative females have rotted his brain and heart.
The Catholic priests who raped children from their congregations would understand Abdullah's behaviour and excuses perfectly. Those who see sex as gross and immoral, perhaps more easily use sex as an instrument of violation. Other, less dramatic effects of sexual paranoia are just as worrying. Since the spread of Saudi religious fundamentalism, devout Muslims have been brainwashed into thinking Islam is mainly concerned about the avoidance of lust and the struggle to find high decorum. Their faith has got distorted and become fearful.
From west to east, millions have sex on their minds day and night and they cannot find the tranquillity for prayer and connection with God and spirituality. Theirs is one long torturous battle against the natural self. So too, I imagine, for the vast numbers of Catholic priests whose celibacy was a sham. Did they punish their victims for their own failures to connect with the divine?
Child abusers are found among people of all religions and none. Religious and cultural communities and ordinary neighbourhoods collectively hide abuse and abusers because that is preferable to the stench of a scandal. When the Sikh British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote a play about sexual violence in a temple, Sikh protesters stopped the performances. They didn't want to be reminded of what goes on in holy places. In my recent memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, I described how a widower in the 1960s touched up women when they bent over to find their shoes after prayers. They said the "dirty cockroach" had deflowered his own daughters. Nobody did anything. Instead, when he died they cleaned up his story and prayed for his soul. No bridegrooms were found for the "used" girls. In mosques and Islamic organisations, this still goes on and is veiled in utmost secrecy.
The abuse of young people in any religious setting is an intolerable betrayal of trust and divinity. But some religions seem more susceptible than others. Substantial numbers of Catholics and Wahabi Muslims are excessively fervent, seriously sanctimonious and phobic about the human body. Is it possible this lethal combination encourages illicit, forced sex with children? Should we be looking to save these souls before they wreck more bodies? I am only posing questions not casting aspersions. Not allowed. Blasphemy, they will cry. These enquiries will be buried under a pile of righteous outrage. Until the next time and the next.
Taher, who is 24, wants to be a writer and is starting that long journey. His first novel is going to be about just such a woman, born too lovely and seen as witchy by conservative Afghani émigrés living in small-town America. And her son, abused by the local imam. It happened to Taher when he was 10.
Taher and I have been discussing the child sexual abuse within the Catholic church worldwide and complicit priests and popes. What paedophile priests have done to children - especially young boys, most of all vulnerable young boys - is horrifying. Far worse though is the cover-up, which appears to have been organised at the Vatican, at the HQ. The top brass ensured their reputation was kept clean. Suffocating silence was thrown over the dirty quilt.
The Catholic hierarchy seeks to monitor and completely control the sexual behaviour of their flocks - banning condoms, abortion, pleasure, damning those who refuse to obey. Millions of believers ignore the injunctions, but millions do not. That power is then abused, as we have seen. More is sure to tumble out in the weeks to come.
But Taher is interested in bigger questions: "Do you not think there are some similarities between 'true' Catholics and 'true' Muslims? Both have leaders who are obsessed with how dangerous sex is and both have really sick attitudes. If they could go easy and just accept sex is part of human life it would be better for them and the rest of us."
A number of Muslim bloggers have started up similar debates since the recent Catholic scandals broke. One asks: "Could it be that Muslims are more sexually repressed than members of other faiths? I guess it is a close call between us and Catholics." Several young Muslim women and men have also contacted me alleging sexual abuse by imams and mullahs.
These two world faiths have more rules, regulations, thought and behaviour police when it comes to carnal relations than any other. Catholicism casts human sensuality as Satanic, injects an overdose of guilt to kill pleasure and within its clergy imposes celibacy, a restriction that is clearly impossible for many men of that God. The custodians of impossible morality so turn into monstrous predators.
Strict Sunni and Shia Muslims also fear sexuality and try to contain it with ever increasing fervour. Young women must cover up completely; girls too are temptresses and so are made to wear scarves, cloaks and gloves. Young men must wait until marriage with a good Muslim woman before they can have sex. All else is haram - wicked, a sin. So consumed are some Muslims with this mission to tame the sexual drive that they live in a distorted universe, a swamp of imagined wickedness and some, like the Catholic priests, end up doing terrible things.
I have interviewed too many such Muslim men who find modern relationships between the sexes only corrupt and filthy. Abdullah, a prisoner who is doing time for raping his niece, tells me that veils cannot hide a woman's breasts and buttocks. He can see right through them which is why, in his view, women should not be in the public space, ever. He can't pray, he says, because provocative females have rotted his brain and heart.
The Catholic priests who raped children from their congregations would understand Abdullah's behaviour and excuses perfectly. Those who see sex as gross and immoral, perhaps more easily use sex as an instrument of violation. Other, less dramatic effects of sexual paranoia are just as worrying. Since the spread of Saudi religious fundamentalism, devout Muslims have been brainwashed into thinking Islam is mainly concerned about the avoidance of lust and the struggle to find high decorum. Their faith has got distorted and become fearful.
From west to east, millions have sex on their minds day and night and they cannot find the tranquillity for prayer and connection with God and spirituality. Theirs is one long torturous battle against the natural self. So too, I imagine, for the vast numbers of Catholic priests whose celibacy was a sham. Did they punish their victims for their own failures to connect with the divine?
Child abusers are found among people of all religions and none. Religious and cultural communities and ordinary neighbourhoods collectively hide abuse and abusers because that is preferable to the stench of a scandal. When the Sikh British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote a play about sexual violence in a temple, Sikh protesters stopped the performances. They didn't want to be reminded of what goes on in holy places. In my recent memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, I described how a widower in the 1960s touched up women when they bent over to find their shoes after prayers. They said the "dirty cockroach" had deflowered his own daughters. Nobody did anything. Instead, when he died they cleaned up his story and prayed for his soul. No bridegrooms were found for the "used" girls. In mosques and Islamic organisations, this still goes on and is veiled in utmost secrecy.
The abuse of young people in any religious setting is an intolerable betrayal of trust and divinity. But some religions seem more susceptible than others. Substantial numbers of Catholics and Wahabi Muslims are excessively fervent, seriously sanctimonious and phobic about the human body. Is it possible this lethal combination encourages illicit, forced sex with children? Should we be looking to save these souls before they wreck more bodies? I am only posing questions not casting aspersions. Not allowed. Blasphemy, they will cry. These enquiries will be buried under a pile of righteous outrage. Until the next time and the next.
Do you have a story that started on Hotmail? Tell us now
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Un-Indian idol
Kapil Dev bowled fast at a time when his country didn't produce fast bowlers; his spirit lives on through the style and aggression of modern Indian teams
Gideon Haigh
May 30, 2009
'The liveliest and least imitable action of all' © Getty Images
In 1982 Scyld Berry, the very excellent cricket correspondent of the Observer who has lately become the editor of Wisden, published a fine book on England's recent tour of the subcontinent, entitled Cricket Wallah. No English writer to that point had studied India with such clarity, sympathy, or indeed rosy prophecy, for he far-sightedly concluded that the country would become "the capital of cricket": demography, he believed, was destiny.
In one judgment alone was Cricket Wallah amiss. On the basis of the tour's two one-day internationals, Berry thought that limited-overs cricket held "no great attraction" in India. Batsmen were still technically correct, and spin bowling endured, "integral, not an adjunct" to the game, for it "suited the rhythms of Indian life". In fact, he had just watched the cricketer who, more than any other, would challenge both those appealing preconceptions.
Two-hundred and seventeen of Kapil Dev's 432 Test wickets were taken in the heat and dust of India by uncompromising toil; he brought a gaiety to batting in a team that sometimes seemed unaware that Tests were no longer timeless. Above all, by leading India to the World Cup of 1983, he turned his country's cricket priorities on their head - and all this from most inauspicious beginnings.
"There are no fast bowlers in India," 15-year-old Kapil was told when he complained about the short rations at lunch at a training camp at Brabourne Stadium in 1974. The judgment was hurtful, but not unfounded. In the last Test India had played at home, for example, the new ball had been taken by Eknath Solkar (two overs) and Sunil Gavaskar (one over), then surrendered to the slow-bowling wiles of Bedi, Chandra and Prasanna. It had not, however, been ever thus. Peer back to pre-war, pre-partition India, and the country's opening attack was probably superior to Australia's. The likes of Tim Wall and Ernie McCormick had nothing to teach Mohammed Nissar and Amar Singh, except that Nissar's best years were swallowed by World War II, while Amar succumbed to pneumonia aged 30.
A "feeling of loss" pervaded Indian cricket in their wake, according to its historian Mihir Bose, which intensified over the next 40 years whenever the country's batsmen crossed paths with bowling of real pace. Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller made them suffer in Australia, Fred Trueman lorded it over them in England, and Charlie Griffiths nearly killed Nari Contractor in Barbados. Most ignominiously Clive Lloyd's pacemen set about Bedi's batsmen like sadistic thugs in a dark alley at Sabina Park in April 1976.
By that stage Kapil had been a first-class cricketer for one season, without much encouragement. In his second game for Haryana, versus Delhi, he played against Bedi, who was selling one of his Gray-Nicolls bats, and had set a reserve on it of Rs 500. With help from his friend Ashok Malhotra, Kapil scraped together Rs 475, but there were no discounts, and no gimmes either: his first tour, to Pakistan, was played on pitches apparently prepared for the diplomatic parity of drawn Tests.
From the first, nonetheless, Kapil upset cricket's prior balances of power. In Spin and Other Turns, Ramchandra Guha describes the first morning of Kapil's Test career, how in his second over the teenager sent a bouncer past the pentangle on Sadiq Mohammad's cap, "very likely the fastest delivery from an Indian bowler since independence". Sadiq's summon of a helmet was so unforeseen that it took some overs to arrive; as Guha notes: "It is a wonder there was one at the ground at all". When West Indies toured India soon after, they dished it out, as was their wont, but Kapil was no less hostile. Normally above the fray, Wisden described the Chepauk Test as "a bumper war" in which India "for once gave as good as they got". Bose believes it a hinge point in Indian cricket history.
Gavaskar, great as he was, could never rival the epic grandeur of a Viv Richards. Kapil, in an era of the international game uncommonly blessed with fast-bowling allrounders, more than held his own against them
Kapil altered also the Indian team's internal dynamics. The dominant presence in the country's cricket to that time had been Gavaskar, batting's classical sculptor: patient, implacable, self-sufficient, self-involved, peppery temper beneath a surface urbanity. Kapil provided a rival to national affection, and a new source of national self-definition. Gavaskar, great as he was, could never rival the epic grandeur of a Viv Richards. Kapil, in an era of the international game uncommonly blessed with fast-bowling allrounders, more than held his own against them.
Remember? Botham, Imran, Hadlee: all fierce rivals. You could imagine them in a western saloon. Botham would be the one chesting open the swing doors and shouting the bar, Imran the one comfortably encircled by comely belles in crinoline, Hadlee the one staring fixedly at his ice water. But that Injun, Kapil - he held aloof. He had the liveliest and least imitable action of all, a skipping, bounding run of gathering energy, and a delivery stride perfectly side-on but exploding at all angles, wrists uncoiling, arms elasticising, eyes afire. Which was part of his significance. No fast bowlers in India? Kapil could have hailed from no other country.
All that stood in the way of Kapil's bowling was his batting, full of generous arcs and fearful cleaves, signed with an exuberant pull shot that featured a chorus-line kick from his crossed front leg. At first, team-mates took Kapil's run-making more seriously than he did himself: he reached the first of eight Test hundreds in Delhi 30 years ago only because Syed Kirmani sacrificed himself, a cacophony of calls sending them to the same end.
He retained a sense of play and adventure into which even opponents sometimes entered. At the Gabba in December 1980, he launched Jeremy Coney over the roof of the Clem Jones Stand and into Stanley Street during an innings of 75 off 51 balls; the puckish New Zealander waved his white handkerchief like a flag of surrender.
Selectors were sterner, benching Kapil after the Delhi Test of December 1984, when he hit his second ball for six and his third down long-off's throat as India stumbled to defeat against England. But Kapil, for all that he accomplished, never really repented. He won the Lord's Test of June 1986 with three fours and a six off Phil Edmonds; he saved the follow-on there four years later with four consecutive sixes off Eddie Hemmings.
It was the year of the building of the Compton-Edrich Stand, and I happened to be amid a throng of ecstatic Indian supporters in temporary seating in front of it. I can still hear the glorious "thunk" of those straight drives, each faster and flatter than the last, into the building site behind us: they lent new meaning to the expression "hard-hat area".
Lord's was the venue, too, of that fabled match 26 years ago, after which Kapil could have retreated to an ashram but remained one of the most significant players who ever lived - all because of one catch. It came from the top edge of the bat of Viv Richards, then on course to be match-winner for the third consecutive World Cup final, and it looked suspiciously like providence.
'Has a more difficult catch been made to seem easier at a more critical moment in the annals of the game?' © PA Photos
Kapil had deposed Gavaskar as captain, in one of those Indian intrigues that outsiders find unintelligible, and led his country with expected spirit and unexpected smarts. Gavaskar, never a one-day natural, had had a wretched tournament, and been first to fall that day in India's ramshackle 183. West Indies in reply had charged to 50 for 1.
Now Madan Lal bowled a bouncer - a bouncer to Richards. What's Hindi for chutzpah? The crowd on the midwicket boundary began shrinking back; even Father Time ducked. In the event Richards miscued, but the ball would have fallen safe had any other fielder been stationed near the drop zone. As it was, Kapil Dev turned, ran back with the flight of the ball, loose stride eating up the distance, cast a split-second glance over his shoulder, and collected the descending ball in his fingertips - making even this look deliberate. Has a more difficult catch been made to seem easier at a more critical moment in the annals of the game?
India had won one game in two previous World Cups, against East Africa; now they won what remained their only global trophy until the Twenty20 World Championship 18 months ago. Both wins similarly tilted the cricket world off its axis. One-day cricket went forth and multiplied in the subcontinent, to the extent that the next Cup was held there four years later, just as Twenty20 did 24 years later, making India its social, cultural and financial fastness.
Kapil was part of that shift, too, shoulder to shoulder with Subhash Chandra's Indian Cricket League, while Gavaskar was firmly in the camp of the official Indian Premier League. Much else had transpired between times, but it was almost as though their unspoken rivalry had never quite ended. The ICL has floundered and the IPL prospered, so Gavaskar might consider his the last word; yet today's stylish, aggressive Indian stars, like MS Dhoni, Virender Sehwag, Ishant Sharma and Zaheer Khan, are more obviously Kapil's spiritual heirs.
Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer
Gideon Haigh
May 30, 2009
'The liveliest and least imitable action of all' © Getty Images
In 1982 Scyld Berry, the very excellent cricket correspondent of the Observer who has lately become the editor of Wisden, published a fine book on England's recent tour of the subcontinent, entitled Cricket Wallah. No English writer to that point had studied India with such clarity, sympathy, or indeed rosy prophecy, for he far-sightedly concluded that the country would become "the capital of cricket": demography, he believed, was destiny.
In one judgment alone was Cricket Wallah amiss. On the basis of the tour's two one-day internationals, Berry thought that limited-overs cricket held "no great attraction" in India. Batsmen were still technically correct, and spin bowling endured, "integral, not an adjunct" to the game, for it "suited the rhythms of Indian life". In fact, he had just watched the cricketer who, more than any other, would challenge both those appealing preconceptions.
Two-hundred and seventeen of Kapil Dev's 432 Test wickets were taken in the heat and dust of India by uncompromising toil; he brought a gaiety to batting in a team that sometimes seemed unaware that Tests were no longer timeless. Above all, by leading India to the World Cup of 1983, he turned his country's cricket priorities on their head - and all this from most inauspicious beginnings.
"There are no fast bowlers in India," 15-year-old Kapil was told when he complained about the short rations at lunch at a training camp at Brabourne Stadium in 1974. The judgment was hurtful, but not unfounded. In the last Test India had played at home, for example, the new ball had been taken by Eknath Solkar (two overs) and Sunil Gavaskar (one over), then surrendered to the slow-bowling wiles of Bedi, Chandra and Prasanna. It had not, however, been ever thus. Peer back to pre-war, pre-partition India, and the country's opening attack was probably superior to Australia's. The likes of Tim Wall and Ernie McCormick had nothing to teach Mohammed Nissar and Amar Singh, except that Nissar's best years were swallowed by World War II, while Amar succumbed to pneumonia aged 30.
A "feeling of loss" pervaded Indian cricket in their wake, according to its historian Mihir Bose, which intensified over the next 40 years whenever the country's batsmen crossed paths with bowling of real pace. Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller made them suffer in Australia, Fred Trueman lorded it over them in England, and Charlie Griffiths nearly killed Nari Contractor in Barbados. Most ignominiously Clive Lloyd's pacemen set about Bedi's batsmen like sadistic thugs in a dark alley at Sabina Park in April 1976.
By that stage Kapil had been a first-class cricketer for one season, without much encouragement. In his second game for Haryana, versus Delhi, he played against Bedi, who was selling one of his Gray-Nicolls bats, and had set a reserve on it of Rs 500. With help from his friend Ashok Malhotra, Kapil scraped together Rs 475, but there were no discounts, and no gimmes either: his first tour, to Pakistan, was played on pitches apparently prepared for the diplomatic parity of drawn Tests.
From the first, nonetheless, Kapil upset cricket's prior balances of power. In Spin and Other Turns, Ramchandra Guha describes the first morning of Kapil's Test career, how in his second over the teenager sent a bouncer past the pentangle on Sadiq Mohammad's cap, "very likely the fastest delivery from an Indian bowler since independence". Sadiq's summon of a helmet was so unforeseen that it took some overs to arrive; as Guha notes: "It is a wonder there was one at the ground at all". When West Indies toured India soon after, they dished it out, as was their wont, but Kapil was no less hostile. Normally above the fray, Wisden described the Chepauk Test as "a bumper war" in which India "for once gave as good as they got". Bose believes it a hinge point in Indian cricket history.
Gavaskar, great as he was, could never rival the epic grandeur of a Viv Richards. Kapil, in an era of the international game uncommonly blessed with fast-bowling allrounders, more than held his own against them
Kapil altered also the Indian team's internal dynamics. The dominant presence in the country's cricket to that time had been Gavaskar, batting's classical sculptor: patient, implacable, self-sufficient, self-involved, peppery temper beneath a surface urbanity. Kapil provided a rival to national affection, and a new source of national self-definition. Gavaskar, great as he was, could never rival the epic grandeur of a Viv Richards. Kapil, in an era of the international game uncommonly blessed with fast-bowling allrounders, more than held his own against them.
Remember? Botham, Imran, Hadlee: all fierce rivals. You could imagine them in a western saloon. Botham would be the one chesting open the swing doors and shouting the bar, Imran the one comfortably encircled by comely belles in crinoline, Hadlee the one staring fixedly at his ice water. But that Injun, Kapil - he held aloof. He had the liveliest and least imitable action of all, a skipping, bounding run of gathering energy, and a delivery stride perfectly side-on but exploding at all angles, wrists uncoiling, arms elasticising, eyes afire. Which was part of his significance. No fast bowlers in India? Kapil could have hailed from no other country.
All that stood in the way of Kapil's bowling was his batting, full of generous arcs and fearful cleaves, signed with an exuberant pull shot that featured a chorus-line kick from his crossed front leg. At first, team-mates took Kapil's run-making more seriously than he did himself: he reached the first of eight Test hundreds in Delhi 30 years ago only because Syed Kirmani sacrificed himself, a cacophony of calls sending them to the same end.
He retained a sense of play and adventure into which even opponents sometimes entered. At the Gabba in December 1980, he launched Jeremy Coney over the roof of the Clem Jones Stand and into Stanley Street during an innings of 75 off 51 balls; the puckish New Zealander waved his white handkerchief like a flag of surrender.
Selectors were sterner, benching Kapil after the Delhi Test of December 1984, when he hit his second ball for six and his third down long-off's throat as India stumbled to defeat against England. But Kapil, for all that he accomplished, never really repented. He won the Lord's Test of June 1986 with three fours and a six off Phil Edmonds; he saved the follow-on there four years later with four consecutive sixes off Eddie Hemmings.
It was the year of the building of the Compton-Edrich Stand, and I happened to be amid a throng of ecstatic Indian supporters in temporary seating in front of it. I can still hear the glorious "thunk" of those straight drives, each faster and flatter than the last, into the building site behind us: they lent new meaning to the expression "hard-hat area".
Lord's was the venue, too, of that fabled match 26 years ago, after which Kapil could have retreated to an ashram but remained one of the most significant players who ever lived - all because of one catch. It came from the top edge of the bat of Viv Richards, then on course to be match-winner for the third consecutive World Cup final, and it looked suspiciously like providence.
'Has a more difficult catch been made to seem easier at a more critical moment in the annals of the game?' © PA Photos
Kapil had deposed Gavaskar as captain, in one of those Indian intrigues that outsiders find unintelligible, and led his country with expected spirit and unexpected smarts. Gavaskar, never a one-day natural, had had a wretched tournament, and been first to fall that day in India's ramshackle 183. West Indies in reply had charged to 50 for 1.
Now Madan Lal bowled a bouncer - a bouncer to Richards. What's Hindi for chutzpah? The crowd on the midwicket boundary began shrinking back; even Father Time ducked. In the event Richards miscued, but the ball would have fallen safe had any other fielder been stationed near the drop zone. As it was, Kapil Dev turned, ran back with the flight of the ball, loose stride eating up the distance, cast a split-second glance over his shoulder, and collected the descending ball in his fingertips - making even this look deliberate. Has a more difficult catch been made to seem easier at a more critical moment in the annals of the game?
India had won one game in two previous World Cups, against East Africa; now they won what remained their only global trophy until the Twenty20 World Championship 18 months ago. Both wins similarly tilted the cricket world off its axis. One-day cricket went forth and multiplied in the subcontinent, to the extent that the next Cup was held there four years later, just as Twenty20 did 24 years later, making India its social, cultural and financial fastness.
Kapil was part of that shift, too, shoulder to shoulder with Subhash Chandra's Indian Cricket League, while Gavaskar was firmly in the camp of the official Indian Premier League. Much else had transpired between times, but it was almost as though their unspoken rivalry had never quite ended. The ICL has floundered and the IPL prospered, so Gavaskar might consider his the last word; yet today's stylish, aggressive Indian stars, like MS Dhoni, Virender Sehwag, Ishant Sharma and Zaheer Khan, are more obviously Kapil's spiritual heirs.
Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer
Monday, 30 March 2009
Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World
Noam Chomsky
Delivered at Harvard University, April 13, 1996
(transcription courtesy of William Greene)
For those who are interested in the real world, a look at the actual history suggests some adjustment -- a modification of free market theory, to what we might call "really existing free market theory." That is, the one that's actually applied, not talked about.
And the principle of really existing free market theory is: free markets are fine for you, but not for me. That's, again, near a universal. So you -- whoever you may be -- you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it's good for your character, it's tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I'll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I'm getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State. And also, this has to be risk-free. So I'm perfectly willing to make profits, but I don't want to take risks. If anything goes wrong, you bail me out.
So, if Third World debt gets out of control, you socialize it. It's not the problem of the banks that made the money. When the S&Ls collapse, you know, same thing. The public bails them out. When American investment firms get into trouble because the Mexican bubble bursts, you bail out Goldman Sachs. And -- the latest Mexico bail out, and on and on. I mean, there's case after case of this.
In fact of the leading -- top -- hundred leading transnationals in the Fortune list of transnationals -- there was a recent study of how they -- how they related to the States in which they- they're all somewhere, you know, so they're all mostly here -- in some National State, it turns out that all hundred of them had benefited from industrial policies, meaning, State intervention in their behalf. All hundred had benefited from the State in which they're based. And twenty of the hundred had been saved from total disaster, that is, collapse, by just State bail-out. When people talk about globalization of the economy, remember that the nanny State has to be very powerful in order to bail out the rich. And nothing is changing in that regard. Twenty out of a hundred, again, were saved from collapse by this, including a number here.
Well, that's really existing free market theory. There are many examples of it quite close to home. So, we could start with our own Governor, Governor Weld, who is described by the Boston Globe as a libertarian with a religious belief in free markets. And then a couple of days later, they reported that through various scams he had- his administration was able to sharply increase Federal subsidies to Massachusetts, so that- way beyond what they were before, so that he could parade as a fiscal conservative. And that's pretty common.
Just the year before, you may recall, if you have long memories, they had to close Georges Bank -- the richest fishing area in the world -- because it was being overfished, thanks to a combination of deregulation and subsidies to the fishing industry, which have that odd consequence that you tend to get overfishing. So it looked as if the ground fish were wiped out, and they had to close it off. It didn't take long for the religious libertarian fanatic, William Weld, to take the next jet plane down to Washington, hat in hand, asking for a Federal bail-out. They wanted the Federal government to declare it a natural disaster. And the reason was, as he explained, with, presumably, some scientists in tow, that there was some strange kind of predatory fish which no one had yet found, but they would find it, don't worry. So some kind of predatory fish had come and, sort of, wiped out all the, you know, the Cod and the Haddock, and all those things. So it was a natural disaster, and therefore the general public had to, sort of, pay off the results of deregulation and subsidizing the fishing industry. Well, that's the way to be a libertarian with religious fervor.
Another one is the leader of the conservative revolution, Newt Gingrich. Nobody is more passionate about the market than he is, in particular about what he -- his own district, which he calls a Norman Rockwell world of jet planes and fiber optics, as indeed it is. Except, if you ask where jet planes and fiber-optics came from, you discover that the public paid for them, and still pays for them. And in fact he manages to get more Federal subsidies for his district than any suburban county in the country outside the Federal system. So, you can have conservatism flowering among the malls, and so on.
Or you can go back to the Reaganites, who were also very passionate about free markets for everyone else. Meanwhile, they boasted to the American business community, correctly, that they had done more- that they had instituted more protection than any post-war American administration, in fact, more than all of them combined. They had doubled import restrictions, blocking- and helped -- and poured public funds into major industries to enable them to recapitalize, to protect the -- in fact reconstruct, the steel industry, and the automotive industry, and semiconductors, and so on, which would have disappeared if they had opened the markets.
The Thatcherites in England were about the same. Government expenditures relative to GNP stayed pretty constant, although, anything that went to the general population collapsed. Meanwhile, military industry shot up, arms sales were booming -- that's all publicly subsidized stuff -- arms sales to nice guys like Saddam Hussein, and General Suharto, and others.
Well, that's really existing free market theory.
What are the core policies?
Well, the Washington consensus -- which is basically designed for the Third World to make it that way, and keep it that way -- it's now being applied not just to the Third World countries, but to the rich industrial societies, with the United States and Britain in the lead. However, it's with a twist.
Since it's being applied at home, this is really existing free market theory that's being applied at home, meaning nuanced. So, powerful government to protect the rich, and market discipline and tough love for everyone else. And you see that very clearly. Go through the various elements of the Washington consensus.
The first one is to-about reducing government. Well, that's false. We're not reducing government, we're switching it -- shifting it around. So, social spending is indeed way down since the 1970s when this stuff started -- accelerated after 1980, but it was starting in the mid 70s. The -- kind of a benchmark example is AFDC, the main support system. That was cut virtually in half from about 1970 to 1990, with obvious effects on poor families and children, and so on. It was a part of a general war against women and children that was conducted by the conservatives under the name of "family values." It's interesting that they were able to get away with that. It tells you something about the intellectual culture.
Well one part was the reduction of AFDC from -- by roughly half from about 1970 to about 1990. It's now, essentially gone. That's- the purpose of that, as you know, is so that seven million- couple of million -- I think five or six million kids, average seven years old can learn responsibility. That's part of tough love.
Meanwhile, another part of the government has been very stable, and in fact is going up, namely, the Pentagon system, which remains at approximately Cold War levels. In fact it's higher now than it was under Nixon, although, you know, the big enemy has disappeared, which tells you exactly how much -- tells a rational person at least, exactly how much they were worried about the Russian threat. Not only does it remain at Cold War levels, but it's going up, under the initiative of the fiscal conservatives. The Heritage Foundation, which, you know, sort of a right-wing foundation that designs the budget for the Gingrich army, are calling for an increase in the Pentagon system, as is Gingrich, as indeed was Clinton. So that goes up.
And I should say that cutting of social spending- social spending is being cut very sharply, very much over public opposition. At the time of the 1994 Congressional election -- you know, the big landslide -- over 60% of the public wanted social spending to increase. Ok. It went very sharply down. What about the Pentagon spending going up? Well that's- the public is 6 to 1 opposed to that, which gives you some- one- it's one aspect of a big picture about what's happening to American democracy, and somewhat of a change, not a huge change.
The- so one part of the system is going up: Pentagon spending. Another part is going down: social spending.
And the same is true in other domains. Like, for example, legal aid for the poor is being slashed and virtually destroyed. On the other hand, the security system, the State -- government security system, State and Federal, that's going up. So, prisons are going way up. The prison population -- crime hasn't really -- hasn't changed for about twenty years, but -- and incidentally, U.S. crime rates are not off the spectrum, contrary to what a lot of people believe. Crime rates are sort of at -- toward the high end of the industrial world, but not off the spectrum, with one exception, namely, murder with guns. But that's a special feature of American society which doesn't have to do with crime rates. Apart from that, crime rates are kind of toward the high end, not going up.
The prison population tripled during the Regan years. It's going up even faster now. And I think the reason is another aspect of the Third World model, namely, the superfluous population. There is a big superfluous population -- they don't contribute to wealth protection. Well, we're civilized folks. We're not like the people that we fund in Colombia who go out and murder them. So, we throw them into jail. And that's going way up, even more. And there's also kind of like a side benefit to this. Putting more and more people in jail -- and in fact, under harsher and harsher conditions -- has an -- is a technique of social control for everybody else.
I mean when you're -- if you're -- you know, someday down the road if you decide to run a dictatorship, and you want to really harm people, it's kind of like Hitler in Germany or something, you know that you're going to carry out policies that are going to cause people a lot of harm, you've got to control them somehow. And there aren't many ways to do it. Everyone hits on the same ways. What you do is engender fear, and hatred, and you know, make them hate the guy who looks a little different, or whatever it may be, and then you punish those bad guys because they're really awful, and, you punish them really hard, and so on. And that makes people even more frightened. You can just see that happening right around you. And building up the perception of crime -- crime has a, like a, what they call in literary theory a subtext -- you're supposed to understand, "criminal" has the word -- little word "black" in front of it. Just like "welfare mother", you know "black"- "rich black welfare mother." And criminal means, you know, that black guy who's coming after you. So what you want to do is -- this has the dual effect of getting rid of the superfluous population -- basically unskilled workers -- close race/class correlation -- and also demonizing them, so everybody else is scared and frightened and they'll be willing to accept what's happening to them too, and not look at where the source is.
So that part of the -- that -- the drug war is basically for this, it has almost nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population, and scaring everybody else.
And so does the harshening of prison conditions. Which is really -- it's -- the United States is off the map on this. We're in violation of international conventions, constantly condemned in human rights forums, and getting much worse. The reinstitution of chain gangs was of course bitterly condemned. But you know, that's that bad South, Alabama. Well, it's now in Illinois. The State Senate of Illinois last -- a week or two ago legislated chain gangs -- not for violent criminals, incidentally -- for people who are found with drugs, or, you know, robbed a store, or something like that. The Chicago press pointed out that this carries a -- this is kind of reminiscent of slavery. But the legislator, the Senator -- State Senator who put it through said that this is just another aspect of what he called tough love. And then he explained that some people work better under humiliation. So it's really good to restore elements of slavery, and again, the subtext is everybody else gets scarred. You know, those guys have to walk around like slaves in chains, we must be in real danger, so therefore, we'll accept what's happening to us. That's the logic.
So prisons are going up and it's -- and that has a lot of side benefits apart from just getting rid of the superfluous population. It is a source of cheap labor. So, prison labor is going way up. Cheap labor, you don't have to worry about unions, no benefits, they don't get out of line. And that also, naturally, undercuts wages elsewhere. So what -- just like forcing welfare mothers to work -- you know, raising children isn't work, as anybody knows who's had children -- so you have to drive them to work. Kind of like people who go to, you know, Fidelity Investment to figure out scams about how to deal with the security market. You really want these people to work. But since there's no jobs for them, they're going to work at low-paid, or publicly subsidized wages, which will undercut other wages. The same with prison labor.
In fact the scale of prison construction -- which is a kind of Keynesian stimulus to the economy anyway -- but its scale has become so enormous that even high-tech industry, you know, the guys who are usually just ripping off the Pentagon system, they're beginning to look at it, figuring out -- recognizing that high-tech surveillance devices, and so on, may be another way to, sort of, get -- to transfer public funds to make sure that high-tech industry keeps moving. It's reached -- it's not at the scale of the Pentagon, but it's going up.
Well, that's one aspect of what's called, reducing government -- modifying government, to be precise.
Another aspect of it is what's called "devolution" -- reducing -- moving governmental power from the Federal to the State level. And that has a kind of a rationale which you hear all over the time -- place. For example there was an op-ed a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times by John Cogan -- Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has pointed out what he called a philosophical issue that divides the Democrats from the Republicans. The philosophical issue is that the Democrats believe in big government and entitlements, and the Republicans believe in getting power down closer to the people, to the States, because they're kind of populist types.
Well, it takes about maybe three seconds' thought to realize that moving power down to the States, in funding and so on, is just moving it away from the people, for a perfectly elementary reason: there's a hidden part of the system -- of the power system that you're not supposed to know about, or think about, and that's private power.
Now, it takes a big corporation, like say, General Electric or Microsoft to sort of pressure the Federal government, but even middle-sized guys have no problems with State governments, they can control them quite easily. And in case anyone was too dull to figure this out by themselves, the same day as Cogan's op-ed in the New York Times, which is a typical one, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about Massachusetts, which had a headline that read: What Fidelity Investment Wants It Usually Gets. And then the story went on to say that Fidelity Investment, the biggest investment firm in Massachusetts, wanted even more subsidy and support from the State government than it already gets, and it was threatening if it didn't it would move over the border to Rhode Island, where it just owns the place. So therefore, the passionately libertarian Governor quickly rearranged, you know, tax subsidies, and one thing or another, so that Fidelity got what it wanted.
Well Fidelity couldn't have done that with the Federal government. It couldn't have said, you know, "you give us even more or we're going to move to Switzerland" or something. I mean, other guys can do it maybe, but not Fidelity.
Raytheon, which is the biggest manufacturing producer, did the same thing. Raytheon -- incidentally Fidelity is not -- it's not that Fidelity is poor, they just announced record profits a couple days ago. Same with Raytheon -- just announced record profits, but you know, having big problems, so they wanted even a bigger tax subsidy, and -- direct subsidy, and tax write-offs, which just means transfer of taxes to -- from the State of Massachusetts, and they threatened that if they didn't get them they were going to go to Tennessee, so of course they got them. The legislature passed a special law giving what they called defense industry special extra subsidies.
Notice that Raytheon is publicly subsidized in the first place. That's where its money comes from. But now it has to be additionally subsidized so that its profits will be even higher than the record profits it just made. Same with Fidelity. And that's the kind of game anybody can -- you know, even -- even way down to much smaller businesses can play with the States.
The consequences of devolution are quite straightforward. It means that any funding that goes to, say, block grants that go to the States, you can be reasonably confident that they'll end up in the deep pockets of rich people, not, you know, in the hands of hungry children, or poor mothers, or anything like that. That's how you get power down to the people. Ok. That's devolution.
In fact quite generally, when you look at it, what's called "government cutting" is more or less cost transfer. It's almost never reduction, sometimes it's increase.
So let's take what's -- take health reform. "Reform" is a word you always ought to watch out for. Like when Mao started the cultural revolution it wasn't called a reform. Reform is a change that you're supposed to like. And watch -- so as soon as you hear the word reform, you kind of reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. Anyhow, there are things called "health reforms." And health reforms are supposed to, you know, cut government costs. Well they do cut one kind of cost, but of course they raise another kind of cost.
There's a very respectable outfit called the National Bi-Partisan Leadership Council, headed by two ex-Presidents, Ford and Carter, and it just did a study of the cost-transfer effects of the planned health reforms. It concluded that they would add about ten billion dollars a year extra costs, but those extra costs will come from wages, and higher premiums. Which means it's a highly regressive tax on the poor. Highly regressive tax, you know, if it comes from wages and premiums of course. And that's ten billion dollars a year. They also estimated that it will increase the number of uninsured by fifteen to twenty percent up by -- this is by the year 2002 -- so up to about 54 million by the year 2002. Well that's a cost. A big cost, unmeasurable cost. And so you find all the way across the board. And furthermore it's no big secret.
So, like, the Wall Street Journal had a headline which pointed out that -- when the reforms were, you know, moving through Congress -- it said: Rich Gain, Poor Lose, Tradeoffs For The Middle Class. Which is right. That's exactly what the reforms are intended to do. You have to remember, by "Middle Class" they mean the people right below the very rich. So they don't mean the median, you know, they're not talking about people with thirty thousand a year income, they mean -- so what it really means is: great for the rich -- super-rich, tradeoffs for the near-rich, tough love for everybody else, which is most everyone. When you close public hospitals, and that sort of thing, you know exactly who's going to suffer.
Well, let's go to -- what are -- take, say, New York, which has a conservative Governor and a conservative Mayor. And they're carrying out very extensive conservative tax cuts, because they're fiscal conservatives.
The tax cuts, the New York Times pointed out in a small item, all benefit business. So, by accident, all the tax cuts benefit business. Well, there are also tax increases, which are compensating for the tax cuts. But they don't call them tax increases. What they call them is, the phrase is: reduction of subsidies for public transportation and for tuition in public universities.
Well "subsidy" is another interesting word, kind of like reform. It's a subsidy if public funds are used for public purposes. That's called a subsidy. It's not called a subsidy when they go to private wealth. That's reform. So the -- so they're cutting down subsidies for public transportation. Well, that's just a tax. If you pay 20 percent more for getting on the subway, that's a tax. Same if you pay higher tuition at City College. And that's a highly regressive tax. So, who rides the subways, and who goes to City College?
So what they're doing is shifting- is cutting taxes for business -- for the rich, and increasing taxes for the poor, which are going to compensate for that. And that's called fiscal conservatism, and cutting government. Well, so it is across the board. Take- I'll come to other examples, but if you think about it, all the -- take a look -- a close look at the things that are called cutting government, and you notice that they quite characteristically have this property.
The next element of the Washington Consensus is making the tax system more regressive. Ok, we don't have to talk about that, it's stated openly. The thing that isn't stated openly is the reason.
This is supposed to be in order to increase investment and give everyone jobs. But it's a really weird way to do that. I mean, the country is already awash in capital. The people whose taxes are being cut don't know what to do with their money. If you want to increase growth, there's another approach that might be used: stimulate weak demand by progressive taxes. That is, put more money into the hands of people who can spend it. That increases growth -- that would increase growth, but that's not the right way to do it. The right way to do it is by cutting financial gains so that you can have even more speculation against currencies. The- so that's the second part, make the tax system more regressive. What about deregulation?
Well, same effect. Deregulation is a cost shifting measure. So for example if you deregulate -- if you allow industries to -- as they have done already, to deposit toxic wastes without cost, because you have deregulation, it increases their profits, but it also increases water and sewage rates, which is a regressive tax on everybody else who's got to pay that. Also, it has further costs. Some of them you can't estimate. For example, the costs in, say, health, and quality of life, and so on. No way to give numbers to those. And there's also going to be the eventual cost of cleanup. But that's going to be a public cost, remember. Incidentally, a good one, because when you clean up the wastes, that increases the Gross National Product, and we all like to see that go up. But, the public will pay those costs.
So what it is, is just another form of radical cost shifting: increase wealth for the rich, and decrease it for everyone else. So, it fits the experiment's design. In general, it's kind of like a short-term profit gain for some, a very small some, and a big cost for everyone else. What about deregulating the labor market?
Well, same process. Actually that was done by simply criminal behavior. The best review of this I know is in Business Week. The Reagan administration, as they point out, essentially informed the corporate world that they were not going to enforce the laws. There are laws, you know, much hated laws like the Wagner Act, that give you the right to organize, and the Reagan administration simply informed business they weren't going to enforce them.
So the number of illegal firings went up by about a factor of six. And similarly across the board. They also informed business they were not going to enforce the OSHA regulations -- health and safety regulations. So the number of days lost to injury, and the number of injuries, and so on, also shot up. And in fact, that was a great way to undermine unions, and the right to organize -- a whole pile of policies like that -- which was part of deregulating labor markets.
Another part of deregulation of labor markets is to make them more -- what's called, more flexible. Meaning, you don't have any security, and no guarantee, the number of temporary workers goes right up -- way up, no benefits, you never know if you're going to have a job tomorrow. That's really good for the economy. That's good for having jobs.
Some of the most profitable corporations, the ones whose- way up on the Fortune 500 list, and booming, are the ones that, what they call, sell manpower, you know, like Manpower Incorporated, selling temps. Which is terrific for making labor markets flexible. It happens to destroy everybody's life, but that doesn't really matter.
It's -- again, the similarity to the Third World is very close. Back in nineteen -- this is what's called "economic health." When you -- when this is carried -- happens, you call it an "economic miracle", another technical term.
So for example, Brazil. There's a terrific economic miracle under the neo-Nazi Generals that we installed with great self-adulation back in the 60s. And by 1971 it had become the Latin American darling of the business community. And the President, the General who ran the place, pointed out that the economy is doing fine, it's just that the people aren't.
Well we just -- we have a Nobel Prize winner, who just won the Nobel Prize last yea r- last time -- Robert Lucas of Chicago, and he was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and said, we've been doing great, and have been for a long time. He didn't even bother to add what the Brazilian General did: it's only the people who aren't doing well. What he means by "we" is the top five percent, or maybe top ten percent. And that's right. We've been doing great, we're doing fine, the economy's fine -- by now we don't even worry about the fact that the people aren't doing so well, like -- I won't bother repeating the statistics which you know, and he knows perfectly well.
Ok, that's economic miracles. We're now beginning to get one ourselves.
What about privatization?
Well, again, the effects of that are obvious. So, say, in the latest economic miracle in Mexico, privatization meant, as usual, handing over public assets to friends of the President, or you know, other rich people, or international investors, at a fraction of their cost. And in fact in Mexico the number of billionaires during the economic miracle went up even faster than the percentage of people on the poverty line, as some were doing well, and the people didn't happen to be doing so well. In fact it was a catastrophe for them, even before the collapse. So that's privatization. What about property rights -- increase of property rights?
That's very important, in fact it's a critical aspect of the -- what are called, misleadingly, the free trade agreements, which actually have strong protectionist elements in them. The Uruguay Round, and NAFTA, and so on. And one of them is increase of intellectual property rights. I won't go into the details, but what it amounts to is guaranteeing that major corporations have a monopoly on the technology and knowledge of the future. And they extended those to the -- by various devices, so that it's about fifty years before you can interfere with owned property, which comes from public subsidy, usually through research, and then is handed over to some private corporation, and nobody else is allowed to touch it.
So increasing property rights has a big effect -- highly protectionist measure which is central to the new trade agreements, and has a long-lasting effect, way down the road on organizing the international economy in who gains and who loses. Last element of the Washington Consensus is reducing trade barriers. And here there's another scam that you ought to keep your eyes on.
What's called "trade" in economics is a very odd notion. So, for example, if Ford Motor Company moves parts from Indiana to Illinois for assembly, and then moves them back to Indiana, that's not called trade. But if Ford Motor Company takes parts made in Indiana and moves them across the border to Mexico, where you can get much cheaper labor and you don't have to worry about, you know, pollution and so on, and they get reassembled in Mexico and then sent back to, say, Illinois for value-added, that's called "exports and imports." It never had anything to do with the Mexican economy, or, in fact, any economy, it was all internal to the Ford Motor Company, but it's exports and imports.
So, how big an element is that? Well, about fifty percent of U.S. trade. So about fifty percent of what's called U.S. trade is actually internal to individual corporations. Meaning, controlled by a very visible hand, with all sorts of methods around for distortion of markets, and you know, robbery, and so on and so forth. About the same for Japan. And for the world, you know, it's hard to get numbers, but what's estimated for the world is around forty percent of trade.
Agreements like, say, the Uruguay Round, you know, GATT, if that increases what's called trade, what it actually does is increase investor rights. That is, it increases the power of transnational corporations. You have to really look pretty closely to figure out what the effect is on trade in any meaningful sense. For example, it may increase cross-border operations, but decrease trade, in a meaningful sense of trade, meaning something that's not under the control of, kind of, corporate mercantilism. Going on with this, it's perhaps worth noticing that the very concept of capitalism, and markets, has virtually disappeared.
So for example, if you take the current issue of Foreign Affairs, there's an article by Joseph Nye of the Kennedy School, I think maybe he's Dean of the Kennedy School, who explains that there's a big new weapon in the hands of American diplomats. American diplomats, he says, has a -- diplomacy has a force multiplier. And the reason is because of the attraction of democracy and free market enthusiasms in the United States. That's given -- those things have given the U.S. a real force multiplier. Then he spells it out. It comes from Cold War investments in high technology: electronics, aviation, telecommunications, and so on. That's our free market enthusiasms and democracy.
Well, where did electronics and, you know, aviation and telecommunications come from? Well, from public funds. They didn't have anything to do with the free market. They came from public funds, which were transferred to high-technology industry, under the conscious guise, deceit, of security. And it was conscious.
So, Truman's first Secretary of the Air Force, back in 1948, pointed out to Congress that the word to use is not "subsidy", the word to use is "security." And in fact the whole system was designed that way, and stays that way. So that's the tribute to democracy and free markets. The tribute to democracy and free markets is: you rob the public by deceit to pay- put- to enrich the rich. That's free markets and democracy. And it's published without comment.
Another article in- and probably nobody notices, you know, because the concept of capitalism, just like the concept of democracy, is just gone. Nobody knows what it is. Democracy means: deceive people into doing what the rich people want. And markets means: making sure -- make sure the public subsidize the rich.
Or to take another example, take, say, the Wall Street Journal, which you'd think would be the last holdout of somebody who remembers what capitalism is. Well they had a front -- lead article a couple of weeks ago, on various strategies that States -- meaning, like, States of the Union -- were using to try to be more business friendly. And they picked two examples, Virginia and Maryland, who are sort of competing to see who can most sponsor entrepreneurial values, and be most business friendly, and so on. And they said, well for a while it looked like -- they have somewhat different strategies, that's why they were describing them -- for a while Maryland was doing better, then it turned out Virginia is doing better- now Virginia is doing better, they're more business friendly, more gung-ho about business, and so on.
Alright, you read the article. Turns out it's not Virginia and Maryland. What it is, is the suburbs of Washington, some of which are in Virginia, and the others of which are in Maryland. And what are the two business strategies- entrepreneurial strategies? Well, the suburbs of Washington figured they could rip-off the National Institute of Health and others to develop Biology-based industries, so they were looking for Biotechnology, and so on. They figured that's going to be the big cash cow. And Virginia, which is more business friendly, decided that the old cash cow, the Pentagon, would probably be the best way to rip-off public funds. So they were concentrating on electronics and telecommunications, and so on. And it turned out that Virginia had the better strategy- the better business strategy. They made a better guess about which public funds to rob. And that's what it means to have entrepreneurial values. And it's, again, reported without comment.
This just continues, virtually without a break. The New -- I'll give you one last example.
The New Yorker had a rather good article, actually. You know the -- by now the story about what's happening to the economy and to the population, which used to be what, you know, crazies on the Left talked about, it's now, sort of, hit the public, you know, so you can -- you read it in the newspapers. The New Yorker had an article in which they reviewed the figures on decline of real wages, and you know, increase in profits, and the story you're familiar with, by a guy named Thomas Cassidy. Wasn't a bad article, actually, he sort of repeated the familiar facts. And then he ended up by saying, look no one's to blame for this, it's just the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom. It just has these effects and there's nothing you can do about it. Then he gave three examples, exactly three examples in the article, of the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom, namely: Grumman, McDonald Douglass, and Hughes Aircraft.
Now, you know, maybe this is some kind of subtle irony that I'm missing, but these are three prototypes of publicly subsidized corporations. Grumman, Hughes, McDonald Douglass? They wouldn't exist for two minutes if it wasn't for huge public subsidy.
So that's the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom.
When Clinton was announcing his grand vision of the free market future at the A.P.E.C. conference in Seattle, he did the same thing. It was in the Boeing terminal, that's where he announced it, and he gave Boeing -- Boeing -- as the example of the grand vision of the free market future, and there were big headlines in all the newspapers, and a lot of applause about our love of the free market, and so on. It's not necessary to comment.
But it is kind of interesting. What it means is, that the concept of capitalism and markets has disappeared as fully as the concept of democracy, which is an interesting fact about the modern period, and a kind of a natural effect of, you know, of applying the Washington Consensus at home. Because you really have to drive out any understanding of what's going on, namely, that it's really existing free markets that are being imposed. Well, all of these current measures share one fundamental principle -- and I guess we're at the heart of it -- well, two related fundamental principles. One is: they transfer wealth to the wealthy. And the second is: they transfer decision-making power to the wealthy. So, all of them have the effect, just think them through, what all -- every one of them has the effect of putting more power to make decisions into the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies, what we call "corporations." Basically totalitarian institutions -- but they're mostly unaccountable. And that's the effect. Think through the examples. Every case of the Washington Consensus applied at home has exactly this effect.
And a good part of the propaganda system has the same goal. In this case surely conscious.
So the propaganda system is designed, has been for years, to demonize unions, which makes a lot of sense. Unions are a democratizing force in which the mass- one of the few ways in which the large mass of the population can pool limited resources and work together for some common good. So that's that bad thing: democracy. So naturally you want to demonize and destroy unions, and that's been going on forever.
And the other leading propaganda theme -- and I don't mean by that, you know, like, just what you hear in the newspapers- read in the newspapers and so on, like the entertainment industry and television and everything else -- is anti-politics. Meaning, setting up a picture -- it's called anti-politics -- the picture -- but a very specific kind of anti-politics -- you have to establish the image, you know, get into people's heads, that the Government is the enemy- the Federal Government. State Governments are okay, because they can be sort of controlled by business anyway, so it doesn't matter. But the Federal Government is sometimes a little too big to be pushed around, so it's the enemy. And it cannot be, nobody can dream of the possibility, that the Government is of, by, and for the people. That's impossible. It's an enemy to be hated and feared.
Not that there aren't a lot of things wrong with it, but that's not -- what's wrong with it, from their point of view, is it has a big defect: it's potentially influenceable by the population, and big enough to stand up against private power. And that's the defect.
So, you have to regard it as the enemy. It cannot be of, by, and for the people. It's a kind of a, Them versus Us business. "Them" is the Government which is the enemy. "Us" is all of us nice people, you know, sober working man, his loyal wife -- maybe, extra job these days -- the hard-working executive toiling twenty hours a day, you know, for the benefit of all, the friendly banker who's out there trying to find -- to give you money. That's "Us." And then there's "Them." "Them" is the outsiders, the un-Americans, you know, the agitators, the union organizers, big government, and so on. And it's sort of, Us versus Them. That's the picture.
That has been rammed into people's heads for at least fifty or sixty years by intensive propaganda everywhere. Movies, television, textbooks -- just constant. And not by accident. This is- this part is all extremely conscious. We have a huge public relations industry which spends billions a year -- dollars a year on exactly this sort of thing, and consciously. They even tell you about it. Well why is it happening now, not, say, thirty years ago?
One proposal is: it's the market in its mysterious wisdom. We can put that aside. This is perfectly conscious social policy, and also, hence, under social control. Second is: we live in lean-and-mean times, we've got to tighten our belts. Complete nonsense. I mean, all you have to do is look at the business press. They're just ecstatic, you know, and have been for years.
Business Week just came out a couple of days ago with the annual issue on the top one-thousand corporations. The headline is: 1995 Was One For The Books. America's Most -- and subline: America's Most Valuable Companies Grew Even More Valuable By A Record Thirty-Five Percent. That's these lean-and-mean times we're in. Another headline in Business Week reads -- The Problem Now: What To Do With All That Cash, as the coffers of corporate America are overflowing with surging profits. Another one talks about the Government, really great Government. It says, the Gingrich Congress represents a milestone for business -- never before have so many goodies been showered so enthusiastically on America's entrepreneurs. The headline of that one, incidentally, is Return To The Trenches. You know, like, we've got to ask more- feeding frenzy has to go on from the nanny State.
Fortune magazine, you know the other big business journal, I mean, they can't even find the adjectives in the last couple of years to describe what's going on. One year it's "dazzling", you know. The next year "stupendous." I mean, I'm waiting for the Fortune 500 issue to see what adjectives they come out with next week. What they've been -- double-digit profit growth for an unheralded four years, with pretty stagnant sales, and, fortunately, wages going down.
CEO salaries are going through the roof, and it's uncorrelated with performance. That's another interesting aspect of it. There have been, now, studies of it, so it's just some other thing, it has nothing to do with markets, or anything else. The -- I mean, while wages continue to decline, as does family income, and so on.
Well, you know, nobody who even looks at the business press can believe that there are lean-and-mean times. As I said, the country's just awash with capital. Their problem is they don't know what to do with it. So, therefore, get more.
Another theme that's around now is, you have to have what's called "downsizing" in order to be competitive.
Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with its figures -- up to the last year they have them for it, 1993 -- from 1983 to 1993 the category of executives, managers, and administrative personnel grew 30 percent. Ok. That's downsizing. The fastest growing white collar population happens to be security guard. Well, yeah, that's connected with turning it into a Third World country. You take a walk down San Salvador, you know, you'll see plenty of security guards. You know, rich people have to be protected. And furthermore, all these prisons you're throwing people into, they need security guards. So, yeah, there's -- they're administrative personnel, and that's increasing, but so are- same in corporations. So there's no downsizing going on, except for working people. That's quite different. Why is it happening now? Anyway those are- let's go back to why it's happening now.
Well, fact is, it's always going on, just depending on the weapons at hand. Business, American business particularly, is highly class-conscious, and very open about it, incidentally. And it's always fighting a bitter class war.
You go back a century ago, into what were called "the gay 90s" -- when incidentally, the international economy was about as -- the international economy was pretty much a s- like it is now in terms of capital flows, and so on, it hasn't become more globalized in terms of trade and capital flow, and so on, than it was then, maybe less so -- the -- about a century ago it looked as if the game was over. You know, they were talking about the end of history, perfection had been reached in the Devil-take-the-hindmost society, where everybody's for themselves, and, enrich yourselves, and so on. It was monstrous for the working people. Very brutal in fact, here. That was a century ago.
Well, you know, it didn't end. You know, in Europe particularly, the social contract was slowly imposed -- not easily. It didn't happen here. By the "roaring 20s", as they were called, labor had no voice. This is the, you know, the age of mass-production of automobiles, and so on. Labor was out of it. It was a business-run society, almost completely, and it looked permanent. Again, you know, utopia of the masters, end of history, all this talk.
In the 1930s it proved to be wrong. There was a lot of popular organizing, popular protest. It rammed through elements of the social contract that had been achieved in Europe decades earlier. And that just caused hysteria in the business community. You read the business press, it was talking about, you know, the hazard facing manufacturers, and, the rising political power of the masses, and, how we're going to face disaster unless we figure out some way to reverse this, and, control their minds, and, control them, and so on.
A huge propaganda campaign began right after the Wagner act was passed -- 1935. In the -- in those -- in the next two years the National Association of Manufacturers, it's public relations budget multiplied by a factor of 20, as they recognized that force alone is not going to be enough. The U.S. has a very violent labor history, and plenty of workers were getting killed, but it was clear that this wasn't going to be enough. They had to have huge propaganda. It was sort of put on -- that's when all this "harmony" business that I was talking about got designed. You know, it's a specific design as to how to carry out what they called scientific methods of strike-breaking by controlling communities, and so on. Well, it was put on hold during the War, and then it picked up right after the Second World War was over, with an enormous propaganda campaign. I mean, you can't believe the scale until you look at it, and the purpose was very explicit.
The purpose was to win the everlasting battle for the minds of men, which have to be indoctrinated with the capitalist story, as we sell our preferred way of life, and on and on; these are all just quotes from mainstream PR literature. And it was very substantial, and aimed precisely at what I described. They describe what they're doing, and you can see it in the propaganda, the schools, the entertainment industry, everything else.
Well, what happened in the 1970s?
What happened is, there were some changes in the international economy, and in technology and so on, which just put new weapons into the hands of the masters.
One crucial factor, which everyone points to, is an enormous growth in financial capital -- financial transactions -- it just boomed -- short range financial transactions. That came about, partly, because of the dismantling of the post-war Bretton Woods system of regulated currencies which kind of made currencies free-floating. The Nixon administration just dismantled it. Partly it came about for technical reasons. I mean, the telecommunications revolution, which was of course publicly subsidized, at that point made it possible to transfer funds very rapidly. So, like, you can -- by now it's estimated at around a trillion dollars a day just shift up and back from one market to another -- very short term transactions. All aimed -- and at a huge -- and, aimed at something: they're all aimed at low growth, and high profits, and low wages. And that's -- that is a factor that's driving policy in that direction. I don't think it's by any means an uncontrollable factor, but it is a -- it's definitely a factor. And that's just put a lot -- and this -- the changes in the composition of capital transactions are very striking.
Around- from about maybe -- the time when you have data, like, late 19th Century, up until about 1970, rough estimate was that about ninety percent of capital transfers had to do with the real economy, you know, with investment and trade, ten percent speculation. By 1990, the figures had reversed. By 1995, the latest UNCTAD -- you know, U.N. Economic Commission estimate was about five percent real economy, ninety five percent speculation -- short term speculation, like, against currencies, which is, essentially, aimed at driving down growth and increasing profits and lowering wages.
This was understood very quickly -- by the late 70s. And there were proposals made, for example by James Tobin -- Yale economist Nobel Prize winner -- at an American Economic Association Presidential Address 1978, simply -- suggested a simple reform: low tax, very low tax, on short-term financial transactions, just to slow it down, you know, throw a little sand in the gears. Probably work, it's been called the Tobin Tax, but it's not getting anywhere because the weapon is a very important one. That weapon has been used very efficiently for all the purposes that have been described.
And there are other things.
Delivered at Harvard University, April 13, 1996
(transcription courtesy of William Greene)
For those who are interested in the real world, a look at the actual history suggests some adjustment -- a modification of free market theory, to what we might call "really existing free market theory." That is, the one that's actually applied, not talked about.
And the principle of really existing free market theory is: free markets are fine for you, but not for me. That's, again, near a universal. So you -- whoever you may be -- you have to learn responsibility, and be subjected to market discipline, it's good for your character, it's tough love, and so on, and so forth. But me, I need the nanny State, to protect me from market discipline, so that I'll be able to rant and rave about the marvels of the free market, while I'm getting properly subsidized and defended by everyone else, through the nanny State. And also, this has to be risk-free. So I'm perfectly willing to make profits, but I don't want to take risks. If anything goes wrong, you bail me out.
So, if Third World debt gets out of control, you socialize it. It's not the problem of the banks that made the money. When the S&Ls collapse, you know, same thing. The public bails them out. When American investment firms get into trouble because the Mexican bubble bursts, you bail out Goldman Sachs. And -- the latest Mexico bail out, and on and on. I mean, there's case after case of this.
In fact of the leading -- top -- hundred leading transnationals in the Fortune list of transnationals -- there was a recent study of how they -- how they related to the States in which they- they're all somewhere, you know, so they're all mostly here -- in some National State, it turns out that all hundred of them had benefited from industrial policies, meaning, State intervention in their behalf. All hundred had benefited from the State in which they're based. And twenty of the hundred had been saved from total disaster, that is, collapse, by just State bail-out. When people talk about globalization of the economy, remember that the nanny State has to be very powerful in order to bail out the rich. And nothing is changing in that regard. Twenty out of a hundred, again, were saved from collapse by this, including a number here.
Well, that's really existing free market theory. There are many examples of it quite close to home. So, we could start with our own Governor, Governor Weld, who is described by the Boston Globe as a libertarian with a religious belief in free markets. And then a couple of days later, they reported that through various scams he had- his administration was able to sharply increase Federal subsidies to Massachusetts, so that- way beyond what they were before, so that he could parade as a fiscal conservative. And that's pretty common.
Just the year before, you may recall, if you have long memories, they had to close Georges Bank -- the richest fishing area in the world -- because it was being overfished, thanks to a combination of deregulation and subsidies to the fishing industry, which have that odd consequence that you tend to get overfishing. So it looked as if the ground fish were wiped out, and they had to close it off. It didn't take long for the religious libertarian fanatic, William Weld, to take the next jet plane down to Washington, hat in hand, asking for a Federal bail-out. They wanted the Federal government to declare it a natural disaster. And the reason was, as he explained, with, presumably, some scientists in tow, that there was some strange kind of predatory fish which no one had yet found, but they would find it, don't worry. So some kind of predatory fish had come and, sort of, wiped out all the, you know, the Cod and the Haddock, and all those things. So it was a natural disaster, and therefore the general public had to, sort of, pay off the results of deregulation and subsidizing the fishing industry. Well, that's the way to be a libertarian with religious fervor.
Another one is the leader of the conservative revolution, Newt Gingrich. Nobody is more passionate about the market than he is, in particular about what he -- his own district, which he calls a Norman Rockwell world of jet planes and fiber optics, as indeed it is. Except, if you ask where jet planes and fiber-optics came from, you discover that the public paid for them, and still pays for them. And in fact he manages to get more Federal subsidies for his district than any suburban county in the country outside the Federal system. So, you can have conservatism flowering among the malls, and so on.
Or you can go back to the Reaganites, who were also very passionate about free markets for everyone else. Meanwhile, they boasted to the American business community, correctly, that they had done more- that they had instituted more protection than any post-war American administration, in fact, more than all of them combined. They had doubled import restrictions, blocking- and helped -- and poured public funds into major industries to enable them to recapitalize, to protect the -- in fact reconstruct, the steel industry, and the automotive industry, and semiconductors, and so on, which would have disappeared if they had opened the markets.
The Thatcherites in England were about the same. Government expenditures relative to GNP stayed pretty constant, although, anything that went to the general population collapsed. Meanwhile, military industry shot up, arms sales were booming -- that's all publicly subsidized stuff -- arms sales to nice guys like Saddam Hussein, and General Suharto, and others.
Well, that's really existing free market theory.
What are the core policies?
Well, the Washington consensus -- which is basically designed for the Third World to make it that way, and keep it that way -- it's now being applied not just to the Third World countries, but to the rich industrial societies, with the United States and Britain in the lead. However, it's with a twist.
Since it's being applied at home, this is really existing free market theory that's being applied at home, meaning nuanced. So, powerful government to protect the rich, and market discipline and tough love for everyone else. And you see that very clearly. Go through the various elements of the Washington consensus.
The first one is to-about reducing government. Well, that's false. We're not reducing government, we're switching it -- shifting it around. So, social spending is indeed way down since the 1970s when this stuff started -- accelerated after 1980, but it was starting in the mid 70s. The -- kind of a benchmark example is AFDC, the main support system. That was cut virtually in half from about 1970 to 1990, with obvious effects on poor families and children, and so on. It was a part of a general war against women and children that was conducted by the conservatives under the name of "family values." It's interesting that they were able to get away with that. It tells you something about the intellectual culture.
Well one part was the reduction of AFDC from -- by roughly half from about 1970 to about 1990. It's now, essentially gone. That's- the purpose of that, as you know, is so that seven million- couple of million -- I think five or six million kids, average seven years old can learn responsibility. That's part of tough love.
Meanwhile, another part of the government has been very stable, and in fact is going up, namely, the Pentagon system, which remains at approximately Cold War levels. In fact it's higher now than it was under Nixon, although, you know, the big enemy has disappeared, which tells you exactly how much -- tells a rational person at least, exactly how much they were worried about the Russian threat. Not only does it remain at Cold War levels, but it's going up, under the initiative of the fiscal conservatives. The Heritage Foundation, which, you know, sort of a right-wing foundation that designs the budget for the Gingrich army, are calling for an increase in the Pentagon system, as is Gingrich, as indeed was Clinton. So that goes up.
And I should say that cutting of social spending- social spending is being cut very sharply, very much over public opposition. At the time of the 1994 Congressional election -- you know, the big landslide -- over 60% of the public wanted social spending to increase. Ok. It went very sharply down. What about the Pentagon spending going up? Well that's- the public is 6 to 1 opposed to that, which gives you some- one- it's one aspect of a big picture about what's happening to American democracy, and somewhat of a change, not a huge change.
The- so one part of the system is going up: Pentagon spending. Another part is going down: social spending.
And the same is true in other domains. Like, for example, legal aid for the poor is being slashed and virtually destroyed. On the other hand, the security system, the State -- government security system, State and Federal, that's going up. So, prisons are going way up. The prison population -- crime hasn't really -- hasn't changed for about twenty years, but -- and incidentally, U.S. crime rates are not off the spectrum, contrary to what a lot of people believe. Crime rates are sort of at -- toward the high end of the industrial world, but not off the spectrum, with one exception, namely, murder with guns. But that's a special feature of American society which doesn't have to do with crime rates. Apart from that, crime rates are kind of toward the high end, not going up.
The prison population tripled during the Regan years. It's going up even faster now. And I think the reason is another aspect of the Third World model, namely, the superfluous population. There is a big superfluous population -- they don't contribute to wealth protection. Well, we're civilized folks. We're not like the people that we fund in Colombia who go out and murder them. So, we throw them into jail. And that's going way up, even more. And there's also kind of like a side benefit to this. Putting more and more people in jail -- and in fact, under harsher and harsher conditions -- has an -- is a technique of social control for everybody else.
I mean when you're -- if you're -- you know, someday down the road if you decide to run a dictatorship, and you want to really harm people, it's kind of like Hitler in Germany or something, you know that you're going to carry out policies that are going to cause people a lot of harm, you've got to control them somehow. And there aren't many ways to do it. Everyone hits on the same ways. What you do is engender fear, and hatred, and you know, make them hate the guy who looks a little different, or whatever it may be, and then you punish those bad guys because they're really awful, and, you punish them really hard, and so on. And that makes people even more frightened. You can just see that happening right around you. And building up the perception of crime -- crime has a, like a, what they call in literary theory a subtext -- you're supposed to understand, "criminal" has the word -- little word "black" in front of it. Just like "welfare mother", you know "black"- "rich black welfare mother." And criminal means, you know, that black guy who's coming after you. So what you want to do is -- this has the dual effect of getting rid of the superfluous population -- basically unskilled workers -- close race/class correlation -- and also demonizing them, so everybody else is scared and frightened and they'll be willing to accept what's happening to them too, and not look at where the source is.
So that part of the -- that -- the drug war is basically for this, it has almost nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population, and scaring everybody else.
And so does the harshening of prison conditions. Which is really -- it's -- the United States is off the map on this. We're in violation of international conventions, constantly condemned in human rights forums, and getting much worse. The reinstitution of chain gangs was of course bitterly condemned. But you know, that's that bad South, Alabama. Well, it's now in Illinois. The State Senate of Illinois last -- a week or two ago legislated chain gangs -- not for violent criminals, incidentally -- for people who are found with drugs, or, you know, robbed a store, or something like that. The Chicago press pointed out that this carries a -- this is kind of reminiscent of slavery. But the legislator, the Senator -- State Senator who put it through said that this is just another aspect of what he called tough love. And then he explained that some people work better under humiliation. So it's really good to restore elements of slavery, and again, the subtext is everybody else gets scarred. You know, those guys have to walk around like slaves in chains, we must be in real danger, so therefore, we'll accept what's happening to us. That's the logic.
So prisons are going up and it's -- and that has a lot of side benefits apart from just getting rid of the superfluous population. It is a source of cheap labor. So, prison labor is going way up. Cheap labor, you don't have to worry about unions, no benefits, they don't get out of line. And that also, naturally, undercuts wages elsewhere. So what -- just like forcing welfare mothers to work -- you know, raising children isn't work, as anybody knows who's had children -- so you have to drive them to work. Kind of like people who go to, you know, Fidelity Investment to figure out scams about how to deal with the security market. You really want these people to work. But since there's no jobs for them, they're going to work at low-paid, or publicly subsidized wages, which will undercut other wages. The same with prison labor.
In fact the scale of prison construction -- which is a kind of Keynesian stimulus to the economy anyway -- but its scale has become so enormous that even high-tech industry, you know, the guys who are usually just ripping off the Pentagon system, they're beginning to look at it, figuring out -- recognizing that high-tech surveillance devices, and so on, may be another way to, sort of, get -- to transfer public funds to make sure that high-tech industry keeps moving. It's reached -- it's not at the scale of the Pentagon, but it's going up.
Well, that's one aspect of what's called, reducing government -- modifying government, to be precise.
Another aspect of it is what's called "devolution" -- reducing -- moving governmental power from the Federal to the State level. And that has a kind of a rationale which you hear all over the time -- place. For example there was an op-ed a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times by John Cogan -- Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has pointed out what he called a philosophical issue that divides the Democrats from the Republicans. The philosophical issue is that the Democrats believe in big government and entitlements, and the Republicans believe in getting power down closer to the people, to the States, because they're kind of populist types.
Well, it takes about maybe three seconds' thought to realize that moving power down to the States, in funding and so on, is just moving it away from the people, for a perfectly elementary reason: there's a hidden part of the system -- of the power system that you're not supposed to know about, or think about, and that's private power.
Now, it takes a big corporation, like say, General Electric or Microsoft to sort of pressure the Federal government, but even middle-sized guys have no problems with State governments, they can control them quite easily. And in case anyone was too dull to figure this out by themselves, the same day as Cogan's op-ed in the New York Times, which is a typical one, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal about Massachusetts, which had a headline that read: What Fidelity Investment Wants It Usually Gets. And then the story went on to say that Fidelity Investment, the biggest investment firm in Massachusetts, wanted even more subsidy and support from the State government than it already gets, and it was threatening if it didn't it would move over the border to Rhode Island, where it just owns the place. So therefore, the passionately libertarian Governor quickly rearranged, you know, tax subsidies, and one thing or another, so that Fidelity got what it wanted.
Well Fidelity couldn't have done that with the Federal government. It couldn't have said, you know, "you give us even more or we're going to move to Switzerland" or something. I mean, other guys can do it maybe, but not Fidelity.
Raytheon, which is the biggest manufacturing producer, did the same thing. Raytheon -- incidentally Fidelity is not -- it's not that Fidelity is poor, they just announced record profits a couple days ago. Same with Raytheon -- just announced record profits, but you know, having big problems, so they wanted even a bigger tax subsidy, and -- direct subsidy, and tax write-offs, which just means transfer of taxes to -- from the State of Massachusetts, and they threatened that if they didn't get them they were going to go to Tennessee, so of course they got them. The legislature passed a special law giving what they called defense industry special extra subsidies.
Notice that Raytheon is publicly subsidized in the first place. That's where its money comes from. But now it has to be additionally subsidized so that its profits will be even higher than the record profits it just made. Same with Fidelity. And that's the kind of game anybody can -- you know, even -- even way down to much smaller businesses can play with the States.
The consequences of devolution are quite straightforward. It means that any funding that goes to, say, block grants that go to the States, you can be reasonably confident that they'll end up in the deep pockets of rich people, not, you know, in the hands of hungry children, or poor mothers, or anything like that. That's how you get power down to the people. Ok. That's devolution.
In fact quite generally, when you look at it, what's called "government cutting" is more or less cost transfer. It's almost never reduction, sometimes it's increase.
So let's take what's -- take health reform. "Reform" is a word you always ought to watch out for. Like when Mao started the cultural revolution it wasn't called a reform. Reform is a change that you're supposed to like. And watch -- so as soon as you hear the word reform, you kind of reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. Anyhow, there are things called "health reforms." And health reforms are supposed to, you know, cut government costs. Well they do cut one kind of cost, but of course they raise another kind of cost.
There's a very respectable outfit called the National Bi-Partisan Leadership Council, headed by two ex-Presidents, Ford and Carter, and it just did a study of the cost-transfer effects of the planned health reforms. It concluded that they would add about ten billion dollars a year extra costs, but those extra costs will come from wages, and higher premiums. Which means it's a highly regressive tax on the poor. Highly regressive tax, you know, if it comes from wages and premiums of course. And that's ten billion dollars a year. They also estimated that it will increase the number of uninsured by fifteen to twenty percent up by -- this is by the year 2002 -- so up to about 54 million by the year 2002. Well that's a cost. A big cost, unmeasurable cost. And so you find all the way across the board. And furthermore it's no big secret.
So, like, the Wall Street Journal had a headline which pointed out that -- when the reforms were, you know, moving through Congress -- it said: Rich Gain, Poor Lose, Tradeoffs For The Middle Class. Which is right. That's exactly what the reforms are intended to do. You have to remember, by "Middle Class" they mean the people right below the very rich. So they don't mean the median, you know, they're not talking about people with thirty thousand a year income, they mean -- so what it really means is: great for the rich -- super-rich, tradeoffs for the near-rich, tough love for everybody else, which is most everyone. When you close public hospitals, and that sort of thing, you know exactly who's going to suffer.
Well, let's go to -- what are -- take, say, New York, which has a conservative Governor and a conservative Mayor. And they're carrying out very extensive conservative tax cuts, because they're fiscal conservatives.
The tax cuts, the New York Times pointed out in a small item, all benefit business. So, by accident, all the tax cuts benefit business. Well, there are also tax increases, which are compensating for the tax cuts. But they don't call them tax increases. What they call them is, the phrase is: reduction of subsidies for public transportation and for tuition in public universities.
Well "subsidy" is another interesting word, kind of like reform. It's a subsidy if public funds are used for public purposes. That's called a subsidy. It's not called a subsidy when they go to private wealth. That's reform. So the -- so they're cutting down subsidies for public transportation. Well, that's just a tax. If you pay 20 percent more for getting on the subway, that's a tax. Same if you pay higher tuition at City College. And that's a highly regressive tax. So, who rides the subways, and who goes to City College?
So what they're doing is shifting- is cutting taxes for business -- for the rich, and increasing taxes for the poor, which are going to compensate for that. And that's called fiscal conservatism, and cutting government. Well, so it is across the board. Take- I'll come to other examples, but if you think about it, all the -- take a look -- a close look at the things that are called cutting government, and you notice that they quite characteristically have this property.
The next element of the Washington Consensus is making the tax system more regressive. Ok, we don't have to talk about that, it's stated openly. The thing that isn't stated openly is the reason.
This is supposed to be in order to increase investment and give everyone jobs. But it's a really weird way to do that. I mean, the country is already awash in capital. The people whose taxes are being cut don't know what to do with their money. If you want to increase growth, there's another approach that might be used: stimulate weak demand by progressive taxes. That is, put more money into the hands of people who can spend it. That increases growth -- that would increase growth, but that's not the right way to do it. The right way to do it is by cutting financial gains so that you can have even more speculation against currencies. The- so that's the second part, make the tax system more regressive. What about deregulation?
Well, same effect. Deregulation is a cost shifting measure. So for example if you deregulate -- if you allow industries to -- as they have done already, to deposit toxic wastes without cost, because you have deregulation, it increases their profits, but it also increases water and sewage rates, which is a regressive tax on everybody else who's got to pay that. Also, it has further costs. Some of them you can't estimate. For example, the costs in, say, health, and quality of life, and so on. No way to give numbers to those. And there's also going to be the eventual cost of cleanup. But that's going to be a public cost, remember. Incidentally, a good one, because when you clean up the wastes, that increases the Gross National Product, and we all like to see that go up. But, the public will pay those costs.
So what it is, is just another form of radical cost shifting: increase wealth for the rich, and decrease it for everyone else. So, it fits the experiment's design. In general, it's kind of like a short-term profit gain for some, a very small some, and a big cost for everyone else. What about deregulating the labor market?
Well, same process. Actually that was done by simply criminal behavior. The best review of this I know is in Business Week. The Reagan administration, as they point out, essentially informed the corporate world that they were not going to enforce the laws. There are laws, you know, much hated laws like the Wagner Act, that give you the right to organize, and the Reagan administration simply informed business they weren't going to enforce them.
So the number of illegal firings went up by about a factor of six. And similarly across the board. They also informed business they were not going to enforce the OSHA regulations -- health and safety regulations. So the number of days lost to injury, and the number of injuries, and so on, also shot up. And in fact, that was a great way to undermine unions, and the right to organize -- a whole pile of policies like that -- which was part of deregulating labor markets.
Another part of deregulation of labor markets is to make them more -- what's called, more flexible. Meaning, you don't have any security, and no guarantee, the number of temporary workers goes right up -- way up, no benefits, you never know if you're going to have a job tomorrow. That's really good for the economy. That's good for having jobs.
Some of the most profitable corporations, the ones whose- way up on the Fortune 500 list, and booming, are the ones that, what they call, sell manpower, you know, like Manpower Incorporated, selling temps. Which is terrific for making labor markets flexible. It happens to destroy everybody's life, but that doesn't really matter.
It's -- again, the similarity to the Third World is very close. Back in nineteen -- this is what's called "economic health." When you -- when this is carried -- happens, you call it an "economic miracle", another technical term.
So for example, Brazil. There's a terrific economic miracle under the neo-Nazi Generals that we installed with great self-adulation back in the 60s. And by 1971 it had become the Latin American darling of the business community. And the President, the General who ran the place, pointed out that the economy is doing fine, it's just that the people aren't.
Well we just -- we have a Nobel Prize winner, who just won the Nobel Prize last yea r- last time -- Robert Lucas of Chicago, and he was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and said, we've been doing great, and have been for a long time. He didn't even bother to add what the Brazilian General did: it's only the people who aren't doing well. What he means by "we" is the top five percent, or maybe top ten percent. And that's right. We've been doing great, we're doing fine, the economy's fine -- by now we don't even worry about the fact that the people aren't doing so well, like -- I won't bother repeating the statistics which you know, and he knows perfectly well.
Ok, that's economic miracles. We're now beginning to get one ourselves.
What about privatization?
Well, again, the effects of that are obvious. So, say, in the latest economic miracle in Mexico, privatization meant, as usual, handing over public assets to friends of the President, or you know, other rich people, or international investors, at a fraction of their cost. And in fact in Mexico the number of billionaires during the economic miracle went up even faster than the percentage of people on the poverty line, as some were doing well, and the people didn't happen to be doing so well. In fact it was a catastrophe for them, even before the collapse. So that's privatization. What about property rights -- increase of property rights?
That's very important, in fact it's a critical aspect of the -- what are called, misleadingly, the free trade agreements, which actually have strong protectionist elements in them. The Uruguay Round, and NAFTA, and so on. And one of them is increase of intellectual property rights. I won't go into the details, but what it amounts to is guaranteeing that major corporations have a monopoly on the technology and knowledge of the future. And they extended those to the -- by various devices, so that it's about fifty years before you can interfere with owned property, which comes from public subsidy, usually through research, and then is handed over to some private corporation, and nobody else is allowed to touch it.
So increasing property rights has a big effect -- highly protectionist measure which is central to the new trade agreements, and has a long-lasting effect, way down the road on organizing the international economy in who gains and who loses. Last element of the Washington Consensus is reducing trade barriers. And here there's another scam that you ought to keep your eyes on.
What's called "trade" in economics is a very odd notion. So, for example, if Ford Motor Company moves parts from Indiana to Illinois for assembly, and then moves them back to Indiana, that's not called trade. But if Ford Motor Company takes parts made in Indiana and moves them across the border to Mexico, where you can get much cheaper labor and you don't have to worry about, you know, pollution and so on, and they get reassembled in Mexico and then sent back to, say, Illinois for value-added, that's called "exports and imports." It never had anything to do with the Mexican economy, or, in fact, any economy, it was all internal to the Ford Motor Company, but it's exports and imports.
So, how big an element is that? Well, about fifty percent of U.S. trade. So about fifty percent of what's called U.S. trade is actually internal to individual corporations. Meaning, controlled by a very visible hand, with all sorts of methods around for distortion of markets, and you know, robbery, and so on and so forth. About the same for Japan. And for the world, you know, it's hard to get numbers, but what's estimated for the world is around forty percent of trade.
Agreements like, say, the Uruguay Round, you know, GATT, if that increases what's called trade, what it actually does is increase investor rights. That is, it increases the power of transnational corporations. You have to really look pretty closely to figure out what the effect is on trade in any meaningful sense. For example, it may increase cross-border operations, but decrease trade, in a meaningful sense of trade, meaning something that's not under the control of, kind of, corporate mercantilism. Going on with this, it's perhaps worth noticing that the very concept of capitalism, and markets, has virtually disappeared.
So for example, if you take the current issue of Foreign Affairs, there's an article by Joseph Nye of the Kennedy School, I think maybe he's Dean of the Kennedy School, who explains that there's a big new weapon in the hands of American diplomats. American diplomats, he says, has a -- diplomacy has a force multiplier. And the reason is because of the attraction of democracy and free market enthusiasms in the United States. That's given -- those things have given the U.S. a real force multiplier. Then he spells it out. It comes from Cold War investments in high technology: electronics, aviation, telecommunications, and so on. That's our free market enthusiasms and democracy.
Well, where did electronics and, you know, aviation and telecommunications come from? Well, from public funds. They didn't have anything to do with the free market. They came from public funds, which were transferred to high-technology industry, under the conscious guise, deceit, of security. And it was conscious.
So, Truman's first Secretary of the Air Force, back in 1948, pointed out to Congress that the word to use is not "subsidy", the word to use is "security." And in fact the whole system was designed that way, and stays that way. So that's the tribute to democracy and free markets. The tribute to democracy and free markets is: you rob the public by deceit to pay- put- to enrich the rich. That's free markets and democracy. And it's published without comment.
Another article in- and probably nobody notices, you know, because the concept of capitalism, just like the concept of democracy, is just gone. Nobody knows what it is. Democracy means: deceive people into doing what the rich people want. And markets means: making sure -- make sure the public subsidize the rich.
Or to take another example, take, say, the Wall Street Journal, which you'd think would be the last holdout of somebody who remembers what capitalism is. Well they had a front -- lead article a couple of weeks ago, on various strategies that States -- meaning, like, States of the Union -- were using to try to be more business friendly. And they picked two examples, Virginia and Maryland, who are sort of competing to see who can most sponsor entrepreneurial values, and be most business friendly, and so on. And they said, well for a while it looked like -- they have somewhat different strategies, that's why they were describing them -- for a while Maryland was doing better, then it turned out Virginia is doing better- now Virginia is doing better, they're more business friendly, more gung-ho about business, and so on.
Alright, you read the article. Turns out it's not Virginia and Maryland. What it is, is the suburbs of Washington, some of which are in Virginia, and the others of which are in Maryland. And what are the two business strategies- entrepreneurial strategies? Well, the suburbs of Washington figured they could rip-off the National Institute of Health and others to develop Biology-based industries, so they were looking for Biotechnology, and so on. They figured that's going to be the big cash cow. And Virginia, which is more business friendly, decided that the old cash cow, the Pentagon, would probably be the best way to rip-off public funds. So they were concentrating on electronics and telecommunications, and so on. And it turned out that Virginia had the better strategy- the better business strategy. They made a better guess about which public funds to rob. And that's what it means to have entrepreneurial values. And it's, again, reported without comment.
This just continues, virtually without a break. The New -- I'll give you one last example.
The New Yorker had a rather good article, actually. You know the -- by now the story about what's happening to the economy and to the population, which used to be what, you know, crazies on the Left talked about, it's now, sort of, hit the public, you know, so you can -- you read it in the newspapers. The New Yorker had an article in which they reviewed the figures on decline of real wages, and you know, increase in profits, and the story you're familiar with, by a guy named Thomas Cassidy. Wasn't a bad article, actually, he sort of repeated the familiar facts. And then he ended up by saying, look no one's to blame for this, it's just the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom. It just has these effects and there's nothing you can do about it. Then he gave three examples, exactly three examples in the article, of the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom, namely: Grumman, McDonald Douglass, and Hughes Aircraft.
Now, you know, maybe this is some kind of subtle irony that I'm missing, but these are three prototypes of publicly subsidized corporations. Grumman, Hughes, McDonald Douglass? They wouldn't exist for two minutes if it wasn't for huge public subsidy.
So that's the market in its infinite and mysterious wisdom.
When Clinton was announcing his grand vision of the free market future at the A.P.E.C. conference in Seattle, he did the same thing. It was in the Boeing terminal, that's where he announced it, and he gave Boeing -- Boeing -- as the example of the grand vision of the free market future, and there were big headlines in all the newspapers, and a lot of applause about our love of the free market, and so on. It's not necessary to comment.
But it is kind of interesting. What it means is, that the concept of capitalism and markets has disappeared as fully as the concept of democracy, which is an interesting fact about the modern period, and a kind of a natural effect of, you know, of applying the Washington Consensus at home. Because you really have to drive out any understanding of what's going on, namely, that it's really existing free markets that are being imposed. Well, all of these current measures share one fundamental principle -- and I guess we're at the heart of it -- well, two related fundamental principles. One is: they transfer wealth to the wealthy. And the second is: they transfer decision-making power to the wealthy. So, all of them have the effect, just think them through, what all -- every one of them has the effect of putting more power to make decisions into the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies, what we call "corporations." Basically totalitarian institutions -- but they're mostly unaccountable. And that's the effect. Think through the examples. Every case of the Washington Consensus applied at home has exactly this effect.
And a good part of the propaganda system has the same goal. In this case surely conscious.
So the propaganda system is designed, has been for years, to demonize unions, which makes a lot of sense. Unions are a democratizing force in which the mass- one of the few ways in which the large mass of the population can pool limited resources and work together for some common good. So that's that bad thing: democracy. So naturally you want to demonize and destroy unions, and that's been going on forever.
And the other leading propaganda theme -- and I don't mean by that, you know, like, just what you hear in the newspapers- read in the newspapers and so on, like the entertainment industry and television and everything else -- is anti-politics. Meaning, setting up a picture -- it's called anti-politics -- the picture -- but a very specific kind of anti-politics -- you have to establish the image, you know, get into people's heads, that the Government is the enemy- the Federal Government. State Governments are okay, because they can be sort of controlled by business anyway, so it doesn't matter. But the Federal Government is sometimes a little too big to be pushed around, so it's the enemy. And it cannot be, nobody can dream of the possibility, that the Government is of, by, and for the people. That's impossible. It's an enemy to be hated and feared.
Not that there aren't a lot of things wrong with it, but that's not -- what's wrong with it, from their point of view, is it has a big defect: it's potentially influenceable by the population, and big enough to stand up against private power. And that's the defect.
So, you have to regard it as the enemy. It cannot be of, by, and for the people. It's a kind of a, Them versus Us business. "Them" is the Government which is the enemy. "Us" is all of us nice people, you know, sober working man, his loyal wife -- maybe, extra job these days -- the hard-working executive toiling twenty hours a day, you know, for the benefit of all, the friendly banker who's out there trying to find -- to give you money. That's "Us." And then there's "Them." "Them" is the outsiders, the un-Americans, you know, the agitators, the union organizers, big government, and so on. And it's sort of, Us versus Them. That's the picture.
That has been rammed into people's heads for at least fifty or sixty years by intensive propaganda everywhere. Movies, television, textbooks -- just constant. And not by accident. This is- this part is all extremely conscious. We have a huge public relations industry which spends billions a year -- dollars a year on exactly this sort of thing, and consciously. They even tell you about it. Well why is it happening now, not, say, thirty years ago?
One proposal is: it's the market in its mysterious wisdom. We can put that aside. This is perfectly conscious social policy, and also, hence, under social control. Second is: we live in lean-and-mean times, we've got to tighten our belts. Complete nonsense. I mean, all you have to do is look at the business press. They're just ecstatic, you know, and have been for years.
Business Week just came out a couple of days ago with the annual issue on the top one-thousand corporations. The headline is: 1995 Was One For The Books. America's Most -- and subline: America's Most Valuable Companies Grew Even More Valuable By A Record Thirty-Five Percent. That's these lean-and-mean times we're in. Another headline in Business Week reads -- The Problem Now: What To Do With All That Cash, as the coffers of corporate America are overflowing with surging profits. Another one talks about the Government, really great Government. It says, the Gingrich Congress represents a milestone for business -- never before have so many goodies been showered so enthusiastically on America's entrepreneurs. The headline of that one, incidentally, is Return To The Trenches. You know, like, we've got to ask more- feeding frenzy has to go on from the nanny State.
Fortune magazine, you know the other big business journal, I mean, they can't even find the adjectives in the last couple of years to describe what's going on. One year it's "dazzling", you know. The next year "stupendous." I mean, I'm waiting for the Fortune 500 issue to see what adjectives they come out with next week. What they've been -- double-digit profit growth for an unheralded four years, with pretty stagnant sales, and, fortunately, wages going down.
CEO salaries are going through the roof, and it's uncorrelated with performance. That's another interesting aspect of it. There have been, now, studies of it, so it's just some other thing, it has nothing to do with markets, or anything else. The -- I mean, while wages continue to decline, as does family income, and so on.
Well, you know, nobody who even looks at the business press can believe that there are lean-and-mean times. As I said, the country's just awash with capital. Their problem is they don't know what to do with it. So, therefore, get more.
Another theme that's around now is, you have to have what's called "downsizing" in order to be competitive.
Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with its figures -- up to the last year they have them for it, 1993 -- from 1983 to 1993 the category of executives, managers, and administrative personnel grew 30 percent. Ok. That's downsizing. The fastest growing white collar population happens to be security guard. Well, yeah, that's connected with turning it into a Third World country. You take a walk down San Salvador, you know, you'll see plenty of security guards. You know, rich people have to be protected. And furthermore, all these prisons you're throwing people into, they need security guards. So, yeah, there's -- they're administrative personnel, and that's increasing, but so are- same in corporations. So there's no downsizing going on, except for working people. That's quite different. Why is it happening now? Anyway those are- let's go back to why it's happening now.
Well, fact is, it's always going on, just depending on the weapons at hand. Business, American business particularly, is highly class-conscious, and very open about it, incidentally. And it's always fighting a bitter class war.
You go back a century ago, into what were called "the gay 90s" -- when incidentally, the international economy was about as -- the international economy was pretty much a s- like it is now in terms of capital flows, and so on, it hasn't become more globalized in terms of trade and capital flow, and so on, than it was then, maybe less so -- the -- about a century ago it looked as if the game was over. You know, they were talking about the end of history, perfection had been reached in the Devil-take-the-hindmost society, where everybody's for themselves, and, enrich yourselves, and so on. It was monstrous for the working people. Very brutal in fact, here. That was a century ago.
Well, you know, it didn't end. You know, in Europe particularly, the social contract was slowly imposed -- not easily. It didn't happen here. By the "roaring 20s", as they were called, labor had no voice. This is the, you know, the age of mass-production of automobiles, and so on. Labor was out of it. It was a business-run society, almost completely, and it looked permanent. Again, you know, utopia of the masters, end of history, all this talk.
In the 1930s it proved to be wrong. There was a lot of popular organizing, popular protest. It rammed through elements of the social contract that had been achieved in Europe decades earlier. And that just caused hysteria in the business community. You read the business press, it was talking about, you know, the hazard facing manufacturers, and, the rising political power of the masses, and, how we're going to face disaster unless we figure out some way to reverse this, and, control their minds, and, control them, and so on.
A huge propaganda campaign began right after the Wagner act was passed -- 1935. In the -- in those -- in the next two years the National Association of Manufacturers, it's public relations budget multiplied by a factor of 20, as they recognized that force alone is not going to be enough. The U.S. has a very violent labor history, and plenty of workers were getting killed, but it was clear that this wasn't going to be enough. They had to have huge propaganda. It was sort of put on -- that's when all this "harmony" business that I was talking about got designed. You know, it's a specific design as to how to carry out what they called scientific methods of strike-breaking by controlling communities, and so on. Well, it was put on hold during the War, and then it picked up right after the Second World War was over, with an enormous propaganda campaign. I mean, you can't believe the scale until you look at it, and the purpose was very explicit.
The purpose was to win the everlasting battle for the minds of men, which have to be indoctrinated with the capitalist story, as we sell our preferred way of life, and on and on; these are all just quotes from mainstream PR literature. And it was very substantial, and aimed precisely at what I described. They describe what they're doing, and you can see it in the propaganda, the schools, the entertainment industry, everything else.
Well, what happened in the 1970s?
What happened is, there were some changes in the international economy, and in technology and so on, which just put new weapons into the hands of the masters.
One crucial factor, which everyone points to, is an enormous growth in financial capital -- financial transactions -- it just boomed -- short range financial transactions. That came about, partly, because of the dismantling of the post-war Bretton Woods system of regulated currencies which kind of made currencies free-floating. The Nixon administration just dismantled it. Partly it came about for technical reasons. I mean, the telecommunications revolution, which was of course publicly subsidized, at that point made it possible to transfer funds very rapidly. So, like, you can -- by now it's estimated at around a trillion dollars a day just shift up and back from one market to another -- very short term transactions. All aimed -- and at a huge -- and, aimed at something: they're all aimed at low growth, and high profits, and low wages. And that's -- that is a factor that's driving policy in that direction. I don't think it's by any means an uncontrollable factor, but it is a -- it's definitely a factor. And that's just put a lot -- and this -- the changes in the composition of capital transactions are very striking.
Around- from about maybe -- the time when you have data, like, late 19th Century, up until about 1970, rough estimate was that about ninety percent of capital transfers had to do with the real economy, you know, with investment and trade, ten percent speculation. By 1990, the figures had reversed. By 1995, the latest UNCTAD -- you know, U.N. Economic Commission estimate was about five percent real economy, ninety five percent speculation -- short term speculation, like, against currencies, which is, essentially, aimed at driving down growth and increasing profits and lowering wages.
This was understood very quickly -- by the late 70s. And there were proposals made, for example by James Tobin -- Yale economist Nobel Prize winner -- at an American Economic Association Presidential Address 1978, simply -- suggested a simple reform: low tax, very low tax, on short-term financial transactions, just to slow it down, you know, throw a little sand in the gears. Probably work, it's been called the Tobin Tax, but it's not getting anywhere because the weapon is a very important one. That weapon has been used very efficiently for all the purposes that have been described.
And there are other things.
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Morals: the one thing markets don't make
No amount of regulation will restore our sense of honour and shame. Economics needs ethics
Windows Live Hotmail just got better. Find out more!
Monday, 16 March 2009
The logic of arranged marriage in India
The logic of arranged marriage in India
15 Mar 2009, 2226 hrs IST, Santosh Desai
|
Why does the institution of the arranged marriage survive in India in this day and age? The India I am talking about in this case includes the educated middle class, where the incidence of arranged marriages continues to be high and more importantly, is accepted without any difficulty as a legitimate way of finding a mate. Twenty years ago, looking at the future, one would have imagined that by now, the numbers of the arranged marriage types would have shrunk and the few remaining stragglers would be looked down upon as belonging to a somewhat primitive tribe. But this is far from being so.
The answer lies partly in the elastic nature of this institution, and indeed most traditional Indian customs, that allows it to expand its definition to accommodate the needs of modernity. So today's arranged marriage places individual will at the heart of the process; young men and women are rarely forced to marry someone against their wishes. The role of the parents has moved to that of being presiding deities, with one hand raised in blessing and the other hand immersed purposefully in the wallet. The need for some arrangement when it comes to marriage is a very real one, both here as well as in those cultures where arranged marriages are anathema. The blind date, being set up by friends, online dating, the speed date, reality swayamvar-type shows are all attempts to arrange ways that one can meet a potential spouse. Here the idea of love is being not-so-gently manufactured by contriving a spark that could turn into the cozy fire of domesticity. The arranged marriage of today is more clearly manufactured but it also offers a more certain outcome. Online matrimonial sites are full of young professionals seeking matches on their own, knowing that what is on the table here is not a date but the promise of marriage. In the West, the curiously antiquated notion that it is the prerogative of the man to propose marriage makes for a situation where the promise of marriage is tantalizingly withheld by one of the concerned parties for an indefinite period of time. Indeed, going by Hollywood movies, it would appear that to mention marriage too early in a relationship is a sure way of scaring off the man. So we have a situation where marriage is a mirage that shimmers on the horizon frequently, but materializes rarely. The mating process becomes a serial hunt with the man doing the pursuing to begin a relationship and the woman taking over the role in trying to convert it into something more lasting. At a more fundamental level, the idea that romantic love is the most suitable basis for a long-term relationship is not as automatic as it might appear. Marriage is the only significant kinship tie that we enter into by choice. We don't choose our parents, our relatives or our children — these are cards that are dealt out to us. For a long time, in a lot of cultures, and even now in some, marriage too is a relationship we do not personally control. This view of marriage works best in contexts where the idea of the individual is not fully developed. People live in a sticky collective and individuality is blurred. A young Saraswat Brahmin boy, earning in four figures was sufficient as a description and one such person was broadly substitutable with another. As the role of the individual increases and as dimensions of individuality get fleshed out in ever newer ways, marriage must account for these changes. The idea of romance makes the coming together of individuals seem like a natural event. Mutual attraction melts individuals together into a union. In contexts where communities fragment and finding mates as a task devolves to individuals, romance becomes a natural agent of marriage. The trouble is that while the device works very well in bringing people together, it is not intrinsically equipped to handle these individuals over time. For, the greater emphasis on the individual has also meant that personal needs and personal growth come to occupy a privileged position in every individual's life. Falling in love becomes infinitely easier than staying in it as individuals are no longer defined primarily by the roles they play in marriage. So we have a situation where people fall in and out of love more often, making the idea of romance as a basis of marriage not as socially productive as it used to be. Romantic love seeks to extend the present while the arranged marriage aims at securing the future. It keeps the headiness of romance at bay, and recognizes that romance and the sustenance of a socially constructed long-term contract like marriage do not necessarily converge. Of course, the arranged marriage has its own assumptions about what variables make this contract work and these too offer no guarantees. In a world where our present has become a poor indicator of our future, the idea of arranging marriages continues to hold charm. Whether it is cloaked in tradition as it is in India or in modernity as it is elsewhere, the institution of marriage needs some help. The expanded Indian view of the arranged marriage functions as a facilitated marriage search designed for individuals. Perhaps that is why convented matches from status families will continue to look for decent marriages, caste no bar. |
Windows Live Hotmail just got better. Find out more!
Monday, 9 March 2009
Ethics, Economics and Global Justice
Rowan Williams
In a conversation a couple of months ago at Canary Wharf, a senior manager in financial services observed that recent years had seen an erosion of the notion that certain enterprises necessarily took time to deliver and that therefore it was a mistake to look for maximal profits on the basis of a balance sheet covering only one or two years. There had been, he suggested, a deep and systemic impatience with the whole idea of taking time to arrive at a desired goal – and thus with a great deal of the understanding of both labour and the building of confidence. Either an enterprise delivered or it didn't, and the question could be answered in a brief and measurable time-span.
For all the rhetoric about accountability, getting your money's worth, the effect of such assumptions in all kinds of settings has been a spectacular failure to understand the variety of ways in which responsible practice might be gauged – whether in relation to investment in actual production or in relation to new financial products, whose sustainability and reliability can only be proved after the passage of time. Very much the same kind of impatience has also been part of the tidal wave of assault on the historic professions – including the law, teaching and academic research and some aspects of public service. The short-term curse continues to afflict the voluntary sector in the absurd timescales attached to grant-giving; but all that is material for a lecture in its own right …
But in connection specifically with the financial crisis, the main point is about what appropriate patience might look like where various financial and commercial enterprises are concerned. The loss of a sense of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather than being automatically deliverable according to a set of static conditions laid down. It involves a degree of human judgement, which in turn involves a level of awareness of one's own human character and that of others – a degree of literacy about the signals of trustworthiness; a shared culture of understanding what is said and done in a human society.
And this learning entails unavoidable insecurity. I do not control others and I do not control the passage of time and the processes of nature; even the processes of human labour are limited by things outside my control (the capacities of human bodies). My lack of a definitive and authoritative or universal perspective means that I may make mistakes because I misread others or because I miscalculate the levels of uncertainty in the processes I deal in. And the further away I get from these areas of learning by trial and error, the further away I get from the inevitable risks of living in a material and limited world, the more easily can I persuade myself that I am after all in control.
Although people have spoken of greed as the source of our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper. It is a little too easy to blame the present situation on an accumulation of individual greed, exemplified by bankers or brokers, and to lose sight of the fact that governments committed to deregulation and to the encouragement of speculation and high personal borrowing were elected repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a crucial couple of decades.
Add to that the fact that warnings were not lacking of some of the risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question of what it was that skewed the judgment of a whole society as well as of financial professionals. John Dunning, a professional analyst of the business world, wrote some six years ago about what he called the "crisis in the moral ecology" of unregulated capitalism (in the editorial afterword to a collection of essays on Making Globalisation Good, p.357); and he and other contributors to his book discussed how "circles of failure" could be created in the global economy by a combination of moral indifference, institutional crisis and market failure, each feeding on the others. Yet warnings went unheeded; people's rational capacities, it seems, were blunted, and unregulated global capitalism was assumed to be the natural way of doing things, based on a set of rational market processes that would deliver results in everyone's interest.
This was not just about greed. At least some apologists for the naturalness of the unregulated market pointed – quite reasonably in the circumstances – to the apparently infallible capacity of the market to free nations from poverty. It may help to turn for illumination to an unexpected source. Acquisitiveness is, in the Christian monastic tradition, associated with pride, the root of all human error and failure: pride, which is most clearly evident in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my environment, my illusion that I can shape the world according to my will. And if that is correct, then the origin of economic dysfunction and injustice is pride – a pride that is manifest in the reluctance to let go of systems and projects that promise more and more secure control, and so has a bad effect on our reasoning powers.
This in turn suggests that economic justice arrives only when everyone recognises some kind of shared vulnerability and limitation in a world of limits and processes (psychological as well as material) that cannot be bypassed. We are delivered or converted not simply by resolving in a vacuum to be less greedy, but by understanding what it is to live as an organism which grows and changes and thus is involved in risk. We change because our minds or mindsets are changed and steered away from certain powerful but toxic myths.
Now, you could say that ethics is essentially about how we negotiate our own and other people's vulnerabilities. The sort of behaviour we recognise as unethical is very frequently something to do with the misuse of power and the range of wrong or corrupt responses to power – with the ways in which fear or envy or admiration can skew our perception of what the situation truly demands of us. Instead of estimating what it is that we owe to truth or to reality or to God as the source of truth, we calculate what we need to do so as to acquire, retain or at best placate power (and there is of course a style of supposedly religious morality that works in just such an unethical way). But when we begin to think seriously about ethics, about how our life is to reflect truth, we do not consider what is owed to power; indeed, we consider what is owed to weakness, to powerlessness.
Our ethical seriousness is tested by how we behave towards those whose goodwill or influence is of no "use" to us. Hence the frequently repeated claim that the moral depth of a society can be assessed by how it treats its children – or, one might add, its disabled, its elderly or its terminally ill. Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other's need. To be an ethical agent is thus to be aware of human frailty, material and mental; and so, by extension, it is to be aware of your own frailty. And for a specifically Christian ethic, the duty of care for the neighbour as for oneself is bound up with the injunction to forgive as one hopes to be forgiven; basic to this whole perspective is the recognition both that I may fail or be wounded and that I may be guilty of error and damage to another.
It's a bit of a paradox, then, to realise that aspects of capitalism are in their origin very profoundly ethical in the sense I've just outlined. The venture capitalism of the early modern period expressed something of the sense of risk by limiting liability and sharing profit; it sought to give limited but real security in a situation of risk, and it assumed that sharing risk was a basis for sharing wealth. It acknowledged the lack of ultimate human control in a world of complex processes and unpredictable agents and attempted to "negotiate vulnerabilities", in the terms I used a moment ago, by stressing the importance of maintaining trust and offering some protection against unlimited loss. By sharing risk between investor and venturer, it also shared power.
The problems begin to arise when the system offers such a level of protection from insecurity that risk comes to be seen as exceptional and unacceptable. We take for granted a high level of guaranteed return and so come to prefer those transactions in which the actual business of time-taking and the limits involved in material labour and scarcity of goods are less involved. It has been persuasively argued that things begin to go astray, morally, in the early and intimate association between capitalism and various colonial projects, in which abundant new natural resources and abundant new reserves of labour (notably in the shape of slavery) could be counted on to minimise some kinds of risk.
In the post-colonial climate, it has been the world of financial products that becomes the favoured basis for both personal and social economy. A badly or inadequately regulated market is one in which no one is properly monitoring the scarcity of credit. And this absence of monitoring is especially attractive when governments depend for their electability on a steady expansion of spending power for their citizens. Increasingly, to pick up the central theme of Philip Bobbitt's magisterial works on modern global and military politics, government rests its legitimacy upon its capacity to satisfy consumer demands and maximise choices – its capacity to defer or obscure that element of the uncontrollable which in earlier phases of capitalist production dictated the habits of mutual trust and shared jeopardy, the habits that made sense of the otherwise morally controversial idea that the use of money was itself in some sense a chargeable commodity, something that needed to be paid for.
Maximised choice is a form of maximised control. And it presupposes and encourages a basic model of the ideal human agent as an isolated subject confronting a range of options, each of which they are equally free to adopt for their own self-defined purposes. If an economy resting on financial services rather than material production offers more choice, a government will lean in this direction for electoral advantage, since its claim to be taken seriously is now grounded in its ability to enlarge the market in which individuals operate to purchase the raw materials for constructing their identities and projects.
As I hope will be clear, this is a deeper matter than just "greed". It is a fairly comprehensive picture of what sort of things human beings are; and to recognise it as a reasonably accurate model of late modern "developed" society, especially in the north Atlantic world, is not to suggest any blanket condemnation of market principles, any nostalgia for pre-modern social sanctions and so forth – only to begin to sketch an analysis of where and how certain quite intractable problems arise.
As already indicated, the modern market state, in Bobbitt's sense of the term, the state that promises maximised choice and minimal risk, is in serious danger of encouraging people to forget two fundamentals of economic reality: scarcity as an inexorable truth about a materially limited world, and concrete productivity and added value as the condition for increasing purchasing power or liberty, and thus sustaining any kind of market. The tension between these two things is, of course, at the heart of economic theory, and imbalance in economic reality arises when one or the other dominates for too long, producing an unhealthily controlled economy (scarcity-driven) or an unhealthily hyperactive and ill-regulated economy (based on the simple expansion of purchasing power).
But forget that tension and what happens is not stability but plain confusion and fantasy. We have woken up belatedly to the results of behaving as though scarcity could be indefinitely deferred: the ecological crisis makes this painfully clear. We have woken up less rapidly and definitively to the effects of displacing labour costs to undeveloped economies. The short-term benefits to local employment in these settings and in lower prices elsewhere cannot offset longer-term issues about security of employment (jobs will move when labour is cheaper in other places) and thus also the problematic social changes brought by large-scale movement towards new employment patterns that have no long-term guarantees. One effect of this pattern is the creation not of a new consumer class but of a new group of urban paupers in unstable developing economies – a phenomenon visible in some east Asian contexts.
The move away from a realistic focus on scarcity and productivity/added value and towards the virtualised economy of money transactions has been deeply seductive, and, over a limited time-frame, spectacularly successful in generating purchasing power. Given that credit is not something that is naturally 'scarce' in precisely the same sense that material resources are, inadequate regulation can, as already noted, foster the illusion that the money market is effectively risk-free; that money can generate money without constraint.
In contrast to an economic model in which the exchange of goods is the basic process being analysed or managed, we have increasingly privileged and encouraged a model in which the process of exchange itself has become the raw material, the motor of profit-making. But, to repeat the point made so many times in the last few months, the problem comes when massively inflated credit is "called in": when the disproportion between actual, measurable material security and what is being claimed and traded on the market is so great that confidence in the institutions involved collapses. The search for impregnable security, independent of the limits of material resource, available labour and the time-consuming securing of trust by working at relationships of transparency and mutual responsibility, has led us to the most radical insecurity imaginable.
This is not the only paradox. In a recent essay in Prospect, Robert Skidelsky discusses why it is that a globalised economy has produced a resurgence of protectionism and nationalism, not to mention the political and economic domination of a single state, the US. We have, he suggests, been seduced into thinking that the mere lack of frontiers in global technology means that we accept a common destiny with other societies and are firmly set on the path to integrated economic operations. "Globalisation – the integration of markets in goods, services, capital and labour – must be good because it has raised millions out of poverty in poorer countries faster than would otherwise have been possible (p.39)." But the Whiggish idea that all this represents an irreversible movement towards an undifferentiated global culture and that a world without economic frontiers is natural, inevitable and by definition benign, rests on several very doubtful assumptions, rooted in an era that is passing – an era in which it was taken for granted that we began from a position of grave scarcity and moved towards unimpeded growth. But we are now in a position of "partial abundance" (i.e. a generally higher standard of living globally) which at the same time is more conscious of the limits of our material and environmental resources. As a result, globalisation is less obviously good news for the "developed" world. "The economic benefits of offshoring are far from evident for richer states," says Skidelsky (ibid.): jobs drain away to places where labour costs are cheaper, and we end up paying more to foreign investors than we earn in international markets. And the temptation for such wealthier economies is thus towards protectionism, with all its damaging consequences for a world economy. It is one of the most effective ways to freeze developing economies in a state of perpetual disadvantage; it makes it impossible for poorer economies to trade their way to wealth, as the rhetoric of the global market suggests they should.
Skidelsky argues that we need to take steps to reduce the attractions of relocating and "offshoring" in the first place, so that countries can focus afresh on their own processes of production so as to keep both internal and external investment alive. As he says, the present situation favours economic agreements that give little or no leverage to workers and that have minimal reference to social, environmental or even local legal concerns. Learning how to use governmental antitrust legislation to break up the virtually monopolistic powers of large multinationals that have become cuckoos in the nest of a national economy would also be an essential part of a strategy designed to stop the slide from opportunistic outsourcing towards protectionism and monitoring or policing the chaotic flow of capital across boundaries.
We have yet to see how much of this is deliverable, but the thrust of the argument is hard to resist, either morally or practically. Morally, protectionism implicitly accepts that wealth maintained at the cost of the neighbour's disadvantage or worse is a tolerable situation – which is a denial of the belief that what is good for humanity is ultimately coherent or convergent. Such a denial is a sinister thing, since it undermines the logic of assuming that what the other finds painful I should find painful too – a basic element of what we generally consider maturely or sanely ethical behaviour. Practically, protectionism is another instance of short-term vision, securing prosperity here by making prosperity impossible somewhere else; in a global context, this is inexorably a factor in ultimately shrinking potential markets.
And the wider agenda sketched by Skidelsky means also that commercial concerns would be prevented from overturning the social and political priorities of elected governments. The arguments around unrepayable international debt a decade ago repeatedly underlined the destructive effects of imposed regimes of financial stabilisation that derailed governmental programmes in poor countries and effectively confiscated any means of shaping a local economy to local needs. And we hardly need reminding of the distorting effect on a national economy – and public ethics, too - of being seen as a pool of cheap labour and a haven for irresponsible practices.
Several writers have said that a reformed and revitalised WTO ought to be able to move us further towards the monitoring I mentioned a moment ago. Some would be more specific and argue that for this to work effectively, there needs also to be some regulation of capital flow and exchange mechanisms, and this is where a variety of commentators from very diverse backgrounds see the "Tobin tax" proposals as having a place taxing currency exchanges in ways that would serve national economies. We should also need some mechanisms by which it could be guaranteed that a recognisable proportion of "savings", locally generated profits in a national economy, could be ploughed back into investment in local infrastructure, so that we should not constantly have to deal with the consequences of new money in a growing economy roaming around looking for a home and ending up fuelling the pressure on banks to lend above their capacity so as to keep the money moving.
Most such moves would, of course, require a formidable, perhaps unattainable level of global agreement and global enforceability; short of this, they could be counterproductive. But the debate on what kinds of international convergence are possible and necessary is a crucial one. The basic question that Skidelsky and others are posing, however, is how the market as we know it can be restructured so as to make it do what it is supposed to do – i.e. to offer producers the chance of a fair and competitive context in which to trade what they produce and become in turn effective investors and developers of the potential of their business and their society.
The last few months have seen an extraordinary and quite unpredictable shift in the balance, with international financial transactions losing credibility and national governments coming into their own as guarantors of some level of stability. It is a rather ironic mutation of the idea of the market state: when it comes to the (credit) crunch, populations want governments to secure their basic spending power, even if it limits their absolute consumer freedoms. There is also a point, recently underlined in the debate in the Church of England's General Synod on this subject, about securing justice for future generations: any morally and practically credible policy should be looking to guarantee that future generations do not inherit liabilities that will cripple the provision of basic social care, for example. Unregulated 'freedom' in the climate of destructive speculation is not the most attractive prospect, certainly not compared with a guarantee that assets will not be allowed to drop indefinitely in value. The only way of 'maximising choice' is to make sure that it is still possible to choose and to use something, and to secure the possibilities reasonable choice for our children and grandchildren, even at the price of restricting some options. Without that restriction, nothing is solid: we should face a world in which everything flows, melts, dissolves, in a world of constantly shifting and spectral valuations.
If we try to draw some of this together into a few governing principles, what might emerge? The non-economist is bound to be intimidated by the complexity of what we confront, but, as has been said, "we are all economists now"; the specialists are not more conspicuously successful than others in mapping the territory, and this at least encourages some tentative proposals from the sidelines, however broad and aspirational. Certainly, over the last century and a half, Anglican theologians have from time to time taken their courage in their hands and attempted to outline what an ethically responsible economy might look like, and I am conscious of standing in the shadow of some very substantial commentators indeed, from F.D.Maurice to William Temple.
In the background too is the formidable legacy of Roman Catholic social teaching, expressed in some powerful statements from the British and American Bishops' Conferences in recent decades. So with this heritage in mind, I shall suggest five elements, in descending order of significance, that might provide the bare bones of an economic culture capable of delivering something like an ethically defensible global policy.
(i) Most fundamentally: we need to move away from a model of economics which simply assumes that it is essentially about the mechanics of generating money, and try to restore an acknowledgement of the role of trust as something which needs time to develop; and so also to move away from an idea of wealth or profit which imagines that they can be achieved without risk, and to return to the primitive capitalist idea, as sketched above, of risk-sharing as an essential element in the equitable securing of wealth for all.
(ii) As many writers, from Partha Dasgupta to Jonathon Porritt have argued, environmental cost has to be factored into economic calculations as a genuine cost in opportunity, resource and durability – and thus a cost in terms of doing justice to future generations. There needs to be a robust rebuttal of any idea that environmental concerns are somehow a side issue or even a luxury in a time of economic pressure; the questions are inseparably connected.
(iii) We need to think harder about the role – actual and potential – of democratically accountable governments in the monitoring and regulation of currency exchange and capital flow. This could involve some international conventions about wages and working conditions, and cooperation between states to try and prevent the indefinite growth of what we might call – on the analogy of tax havens – cheap labour havens. Likewise, it might mean considering the kind of capital controls that prevent a situation where it is advantageous to allow indefinitely large sums of capital out of a country.
(iv) The existing international instruments – the IMF and World Bank, the WTO and the G8 and G20 countries – need to be reconceived as both monitors of the global flow of capital and agencies to stimulate local enterprise and provide some safety nets as long as the global playing field is so far from being level. They need to provide some protective sanctions for the disadvantaged – not aimed at undermining market mechanisms but at letting them work as they should, working to allow countries to trade their way out of destitution.
(v) Necessary short-term policies to kickstart an economy in crisis – such as we have seen in the UK in recent months – should be balanced by long-term consideration of the levels of material and service production that will provide an anchor of stability against the possible storms of speculative financial practice. This is not simply about "baling out" firms under pressure but about a comprehensive look at national economies with a view to understanding what sort of production levels would act as ballast in times of crisis, and investing accordingly.
Aspirational these may be; but what I hope is not vague here is the moral orientation that lies behind all these points. Ethics, I suggested, is about negotiating conditions in which the most vulnerable are not abandoned. And we shall care about this largely to the extent to which we are conscious of our own vulnerability and limitedness. One of the things most fatal to the sustaining of an ethical perspective on any area of human life, not just economics, is the fantasy that we are not really part of a material order – that we are essentially will or craving, for which the body is a useful organ for fulfilling the purposes of the all-powerful will, rather than being the organ of our connection with the rest of the world. It's been said often enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.
Implied in what has just been said is a recognition of the dangers of "growth" as an unexamined good. Growth out of poverty, growth towards a degree of intelligent control of one's circumstances, growth towards maturity of perception and sympathy – all these are manifestly good and ethically serious goals, and, as has already been suggested, there are ways of conducting our economic business that could honour and promote these. A goal of growth simply as an indefinite expansion of purchasing power is either vacuous or malign – malign to the extent that it inevitably implies the diminution of the capacity of others in a world of limited resource. Remember the significance of scarcity and vulnerability in shaping a sense of what ethical behaviour looks like.
It is true that modern production creates markets by creating new "needs" – or more properly, new expectations. Human creativity moves on and human ingenuity constantly enlarges the reach of human management of the environment. That isn't in itself an evil; but a mature perspective on this would surely note two things. One is that there is always some choice involved in what is to be developed – and thus some opportunity cost. Not everything can be produced according to the dictates of desire, and so there will still be the need to sort out priorities. Second, we cannot ignore or postpone the question of what we want enlarged management of the environment for. The reduction of pain or of frustration, the augmenting of opportunity for human welfare and joy – again, these are obviously good things. They are good because they connect with a sense of what is properly owing to human beings, a sense of human dignity. And thus if the way in which they are secured for some reduces the opportunities of others, the pursuit of them is not compatible with a serious commitment to human dignity.
All this amounts to a belief that pursuing ethical economic growth, while not systematically hostile to new demands and new markets, while indeed acknowledging the way in which new markets can and should help to secure the prosperity of new producers, necessarily means looking critically at our lifestyle. To make it specific, and to use one of the more obvious examples, it has become more and more clear that lifestyles dependent on high levels of fossil fuel consumption reduce the long-term opportunities of basic human flourishing for many people because of their environmental cost – not to mention the various political traps associated with the production and marketing of oil in some parts of the world, with the consequent risks to peace and regional stability. Growth as an infinitely projected process of better and cheaper access to fossil fuel-related goods, including transport, would not be an impressive ethical horizon. The question which present circumstances are forcing rather harshly on our attention is how self-critical we can find it in ourselves to be about our lifestyle in the more affluent parts of the world – not in order to adopt a corporate monastic poverty but in order to arrive at a sense of the acceptable limits to growth in the context of what might be good for the human family overall and the planet itself.
The five broad principles sketched above could only be fleshed out against a background in which people recognised that talking about the need for growth made no sense except in relation to a world of complex social and political relationships and of limited material resources – a background of willingness to ask not what might be abstractly possible in terms of increasing the range of consumer goods but what might be manageable as part of a balanced global network of forces, basic needs, mutual respect and so on.
Basic to everything we might want to say about the financial crisis from the religious point of view is the question, "what for?" What is growth for? For what and for whom is wealth important? If it is essential to invest in certain kinds of productive ventures, how does this relate to the broader and longer-term imperative of securing the funding of social care future by way of sustainable shared resources, accumulated wealth? And so on. But behind such questions as these is the unavoidable issue of what human beings are for; or, to put it less crudely, what the content is of ideas of human dignity and where we look for their foundation or rationale. The principles outlined a moment ago require a context not only of geopolitical and social analysis, not even of pragmatic recognitions of the limits of material resources or the opportunity costs of certain financial decisions, but of a comprehensive sense of belonging in a world – and a world that is neither self-explanatory nor self-sufficient, but is transparent to a deeper level of agency or liberty, that level that is called God by the religious traditions of humanity.
In Christian belief, the world exists because of a free act of generous love by the creator. God has made a world in which, by working with the limitations of a material order declared by God to be 'very good', humans may reflect the liberty and generosity of God. And our salvation is the restoration of a broken relationship with this whole created order, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the establishing by the power of his Spirit a community in which mutual service and attention are the basic elements through which the human world becomes transparent to its maker.
The realising of that transparency is, for religious believers of whatever tradition, the beginning of happiness – not of a transient feeling of well-being or even euphoria, but of a settled sense of being at home, being absolved from urgent and obsessional desire, from the passion to justify your existence, from the anxieties of rivalry. And so what religious belief has to say in the context of our present crisis is, first, a call to lament the brokenness of the world and invite that change of heart which is so pivotal throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures; and, second, to declare without ambiguity or qualification that human value rests on God's creative love and not on possession or achievement. It is not for believers to join in the search for scapegoats, because there will always be, for the religious self, an awareness of complicity in social evil. Nor is it for believers to make light of the real suffering that goes with economic uncertainty and loss – no less real for the formerly affluent Westerner faced with redundancy than for the powerless farmer or woman worker enduring yet another change for the worse in a battered and injured African or Asian economy.
But the task is to turn people's eyes back to the vision of a human dignity that is indestructible. This is the vision that will both allow us to retain a hold on our sense of worth even when circumstances are painful or humiliating and sustain the sense of obligation to the needs of others, near at hand or strangers, so that dignity may be made manifest.
In conclusion, let me suggest three central aspects of a religious – and more specifically, Christian – contribution to the ongoing debate, which may focus some more detailed reflection:
(i) Our faith depends on the action of a God who is to be trusted; God keeps promises. There could hardly be a more central theme in Jewish and Christian scripture, and the notion is present in slightly different form in Islam as well. Thus, to live in proper harmony with God, human beings need to be promise-keepers in all areas of their lives, not least in financial dealings.
(ii) As we have noted more than once already, the perspective of faith understands human beings as part of creation – not wholly in control, though gifted with capacities that allow real and significant powers over the environment, bound to material identity and unable to escape material need. Living in faith is living in awareness of this created and limited identity without resentment or fantasy.
(iii) Living as part of creation brings with it a sense of the common destiny and common predicament of humanity. But more specifically, the scriptural understanding of our calling, especially as set out in the letters of St Paul, sees the ideal human community as one in which the welfare and giftedness of each and the welfare of all are inseparable. What is good in God's eyes for human beings not something that is altered by differences in culture or income; we can't say that what is unwelcome or evil for us is tolerable for others.
So: trustworthiness, realism or humility and the clear sense that we must resist polices or practices which accept the welfare of some at the expense of others – there is a back-of-an-envelope idea of where we might start in pressing for a global economic order that has some claim to be just. It can't be too often stressed that we are not talking about simply limiting damage to vulnerable societies far away: the central issues exposed by the financial crisis are everyone's business, and the risks of what some commentators (Timothy Garton Ash and Jonathon Porritt) have called a "barbarising" of western societies as a result of panic and social insecurity are real enough.
Equally it can't be too often stressed that it is only the generosity of an ethical approach to these matters that can begin to relate material wealth to human well-being, the happiness that is spiritual and relational and based on the recognition of non-negotiable human worth. There is much to fear at the moment, but, as always, more to hope for – so long as we can turn our backs on the worlds of unreality so seductively opened up by some of our recent financial history. Patience, trust and the acceptance of a world of real limitation are all hard work; yet the only liberation that is truly worth while is the liberation to be where we are and who we are as human beings, to be anchored in the reality that is properly ours. Other less serious and less risky enterprises may appear to promise a power that exceeds our limitations – but it is at the expense of truth, and so, ultimately at the expense of human life itself. Perhaps the very heart of the current challenge is the invitation to discover a little more deeply what is involved in human freedom – not the illusory freedom of some fantasy of control.
Windows Live just got better. Find out more!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)