wikileaks
The Call Of The American Demarche
Does India really follow the US lead as blindly as the Wikileaks cables seem to suggest?
Pranay Sharma
A Few Views Through The Cablegate
Cable 162458 July 17, 2008: Claims Congress MP Satish Sharma's aide, Nachiketa Kapur, confided to an embassy official that RLD MPs had been bribed Rs 10 crore each and showed him two chests containing Rs 50-80 crore for bribing Opposition MPs before a no-confidence vote against UPA-I.
Cable 195165 March 4, 2009: Home Minister P. Chidambaram confides to FBI chief that the constitutional status of the National Investigation Agency is debatable.
Cable 220281 Aug 11, 2009: US ambassador Timothy Roemer is told by NSA M.K. Narayanan that he differs with PM Singh on his policy to engage Pakistan.
Cable 206814 May 13, 2009: BJP leader L.K. Advani says his party, if it were to come to power, would rethink its decision of opposing the nuclear deal.
Cable 243925 Jan 15, 2010: M.K. Narayanan tells US ambassador Roemer that Chidambaram needs someone “to check him and put a bit in his mouth”. Congress leader Digvijay Singh says Narayanan had to leave because of his turf war with the home minister.
Cable No 215357 July 7, 2009: Quotes India's PR to the UN Hardeep Puri saying his “clear” brief from New Delhi is to seek “a greater degree of convergence with the US” in the UN.
Cable No 205168 May 1, 2009: Cites joint secretary (Americas) Gaitri Kumar saying that the US should convey to the MEA any complaint about Puri's functioning in the UN.
Cable No 149884 April 15, 2008: An MEA official informs the US about the Iranian president's visit to India even before the information is made public or conveyed to other government agencies.
Cable No. 64794 May 19, 2006: Indian deputy PR Ajai Malhotra criticises his boss, Nirupam Sen, for opposing the US in UN, says his brief is to oppose him.
Cable 225053 Sept 14, 2009: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wants to know about finance minister Pranab Mukherjee's ideological orientation, and why Montek Singh Ahluwalia wasn't given that post.
Cable 40501 Sept 13, 2005: Ambassador David Mulford asks Condoleezza Rice to tell Manmohan Singh that India's decision to not vote on Iran in the IAEA could have an adverse impact on the nuclear deal.
Cable 51088 Jan 30, 2006: Mulford hails the sacking of Mani Shankar Aiyar from the petroleum ministry, and says the cabinet reshuffle has an "undeniable pro-America tilt".
***
As Parliament stalled repeatedly over the sensational Wikileaks cables and the nation was left aghast at the seemingly unfettered access American officials have to the corridors of power in New Delhi, you’d have thought the Indian officialdom had been warned about the perils of rubbing shoulders with all those whose calling cards mention the Embassy of the United States of America. Yet, indifferent to the shock and awe The Hindu-Wikileaks cables generated, a government luminary had the chutzpah to accommodate in his breathless schedule a meeting with a middle-rung American official, to brief him, of all things, on the functioning of his department. It was a gross violation of protocol—the Indian official’s rank meant he met none other than the American ambassador.
Last week also saw a leader of a coalition partner of the UPA government desperately seek from the US embassy a special slot for a visa interview for his son, in the hope of helping him circumvent long queues. Imagine the scenario before the little Wikileaks bombs exploded so dramatically? Secretary-level officials of different ministries readily furnish their mobile numbers to US embassy officials and provide appointments to them without going through the Union ministry of external affairs (MEA). In fact, all those who matter in New Delhi—from politicians to industrialists to opinion-makers—vie with each other to have a one-to-one meeting with the Americans, sharing information and gossip, and unwittingly articulating, often highlighting, the American point of view on sensitive issues.
There are simply too many Indian tongues whispering into the American ear, spilling, as the Wikileaks cables (see infographic) bear out, sensitive aspects of Indian foreign policy, relations between top politicians, their ideological inclinations, even their machinations, and their propensity to strike strong anti-America poses only for public consumption. So then, are we America’s chamcha, a lackey willing to do its bidding? Is America’s penetration of the Indian system worrying?
Take the cable that quotes an American official saying he had been shown two chests of cash by Congress MP Satish Sharma’s aide, Nachiketa Kapur, who claimed the money would soon be utilised for bribing Opposition MPs to vote against the no-confidence motion against UPA-I. A school of thought argues that the money was perhaps America’s, supplied by an intelligence operative, and Kapur was only accounting for the cash to the official who had come calling on him. “What was the need for Kapur to otherwise show the cash to the official? It proves America has become a player in our system,” says one diplomatic source.
A tad exaggerated perhaps. Yet, Kapur’s candour illustrates vividly the confidence an aide of an important MP reposes in the Americans. Says former foreign minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, “Since the US hasn’t spoken about the authenticity of the cables, these are therefore deemed genuine. It’s an invasion by the Americans into the Indian system.” Endorsing Sinha is former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh, who was miffed to discover that his parleys with Myanmarese leaders during his 2005 trip to Yangon had been relayed to the US, quite obvious from a Wikileaks cable. “How many moles do we have? The American penetration of the Indian establishment is alarming indeed,” he said, adding that the controversy shows the Manmohan government in “poor light”.
Waltzing to whose tune? A US embassy party in New Delhi. (Photograph by Sanjoy Ghosh)
A clutch of cables pertaining to the United Nations bolsters the theory about America penetrating the Indian system. One cable quotes India’s Permanent Representative in the UN, Hardeep Puri, as saying that his specific brief is to seek a “greater degree of convergence” with the US, in contrast to his predecessor, Nirupam Sen’s. Another cable has an Indian official criticise Sen’s ‘anti-US’ approach. But the former diplomat asks of his detractors: “Since I was perceived by at least some American diplomats in an adversarial light, how was I able to continue there for another two years after retiring on March 31, 2007?” Sen wasn’t willing to provide the answer, but MEA sources say he was given an extension at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, who wanted to correct UPA's pro-Washington tilt.
Yet, the pro-America lobby in the UPA-I regime felt emboldened enough to scuttle a fundamental change in the UN that Sen had initiated, only to please the Americans. This pertained to the choice of a candidate for the post of UN secretary-general. Under a 1946 resolution, described as 11/1, the US and other P-5 members of the Security Council (SC), along with the support of four non-permanent members, send only one name for the approval of General Assembly (GA). This practice had once led Sen to remark that the UN secretary-general acted more like a “secretary to the P-5” and a “general to the General Assembly”.
Sen and some members of the GA, therefore, proposed that it be made mandatory for the SC to shortlist at least three names for the post of secretary-general. South Block, sources say, initially tried to dissuade Sen from pursuing this course, but he remained steadfast saying he needed a written order before he could retract from his position. It was then that South Block turned wily, writing a new script that, sources insist, was truly Machiavellian—and aimed at pleasing the Americans.
What was that script? In 2006, Shashi Tharoor threw his hat in the ring, not as an official Indian candidate, but as an ‘independent’ who, straw polls indicated, enjoyed tremendous popularity in the UN and was supposed to give the SC (read the US) nominee a run for the money. Sources say a nervous US asked New Delhi to endorse Tharoor as its official candidate. The announcement sowed seeds of doubt among the GA members who perceived Sen’s attempt to alter 11/1 as a ruse to win for India the post of secretary-general. The GA became badly divided, provoking many of its members to abandon the plan of rewriting 11/1—and diluting the powers of P-5.
Yet another example of the craven behaviour of Indian officials towards America is borne out by the experience of Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, whose divestment of the petroleum ministry portfolio is celebrated in a Wikileaks cable. The Americans thought Aiyar was anti-America, a charge he dismisses outright. “I was disappointed (at the divestment),” says Aiyar, “but I don’t believe it was because of pressure from outside.”
But what rankled Aiyar was that then US ambassador David Mulford declared in a public speech that Murli Deora was better informed about the petroleum ministry than Aiyar. As he told Outlook, “While Mulford was perfectly within his rights to send secret cables to his government about us, to make a public statement comparing two ministers was an act of gross impropriety. I objected very strongly to it, and conveyed my protest to the foreign secretary. But instead of a public expression of deep displeasure, the foreign secretary preferred merely to whisper in the US ambassador’s ear. I thought it was inadequate.”
The love for America is a trait the BJP too shares with the Congress. One cable has the US embassy complaining to Washington that the NDA government gave them better access than the UPA. Again, BJP leader L.K. Advani was initially opposed to the idea of sending Indian troops to Iraq, but a 2003 trip to the US and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to his hotel room saw him accede to Washington. Ultimately, Indian troops weren’t sent because of prime minister A.B. Vajpayee’s opposition. Says Sinha, “There is no denying that there were elements even in the NDA who were very close to the US, but you should judge us by our actions.” He says it is well-documented that the BJP-led NDA warded off American pressure to sign the CTBT and the nuclear deal, believing these militated against India’s interest. (Analysts, however, say the NDA would have agreed to the nuclear deal had it been voted to power in 2004.)
The aggrieved Both Aiyar and Natwar Singh have bones to pick
What has enabled the Americans to make deep inroads into the Indian system? To begin with, the Indian middle class, to which the elite belong, has made an ideological shift to the US. Every middle-class family seems to have a member working in the US. It is the land where parents wish to send their children for education, and seasoned bureaucrats are keen on short-term courses in the American universities. Visas have granted the US embassy an unprecedented clout and reach. In addition, bureaucrats have seen three successive governments, beginning 1999, tilt away from Russia and inch closer to Washington. This shift has transmitted a message to the officialdom that America is the flavour of the season, engendering hopes in them of advancing their careers by taking a pro-US line in consonance with that of their political masters.
There’s no denying that America’s support to India has given it a considerable heft in the international arena. Says an Indian diplomat, “We have used the US as a stepladder.” Has the climb up the hierarchy of global powers compromised India’s sovereignty? And though a country’s interests keep shifting, and there’s always give-and-take in diplomacy, New Delhi can’t be seen to have bartered on possible gains of the future for America’s support, other than on Iran.
Iran remains a contentious issue among foreign policy wonks. Former foreign secretary Shyam Saran insists it was in India’s interest to have voted along with the US in the IAEA in 2005 (see interview). Again, Aiyar pursued the India-Pakistan-Iran (IPI) gas pipeline on the basis of a cabinet decision. Substantial progress was registered on the issue in the first two years of Aiyar’s departure from the petroleum ministry. But the pipeline subsequently got stalled because of the instability in Pakistan.
Perhaps the Wikileaks cables are a timely warning to India to draw certain lines in its relationship with the US. As Aiyar says, “My only suggestion to our ministries is to exercise greater discretion in their exchange with foreign diplomats. Do not retail gossip, be more disciplined.” Perhaps the furore over Wikileaks cables is a reminder to Indians to not be unduly enamoured of America, to not sacrifice their self-respect, to introduce a certain balance in its conduct of foreign policy.
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Sunday 27 March 2011
Saturday 26 March 2011
Teach history warts and all
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: March 25 2011 23:10 | Last updated: March 25 2011 23:10
“Time to head off!” wisecracks the hooded executioner on the cover of Even More Terrible Tudors, one of the popular titles in the Horrible Histories series. “I’ve got a mammoth brain!” grunts a caveman on the cover of The Savage Stone Age, holding up the dripping organ in question, while his family, sitting in the background, cooks the rest of the mammoth. History-minded schoolboys buy these books – written or co-written by the Englishman Terry Deary and aimed at presenting “history with the nasty bits left in” – by the dozens.
The idea that the history of one’s own country should be as exhilarating to young readers as, say, cars exploding or ladies in bathing suits is a peculiarly British one. When Michael Gove, education secretary, told Conservatives at their party conference last October that the narrative of children’s history courses could stand to be a bit snappier, he started an argument that has riled British historians ever since. If people are uninspired by the country’s past, Mr Gove says, “we will not properly value the liberties of the present”. Mr Gove is nationalistic to say so, but he is right. If defending one’s rights requires knowing where they came from, then learning one’s own history is indispensable.
The argument is over how best to breathe life into a mass of facts and dates. For Mr Gove, the missing element is a strong narrative, built of real protagonists facing big challenges. The government enlisted as its history adviser Simon Schama of Columbia University (and the Financial Times), who has found a way to make European and British history enthralling, both in books and on screen. Mr Gove and Mr Schama have their detractors, however. The University of California historian of Britain, James Vernon, believes teaching works best “not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically”. Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian of Germany, is not hostile to the narrative lines dear to Mr Gove and Mr Schama, but warns us against getting swept up in them. In a recent London Review of Books essay, he urges scepticism towards sources and warns students “not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with”.
This is the point on which Mr Schama and Mr Evans are most likely to agree. Mr Schama, too, has described history as a force for challenging orthodoxies, as the “greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance”. And yet, this may be the point on which classroom teachers have their deepest doubts. The intellectual independence that Messrs Schama and Evans extol characterises only a minority of published historians – why should we expect it from A-level students? Should we even want it? There are, after all, problems with teaching scepticism. The questioning of authority is indispensable and often heroic, but one needs a certain “feel” for a subject matter before one can carry it out. Until that point, scepticism is little more than a truculent contrarianism and a waste of other students’ time. It is most tellingly applied to the things one knows best. Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down.
One wonders whether this is not Mr Gove and Mr Schama’s real gripe. Mr Evans accuses them of “confusing history with memory”. But maybe memory is what young people need to be taught before they can be taught actual history. An example of this memory/ history distinction comes from Black History Month, as it is taught in US grade schools. Children spend every February either learning or rehashing the achievements of African-Americans – always in a morale-boosting way. As history, such courses have little to recommend them. To treat the deeds of the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in greater detail than those of George Washington, which is the inevitable end-result of a dedicated month, is to perpetrate a distortion.
But as memory, Black History Month has been a striking success. Children, and not just black children, quite like it. The reasons are paradoxical. Probably no pedagogical innovation was ever carried out for reasons more political, but Black History Month is the least politically correct corner of the grade-school history curriculum. You always know who the good guys are in Black History Month and their struggles are taught with an old-fashioned, un-nuanced moralism that makes Our Island Story look like Hamlet. The results are plain to see. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland released a survey of 2,000 11th- and 12th-graders (high-school leavers) who had been asked to name the 10 most significant Americans, excepting presidents. Three mainstays of Black History Month – Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman – ranked one, two and three, well ahead of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
By about the age of eight or 10, children should have a simple, logical and non-cynical narrative of their country to carry around for the rest of their lives as a net to catch knowledge in. Non-cynical, because children cannot build such a net if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart. That is the problem with teaching young people: there is a line on one side of which a teacher’s duty is to promote credulity and on the other side of which it is to promote scepticism. Errors are inevitable. But they will be self-correcting, to some extent. By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and “distance” as any educator could wish.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Published: March 25 2011 23:10 | Last updated: March 25 2011 23:10
“Time to head off!” wisecracks the hooded executioner on the cover of Even More Terrible Tudors, one of the popular titles in the Horrible Histories series. “I’ve got a mammoth brain!” grunts a caveman on the cover of The Savage Stone Age, holding up the dripping organ in question, while his family, sitting in the background, cooks the rest of the mammoth. History-minded schoolboys buy these books – written or co-written by the Englishman Terry Deary and aimed at presenting “history with the nasty bits left in” – by the dozens.
The idea that the history of one’s own country should be as exhilarating to young readers as, say, cars exploding or ladies in bathing suits is a peculiarly British one. When Michael Gove, education secretary, told Conservatives at their party conference last October that the narrative of children’s history courses could stand to be a bit snappier, he started an argument that has riled British historians ever since. If people are uninspired by the country’s past, Mr Gove says, “we will not properly value the liberties of the present”. Mr Gove is nationalistic to say so, but he is right. If defending one’s rights requires knowing where they came from, then learning one’s own history is indispensable.
The argument is over how best to breathe life into a mass of facts and dates. For Mr Gove, the missing element is a strong narrative, built of real protagonists facing big challenges. The government enlisted as its history adviser Simon Schama of Columbia University (and the Financial Times), who has found a way to make European and British history enthralling, both in books and on screen. Mr Gove and Mr Schama have their detractors, however. The University of California historian of Britain, James Vernon, believes teaching works best “not by turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically”. Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian of Germany, is not hostile to the narrative lines dear to Mr Gove and Mr Schama, but warns us against getting swept up in them. In a recent London Review of Books essay, he urges scepticism towards sources and warns students “not to accept passively every fact and argument they are presented with”.
This is the point on which Mr Schama and Mr Evans are most likely to agree. Mr Schama, too, has described history as a force for challenging orthodoxies, as the “greatest, least sentimental, least politically correct tutor of tolerance”. And yet, this may be the point on which classroom teachers have their deepest doubts. The intellectual independence that Messrs Schama and Evans extol characterises only a minority of published historians – why should we expect it from A-level students? Should we even want it? There are, after all, problems with teaching scepticism. The questioning of authority is indispensable and often heroic, but one needs a certain “feel” for a subject matter before one can carry it out. Until that point, scepticism is little more than a truculent contrarianism and a waste of other students’ time. It is most tellingly applied to the things one knows best. Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down.
One wonders whether this is not Mr Gove and Mr Schama’s real gripe. Mr Evans accuses them of “confusing history with memory”. But maybe memory is what young people need to be taught before they can be taught actual history. An example of this memory/ history distinction comes from Black History Month, as it is taught in US grade schools. Children spend every February either learning or rehashing the achievements of African-Americans – always in a morale-boosting way. As history, such courses have little to recommend them. To treat the deeds of the 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in greater detail than those of George Washington, which is the inevitable end-result of a dedicated month, is to perpetrate a distortion.
But as memory, Black History Month has been a striking success. Children, and not just black children, quite like it. The reasons are paradoxical. Probably no pedagogical innovation was ever carried out for reasons more political, but Black History Month is the least politically correct corner of the grade-school history curriculum. You always know who the good guys are in Black History Month and their struggles are taught with an old-fashioned, un-nuanced moralism that makes Our Island Story look like Hamlet. The results are plain to see. In 2008, education professors from Stanford and the University of Maryland released a survey of 2,000 11th- and 12th-graders (high-school leavers) who had been asked to name the 10 most significant Americans, excepting presidents. Three mainstays of Black History Month – Martin Luther King, the anti-segregationist protester Rosa Parks and the escaped slave Harriet Tubman – ranked one, two and three, well ahead of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
By about the age of eight or 10, children should have a simple, logical and non-cynical narrative of their country to carry around for the rest of their lives as a net to catch knowledge in. Non-cynical, because children cannot build such a net if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart. That is the problem with teaching young people: there is a line on one side of which a teacher’s duty is to promote credulity and on the other side of which it is to promote scepticism. Errors are inevitable. But they will be self-correcting, to some extent. By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and “distance” as any educator could wish.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Tuesday 1 March 2011
"Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"
The Un-Sustainability Of Modern Capitalism
By Anthony Wile
28 February, 2011
The Daily Bell
An interview with John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"
Daily Bell: Please treat this interview as if no one knew about you or your bestselling books. Give us some background on where you grew up and how you entered the CIA.
John Perkins: I grew up in New Hampshire and went to business school in Boston. At that time, I was approached by the National Security Agency (NSA), not the CIA, for a series of very sensitive tests including lie detector and personality test. They concluded I would make a good economic hit man, which is essentially a con artist with an economic background. They also said they found several weaknesses in my character that maybe they could use as hooks that would bring me into their game. Primarily, money, sex and power. Being that I was a young man, I was seduced by all of them.
Daily Bell: You were chief economist at a major international consulting firm; how did you gain that position?
John Perkins: After the NSA recruited me, I joined the Peace Corps. When I came out of the Peace Corps, Charles P. Maine hired me. It was a Boston consulting firm and the Sr. VP who hired me had very close ties to the NSA and the intelligence network of the United States in general. What I came to realize was it was all part of the scheme to turn me into an economic hit man. The first economic hit man, guys like Kermit Roosevelt, who overthrew the democratically elected President of Iran actually worked for the CIA.
But the weakness in that system was that if guys like Kermit Roosevelt had been discovered, the US government would have been in deep trouble. So very soon after that experience, they started to use private consultants, instead of actual government employees to do this work. Companies like Charles T. Main were brought in with legitimate contracts, working for the state department or the World Bank or the treasury department or USAID or other organizations and within these organizations were guys like me who did this special field of work.
Daily Bell: Interesting. You advised the World Bank, United Nations, IMF, U.S. Treasury Department, Fortune 500 corporations, and countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. What is your opinion of the World Bank?
John Perkins: The World Bank is a tool of economic hit men, there is no question about it. It's the tool of big corporations, the IMF and most of what we call intelligence agencies of the United States, CIA and NSA. Essentially the job of all these organizations is to help what used to be just US businesses – now we call them multi-nationals – get themselves established around the world in positions where they can exploit the world's resources, natural resources and human resources. All of these organizations are basically tools of what they call the corporatocracy. The men and a few women who run the biggest and most powerful corporations also run most of the government. Economic hit men help channel the resources of organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, the NSA and the CIA to support the larger agenda.
Daily Bell: The IMF?
John Perkins: It's a servant of the corporatocracy, of economic hit men. One of my jobs as an economic hit man was to identify countries that had resources like oil and arrange huge loans for those countries from the World Bank and sister organizations. But the money would never go to the actual country; instead it would go to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country like power plants and industrial parks; things that would benefit a few very wealthy families.
So then the people of the country would be left holding this huge debt that they couldn't repay. We would come back and say, "well, since you can't repay your debt, you have to restructure your loan." That's when the IMF comes in. So the World Bank makes the original loan and IMF shows up and says, "We'll help you restructure your loan, but in order to do that you have to meet certain conditionalities. You have to sell your oil or whatever the coveted resource is at a cheap price, to the oil companies without restrictions." Or they would suggest the country sell electric utilities, water and sewage, maybe even your schools and jails to private multi-national corporations. Or maybe allow military bases to be built; these sorts of things.
Daily Bell: The United Nations?
John Perkins: I think the United Nations has an important function that it should be performing. We need an organization like that in the world today. Unfortunately, the United Nations has been rendered basically impotent. The United Nations was very opposed to us going into Iraq, but the Bush administration totally ignored that and went in anyway. I think it's very unfortunate that the United Nations has been emasculated by the United States.
Daily Bell: What do you think of the Bank for International Settlements? Is it true that it has worldwide and absolute immunity? Why does a central bank for central banks need sovereign immunity? How is that even enforceable?
John Perkins: It's enforceable because that's the way the laws are written in all the various countries that we inhabit. As long as the people who are running the banks and corporations also control politicians, which today they do around the world, then they get to write the laws. It's interesting that during a lot of my lifetime in the United States, for example, our laws were written by elected officials, but today that is not the case. Today in the United States lobbyists write the laws; the elected officials are essentially owned by big corporations. That's not true on all issues, but it's true on the big issues that affect big corporations. We've reached a new geopolitical reality that we have never known before. This is a new situation.
Daily Bell: You have been extraordinarily successful as a writer. And you have worked directly with heads of state and CEOs of major companies. What do you think of Western corporations? Aren't they a product of legislative activity? Wouldn't we be better off had the Western legal system not created corporations in the first place?
John Perkins: I can't speculate on what might have happened if corporations were not created but capitalism has been around for about 400 years and has taken many different forms. But in the last years since the 70s, and particularly beginning in 1980 when Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States, many leaders around the world embraced what I call predatory capitalism, which is very well defined by the economist, Milton Friedman, from the Chicago School of Economics.
Friedman said the only goal of business should be to maximize profits regardless of the social or environmental costs. That was a radical statement. When I went to business school in the 60s, we were taught that a good CEO makes a decent rate of return for his investors, but he also has to be a good citizen and the corporation should be a good community citizen. Pay reasonable taxes. Take care of the suppliers, take care of the employees; take care of the customers, not just profits.
So we entered this phase where we have embraced this form of capitalism that says maximize profits regardless of the social or environmental cost. It's a terribly destructive and unsustainable philosophy to have and we must turn that around. My goal or orientation is to try to make corporations become more responsible. The new goal should be go ahead and make a decent rate of return for your investors, but only to do so on a playing field that says we are going to be sustainable and just and peaceful. They are the public servants and they should realize they have a greater obligation than making just maximizing profits.
Daily Bell: Your Confessions of an Economic Hit Man spent 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and is a startling exposé of international corruption. Tell us more about how you came to write it.
John Perkins: I started writing it in the 80s after I stopped being an economic hit man. I contacted other economic hit men and jackals who destabilize government when hit men fail; I contacted these people to include them in the book. Then I received anonymous phone calls; threats on my daughter's life, and she was very young at the time.
I took the threats very seriously, as I have seen what jackals can do because I failed to corrupt Jaime Roldos, the democratically elected President of Equador and Arias Madreid of Panama; the jackals assassinated both of those leaders.
At the same time I received what you would call, a legal bribe from a big corporation in the United States; they would pay me a very large consulting fee and I wouldn't have to do much work if I would not write this book. So, I didn't write the book; I accepted the consultancy.
On 9/11, I was in the Amazon. I cut short my trip and came back to New York and I stood looking at ground zero looking at the smoldering ruins and I knew I had to write this book. I had to expose the truth about what I had done and what so many others were doing to create a terribly violent, painful, unhappy and unsustainable world. I wrote the whole book in secrecy. It's become my best insurance policy, because any good jackal knows if he assassinated me the book's sales would soar. The book has sold over a million copies in English alone and is now in over 30 languages. If someone shoots me tonight, we'll sell another million.
Daily Bell: Wow. Elaborate on the problems that the CIA, the NSA and American corporations cause.
John Perkins: The problems are pretty self-evident; we have created a world where 5% of us in the United States consume about 30% of the world's resources. The system that we created is a total failure and it causes tremendous misery. People often talk about the prophet of 2012 and Mayan prophecy of doomsday, but I think more than half the people of the world have already met doomsday. They are living in dire poverty and starving to death or on the verge of starvation, so we have created a world that is its own doomsday. This system has been created by organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the CIA, the NSA and the multinationals.
Daily Bell: It's not just an American system ...
John Perkins: It's a global system; you could say the United States has been the driving force behind it, though. Great Britain has tried in some regards to change it, but the big corporations are really calling the shots around the world. Everything today is pretty much run by the big corporations. Obama is very much under the influence of the corporatocracy.
Daily Bell: What are the solutions?
John Perkins: I think it's very important that we the people of the world come together and realize that we do have power. I want cheap petroleum; if that means destroying the Amazon rain forest, I'll just look the other way. Until we realize that corporations are calling the shots and not the governments and that we are empowering this system, it will continue as is. We have to put pressure on these corporations to become compassionate, good world citizens. In this era of the Internet, I think we have a tremendous opportunity to do that now and make some changes.
Daily Bell: What does the CIA think of your exposure? Are they angry with you?
John Perkins: You will have to ask them because I don't know. I don't know who they are; who would you ask. I can't answer that question.
Daily Bell: Your latest book "Hoodwinked" is a blueprint for a new form of global economics. The solutions are not "return to normal" ones. You are challenging us to "soar to new heights, away from predatory capitalism and into an era more transformative than the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions." Tell us about the book and the steps we can take to build a better tomorrow. Is it through state and UN and activism, or the private sector or both?
John Perkins: Well, as we discussed, it's through the consumer. We need to realize that people that work for corporations are also consumers. At the very top of so many corporations we may have some extreme sociopaths, but the majority of these people at these corporations are good decent people who want to see good things for their children and grandchildren. They don't want to see countries sink beneath the ocean or the glaciers melt, or holes in the ozone.
But we have been sending a very strong message that says we want cheap goods and services even if it means being socially and environmentally irresponsible. We have to send a new message. We have to send the message that we want a just and peaceful world. Stop the desperation and the exploitation. We have to get rid of these terrible conditions, these wars, these consumerist trinkets. We need to create new technologies. Sustainable energy. Getting rid of poverty and injustice is a must.
Daily Bell: Can we do that through more regulation? Does the private sector generally need more regulation? Is that the point? But who would provide it? The UN? Is it better than to have a strong and effective world government? Would you like to see that fully come about?
John Perkins: I think the global recession has proven we need to have regulations to control these greedy people who run these corporations. We must be protected against them. Corporations are there to serve us, the people. Serving the public. I am not for lots of regulation, but I do think you need to level the playing field. It's like getting on a plane and having the security that the pilot knows the proper rules and regulations and has your safety in mind. You need to have that with the economy. Beyond that you let the pilot fly the plane.
As to who does that, is a very important question. It appears each country determines this at present – so maybe it would be good to have a world body to control this, maybe through stock markets and accounting agencies.
Daily Bell: Hmmm...interesting. So, you believe in a greener world. Are you worried about global warming?
John Perkins: Yes, it's a big concern.
Daily Bell: Are you a proponent of Peak Oil? Are we running out of energy?
John Perkins: I don't think that the concern is so much we are running out of energy as that we cannot afford to continue drilling for oil and sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bigger problem is how we use oil not whether we are running out of it or not.
Daily Bell: You are a founder and board member of Dream Change and The Pachamama Alliance, nonprofit organizations devoted to establishing a world our children will want to inherit. When did you become involved with these organizations?
John Perkins: In about 1990, I had been back in SA and met with some of the tribes there and said I wanted to help with saving the rain forest; well they told me, if you want to save the rain forest that's great, but don't come here and try to change us; we are not destroying the rain forest, your people are destroying the rain forest. Your oil companies, your lumber companies, your cattle companies. You have a dream of big buildings, lots of cars and heavy industry, and now you have to understand that your dream has become a nightmare; it's been very destructive. If you want to change the world, you must change the dream of your people.
I thought that was very eloquent. I came back to the United States in 1991 and formed a non-profit called Dream Change; its mission was to create a more sustainable environment. The other organization called Pachamama Alliance is now in 40 countries, with 4000 facilitators. We send money to the Amazon to assist with sustaining a more peaceful, just world. We try to help indigenous people sustain their culture.
Daily Bell: Are you a fan of Hugo Chavez?
John Perkins: I don't know that I am a fan. What I do know is that he changed history. When Hugo Chavez stood up to the CIA in the coup of 2002 and survived that, he sent a strong message throughout the world, particularly to South America. It meant that the United States was a paper tiger and a strong President can survive a coup. He has changed history, there is no question. Depending on who you talk to, they love him or hate him; but he has done a very good job for poor people. I would say he will go down in history as having a huge impact on the world.
Daily Bell: How about Barack Obama? How has he been doing?
John Perkins: Barack Obama is in an incredibly tenuous situation. The man really doesn't have a lot of power. The corporations have the power. Presidents of the United States and everywhere else are extremely vulnerable. A guy like Obama understands that if he rocks the boat too much, he's going to go down. It doesn't have to be a bullet; it can be character assassination.
Everyone has a skeleton in his or her closet and even if a guy like Obama didn't have any skeletons, they can be created, just like the rumors that he wasn't an American citizen, all the rumors. But what we can't forget is that Barack Obama never ran under a campaign saying, yes I can. It was, yes WE can. It's we the people. He can't do it. The people have to stand behind him. He just doesn't have the power.
Daily Bell: Food for thought. Any books or articles you want to recommend to us? Closing thoughts?
John Perkins: I would love to have people subscribe to my newsletter, which comes out twice a month - www.johnperkins.org. I am also on Twitter and Face book. I love having people keep in touch with me that way.
Daily Bell: Thank you for your time. Good luck with your book.
Wednesday 23 February 2011
This is an Arab 1848. But US hegemony is only dented
With western-backed despots being turfed out politics has changed for ever. So just how far can the revolution spread?
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o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 February 2011 22.59 GMT
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revolutionary murals Tahrir Square protests Revolutionary murals on the walls of newly established toilet facilities for protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire.
Those who promoted such ideas appear to the most unhappy: Israel and its lobbyists in Euro-America; the arms industry, hurriedly trying to sell as much while it can (the British prime minister acting as a merchant of death at the Abu Dhabi arms fair); and the beleaguered rulers of Saudi Arabia, wondering whether the disease will spread to their tyrannical kingdom. Until now they have provided refuge to many a despot, but when the time comes where will the royal family seek refuge? They must be aware that their patrons will dump them without ceremony and claim they always favoured democracy.
If there is a comparison to be made with Europe it is 1848, when the revolutionary upheavals left only Britain and Spain untouched – even though Queen Victoria, thinking of the Chartists, feared otherwise. Writing to her besieged nephew on the Belgian throne, she expressing sympathy but wondered whether "we will all be slain in our beds". Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown or bejewelled headgear, and has billions stored in foreign banks.
Like Europeans in 1848 the Arab people are fighting against foreign domination (82% of Egyptians, a recent opinion poll revealed, have a "negative view of the US"); against the violation of their democratic rights; against an elite blinded by its own illegitimate wealth – and in favour of economic justice. This is different from the first wave of Arab nationalism, which was concerned principally with driving the remnants of the British empire out of the region. The Egyptians under Nasser nationalised the Suez canal and were invaded by Britain, France and Israel – but that was without Washington's permission, and the three were thus compelled to withdraw.
Cairo was triumphant. The pro-British monarchy was toppled by the 1958 revolution in Iraq, radicals took power in Damascus, a senior Saudi prince attempted a palace coup and fled to Cairo when it failed, armed struggles erupted in Yemen and Oman, and there was much talk of an Arab nation with three concurrent capitals. One side effect was an eccentric coup in Libya that brought a young, semi-literate officer, Muammar Gaddafi, to power. His Saudi enemies have always insisted that the coup was masterminded by British intelligence, just like the one that propelled Idi Amin to power in Uganda. Gaddafi's professed nationalism, modernism and radicalism were all for show, like his ghosted science-fiction short stories.
It never extended to his own people. Despite the oil wealth he refused to educate Libyans, or provide them with a health service or subsidised housing, squandering money on absurdist projects abroad – one of which was to divert a British plane carrying socialist and communist Sudanese oppositionists and handing them over to fellow dictator Gaafar Nimeiry in Sudan to be hanged, thus wrecking the possibility of any radical change in that country, with dire consequences, as we witness every day. At home he maintained a rigid tribal structure, thinking he could divide and buy tribes to stay in power. But no longer.
Israel's 1967 lightning war and victory sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism. Internecine conflicts in Syria and Iraq led to the victory of rightwing Ba'athists blessed by Washington. After Nasser's death and his successor Saadat's pyrrhic victory against Israel in 1973, Egypt's military elite decided to cut its losses, accepted annual billion-dollar subsidies from the US and do a deal with Tel Aviv. In return its dictator was honoured as a statesman by Euro-America, as was Saddam Hussein for a long time. If only they had left him to be removed by his people instead of by an ugly and destructive war and occupation, over a million dead and 5 million orphaned children.
The Arab revolutions, triggered by the economic crisis, have mobilised mass movements, but not every aspect of life has been called into question. Social, political and religious rights are becoming the subject of fierce controversy in Tunisia, but not elsewhere yet. No new political parties have emerged, an indication that the electoral battles to come will be contests between Arab liberalism and conservatism in the shape of the Muslim Brotherhood, modelling itself on Islamists in power in Turkey and Indonesia, and ensconced in the embrace of the US.
American hegemony in the region has been dented but not destroyed. The post-despot regimes are likely to be more independent, with a democratic system that is fresh and subversive and, hopefully, new constitutions enshrining social and political needs. But the military in Egypt and Tunisia will ensure nothing rash happens. The big worry for Euro-America is Bahrain. If its rulers are removed it will be difficult to prevent a democratic upheaval in Saudi Arabia. Can Washington afford to let that happen? Or will it deploy armed force to keep the Wahhabi kleptocrats in power?
A few decades ago the great Iraqi poet Muddafar al-Nawab, angered by a gathering of despots described as an Arab Summit, lost his cool:
… Mubarik, Mubarik,
Wealth and good health
Fax the news to the UN.
Camp after Camp and David,
Father of all your Camps.
Damn your fathers
Rotten Lot;
The stench of your bodies floods your nostrils …
O Make-Believe Summit
Leaders
May your faces be blackened;
Ugly your drooping bellies
Ugly your fat arses
Why the surprise
That your faces resemble both ...
Summits … summits … summits
Goats and sheep gather,
Farts with a tune
Let the Summit be
Let the Summit not be
Let the Summit decide;
I spit on each and every one of you
Kings … Sheikhs … Lackeys …
Whatever else, Arab summits will not be the same again. The poet has been joined by the people.
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Comments (…)
* Tariq Ali
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o Tariq Ali
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 February 2011 22.59 GMT
o larger | smaller
o Article history
revolutionary murals Tahrir Square protests Revolutionary murals on the walls of newly established toilet facilities for protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire.
Those who promoted such ideas appear to the most unhappy: Israel and its lobbyists in Euro-America; the arms industry, hurriedly trying to sell as much while it can (the British prime minister acting as a merchant of death at the Abu Dhabi arms fair); and the beleaguered rulers of Saudi Arabia, wondering whether the disease will spread to their tyrannical kingdom. Until now they have provided refuge to many a despot, but when the time comes where will the royal family seek refuge? They must be aware that their patrons will dump them without ceremony and claim they always favoured democracy.
If there is a comparison to be made with Europe it is 1848, when the revolutionary upheavals left only Britain and Spain untouched – even though Queen Victoria, thinking of the Chartists, feared otherwise. Writing to her besieged nephew on the Belgian throne, she expressing sympathy but wondered whether "we will all be slain in our beds". Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown or bejewelled headgear, and has billions stored in foreign banks.
Like Europeans in 1848 the Arab people are fighting against foreign domination (82% of Egyptians, a recent opinion poll revealed, have a "negative view of the US"); against the violation of their democratic rights; against an elite blinded by its own illegitimate wealth – and in favour of economic justice. This is different from the first wave of Arab nationalism, which was concerned principally with driving the remnants of the British empire out of the region. The Egyptians under Nasser nationalised the Suez canal and were invaded by Britain, France and Israel – but that was without Washington's permission, and the three were thus compelled to withdraw.
Cairo was triumphant. The pro-British monarchy was toppled by the 1958 revolution in Iraq, radicals took power in Damascus, a senior Saudi prince attempted a palace coup and fled to Cairo when it failed, armed struggles erupted in Yemen and Oman, and there was much talk of an Arab nation with three concurrent capitals. One side effect was an eccentric coup in Libya that brought a young, semi-literate officer, Muammar Gaddafi, to power. His Saudi enemies have always insisted that the coup was masterminded by British intelligence, just like the one that propelled Idi Amin to power in Uganda. Gaddafi's professed nationalism, modernism and radicalism were all for show, like his ghosted science-fiction short stories.
It never extended to his own people. Despite the oil wealth he refused to educate Libyans, or provide them with a health service or subsidised housing, squandering money on absurdist projects abroad – one of which was to divert a British plane carrying socialist and communist Sudanese oppositionists and handing them over to fellow dictator Gaafar Nimeiry in Sudan to be hanged, thus wrecking the possibility of any radical change in that country, with dire consequences, as we witness every day. At home he maintained a rigid tribal structure, thinking he could divide and buy tribes to stay in power. But no longer.
Israel's 1967 lightning war and victory sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism. Internecine conflicts in Syria and Iraq led to the victory of rightwing Ba'athists blessed by Washington. After Nasser's death and his successor Saadat's pyrrhic victory against Israel in 1973, Egypt's military elite decided to cut its losses, accepted annual billion-dollar subsidies from the US and do a deal with Tel Aviv. In return its dictator was honoured as a statesman by Euro-America, as was Saddam Hussein for a long time. If only they had left him to be removed by his people instead of by an ugly and destructive war and occupation, over a million dead and 5 million orphaned children.
The Arab revolutions, triggered by the economic crisis, have mobilised mass movements, but not every aspect of life has been called into question. Social, political and religious rights are becoming the subject of fierce controversy in Tunisia, but not elsewhere yet. No new political parties have emerged, an indication that the electoral battles to come will be contests between Arab liberalism and conservatism in the shape of the Muslim Brotherhood, modelling itself on Islamists in power in Turkey and Indonesia, and ensconced in the embrace of the US.
American hegemony in the region has been dented but not destroyed. The post-despot regimes are likely to be more independent, with a democratic system that is fresh and subversive and, hopefully, new constitutions enshrining social and political needs. But the military in Egypt and Tunisia will ensure nothing rash happens. The big worry for Euro-America is Bahrain. If its rulers are removed it will be difficult to prevent a democratic upheaval in Saudi Arabia. Can Washington afford to let that happen? Or will it deploy armed force to keep the Wahhabi kleptocrats in power?
A few decades ago the great Iraqi poet Muddafar al-Nawab, angered by a gathering of despots described as an Arab Summit, lost his cool:
… Mubarik, Mubarik,
Wealth and good health
Fax the news to the UN.
Camp after Camp and David,
Father of all your Camps.
Damn your fathers
Rotten Lot;
The stench of your bodies floods your nostrils …
O Make-Believe Summit
Leaders
May your faces be blackened;
Ugly your drooping bellies
Ugly your fat arses
Why the surprise
That your faces resemble both ...
Summits … summits … summits
Goats and sheep gather,
Farts with a tune
Let the Summit be
Let the Summit not be
Let the Summit decide;
I spit on each and every one of you
Kings … Sheikhs … Lackeys …
Whatever else, Arab summits will not be the same again. The poet has been joined by the people.
Wednesday 2 February 2011
Its Asian prosperity that's undermined dysfunctional Arab states
Food and failed Arab states
By Spengler
Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year.
Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day. Food comprises almost half the country's consumer price index, and much more than half of spending for the poorer half of the country. This will get worse, not better.
Not the destitute, to be sure, but the aspiring and frustrated young, confronted the riot police and army on the streets of Egyptian cities last week. The uprising in Egypt and Tunisia were not food riots; only in Jordan have demonstrators made food the main issue. Rather, the jump in food prices was the wheat-stalk that broke the camel's back. The regime's weakness, in turn, reflects the dysfunctional character of the country. 35% of all Egyptians, and 45% of Egyptian women can't read.
Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, "The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere." Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.
In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a "complete" ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak's authority?
Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's First Lady, continues to campaign against the practice, which she has denounced as "physical and psychological violence against children." Last May 1, she appeared at Aswan City alongside the provincial governor and other local officials to declare the province free of it. And on October 28, Mrs Mubarak inaugurated an African conference on stopping genital mutilation.
The most authoritative Egyptian Muslim scholars continue to recommend genital mutilation. Writing on the web site IslamOnline, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi - the president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars - explains:
What does that say about the character of the country's middle class? Only one news dispatch among the tens of thousands occasioned by the uprising mentions the subject; the New York Times, with its inimitable capacity to obscure content, wrote on January 27, "To the extent that Mr. Mubarak has been willing to tolerate reforms, the cable said, it has been in areas not related to public security or stability.
For example, he has given his wife latitude to campaign for women's rights and against practices like female genital mutilation and child labor, which are sanctioned by some conservative Islamic groups." The authors, Mark Landler and Andrew Lehren, do not mention that 90% or more of Egyptian women have been so mutilated. What does a country have to do to shock the New York Times? Eat babies boiled?
Young Tunisians and Egyptians want jobs. But (via Brian Murphy at the Associated Press on January 29) "many people have degrees but they do not have the skill set," Masood Ahmed, director of the Middle East and Asia department of the International Monetary Fund, said earlier this week. "The scarce resource is talent," agreed Omar Alghanim, a prominent Gulf businessman. The employment pool available in the region "is not at all what's needed in the global economy." For more on this see my January 19 essay, Tunisia's lost generation. There are millions of highly-qualified, skilled and enterprising Arabs, but most of them are working in the US or Europe.
Egypt is wallowing in backwardness, not because the Mubarak regime has suppressed the creative energies of the people, but because the people themselves cling to the most oppressive practices of traditional society. And countries can only languish in backwardness so long before some event makes their position untenable.
Wheat prices 101 and Egyptian instability
In this case, Asian demand has priced food staples out of the Arab budget. As prosperous Asians consume more protein, global demand for grain increases sharply (seven pounds of grain produce one pound of beef). Asians are rich enough, moreover, to pay a much higher price for food whenever prices spike due to temporary supply disruptions, as at the moment.
Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians and Yemenis are not. Episodes of privation and even hunger will become more common. The miserable economic performance of all the Arab states, chronicled in the United Nations' Arab Development Reports, has left a large number of Arabs so far behind that they cannot buffer their budget against food price fluctuations.
Earlier this year, after drought prompted Russia to ban wheat exports, Egypt's agriculture minister pledged to raise food production over the next ten years to 75% of consumption, against only 56% in 2009. Local yields are only 18 bushels per acre, compared to 30 to 60 for non-irrigated wheat in the United States, and up 100 bushels for irrigated land.
The trouble isn't long-term food price inflation: wheat has long been one of the world's bargains. The International Monetary Fund's global consumer price index quadrupled in between 1980 and 2010, while the price of wheat, even after the price spike of 2010, only doubled in price. What hurts the poorest countries, though, isn't the long-term price trend, though, but the volatility.
People have drowned in rivers with an average depth of two feet. It turns out that China, not the United States or Israel, presents an existential threat to the Arab world, and through no fault of its own: rising incomes have gentrified the Asian diet, and - more importantly - insulated Asian budgets from food price fluctuations. Economists call this "price elasticity." Americans, for example, will buy the same amount of milk even if the price doubles, although they will stop buying fast food if hamburger prices double. Asians now are wealthy enough to buy all the grain they want.
If wheat output falls, for example, due to drought in Russia and Argentina, prices rise until demand falls. The difference today is that Asian demand for grain will not fall, because Asians are richer than they used to be. Someone has to consume less, and it will be the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, in this case the poorer Arabs.
That is why the volatility of the wheat price (the rolling standard deviation of percentage changes in the price over twelve months) has trended up from about 5% during the 1980s and 1990s to about 15% today. This means that there is a roughly two-thirds likelihood that the monthly change in the wheat price will be less than 15%.
It also means that every so often the wheat price is likely to go through the ceiling, as it did during the past 12 months. To make life intolerable for the Arab poor, the price of wheat does not have to remain high indefinitely; it only has to trade out of their reach once every few years.
And that is precisely what has happened during the past few years:
After 30 years of stability, the price of wheat has had two spikes into the $9 per bushel range at which very poor people begin to go hungry. The problem isn't production. Wheat production has risen steadily - very steadily in fact - and the volatility of global supply has been muted:
The line in Chart 3 above marked "production volatility" is the five-year standard deviation of annual percentage changes in world wheat supply (data from US Department of Agriculture). During the 1960s and 1970s, it hovered around the 3% to 5% range, but fell to the 1% to 3% range.
It shows an approximately two-thirds likelihood that world wheat supply will change by less than 3% each year. Wheat supply dropped by only 2.4% between 2009 and 2010 - and the wheat price doubled. That's because affluent Asians don't care what they pay for grain. Prices depend on what the last (or "marginal") purchaser is willing to pay for an item (what was the price of the last ticket on the last train out of Paris when the Germans marched on June 14, 1940?). Don't blame global warming, unstable weather patterns: wheat supply has been fairly reliable. The problem lies in demand.
Officially, Egypt's unemployment rate is slightly above 9%, the same as America's, but independent studies say that a quarter of men and three-fifths of women are jobless. According to a BBC report, 700,000 university graduates chase 200,000 available jobs.
A number of economists anticipated the crisis. Reinhard Cluse of Union bank of Switzerland told the Financial Times last August:
Egypt has $35 billion of central bank reserves, adequate under normal conditions, but thin insulation against capital flight. Foreigners hold $25 billion of Egypt's short-term Treasury bills, for example. It would not take long for a run on the currency to materialize - and if the currency devalues, food and fuel become all the more expensive. A vicious cycle may ensue.
Under the title The Failed Muslim States to Come (Asia Times Online December 16, 2008), I argued that the global financial crisis then at its peak would destabilize the most populous Muslim countries:
The best thing the United States could do at the moment would be to offer massive emergency food aid to Egypt out of its own stocks, with the understanding that President Mubarak would offer effusive public thanks for American generosity. This is a stopgap, to be sure, but it would pre-empt the likely alternative. Otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood will preach Islamist socialism to a hungry audience. That also explains why Mubarak just might survive. Even Islamists have to eat. The Iranian Islamists who took power in 1979 had oil wells; Egypt just has hungry mouths. Enlightened despotism based on the army, the one stable institution Egypt possesses, might not be the worst solution.
By Spengler
Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year.
Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, beholden to foreign providers for nearly half its total food consumption. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day. Food comprises almost half the country's consumer price index, and much more than half of spending for the poorer half of the country. This will get worse, not better.
Not the destitute, to be sure, but the aspiring and frustrated young, confronted the riot police and army on the streets of Egyptian cities last week. The uprising in Egypt and Tunisia were not food riots; only in Jordan have demonstrators made food the main issue. Rather, the jump in food prices was the wheat-stalk that broke the camel's back. The regime's weakness, in turn, reflects the dysfunctional character of the country. 35% of all Egyptians, and 45% of Egyptian women can't read.
Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, "The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere." Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.
In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a "complete" ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak's authority?
Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's First Lady, continues to campaign against the practice, which she has denounced as "physical and psychological violence against children." Last May 1, she appeared at Aswan City alongside the provincial governor and other local officials to declare the province free of it. And on October 28, Mrs Mubarak inaugurated an African conference on stopping genital mutilation.
The most authoritative Egyptian Muslim scholars continue to recommend genital mutilation. Writing on the web site IslamOnline, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi - the president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars - explains:
The most moderate opinion and the most likely one to be correct is in favor of practicing circumcision in the moderate Islamic way indicated in some of the Prophet's hadiths - even though such hadiths are not confirmed to be authentic. It is reported that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said to a midwife: "Reduce the size of the clitoris but do not exceed the limit, for that is better for her health and is preferred by husbands."That is not a Muslim view (the practice is rare in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan), but an Egyptian Muslim view. In the most fundamental matters, President and Mrs Mubarak are incomparably more enlightened than the Egyptian public. Three-quarters of acts of genital mutilation in Egypt are executed by physicians.
What does that say about the character of the country's middle class? Only one news dispatch among the tens of thousands occasioned by the uprising mentions the subject; the New York Times, with its inimitable capacity to obscure content, wrote on January 27, "To the extent that Mr. Mubarak has been willing to tolerate reforms, the cable said, it has been in areas not related to public security or stability.
For example, he has given his wife latitude to campaign for women's rights and against practices like female genital mutilation and child labor, which are sanctioned by some conservative Islamic groups." The authors, Mark Landler and Andrew Lehren, do not mention that 90% or more of Egyptian women have been so mutilated. What does a country have to do to shock the New York Times? Eat babies boiled?
Young Tunisians and Egyptians want jobs. But (via Brian Murphy at the Associated Press on January 29) "many people have degrees but they do not have the skill set," Masood Ahmed, director of the Middle East and Asia department of the International Monetary Fund, said earlier this week. "The scarce resource is talent," agreed Omar Alghanim, a prominent Gulf businessman. The employment pool available in the region "is not at all what's needed in the global economy." For more on this see my January 19 essay, Tunisia's lost generation. There are millions of highly-qualified, skilled and enterprising Arabs, but most of them are working in the US or Europe.
Egypt is wallowing in backwardness, not because the Mubarak regime has suppressed the creative energies of the people, but because the people themselves cling to the most oppressive practices of traditional society. And countries can only languish in backwardness so long before some event makes their position untenable.
Wheat prices 101 and Egyptian instability
In this case, Asian demand has priced food staples out of the Arab budget. As prosperous Asians consume more protein, global demand for grain increases sharply (seven pounds of grain produce one pound of beef). Asians are rich enough, moreover, to pay a much higher price for food whenever prices spike due to temporary supply disruptions, as at the moment.
Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians and Yemenis are not. Episodes of privation and even hunger will become more common. The miserable economic performance of all the Arab states, chronicled in the United Nations' Arab Development Reports, has left a large number of Arabs so far behind that they cannot buffer their budget against food price fluctuations.
Earlier this year, after drought prompted Russia to ban wheat exports, Egypt's agriculture minister pledged to raise food production over the next ten years to 75% of consumption, against only 56% in 2009. Local yields are only 18 bushels per acre, compared to 30 to 60 for non-irrigated wheat in the United States, and up 100 bushels for irrigated land.
The trouble isn't long-term food price inflation: wheat has long been one of the world's bargains. The International Monetary Fund's global consumer price index quadrupled in between 1980 and 2010, while the price of wheat, even after the price spike of 2010, only doubled in price. What hurts the poorest countries, though, isn't the long-term price trend, though, but the volatility.
People have drowned in rivers with an average depth of two feet. It turns out that China, not the United States or Israel, presents an existential threat to the Arab world, and through no fault of its own: rising incomes have gentrified the Asian diet, and - more importantly - insulated Asian budgets from food price fluctuations. Economists call this "price elasticity." Americans, for example, will buy the same amount of milk even if the price doubles, although they will stop buying fast food if hamburger prices double. Asians now are wealthy enough to buy all the grain they want.
If wheat output falls, for example, due to drought in Russia and Argentina, prices rise until demand falls. The difference today is that Asian demand for grain will not fall, because Asians are richer than they used to be. Someone has to consume less, and it will be the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, in this case the poorer Arabs.
That is why the volatility of the wheat price (the rolling standard deviation of percentage changes in the price over twelve months) has trended up from about 5% during the 1980s and 1990s to about 15% today. This means that there is a roughly two-thirds likelihood that the monthly change in the wheat price will be less than 15%.
It also means that every so often the wheat price is likely to go through the ceiling, as it did during the past 12 months. To make life intolerable for the Arab poor, the price of wheat does not have to remain high indefinitely; it only has to trade out of their reach once every few years.
And that is precisely what has happened during the past few years:
After 30 years of stability, the price of wheat has had two spikes into the $9 per bushel range at which very poor people begin to go hungry. The problem isn't production. Wheat production has risen steadily - very steadily in fact - and the volatility of global supply has been muted:
The line in Chart 3 above marked "production volatility" is the five-year standard deviation of annual percentage changes in world wheat supply (data from US Department of Agriculture). During the 1960s and 1970s, it hovered around the 3% to 5% range, but fell to the 1% to 3% range.
It shows an approximately two-thirds likelihood that world wheat supply will change by less than 3% each year. Wheat supply dropped by only 2.4% between 2009 and 2010 - and the wheat price doubled. That's because affluent Asians don't care what they pay for grain. Prices depend on what the last (or "marginal") purchaser is willing to pay for an item (what was the price of the last ticket on the last train out of Paris when the Germans marched on June 14, 1940?). Don't blame global warming, unstable weather patterns: wheat supply has been fairly reliable. The problem lies in demand.
Officially, Egypt's unemployment rate is slightly above 9%, the same as America's, but independent studies say that a quarter of men and three-fifths of women are jobless. According to a BBC report, 700,000 university graduates chase 200,000 available jobs.
A number of economists anticipated the crisis. Reinhard Cluse of Union bank of Switzerland told the Financial Times last August:
"Significant hikes in the global price of wheat would present the government with a difficult dilemma.One parameter to watch closely is the Egyptian pound. Insurance against Egyptian default was the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) +3.3% a week ago; on Friday, it stood at Libor + 4.54%. That's not a crisis level, but if banks start reducing exposure, things could get bad fast. In 2009 Egyptian imports were $55 billion against only $29 billion of exports; tourism (about $15 billion in net income) and remittances from Egyptian workers (about $8 billion) and other services brought the current account into balance. Scratch the tourism, and you have a big deficit.
Do they want to pass on price rises to end consumers, which would reduce Egyptians' purchasing power and might lead to social discontent?
Or do they keep their regulation of prices tight and end up paying higher subsidies for food? In which case the problem would not go away but end up in the government budget.
Egypt's public debt is already high, at roughly 74% of gross domestic produce (GDP), according to UBS. Earlier this year the IMF projected that Egypt's food subsidies would cost the equivalent of 1.1% of GDP in 2009-10, while subsidies for energy were expected to add up to 5.1%.
...
Tensions over food have led to violence in bread queues before and it wouldn't take much of a price rise for the squeeze on many consumers to become unbearably tight."
Egypt has $35 billion of central bank reserves, adequate under normal conditions, but thin insulation against capital flight. Foreigners hold $25 billion of Egypt's short-term Treasury bills, for example. It would not take long for a run on the currency to materialize - and if the currency devalues, food and fuel become all the more expensive. A vicious cycle may ensue.
Under the title The Failed Muslim States to Come (Asia Times Online December 16, 2008), I argued that the global financial crisis then at its peak would destabilize the most populous Muslim countries:
Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first. The present crisis is painful for most of the world but deadly for many Muslim countries, and especially so for the most populous ones. Policy makers have not begun to assess the damage. The diplomatic strategy of the industrial nations now resembles a James Clavell potboiler, in which an earthquake interrupts a hopelessly immured plot. Moderate Islam was the El Dorado of the diplomatic consensus.I was wrong. It wasn't the financial crisis that undermined dysfunctional Arab states, but Asian prosperity. The Arab poor have been priced out of world markets. There is no solution to Egypt's problems within the horizon of popular expectations. Whether the regime survives or a new one replaces it, the outcome will be a disaster of, well, biblical proportions.
It might have been the case that Pakistan could be tethered to Western interests, or that Iran could be engaged peacefully, or that Turkey would incubate a moderate form of Islam. I considered all of this delusional, but the truth is that we shall never know. The financial crisis will sort them out first.
The best thing the United States could do at the moment would be to offer massive emergency food aid to Egypt out of its own stocks, with the understanding that President Mubarak would offer effusive public thanks for American generosity. This is a stopgap, to be sure, but it would pre-empt the likely alternative. Otherwise, the Muslim Brotherhood will preach Islamist socialism to a hungry audience. That also explains why Mubarak just might survive. Even Islamists have to eat. The Iranian Islamists who took power in 1979 had oil wells; Egypt just has hungry mouths. Enlightened despotism based on the army, the one stable institution Egypt possesses, might not be the worst solution.
Tuesday 1 February 2011
What makes a good teacher?
Many state pupils are badly taught because the training system tries to make every class the same, says Katharine Birbalsingh
'Good teachers get extremely frustrated with the parrot-like approach dictated by Ofsted inspectors,' says Birbalsingh Photo: JANE MINGAY
Recently, I visited one of our top public boys' schools and sat in on a few lessons. I found exactly what I was expecting: old-fashioned teaching centred on knowledge instead of skills, with the teacher at the front and children at their desks; no group work nor games, just listening, responding and serious concentration. These teachers had not been moulded into what those of us in the state schools sector understand to be a good teacher.
My recent visits to private schools have me questioning my very understanding of the term "teaching". What is it, after all, that makes a good teacher? With cuts to teacher-training places being planned by the Government, as The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, now is a good moment to ask what exactly we want our teachers to be trained in.
Training institutions are charged with the task of shaping teachers who will be "outstanding" or "good", according to Ofsted criteria. There are certain formulae. One must begin the lesson with a "starter", to last no more than
4-5 minutes. One must end with a plenary, summing up the lesson, again to last no more than 4-5 minutes. There must be an objective to the lesson, written up on the board, that in many classrooms children will copy into their books. With some bottom sets, this simple act of copying a long objective might waste up to 10 minutes of the 40 or 50-minute lesson. No matter, to be a good teacher in the state sector, one must do as one is told.
4-5 minutes. One must end with a plenary, summing up the lesson, again to last no more than 4-5 minutes. There must be an objective to the lesson, written up on the board, that in many classrooms children will copy into their books. With some bottom sets, this simple act of copying a long objective might waste up to 10 minutes of the 40 or 50-minute lesson. No matter, to be a good teacher in the state sector, one must do as one is told.
Be sure to use the interactive whiteboard in the lesson, of course. One is constantly reminded that "use of technology" will increase results. Funny, then, how the boys in our top public schools make do with only a handful of interactive whiteboards, which, by their teachers' own admission, are "hardly ever used".
One must remember that one isn't a "teacher" in a state school classroom. Instead, one is a "facilitator of learning". One doesn't teach knowledge, one teaches skills. So standing in front of the class and actually teaching is frowned upon. Far better to set the children up in groups, give them envelopes filled with bits of paper and ask them to put the pieces of paper in the correct order. Then, the facilitator of learning can roam around the classroom, facilitating instead of teaching, and guiding pupils through the maze of "personalised" and "independent" learning.
I know of one school where facilitating is such a rage that they combine classes, so that 60 children are in any given lesson, with two different teachers, one at the front who can teach, while the other moves among the children. What good an extra teacher is going to be (if they ever manage to reach you) when one is learning maths is beyond me. There are 59 other pupils, after all, in the class. The fact that half the class can barely hear the teacher at the front because there is too much noise, and some of them are just too far away, means nothing when set against the supposed value of the "facilitator". The problem with teacher-training institutions is that they are all singing from the same hymn sheet. The philosophy that underpins state education is that we are in the business of pursuing equality, not excellence. The role of the school is to ensure that we give children equal opportunity. I, for one, would agree with this noble aspiration. I want children to have exactly this, and it is precisely because I can see that equal opportunity is not being provided to our poorest and most disadvantaged that I spoke out at the Conservative Party conference last year.
The irony is that if one does not pursue excellence, one cannot provide equal opportunity. But somehow, our understanding of "equal opportunity" has metamorphosed into "sameness". So rather than allow our teachers to be excellent in their different and innovative ways, some teacher-training institutions and some schools attempt to squash all ingenuity out of teachers, and make them into parrot-like machines churning out whatever skill-based nonsense they have been brainwashed with.
As I sat in on these lessons in one of our top public schools, I was struck by the fact that if I had been grading them according to Ofsted criteria – the standards by which we judge state school teachers – these public school teachers would have failed outright.
No teacher in the state sector would dare to teach the way they did. Yet the children were so well taught that they seemed to know everything about the subject. I sat in on one history lesson in which the pupils learnt more than their contemporaries in the state sector would learn in an entire term.
And if that sounds as though I'm making it up, imagine the time it takes to get children huddled around in groups, quieten them down, give instructions on how to do the complicated exercise of not losing the bits of paper, making sure they don't get bent out of shape, ensuring they get returned to the envelope, and so on.
So what is the best way of training teachers? Teach First is an organisation that takes the brightest from Oxford and Cambridge and has them teach for a minimum of two years. A number stay permanently. Some question Teach First and say that academic excellence is not necessarily a sign that one will be an excellent teacher. True, but one cannot be an excellent teacher without brains. Intelligence is a pre-requisite to being a good teacher. Often, but not always, academic excellence demonstrates that one is sharp. So Teach First is a fantastic way of getting our brightest into classrooms.
Above all, the question that needs answering is whether there is a right way and a wrong way to be a good teacher. Can one still be a good teacher if one never has the prescribed model of a starter, plenary, objective, group work, facilitation and so on? Are there really formulae for being "good"? Certainly, the teacher-training institutions would say that there are, which would explain why they believe it is so crucial that we retain them to ensure a guiding hand over teacher training.
The fear, it would seem, is that leaving training to schools might create too much variety in the profession, putting an end to the pursuit of "sameness" in the classroom. But I would argue that variety is the thing that will ensure equal opportunities for all.
The problem is that good teachers want the freedom to teach as they please. They want to do what is best for their pupils. Every class is unique, so every class needs a different approach and teaching style.
Good teachers often get extremely frustrated with the parrot-like approach dictated by Ofsted inspectors and senior leaders. Sometimes they get so annoyed that they defect to the private sector, where freedom is abundant.
Many times, as a senior teacher, I would observe excellent practitioners who were superb with pupils but I would be forced to give them a "good" instead of an "outstanding" for their lesson, simply because some ill-thought-out Ofsted boxes had not been ticked.
And there you have it. If one is to judge teachers by criteria, the list begins in teacher-training institutions, and is confirmed and justified in the end by Ofsted. The teachers who are caught in between are puppets, doing what they are told. That, at any rate, is what we see. In reality, the best teachers do their own thing behind closed classroom doors. They do precisely what they are told not to do and dare to teach knowledge instead of skills, dare to stand in front of the class "teaching" for more than five minutes, and don't insist on their children copying down an objective for the lesson. Then, when they are observed, they put on an act to satisfy the Ofsted criteria, and live to teach another day.
Such is the reality of the state sector, where good teachers are under siege, having to pretend in order to get their rubber-stamp approval. Children are different from each other. Classrooms and schools vary immensely. That is why the freedom to choose what lesson is appropriate, what teacher might work best, what curriculum best suits, is so imperative if we are to provide equality of opportunity.
The public school boys who run Britain aren't doing so because they were all considered to be the same at school: they run Britain because their teachers had the freedom to choose and, perhaps in the end, that is what it is to be a good teacher.
Wednesday 12 January 2011
Tiger Mother's book makes case for ultra-strict Chinese parenting
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua set to stir controversy with critique of liberal western childrearing
Chua – who is married to novelist Jed Rubenfeld, author of The Interpretation of Murder – relates in the book how she approached the rearing of her own two daughters, Sophia and Lulu, with the strictness of the Chinese child-rearing model she inherited from her own parents.
The Tiger, Chua explains, is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. And as a "Tiger mother" herself, she assumed the absolute right to dictate her children's activities and demand rigorous academic standards of them at all times, ridiculing them if necessary to spur them on to greater efforts.
Her children were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a playdate, watch TV or choose their own extracurricular activities. They were also expected to be top in every subject (except gym and drama) and never get anything other than A-grades – because, Chua explains, Chinese parents believe it is their responsibility to ensure their children's academic achievement above everything else.
Chua argues that western parents. with their emphasis on nurturing their children's self-esteem and allowing free expression, have set their children up to accept mediocrity. "Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently," she says. If their child doesn't achieve perfect exam results, the Chinese parent assumes it's because he or she didn't work hard enough. "That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child," Chua says. And it is crucial for a mother to have the "fortitude" to override her children's preferences, because to enjoy anything you have to be good at it, to be good at it you have to work, and children on their own never wish to work, she adds.
(Nor is it just solely in the arena of schoolwork that a healthy disregard for your child's feelings is recommended. Where a western mother would tremble, a Chinese mother, Chua says, would not hesitate to say to her child: "Hey fatty – lose some weight.")
The author admits her views are controversial even with her own husband, and unsurprisingly, her book has provoked an outcry. An extract published in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" has attracted 3,500 comments, ranging from the horrified ("As a parent of two kids myself, I had an overwhelming, visceral response to this article. Her style borders on abusive"; "this woman's parenting style is reminiscent of Joan Crawford in 'Mommy Dearest'") to the laudatory ("Her style of parenting creates structure, discipline and work ethics. As long as you don't stop loving and supporting your kids, there is nothing wrong with having high expectations for them").
Chua's book may have started the ball rolling, but it won't be the only controversial title of early 2011. The anonymously-written O: A Presidential Novel, said to be written with insider knowledge of the White House and promising to be a new Primary Colors, is out in the US later this month. Meanwhile Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, Known and Unknown, comes out in February, with James Frey's new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, featuring a bisexual Christ returning to live in 21st-century New York, out in the spring.
In June, Michael Brooks will present an exposé of fraud, suppressed evidence and unethical PR games in the "highly competitive and ruthless" world of science in the book Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. Later in the year the regularly provocative Chuck Palahniuk will describe an 11-year-old girl's existence in hell in the novel Damned, which he himself described as "The Shawshank Redemption having a baby with The Lovely Bones, raised by Judy Blume".
Monday 20 September 2010
The selfish search for the self
September 20, 2010
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The selfish search for the self
For these middle-class wives, theirs is an existential crisis borne out of over-high expectations and, frankly, emotional greed, consumerism of the heart
OK, let's get the ugly feelings over with. I am madly envious of the flush Elizabeth Gilbert, an unquestionably brilliant writer, whose autobiographical Eat, Pray, Love sold millions and is now a film with the delectable Julia Roberts. Oh, and endorsements gather around her as if she is the belle of a Hello! magazine party: there's Sophie Dahl and Elle Macpherson and Meg Ryan waxing lyrical. And the formidable Hillary Clinton and Oprah. Serious reviewers, too, have fallen for her charm and modern-day odyssey."If only," you think, if you have penned a modest memoir yourself - abject, I know - then it all boils over, staining the pages of the bestseller you are forcing yourself to read, really only to find stuff to mock and of course imitate. I am not alone in this world of seething writerly resentment. So discount, say, 30 per cent of what follows, put it down to the above. But the rest still holds.
But first the plot, which you probably know anyway, so loud and extensive has been the publicity. When in her mid-thirties, Gilbert was an East Coast writer and journalist, winner of many awards, starring in her own reality show of unending opportunities with her husband with whom she had been for eight years. One night in her bathroom she experienced a dramatic epiphany, only instead of seeing the light, she saw gloom and darkness ahead.
She didn't want to be married any more; wasn't cut out to be a mom; couldn't carry on with the role she had inhabited. It was, she says, a breakdown. So she went off to Italy to learn how to eat, to India for spiritual awakening and finally to Bali, where she found peace, equilibrium and a fab new husband and they live happily ever after.
The story is moving and believable. Up to a point. It certainly has captured the hearts of middle-class wives who find at a certain age that the house and hearth and husband don't satisfy all their longings. Theirs is a domestic existential crisis borne out of over-high expectations and, frankly, emotional greed, consumerism of the heart.
Gilbert joins the long line of American women who feel they must (temporarily) leave the richest and most self-regarding nation on earth in order to find their bodies and the meaning of life. It started back in the Sixties when stars went off to be hugged and consoled by dodgy men in saffron robes. Later, devotees of foreign enlightenment included Goldie Hawn and drug-addled pop singers. Some of the best songs in Joni Mitchell's album Blue tell that story of home and away. British celebs have gone for this therapy, too - ever since the Beatles got themselves their own guru. Some good comes of these earnestly undertaken journeys.
However, something different and deeply annoying is happening in Gilbert's case. The end of her marriage obviously causes her some pain, but, if it meant anything, she just couldn't have moved on so slickly. "I was the administrator of my own rescue," she says, an American true believer in can-do and must-have.
For the rest of us, when things fall apart, the dissolution of selfhood is so debilitating, you can't feed your children for days. But Gilbert got a book contract before setting off, planning a successful reincarnation, without risks. That is what the privileged do. And lordy lord, what a lot of tadpoles have spawned from this big, vain frog-turned-princess. Tour companies are offering great deals so you too can eat in Italy, pray in India and cool off in Bali. Breathless females write about their inner makeovers. One, for example, says: "I wasn't the only one ... there were students from all over the world, including Germany, Singapore and Canada, all of whom had read the book, which during our feverish conversations about it, soon took on something of a Bible-like status." A rich and stupid woman I know in India is about to set off on one as well, copying the worst of Western indulgences because now she can.
Gilbert's book is really about the winners who take it all in this monstrously unfair age of globalisation, just another form of exploitation, whereby Westerners appropriate ancestral knowledge and assets of nations, selling them back, keeping back all gain and kudos, all done shamelessly.
From these trips of profitable self-discovery, it is but a small step to the exciting new business opportunities on the financial pages of newspapers, which announce that water shortages the world over will bring vast fortunes for forward-thinking investors. Usually a picture of a child at a dry well accompanies these exciting tips.
There are individual Westerners - including Americans - who are neither so crass nor covetous. Like Katherine Russell Rich, also a journalist, who lost her job, had two bouts of cancer and took off to India to immerse herself in Hindi: "I no longer had the language to describe my life, so I decided to borrow someone else's." Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, is a story of a deep struggle with her own identity, the person she became as she acquired, slowly and painfully, another world language and worldview in a small town in Rajasthan. It is also a story of the kindness of strangers who wanted nothing in return and those who weren't at all kind or understanding.
It is a multi-layered book which examines the nature of language and addresses appalling political conflicts such as the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and the sexism of Asian societies. She is too courteous to expose the worst behaviour of some of her host families but you know, through her exact and carefully chosen words. Unlike Gilbert, Rich doesn't find the perfect jeans, or the perfect man as she goes back home. Her book will not be made into a Hollywood movie because there is no simple beginning, middle or blissful end. Hers is an exposition on the 21st century and how lost we all are.
With humility and an open mind, Westerners can genuinely connect even with those with whom they have nothing in common and experience uncertainty. There is hope here far bigger than that in Gilbert's romance. But, sadly, it is the latter that sells - and how.
y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk [y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk]
For further reading : 'Dreaming in Hindi: Life in Translation', Katherine Russell Rich (pbk 2010)
Tuesday 31 August 2010
We lost sight of fairness in the false promise of wealth
Acceptance of inequality rests on assumptions that 'free markets' make us all richer in the end. Growth figures tell it differently
As Nick Clegg fends off accusations of selling out and Labour leadership candidates set out their stall, debates about inequality show no sign of going away. But the moral arguments are rarely extended far enough, and virtually no politician challenges a basic, erroneous premise that inequality is a price worth paying for a more efficient market system that enriches us all
As Nick Clegg fends off accusations of selling out and Labour leadership candidates set out their stall, debates about inequality show no sign of going away. But the moral arguments are rarely extended far enough, and virtually no politician challenges a basic, erroneous premise that inequality is a price worth paying for a more efficient market system that enriches us all
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