10 lies we're told about welfare

Has someone made Jim Royle a policy adviser? Millions are being made poorer while we're fobbed off with porkies

• 
• • Ricky Tomlinson
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 April 2013 14.47 BST

Protesters against the proposed 'bedroom tax' gather outside Downing Street in London. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

Welfare reform, my arse. Has Jim Royle parked his chair, feet up, telly on, in the corridors between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions? Employing him as adviser can be the only explanation for the utter rubbish that boils forth from this government on welfare.

Who else could have dreamed up the bedroom tax, a policy so stupid it forces people to leave their homes and drag themselves around the country in search of nonexistent one-bedroom flats?

That one has to be the result of too many hours in front of Jeremy Kyle (no offence) with the heating on full and a can of super-strength lager. It seems as if that is how this government views ordinary people: feckless and useless – poor, because they brought it on themselves, deliberately.

Maybe the cabinet is confused. Twenty-three millionaires in the one room can get like that. But do you know what, enough. Let's call this government's welfare policy what it is – wrong, nasty and dishonest.

Off the top of my head, I can list 10 porkies they are spinning to justify the latest stage of their attack on our 70-year-old welfare state.

1. Benefits are too generous

Really? Could you live on £53 a week as Iain Duncan Smith is claiming he could if he had to? Then imagine handing back 14% of this because the government deems you have a "spare room". Could you find the money to pay towards council tax and still afford to eat at the end of the week?

2. Benefits are going up

They're not. A 1% "uprating" cap is really a cut. Inflation is at least 2.7% . Essentials like food, fuel and transport are all up by at least that, in many cases far more. Benefits are quickly falling behind the cost of living.

3. Jobs are out there, if people look

Where? Unemployment rose last month and is at 2.5 million, with one million youngsters out of work. When Costa Coffee advertised eight jobs, 1,701 applied.

4. The bedroom tax won't hit army families or foster carers

Yes it will. Perhaps most cruel of all, the tax will not apply to foster families who look after one kid. If you foster siblings, then tough. But these kids are often the hardest to place. Thanks to George Osborne and IDS, their chances just got worse. And even if your son or daughter is in barracks in Afghanistan, then don't expect peace of mind as the government still has to come clean on plans for their bedroom.

5. Social tenants can downsize

Really, where? Councils sold their properties – and Osborne wants them to sell what's left. Housing associations built for families. In Hull, there are 5,500 people told to chase 70 one-bedroom properties.

6. Housing benefit is the problem

In fact it's rental costs. Private rents shot up by an average of £300 last year. No wonder 5 million people need housing benefits, but they don't keep a penny. It all goes to landlords. 

7. Claimants are pulling a fast one

No. Less than 1% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. But tax avoidance and evasion is estimated to run to £120bn.

8. It's those teenage single mums

An easy target. Yet only 2% of single mums are teenagers. And most single mums, at least 59%, work.

9. We're doing this for the next generation

No you're not. The government's admitted at least 200,000 more children will be pushed deeper into poverty because of the welfare changes.

10. Welfare reforms are just about benefit cuts

Wrong. The attack on our welfare state is hitting a whole range of services – privatising the NHS, winding up legal aid for people in debt and closing SureStart centres and libraries. All this will make life poorer for every community.

Some call these myths. I call them lies. We are being told lies about who caused this crisis and lied to about the best way out of it. But I know one thing to be true: this government's polices will make millions of people poorer and more afraid. To do that when you do not have to, when there are other options, is obscene. That's why I'm backing union Unite'sOurWelfareWorks campaign in its efforts to help highlight the truth about our welfare state.

Primary school maths whiz kids are set up for life

Hamish McRae in The Independent

An important, if troubling, bit of research has just been published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, backed with some government money.

It shows that 10-year-olds who are good at mathematics earn significantly more once they reach their thirties than those who are not. The IFS took a large group of children born in April 1970, then looked at their maths and English scores 10 years later. Then, they looked at their earnings at the ages of 30, 34 and 38.

The findings showed that those who were in the top 15 per cent of maths scores at age 10, earned on average 7.3 per cent more at 30 – equivalent to £2,100 a year – than the child who scored the average in that class, even adjusting for all other factors. Those who did similarly well in English earned 1.9 per cent – or £550 – more than the middle-ranker. So, being good at English is helpful, but being good at maths is even better.

The IFS says this suggests that employers value maths skills and are prepared to bid for people who have them, and it therefore concludes that we need to invest more in lifting children's performance in maths.

This makes sense, but also carries the worry that if 10-year-olds happen to be bad at maths, they are disadvantaged through life. It would thus follow that having a bad maths teacher at primary school can really damage people's chances, while a great one can lift children up for the rest of their lives.

The task for educators is huge, and clear objectives are a help. But, if numeracy is more important in the job market than literacy, what conclusions should we draw?

Britain And India: A Convenient Scapegoat In A Time Of Economic Crisis

By Colin Todhunter



07 November, 2012

Countercurrents.org



India is likely to be told this week that Britain plans to slash its 280 million pounds a year aid to it following growing domestic pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to stop funding emerging economic powers such as India at a time when Britain is in serious economic crisis.



International Development Secretary Justine Greening during her visit to New Delhi is expected to discuss a timetable for winding down British aid commitment to India. She is expected to make it clear that the UK’s commitment to India will change radically at the end of the current eight-year 1.6 billion pound programme which lasts until 2015.



The idea to cut aid has been building for some years and has received added impetus from recent events. In 2011, Cameron led one of the largest-ever business delegations to India, comprising six cabinet ministers and around 60 business leaders. He lobbied heavily in favour of supplying India with the British built Eurofighter. But in 2012 as Britain seemed destined to lose the contract for 126 fighter jets, the knives came out in Britain – both for Cameron and for India too.



Instead of the British media attacking the sordid nature of the heavily taxpayer-subsidised arms industry and the way its massive profits are made by stoking tensions and war, it saw better mileage from cashing in on fear mongering by telling the public that the apparent loss of the contract to the French company Dassault, which makes the Rafale fighter, could jeopardise thousands of British jobs. It would have been much more constructive for the media to have regarded the loss any jobs in the arms sector as an opportunity to reinvest arms industry subsidies in more socially useful ventures, such as renewable energy.



As a backlash over India’s decision, however, sections of the public and various self-appointed opinion leaders took it on themselves to also apportion blame to India by linking the loss of the contract to the issue of aid. They were quick to point out that the British Government’s aid package is around 15 times larger than what France sent to India in 2009.



They asked, “Where is the trade dividend?” – especially in light of former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell saying that the aid relationship with India is very important and its focus included seeking to sell Typhoon jets. He made it clear that aid was linked to trade. In order to get the government off the hook, this stance (and claims that aid was being used as a bribe) was soon being strenuously denied by various members of the government in light of the French seemingly bagging the prize.



Public pressure has subsequently grown over sending aid to India, especially at a time when massive public sector job losses and slashes to services are being made in Britain. The issue has certainly struck a chord with sections of the British public.



Egged on by politicians and the media, sections of the public began to ask why should the overburdened British taxpayer give aid to a country with 300 billion dollars worth of foreign reserves and year on year growth that has been over 8.5 per cent? It did also not go unnoticed that India has funds not just for its own aid and space programmes, but for nuclear weapons too, while Britain itself has no space programme and has been debating scaling down its own nuclear weapons systems.



Many in Britain also questioned why aid should be given to India, which has an economy on course to overtake Britain’s in the next ten years, and that, according to financial advisers Merrill Lynch, has 153,000 dollar-millionaires – a number that grew by 20 per cent in just one year, compared with Britain’s own increase of less than one per cent.



The argument proceeded along the lines that India might do better to scrap its space programme, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and its huge aircraft buying programme worth billions and redirect all those funds to invest in improving the plight of the poor.



And then there was the matter of giving money to India being a waste anyhow, seeing that rich Indians and politicians have salted away billions in Swiss bank accounts since independence. The accusation is that much aid money to India is thus chewed up by corruption and fraud. The lavish spending of India’s rich has been targeted too, with much focus on multi-storey Mumbai penthouses, Formula 1 and the like.



Cut through the tabloid-type hysteria and the media’s agenda, and there is indeed a certain logic behind many such criticisms. But what has often been ignored during this tirade against India is that, as a strategy for poverty alleviation and within the broader context, the impact of aid is minimal at the very best.



There is no denying that, despite India’s rising power on the world stage, poverty remains rife and the country is home to a third of the world’s malnourished children. India’s annual average income per person is around 2.5 per cent of Britain’s.



However, much of the hardships are today fuelled by rising inequality brought about by neoliberal economic policies. Inequality in India has increased significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s (1). India’s rich elites have benefited enormously, and this has often been at the expense of the poor. Look no further than the real estate speculators and the land grabs from the poor, the rising obesity levels and the persistent malnourishment, the corporate rich and the theft of natural resources in the tribal areas and the high GDP and the low poverty alleviation statistics. Aid is like using a plaster to stem a burst dam.



Regardless of whether India even wants this relatively small sum of aid in the first place from it’s former colonial oppressor, which so many Indian politicians have openly stated it patently does not, it’s a pity that sections of the British media and certain politicians do not highlight the fact that the sum given by Britain to India is anyhow only less than one per cent of Britain’s debts – hardly a drain on the British economy as it is too often made out to be. It’s also a pity that they don’t focus more on the real drain placed on the British economy via the hundreds of billions that are being picked from the pockets of ordinary Brits via bank bail outs, corporate subsidies and fraud and tax avoidance and evasion by the rich.



According to economics professor John Foster (2), the aggregate wealth of Britain’s richest 1,000 people was in 2010 some 333 billion pounds. In 2010, Britain’s aggregate national debt was half that amount. In 2009, the top 1,000 increased their wealth by a third, meaning that the amount they actually increased their wealth by in just one year was half of the national debt!



But that is a taboo issue. It’s not up for public debate or scrutiny. It’s not to be questioned. The dirty machinations of capitalism are to be hidden away – preferably in an offshore bank account.



Much easier to point the finger at India in order to divert attention from the predatory capitalism that continues to fuel Britain’s economic woes and exacerbate poverty in India. Much easier to use aid to India as a convenient whipping boy.



But can we expect much better? Not really. The British press, politicians and establishment mouthpieces have been using welfare provision within Britain itself as a convenient scapegoat for capitalism’s failings for decades!

Andrew Strauss: more straight bat than flashing blade

Robert Colville in The Telegraph

One of humanity’s besetting sins is that we’re addicted to charisma. Besotted by it, even. We look for the leader with the movie-star looks, the resounding oratory – the sheer, obvious talent. A Steve Jobs can behave abominably to his underlings, can decide that deodorant is for the little people, and still we swoon.

But is this really a good idea? Over the past few decades, English cricket has been conducting what might be termed an uncontrolled experiment in management theory. The lab rats in question have been those poor souls faced with the uniquely impossible demands of the national captaincy: helping to select a team, motivating the players, producing tactical plans and modifying them on the fly, coping with media scrutiny, and all the while maintaining their own level of performance.

Sometimes, there has been an obvious candidate – as yesterday, when Alastair Cook accepted the job with the air of a crown prince assuming his birthright. Cook, like Mike Atherton, was an “FEC”, a player always earmarked as a Future England Captain. But in their absence, the authorities invariably haver between charisma and character. For every Mike Brearley, whose man-management skills lay behind Ian Botham’s destruction of the Aussies, there is a – well, an Ian Botham, who had only just resigned the captaincy after a miserable tenure.

The temptation is often to hand the leadership to the player who shines the brightest, to a Botham or an Andrew Flintoff or Kevin Pietersen, in the (usually forlorn) hope that he can galvanise others with his sheer ability. There is, however, another path. Andrew Strauss, who resigned as captain yesterday, shares Pietersen’s South African birthplace, yet is his opposite in terms of character, temperament and playing style. Pietersen is the stupendously athletic strokemaker. Strauss is the man who had to work for his place, for his captaincy, for every one of his 7,037 Test runs.

As an England novice, he was “Lord Brocket” and “PT” (the P stands for “Posh”; the T is less kind). He failed an audition for the captaincy, losing out to Flintoff, only getting the job after Pietersen’s intrigues against the then coach resulted in both losing their jobs.

Here’s the strange thing, though. As a leader, Pietersen was a flop: on a tour of India, wrote team-mate Graeme Swann in his autobiography, the superstar was briefly reduced “to a period of screaming '----ing bowl ----ing straight’ at everyone”. It was his replacement as captain who led England to back-to-back Ashes victories (the second gloriously crushing), and briefly to the status of No 1 in the world.

Strauss would perhaps not make the short list for history’s greatest captain: as well as the many Australian or West Indian contenders, there is Graeme Smith of South Africa, who finished off not just Strauss’s captaincy, but those of Michael Vaughan and Nasser Hussain too. Even in purely English terms, Vaughan probably eclipses his former lieutenant for his hint of unorthodoxy, his tactical flair.

Strauss, though, is the man you trust to get the job done – the one to lead a polar expedition, to do everything by the book, and to bring his men back alive. “Strauss is one of those guys who demand respect,” writes Swann, “and on a daily basis you never really fathom why. He just does. He always says the right things, whether it be in team meetings or press conferences, and his word is never questioned.” Except by Pietersen, who disliked his captain so much that he reportedly advised the South Africans on how to get him out.

Was it a failure that Strauss, and coach Andy Flower, could not reconcile this wayward genius to a regime of grinding perfectionism? Perhaps. Yet surveys of what makes for a great corporate leader tend to look surprisingly like profiles of Andrew Strauss. In her book Quiet – which argues that flashiest is not always best – Susan Cain observes that true greats display “extreme humility coupled with intense professional will”: they are not messianic Steve Jobs types, but those “who build not their own egos, but the institutions they run”.

The rivalry between Strauss and Pietersen, then, incarnates not just the great divide within English cricket, but in leadership more generally. Study after study has shown that we pay attention to those who shout the loudest, who make the boldest claims. In the process, we wildly overestimate the role of pure luck and the contribution of others.

True, charisma does have its place. Yet for all that it would be wonderful to see Pietersen light up Lord’s again, it seems somehow fitting that he and Strauss, yin and yang, are locked together on 21 Test centuries, one behind the national record. At the start of his career, you would have found few takers for Strauss ending up in a position of such pre-eminence. But then, as Iain Duncan Smith once noted, you should never underestimate the determination of a quiet man.

After 800 years, the barons are back in control of Britain

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 20.30 BST

King John, surrounded by English barons, ratifying the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Image

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus – pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been destroyed once; the day after my visit they were destroyed again. But the repeated destruction, removals and arrests have not deterred them. As one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If we go to prison we'll just come back … I'm not saying that this is the only way. But at least we're creating an opportunity for young people to step out of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land – even disused land – is guarded as fiercely as the rest of the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest (the document appended to the Magna Carta in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The relationship between land and democracy is a strong one, which is not widely understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power of the kind familiar to King John and his barons still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons, most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those who fund the major parties and establish the limits of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt. This spring, the government dropped a clause into an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning class is still well-represented, approved the measure. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as housing benefit payments are being cut back. I remember a political postcard from the early 1990s titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede are trying to revive a different tradition, largely forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to make "the Earth a common treasury for all … not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation". The tradition of resistance, the assertion of independence from the laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten property, long pre-date and long post-date the Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into the town, I found the pavements packed with people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas, forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was carried down the road. The sense of common purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half of what we need is here already. Now how do we recruit it to the fight for democracy?

Unemployment matters more than GDP or inflation

Jobless figures are the one major economic indicator that measures people. And they demonstrate the toll in misery across Europe

• 
• • Mehdi Hasan
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 March 2012 21.00 GMT

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

 

There is a spectre haunting Europe – the spectre of mass unemployment. On Thursday it was announced that the eurozone's unemployment rate had risen to a record high of 10.7% in January. That's 16.9 million people out of work across the 17-nation euro area.

Across the 27-member European Union unemployment is also topping 10% for the first time: a jaw-dropping 24.3 million jobless. The sheer size of the continent's growing army of unemployed workers is difficult to comprehend.

Spain holds the EU record, with unemployment at 23.3%, or 5.3 million people – and rising. "This is the terrible cancer of our society," said Rafael Zornoza Boy, the bishop of Cadiz, last week. Yet prime minister Mariano Rajoy's new (and conservative) government's pleas to give Madrid some leeway on spending cuts fell on deaf ears at Friday's EU summit of fiscal self-flagellists in Brussels. Then there is poor Greece, where EU-imposed cuts have left one in five unemployed and have driven up the suicide rate by 40%. Austerity is, literally, killing Europeans.

Poll after poll shows voters across the EU care much more about the jobs deficit than they do about the budget deficit. Nonetheless, the proverbial Martian, landing in Brussels last week, would have been stunned to witness the complacency and indifference of the continent's political elites to the crisis of spiralling joblessness. EU leaders continue to fiddle – over borrowing limits, fiscal compacts, treaty changes – as their economies crash and burn. The austerity gamble hasn't paid off. Fiscal consolidation has failed to spur growth or boost employment.

Fiscal stimulus, on the other hand, works. The US has had 23 consecutive months of private-sector job growth, with 3.7m new jobs created over the past two years thanks to Barack Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. US unemployment benefit claims are now at a four-year low.
But Europe's political and financial elites – led by austerity junkies such as "Merkozy", the European Central Bank's Mario Draghi and, of course, our very own David Cameron – pretend not to notice. Here on the jobless side of the Atlantic, the only solution to austerity-induced unemployment, it seems, is more austerity. In Brussels, eurozone finance ministers threatened to impose swingeing fines on those member states, such as Spain and the Netherlands, that may miss their budget deficit targets. If insanity, as Albert Einstein is said to have once remarked, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then our leaders have gone mad.

The irony is that mass unemployment itself is the biggest barrier to deficit reduction. Basic economics teaches us that the best way to cut borrowing levels is to get people back to work and paying taxes. Or as John Maynard Keynes put it: "Look after unemployment and the budget will look after itself."

But Europe's crisis isn't just about economics. Unlike GDP or inflation, unemployment is the only major economic indicator that measures real human beings, rather than growth or prices.

Having a job isn't just about earning a living or paying taxes; it's about human dignity and self-worth. The human and social costs of unemployment are well-documented: financial hardship, emotional stress, depression, lethargy, loss of morale and status, shame, sickness and premature death. Then there is the hopelessness that often leads to rising crime, disorder and social unrest. We can probably expect a new wave of riots and violence in the continent's city centres.

The tragedy is that there is nothing unavoidable about Europe's unemployment crisis. The US is proof that even the most modest of fiscal stimuli can create jobs. But politicians in Germany, where mass unemployment in the 1930s helped the Nazis seize power, refuse to countenance any loosening of the fiscal purse strings inside the EU, arguing that such a move would increase borrowing costs and might panic the bond markets. Yet, as the Nobel-prizewinning economist Christopher Pissarides has written, "a small rise in gilt interest rates is a small price to pay for more jobs".

Here in the UK, where unemployment stands at a 17-year high of 2.7 million (or a staggering 6.3 million if the "underemployed" are included), our own do-nothing chancellor, George Osborne, continues to proclaim that "the British government has run out of money". Really? Perhaps he should have a word with Mervyn King. Over the past three years, the Bank of England governor has, with a mere tap on his keyboard, authorised the creation of £325bn of new money, out of thin air, through a process of "quantitative easing" (QE). This, however, has so far been used only to bail out the bankers. Why not use it to bail out millions of jobless Britons?

If we assume it would cost £26,000 (the median salary for UK workers) to create each new job, the cost to the government of putting a million people back to work would be £26bn – or around half of the latest £50bn tranche of QE released by the Bank last month.

How many more of Europe's jobs will be sacrificed at the altar of deficit reduction? How many more lives ruined, families impoverished and communities destroyed in pursuit of growth-choking, job-killing, self-defeating austerity? It is unacceptable for governments to stand by as dole queues lengthen. Unemployment is not a price worth paying. Nor is it a price that has to be paid.

India's elite is blinded by a cultish belief in progress

Rather than emulate US swagger, my home country should learn a lesson from America's current jobs crisis

• 
• • Siddhartha Deb
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 February 2012 17.30 GMT

Prosperity for some: a man cycles past offices near New Delhi. Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images

 

From 2007 to 2009, during the process of gathering material for a non-fiction book on India, I often found myself exposed to the aspirations of its upper and middle classes. These people were part of the 150 or 200 million who had done very well materially from the economic changes of the past two decades, and as a group they believed firmly in India as a superpower on a path of infinite growth.

The people I met ranged from extremely wealthy businessmen, part of a super-elite, to the salaried middle classes. When I encountered them as individuals, usually in extended sessions, they often showed themselves capable of nuance and even outright contradiction, from the government official who expressed understanding for ultra-left guerrillas fighting the government and mining corporations in central India to the waitress at an upscale Delhi restaurant who wished, despite her apparent upward mobility, to have her mother's less affluent but stable life as a provincial schoolteacher.

But what was apparent in my long conversations with individuals was hardly ever true in the aggregate. In the public discourse produced by the upper and middle classes in India – in newspapers and talk shows, in tweets and television soaps, in the comments that flood websites should anyone dare make a dissenting note – such contradictions vanish, replaced by an uncomplicated, almost cultish faith in India as a success story. In this version of contemporary India, the material wealth of the upper and middle classes can only keep on increasing. The comfortable will get rich, the rich get richer. As for the poor living on 50 cents a day (perhaps as much as 77% of the entire population, according to one government report), they might see their lot improve. If not, they have only their lack of ability, effort and merit to blame.

In fact, when a series of scandals exploded in 2010, the elite response involved fixating on the corruption of government and politicians. It is true that both government officials and politicians were involved in the scandals, which included the shoddy construction of buildings for the Commonwealth Games and the irregularities involved in auctioning off the mobile phone spectrum that may have cost the public exchequer $39bn. But although corporations and the media were quite complicit in such corruption, as evident from the last of the 2010 scandals, which involved the income tax department's wiretaps on a British-Indian corporate lobbyist called Niira Radia, their role vanished in the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare last year.

Along with the corporations and the media, India's middle and upper classes were particularly eager supporters of Hazare, a former soldier and social reformer whose primary demand was for the creation of a Jan Lokpal, a tribunal that would have policing powers over the government and legislature. When rallying behind Hazare, elite Indians did not raise questions about inequality, in the way their country lags behind other poor countries in many social indicators, including the child mortality rate, underweight children and female youth literacy, or how large sections of the population from Kashmiris in the north to tribal people in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh feel the state as nothing but an oppressive presence.

Those supporting the Hazare movement seemed unconcerned with such things, instead focusing on government corruption as all that stood between their present wellbeing and future prosperity. If only the corrupt state would step aside in certain areas – obviously not Kashmir, Chhattisgarh or the north-east – the Indian elites could prosper even further.

The Hazare movement has since petered out, but its central idea, of the unique meritoriousness of the middle and upper classes of India, remains. It is an illusion, and it reminds me of the illusion among the middle and upper classes of another society, and that is the US. I live and teach in New York, where I've seen among my students (mostly white, just as elites in India tend to be mostly upper caste) and in the Occupy Wall Street movement an elite that has suddenly been forced to examine its notions of unique meritoriousness and endless prosperity.

The lack of jobs in the US, something that earlier affected only those in manufacturing and the service industry, and therefore had an impact mostly on inner city African Americans, poor immigrants and rural whites, has now worked its way into the lives of the middle and upper classes, towards even people with expensive college degrees.

In the conversations I've had with members of this American middle class, I've been privy to another reality behind their seemingly affluent facades. I teach writing, and so I've read, with surprise, about a student whose past consisted of private school education, a large suburban house, well-paid professional parents, and global travel, but whose parents are now unemployed, their large house caught up in endless mortgage payments, and where, along with attending classes, it is equally important for this student to scrounge for a subway card and food. It's not just the young who are afflicted, either. On New Year's Eve, an old friend of mine showed me around the house he'd fixed up painstakingly over the years. He now plans to sell it off because, in spite of having a steady job, he can no longer keep up with the mortgage payments.

It's painful to see people struggling with such hopelessness. Yet I can't help but note that it's allowed a significant portion of Americans to shed their shell of complacency, their belief that they must continue to prosper because they are deserving and that the world of the marketplace will always deal them a fair hand. In India, the elites shout themselves hoarse about emulating America – in its wealth, its swaggering confidence, its Hummers and parking lots – even as that America ceases to exist. Even in the land of manifest destiny, destiny has run into its limits, and it seems only a matter of time before the same turns out to be true for India's privileged classes.

Apple and the art of business

By Sreeram Chaulia

Since the ailing Steve Jobs announced his retirement from the chief executive position at Apple Inc last week, tributes have poured in to a giant of a business leader whose personality rivaled few others in corporate history.

Hailed as a genius who steered Apple from a down-in-the-dumps crisis in 1996 to the world's most valuable company (this year briefly surpassing ExxonMobil), Jobs' life imparts a message that individuals can make all the difference even in a complex and diversified global economy.

Of all the stunning insights Jobs has bequeathed, the basic one is that entrepreneurship is an art, rather than a science to be learnt through formal education or training. A college dropout like Microsoft's founder Bill Gates and Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, Jobs read the pulse of consumers like no other business titan of our times, and did so in an uncanny and instinctive fashion without meticulous market surveys, focus group discussions, or commissioned research reports.

One quote that epitomizes Jobs is his response to a journalist when asked how thoroughly he had analyzed market moods and tastes before introducing the iPad tablet computer: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

This arrogant statement upends the mythology of capitalism, wherein the "consumer is the king" and corporations compete to serve this master by peddling choices. Jobs' scintillating career demonstrates that the marketplace is essentially a creation and a construction of wants and desires, not an invention to satisfy consumers' own preferences.

Apple, now valued at over US$300 billion, is at the apex of designing new gadgets whose need is not necessarily felt by people ex ante, but which nevertheless become indispensable for millions of buyers after getting launched.

"Coolness" - an ineffable quality - separated Apple from its direct competitors as well as peers in other industries. From the day the Macintosh arrived in 1984 until the latest iterations of the iPhones, iPods and iPads, Jobs imbued in his production stable a magical touch that made their outputs objects of mass desire.

In assessing which model of an electronic device would "click" and emote with the consuming public, Jobs must have performed mental and psychological role plays wherein he became the market, and the market became him. If business leadership is about divining the market and its future shape beforehand, Jobs was a natural at it.

Apart from design cachets in Apple devices, which were premised on gut feelings about American and global popular culture and psyche, Jobs deployed daring marketing tricks, such as keeping the supply of new products scarce and limited and whetting the appetite of customers until they became ravenously hungry. Such a teasing marketing strategy was risky, as impatient consumers could have jumped ship and plumped for an alternative tablet computer or smart phone that was readily available without the agonizing wait.

But apart from technical know-how about logistics and supply chains, Jobs had the supreme artful confidence of a maestro to execute this approach, knowing that the hungry would salivate and wait for the "real thing" rather than substitutes that lacked the X-factor of Apple.

Apple probably has the lone distinction of counterfeits not only its specific products but of its entire stores and retail outlets, as seen in China this year. Even the recognizable facade of the Apple store was fabricated in numerous locations by conmen in just one area - Kunming - until the government clamped down. It shows that a strategy of setting up far fewer sales points than is actually warranted by the mushrooming consumer demand pays off (provided competitors lack your charisma and pulling power).

The way Apple entered and then cracked the Chinese market - which had hitherto been a wild goose chase for several Western technology firms - is worthy of business school case studies. Where literally every other starry eyed international technological firm had beaten a sullen retreat, Apple went into China with its colossal global reputation and tapped into the rising disposable purses of the world's second largest economy. Jobs, the demystifying business guru, silenced market analysts who used to highlight China's cultural peculiarities and how Western multinationals lacked the local discretionary knowledge to woo the Chinese buyer.

As the ultimate capitalist of our times, one who rivals the industrial-age Henry Ford in ambition and vision, Jobs' reading of the Chinese market revealed that culture and local idiosyncrasies can be overcome through global consciousness and integration into a seamless "world market" that defies nationalism and parochialism. With every buyer, including the upwardly mobile Chinese one, glued into the same materialistic dreams, globalization takes on a new universalizing force with companies like Apple at its nerve center.

Chrystia Freeland of Reuters has written about the "Apple economy" as a distinctive phenomenon that globalizes employment and life chances instead of confining them to workers within countries where corporations are headquartered. With the bulk its buyers, manufacturers, salespersons and assemblers coming from outside the United States, Apple under Jobs was the ultimate symbol of a new era in economic organization of the planet. Local identities remain entrenched in some spheres, but ever less so in the high-technology domain, where the likes of Jobs have rendered the nation-state a defunct unit of analysis.

Steve Jobs was like an orchestra conductor who had the command to sway the audience the way he wanted them. He was not an average soap opera producer who went by "what the people like to see". Similar to the great auteur Alfred Hitchcock, who confessed to "enjoying playing the audience like a piano", Jobs delighted in deciding what form and content daily-use technology should take, and the masses lapped up his confections.

Few business leaders can deny that they nurse inner urges to take the market to a different plane, beyond staying profitable within the existing parameters. The premature departure of Jobs (he is only 57-years-old) from active stewardship of the most admired company for innovation is an opportunity to examine what it takes for one individual to remake her or his profession or field. It is a moment to reflect on how the part can transform the whole through unconventional boldness and inspired imaginativeness.

Reminiscing about a low point in 1985, when he was forced to quit as CEO of Apple, a company he had co-founded in 1976, Jobs talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again". Each of us, regardless of the station of life, has a chance to become a "beginner again", unlearn received wisdom and think fresh. Jobs' take-home legacy is a lesson that creativity is within reach if the mind is attuned.

Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India, and the first ever B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical Analysis at the Takshashila Institution. He is the author of the recent book, International Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (I.B. Tauris, London)

Oprah and the philanthropy that chokes

Billionaire celebrities want to save the world Oprah Winfrey-style. But their giving has a price

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• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 August 2011 17.36 BST
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Oprah Winfrey has given money to New Orleans, HIV/Aids prevention, abused women's shelters and private scholarships. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Media empress Oprah Winfrey has been nominated for a special Oscar, the Jean Hersholt award, for those "whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry". This has created mild controversy in the US, with some charging that she is insufficiently Hollywood to merit an award held by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. But Winfrey is as good a choice as any to confer an aura of piety on an industry better known for lavish lifestyles than saving the world. Her contributions to charitable causes have included reconstruction in New Orleans, HIV/Aids prevention, abused women's shelters, church charities and private school scholarships for disadvantaged children. More interesting is why humanitarianism has assumed such importance as a must-be-seen-to-be-doing-it activity for the rich and the famous. From the obligatory royal photo-op with the homeless on LA's Skid Row to the ubiquitous images of white female celebrities cradling African babies, exhibitionist "caring" is as essential a marker of wealth and celebrity as signature scents and personal assistants. It's too easy to argue this is about mitigating guilt and resentment. More significant is how billionaire benevolence is closely tied to the big neoliberal political manoeuvres of our time. This relationship can be scrutinised without necessarily questioning Winfrey's personal sincerity or denying that wealthy giving benefits a few. Brand Oprah is a seamless and hugely influential melding of capitalism, self-help, humanitarian aspirations and spirituality. Endless consumption is encouraged by personal recommendations and lavish freebies from iPods to jewellery. At the same time, disciples can practise tasteful austerity with "debt diets" reminding us that "we are all responsible for everything that happens to us". The poor, too, are responsible both for their condition and for overcoming it. Buying things for the deserving poor – and Winfrey is clear that they are not all deserving – must be seen as "giving them bootstraps". Pledging to "destroy the welfare mentality", Winfrey has often suggested that receiving state assistance is a choice, one she herself rejected. Her grand philanthropic acts, such as the failed experiment to move 100 Chicago families into private housing during Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" efforts, are accompanied by politically welcomed criticism of public assistance as dependence. Yet as psychologist Bruce Levine notes, it is precisely "fundamentalist consumerism" which destroys self-reliance. Winfrey has been justifiably accused by activists of "reinforcing the US war on the poor" by blaming victims. In practising what should really be called "humanitarian privatisation", Winfrey and other philanthropists like Bill Gates have targeted public education with missionary zeal, speaking authoritatively on a subject they know little about. Having decided not to donate to inner-city public schools after criticising them and deeming their students unwilling to learn, Winfrey has publicly backed those advocating "charter schools", the US equivalent of free schools – including Gates and the makers of a controversial film, Waiting for "Superman", which attacks teachers and unions. In a parallel move, Rupert Murdoch is going ahead with plans to sponsor an academy in east London over the objections of the local council. The billionaire "humanitarianism" of Winfrey, Gates and Murdoch is deeply compromised not only by its failure to acknowledge the causal relationship between extreme wealth and great poverty but by participating in an ideological assault on the welfare state. It posits itself as the only way to change the world – from above and with a wealthy few firmly in control. A Hollywood celebrity more worthy of our respect is Matt Damon who, as American schoolteachers demonstrated this month in a Save Our Schools rally, confronted media suggestions that job security made teachers lazy. In a video clip that has gone viral, Damon lambasts "MBA-style thinking" as "the problem with [education] policy right now". This solidarity with the aspirations of the many and not the self-interested paternalism of the few is the humanitarianism that our times call for.

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I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right

 Charles Moore in The Telegraph on 23/7/2011

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. The most visible form of worker oppression was picketing. The most important thing about Arthur Scargill’s disastrous miners’ strike was that he always refused to hold a ballot on it.

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes. David Cameron, escaping skilfully from the tight corner into which he had got himself, admitted as much. Mr Murdoch himself, like a tired old Godfather, told the House of Commons media committee on Tuesday that he was so often courted by prime ministers that he wished they would leave him alone.

The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy. One of Mr Murdoch’s biggest arguments for getting what he wanted in the expansion of his multi-media empire was the backing of “our readers”. But the News of the World and the Sun went out of the way in recent years to give their readers far too little information to form political judgments. His papers were tools for his power, not for that of his readers. When they learnt at last the methods by which the News of the World operated, they withdrew their support.

It has surprised me to read fellow defenders of the free press saying how sad they are that the News of the World closed. In its stupidity, narrowness and cruelty, and in its methods, the paper was a disgrace to the free press. No one should ever have banned it, of course, but nor should anyone mourn its passing. It is rather as if supporters of parliamentary democracy were to lament the collapse of the BNP. It was a great day for newspapers when, 25 years ago, Mr Murdoch beat the print unions at Wapping, but much of what he chose to print on those presses has been a great disappointment to those of us who believe in free markets because they emancipate people. The Right has done itself harm by covering up for so much brutality.

The credit crunch has exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked. The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people. A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise. How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan? But when loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different.

And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.
This column’s mantra about the credit crunch is that Everything Is Different Now. One thing that is different is that people in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order. They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, “What's in it for me?”, and they do not hear a good answer.
Last week, I happened to be in America, mainly in the company of intelligent conservatives. Their critique of President Obama’s astonishing spending and record-breaking deficits seemed right. But I was struck by how the optimistic message of the Reagan era has now become a shrill one. On Fox News (another Murdoch property, and one which, while I was there, did not breathe a word of his difficulties), Republicans lined up for hours to threaten to wreck the President’s attempt to raise the debt ceiling. They seemed to take for granted the underlying robustness of their country’s economic and political arrangements. This is a mistake. The greatest capitalist country in history is now dependent on other people’s capital to survive. In such circumstances, Western democracy starts to feel like a threatened luxury. We can wave banners about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but they tend to say, in smaller print, “Made in China”.

As for the plight of the eurozone, this could have been designed by a Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works. A single currency is created. A single bank controls it. No democratic institution with any authority watches over it, and when the zone’s borrowings run into trouble, elected governments must submit to almost any indignity rather than let bankers get hurt. What about the workers? They must lose their jobs in Porto and Piraeus and Punchestown and Poggibonsi so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.

When we look at the Arab Spring, we tend complacently to tell ourselves that the people on the streets all want the freedom we have got. Well, our situation is certainly better than theirs. But I doubt if Western leadership looks to a protester in Tahrir Square as it did to someone knocking down the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are bust – both actually and morally.

One must always pray that conservatism will be saved, as has so often been the case in the past, by the stupidity of the Left. The Left’s blind faith in the state makes its remedies worse than useless. But the first step is to realise how much ground we have lost, and that there may not be much time left to make it up.