Makarand Paranjpe 1
Makarand Paranjape 2
Hindol Sengupta
Showing posts with label renaissance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label renaissance. Show all posts
Friday, 29 December 2017
Tuesday, 12 April 2016
Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance
Paul Mason in The Guardian
Historical societies withered because the rich did not pay their taxes – we must not let the Panama Papers revelations pass without taking action
Governments today, like that of Perugia in the mid-1400s, are stuffed full of people who benefit from a legalised form of corruption. Photograph: Julian Elliott/Getty Images/Robert Harding Worl
The size of the missing tax take is disputed. If, as the Tax Justice Network estimates, the global wealth held offshore is $21tn, it might generate $188bn a year for cash-strapped governments.
Why don’t they act? Because, as with the government of Perugia in the mid 1400s, they are stuffed full of people who benefit.
Why doesn’t the populace revolt? Well, the problem with a globalised economy composed of nation states is that you can revolt all you like, beef up national tax systems, even expose the doings of the rich in newspapers ... but as long as the concept of “offshore” exists, so will the legalised corruption.
To the mature democracies of the world, the Panama Papers – as with the Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks and numerous other data dumps before them – are a warning. If wealth equals power, then the doubling of ratio of wealth to income in the advanced economies since the 70s (see Piketty and Zucman 2014) could tilt power so far in the direction of a new hereditary elite that there is no return.
Last week, Costas Efimeros, the editor of a Greek investigative website, warned that the Panama revelations might be the “last chance” for leak-journalism. If a revelation does not provoke outrage, and the wrongdoers go unpunished, he wrote, “then the continuous revelation of scandals has the exact opposite result: defeatism, the feeling of weakness, the fatalistic acceptance of the rule of the powerful”.
If he is right, there are implications for all of us locked into this scrum around documents, reputations, professional codes and disputed facts.
First, this has to result in action. I am less concerned with taking down an already hapless British prime minister than with empowering him, or his successor, with the will to act unilaterally.
Britain could and should take direct rule of its tax-opaque dependencies. It should abolish non-domicile status. And it should create a taskforce within HMRC specifically designed to prosecute evaders and collect money from the aggressive avoiders.
Second, it has to result in words. I would settle for a prime-ministerial statement to be read out at Oxbridge colleges, public schools and in every bank, law firm and adviser registered with the FSA. It should say: “It’s over. There are no more respectable forms of tax avoidance and from now on offshore wealth will be treated the same way we treat terrorist finance.”
Third, it should be unilateral. The great lesson of the Italian city states in the high Renaissance was that if you will it, it can happen. You can will an economy where science, innovation, art and banking coincide: talented people get rich, inherited wealth soon evaporates; rulers listen to demands for social justice – and if they don’t, they burn.
Acting unilaterally goes against the DNA of the globalised elite. Their “nation” is the global system, and it’s seen as heresy for one country to act without others. “If we do, money will simply move offshore,” is the mantra. “Let it go,” should be the response.
Unilateral action by the UK would be powerful. It would disrupt the system of organised corruption and it would send a signal. We want to enjoy the best of what the next 20 years can offer our population – not the second best after a 1% elite has skimmed off the cream.
We don’t want to be a neo-feudal backwater, where inherited wealth and an unofficial mafia rules. We want to be the Florence, Bruges or Amsterdam of the coming century, not the Perugia.
Historical societies withered because the rich did not pay their taxes – we must not let the Panama Papers revelations pass without taking action
Panama Papers demonstration in Whitehall on Saturday. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Amid the cobbled passageways and tumbling tenements of the Italian city of Perugia, it’s possible to daydream you are in the middle ages. You are surrounded by medieval art and architecture. And then you think: hold on, what happened to the Renaissance?
Sure, there are some imposing private palaces from the period 1300-1500, and sure Raphael left half a fresco in a tiny chapel. But it’s not Florence. The money was clearly here at some point but, some time after 1300, the artistic, cultural and scientific riches moved somewhere else. By 1500, the city was “smaller, poorer and politically narrower” than 200 years before, writes historian Sarah Rubin Blanshei.
Why? Because the rich did not pay their taxes. The Perugian elite became a closed stratum of mafiosi, earning their money from mercenary work abroad, jealously guarding their family inheritance, stifling social mobility. Sound familiar?
As David Cameron’s fiasco over the Panama Papers collides with George Osborne’s over the budget, the danger is that we frame these merely as political scandals.
In fact, the Panama Papers point to a deeper sickness. Globalised capitalism has become an organised and legalised form of corruption, in which the work of the manager, the inventor and the entrepreneur come second to that of people whose wealth “works for them” – preferably in a jurisdiction nobody can see.
If you listen to Cameron’s defenders, their logic follows three contours: he did nothing illegal, nothing unparliamentary and nothing wrong.
I do not doubt his decision to invest in an offshore fund was legal.
That he failed to register his shares in Blairmore on becoming an MP, and lobbied for the protection of offshore trusts while being an undeclared beneficiary of one, does merit investigation by Parliament.
But it’s the insistence by the apopleptic right that he should not be criticised over tax avoidance – that “everybody does it” – that we should register as a kind of collective Marie Antoinette moment for the UK’s social elite.
If someone walked into a pub and announced they had found a way to scam the benefit system, they would face opprobrium or a swift, anonymous call to the benefit cheats hotline.
But a large part of the UK financial industry is dedicated to scamming the rules whereby both individuals and companies pay tax on income. London is home to literally hundreds of advisory companies – many of them registered professionals in finance, accountancy and the law – whose purpose is to do only this.
Amid the cobbled passageways and tumbling tenements of the Italian city of Perugia, it’s possible to daydream you are in the middle ages. You are surrounded by medieval art and architecture. And then you think: hold on, what happened to the Renaissance?
Sure, there are some imposing private palaces from the period 1300-1500, and sure Raphael left half a fresco in a tiny chapel. But it’s not Florence. The money was clearly here at some point but, some time after 1300, the artistic, cultural and scientific riches moved somewhere else. By 1500, the city was “smaller, poorer and politically narrower” than 200 years before, writes historian Sarah Rubin Blanshei.
Why? Because the rich did not pay their taxes. The Perugian elite became a closed stratum of mafiosi, earning their money from mercenary work abroad, jealously guarding their family inheritance, stifling social mobility. Sound familiar?
As David Cameron’s fiasco over the Panama Papers collides with George Osborne’s over the budget, the danger is that we frame these merely as political scandals.
In fact, the Panama Papers point to a deeper sickness. Globalised capitalism has become an organised and legalised form of corruption, in which the work of the manager, the inventor and the entrepreneur come second to that of people whose wealth “works for them” – preferably in a jurisdiction nobody can see.
If you listen to Cameron’s defenders, their logic follows three contours: he did nothing illegal, nothing unparliamentary and nothing wrong.
I do not doubt his decision to invest in an offshore fund was legal.
That he failed to register his shares in Blairmore on becoming an MP, and lobbied for the protection of offshore trusts while being an undeclared beneficiary of one, does merit investigation by Parliament.
But it’s the insistence by the apopleptic right that he should not be criticised over tax avoidance – that “everybody does it” – that we should register as a kind of collective Marie Antoinette moment for the UK’s social elite.
If someone walked into a pub and announced they had found a way to scam the benefit system, they would face opprobrium or a swift, anonymous call to the benefit cheats hotline.
But a large part of the UK financial industry is dedicated to scamming the rules whereby both individuals and companies pay tax on income. London is home to literally hundreds of advisory companies – many of them registered professionals in finance, accountancy and the law – whose purpose is to do only this.
Governments today, like that of Perugia in the mid-1400s, are stuffed full of people who benefit from a legalised form of corruption. Photograph: Julian Elliott/Getty Images/Robert Harding Worl
The size of the missing tax take is disputed. If, as the Tax Justice Network estimates, the global wealth held offshore is $21tn, it might generate $188bn a year for cash-strapped governments.
Why don’t they act? Because, as with the government of Perugia in the mid 1400s, they are stuffed full of people who benefit.
Why doesn’t the populace revolt? Well, the problem with a globalised economy composed of nation states is that you can revolt all you like, beef up national tax systems, even expose the doings of the rich in newspapers ... but as long as the concept of “offshore” exists, so will the legalised corruption.
To the mature democracies of the world, the Panama Papers – as with the Lux Leaks, Swiss Leaks and numerous other data dumps before them – are a warning. If wealth equals power, then the doubling of ratio of wealth to income in the advanced economies since the 70s (see Piketty and Zucman 2014) could tilt power so far in the direction of a new hereditary elite that there is no return.
Last week, Costas Efimeros, the editor of a Greek investigative website, warned that the Panama revelations might be the “last chance” for leak-journalism. If a revelation does not provoke outrage, and the wrongdoers go unpunished, he wrote, “then the continuous revelation of scandals has the exact opposite result: defeatism, the feeling of weakness, the fatalistic acceptance of the rule of the powerful”.
If he is right, there are implications for all of us locked into this scrum around documents, reputations, professional codes and disputed facts.
First, this has to result in action. I am less concerned with taking down an already hapless British prime minister than with empowering him, or his successor, with the will to act unilaterally.
Britain could and should take direct rule of its tax-opaque dependencies. It should abolish non-domicile status. And it should create a taskforce within HMRC specifically designed to prosecute evaders and collect money from the aggressive avoiders.
Second, it has to result in words. I would settle for a prime-ministerial statement to be read out at Oxbridge colleges, public schools and in every bank, law firm and adviser registered with the FSA. It should say: “It’s over. There are no more respectable forms of tax avoidance and from now on offshore wealth will be treated the same way we treat terrorist finance.”
Third, it should be unilateral. The great lesson of the Italian city states in the high Renaissance was that if you will it, it can happen. You can will an economy where science, innovation, art and banking coincide: talented people get rich, inherited wealth soon evaporates; rulers listen to demands for social justice – and if they don’t, they burn.
Acting unilaterally goes against the DNA of the globalised elite. Their “nation” is the global system, and it’s seen as heresy for one country to act without others. “If we do, money will simply move offshore,” is the mantra. “Let it go,” should be the response.
Unilateral action by the UK would be powerful. It would disrupt the system of organised corruption and it would send a signal. We want to enjoy the best of what the next 20 years can offer our population – not the second best after a 1% elite has skimmed off the cream.
We don’t want to be a neo-feudal backwater, where inherited wealth and an unofficial mafia rules. We want to be the Florence, Bruges or Amsterdam of the coming century, not the Perugia.
Saturday, 21 March 2015
The West and the Rest
Gautam Adhikari in The Times of India
What is it about the so-called West that so many in the Indian elite seem to hate? Not ordinary people, but the bureaucratic-academic-intellectual elite that dominates public as well as private discourse in the metropolises, particularly in Delhi and, less influentially, Kolkata and Mumbai. Too many members of that privileged class sneer at the West, especially America, and both right-wing ultra-nationalists and left-wing Lohiaite and Gandhian socialists want to build protective walls for the native masses against a tide of Western culture and values that they fear are out to sabotage India.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty that’s dysfunctional in Western societies, by which we mean the urbanised, modernised and, therefore, advanced economies that lie mostly in the Western hemisphere. But isn’t the aim today of every developing nation to achieve precisely that kind of urbanised advancement as best as feasible?
Swathes of India’s intellectual elite would apparently disagree. They conjure up visions of a bucolic, spiritually untainted, pristinely Indian and self-reliant utopia that can come about if only the Western model of growth were jettisoned once for all. There are several problems with this dream, to say nothing of the futility of searching for a tested model of such an ideal society. Walden Pond, Tolstoy Farm and Sabarmati Ashram are not examples anyone can recreate on a national scale.
Like it or not urbanised modernisation, with all its flaws, forms the only surviving blueprint that humankind has to improve the quality and durability of life. And, it so happens, the current phase of urbanised advancement the human race is passing through indeed began a few centuries ago in societies located in the West.
That by no means implies that the road to this unprecedentedly rapid phase of modernisation of the world began magically in the West. The bricks of that road had been laid gradually over centuries by many civilisations, though it was from Europe for a complex range of reasons that the path began to take the shape of a highway.
Hundreds of scholars and intellectuals, mainly Western, have written on how a 15,000-year-old agricultural system suddenly gave way to an industrial society, and thence to our globalised post-industrial world in the space of a few hundred years. Only, it wasn’t all that sudden, though the speed of change was truly phenomenal.
If you don’t trust Western scholars on the subject, there are non-Western options available. You can read Nayan Chanda’s ‘Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization’. He is of pure Indian origin. His 2007 book traces the ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began from the start of early human migration from Africa 50-70,000 years ago and remains ongoing in this intricately globalised phase of our history.
Much of the foundation of Western enlightenment, for instance, was based on ancient Greek philosophy and logic. Along with their own speculative philosophy, the Greeks were open-minded enough to borrow ideas that had germinated in China and India. The Romans borrowed wholesale from the Greeks and developed ideas to create social and legal systems that form a basis for many modern institutions.
Then came a lull in the area now known as the West for about a millennium. It is commonly called the Dark Ages in European literature but it was not dark at all for a rising Islamic-Arab civilisation, which thrived for much of that period to keep Greek thought alive while also developing Chinese inventions and Indian mathematics to spread ideas across a wide empire. The Arabs thus formed a crucial link in global civilisation.
Then, to compress a complex story, came the European Renaissance. As the name implies, it was a ‘rebirth’ of ideas and a socio-cultural reawakening that led in due course to the industrial revolution and to this extraordinary stage in civilisation that we inhabit. In sum, we live a life born of interconnectedness and interdependence.
To put it another way, what we call the West today is little more than a stage in the march of human history. In the intertwined world that has come about as a result of millennia of exchange between cultures, the West is a convenient geopolitical term that combines both a violently harsh as well as enlightened tale of interdependence.
So, get over it. Why try to reinvent the wheel?
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
25 Best British Jokes
1. “I’ve been single for so long now, when somebody says to me, 'Who are you with?’, I automatically say: 'Vodafone.’”
Miranda Hart
2. “I went to a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”
Peter Kay
3. “A friend of mine always wanted to be run over by a steam train. When it happened, he was chuffed to bits.”
Tim Vine
4. “I thought when I was 41, I would be married with kids. Well, to be honest I thought I would be married with weekend access.”
Sean Hughes
5. “I heard a rumour that Cadbury is bringing out an oriental chocolate bar. Could be a Chinese Wispa.”
Rob Auton
6. “I lost my virginity very late. When it finally happened, I wasn’t so much deflowered as deadheaded.”
Holly Walsh
7. “I’m sure wherever my dad is he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”
Jack Whitehall
8. “Hedgehogs. Why can’t they just share the hedge?”
Dan Antopolski
9. “Try shoving an ice-cube down your wife’s front at night. 'There’s the chest freezer you wanted.’”
Ken Dodd
10. “You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.”
Stewart Francis
11. “Most of us have a skeleton in the cupboard. David Beckham takes his out in public.”
Andrew Laurence
12. “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”
Tim Vine
13. “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
Nick Helm
14. “I waited an hour for my starter so I complained: 'It’s not rocket salad.’”
Lou Sander
15. “I told the ambulance men the wrong blood type for my ex, so he knows what rejection feels like.”
Pippa Evans
16. “I’m in a same-sex marriage… the sex is always the same.”
Alfie Moore
17. “A sewage farm. In what way is it a farm? Is there a farm shop?”
Jack Dee
18. “There are only two conditions where you’re allowed to wake up a woman on a lie-in. It’s snowing or the death of a celebrity.”
Michael McIntyre
19. “For boys, puberty is like turning into the Incredible Hulk - but very, very slowly.”
John Bishop
20. A big girl once came up to me after a show and said 'I think you’re fatist.’ I said 'No. I think you’re fattest.’
Jimmy Carr
21. “In the Bible, God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s a pretty good summer for us in Wales. That’s a hosepipe ban waiting to happen. I was eight before I realised you could take a kagoule off.”
Rhod Gilbert
22. “No wonder Bob Geldof is such an expert on famine. He’s been dining off 'I Don’t Like Mondays’ for 30 years.”
Russell Brand
23. 'Toughest job I ever had: selling doors, door to door.’
Bill Bailey
24. “Dogs don’t love you. They’re just glad they don’t live in China.”
Romesh Ranganathan
25. “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”
Matt Kirshen
Sunday, 1 April 2012
The rebirth of Japan
What's the story of the next decade?
The country's urge to reset its business culture is a lesson to Britain in finding the way back to prosperity
In some fields Japan is years ahead of the rest of the world. Photograph: Gina Calvi/Alamy
It is a small thing, but it says a lot about the country. At Tokyo's Narita airport, when you take off your shoes at the security screening check, the guard hands you a pair of leather slippers. The message is obvious: this airport cares for your wellbeing and recognises your need.
In Japan, taxi doors swing open automatically; toilet seats are electronically warmed and cleaned; and the extraordinary variety of food is presented exquisitely. There is a passion for satiating every imaginable human want and a joy in embracing the science, technology and innovation that might help deliver just that.
For 40 years, between 1950 and 1990, this passion was a key ingredient driving one of the most remarkable periods of growth in economic history. But for the past 20 years, Japan has been stricken by stagnation. In the late 1980s-90s, it suffered a financial crisis nearly as severe as our own. The economic model – the Ministry of International Trade and Industry guiding Japanese companies; the keiretsu networks of loosely conglomerated firms and associated banks; the great global brands – suffered an implosion.
Yet this remains a $5trn economy, the third largest on the planet. The Japanese themselves are desperate to recover the elixir of growth, and understand that economic conservatism – in Japan just as in Britain – leads to disappointment and heartbreak.
In 2009, the Democratic party of Japan was elected by a landslide, pledging a root and branch reform of every bureaucratic, corporatist and anti-democratic element in Japan's broken system. It also pledged to recast economic policy to serve the people. Despite some epic mistakes, notably its handling of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it still holds an opinion poll lead over its rival, the Liberal Democratic party (LDP).
However, forces within the government are very much open to pondering where it should go next. Ten days ago, I was invited by the DPJ government to go to Tokyo to contribute to this ongoing conversation.
Cabinet members wanted to discuss what a 21st-century social contract might look like, respecting both necessary labour market flexibility and security. They wanted to understand the contribution that open innovation ecosystems and an entrepreneurial state can play in driving forward innovation and investment. Above all, they asked: how could Japan reinvent its stakeholder capitalism of the second half of the 20th century so that it was more democratic? And they thought there might be something in my ideas rehearsed in the books The State We're In and Them and Us. In short, how could Japan do good capitalism?
It is the question – not only in Japan but, I would argue, in Britain. In Japan the devastating earthquake in Tohoku 12 months ago has made it even more acute. Three hundred and forty thousand people are still without homes. At least 19,000 died. And the nuclear power station at Fukushima very nearly suffered a meltdown.
At the time of the crisis, Japan hoped that, with the DPJ in power, there would be a decisive change from the way such matters had been handled in the past – obfuscation, delay, inactivity and anxiety to protect corporate interests. Yet the new government bounced off the secrecy of Tokyo Electric Power Company, the bureaucratic ministries, a muzzled media and the enveloping tentacles of the employers' organisation, the Keidanren, as if nothing had changed. Prime Minster Kan became party to delivering inadequate and late information via the impenetrable state and corporate networks; many Japanese became devotees of BBC World News as the only purveyor of truth. Kan was forced to resign last summer.
But the Japanese electorate is not ready to return to the status quo. They know they need nuclear power which just 12 months ago provided more than a third of their electricity needs; but as power stations are being closed down for safety inspections local communities are vetoing their reopening. In May, the last nuclear power station operating will also be mothballed.
The terms for their restarting are tough. Local communities, fired up by a new citizen activism, want effective oversight, transparency of information and commitments to meet international safety standards. It is Japanese good capitalism, driven by citizen demands from below.
Faced with this new phenomenon, the LDP is at a loss, while the DPJ itself seems to be re-gathering its conviction that its reform agenda is the only way forward. At an open meeting in the Japanese parliament, I was struck by the interest DPJ MPs showed in discussing innovative ways of kickstarting credit flows – as anathema to the Bank of Japan and Ministry of Finance as they are to the Bank of England and Treasury.
The Bank of Japan has just expanded a version of the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme; but abstains from the activism it used to show in the great days of Japan's growth. The conclusions are obvious. Japan's financial system is broken; an activist state has to restart bank lending by assuming some of the risk – just as it must in Britain.
If Japan could reset its macroeconomic policy, there is an enormous pool of dynamic hi-tech medium-sized firms that could immediately grow very fast. Consultant Gerhard Fasol argues that in areas like LED lighting or mobile phone payment systems, Japan is 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. The Fujitsus and Toshibas of tomorrow are in the wings. What Japan needs is for the increasingly sclerotic giants to be challenged by these many insurgents, who need new institutions to support their ambitions to go global. A new entrepreneurial, accountable state could drive a second phase of powerful Japanese growth.
These debates are foreign to our primitive business culture, which undervalues service and innovation and scarcely thinks about a more productive capitalism. There is a long list of British companies that have tried to break into Japan's market and failed. Observers say the common theme is wholesale insensitivity to the need for service and innovation, the precondition for any success in Japan.
Britain and Japan are two island economies, both mired in private debt with stricken financial systems. Although Japan has a long way to go, it is becoming obvious, confirmed by last week's British budget, which of the two countries is most likely to create the 21st-century framework for growth and prosperity. The Asian story of the next decade will be Japan's renaissance and China's relapse.
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