Finance's hold on our everyday life must be broken

The rampant capitalism that has brought the market into every corner of society needs to be reined in

• 
• • Costas Lapavitsas
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 1 January 2014 16.30 GMT

‘Financial calculation evaluates everything in pennies and pounds, transforming the most basic goods – above all, housing – into "investments".’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The mature economies of the modern world, particularly the United States and Britain, are often described as "financialised". The term reflects the ascendancy of the financial sector. Even more important, it conveys the penetration of the financial system into every nook and cranny of society, including housing, education, health and other areas of life that were previously relatively immune.

Evidence that financialisation represents a deep transformation of mature economies is offered by the global crisis of 2007-09. The crisis originated in the elephantine US financial system, and was associated with speculation in housing. For a brief period it led to serious questioning of mainstream economic theory and policy: how to confront the turmoil, and what to do about the diseased financial system; are new economic theories needed? However, after six years it is clear that very little has changed. Financialisation is here to stay.

Consider, for instance, the policies to confront the crisis. First, public funds were injected into banks to boost capital. Second, public liquidity was made available to banks to sustain their operations. Third, public interest rates were driven to zero to enable banks to make secure profits by lending to their own customers at higher rates.

This extraordinary public largesse towards private banks was matched by austerity and wage reductions for workers and households. As for restructuring finance, nothing fundamental has taken place. The behemoths that continue to dominate the global financial system operate in the knowledge that they enjoy an unspoken public guarantee. The unpalatable reality is that financialisation will persist, despite its costs for society.

Financialisation represents a historic and deep-seated transformation of mature capitalism. Big businesses have become "financialised" as they have ample profits to finance investment, rely less on banks for loans and play financial games with available funds. Big banks, in turn, have become more distant from big businesses, turning to profits from trading in open financial markets and from lending to households. Households have become "financialised" too, as public provision in housing, education, health, pensions and other vital areas has been partly replaced by private provision, access to which is mediated by the financial system. Not surprisingly, households have accumulated a tremendous volume of financial assets and liabilities over the past four decades.

The penetration of finance into the everyday life of households has not only created a range of dependencies on financial services, but also changed the outlook, mentality and even morality of daily life. Financial calculation evaluates everything in pennies and pounds, transforming the most basic goods – above all, housing – into "investments". Its logic has affected even the young, who have traditionally been idealistic and scornful of pecuniary calculation. Fertile ground has been created for neoliberal ideology to preach the putative merits of the market.

Financialisation has also created new forms of profit associated with financial markets and transactions. Financial profit can be made out of any income, or any sum of money that comes into contact with the financial sphere. Households, for example, generate profits for finance as debtors (mostly by paying interest on mortgages) but also as creditors (mostly by paying fees and charges on pension funds and insurance). Finance is not particular about how and where it makes its profits, and certainly does not limit itself to the sphere of production. It ranges far and wide, transforming every aspect of social life into a profit-making opportunity.

The traditional image of the person earning financial profits is the "rentier", the individual who invests funds in secure financial assets. In the contemporary financialised universe, however, those who earn vast returns are very different. They are often located within a financial institution, presumably work to provide financial services, and receive vast sums in the form of wages, or more often bonuses. Modern financial elites are prominent at the top of the income distribution, set trends in conspicuous consumption, shape the expensive end of the housing market, and transform the core of urban centres according to their own tastes.

Financialised capitalism is, thus, a deeply unequal system, prone to bubbles and crises – none greater than that of 2007-09. What can be done about it? The most important point in this respect is that financialisation does not represent an advance for humanity, and very little of it ought to be preserved. Financial markets are, for instance, able to mobilise advanced technology employing some of the best-trained physicists in the world to rebalance prices across the globe in milliseconds. This "progress" allows financiers to earn vast profits; but where is the commensurate benefit to society from committing such expensive resources to these tasks?

Financialisation ought to be reversed. Yet such an entrenched system will never be reversed by regulation alone. Its reversal also requires the creation of public banking that would operate with a new spirit of public service. It also needs effective controls to be applied to private banking as well as to international flows of capital. Not least, it requires new methods of meeting the financial requirements of households, as well as of small and medium enterprises. There is an urgent need for communal and associational ways to provide housing, education, health and other basic goods and services for working people, breaking the hold of finance on everyday life.

Ultimately, financialisation will not be reversed without an ambitious programme to re-establish the superiority of the social over the private, and the collective over the individual in contemporary society. Reversing financialisation is about reining in the rampant capitalism of our day.

Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves

Museums of art should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and display them accordingly. Step through the lobby into the gallery of love

• 
• • Alain de Botton
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 10 October 2013 13.35 BST

Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet might help you make a long-term relationship more exciting.

What would you do to help someone who felt deeply anxious about the future? Or who was dragged down by a sense of sadness and loneliness? How could you make a long-term relationship more exciting or alleviate your impression of being a loser?

My answer in all of these cases is to recommend that you look closely and repeatedly at certain works of art. To be more specific, I'd advise taking in Sugimoto's North Atlantic Ocean for the first problem, Richard Serra's Fernanda Pessoa for the second, Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet for the third and a 15th-century statue of the Buddhist saintly figure, Guanyin, for the fourth.

The idea that one might use art for a purpose, for "instrumental" reasons, tends to set off alarm bells. Art is not an instrument, comes the almost automatic reply. It shouldn't be thought of as some kind of tool. It's not a pill. It shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to cheer you up or to make you a more empathetic person. Art galleries aren't chemists.

I couldn't disagree more. If culture is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might call our souls. Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves.

Religions have always been clear on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the west, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice. A lot of Buddhist sculpture had an equally clear mission: to encourage us to achieve an inner calm by contemplating the serene expression on the Buddha's face, especially his smile. We should take some inspiration from these examples and demand more from the art of our times.

There is nothing wrong with thinking of artworks as tools and asking them to do things for us. They can help our psyches in a variety of ways: rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses and reawaken appreciation. But in order to do these things, they need to be better signposted as having the power to do so. Modern galleries should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and honour it in the way they display them. At present, art museums are typically set out under headings such as The Nineteenth Century or The Northern Italian School, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. But this may not do very much for us in our deep selves. A more fertile indexing system would group together artworks from across genres and eras according to our inner needs.

In my ideal museum, you would enter into the lobby and find a map showing galleries devoted to a range of topics with which we often need help: work, love, family, mortality, community, status, anxiety. In the gallery of love, for example, you might be shown Pisano's Daphnis and Chloe, a deeply evocative reminder of the sense of gratitude and wonder with which most of us start relationships, but all too soon abandon (art is a superlative memory-bank for precious emotions that otherwise disappear). The gallery might then move us on to a Richard Long sculpture, where highly irregular and jagged stones were brought into harmony within a perfect circle, a metaphor for the way our own differences would ideally be accommodated in relationships.

Through such themed galleries, art would start to serve psychology in the same way it has served theology for centuries. A walk through a museum of art would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the emotions which are easiest for us to forget but life-enhancing to remember. Arranged in this way, museums of art would then be able to claim that they really had fulfilled that excellent but as yet elusive ambition of becoming substitutes for our cathedrals and churches in a rapidly secularising society.

Fleeing the light - Political Parties and The Right to Information Act

ARUNA ROY

NIKHIL DEY in THE HINDU

  

 

Political parties have acted as judge, jury, supplicant and advocate in their move to amend the RTI Act and exempt themselves from its purview. Their rhetoric on transparency is more hollow than ever

A friend called the other day, and said: “I want to congratulate all of you in the RTI community, because you have managed to do what no one, and nothing else has managed to for a long time: bring about unity and unanimity in the political class.” His comment, laced with irony and sarcasm was not far from the truth.

The Central Information Commission (CIC) decision to classify political parties as public authorities and bring them under the RTI Act has kicked up a storm in our democratic polity.

The reaction of the parties to the Central Information Commission order that political parties will be considered public authorities under the RTI has been poor in content and abysmal in form. It is a pity that the opportunity provided for the politician to transform into a statesman is lost in the muddle of apprehension and self-interest. For a country that is unanimous in its opinion that electoral politics and democratic governance are being perverted by the undue influence of money, and vested interests, both the content and the form of reaction are important.

Let us understand the content first. Through the one line amendment, political parties in parliament are seeking to carve out an exclusive space for themselves beyond the reach and purview of the RTI Act. While all other associations or bodies constituted by law, can come under the purview of the RTI Act, an insertion “explains” that by law, this will exclude any association of persons registered under the Representation of Peoples Act.

Here are a set of implications that arise from this quick and potentially decisive amendment: The representatives of the people, have made it clear that they do not want to be answerable to the people. By removing themselves completely from the purview of the transparency law, they are preventing any obligation they might have to directly answer any query from the citizen on any issue.

This amendment dramatically exposes the extent of doublespeak. Many politicians have shared their concern with the growing influence of money, and even political parties have expressed distress that the use of unaccounted money is completely perverting the democratic political system. While parties across the spectrum have publicly reiterated their commitment to full financial transparency, the content of this “consensual” amendment has revealed the truth. By proposing a blanket exemption for themselves from the RTI Act, it is clear that they are not willing to answer questions of the citizen on anything- even financial matters.

Credibility gap

The yawning gap between ‘statements submitted’ and real expenditure during elections is no secret. Recent statements by politicians have exposed dramatically what real election spending to "secure" a seat means. This does not end with party issues but also determines key appointments in government. Is it surprising that the citizen wants to know where the money comes from and where it goes?

This amendment would negate one of the biggest opportunities we have had to identify, and fight the misuse of money in politics. Let us not have any illusions. Fighting corruption, and corporate/commercial influence in politics is only possible with the help of the ordinary citizen. The RTI has evolved into a decentralised process that allows an ordinary person to interface at her own expense and with her constitutional legitimacy as a sovereign citizen. The multiple uses of the Act to improve government functioning are so many that they defy enumeration. Accepting applicability of the RTI is therefore seen as the one stated intent of any structure to lay itself open to scrutiny and accountability. It is the many questions that citizens will pose, in a million places across the country, that will shine the torch, search, probe, expose, audit, and actually help regulatory institutions like the income tax department, and the election commission to eventually bring about real change and political reform.

Legitimate objections

This is not to say that we do not understand the complexities of political activity, and the need to keep some internal discussions out of the public domain. We do not feel that every question that is asked by every citizen needs to be answered under this, or any other law. The technical reading of the Act by the CIC brought political parties under the purview of the RTI Act as public authorities. The technical implication of being classified a ‘public authority’ has led to many legitimate objections from party leaders. Even with the current CIC decision, the concerns could have been “technically” addressed without amending the act – even through some amendments to the rules, perhaps. After all, even the defence establishment keeps strategy and internal matters out of the public domain while subjecting itself to, and benefiting from the purview of the RTI Act.

The nature of the political response has been even more disappointing and unacceptable. When a privileged class closes ranks to impose its decision, it is “technicalities” with the inevitable fallout that will determine the outcomes. Politicians know that substantive constitutional principles override technicalities of law. That is why perhaps in this case alone they were not willing to take the risk of taking the CIC decision to court.

And now the likelihood is that they will pass this amendment in their own court without even allowing the matter to go to the Standing Committee of Parliament. Can any institution be judge, jury, supplicant, and advocate, in a matter in relation to itself? Is this interpretation of privilege constitutional? Is it ethical or logical?

Eventually, none of us want to weaken the political system, or burden it with questions that will not allow it to function. But a blanket exemption can surely not be the means to make a political system strong, transparent, and accountable. This has led to the belief that freedom in internal matters and strategy like candidate selection is only a red herring to take the attention away from the real worry of financial disclosures.

If there had to be an amendment, it was incumbent upon parliamentarians to show that the political class was going to overcome technicalities to improve the scope of the law, not curtail it. People focus on substantive issues- not the technicalities. They want parties to live up to their rhetoric of transparency, and their stated desire to fight corruption in politics. This was in fact a historic opportunity lost to the exigencies of obvious and immediate self- preservation. It could have been used to enforce greater transparency not only amongst the political class, but also to expand direct coverage of the RTI to all institutions and organisations who spend public funds. In finding the substantively correct way of broadening coverage of the RTI, the political class, would not only have created a standard for themselves, but for the whole fabric of Indian society.

That would have been a huge quantum leap towards a healthy and ethical society.

How do we talk about cancer?

Knowing whether to say 'how are you?' or mention 'bravery' is one problem, another is our society in which death is a taboo

• 
• • Mike Marqusee
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 31 July 2013 12.45 BST

'If you ask someone with cancer how she or he is, do be prepared to listen to the answer.' Photograph: Ali Jarekji/Reuters

Among cancer sufferers there's often a shared moan about how some friends or acquaintances "just don't get it", how some turn away and retreat, and some meddle and proselytise.

Cancer sufferers all have their own pet grievances and I wouldn't claim to speak for others. In fact, recognising the infinite variety of individual responses to cancer is a necessary part of having, handling and treating cancer. To revise Tolstoy, all healthy people are alike, all unhealthy people are unhealthy after their own fashion. We are all variants from a norm; that's why we're being treated.

So there are no uniform rules of the game when it comes to talking to friends or acquaintances who have cancer about their condition.

Take "you're looking well" or variants thereof. Sometimes people do get a boost from such remarks, or are at least relieved to know that they don't look as bad as they feel. But for me there's always a disconnection: if I really do look well (and I suspect that's mainly because I don't look as bad as people expect or fear), then my appearance belies reality. I'm not well. I'm ill. And there are times when "you look well" feels like a denial, and places you in the awkward position of having to deny the denial (and say you may look well but feel like shit) or to go along, keep up the pretence, and thereby suppress an underlying, insistent truth.

Some people feel buoyed when people compliment their "bravery". Others, including me, find the bravery rhetoric around cancer deeply misconceived. It shifts responsibility on to the patient; if you succumb to your cancer, or even if you just complain about it, are you wanting in "bravery"? When someone tells me I've been "brave" I don't know what to make of it. There's no choice in the matter. This is a front line it's impossible to flee from.

Then there's "how are you?", a casual enquiry, in practice little more than a salutation, that acquires all kinds of challenges for the person with cancer. How do you answer? What does the person asking really want to know? How earnest is the question? Responses vary according to mood and context. Sometimes, I simply say "OK" – either because at that moment I can't muster the energy required to give a meaningful answer or because I'm unsure whether the inquirer really wants to hear that answer. Sometimes, when I do attempt to give a candid reply, I sense the inquirer shrinking way, uncertain how to respond, how to handle this discourse of pain and mortality.

While I don't think there can be a protocol to govern this kind of dialogue, I would say that if you ask someone with cancer how she or he is, do be prepared to listen to the answer. And remember that listening to it is nowhere near as uncomfortable as living with it.

Before I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and began my own journey through the labyrinth of cancer, I was as insensitive as anyone to these issues. So I know this question – how we talk about cancer – is not about individual foibles. It's not about making people feel guilty. The situation, for both parties, is impossible: a convergence of reticence and disquiet, closeness and distance, helplessness and the desire to help. The conventions of everyday language are stretched to breaking point.

But while some of our difficulties in engaging in this kind of dialogue may be rooted in the human condition, I've also been asking myself how much of it is peculiar to our own society. Surrounded by commercial displays of young, trim, blemish-free bodies, it's easy to feel marginalised. Our culture enjoins celebration and affirmation; huge efforts go into the manufacturing of "feel-good" moments, one succeeded rapidly by another. The affirmative act becomes a social duty, a gesture that we, the ill, are expected to make, and for which we are congratulated.

Sure, even for the severely ill, there's plenty to affirm in life – wondrous works of art, sublime acts of rebellion, love and friendship – but life is also arbitrarily cruel, and it's an additional cruelty to ask people to deny that reality.

A society that vaunts individual success, where nothing is disdained so much as a "loser", does not quite know what to do with the ill or disabled. Unless our suffering can be sentimentally packaged, or recast as part of the neoliberal cult of "can do, will do", it remains unrepresented. The consumerist regime generates a perpetual present, in which life is a succession of satisfied desires, without links to past or future. Terminal illness cannot be accommodated within that framework.

We lack the ritual and social contextualisation of death found in pre-modern societies, and while there's no going back to that, an honest, self-aware, humane society must find ways and means of integrating death and suffering into its everyday norms.

In the digital economy, we'll soon all be working for free – and I refuse

The digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated 
X Factor: someone will make it, but most won't – and the real loser is society

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013 20.00 BST

Mary Portas, whose company offered a week-long internship at a Westminster school auction. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features

Never mind checking your privilege. Flaunting those enviable privileges is where it's at. Go to any of our big cities and cash will be flowing through ponced-up restaurants nestled between Poundland and the nail bars. They even wave it in our faces.

Already at a private school that charges £7,000 a term? Then you must need a hand up the ladder. So let Mater and Pater bid as internships for Mary Portas or Fabergé are auctioned off. Not so much getting a foot in the door as crowbarring it in with money. Theirs is a world in which austerity remains an abstract idea.

Meanwhile, we have more than a million Neets in the country – young people not in work, education or training. They could do with a helping hand but they have somehow missed the boat. It hardly matters to them that the boat was the Titanic. Their older brothers and sisters have gone to college but are still in a world of part-time pub jobs. They don't have proper salaries and therefore no chance of mortgages. And, of course, in other European countries the situation is even worse.

At this point it is customary to blame the banksters. Or at least the politicians. But there is another group partly responsible for the parlous state in which we find ourselves: the digi-heads of Silicon Valley who told us everything could be kinda free. And easy. In some virtual paradise.

But it's not lovely being asked to work for free, whether you are 18 or 48. On the popular free app known as Facebook, the great music writer Barney Hoskyns put up a manifestothat struck home: he asked "freelance content providers" – be they actors, writers, musicians or photographers – to withdraw from unpaid labour. (I did that a while back – except, of course, for causes I believe in.)

But this is about more than that. It's about technology taking jobs, about what it can and can't provide. Hoskyns quotes Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, in which he argues: "Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers." Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.

Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for "experience".

In an interview with Scott Timberg for Salon, Lanier gives a potent example: Kodak used to have "140,000 really good middle-class employees. Instagram has 13 employees, period." He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. "There is not a middle-class hump. It's an all-or-nothing society."

We can shrug and say it's just another industrial revolution, a move from formal to informal work, the whole "portfolio" number. But where is the social contract, then, if it "doesn't tide you over when you're sick and it doesn't let you raise kids and it doesn't let you grow old"?

The implosion of the middle class produces instability. We cannot all be freelancers for ever. Freelance work, like interning, is fine if you have the funds to manage without a regular income. That is, if you are already wealthy. But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won't. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can't outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.

He sees musicians and artists and journalists as canaries in the mineshaft of this new economy. Who will pay them? "Is this the precedent we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because, eventually, technology will get to everybody."

Education and healthcare farmed out to the bright-eyed tech nerds? It's already happening. We are already missing the human touch in our hospitals and schools. Gove'snew iPad-levels still cut out the creative subjects from the core – and just when we need the innovations they bring the most. Growth – the holy grail, with nearly half of all European youth unemployed – is impeded when technology eats into job security and therefore has repercussions for pensions and benefits. Those without salaried work cannot hope to support an older generation.

The creative industries, first music and now journalism, saw these changes coming too late. My children have been brought up in a world where they have to compete with those who will work for free. It is only a matter of time until we will all be asked to do the same. And I refuse.

For what is being eroded is not only actual wages but also the very idea that work must be paid for. Huge profits are being made from these so-called opportunities for our youth. But they are, in fact, the exploitation of insecurity. This is not about being anti-technology. It is about being pro-human. Technology is here and it's often great. But we must find a sustainable way of using it so that the stuff we do or make is paid for in living and not virtual wages.

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

by Girish Menon

Sage Valmiki's life has been emulated by many robber barons of the world and it provides a prototype for Sreesanth to emulate in order to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Indian public.

Valmiki, the writer of the Indian epic on ideal behaviour The Ramayana, was a low caste robber who preyed on victims in order to feed his family. In latter life, probably after accumulating wealth, he turned into a philosopher and his diktats on ideal behaviour for an individual are still recognised as the right way for a Hindu.

Valmiki's transformation is a theme, recognised by David Mandelbaum in his treatise 'Society in India', that shows dynamism and upward mobility in what was once considered a stratified and calcified Indian caste system. Mandelbaum's thesis has been that contrary to prevalent mythology the Indian caste system provides an opportunity for mobility in two major steps. Firstly, the individual has to attain secular wealth and this should be followed by copying the social mores of the prevalent elites.

Mandelbaum talks about the Kayastha caste, scribes by trade, who were very low in the Hindu hierarchy before the period of Muslim rulers in Indian history. The Kayastha's writing and translation skills came into demand during the Muslim rule, and this helped them acquire secular wealth and power in the courts. Thus over time and after learning the mores of their social superiors they ascended to a status that is high even today in modern India.

The Ambani family's history has parallels to Valmiki too. Dhirubhai Ambani fell foul of the law on many occasions during his wealth accumulation period. Today, the Ambani empire resembles the Mughal empire in its heydays. And all the celebrities and wannabes look to them for patronage. One of the Ambani scions even owns a cricket team, the Mumbai Indians, which has some of the greatest cricketers on its payroll.

Mohd. Azharuddin, former Indian cricket team captain, is another Indian Valmiki. Today, he is a Member of Parliament from the ruling Congress party. There may also be many other Valmikis who have not been publicly found out, but who having amassed secular wealth find it imperative to advise others on the ideal behaviour in life.

So all is not lost for Sreesanth. He could take a leaf from Suresh Kalmadi's book and stay away from the public eye for some time in a protected environment like Tihar jail. When released he could don some saffron robes, get a BJP endorsement and end up as a Member of Parliament. Given that the lotus is its election symbol, image consultants and spin doctors will find it easy to draw a parallel between the flower's development and the transformation of Sreesanth.

This writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.

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MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING - Why the IPL’s critics are mean and wrong

Mukul Kesavan

The uproar about the IPL following the ‘revelations’ about S. Sreesanth and his erring teammates threatens to become farcical. Sting-meister Aniruddha Bahal of Cobrapost suggested on a television show that franchises ought to be punished for the misdemeanours of contracted players. Bahal reached for and found a precedent for his prescription from a different game in a foreign country: the relegation of the Italian football club, Juventus, to a lower league because some of its players had transgressed. Are we seriously citing Silvio Berlusconi’s country as a model of corporate governance? Please. We can do without Serie A as a moral exemplar. Punishing companies for the criminality of their employees… what will these hacks dream up next? The other storm in this teacup is the suggestion that an isolated instance of spot-fixing is symptomatic of a more general shadiness in the IPL. Instead of celebrating the league as the beating heart of cricketing livelihood and hailing the BCCI as the gruff but golden-hearted uncle who bankrolls the global game, you have jealous (foreign) cricket boards and their Test-loving lackeys in the (white-and-Western) press, trying to characterize Sreesanth’s misdemeanour as ‘systemic’. In this bilious narrative, the IPL is a sinful Oriental honeypot where corruption is inevitable. This isn’t reportage, this is racism. These Anglo dead-enders and their self-hating henchmen in the Indian media have a favourite word: ‘opaque’. So the IPL is evil because its ownership structure is opaque. Throw in dark mutterings about ‘benami’ or anonymous shares in the principal franchises and you can dress up unsourced speculation as investigative journalism. Is there any sporting league in the world where it’s clearer who the owners are? Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Nita Ambani, and so on, are on television rooting for the players they own every night of the week. Instead of the corporate anonymity typical of business, with the IPL you can literally put a face to the franchise. Unable to fault the cricket, the IPL’s critics have targeted the cheerleaders on the field and, especially, in the studio. The easy badinage that makes Extraaa Innings so deliciously different from the po-faced pre-shows that just talk cricket is condemned as male lasciviousness by killjoy critics. The best answer to this pious accusation is to ask, in what world would professionals like Navjyot Singh Sidhu and Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle and Kapil Dev, role models all, with reputations to lose, use women’s bodies as cues for double entendre and innuendo? The answer is obvious: they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even allow themselves to be complicit in someone else’s demeaning banter: they would just get up and leave. So if they aren’t doing that, it’s not happening. N. Srinivasan, the BCCI president, is a special target for dead-ender venom. Everything he does is designated nefarious. The fact that he is in charge of the BCCI and the owner of an IPL franchise is deemed a wicked conflict of interest. When Srikkanth wore two hats, one as the chief selector of the national team and the other as brand ambassador for the Chennai Super Kings, the franchise owned by Srinivasan, journalists sang the conflict-of-interest ditty like a theme song. Srinivasan’s decision to make Dhoni a vice-president of India Cements Ltd, a company he happens to own, apparently compounds this conflict-of-interest problem. This carping has got to the stage where not even a man’s business is his own business, if you see what I mean. If men are known by the company they keep, Mr Srinivasan is in very good company; Anil Kumble has had exactly the same problem with sanctimonious critics. India’s greatest bowler, its most pugnacious captain, a man who has a traffic landmark in Bangalore named after him, had his integrity called into question merely because he started up a player management company at the same time as he became president of the Karnataka State Cricket Association. He couldn’t understand the objections to this double role and the reason he couldn’t is that ‘conflict of interest’ is an arcane Western notion born of an alien business culture where everything is premised on contract, unlike India where a man’s word is his bond. Cricket is Kumble’s dharma; it’s inevitable that he will seek to involve himself in every aspect of the game. He has to be judged by what he actually does, not by some theoretical constraint upon his judgment, glibly labelled a ‘conflict of interest’. And the same courtesy must be extended to N. Srinivasan, distinguished cricket administrator, successful businessman, paterfamilias and pillar of Chennai society. ‘Conflict of interest’ as an insinuation has been used to tar the reputations of Indian cricket’s greatest commentators. Men like Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar, who have been saying the same things in unchanged sentences with iron consistency for years, are now being criticized for tailoring their views to the BCCI’s prejudices, of being the BCCI’s paid publicists. Why should pundits lucky enough to sign a contract to be the BCCI’s in-house commentators be stigmatized in this way? Why can’t we accept their explanation that the reason they agree with the BCCI on nearly everything is a coincidence rather than a sign of being compromised? Harsha Bhogle couldn’t even tweet the distinction between spot-fixing and match-fixing without following up immediately with another tweet anxiously clarifying that he saw both forms of fixing as equally culpable and bad, in case some swivel-eyed loon online thought he was carrying water for the IPL. This intemperate talk of embedded journalists and gelded commentators destroys the sacred bond between fans and broadcasters so essential to the health of the game. Can’t the critics see that it is their reflexive, corrosive suspicion that is destroying Indian cricket, not the alleged excesses of the proprietors, players and publicists of the IPL? The answer to this rhetorical question is, no, they can’t, because modern hacks hold nothing sacred, not even the cardinal principle in law that a man is innocent till proven guilty. Cowardly articles have made references to Ajay Jadeja without naming him. Jadeja has been a regular on the IPL pre-show and the self-appointed guardians of cricketing morality have insinuated that the BCCI’s willingness to accept, on its authorized telecasts, a former cricketer accused of match fixing in an earlier era is symbolic of the IPL’s fudging of past wrongdoing, its less-than-zero tolerance for corruption. The problem with this argument is that Jadeja wasn’t found guilty of match-fixing by any court in India. Ergo, by the principles of natural justice and our republic’s laws, not having been charged and convicted, he is innocent. As Sunil Gavaskar sagely said on television after the Sreesanth story broke, there should be no rush to judgment. These are wise words: if the past and precedent (and the ability of the Indian police to secure a conviction) are a guide, it isn’t just possible, it is likely that Sunnybhai might find himself some years from now sharing a commentary box with a shiny, new, exonerated Sreesanth. The IPL is a golden Ganga in spate; it gilds everything that it touches.

Another Country

Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them

GEORGE MONBIOT

Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.

So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.

I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.

A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.

By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.

But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.

My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.

The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Luis Suárez's handball: Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Football is only a reflection of that society - and that doesn't say much about us

Mark Steel in The Independent

Luis Suárez should be given a job in the Cabinet. He’s the footballer who’s been called a cheat, after he handled the ball just before scoring a goal for Liverpool in the FA Cup, and experts are undecided as to how he should be dealt with. And you can see the difficulty, because with such a brazen attitude towards cheating, he ought to be running one of our major institutions.

Suárez appears to have grasped how society’s rules have changed. Under the old system, if you cheated you hoped you weren’t caught. Now you don’t mind getting caught, you just announce that cheating isn’t really breaking any rules, and carry on. Football is only a reflection of that society.

So in his next match, Suárez could place the ball in a Sherman tank and drive it through the goal, flanked by marines who assassinate the opposing goalkeeper. His manager would say, “I can’t comment as I didn’t see the incident, but his first touch was astounding”. Match of the Day would debate whether the commandos were interfering with play. And after he’d scored 60 goals this way, the Football Association would set up an inquiry, in which Suárez would say he couldn’t recall ever playing football in his life. The inquiry would propose a limit on the number of tanks in each half but this wouldn’t be implemented as Suárez would be outraged at the restrictions on his freedom.

Or he could learn from the Deputy Prime Minister, by pledging to abolish handball at all times in every way, including by the goalkeeper, with fines for anyone who even carries the ball to the ground. And then spend the next match throwing balls in the goal, before announcing: “I’m really, really sorry to have made such a foolish promise. I’m sure you’ll understand that from now on I’m going to do this in every match.”

Maybe the first part of each footballer’s training now is to study the banks. The coach says: “This lot were caught bringing the whole economic system down, but did they bother looking sheepish? No, they insisted on an extra bonus as it would be even harder clearing up the mess than it was causing it. If they can do that after causing a global recession, you can do it after diving in the box.”

As the attitude towards cheating is so similar in different fields, football pundits should be regular guests on the news. So Alan Shearer could say: “You can see from this angle, the police have definitely falsified 116 documents, but the ref hasn’t blown the whistle so they’ve got away with it.”

Some commentators suggested that Suárez should have owned up to his foul, but with the modern rules, even if he’d announced on the Tannoy, “I punched that ball in the goal ha ha ha”, the referee would have let it stand, but suggested at some point in the future someone should set up a self-regulating body made up of prominent figures from the handballing community.

Family isn't dead – it's getting better

If people abandon the traditional model and forgo children or marriage it does not destroy societies, it can liberate them

• 
• • Jill Filipovic
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 December 2012 13.30 GMT

'It is actually exceedingly difficult in much of the world for women to achieve highly in a career while also having a thriving family and personal life.' Photograph: Aping Vision/STS/Getty Images

 

Are we living in a post-familial age? According to a new report, The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity's Future?, the answer is yes: the traditional family unit is slowly dying out as more people choose to forgo children and even marriage. As a result, society is economically imperilled, lacking the necessary workforce to support older generations. We're also "values-challenged", entering a brave new world of materialistic indulgence, selfishness and protracted adolescence.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? Luckily, almost none of it is true.

People around the world are indeed delaying childbearing and marriage, and larger numbers of people never marry or reproduce at all. But that is not synonymous with a moral decline, or selfish decadence. It represents an uptick in women's rights, a commitment to creating the family one wants, and wider choices for everyone.

It's no shock that the drop in the number of children a woman has came along with the advent of the birth control pill. The countries with the highest birth rates aren't just highly religious; they're poor, have abominable human rights records and lack access to reliable birth control. Contrary to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's position, it is not in fact the country with the most babies that wins: if that was the case, Nigeria would be running the show.

Despite the clear correlation between reproductive rights and prosperity, the report's author, joined by conservative commentators, laments the decline in childbearing because, as David Brooks says, it represents a rise of individualism and personal freedom – and that's a bad thing. Brooks writes:

"People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They're better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice – commitments to family, God, craft and country."

But the moral case against individualism and choice doesn't have legs. It's a moral good when people have a wide array of choices and increased personal freedom – not just for the individual, but also for children, family and society. And the evidence backs that up.

Valuing tradition, family and God doesn't automatically translate into healthy families or economic prosperity. Just look at the United States: the states that most idealise the conservative model do have higher birth rates, earlier marriage, higher levels of religiosity and more consistent church attendance. They make up consistent conservative voting blocks. They also have the highest levels of divorce in the country, the highest poverty rates, the highest teen pregnancy rates, the lowest child health ratings and the lowest education levels. On the other hand, the states that champion "liberal values" do have later marriage rates and lower birth rates. They're also richer and better educated, the children that reside in them are healthier and families split up less often.

And contrary to the assertions in both the report and the commentary surrounding it, a lower birth rate does not actually mean that individuals end up voting to support only the interests of affluent childless singles. Quite the opposite: the social safety net is much stronger in liberal, supposedly individualistic, lower-birthrate blue states. An array of choices seems to mean that people respect and support a variety of paths.

The rest of the world tells a similar story. There are obviously myriad complex factors that play into a nation's success, but the places where people are the healthiest and the most economically stable are the relatively liberal nations that provide for social welfare while allowing many different models of family to flourish.

Meanwhile, the arguments in favour of a return to the traditional family remain unconvincing, and even insulting. For example, NYT columnist Ross Douthat accuses single people of being "decadent" in their selfish singledom (an argument neatly taken down by Ann Friedman). In the report itself, the authors project a nobility on to staying at home and "sacrificing" for one's family, as opposed to young people who show "an almost defiant individualism" and "indulge themselves in hobbies, fashion or restaurants". Singapore pastor Andrew Ong says that the child-free media culture is "about not growing up".

Listening to these guys, you would think that kids are an awful drag, that raising a family requires (almost entirely female) sacrifice, and that such hardship simply must be endured for … something they don't quite specify. By contrast, they seem to think that single people are in a perpetual adolescence, out partying, eating and drinking until, I suppose, we get ours by dying alone with our cats.

That's not making much of a case for marriage and babies, is it?

In reality, most of these selfish singles are in fact eventually getting married and having babies. They're just doing it later. The result is that these selfish late procreators are wealthier, their marriages last longer and their kids are healthier. How awful.

Investing in future generations is crucial, but conservatives seem to value not so much investment as major personal sacrifice in the here-and-now that results in poorer outcomes for everyone involved. And for what? So that future generations can grow up to sacrifice themselves too? Feminists and other liberals aren't against supporting children and making the world a better place. We just realise that the best way to do that isn't by making ourselves collectively miserable, but by actually taking steps to improve society for everyone, now and later.

One of the ways we're doing that is by making it easier for women to choose to have children. Demanding that women sacrifice everything for child-rearing isn't exactly getting the young ladies to line up, but that's what our current employment model is based upon. It is actually exceedingly difficult in much of the world for women to achieve highly in a career while also having a thriving family and personal life. Our current employment model is based on a family economy with a male partner who is able to work full time, and a female partner who stays at home and tends to the children. Women are now in the workforce in unprecedented numbers – but the workforce hasn't adjusted to give people much time for anything other than work. And conservatives have championed this model, praising folks who do multiple jobs just to make ends meet or work 80 hours a week. High-achieving men still often have wives who stay home. What happens, then, is high-achieving women either "opt out" and let their husbands do the bread-winning, don't get married or decide that they want to have kids later or not at all. And the economy suffers for it.

But young single people don't just want to slave away at work all day, and we don't have someone at home taking care of the rest of our lives. We also want a work-life balance. We may not be going home to children, but we want to pursue our hobbies, spend time with the families we've created and engage with our communities. We realise there is much more to life than just work – but we also think there's much more to life than a traditional family.

That kind of push-back could be the key in making work-life balance a reality. Historically, women's work has been undervalued and disrespected. One reason "work-life balance" is discussed but not actually executed is because, I suspect, it's women – and the most disrespected and undervalued group of women, mothers – who that balance is perceived to benefit. So what if this new group of highly effective, highly motivated, hard-working young single people are now demanding more balance and reasonable work hours and leave policies? Everyone benefits.

Women today also want relationships that are mutually supportive and egalitarian, something they might struggle to find – but not for the reasons conservatives seem to think. Lots of men haven't caught up, and still want wives who will be subservient and financially dependent. For men, getting married and having kids comes with increased social status and emotional benefits, not to mention actual salary increases and workplace opportunities. For women it's the opposite: motherhood brings with it lost income and opportunity. There simply aren't enough subservient women who are willing to put themselves in financial, social and sometimes even physical peril to have a "traditional family".

Despite its reliance on rightwing values, there is much to be gleaned from this report. It identifies a place where liberal feminists worried about gender equality and conservatives worried about fertility rates can come together to promote both of our goals. Make reproductive freedom a priority, including the right to have healthy babies. We do this by promoting healthcare that covers the family planning tools that lead to healthy, wanted pregnancies. Federally mandated parental leave and other family-friendly policies like state-sponsored childcare would also make it easier for women and men to work and raise families. More affordable housing programmes would make it more plausible for parents to stay in the places where they choose to live, and where they have put down their social roots and earned their stripes at work. Real investment in public education would relieve much of the financial burden for parents who want their children to have the same opportunities they did.

Finally, support a variety of lifestyles and choices. When the traditional family model isn't something that everyone is expected to personally sacrifice to create, we can construct and implement policies that benefit actual families, in all of their incarnations. When they are not a crass economic contract where financial support is traded for housekeeping and child-rearing but instead a unit based on love, respect and mutual support, marriages last longer. The conservative and religious promise that there is only one best way to live, one that requires temporal sacrifice and is justified solely by obligation but will be rewarded by happiness in the afterlife, but it doesn't actually lead to good outcomes here on Earth.

Family isn't dead. It's just getting better. Expanding its definition and allowing people to choose their own happiness model is just making it more highly valued than ever.