Why do top results-- in boards, JEE or UPSC-- matter to us so much?
KANTI BAJPAI
Judging by the hoopla surrounding the board examination results, Indian school education is in decline. What we are witnessing is a kind of decadence. The media is only helping construct this decadence. It has little or no understanding of education, focuses on the most sensational and trivial aspects of school life, and is fetishising learning. Unfortunately, it is not just the media. The government, the examining boards, school managements, teachers, and, yes, parents have combined to bring Indian education to this pass.
We think that Indian schools are world-class institutions in the making, that our science and mathematics are the envy of others, and that Indian students are smarter and harder working than anyone else. None of this is true. Indian schools are in a shambles; our science and mathematics teaching are appalling; and our students, while intelligent and diligent, are of the same genetic material as other human beings and, given the burden of our curriculum, are in danger of losing their creativity and energy by the time they "succeed" in school examinations.
Our annual board results, IIT results and civil service examination results are feeding the frenzy over the search for the smartest and the most likely to succeed. This year, the frenzy over who "topped" the exams, which school produced the best results, how many students got into engineering colleges or got the best SAT results (the US college entrance test which is a 10th standard exam, at best!), and who headed the IIT entrance lists has been worse than ever.
The question is: how can it possibly be interesting educationally that student X got 95.6 per cent and was at the top of an examination list when it is likely that the next person, who never features in the public adulation, got 95.5 per cent? Does anyone seriously think that there can be any difference intellectually and in terms of life chances and attainments based on these infinitesimal differences? Indeed, is there much difference between someone who scored 95 per cent and 89 per cent? Has anyone bothered to track all these "toppers"? Where do they end up on the scales of life�income, professional satisfaction, social status, personal happiness? What do they contribute to the good of society around them?
This is not to denigrate those who have topped. It is to ask what this frenzy of interest is about. It is not about education, whatever else it is about. It is a circus, without a circus master. Each of us helps make this spectacle, though some are more responsible than others. For instance, why does the CBSE, the most reported board, splash the name of the toppers around and feed media comparisons relating to this year's average as against last year's, how many passed and how many did not, and so on? Why do school principals like me and school managements tell the media who amongst our students topped the results and what our averages are? Why do school managements base their judgement of their school's success so massively on the board results? Why do parents, most of whom did not do particularly well themselves in the board examination in their own day, and who know that school examination results do not count for much in the game of life, become so drunken over the results, losing all sense of proportion?
One reason for this fetish relating to marks and averages is scarcity. In a country of scarcities, even a marginal difference, we conclude, can make an enormous difference to our children: that extra mark will mean extra consideration when colleges admit (somewhat true, at least in India) and when employers hire (largely not true).
Another reason for the fetish of results is our paranoia. We are convinced that people out there are conspiring to deny our meritorious children what they rightly deserve.What can stop them from doing so except a marksheet in front of them? After all, who can quarrel with the numbers? It is another matter that the numbers we fetishise are only one indication of the quality of a student's mind, and no one, with any sense, would go only by numbers, at least for the purpose of hiring.
Finally, we urban, "educated", middle-class Indians have made the board results into a fetish because we need a clear, simple and apparently unassailable index of success. So much in India seems second-rate and bleak (it is not, but we have persuaded ourselves that our country is a collective failure) that we must have some golden eggs. It does not matter that the eggs are in someone else's basket, that someone else's son or daughter has topped. We hunger for an affirmation that there are "successes" amongst us capable of transcending the "mediocrity" around. We are in search of supermen so that we can feel better.
(The author is the Headmaster of the Doon School.)
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
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Thursday 7 June 2007
Tuesday 5 June 2007
The Disappearing Act Of A Character Called Sukhi Lala
By Jawed Naqvi
04 June, 2007
The Dawn
Unlike India, where it is difficult to tell these days when a Congress-led coalition has paved the way for a BJP led alliance and vice versa, political groups in Pakistan seem to have a lacerating relationship. The army, the mullahs, the PPP and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League are complemented in their hostile aloofness towards each other by a marked regional fervour of the Baloch, the Pashtuns, the Punjabis, and the Sindhis, with the MQM bringing up a vengeful tail. Also, unlike India, where the media has allowed itself to follow a consensus on most key issues, both foreign and domestic, the absence of a common perspective on most key issues in Pakistan makes it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for the media to pursue a consensus simply because it is just not there at the political level.
Journalists are creatures of their politics and it is a bit of a myth that they pursue 'objectivity', if such a creature truly exists, beyond a reasonable flexibility around their given ideals. To the Indian eye, therefore, the relatively unbending Pakistani media is more akin to the regional media in India, say like Tamil Nadu, where the political contradictions are actually played out more nakedly, and viciously. In Uttar Pradesh, Sahara TV, aligned with Mulayam Singh Yadav, is unlikely to present his successor, Ms Mayawati in fair light. Such antagonisms are a fact in practically every state.
But at the federal level all this changes quite magically. The Left Front's support for the Congress, despite their bitter feud in West Bengal, is a case in point.
Violent contradictions at the state level and a consensual political platform at the federal level define Indian politics and, in a sense, the media too. When a newspaper has switched sides, from supporting the BJP to brazenly idolising the Congress, or in rare cases when a newspaper or a TV channel has shifted from a left-liberal corner to the hard-line centre, or from the right to the centre and back again to its original posture, is difficult to tell. I asked a sagacious uncle how senior journalists who would swear by Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was prime minister had switched their loyalty to Manmohan Singh. A notable example, though not the only one, is Manmohan Singh's media adviser who once had described Vajpayee as a latter day Nehru.
The uncle's reply was in Urdu and it deserves to be recorded accurately. "Ye log badalte nahi hain beta, ye log hotey hi aise hain." (These people do not change, son. They just happen to be made this way.) This is not to say that politicians in Pakistan do not switch sides or that journalists do not change political corners. In fact, even sitting in far away Delhi one can make out that the present ruling party in Pakistan has generously poached people from different ideological corners. In this malleability there is hardly any difference between an Indian ruling coalition, be it led by the Congress or the BJP, and the current coalition of poached leaders that is ruling Pakistan. In fact, it seems easier for people to become a notable figure in a rival party before making a transition to the current one.
Take Shankar Singh Vaghela for example, who heads the Congress party's strategy in Gujarat. He is a former leader of the RSS/BJP stock. He switched sides to spite the current state chief minister Narendra Modi. Well-known ideologue of the intellectual right Sudheendra Kulkarni came to the BJP from a communist corner. Devi Prasad Tripathi was in the RSS stable before he became a senior member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist. He even went to jail as a comrade during Indira Gandhi's emergency rule. It is another matter that Tripathi later joined the same Congress that once threw him into prison. He is currently a leader of the breakaway National Congress Party. Likewise with the BJP. It has senior leaders, like Najma Heptullah, who once adorned the Congress.
So how has India, at least to the naked eye, evolved a seemingly consensual (some would say incestuous) politics as opposed to Pakistan, or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka — the list can be easily extended to virtually all the South Asian countries because political rivalries there are like a fight unto death?
The answer perhaps lies in India's case in the consensus of Sukhi Lala. Let me explain this idiom. In the early days of the Indian cinema, in the 1940s, 50s and to an extent up to the 1960s, the arch villain in a movie was the avaricious moneylender who wreaked havoc on innocent village folks with his greed. In the classic Do Bigha Zameen and the magnum opus Mother India, the forced alienation of the peasant from his land by the moneylender was widely appreciated theme that reflected a political and economic reality of the newly independent nation. Similar themes were also the burden of the literature of that period, Prem Chand being the best recognised of the campaigners who highlighted rural distress and exploitation.
In Mother India, the nasty moneylender was called Sukhi Lala, who stole the land from an illiterate peasant family by fudging records of a loan he had once advanced to the peasant family's head. Over a period of time the villain mutated from moneylender into a gambler who played 'satta', popular pejorative for the stock market. With time this moneylender-satta-player duo gave way to the gun-toting smuggler and the rise of the underworld don. More recently Indian cinema has created the ubiquitous 'terrorist' as the chief villain who sports a beard and speaks like a Pathan or a Kashmiri. At some point, with the rise of the non-resident Indians' profile in the affairs of the home country, the remaining vestiges of Sukhi Lala disappeared. In fact in a popular genre of current cinema the villain himself has vanished. In fact, in the Guru, released some months ago, which is supposed to be a story based on the life of a powerful Indian tycoon, you would notice that the villain Sukhi Lala has mutated into a hero.
It is this Sukhi Lala who supports Narendra Modi in Gujarat as the model chief minister, then strikes a deal for various industrial projects with the communists in West Bengal. He controls the politics of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana that surround Delhi. He has his liaison officers masquerading as party apparatchiks in the Congress, BJP and most regional parties. Therefore, even though Sukhi Lala of Mother India is still going about his business, plundering economically vulnerable village folk, in his new avatar he is no longer regarded as a villain but the harbinger of a world order of which India would be an integral part.
As I read the news report about the proposed censorship by the Cable Operators Association of Pakistan (CAP) of politically unsavoury news telecasts, it reminded me of the delicate balancing act that Sukhi Lala everywhere has to perform before he is in any position to swamp the society.
"We have decided that we'll not become part of any campaign which goes against the armed forces, judiciary and integrity of Pakistan and will virtually boycott the channels, which indulge in such acts," said CAP chairman Khalid Shaikh at the Karachi Press Club. Now we all know that it would require daunting political calisthenics for anyone at this point in time to defend the judiciary in Pakistan without offending the army and vice versa. But once this consensus is achieved, as Mr Shaikh is striving hard to put together, Pakistan may go India's way.
The once evocative slogan of Roti, Kapda Aur Makan would be muffled by its own former patrons. And Sukhi Lala, the quick change artist that he is, is waiting for precisely this moment.
04 June, 2007
The Dawn
Unlike India, where it is difficult to tell these days when a Congress-led coalition has paved the way for a BJP led alliance and vice versa, political groups in Pakistan seem to have a lacerating relationship. The army, the mullahs, the PPP and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League are complemented in their hostile aloofness towards each other by a marked regional fervour of the Baloch, the Pashtuns, the Punjabis, and the Sindhis, with the MQM bringing up a vengeful tail. Also, unlike India, where the media has allowed itself to follow a consensus on most key issues, both foreign and domestic, the absence of a common perspective on most key issues in Pakistan makes it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for the media to pursue a consensus simply because it is just not there at the political level.
Journalists are creatures of their politics and it is a bit of a myth that they pursue 'objectivity', if such a creature truly exists, beyond a reasonable flexibility around their given ideals. To the Indian eye, therefore, the relatively unbending Pakistani media is more akin to the regional media in India, say like Tamil Nadu, where the political contradictions are actually played out more nakedly, and viciously. In Uttar Pradesh, Sahara TV, aligned with Mulayam Singh Yadav, is unlikely to present his successor, Ms Mayawati in fair light. Such antagonisms are a fact in practically every state.
But at the federal level all this changes quite magically. The Left Front's support for the Congress, despite their bitter feud in West Bengal, is a case in point.
Violent contradictions at the state level and a consensual political platform at the federal level define Indian politics and, in a sense, the media too. When a newspaper has switched sides, from supporting the BJP to brazenly idolising the Congress, or in rare cases when a newspaper or a TV channel has shifted from a left-liberal corner to the hard-line centre, or from the right to the centre and back again to its original posture, is difficult to tell. I asked a sagacious uncle how senior journalists who would swear by Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was prime minister had switched their loyalty to Manmohan Singh. A notable example, though not the only one, is Manmohan Singh's media adviser who once had described Vajpayee as a latter day Nehru.
The uncle's reply was in Urdu and it deserves to be recorded accurately. "Ye log badalte nahi hain beta, ye log hotey hi aise hain." (These people do not change, son. They just happen to be made this way.) This is not to say that politicians in Pakistan do not switch sides or that journalists do not change political corners. In fact, even sitting in far away Delhi one can make out that the present ruling party in Pakistan has generously poached people from different ideological corners. In this malleability there is hardly any difference between an Indian ruling coalition, be it led by the Congress or the BJP, and the current coalition of poached leaders that is ruling Pakistan. In fact, it seems easier for people to become a notable figure in a rival party before making a transition to the current one.
Take Shankar Singh Vaghela for example, who heads the Congress party's strategy in Gujarat. He is a former leader of the RSS/BJP stock. He switched sides to spite the current state chief minister Narendra Modi. Well-known ideologue of the intellectual right Sudheendra Kulkarni came to the BJP from a communist corner. Devi Prasad Tripathi was in the RSS stable before he became a senior member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist. He even went to jail as a comrade during Indira Gandhi's emergency rule. It is another matter that Tripathi later joined the same Congress that once threw him into prison. He is currently a leader of the breakaway National Congress Party. Likewise with the BJP. It has senior leaders, like Najma Heptullah, who once adorned the Congress.
So how has India, at least to the naked eye, evolved a seemingly consensual (some would say incestuous) politics as opposed to Pakistan, or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka — the list can be easily extended to virtually all the South Asian countries because political rivalries there are like a fight unto death?
The answer perhaps lies in India's case in the consensus of Sukhi Lala. Let me explain this idiom. In the early days of the Indian cinema, in the 1940s, 50s and to an extent up to the 1960s, the arch villain in a movie was the avaricious moneylender who wreaked havoc on innocent village folks with his greed. In the classic Do Bigha Zameen and the magnum opus Mother India, the forced alienation of the peasant from his land by the moneylender was widely appreciated theme that reflected a political and economic reality of the newly independent nation. Similar themes were also the burden of the literature of that period, Prem Chand being the best recognised of the campaigners who highlighted rural distress and exploitation.
In Mother India, the nasty moneylender was called Sukhi Lala, who stole the land from an illiterate peasant family by fudging records of a loan he had once advanced to the peasant family's head. Over a period of time the villain mutated from moneylender into a gambler who played 'satta', popular pejorative for the stock market. With time this moneylender-satta-player duo gave way to the gun-toting smuggler and the rise of the underworld don. More recently Indian cinema has created the ubiquitous 'terrorist' as the chief villain who sports a beard and speaks like a Pathan or a Kashmiri. At some point, with the rise of the non-resident Indians' profile in the affairs of the home country, the remaining vestiges of Sukhi Lala disappeared. In fact in a popular genre of current cinema the villain himself has vanished. In fact, in the Guru, released some months ago, which is supposed to be a story based on the life of a powerful Indian tycoon, you would notice that the villain Sukhi Lala has mutated into a hero.
It is this Sukhi Lala who supports Narendra Modi in Gujarat as the model chief minister, then strikes a deal for various industrial projects with the communists in West Bengal. He controls the politics of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana that surround Delhi. He has his liaison officers masquerading as party apparatchiks in the Congress, BJP and most regional parties. Therefore, even though Sukhi Lala of Mother India is still going about his business, plundering economically vulnerable village folk, in his new avatar he is no longer regarded as a villain but the harbinger of a world order of which India would be an integral part.
As I read the news report about the proposed censorship by the Cable Operators Association of Pakistan (CAP) of politically unsavoury news telecasts, it reminded me of the delicate balancing act that Sukhi Lala everywhere has to perform before he is in any position to swamp the society.
"We have decided that we'll not become part of any campaign which goes against the armed forces, judiciary and integrity of Pakistan and will virtually boycott the channels, which indulge in such acts," said CAP chairman Khalid Shaikh at the Karachi Press Club. Now we all know that it would require daunting political calisthenics for anyone at this point in time to defend the judiciary in Pakistan without offending the army and vice versa. But once this consensus is achieved, as Mr Shaikh is striving hard to put together, Pakistan may go India's way.
The once evocative slogan of Roti, Kapda Aur Makan would be muffled by its own former patrons. And Sukhi Lala, the quick change artist that he is, is waiting for precisely this moment.
Tuesday 29 May 2007
The Growing Abuse Of Transfer Pricing By TNCs
By Kavaljit Singh
28 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The large-scale tax avoidance practices used by transnational corporations (TNCs) came into public notice recently when the giant drug TNC, GlaxoSmithKline, agreed to pay the US government $3.4 billion to settle a long-running dispute over its tax dealings between the UK parent company and its American subsidiary. This was the largest settlement of a tax dispute in the US. The investigations carried out by Internal Revenue Service found that the American subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline overpaid its UK parent company for drug supplies during 1989-2005 period, mainly its blockbuster drug, Zantac. These overpayments were meant to reduce the company's profit in the US and thereby its tax bill. The IRS charged the Europe’s largest drugs company for engaging in manipulative “transfer pricing.”
What is transfer pricing? Transfer pricing is the price charged by one associate of a corporation to another associate of the same corporation. When one subsidiary of a corporation in one country sells goods, services or know-how to another subsidiary in another country, the price charged for these goods or services is called the transfer price. All kinds of transactions within the corporations are subject to transfer pricing including raw material, finished products, and payments such as management fees, intellectual property royalties, loans, interest on loans, payments for technical assistance and know-how, and other transactions. The rules on transfer pricing requires TNCs to conduct business between their affiliates and subsidiaries on an “arm's length” basis, which means that any transaction between two entities of the same TNC should be priced as if the transaction was conducted between two unrelated parties.
Transfer pricing, one of the most controversial and complex issues, requires closer scrutiny not only by the critics of TNCs but also by the tax authorities in the poor and the developing world. Transfer pricing is a strategy frequently used by TNCs to book huge profits through illegal means. The transfer price could be purely arbitrary or fictitious, therefore different from the price that unrelated firms would have had to pay. By manipulating a few entries in the account books, TNCs are able to reap obscene profits with no actual change in the physical capital. For instance, a Korean firm manufactures a MP3 player for $100, but its US subsidiary buys it for $199, and then sells it for $200. By doing this, the firm’s bottom line does not change but the taxable profit in the US is drastically reduced. At a 30 per cent tax rate, the firm’s tax liability in the US would be just 30 cents instead of $30.
TNCs derive several benefits from transfer pricing. Since each country has different tax rates, they can increase their profits with the help of transfer pricing. By lowering prices in countries where tax rates are high and raising them in countries with a lower tax rate, TNCs can reduce their overall tax burden, thereby boosting their overall profits. That is why one often finds that corporations located in high tax countries hardly pay any corporate taxes.
A study conducted by Simon J. Pak of Pennsylvania State University and John S. Zdanowicz of Florida State University found that US corporations used manipulative pricing schemes to avoid over $53 billion in taxes in 2001. Based on US import and export data, the authors found several examples of abnormally priced transactions such as toothbrushes imported from the UK into the US for a price of $5,655 each, flash lights imported from Japan for $5,000 each, cotton dishtowels imported from Pakistan for $153 each, briefs and panties imported from Hungary for $739 a dozen, car seats exported to Belgium for $1.66 each, and missile and rocket launchers exported to Israel for just $52 each.
With the removal of restrictions on capital flows, manipulative transfer pricing has increased manifold. According to UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 1996, one-third of world trade is basically intra-firm trade. Because of mergers and acquisitions, intra-firm trade, both in numbers and value terms, has increased considerably in recent years. Given that there are over 77,000 parent TNCs with over 770,000 foreign affiliates, the number of transactions taking place within these entities is unimaginable. Hence, it makes the task of tax authorities extremely difficult to monitor and control each and every transaction taking place within a particular TNC. The rapid expansion of Internet-based trading (E-commerce) has further complicated the task of national tax authorities.
Not only do TNCs reap higher profits by manipulating transfer pricing: there is also a substantial loss of tax revenue to countries, particularly developing ones, that rely more on corporate income tax to finance their development programs. Besides, governments are under pressure to lower taxes as a means of attracting investment or retaining a corporation’s operation in their country. This leads to a heavier tax burden on ordinary citizens for financing social and developmental programs. Although several instances of fictitious transfer pricing have come to public notice in recent years, there are no reliable estimates of the loss of tax revenue globally. The Indian tax authorities are expecting to garner an additional US$111 million each year from TNCs with the help of new regulations on transfer pricing introduced in 2001.
In addition, fictitious transfer pricing creates a substantial loss of foreign exchange and engenders economic distortions through fictitious entries of profits and losses. In countries where there are government regulations preventing companies from setting product retail prices above a certain percentage of prices of imported goods or the cost of production, TNCs can inflate import costs from their subsidiaries and then charge higher retail prices. Additionally, TNCs can use overpriced imports or underpriced exports to circumvent governmental ceilings on profit repatriation, thereby causing a drain of foreign exchange. For instance, if a parent TNC has a profitable subsidiary in a country where the parent does not wish to re-invest the profits, it can remit them by overpricing imports into that country. During the 1970s, investigations revealed that average overpricing by parent firms on imports by their Latin American subsidiaries in the pharmaceutical industry was as high as 155 per cent, while imports of dyestuff raw materials by TNC affiliates in India were overpriced in the range of 124 to 147 per cent.
Given the magnitude of manipulative transfer pricing, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued detailed guidelines. Transfer pricing regulations are extremely stringent in developed countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia. In the US, for instance, regulations related to transfer pricing cover almost 300 pages, which dent the myth that the US espouses “free market” policies.
However, developing countries are lagging behind in enacting regulations to check the abuse of transfer pricing. India framed regulations related to transfer pricing as late as 2001. However, many countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, tax authorities have yet to enact regulations curbing the abuse of transfer pricing mechanisms. The abuse of transfer pricing mechanisms could be drastically curbed if there is an enhanced international coordination among national tax authorities.
28 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The large-scale tax avoidance practices used by transnational corporations (TNCs) came into public notice recently when the giant drug TNC, GlaxoSmithKline, agreed to pay the US government $3.4 billion to settle a long-running dispute over its tax dealings between the UK parent company and its American subsidiary. This was the largest settlement of a tax dispute in the US. The investigations carried out by Internal Revenue Service found that the American subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline overpaid its UK parent company for drug supplies during 1989-2005 period, mainly its blockbuster drug, Zantac. These overpayments were meant to reduce the company's profit in the US and thereby its tax bill. The IRS charged the Europe’s largest drugs company for engaging in manipulative “transfer pricing.”
What is transfer pricing? Transfer pricing is the price charged by one associate of a corporation to another associate of the same corporation. When one subsidiary of a corporation in one country sells goods, services or know-how to another subsidiary in another country, the price charged for these goods or services is called the transfer price. All kinds of transactions within the corporations are subject to transfer pricing including raw material, finished products, and payments such as management fees, intellectual property royalties, loans, interest on loans, payments for technical assistance and know-how, and other transactions. The rules on transfer pricing requires TNCs to conduct business between their affiliates and subsidiaries on an “arm's length” basis, which means that any transaction between two entities of the same TNC should be priced as if the transaction was conducted between two unrelated parties.
Transfer pricing, one of the most controversial and complex issues, requires closer scrutiny not only by the critics of TNCs but also by the tax authorities in the poor and the developing world. Transfer pricing is a strategy frequently used by TNCs to book huge profits through illegal means. The transfer price could be purely arbitrary or fictitious, therefore different from the price that unrelated firms would have had to pay. By manipulating a few entries in the account books, TNCs are able to reap obscene profits with no actual change in the physical capital. For instance, a Korean firm manufactures a MP3 player for $100, but its US subsidiary buys it for $199, and then sells it for $200. By doing this, the firm’s bottom line does not change but the taxable profit in the US is drastically reduced. At a 30 per cent tax rate, the firm’s tax liability in the US would be just 30 cents instead of $30.
TNCs derive several benefits from transfer pricing. Since each country has different tax rates, they can increase their profits with the help of transfer pricing. By lowering prices in countries where tax rates are high and raising them in countries with a lower tax rate, TNCs can reduce their overall tax burden, thereby boosting their overall profits. That is why one often finds that corporations located in high tax countries hardly pay any corporate taxes.
A study conducted by Simon J. Pak of Pennsylvania State University and John S. Zdanowicz of Florida State University found that US corporations used manipulative pricing schemes to avoid over $53 billion in taxes in 2001. Based on US import and export data, the authors found several examples of abnormally priced transactions such as toothbrushes imported from the UK into the US for a price of $5,655 each, flash lights imported from Japan for $5,000 each, cotton dishtowels imported from Pakistan for $153 each, briefs and panties imported from Hungary for $739 a dozen, car seats exported to Belgium for $1.66 each, and missile and rocket launchers exported to Israel for just $52 each.
With the removal of restrictions on capital flows, manipulative transfer pricing has increased manifold. According to UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 1996, one-third of world trade is basically intra-firm trade. Because of mergers and acquisitions, intra-firm trade, both in numbers and value terms, has increased considerably in recent years. Given that there are over 77,000 parent TNCs with over 770,000 foreign affiliates, the number of transactions taking place within these entities is unimaginable. Hence, it makes the task of tax authorities extremely difficult to monitor and control each and every transaction taking place within a particular TNC. The rapid expansion of Internet-based trading (E-commerce) has further complicated the task of national tax authorities.
Not only do TNCs reap higher profits by manipulating transfer pricing: there is also a substantial loss of tax revenue to countries, particularly developing ones, that rely more on corporate income tax to finance their development programs. Besides, governments are under pressure to lower taxes as a means of attracting investment or retaining a corporation’s operation in their country. This leads to a heavier tax burden on ordinary citizens for financing social and developmental programs. Although several instances of fictitious transfer pricing have come to public notice in recent years, there are no reliable estimates of the loss of tax revenue globally. The Indian tax authorities are expecting to garner an additional US$111 million each year from TNCs with the help of new regulations on transfer pricing introduced in 2001.
In addition, fictitious transfer pricing creates a substantial loss of foreign exchange and engenders economic distortions through fictitious entries of profits and losses. In countries where there are government regulations preventing companies from setting product retail prices above a certain percentage of prices of imported goods or the cost of production, TNCs can inflate import costs from their subsidiaries and then charge higher retail prices. Additionally, TNCs can use overpriced imports or underpriced exports to circumvent governmental ceilings on profit repatriation, thereby causing a drain of foreign exchange. For instance, if a parent TNC has a profitable subsidiary in a country where the parent does not wish to re-invest the profits, it can remit them by overpricing imports into that country. During the 1970s, investigations revealed that average overpricing by parent firms on imports by their Latin American subsidiaries in the pharmaceutical industry was as high as 155 per cent, while imports of dyestuff raw materials by TNC affiliates in India were overpriced in the range of 124 to 147 per cent.
Given the magnitude of manipulative transfer pricing, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has issued detailed guidelines. Transfer pricing regulations are extremely stringent in developed countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia. In the US, for instance, regulations related to transfer pricing cover almost 300 pages, which dent the myth that the US espouses “free market” policies.
However, developing countries are lagging behind in enacting regulations to check the abuse of transfer pricing. India framed regulations related to transfer pricing as late as 2001. However, many countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, tax authorities have yet to enact regulations curbing the abuse of transfer pricing mechanisms. The abuse of transfer pricing mechanisms could be drastically curbed if there is an enhanced international coordination among national tax authorities.
Thursday 10 May 2007
Blair - Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off Stage
By Tariq Ali
10 May, 2007
Counterpunch
Tony Blair's success was limited to winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow-Conservatives was a matter of high drama: an announcement outside the Louvre's glass pyramid during the Paris Congress brokering the end of the Cold War; tears; a crowded House of Commons. Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.
A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:
"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...
Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years--to take the highlights--we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..."
This, too, is mild compared to what is said about Blair in the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Senior diplomats have told me on more than one occasion that it would not upset them too much if Blair were to be tried as a war criminal. More cultured critics sometimes compare him to the Cavaliere Cipolia, the vile hypnotist of fascist Italy, so brilliantly portrayed in Thomas Mann's 1929 novel 'Mario and the Magician'. Blair is certainly not Mussolini, but like the Duce he enjoyed to simultaneously lead and humiliate his supporters.
What much of this reveals is anger and impotence. There is no mechanism to get rid of a sitting Prime Minister unless his or her party loses confidence. The Conservative leadership decided that Thatcher simply had to go because of her negative attitude to Europe. Labour tends to be more sentimental towards its leaders and in this case they owed so much to Blair that nobody close to him wants to be cast in the role of Brutus. In the end he decided to go himself. The disaster in Iraq had made him a much hated politician and slowly support began to ebb. One reason for the slowness was that the country is without a serious opposition. In Parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair. The Liberal-Democrats were ineffective. Blair had summed up Britain's attitude to Europe at Nice in 2000:
"It is possible, in our judgement, to fight Britain's corner, get the best out of Europe for Britain and exercise real authority and influence in Europe. That is as it should be. Britain is a world power."
This grotesque, self-serving fantasy that 'Britain is a world power' is to justify that it will always be EU/UK. The real union is with Washington. France and Germany are seen as rivals for Washington's affections, not potential allies in an independent EU. The French decision to re-integrate themselves into NATO and pose as the most vigorous US ally was a serious structural shift which weakened Europe. Britain responded by encouraging a fragmented political order in Europe through expansion and insisted on a permanent US presence on the continent.
Blair's half-anointed, half-hated successor, Gordon Brown, is far more intelligent (he reads books) but politically no different. There might be a change of tone, but little else. It is a grim prospect with or without Blair and an alternative politics (anti-war, anti-Trident, defence of public services) is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Its absence nationally fuels the anger felt by substantial sections of the population, reflected in voting (or not) against those in power.
10 May, 2007
Counterpunch
Tony Blair's success was limited to winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician, but without much substance; bereft of ideas he eagerly grasped and tried to improve upon the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But though in many ways Blair's programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher's, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher's overthrow by her fellow-Conservatives was a matter of high drama: an announcement outside the Louvre's glass pyramid during the Paris Congress brokering the end of the Cold War; tears; a crowded House of Commons. Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car-bombs and mass carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher's supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even Blair's greatest sycophants in the British media: Martin Kettle and Michael White (The Guardian), Andrew Rawnsley (Observer), Philip Stephens (FT) confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.
A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:
"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...
Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years--to take the highlights--we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..."
This, too, is mild compared to what is said about Blair in the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Senior diplomats have told me on more than one occasion that it would not upset them too much if Blair were to be tried as a war criminal. More cultured critics sometimes compare him to the Cavaliere Cipolia, the vile hypnotist of fascist Italy, so brilliantly portrayed in Thomas Mann's 1929 novel 'Mario and the Magician'. Blair is certainly not Mussolini, but like the Duce he enjoyed to simultaneously lead and humiliate his supporters.
What much of this reveals is anger and impotence. There is no mechanism to get rid of a sitting Prime Minister unless his or her party loses confidence. The Conservative leadership decided that Thatcher simply had to go because of her negative attitude to Europe. Labour tends to be more sentimental towards its leaders and in this case they owed so much to Blair that nobody close to him wants to be cast in the role of Brutus. In the end he decided to go himself. The disaster in Iraq had made him a much hated politician and slowly support began to ebb. One reason for the slowness was that the country is without a serious opposition. In Parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair. The Liberal-Democrats were ineffective. Blair had summed up Britain's attitude to Europe at Nice in 2000:
"It is possible, in our judgement, to fight Britain's corner, get the best out of Europe for Britain and exercise real authority and influence in Europe. That is as it should be. Britain is a world power."
This grotesque, self-serving fantasy that 'Britain is a world power' is to justify that it will always be EU/UK. The real union is with Washington. France and Germany are seen as rivals for Washington's affections, not potential allies in an independent EU. The French decision to re-integrate themselves into NATO and pose as the most vigorous US ally was a serious structural shift which weakened Europe. Britain responded by encouraging a fragmented political order in Europe through expansion and insisted on a permanent US presence on the continent.
Blair's half-anointed, half-hated successor, Gordon Brown, is far more intelligent (he reads books) but politically no different. There might be a change of tone, but little else. It is a grim prospect with or without Blair and an alternative politics (anti-war, anti-Trident, defence of public services) is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Its absence nationally fuels the anger felt by substantial sections of the population, reflected in voting (or not) against those in power.
Sunday 6 May 2007
Yeltsin - Sinister side of the clown
by Mahir Ali; May 05, 2007
SOME of Boris Yeltsin’s worst transgressions barely rated a mention in much of the media coverage that followed his demise last month. The broad tendency was to paint him as Russia’s democratic saviour, a political colossus given to occasional acts of drunken tomfoolery.
In a tribute published in The New York Times last Sunday, Bill Clinton described him as imperfect but “intelligent, passionate, emotional, strong-willed and courageous”, concluding: “Russia and the world were lucky to have him. History will be kind to my friend Boris.”
Among the stock footage favoured by many television networks over the past 10 days is a clip that shows Yeltsin making a remark that prompts an outburst of Clintonian laughter. It dates back to the period when Clinton compared him with Abraham Lincoln, a compliment that coincided with the destruction of Grozny by Russian planes, tanks and missiles.
Apart from the indelible image of Yeltsin berating troops from atop a tank outside the Russian parliament in August 1991, news reports tended to focus on the lighter moments in the former president’s career: Boris the friendly bear dancing on stage with a rock group, Boris the muzhik greeting an unsuspecting woman with a pinch on the backside, Boris the jester pretending to conduct a German orchestra. One almost expected the compilation of clips to be followed by a blurb along the lines of: “I thought Boris Yeltsin was a leading 20th-century political figure, until I discovered Smirnov” (or Stolichnaya, as the case may be).
Hardly any network deemed it worthwhile to visually juxtapose that moment of bravery - or at least bravado - from August 1991, when the coup attempt against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev provided Yeltsin with the opportunity to strike a pose that would be recognized by posterity as his finest hour, with the scene some two years later in exactly the same part of Moscow, when Yeltsin ordered a military assault against the same Russian parliament that stood by him in 1991. This instance of state terrorism enjoyed widespread western approbation at the time and continues to be glossed over in retrospect, with leading American newspapers fallaciously describing it as a successful effort to defeat a communist coup attempt.
In certain other contexts, such as the economic “shock therapy” that reduced a large proportion of Russians to penury, liberal western media organs are now prepared to admit that Yeltsin was seriously mistaken, albeit without acknowledging the folly of their uncritical contemporary support. The blanket stamp of approval was somewhat more difficult in the case of the systematic violation of human rights in Chechnya. But then, what’s indefensible can often be ignored, and perhaps it’s not surprising that images of the havoc wreaked in Grozny and the massacres perpetrated in Chechen villages by ill-trained Russian conscripts have generally been absent from recent coverage of the Yeltsin years.
Boris Yeltsin was an unknown quantity when, shortly after the advent of Gorbachev, he was plucked from Sverdlovsk and installed as the metropolitan party leader in Moscow. His populist approach to the job offered a sharp contrast to the cautious conservatism traditionally associated with party bureaucrats, and Muscovites relished the sight of the local party chief travelling on public transport, publicly sounding off about empty shelves in shops, tracking down hoarders and lamenting the slow pace of perestroika. In the reformist atmosphere introduced by Gorbachev, Yeltsin swept through the Soviet capital like a fresh breeze.
His acrimonious rupture with the Communist Party did his popularity no harm. He seemed to represent the future, whereas much of the party, despite all of Gorbachev’s efforts, still seemed to be mired in the past. If Muscovites could have envisaged at that point the sort of future that lay in wait, their attitude may have changed dramatically - as it eventually did: on the eve of his departure from the Kremlin at the end of 1999, Yeltsin’s popularity had dwindled to two per cent.
Ten years earlier, however, his incessant attacks on the privileges enjoyed by the Communist hierarchy and the hurdles in the path of democratic reforms fell on receptive ears. In the first contested elections to the Russian Federation’s Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin stood against a party candidate and won by a huge majority. Those elections, organized while the USSR was very much intact, were arguably the fairest that Russia has witnessed.
The parliament elected Yeltsin as its chairman, but he had set his eyes on a higher goal, and in mid-1991 he achieved his ambition by becoming Russia’s first directly elected president - a platform that strengthened his ability to undermine Gorbachev, whose elevation to the post of the Soviet Union’s first executive president had not been preceded by a popular vote.
A couple of months later, Yeltsin leapt to his rival’s defence when a conspiracy between members of the party hierarchy, the interior ministry and the KGB led to Gorbachev being taken prisoner. The coup-makers, who ostensibly wanted to reverse the reform process, behaved like nervous clowns. A more ruthless and clearly thought-out operation would, at the very least, have entailed Yeltsin’s neutralization. Instead, although tanks were ordered on to the roads, the soldiers manning them were sufficiently confused by their mission to be obeying the traffic lights.
Muscovites reacted to the show of force by pouring on to the streets, determined to resist the backwards lurch, and buoyed no doubt by Yeltsin’s declaration from atop a T-72 tank: “We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’etat. We appeal to the citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists. The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee [formed by the conspirators] to be illegal.”
Chances are that the coup would have floundered anyhow, but it did wonders for Yeltsin’s image - although he found time for other pursuits during those three crucial days: on one occasion, former foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze found him passed out on the carpet, with an empty bottle of vodka close by. Meanwhile, the coup attempt set the scene for three momentous events: the humiliation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the disbanding of the Communist Party and, within months, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was instrumental in each of them.
The final act involved a meeting between Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia in a hunting lodge near the Polish border, where they arbitrarily chose independence for the USSR’s constituent republics, pre-empting a new union treaty that had been all but finalized. The undemocratic and unconstitutional move was effectively another coup against Gorbachev. The theoretical burial of the Soviet Union was followed by a feast that ended in a drunken brawl.
In the brave new Russia, the sudden removal of state subsidies was accompanied by the sale of state assets at throwaway prices. A handful of enterprising folk grew very, very rich while millions saw their savings rendered worthless: in 1992, inflation went up by 2,000 per cent. These policies inevitably invited parliamentary efforts to overturn them, leading to the 1993 confrontation. It seems perverse for the man who ordered military action against his nation’s parliament to be hailed as the father of Russian democracy, but in some eyes Yeltsin could do no serious wrong: he may have been a bit of a monster, but he was a monster who devoured communism and usually obeyed the west.
So who cares that in 1996, faced with the prospect of defeat in his re-election attempt, he seriously toyed with the idea of dispensing with the democratic process, until the crony capitalists he had nurtured came to his aid? Vladimir Putin, who isn’t always prepared to kowtow to the west, is often accused of possessing an authoritarian streak, but it’s seldom noted that he inherited it from Yeltsin - whose choice of successor, incidentally, was guided by one overriding factor: it had to be someone who would guarantee the outgoing president and his family immunity from prosecution. Yeltsin’s distaste for privileges and corruption had not survived the collapse of communism.
Towards the end of his tenure, a pair of scholars, Professor Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, offered this scathing opinion: “For the first time in recent world history one of the major industrial nations with a highly educated society has dismantled the results of several decades of economic development.” Small wonder, then, that when foreign correspondents took to the streets of Moscow for a vox pop last week, they could hardly find anyone willing to say a kind word about a leader who, whatever Bill Clinton may say, is likely to go down in history as a destroyer rather than a builder. “I think all of Russia is celebrating in silence,” ventured one young man. Gorbachev’s reaction, not surprisingly, was more measured: “A tragic fate,” he noted. “On [his] shoulders rest major events for the good of the country as well as serious mistakes.” Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, echoed many of her ideological peers - and demonstrated her tenuous grasp of recent history - in describing the deceased as a “patriot and liberator” without whom “Russia would have remained in the grip of communism”.
A week ago, the late Russian leader became the first of his ilk since the days of the tsars to be laid to rest following a church service. Perhaps a suitable epitaph, simply and accurately summarizing the complexities of his political career, could have been: “Here lies Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, sober at last...”
SOME of Boris Yeltsin’s worst transgressions barely rated a mention in much of the media coverage that followed his demise last month. The broad tendency was to paint him as Russia’s democratic saviour, a political colossus given to occasional acts of drunken tomfoolery.
In a tribute published in The New York Times last Sunday, Bill Clinton described him as imperfect but “intelligent, passionate, emotional, strong-willed and courageous”, concluding: “Russia and the world were lucky to have him. History will be kind to my friend Boris.”
Among the stock footage favoured by many television networks over the past 10 days is a clip that shows Yeltsin making a remark that prompts an outburst of Clintonian laughter. It dates back to the period when Clinton compared him with Abraham Lincoln, a compliment that coincided with the destruction of Grozny by Russian planes, tanks and missiles.
Apart from the indelible image of Yeltsin berating troops from atop a tank outside the Russian parliament in August 1991, news reports tended to focus on the lighter moments in the former president’s career: Boris the friendly bear dancing on stage with a rock group, Boris the muzhik greeting an unsuspecting woman with a pinch on the backside, Boris the jester pretending to conduct a German orchestra. One almost expected the compilation of clips to be followed by a blurb along the lines of: “I thought Boris Yeltsin was a leading 20th-century political figure, until I discovered Smirnov” (or Stolichnaya, as the case may be).
Hardly any network deemed it worthwhile to visually juxtapose that moment of bravery - or at least bravado - from August 1991, when the coup attempt against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev provided Yeltsin with the opportunity to strike a pose that would be recognized by posterity as his finest hour, with the scene some two years later in exactly the same part of Moscow, when Yeltsin ordered a military assault against the same Russian parliament that stood by him in 1991. This instance of state terrorism enjoyed widespread western approbation at the time and continues to be glossed over in retrospect, with leading American newspapers fallaciously describing it as a successful effort to defeat a communist coup attempt.
In certain other contexts, such as the economic “shock therapy” that reduced a large proportion of Russians to penury, liberal western media organs are now prepared to admit that Yeltsin was seriously mistaken, albeit without acknowledging the folly of their uncritical contemporary support. The blanket stamp of approval was somewhat more difficult in the case of the systematic violation of human rights in Chechnya. But then, what’s indefensible can often be ignored, and perhaps it’s not surprising that images of the havoc wreaked in Grozny and the massacres perpetrated in Chechen villages by ill-trained Russian conscripts have generally been absent from recent coverage of the Yeltsin years.
Boris Yeltsin was an unknown quantity when, shortly after the advent of Gorbachev, he was plucked from Sverdlovsk and installed as the metropolitan party leader in Moscow. His populist approach to the job offered a sharp contrast to the cautious conservatism traditionally associated with party bureaucrats, and Muscovites relished the sight of the local party chief travelling on public transport, publicly sounding off about empty shelves in shops, tracking down hoarders and lamenting the slow pace of perestroika. In the reformist atmosphere introduced by Gorbachev, Yeltsin swept through the Soviet capital like a fresh breeze.
His acrimonious rupture with the Communist Party did his popularity no harm. He seemed to represent the future, whereas much of the party, despite all of Gorbachev’s efforts, still seemed to be mired in the past. If Muscovites could have envisaged at that point the sort of future that lay in wait, their attitude may have changed dramatically - as it eventually did: on the eve of his departure from the Kremlin at the end of 1999, Yeltsin’s popularity had dwindled to two per cent.
Ten years earlier, however, his incessant attacks on the privileges enjoyed by the Communist hierarchy and the hurdles in the path of democratic reforms fell on receptive ears. In the first contested elections to the Russian Federation’s Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin stood against a party candidate and won by a huge majority. Those elections, organized while the USSR was very much intact, were arguably the fairest that Russia has witnessed.
The parliament elected Yeltsin as its chairman, but he had set his eyes on a higher goal, and in mid-1991 he achieved his ambition by becoming Russia’s first directly elected president - a platform that strengthened his ability to undermine Gorbachev, whose elevation to the post of the Soviet Union’s first executive president had not been preceded by a popular vote.
A couple of months later, Yeltsin leapt to his rival’s defence when a conspiracy between members of the party hierarchy, the interior ministry and the KGB led to Gorbachev being taken prisoner. The coup-makers, who ostensibly wanted to reverse the reform process, behaved like nervous clowns. A more ruthless and clearly thought-out operation would, at the very least, have entailed Yeltsin’s neutralization. Instead, although tanks were ordered on to the roads, the soldiers manning them were sufficiently confused by their mission to be obeying the traffic lights.
Muscovites reacted to the show of force by pouring on to the streets, determined to resist the backwards lurch, and buoyed no doubt by Yeltsin’s declaration from atop a T-72 tank: “We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’etat. We appeal to the citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists. The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee [formed by the conspirators] to be illegal.”
Chances are that the coup would have floundered anyhow, but it did wonders for Yeltsin’s image - although he found time for other pursuits during those three crucial days: on one occasion, former foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze found him passed out on the carpet, with an empty bottle of vodka close by. Meanwhile, the coup attempt set the scene for three momentous events: the humiliation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the disbanding of the Communist Party and, within months, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was instrumental in each of them.
The final act involved a meeting between Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia in a hunting lodge near the Polish border, where they arbitrarily chose independence for the USSR’s constituent republics, pre-empting a new union treaty that had been all but finalized. The undemocratic and unconstitutional move was effectively another coup against Gorbachev. The theoretical burial of the Soviet Union was followed by a feast that ended in a drunken brawl.
In the brave new Russia, the sudden removal of state subsidies was accompanied by the sale of state assets at throwaway prices. A handful of enterprising folk grew very, very rich while millions saw their savings rendered worthless: in 1992, inflation went up by 2,000 per cent. These policies inevitably invited parliamentary efforts to overturn them, leading to the 1993 confrontation. It seems perverse for the man who ordered military action against his nation’s parliament to be hailed as the father of Russian democracy, but in some eyes Yeltsin could do no serious wrong: he may have been a bit of a monster, but he was a monster who devoured communism and usually obeyed the west.
So who cares that in 1996, faced with the prospect of defeat in his re-election attempt, he seriously toyed with the idea of dispensing with the democratic process, until the crony capitalists he had nurtured came to his aid? Vladimir Putin, who isn’t always prepared to kowtow to the west, is often accused of possessing an authoritarian streak, but it’s seldom noted that he inherited it from Yeltsin - whose choice of successor, incidentally, was guided by one overriding factor: it had to be someone who would guarantee the outgoing president and his family immunity from prosecution. Yeltsin’s distaste for privileges and corruption had not survived the collapse of communism.
Towards the end of his tenure, a pair of scholars, Professor Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, offered this scathing opinion: “For the first time in recent world history one of the major industrial nations with a highly educated society has dismantled the results of several decades of economic development.” Small wonder, then, that when foreign correspondents took to the streets of Moscow for a vox pop last week, they could hardly find anyone willing to say a kind word about a leader who, whatever Bill Clinton may say, is likely to go down in history as a destroyer rather than a builder. “I think all of Russia is celebrating in silence,” ventured one young man. Gorbachev’s reaction, not surprisingly, was more measured: “A tragic fate,” he noted. “On [his] shoulders rest major events for the good of the country as well as serious mistakes.” Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, echoed many of her ideological peers - and demonstrated her tenuous grasp of recent history - in describing the deceased as a “patriot and liberator” without whom “Russia would have remained in the grip of communism”.
A week ago, the late Russian leader became the first of his ilk since the days of the tsars to be laid to rest following a church service. Perhaps a suitable epitaph, simply and accurately summarizing the complexities of his political career, could have been: “Here lies Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, sober at last...”
Sunday 22 April 2007
Unlike us, the French do it all wrong but still get life so right
From The Sunday Times
April 22, 2007
Unlike us, the French do it all wrong but still get life so right
Simon Jenkins
Both France and Britain are about to change their leaders. The French will do so by ballot, the British by bistro.
The French are staging a raucous two-ring circus to elect their new president, involving a first vote today and another in two weeks’ time. The British have already been told who is to lead them. It was ordained 13 years ago by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the Granita restaurant in Islington, north London. Blair would be prime minister first provided he ensured Brown would follow him.
In never moving Brown from the security of the Treasury and packing the cabinet with wimps and half-wits, Blair has been as good as his word, despite regarding Brown as unworthy of the office. The voters can get stuffed. While France practises the politics of Wilkes, Paine and Mill, Britain borrows from Louis XIV.
Modern elections are festivals of indecent exposure. They display politicians in all their nakedness and in doing so reveal much about the countries they purport to lead. The French election has been no exception. It has not been a pleasant spectacle for Brussels oligarchs or Americans who like to lump all Europeans together as homogeneous. It has peeled away the skin and shown France worried, vulnerable, proud, vital, stylish and unlike anywhere else — in other words, French.
Two years ago the French (and the Dutch) did Europe a signal service by voting against a new European constitution. They thereby relieved Britain of the necessity of doing the same. We forget how those referendums shattered Labour’s establishment. Peter Hain, now running for Labour’s deputy leadership, deceitfully called the new constitution merely “a tidying up operation”. Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and Jack Straw sat around after the French vote like Roman cardinals contemplating Luther’s Reformation, glumly demanding a “period of sober reflection”. Jos� Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, declared a “risk of contagion” across Europe if the referendums continued. The French and Dutch should vote again and do so “until they get it right”. Only in Brussels is democracy considered a disease.
The French vote was, of course, peculiar. The vote against the new constitution was not (as it would have been in Britain) because it was too centralist and corporatist. The French “no” lobby’s case was that Europe was becoming too liberal, too open-market and thus threatening France’s cartelised public sector and restrictive labour laws. Worse, an expanded Europe would put French jobs at the mercy of east Europeans. France, co-founder of the new Europe, now rejected its pan-Europeanism. It was a reactionary vote but it worked. Indeed it may be called in aid again if the Anglo-German plan to revive the constitution as “just a treaty” goes ahead. Blair, eager for some European credentials before he retires, will argue that a treaty would need no referendums and can be slipped through before Brown takes over. Of course Europe needs a new constitution/ treaty, but not this one and not without a vote.
A similar chauvinism has been reflected in the election campaign. The contest between Nicolas Sarkozy and S�golãne Royal has only superficially displayed the new politics, where personality and vision are all and policy programmes unimportant. The right-wing Sarkozy’s desire to “get France back to work” is closest to Britain’s Thatcherite consensus, but Thatcherism is not something he would dare advocate. The left-wing Royal is corporatist, conservative and protectionist. She is pledged to maintain the 35-hour week, state benefits and guarantee employment and housing tenure, despite their contribution to a devastating 22% youth unemployment rate.
Both these candidates, along with the centrist François Bayrou, share a nationalism which, to outsiders, seems old-fashioned and Gaullist. Nervous about immigration, passionate for the public sector and defensive of the state, they could not be farther from the reform programmes being sought in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.
None of them would suggest opening French agriculture to world competition. None would hint at multiculturalism in a country whose southern shores are besieged by Muslim and north African migrants. None would attack the scale of the public sector, which still owns or controls all public utilities and has half of all adults dependent on it. One of Sarkozy’s final rallies was in a boiler-making plant where he pledged to protect French manufacturing against foreign competition.
This conservatism evokes the derision of Britons eager to repay the smugness that France hurled at us during the horrors of the 1970s. They point to the 30,000 French who pour into Britain looking for work each year, drawn by a more open and dynamic economy. It takes two days to set up a company in Britain, three months in France. From the Huguenots and the Orl�anists to the Communards and the resistance, Britain has long been accustomed to accepting refugees from France’s political and military disasters. Today critics cite French businessmen building factories in Kent. They see Paris declining into a sort of Venice on dry land, industries awash in subsidies and stuck in the doldrums, French culture perpetually “en crise”.
Yet such derision rarely turns over the coin. It does not mention that more Britons now migrate to France than vice-versa (42,000 in 2005). They are drawn by the quality of life that attracts 7.3m British holidaymakers a year and 50,000 British second-home owners. There are few French pleasure seekers pouring the other way. France takes seriously the protection of its urban and rural environment. It values civic life: witness the cleanliness, security and confidence of municipalities there compared with Britain’s. Public services work. France’s trains run far and fast. Towns and cities, parks and museums are beautiful — as are even motorway service stations. The public realm in France has taste and bravura. In Britain it is grotty, largely because it is under the aegis of Whitehall and Westminster.
Europeans used to fight to get into Britain’s NHS hospitals. Not any more. Today the flight from these demoralised, MRSA-ridden places to France’s immaculate hospitals is becoming a flood. When last year Jacques Chirac warned that to pursue British policies risked having to accept Britain’s quality of life, his audience laughed. The risk was unthinkable.
A recent study of Anglo-French relations, That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, delighted in the implacable polarity of these two cultures. It stretches back and forward through centuries of conflict to such piquant contrasts as the British official complaining that something “might work in theory but not in practice” while a French counterpart complains that “it might work in practice but not in theory”. Did not Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister inform the baffled Jim Hacker that Britain’s nuclear missiles were targeted not on Moscow but on Paris? Have not the Royal Navy’s bases always faced the French coast and not Germany or the Atlantic?
This is all good clean fun. Where it becomes less attractive is when British comment on other countries takes as its basic premise that they would be better off if only they were run likeSite is currently unavailable .Please come back later
April 22, 2007
Unlike us, the French do it all wrong but still get life so right
Simon Jenkins
Both France and Britain are about to change their leaders. The French will do so by ballot, the British by bistro.
The French are staging a raucous two-ring circus to elect their new president, involving a first vote today and another in two weeks’ time. The British have already been told who is to lead them. It was ordained 13 years ago by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the Granita restaurant in Islington, north London. Blair would be prime minister first provided he ensured Brown would follow him.
In never moving Brown from the security of the Treasury and packing the cabinet with wimps and half-wits, Blair has been as good as his word, despite regarding Brown as unworthy of the office. The voters can get stuffed. While France practises the politics of Wilkes, Paine and Mill, Britain borrows from Louis XIV.
Modern elections are festivals of indecent exposure. They display politicians in all their nakedness and in doing so reveal much about the countries they purport to lead. The French election has been no exception. It has not been a pleasant spectacle for Brussels oligarchs or Americans who like to lump all Europeans together as homogeneous. It has peeled away the skin and shown France worried, vulnerable, proud, vital, stylish and unlike anywhere else — in other words, French.
Two years ago the French (and the Dutch) did Europe a signal service by voting against a new European constitution. They thereby relieved Britain of the necessity of doing the same. We forget how those referendums shattered Labour’s establishment. Peter Hain, now running for Labour’s deputy leadership, deceitfully called the new constitution merely “a tidying up operation”. Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and Jack Straw sat around after the French vote like Roman cardinals contemplating Luther’s Reformation, glumly demanding a “period of sober reflection”. Jos� Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, declared a “risk of contagion” across Europe if the referendums continued. The French and Dutch should vote again and do so “until they get it right”. Only in Brussels is democracy considered a disease.
The French vote was, of course, peculiar. The vote against the new constitution was not (as it would have been in Britain) because it was too centralist and corporatist. The French “no” lobby’s case was that Europe was becoming too liberal, too open-market and thus threatening France’s cartelised public sector and restrictive labour laws. Worse, an expanded Europe would put French jobs at the mercy of east Europeans. France, co-founder of the new Europe, now rejected its pan-Europeanism. It was a reactionary vote but it worked. Indeed it may be called in aid again if the Anglo-German plan to revive the constitution as “just a treaty” goes ahead. Blair, eager for some European credentials before he retires, will argue that a treaty would need no referendums and can be slipped through before Brown takes over. Of course Europe needs a new constitution/ treaty, but not this one and not without a vote.
A similar chauvinism has been reflected in the election campaign. The contest between Nicolas Sarkozy and S�golãne Royal has only superficially displayed the new politics, where personality and vision are all and policy programmes unimportant. The right-wing Sarkozy’s desire to “get France back to work” is closest to Britain’s Thatcherite consensus, but Thatcherism is not something he would dare advocate. The left-wing Royal is corporatist, conservative and protectionist. She is pledged to maintain the 35-hour week, state benefits and guarantee employment and housing tenure, despite their contribution to a devastating 22% youth unemployment rate.
Both these candidates, along with the centrist François Bayrou, share a nationalism which, to outsiders, seems old-fashioned and Gaullist. Nervous about immigration, passionate for the public sector and defensive of the state, they could not be farther from the reform programmes being sought in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.
None of them would suggest opening French agriculture to world competition. None would hint at multiculturalism in a country whose southern shores are besieged by Muslim and north African migrants. None would attack the scale of the public sector, which still owns or controls all public utilities and has half of all adults dependent on it. One of Sarkozy’s final rallies was in a boiler-making plant where he pledged to protect French manufacturing against foreign competition.
This conservatism evokes the derision of Britons eager to repay the smugness that France hurled at us during the horrors of the 1970s. They point to the 30,000 French who pour into Britain looking for work each year, drawn by a more open and dynamic economy. It takes two days to set up a company in Britain, three months in France. From the Huguenots and the Orl�anists to the Communards and the resistance, Britain has long been accustomed to accepting refugees from France’s political and military disasters. Today critics cite French businessmen building factories in Kent. They see Paris declining into a sort of Venice on dry land, industries awash in subsidies and stuck in the doldrums, French culture perpetually “en crise”.
Yet such derision rarely turns over the coin. It does not mention that more Britons now migrate to France than vice-versa (42,000 in 2005). They are drawn by the quality of life that attracts 7.3m British holidaymakers a year and 50,000 British second-home owners. There are few French pleasure seekers pouring the other way. France takes seriously the protection of its urban and rural environment. It values civic life: witness the cleanliness, security and confidence of municipalities there compared with Britain’s. Public services work. France’s trains run far and fast. Towns and cities, parks and museums are beautiful — as are even motorway service stations. The public realm in France has taste and bravura. In Britain it is grotty, largely because it is under the aegis of Whitehall and Westminster.
Europeans used to fight to get into Britain’s NHS hospitals. Not any more. Today the flight from these demoralised, MRSA-ridden places to France’s immaculate hospitals is becoming a flood. When last year Jacques Chirac warned that to pursue British policies risked having to accept Britain’s quality of life, his audience laughed. The risk was unthinkable.
A recent study of Anglo-French relations, That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, delighted in the implacable polarity of these two cultures. It stretches back and forward through centuries of conflict to such piquant contrasts as the British official complaining that something “might work in theory but not in practice” while a French counterpart complains that “it might work in practice but not in theory”. Did not Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister inform the baffled Jim Hacker that Britain’s nuclear missiles were targeted not on Moscow but on Paris? Have not the Royal Navy’s bases always faced the French coast and not Germany or the Atlantic?
This is all good clean fun. Where it becomes less attractive is when British comment on other countries takes as its basic premise that they would be better off if only they were run likeSite is currently unavailable .Please come back later
Wednesday 18 April 2007
PowerPointless
New research has found that PowerPoint, the ubiquitous computer software for business presentations, is a waste of time. Martin Waller welcomes its demise, while Michael Gove praises the power of oratory
At some stage, around the 38th minute, you were tempted to pinch yourself to ensure that you were still awake, and if not, that you had not slipped off into some hell devised solely for corporate man.
“We are DETERMINED . . . that we OPERATE . . . one of the most ACTIVE . . . and CUSTOMER-ORIENTED . . . delivery systems . . . for HIGH-VALUE fast-moving consumer goods . . . and that we RETAIN . . . a COMMANDING lead . . . over our COMPETITORS . . .”
The speaker was one of our most respected industrialists, whom I had better not name. The year was some time in the early 1990s. The style of delivery was more suited to a mass rally for a Third World dictator. The event was the presentation of his organisation’s annual financial results.
The organisation makes . . . again, shall we just say the sort of consumer goods you and I use every day. We had already LEARNT, as evidenced by an eye-straining array of coloured graphics, that the MARGINS in the grommets division had been LEVERAGED by a FULL THREE PERCENTAGE POINTS, while TURNOVER in bent widgets . . .
Enough. The whole bloody thing took up 55 minutes of my life, as I can testify, because my watch was easily the most fascinating object in the room. Every single utterance, every boast, every statistic, was accompanied on the screen behind him with a written repetition on his PowerPoint (the curse of business presentations launched by Microsoft in 1988).
After a cursory question and answer session — what more could even the most dedicated fact junkie possibly want to know? — we filed away, shellshocked, to be handed a copy of said presentation, in case any tiny aspect, any inessential detail, any jot and tittle of his organisation’s performance over the past year, had eluded us.
It was all made possible by what was then the latest technology, the PowerPoint presentation. It is an unacknowledged rule of emerging technology that the easier you make it to generate product, the more rubbish gets generated by said technology.
In the days when faxes were quite hard to set up, with a funny revolving roller that the paper had to be fixed around, you sent only essential faxes. Today, faxes are so easy to send that no one uses them any more. This is because the fax machine is permanently clogged up. And anyway, everyone uses e-mails and attachments.
Now e-mails are so easy, so omnipresent, that . . . well, you’ll have seen the results in your e-mail box. And don’t get me started on mobile phones.
It was the sheer ease of filling up his PowerPoint with so many facts and figures that allowed Sir An . . . our man to go on, at quite such a length, about the margins in the grommet division etc. Had he been restricted to pen and paper, or to those flip-over charts beloved of polytechnic lecturers, he would have been severely curtailed. The sheer effort of filling in each page, even if carried out in some basement by a team of corporate slaves, would have required a shorter version. And his presentation would in any event have been mercifully invisible to at least half his audience.
Instead he, or more likely one of the slaves, entered it all into Microsoft Windows with full-colour graphics so it could be regurgitated at length on a huge screen.
Now, research at an Australian university has proved that PowerPoint and the human animal are not the best of collaborators. Apparently, evolving on the savannah on a diet of half-rotted ox and at constant risk from sabre-toothed tigers did not provide us with brains properly wired to read and take in information that comes at you in a pincer movement, as the spoken word and as a series of letters, lines and graphs on a screen. It is the end, they say, for the PowerPoint.
The research, from the University of New South Wales, suggests that we process information best in verbal or written form, but not in both simultaneously. As so often, it has taken the best efforts of brainy academics to prove what most of us instinctively knew. Trying to follow what someone is saying while watching the same words on a screen is the equivalent of riding a bicycle along a crowded train. It offers the appearance of making extra progress but is actually rather impractical.
For our ape-like ancestors, it was either chowing down on the ox or watching for the sabre-tooth. Multitasking was inadvisable. This may even be why we evolved in groups, with tasks shared out. That or the sheer boringness of the average savannah.
One City communications specialist, who was untypically unwilling to be quoted by name, probably because his clients still insist on PowerPoint presentations, puts it thus: “It provides a comforter, really. It would be more sensible just to talk.
“Look at David Cameron, when he first became leader of the Tory Party. He just got up on stage and spoke beautifully, without any notes whatsoever. But not everyone can do that. With PowerPoint, people feel they can get away with practising less, if they have the words in front of them.”
The presentation also encourages screens full of as many words or data as can be crammed on, without any chance that they can all be appreciated or even read in time. Advertisers learnt a long time ago that the longer and more boring their ads, the less they worked. Corporate man, probably because he evolved in an environment dominated by meaningless management buzz-words and claptrap, has never quite grasped this.
Perhaps the only legitimate use is in the production of a series of paper pages as an aide memoire to a proper presentation or for a one-to-one briefing. This has occasioned an odd linguistic shift. “Now, if you will just have a look at the next slide.” No, it’s a piece of paper. Been around for centuries, you know.
Even here, there are pitfalls. I recall many years ago being deeply impressed at being invited to a private room at an expensive London hotel to meet another distinguished industrialist. Now, when two people are gathered together to break bread, there is a tacit assumption that this is an occasion for social intercourse, the equivalent of our primate ancestors huddled together picking off one another’s ticks. And we had not previously met.
As the tricolore salad was cleared away, his barely touched, I realised why he had been so keen on a private room. “I wonder,” he said, removing from his briefcase a familiar plastic-fronted folder, “if I could just show you how we have leveraged the margins at our grommets division . . .”
Professor John Sweller, of the University of New South Wales, says: “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched.” If only.
— Martin Waller
Why speechmaking is still the way to persuade
In the latest issue of The Spectator, the magazine’s political editor Fraser Nelson describes being invited to a “wonderfully conspiratorial” dinner at a London hotel by the Home Secretary. Nelson is properly circumspect, as a lobby correspondent should be, about what went on. But he does reveal that the evening was blighted by the presence of “the most unwelcome guest of all” — an overhead projector.
There are few words that have a greater capacity to chill than “I’ll just take you through this on PowerPoint” and thSite is currently unavailable .Please come back later
At some stage, around the 38th minute, you were tempted to pinch yourself to ensure that you were still awake, and if not, that you had not slipped off into some hell devised solely for corporate man.
“We are DETERMINED . . . that we OPERATE . . . one of the most ACTIVE . . . and CUSTOMER-ORIENTED . . . delivery systems . . . for HIGH-VALUE fast-moving consumer goods . . . and that we RETAIN . . . a COMMANDING lead . . . over our COMPETITORS . . .”
The speaker was one of our most respected industrialists, whom I had better not name. The year was some time in the early 1990s. The style of delivery was more suited to a mass rally for a Third World dictator. The event was the presentation of his organisation’s annual financial results.
The organisation makes . . . again, shall we just say the sort of consumer goods you and I use every day. We had already LEARNT, as evidenced by an eye-straining array of coloured graphics, that the MARGINS in the grommets division had been LEVERAGED by a FULL THREE PERCENTAGE POINTS, while TURNOVER in bent widgets . . .
Enough. The whole bloody thing took up 55 minutes of my life, as I can testify, because my watch was easily the most fascinating object in the room. Every single utterance, every boast, every statistic, was accompanied on the screen behind him with a written repetition on his PowerPoint (the curse of business presentations launched by Microsoft in 1988).
After a cursory question and answer session — what more could even the most dedicated fact junkie possibly want to know? — we filed away, shellshocked, to be handed a copy of said presentation, in case any tiny aspect, any inessential detail, any jot and tittle of his organisation’s performance over the past year, had eluded us.
It was all made possible by what was then the latest technology, the PowerPoint presentation. It is an unacknowledged rule of emerging technology that the easier you make it to generate product, the more rubbish gets generated by said technology.
In the days when faxes were quite hard to set up, with a funny revolving roller that the paper had to be fixed around, you sent only essential faxes. Today, faxes are so easy to send that no one uses them any more. This is because the fax machine is permanently clogged up. And anyway, everyone uses e-mails and attachments.
Now e-mails are so easy, so omnipresent, that . . . well, you’ll have seen the results in your e-mail box. And don’t get me started on mobile phones.
It was the sheer ease of filling up his PowerPoint with so many facts and figures that allowed Sir An . . . our man to go on, at quite such a length, about the margins in the grommet division etc. Had he been restricted to pen and paper, or to those flip-over charts beloved of polytechnic lecturers, he would have been severely curtailed. The sheer effort of filling in each page, even if carried out in some basement by a team of corporate slaves, would have required a shorter version. And his presentation would in any event have been mercifully invisible to at least half his audience.
Instead he, or more likely one of the slaves, entered it all into Microsoft Windows with full-colour graphics so it could be regurgitated at length on a huge screen.
Now, research at an Australian university has proved that PowerPoint and the human animal are not the best of collaborators. Apparently, evolving on the savannah on a diet of half-rotted ox and at constant risk from sabre-toothed tigers did not provide us with brains properly wired to read and take in information that comes at you in a pincer movement, as the spoken word and as a series of letters, lines and graphs on a screen. It is the end, they say, for the PowerPoint.
The research, from the University of New South Wales, suggests that we process information best in verbal or written form, but not in both simultaneously. As so often, it has taken the best efforts of brainy academics to prove what most of us instinctively knew. Trying to follow what someone is saying while watching the same words on a screen is the equivalent of riding a bicycle along a crowded train. It offers the appearance of making extra progress but is actually rather impractical.
For our ape-like ancestors, it was either chowing down on the ox or watching for the sabre-tooth. Multitasking was inadvisable. This may even be why we evolved in groups, with tasks shared out. That or the sheer boringness of the average savannah.
One City communications specialist, who was untypically unwilling to be quoted by name, probably because his clients still insist on PowerPoint presentations, puts it thus: “It provides a comforter, really. It would be more sensible just to talk.
“Look at David Cameron, when he first became leader of the Tory Party. He just got up on stage and spoke beautifully, without any notes whatsoever. But not everyone can do that. With PowerPoint, people feel they can get away with practising less, if they have the words in front of them.”
The presentation also encourages screens full of as many words or data as can be crammed on, without any chance that they can all be appreciated or even read in time. Advertisers learnt a long time ago that the longer and more boring their ads, the less they worked. Corporate man, probably because he evolved in an environment dominated by meaningless management buzz-words and claptrap, has never quite grasped this.
Perhaps the only legitimate use is in the production of a series of paper pages as an aide memoire to a proper presentation or for a one-to-one briefing. This has occasioned an odd linguistic shift. “Now, if you will just have a look at the next slide.” No, it’s a piece of paper. Been around for centuries, you know.
Even here, there are pitfalls. I recall many years ago being deeply impressed at being invited to a private room at an expensive London hotel to meet another distinguished industrialist. Now, when two people are gathered together to break bread, there is a tacit assumption that this is an occasion for social intercourse, the equivalent of our primate ancestors huddled together picking off one another’s ticks. And we had not previously met.
As the tricolore salad was cleared away, his barely touched, I realised why he had been so keen on a private room. “I wonder,” he said, removing from his briefcase a familiar plastic-fronted folder, “if I could just show you how we have leveraged the margins at our grommets division . . .”
Professor John Sweller, of the University of New South Wales, says: “The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched.” If only.
— Martin Waller
Why speechmaking is still the way to persuade
In the latest issue of The Spectator, the magazine’s political editor Fraser Nelson describes being invited to a “wonderfully conspiratorial” dinner at a London hotel by the Home Secretary. Nelson is properly circumspect, as a lobby correspondent should be, about what went on. But he does reveal that the evening was blighted by the presence of “the most unwelcome guest of all” — an overhead projector.
There are few words that have a greater capacity to chill than “I’ll just take you through this on PowerPoint” and thSite is currently unavailable .Please come back later
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