Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain
A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.
No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.
"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."
Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.
A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.
The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.
Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.
Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.
With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.
These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.
Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.
As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.
“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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Tuesday 14 June 2011
Friday 10 June 2011
The song No Charge reminds us that Britain used to be less greedy
Those who believe the myth that 1970s Britain was 'the sick man of Europe' forget how progressive the decade was
Neil Clark
Neil Clark
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 10.30 BST
It's regarded by some as one of the slushiest No 1 records of all time. It's exactly 35 years ago this week that No Charge, sung by the Canadian artist JJ Barrie, got to No 1 in the British pop charts – and thanks to the wonders of BBC4, who are repeating Top of the Pops shows from 1976 on a weekly basis, we'll all be able to see it performed on our television screens next Monday.
Some won't be looking forward to it too much – in his Guardian article of a week ago, Alexis Petridis claimed that 1976 was the worst year for pop music ever.
But leaving aside debates about musical merit, what watching the repeats of Top of the Pops and other programmes from the same era on channels such as Yesterday, ITV3 and ITV4 shows us is what a less commercialised age the pre-Thatcherite 1970s were.
No Charge might be considered over-sentimental by some, but it is also a powerful critique of the mentality of putting a dollar sign on things we should be doing for free.
It's extremely unlikely that such a song would be released in the uber-capitalist Britain of today, let alone get to No 1. But in the progressive, left-leaning mid-1970s, it was always likely to be a hit.
Thanks to the glories of the "market economy", many things which were free, or at least very cheap, 35 years ago, cost a small fortune today. In 1976 you didn't have to book up months in advance to find a reasonable train fare from London to Liverpool, you just turned up on the day. Utility bills were not something to be feared in the days when publicly owned bodies and not profit-hungry private companies provided your electricity, gas and water.
Students going on to higher education did not have to worry about building up huge debts in order to pursue their studies. Neither did old people have to worry about selling their homes in order to finance going into care. And in those pre-Sky days, all the best sports – including live coverage of England's summer Test match series – could be watched on television for the very modest cost of the licence fee.
In short, in the social democratic Britain of the 1970s, No Charge was not just the name of a No 1 hit record, it summed up the ethos of the era – an era in which the interests of people came before corporate profits.
This aspect of the 1970s is often lost in accounts of the period. The dominant neoliberal narrative casts 1970s Britain as the "sick man of Europe" – a country rescued from the horrors of collectivism by the great saviour Margaret Thatcher. But even the liberal left have bought in to large parts of this rightwing myth, and have failed to stick up for the 1970s as much as they should. The fact that Britain went to the IMF in the autumn of 1976 is taken as proof that the postwar settlement had failed – even Denis Healey, chancellor at the time, has admitted: "We didn't really need the money at all."
Watching television programmes of the 1970s reminds us of the anti-capitalist values which were once mainstream. The year that No Charge got to No 1 saw the television debut of James Mitchell's drama series, When the Boat Comes In, which tells the story of trade union activist and strike organiser Jack Ford. The Onedin Line, currently being re-shown on the Yesterday channel, highlighted the greed of unscrupulous ship-owners and the terrible conditions that sailors had to endure in the 19th century. Upstairs Downstairs, another 70s classic being repeated on ITV3, showed how those "downstairs" saw their position improve in the 20th century. In Poldark, the title character takes the side of the poor against the greedy landowner and banker George Warleggan.
Since the days when those programmes were screened, we've seen the money-grabbing values of the City and Wall Street permeate all aspects of our lives. Who would have thought that water – which falls out of the sky for free – would become a tradable commodity, or that care homes would be owned by City investors?
While in the summer of 1976 we were listening to No Charge and enjoying the lowest levels of inequality in our history, in the grossly unequal Britain of June 2011, we're tuning into The Apprentice. The proto-Thatcherite little boy in No Charge – who wants to bill his mum $5 for "mowin the lawn" and $1 for "takin out the trash" – rightly gets corrected: today he'd probably be lauded as a brilliant up-and-coming entrepreneur.
Neoliberals want us to believe that "market forces" are the only show in town. But watching 1970s television programmes gives us a window into a world where things were different. It's not possible to turn the clock back to 1976, but we can make the title of JJ Barrie's No 1 hit record the slogan for a better and less commercialised Britain.
Neil Clark
Neil Clark
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 10.30 BST
It's regarded by some as one of the slushiest No 1 records of all time. It's exactly 35 years ago this week that No Charge, sung by the Canadian artist JJ Barrie, got to No 1 in the British pop charts – and thanks to the wonders of BBC4, who are repeating Top of the Pops shows from 1976 on a weekly basis, we'll all be able to see it performed on our television screens next Monday.
Some won't be looking forward to it too much – in his Guardian article of a week ago, Alexis Petridis claimed that 1976 was the worst year for pop music ever.
But leaving aside debates about musical merit, what watching the repeats of Top of the Pops and other programmes from the same era on channels such as Yesterday, ITV3 and ITV4 shows us is what a less commercialised age the pre-Thatcherite 1970s were.
No Charge might be considered over-sentimental by some, but it is also a powerful critique of the mentality of putting a dollar sign on things we should be doing for free.
It's extremely unlikely that such a song would be released in the uber-capitalist Britain of today, let alone get to No 1. But in the progressive, left-leaning mid-1970s, it was always likely to be a hit.
Thanks to the glories of the "market economy", many things which were free, or at least very cheap, 35 years ago, cost a small fortune today. In 1976 you didn't have to book up months in advance to find a reasonable train fare from London to Liverpool, you just turned up on the day. Utility bills were not something to be feared in the days when publicly owned bodies and not profit-hungry private companies provided your electricity, gas and water.
Students going on to higher education did not have to worry about building up huge debts in order to pursue their studies. Neither did old people have to worry about selling their homes in order to finance going into care. And in those pre-Sky days, all the best sports – including live coverage of England's summer Test match series – could be watched on television for the very modest cost of the licence fee.
In short, in the social democratic Britain of the 1970s, No Charge was not just the name of a No 1 hit record, it summed up the ethos of the era – an era in which the interests of people came before corporate profits.
This aspect of the 1970s is often lost in accounts of the period. The dominant neoliberal narrative casts 1970s Britain as the "sick man of Europe" – a country rescued from the horrors of collectivism by the great saviour Margaret Thatcher. But even the liberal left have bought in to large parts of this rightwing myth, and have failed to stick up for the 1970s as much as they should. The fact that Britain went to the IMF in the autumn of 1976 is taken as proof that the postwar settlement had failed – even Denis Healey, chancellor at the time, has admitted: "We didn't really need the money at all."
Watching television programmes of the 1970s reminds us of the anti-capitalist values which were once mainstream. The year that No Charge got to No 1 saw the television debut of James Mitchell's drama series, When the Boat Comes In, which tells the story of trade union activist and strike organiser Jack Ford. The Onedin Line, currently being re-shown on the Yesterday channel, highlighted the greed of unscrupulous ship-owners and the terrible conditions that sailors had to endure in the 19th century. Upstairs Downstairs, another 70s classic being repeated on ITV3, showed how those "downstairs" saw their position improve in the 20th century. In Poldark, the title character takes the side of the poor against the greedy landowner and banker George Warleggan.
Since the days when those programmes were screened, we've seen the money-grabbing values of the City and Wall Street permeate all aspects of our lives. Who would have thought that water – which falls out of the sky for free – would become a tradable commodity, or that care homes would be owned by City investors?
While in the summer of 1976 we were listening to No Charge and enjoying the lowest levels of inequality in our history, in the grossly unequal Britain of June 2011, we're tuning into The Apprentice. The proto-Thatcherite little boy in No Charge – who wants to bill his mum $5 for "mowin the lawn" and $1 for "takin out the trash" – rightly gets corrected: today he'd probably be lauded as a brilliant up-and-coming entrepreneur.
Neoliberals want us to believe that "market forces" are the only show in town. But watching 1970s television programmes gives us a window into a world where things were different. It's not possible to turn the clock back to 1976, but we can make the title of JJ Barrie's No 1 hit record the slogan for a better and less commercialised Britain.
What I would do as head of the IMF
What I would do as head of the IMF
My leadership challenge aims to expose the IMF's policy of imposing brutal cuts while protecting indebted states' creditors
Aurelie
Aurélie Trouvé
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 13.42 BST
larger | smaller
IMF ireland
Protesters outside parliament in Dublin in December last year. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
Today is the deadline for nominations in the race for the IMF leadership, and I have put forward a radically alternative candidate to do the job: me.
I am a French economics lecturer and have been the co-chair of the association Attac, an international organisation and network in the global justice movement, for four years. Attac is present in more than 40 countries worldwide, and has tens of thousands of adherents. Founded in France in 1998 by dozens of other associations, unions and alternative media, it has been a mainstay of the construction of the World Social Forum. We are a popular education movement that is action-oriented, and we denounce the mechanisms of neoliberalism while proposing tangible alternatives to both disarm the big world of finances and build an economy at the service of wealth-sharing and the preservation of our planet.
My leadership challeng aims to expose the current and past policies of the IMF, which are to unconditionally defend the interests of the creditors of indebted states while imposing brutal plans of social austerity (look at the state of Hungary, Ukraine and Latvia in 2008, Iceland in 2009, and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in 2010). Since the devastation brought by the financial crisis in 2008, neither the G20 nor the IMF or other international institutions have taken any steps to significantly reduce the volatility of international financial markets. Speculation is now raging, both on commodities and the securities of public debts.
With the above with mind, here are five crucial steps to tackle the crisis which I would put forward, should I become head of the IMF:
• I would put a stop to all austerity plans, and establish a tax on financial transactions, as well as implementing a strict regulation of transactions on derivatives products.
• I would put forward the co-ordination of economic policies at the international level, bringing countries with excessive imbalances (China, Germany, Japan on the side of those with a surplus, and the US on the side of countries with a deficit) to rebalance themselves in a co-ordinated manner, through adjustments in exchange rates coupled with active fiscal and wage policies.
• I would push for the development of an international currency based on a basket of the major currencies, as an alternative to the dollar.
• I would guarantee special drawing rights (an international reserve asset created by the IMF to supplement its member countries' official reserves) to help countries in difficulty during the period leading to the reduction of global imbalances, or during unexpected economic shocks.
• I would work towards democratising the IMF by integrating it to the UN system, with one vote for each of the 187 IMF member countries. It is about time to put an end to the exclusive ruling power of the biggest economies.
My leadership challenge aims to expose the IMF's policy of imposing brutal cuts while protecting indebted states' creditors
Aurelie
Aurélie Trouvé
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 13.42 BST
larger | smaller
IMF ireland
Protesters outside parliament in Dublin in December last year. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
Today is the deadline for nominations in the race for the IMF leadership, and I have put forward a radically alternative candidate to do the job: me.
I am a French economics lecturer and have been the co-chair of the association Attac, an international organisation and network in the global justice movement, for four years. Attac is present in more than 40 countries worldwide, and has tens of thousands of adherents. Founded in France in 1998 by dozens of other associations, unions and alternative media, it has been a mainstay of the construction of the World Social Forum. We are a popular education movement that is action-oriented, and we denounce the mechanisms of neoliberalism while proposing tangible alternatives to both disarm the big world of finances and build an economy at the service of wealth-sharing and the preservation of our planet.
My leadership challeng aims to expose the current and past policies of the IMF, which are to unconditionally defend the interests of the creditors of indebted states while imposing brutal plans of social austerity (look at the state of Hungary, Ukraine and Latvia in 2008, Iceland in 2009, and Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland in 2010). Since the devastation brought by the financial crisis in 2008, neither the G20 nor the IMF or other international institutions have taken any steps to significantly reduce the volatility of international financial markets. Speculation is now raging, both on commodities and the securities of public debts.
With the above with mind, here are five crucial steps to tackle the crisis which I would put forward, should I become head of the IMF:
• I would put a stop to all austerity plans, and establish a tax on financial transactions, as well as implementing a strict regulation of transactions on derivatives products.
• I would put forward the co-ordination of economic policies at the international level, bringing countries with excessive imbalances (China, Germany, Japan on the side of those with a surplus, and the US on the side of countries with a deficit) to rebalance themselves in a co-ordinated manner, through adjustments in exchange rates coupled with active fiscal and wage policies.
• I would push for the development of an international currency based on a basket of the major currencies, as an alternative to the dollar.
• I would guarantee special drawing rights (an international reserve asset created by the IMF to supplement its member countries' official reserves) to help countries in difficulty during the period leading to the reduction of global imbalances, or during unexpected economic shocks.
• I would work towards democratising the IMF by integrating it to the UN system, with one vote for each of the 187 IMF member countries. It is about time to put an end to the exclusive ruling power of the biggest economies.
Is Monogamy Obsolete? New Books Challenge Our Ideas of Fidelity
by Jessica Bennett
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am
Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.
As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."
The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."
But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.
Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."
Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships
Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH
It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)
“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”
There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."
She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."
And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”
Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am
Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.
As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."
The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."
But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.
Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."
Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships
Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH
It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)
“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”
There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."
She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."
And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”
Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.
Wednesday 8 June 2011
Cost Benefit Analysis
An Answer To The Meaning of Life
Love, economists have discovered, is depreciating rapidly. On current trends, it is expected to fall by £1.78 per passion-hour between now and 2030...
George Monbiot
Love, economists have discovered, is depreciating rapidly. On current trends, it is expected to fall by £1.78 per passion-hour between now and 2030. The opportunity cost of a kiss foregone has declined by £0.36 since 1988. By 2050 the net present value of a night under the stars could be as little as £56.13. This reduction in the true value of love, they warn, could inflict serious economic damage.
None of that is true, but it’s not far off. Love is one of the few natural blessings which has yet to be fully costed and commodified. They’re probably working on it now.
Under the last government, the Department for Transport announced that it had discovered “the real value of time”. Here’s the surreal sentence in which this bombshell was dropped:
“Forecast growth in the real value of time is shown in Table 3.”(1)
Last week the Department for Environment announced the results of its National Ecosystem Assessment, a massive exercise involving 500 experts. The assessment, it tells us, establishes “the true value of nature … for the very first time.”(2) If you thought the true value of nature was the wonder and delight it invoked, you’re wrong. It turns out that it’s a figure with a pound sign on the front. All that remains is for the Cabinet Office to tell us the true value of love and the price of society, and we’ll have a single figure for the meaning of life.
The government has not yet produced one number for “the true value of nature”, but its scientists have costed some of the assets that will one day enable this magical synthesis to be achieved. The assessment has produced figures, for example, for the value of green spaces to human well-being. If we look after them well, our parks and greens will enhance our well-being to the tune of £290 per household per year in 2060(3).
How do they calculate these values? The report tells us that the “ecosystem services” it assesses include “recreation, health and solace”, and natural spaces “in which our culture finds its roots and sense of place” (4). These must be taken into account when costing “shared social value”. Shared social value arises from developing “a sense of purpose”, and being “able to achieve important personal goals and participate in society.” It is enhanced by “supportive personal relationships” and “strong and inclusive communities.”(5) These are among the benefits which the experts claim to be costing.
The exercise is well-intentioned. The environment department rightly points out that businesses and politicians ignore the uncosted damage their decisions might inflict on the natural world and human welfare. It seeks to address this oversight by showing that “there are real economic reasons for looking after nature.”(6) But there are two big problems.
The first is that this assessment is total nonsense, pure reductionist gobbledegook, dressed up in the language of objectivity and reason, but ascribing prices to emotional responses: prices, which, for all the high-falutin’ language it uses, can only be arbitrary. It has been constructed by people who feel safe only with numbers, who must drag the whole world into their comfort zone in order to feel that they have it under control. The graphics used by the assessment are telling: they portray the connections between people and nature as interlocking cogs(7). It’s as clear a warning as we could take that this is an almost-comical attempt to force both nature and human emotion into a linear, mechanistic vision.
The second problem is that it delivers the natural world into the hands of those who would destroy it. Picture, for example, a planning enquiry for an opencast coal mine. The public benefits arising from the forests and meadows it will destroy have been costed at £1m per year. The income from opening the mine will be £10m per year. No further argument needs to be made. The coal mine’s barrister, presenting these figures to the enquiry, has an indefeasible case: public objections have already been addressed by the pricing exercise; there is nothing more to be discussed. When you turn nature into an accounting exercise, its destruction can be justified as soon as the business case comes out right. It almost always comes out right.
Cost-benefit analysis is systematically rigged in favour of business. Take, for example, the decision-making process for transport infrastructure. The last government developed an appraisal method which almost guaranteed that new roads, railways and runways would be built, regardless of the damage they might do or the paltry benefits they might deliver(8). The method costs people’s time according to how much they earn, and uses this cost to create a value for the development. So, for example, it says the market price of an hour spent travelling in a taxi is £45, but the price of an hour spent travelling by bicycle is just £17, because cyclists tend to be poorer than taxi passengers(9).
Its assumptions are utterly illogical. For example, commuters are deemed to use all the time saved by a new high speed rail link to get to work earlier, rather than to live further away. Rich rail passengers are expected to do no useful work on trains, but to twiddle their thumbs and stare vacantly out of the window throughout the journey. This costing system explains why successive governments want to invest in high-speed rail rather than cycle lanes, and why multi-billon pound road schemes which cut two minutes off your journey are deemed to offer value for money(10). None of this is accidental: the cost-benefit models governments use excite intense interest from business lobbyists. Civil servants with an eye on lucrative directorships in their retirement ensure that the decision-making process is rigged in favour of over-development.
This is the machine into which nature must now be fed. The National Ecosystem Assessment hands the biosphere on a plate to the construction industry.
It’s the definitive neoliberal triumph: the monetisation and marketisation of nature, its reduction to a tradeable asset. Once you have surrendered it to the realm of Pareto optimisation and Kaldor-Hicks compensation, everything is up for grabs. These well-intentioned dolts, the fellows of the Grand Academy of Lagado who produced the government’s assessment, have crushed the natural world into a column of figures. Now it can be swapped for money.
Love, economists have discovered, is depreciating rapidly. On current trends, it is expected to fall by £1.78 per passion-hour between now and 2030...
George Monbiot
Love, economists have discovered, is depreciating rapidly. On current trends, it is expected to fall by £1.78 per passion-hour between now and 2030. The opportunity cost of a kiss foregone has declined by £0.36 since 1988. By 2050 the net present value of a night under the stars could be as little as £56.13. This reduction in the true value of love, they warn, could inflict serious economic damage.
None of that is true, but it’s not far off. Love is one of the few natural blessings which has yet to be fully costed and commodified. They’re probably working on it now.
Under the last government, the Department for Transport announced that it had discovered “the real value of time”. Here’s the surreal sentence in which this bombshell was dropped:
“Forecast growth in the real value of time is shown in Table 3.”(1)
Last week the Department for Environment announced the results of its National Ecosystem Assessment, a massive exercise involving 500 experts. The assessment, it tells us, establishes “the true value of nature … for the very first time.”(2) If you thought the true value of nature was the wonder and delight it invoked, you’re wrong. It turns out that it’s a figure with a pound sign on the front. All that remains is for the Cabinet Office to tell us the true value of love and the price of society, and we’ll have a single figure for the meaning of life.
The government has not yet produced one number for “the true value of nature”, but its scientists have costed some of the assets that will one day enable this magical synthesis to be achieved. The assessment has produced figures, for example, for the value of green spaces to human well-being. If we look after them well, our parks and greens will enhance our well-being to the tune of £290 per household per year in 2060(3).
How do they calculate these values? The report tells us that the “ecosystem services” it assesses include “recreation, health and solace”, and natural spaces “in which our culture finds its roots and sense of place” (4). These must be taken into account when costing “shared social value”. Shared social value arises from developing “a sense of purpose”, and being “able to achieve important personal goals and participate in society.” It is enhanced by “supportive personal relationships” and “strong and inclusive communities.”(5) These are among the benefits which the experts claim to be costing.
The exercise is well-intentioned. The environment department rightly points out that businesses and politicians ignore the uncosted damage their decisions might inflict on the natural world and human welfare. It seeks to address this oversight by showing that “there are real economic reasons for looking after nature.”(6) But there are two big problems.
The first is that this assessment is total nonsense, pure reductionist gobbledegook, dressed up in the language of objectivity and reason, but ascribing prices to emotional responses: prices, which, for all the high-falutin’ language it uses, can only be arbitrary. It has been constructed by people who feel safe only with numbers, who must drag the whole world into their comfort zone in order to feel that they have it under control. The graphics used by the assessment are telling: they portray the connections between people and nature as interlocking cogs(7). It’s as clear a warning as we could take that this is an almost-comical attempt to force both nature and human emotion into a linear, mechanistic vision.
The second problem is that it delivers the natural world into the hands of those who would destroy it. Picture, for example, a planning enquiry for an opencast coal mine. The public benefits arising from the forests and meadows it will destroy have been costed at £1m per year. The income from opening the mine will be £10m per year. No further argument needs to be made. The coal mine’s barrister, presenting these figures to the enquiry, has an indefeasible case: public objections have already been addressed by the pricing exercise; there is nothing more to be discussed. When you turn nature into an accounting exercise, its destruction can be justified as soon as the business case comes out right. It almost always comes out right.
Cost-benefit analysis is systematically rigged in favour of business. Take, for example, the decision-making process for transport infrastructure. The last government developed an appraisal method which almost guaranteed that new roads, railways and runways would be built, regardless of the damage they might do or the paltry benefits they might deliver(8). The method costs people’s time according to how much they earn, and uses this cost to create a value for the development. So, for example, it says the market price of an hour spent travelling in a taxi is £45, but the price of an hour spent travelling by bicycle is just £17, because cyclists tend to be poorer than taxi passengers(9).
Its assumptions are utterly illogical. For example, commuters are deemed to use all the time saved by a new high speed rail link to get to work earlier, rather than to live further away. Rich rail passengers are expected to do no useful work on trains, but to twiddle their thumbs and stare vacantly out of the window throughout the journey. This costing system explains why successive governments want to invest in high-speed rail rather than cycle lanes, and why multi-billon pound road schemes which cut two minutes off your journey are deemed to offer value for money(10). None of this is accidental: the cost-benefit models governments use excite intense interest from business lobbyists. Civil servants with an eye on lucrative directorships in their retirement ensure that the decision-making process is rigged in favour of over-development.
This is the machine into which nature must now be fed. The National Ecosystem Assessment hands the biosphere on a plate to the construction industry.
It’s the definitive neoliberal triumph: the monetisation and marketisation of nature, its reduction to a tradeable asset. Once you have surrendered it to the realm of Pareto optimisation and Kaldor-Hicks compensation, everything is up for grabs. These well-intentioned dolts, the fellows of the Grand Academy of Lagado who produced the government’s assessment, have crushed the natural world into a column of figures. Now it can be swapped for money.
Friday 3 June 2011
The IMF itself should be on trial
Johann Hari
Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death
Friday, 3 June 2011
Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.
So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Khan, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.
To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.
The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.
Let’s look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small country of Malawi in Southeastern Africa was facing severe economic problems after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the IMF has acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the US and every other successful country had developed – by protecting its infant industries, subsidising its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.
That’s what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people – and accountable to them – would look like. But the IMF did something very different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the ‘structural adjustments’ the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidising fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for farmers – most of the population – to grow anything in the country’s feeble and depleted soil. They told them to prioritise giving money to international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.
So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.
The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.
At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the government had ‘slowed’ in implementing the marketeeing ‘reforms’ that had led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground, conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF “bears responsibility for the disaster.”
Then, in the starved wreckage, Malawi did something poor countries are not supposed to do. They told the IMF to get out. Suddenly free to answer to their own people rather than foreign bankers, Malawi disregarded all the IMF’s ‘advice’, and brought back subsidies for the fertiliser, along with a range of other services to ordinary people. Within two years, the country was transformed from being a beggar to being so abundant they were supplying food aid to Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The Malawian famine should have been a distant warning cry for you and me. Subordinating the interests of ordinary people to bankers and speculators caused starvation there. Within a few years, it had crashed the global economy for us all.
In the history of the IMF, this story isn’t an exception: it is the rule. The organisation takes over poor countries, promising it has medicine that will cure them – and then pours poison down their throats. Whenever I travel across the poor parts of the world I see the scars from IMF ‘structural adjustments’ everywhere, from Peru to Ethiopia. Whole countries have collapsed after being IMF-ed up – most famously Argentina and Thailand in the 1990s.
Look at some of the organisation’s greatest hits. In Kenya, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees to see the doctor – so the number of women seeking help or advice on STDs fell by 65 per cent, in one of the countries worst affected by AIDS in the world.
In Ghana, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees for going to school – and the number of rural families who could afford to send their kids crashed by two-thirds. In Zambia, the IMF insisted they slash health spending – and the number of babies who died doubled. Amazingly enough, it turns out that shoveling your country’s money to foreign bankers, rather than your own people, isn’t a great development strategy.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz worked closely with the IMF for over a decade, until he quit and became a whistle-blower. He told me a few years ago: “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.”
Some people call the IMF “inconsistent”, because the institution supports huge state-funded bank bailouts in the rich world, while demanding an end to almost all state funding in the poor world. But that’s only an inconsistency if you are thinking about the realm of intellectual ideas, rather than raw economic interests. In every situation, the IMF does what will get more money to bankers and speculators. If rich governments will hand banks money for nothing in “bailouts”, great. If poor countries can be forced to hand banks money in extortionate “repayments”, great. It’s absolutely consistent.
Some people claim that Strauss-Khan was a “reformer” who changed the IMF after he took over in 2009. Certainly, there was a shift in rhetoric – but detailed study by Dr Daniela Gabor of the University of the West of England has shown that the substance is business-as-usual.
Look, for example, at Hungary. After the 2008 crash, the IMF lauded them for keeping to their original deficit target by slashing public services. The horrified Hungarian people responded by kicking the government out, and choosing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had created. They introduced a 0.7 per cent levy on the banks (four times higher than anywhere else). The IMF went crazy. They said this was “highly distortive” for banking activity – unlike the bailouts, of course – and shrieked that it would cause the banks to flee from the country. The IMF shut down their entire Hungary programme to intimidate them.
But the collapse predicted by the IMF didn’t happen. Hungary kept on pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population. They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The IMF shrieked at every step, and demanded cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead. It was the same old agenda, with the same old threats. Strauss-Khan did the same in almost all the poor countries where the IMF operated, from El Salvador to Pakistan to Ethiopia, where big cuts in subsidies for ordinary people have been imposed. Plenty have been intimidated into harming their own interests. The US-based think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research found 31 of 41 IMF agreements require ‘pro-cyclical’ macroeconomic policies – pushing them further into recession.
It is not only Strauss-Khan who should be on trial. It is the institution he has been running. There’s an inane debate in the press about who should be the next head of the IMF, as if we were discussing who should run the local Milk Board. But if we took the idea of human equality seriously, and remembered all the people who have been impoverished, starved and killed by this institution, we would be discussing the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission – and how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.
If Strauss-Khan is guilty, I suspect I know how it happened. He must have mistaken the maid for a poor country in financial trouble. Heads of the IMF have, after all, been allowed to rape them with impunity for years.
Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but with starving her, and her family, to death
Friday, 3 June 2011
Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.
So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Khan, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.
To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.
The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.
Let’s look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small country of Malawi in Southeastern Africa was facing severe economic problems after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the IMF has acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the US and every other successful country had developed – by protecting its infant industries, subsidising its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.
That’s what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people – and accountable to them – would look like. But the IMF did something very different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the ‘structural adjustments’ the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidising fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for farmers – most of the population – to grow anything in the country’s feeble and depleted soil. They told them to prioritise giving money to international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.
So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.
The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.
At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the government had ‘slowed’ in implementing the marketeeing ‘reforms’ that had led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground, conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF “bears responsibility for the disaster.”
Then, in the starved wreckage, Malawi did something poor countries are not supposed to do. They told the IMF to get out. Suddenly free to answer to their own people rather than foreign bankers, Malawi disregarded all the IMF’s ‘advice’, and brought back subsidies for the fertiliser, along with a range of other services to ordinary people. Within two years, the country was transformed from being a beggar to being so abundant they were supplying food aid to Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The Malawian famine should have been a distant warning cry for you and me. Subordinating the interests of ordinary people to bankers and speculators caused starvation there. Within a few years, it had crashed the global economy for us all.
In the history of the IMF, this story isn’t an exception: it is the rule. The organisation takes over poor countries, promising it has medicine that will cure them – and then pours poison down their throats. Whenever I travel across the poor parts of the world I see the scars from IMF ‘structural adjustments’ everywhere, from Peru to Ethiopia. Whole countries have collapsed after being IMF-ed up – most famously Argentina and Thailand in the 1990s.
Look at some of the organisation’s greatest hits. In Kenya, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees to see the doctor – so the number of women seeking help or advice on STDs fell by 65 per cent, in one of the countries worst affected by AIDS in the world.
In Ghana, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees for going to school – and the number of rural families who could afford to send their kids crashed by two-thirds. In Zambia, the IMF insisted they slash health spending – and the number of babies who died doubled. Amazingly enough, it turns out that shoveling your country’s money to foreign bankers, rather than your own people, isn’t a great development strategy.
The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz worked closely with the IMF for over a decade, until he quit and became a whistle-blower. He told me a few years ago: “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.”
Some people call the IMF “inconsistent”, because the institution supports huge state-funded bank bailouts in the rich world, while demanding an end to almost all state funding in the poor world. But that’s only an inconsistency if you are thinking about the realm of intellectual ideas, rather than raw economic interests. In every situation, the IMF does what will get more money to bankers and speculators. If rich governments will hand banks money for nothing in “bailouts”, great. If poor countries can be forced to hand banks money in extortionate “repayments”, great. It’s absolutely consistent.
Some people claim that Strauss-Khan was a “reformer” who changed the IMF after he took over in 2009. Certainly, there was a shift in rhetoric – but detailed study by Dr Daniela Gabor of the University of the West of England has shown that the substance is business-as-usual.
Look, for example, at Hungary. After the 2008 crash, the IMF lauded them for keeping to their original deficit target by slashing public services. The horrified Hungarian people responded by kicking the government out, and choosing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had created. They introduced a 0.7 per cent levy on the banks (four times higher than anywhere else). The IMF went crazy. They said this was “highly distortive” for banking activity – unlike the bailouts, of course – and shrieked that it would cause the banks to flee from the country. The IMF shut down their entire Hungary programme to intimidate them.
But the collapse predicted by the IMF didn’t happen. Hungary kept on pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population. They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The IMF shrieked at every step, and demanded cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead. It was the same old agenda, with the same old threats. Strauss-Khan did the same in almost all the poor countries where the IMF operated, from El Salvador to Pakistan to Ethiopia, where big cuts in subsidies for ordinary people have been imposed. Plenty have been intimidated into harming their own interests. The US-based think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research found 31 of 41 IMF agreements require ‘pro-cyclical’ macroeconomic policies – pushing them further into recession.
It is not only Strauss-Khan who should be on trial. It is the institution he has been running. There’s an inane debate in the press about who should be the next head of the IMF, as if we were discussing who should run the local Milk Board. But if we took the idea of human equality seriously, and remembered all the people who have been impoverished, starved and killed by this institution, we would be discussing the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission – and how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.
If Strauss-Khan is guilty, I suspect I know how it happened. He must have mistaken the maid for a poor country in financial trouble. Heads of the IMF have, after all, been allowed to rape them with impunity for years.
Tuesday 31 May 2011
Difference between Warne and Macgill
Terry Jenner talking to Sambit Bal
I did ask him, though, about the difference between Stuart MacGill and Warne. MacGill had benefitted from Warne’s absence and used the period profitably, claiming 43 wickets in eight Tests at 25.11, with a strike rate of 45.9. But of course he had made no impression on the touring Indians, nor was he expected to. During a meet-the-press event before the Test, MacGill, while giving fulsome praise to Warne, had questioned, only half in jest, his claims to mystery balls.
“Stuart is right,” Jenner said. “There is only so much spin you can generate, and there are only so many balls you can bowl.” Then he counted them: the legbreak, the topspinner, the backspinner, the flipper and the googly. The difference between Warne and Macgill, he said, wasn’t the number of different balls they possessed or how much they spun the ball. It was in how the ball arrived at the batsman.
Then he proceeded, oblivious to scores of other journalists and a few commentators around, to give a full demonstration. Because he was so round-arm, MacGill’s ball arrived at the right eye of the batsman and went on straight, giving the batsman 20:20 vision. “When Warnie bowls to right-handers,” Jenner said, mimicking Warne’s action, “the ball arrives at eye-level and then disappears behind the left ear, forcing the batsman to search for it.” That Warne had the ability to drift the ball wasn’t unknown, but Jenner’s way of explaining it gave it different meaning.
I did ask him, though, about the difference between Stuart MacGill and Warne. MacGill had benefitted from Warne’s absence and used the period profitably, claiming 43 wickets in eight Tests at 25.11, with a strike rate of 45.9. But of course he had made no impression on the touring Indians, nor was he expected to. During a meet-the-press event before the Test, MacGill, while giving fulsome praise to Warne, had questioned, only half in jest, his claims to mystery balls.
“Stuart is right,” Jenner said. “There is only so much spin you can generate, and there are only so many balls you can bowl.” Then he counted them: the legbreak, the topspinner, the backspinner, the flipper and the googly. The difference between Warne and Macgill, he said, wasn’t the number of different balls they possessed or how much they spun the ball. It was in how the ball arrived at the batsman.
Then he proceeded, oblivious to scores of other journalists and a few commentators around, to give a full demonstration. Because he was so round-arm, MacGill’s ball arrived at the right eye of the batsman and went on straight, giving the batsman 20:20 vision. “When Warnie bowls to right-handers,” Jenner said, mimicking Warne’s action, “the ball arrives at eye-level and then disappears behind the left ear, forcing the batsman to search for it.” That Warne had the ability to drift the ball wasn’t unknown, but Jenner’s way of explaining it gave it different meaning.
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