If bankers leave the country, it would be no loss

Ignore their howls of protest. 

They took home unheard of sums. Only in Britain do ministers dance to their tune. But public fury cannot be defied for ever

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013

Illustration by Belle Mellor

The peasants are revolting across Europe. They want bankers' blood and mean to get it. Until now, public response to the credit crunch has been one of general bafflement and wrist-slapping. The banks persuaded the world it was all an act of fate. As it was, they were too big to fail and their leaders too saintly to atone for it. For four years, British banks were showered with nearly half a trillion pounds of public and printed money. They duly recovered and stayed rich, while everyone else went poor.

The worm has turned. The banks and government alike have failed to deliver recovery. The people want revenge, and have found it – of all places – in the European parliament. It has declared that EU bankers cannot get bonuses bigger than their salaries, or twice as big if shareholders approve. This applies wherever EU bankers work, and to any overseas banker working in the EU.

Meanwhile, a Swiss referendum now requires top executives to seek explicit shareholder approval for their pay, with a ban on golden hellos and goodbyes. The Netherlands is talking of a tighter 20% cap on bonuses. Even laissez-faire Britain has seen the National Association of Pension Funds demand that boards keep executive pay rises down to inflation.

Europe's once omnipotent banking lobby has been all but neutered by the scale of scandal. The German government caved in to the EU parliament under pressure from the opposition Social Democrats. This was after the Libor scandal revealed Deutsche Bank cutting one trader's bonus by £34m, thus implying a staggering original sum. The Swiss campaign was kicked into life by the drugs firm Novartis giving its departing chairman a $76m gift. Some 68% of Swiss voted for the new curb.

Only in Britain do ministers still dance to the bankers' tune. Last month RBS executives brushed aside their state shareholder and paid themselves £600m in bonuses after posting a £5bn loss. Loss-making Lloyds dipped into its till and gave senior staff an extra £365m. Money-laundering HSBC announced 78 of its London executives would take home more than £1m each. They all say bonuses were unrelated to fines or losses, but they always say that. George Osborne was humiliated in Brussels on Tuesday by having to plead their fruitless cause.

Last year the City of London's much-heralded "shareholder spring" got nowhere. Revolts against executive pay at WPP, Barclays, Trinity Mirror and elsewhere had little noticeable impact. While overall pay stagnated, that of top executives rose 12%. Opinion polls showed the public overwhelmingly hostile to top pay. Only the government and the London mayor stand between the very rich and a furious public. The peasants' revolt means that even British ministers cannot defy opinion for ever.

The reality is that the banking community has allowed this thirst for revenge to build up for over four years, and it just did not care. Ever since the 1980s and financial deregulation, the profession took home sums of money unheard of in any other line of work.

This had nothing to do with free markets, except within a tight group of high-rolling traders. Modern bankers derive "economic rent" from exploiting oligopolistic cartels in financial services, with shareholders kept at one remove. The astronomical traders' bonuses are asymmetric returns on cash that properly belongs to depositors and shareholders whose money bears the risk. In any other business such bonuses would be regarded as theft from the firm.

For four years the British government – Labour and the coalition – huffed and puffed but was too terrified of the banks to act. Regulators were suborned by lobbyists and ministers, their offices packed with seconded bankers, and did as they were told. They gave huge sums to the banks in the belief that this was benefiting the demand economy. In Britain, some £400bn of cash was "pumped into the economy" via the banks. They merely traded or hoarded it, to their ever greater enrichment. The money vanished. A thousand pounds handed to every British citizen would have had more impact on the economy.

Last year, as if learning nothing, the Treasury gave the banks another £80bn to boost business and mortgage lending. This week it was predictably revealed that lending to small businesses actually fell as result. It was like giving money to a drunk and telling him to support his children. Never in the history of money can policy have been so glaringly inept. The banks laughed.

No trade unions are fiercer in defending their interests than the rich professions. As we saw this week with lawyers, cut their largesse and they threaten to take it out on the poor, the economy, the government, everyone. The banks howl that the bonus cap means their greed will go "offshore". This seems exaggerated. But the EU curbs could possibly see the start of the high-rollers moving out of over-regulated Europe towards the Americas and Asia.

This would not be wholly good news for Britain: finance has been the boom industry of the past quarter-century. But more likely is that the more toxic activities will go, and that is no loss. Either way, the banks have themselves to blame. They flew their golden wings too near the sun, and rage has melted them. They have only one plea on their side. The culture of greed in the City was nothing to the culture of ineptitude at the Bank of England and the Treasury. They pumped out the money. Never in British economic history can so much have been so wasted on so fruitless a cause. And still no hint of remorse.

A Record of Hugo Chavez - RIP

by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN in the hindu

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias, President of Venezuela, who died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58, was a defining figure in Latin American politics for fifteen years, becoming almost synonymous with the popular tide that has elected and reelected left and centre-left governments across the continent in that time.

Mr. Chávez combined courage with immense conviction. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.

Yet ordinary people’s suffering under austerity measures led Mr. Chávez’s fellow officers to try again, in November 1992; they failed. Mr. Chávez, however, renamed his group the Movement of the Fifth Republic, which later merged with other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and won the 1998 presidential election on a socialist manifesto, promising millions relief from a system which had put oil wealth into luxurious lives for the rich and profits for the oil corporations.

Mr. Chávez removed corrupt military officers and started a national reform programme. Venezuela, according to the United States Department of Energy and a former CIA oil expert, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 1.36 trillion barrels, and the new president promptly nationalised the main oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), putting the profits into very effective social programmes. Carles Mutaner, Joan Benach, and Maria Paez Victor note in CounterPunch that between 2000 and 2010 social spending increased by 61 per cent or $772 billion; the country has the region’s lowest level of inequality, with a reduction in its Gini coefficient of 54 per cent. Poverty is down from 71 per cent in 1996 to 21 now, and extreme poverty is down from 40 per cent to 7.3. The programmes, or Misiones, have reached 20 million people, and 2.1 million have received senior citizens’ pensions, a sevenfold increase under Mr. Chávez.

The country has also cut food imports from 90 per cent to 30 per cent of its consumption, and has reduced child malnutrition from 7.7 per cent in 1990 to 5 today; infant mortality has declined from 25/1000 to 13 in the same period, and the country now has 58 doctors per 10,000 people (as against 18 in 1996). As many as 96 per cent of the population now have access to clean water, and with school attendance at 85 per cent, one in three Venezuelans is enrolled in free education up to and including university.

Oil royalties help. A 2001 law cut foreign companies’ share of the sale price from 84 to 70 per cent, and they now pay royalties of 16.6 per cent on Orinoco basin heavy crude; they used to pay 1 per cent. Exxon and Conoco Philips rejected these terms, as Deepak Bhojwani says in the Economic and Political Weekly (December 22, 2012), and were expelled, but Chevron stayed.

Mr. Chávez of course infuriated the mainly white elites, some of whom talked of him in racist terms, as well as the United States government and press, both of which have consistently vilified him in language bordering on the delusional. The State Department greeted the 2002 coup against Mr. Chávez by expressing solidarity with the Venezuelan people and looking forward to “working with all democratic forces in Venezuela.” The statement also said Mr. Chávez had dismissed the Vice—President and Cabinet. In fact it was the coup figurehead, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who, according to the Notable Names Database NNDB, dissolved the national assembly, disbanded the supreme court, closed the attorney—general’s and comptroller’s offices, and repealed 48 redistributive laws meant to help the poor.

Yet huge public support for Mr. Chávez meant the regime collapsed within days. The President was reinstated, but the then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hectored him to “respect the constitution”, and Greg Palast points out in The Progressive that in 2006 the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy called him a demagogue out to undermine democracy and destabilise Venezuela.

The U.S. press dutifully played its part. In September 2012, the WorldNet columnist Drew Zahn called Mr. Chávez a “socialist dictator”, when the President was about to win a fourth successive election. All those elections were of far greater probity than the respective U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004; this time Mr. Chávez won by 11 percentage points on a turnout of 80 per cent. Other U.S. media bodies have spread partial truths about the Caracas government, saying it bloats the public sector and lets the budget deficit spiral. In fact, as Mark Weisbrot notes in the Guardian, 18.4 per cent of Venezuela’s work force is in the public sector, in contrast to Norway’s 29 per cent, and its 2012 budget deficit, projected at 51.3 per cent of GDP, is lower than the European Union average of 82.5 per cent; inflation has declined too, from 27 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent now. Weisbrot also points out that the New York Times — which welcomed the coup — has taken 14 years, longer even than other American media outfits, to publish any arguments for Mr. Chávez. Carles Mutaner and colleagues comment that U.S. analysts ask what Venezuela will do when the oil runs out, but do not ask that about other oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Canada; neither do critics note that the country’s interest payments are only about 3 per cent of export earnings.

One of Washington’s problems is that, as Greg Palast recognises, Mr. Chávez kept oil revenues within Latin America; unlike Saudi Arabia, which buys U.S. treasury bills and other assets, Venezuela at one point withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve, and since 2007 has aided other Latin American countries with $36 billion, most of which has been repaid back. In effect, this supplants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and possibly also its neoliberal fellow—crusader the World Bank. Even more unpalatably for Washington, Chávismo is now a clear political programme towards a Bolivarian Revolution, which Palast calls a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with progressive income tax, public works, social security, and cheap electricity. For Bolivarians, such things are rights; they are even reminiscent of T.H. Marshall’s view that they are integral to substantive citizenship. Worst of all for U.S. regional hegemony, Mr. Chávez himself said Venezuela is no longer an oil colony, that it has regained its oil sovereignty, and that he wanted to replace the IMF with an International Humanitarian Bank based on cooperation; Uruguay already pays for Venezuelan oil with cows. Mr. Chávez wished the IMF and the World Bank would “disappear”, and his passionate concern for Latin American countries’ sovereignty made him a decisive figure in the 2011 creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac).

Mr. Chávez could be ruthless; in 2010 a military court sentenced his former key ally Raúl Isaias Baduel to just under eight years for embezzlement after a long—delayed trial, and Baduel is now banned from future political office, almost certainly because he criticised constitutional reforms which would allow a president more than two terms. Mr. Chávez was, however, no doctrinaire leader. Although a Christian, he criticised clerical collusion with the ancien régime, and did not accept the Church’s authority in politics. He also thought seriously about political economy. Bhojwani notes that he favoured a form of 21st century socialism partly derived from the work of Heinz Dieterich Steffan. For Mr. Chávez, ethics, morality, cooperativism, and associationism make for strong public economic activity and in turn protects the equality which is essential to liberty; it even includes a respect for private property.

The Venezuelan electorate have repeatedly endorsed this; in the December 2012 gubernatorial elections — the first ones in 14 years in which Mr. Chávez himself did not campaign — Mr. Chávez allies won 20 out of 23 states. After the President’s win in October, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had sent him a message saying, “Your victory is also ours.” Billions, and not only poor people, around the world would agree: Tu victoria es también la nuestra.

We can ignore history at our own peril

Dileep Padgaonkar 

We shouldn’t turn to the past to compare or contrast it with the present in a mechanical fashion. That would be worse than odious: it would be misleading. But what we can and should do is to find out if the echoes of personalities, trends and processes that shaped events at a particular stage of history reverberate in our times. Such an exercise offers us a perspective that is all too often lost in the hurly-burly of daily life.

It took Adolf Hitler a good decade - from 1919 to 1929 -to gain control of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). During this period he had made a mark in Bavaria with his fiery speeches redolent with ultra-nationalist rhetoric targeted at Marxists – an umbrella term that included communists and social democrats, trade-unionists and intellectuals, artistes and gays and, above all, Jews. But in those years, as he pointed out time and again, he was content to be the drummer boy of an array of right-wing forces. And he seldom failed to point out that his was a petty bourgeois background ‘without name, special position or connection’ and that he had ‘come up from the bottom.’ He also made much of the fact that he had abjured meat and alcohol and that his private life was scrupulously chaste – a claim that is still a matter of speculation.

For all his talk of socialism, Hitler, in order to acquire a cachet of legitimacy that he desperately needed to fulfil his dream of wielding political power, befriended landed aristocrats and industrial barons. They were wary of him at first because of his claim to champion the cause of workers, farmers, petty shop-keepers and civil servants. But by and by they came around to Hitler’s view that the crises that plunged Germany into chaos after its defeat in the First World War could not be contained without a powerful leader who would impose iron discipline to cleanse the Weimar republic of corrupt, self-serving, ineffective and hedonistic elites including, in the first place, ‘Marxist’ politicians, intellectuals and artists.

What impressed them – as it needed impressed ordinary folk – was not only Hitler’s single-minded pursuit to avenge the defeat of WWI but also his skills as a consummate actor. His oratory, as Ian Kershaw notes in his splendid two-volume biography of the Nazi leader, mesmerised his listeners. It included ‘ the delayed entry into the packed hall, the careful construction of speeches, the choice of colourful phrases, the gestures and the body language.’ About the delivery of the speeches, Kershaw adds: ‘A pause at the beginning to allow the tension to mount; a low-key, even hesitant, start; undulations and variations of diction, not melodious certainly, but vivid and highly expressive; almost staccato bursts of sentences, followed by well-timed ‘rallentando’ (gradual decrease of speed) to expose the emphasis of a key point; theatrical use of the hands as the speech rose in crescendo; sarcastic wit aimed at opponents: all were devices carefully nurtured to maximise effect.’

Hitler himself acknowledged what drove him to such frenzy. It was the recognition that ‘masses are blind and stupid. What is stable in them is one emotion: hatred.’ The more he preached intolerance and hatred as the solution to Germany’s problems, the more his audience ate out of his hands: hatred for rivals in his own party ranks and for political parties that stood in his way, hatred for minorities, hatred for liberals, hatred for Germany’s neighbours.  During these passages, as Kershaw writes, the crowds often interrupted him with cheers and shouts of ‘Bravo!’ followed at the end by a lengthy ovation, and cries of ‘Heil!’ 

The indoctrination of the masses, Hitler reckoned, was an imperative to realise his ambitions. He therefore laid great store by propaganda. He was the first politician in Germany to cut 50000 records of his speeches for nation-wide distribution and exploit the new technology of radio and the talkies to spread his message: something that was as effective then as the Internet is today. The message, however, has less to do with policies and programmes and more to do with rubbishing his ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ opponents on charges of acting at the behest of foreign, enemy forces who were hell-bent on striking at the roots of German nationalism.

That this approach worked is evident from the rapturous welcome he received on 24 February 1928 when, led by the stalwarts of his party, he declared that  ‘the Jew’ would have to be shown that ‘we’re the bosses here; if he behaves well, he can stay – if not, then out with him.’ Five years later, such rhetoric propelled him to absolute power with consequences that need no reiteration. But should students of history overlook the fact that statements along similar lines have been voiced against minorities in our own country before and after we got rid of colonial rule? And can one ignore the fact that the search of a ‘strong man’ to solve intractable problems led to rack and ruin in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s? 

Let me repeat: speaking about this past in Europe is not to harp on the situation in India today. Our political parties know that India is far too pluralistic to succumb to the lure of atavistic emotions, especially if one individual, or one family, claims to speak on behalf of one people, one nation and one culture. But we can ignore the developments in crises-ridden Weimar Germany at our own risk. We need sound policies, not sound bytes, reforms, not recrimination, debate, not demagoguery, a statesman, not a messiah.  

A Capitalist Command Economy

With threats and bribes, Gove forces schools to accept his phoney 'freedom'

Through its academies programme, the government is creating a novelty: the first capitalist command economy

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 4 March 2013 20.30 GMT

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

So much for all those treasured Tory principles. Choice, freedom, competition, austerity: as soon as they conflict with the demands of the corporate elite, they drift into the blue yonder like thistledown.

This is a story about England's schools, but it could just as well describe the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs.

All over England, schools are being obliged to become academies: supposedly autonomous bodies which are often "sponsored" (the government's euphemism for controlled) by foundations established by exceedingly rich people. The break-up of the education system in this country, like the dismantling of the NHS, reflects no widespread public demand. It is imposed, through threats, bribes and fake consultations, from on high.

The published rules looked straightforward: schools will be forced to become academies only when they are "below the floor standard ... seriously failing, or unable to improve their results". All others would be given a choice. But in many parts of the country, schools which suffer from none of these problems are being prised out of the control of elected councils and into the hands of central government and private sponsors.

For five years, until 2012, Roke primary school in Croydon, south London, was rated as "outstanding" by the government's inspection service, Ofsted. Then two temporary problems arose. Several of the senior staff retired, leading to a short period of disruption, and a computer failure caused a delay in giving the inspectors the data they wanted. The school was handed the black spot: a Notice to Improve. It worked furiously to meet the necessary standards – and it has now succeeded. But before the inspection service returned to see whether progress had been made, the governors were instructed by the Department for Education to turn it into an academy.

In September last year the Department for Education held a closed meeting with the school's governors, in which they were told (according to the chair of the governors) that if they did not immediately accept its demand, "we will get the local authority to fire you, all of you ... if the local authority don't do it, we will. And we will put in our own interim board of governors, who will do what we say". The governors were instructed not to tell the parents about the meeting and their decision.

They did as they were told, partly because they had a sponsor in mind: the local secondary school, which had been helping Roke to raise its standards. They informed the department that this was their choice. It waited until the last day of term – 12 December – then let them know that it had rejected their proposal. The sponsor would be the Harris Federation. It was founded by Lord Harris, the chairman of the retail chain Carpetright. He is a friend of David Cameron's and one of the Conservative party's biggest donors.Roke will be the Harris Federation's 21st acquisition.

The parents knew nothing of this until 7 January, when 200 of them were informed at a meeting with the governors. They rejected the Harris Federation's sponsorship almost unanimously, in favour of a partnership with the local secondary school.

The local MP appealed to the schools minister Lord Nash, who happens to be another very rich businessman, major Tory donor and sponsor of academies. He replied last month: the decision is irreversible – Harris will run the school. But there will now be a "formal consultation" about it. He did not explain what the parents would be consulted about: the colour of the lampshades? Oh, and the body which will conduct the "consultation" is ... the Harris Federation. There is no mechanism for appeal. The parents feel they have been carpet-bombed.

Similar stories are being told up and down the country. Academy brokers hired by the department roam the land like medieval tax collectors, threatening and cajoling governors and head teachers, trying to force them into liaisons with corporate sponsors. Far from targeting failing schools, they often seem to pick on good schools that run into temporary difficulties. When standards rise again, the sponsors can take credit for it, and the "turnaround" can be claimed as another success. Ofsted is widely suspected of colluding in this process.

Where threats don't work, the department resorts to bribery. Schools are being offeredsweeteners of up to £65,000 of state money to convert. Vast resources are being poured by the education secretary, Michael Gove, into the academies programme, which has exceeded its budget by £1bn over the last two years. We are being pushed towards the policy buried on page 52 of the department's white paper: "it is our ambition that academy status should be the norm for all state schools".

Is this a prelude to privatisation? A leaked memo from the department recommends "reclassifying academies to the private sector". Just as Conservative health secretaries have done to the NHS, Michael Gove has published misleading statistics about our schools, to create the impression that they are failing by international standards. They are not.

Neither truth nor principle stands in the way of this demolition programme. All the promises of the market fundamentalists – choice, competitive tendering, decentralisation and savings – are abandoned in favour of brutal and extravagant dictat. Thus the government creates a novelty: a capitalist command economy.

Ten years on, the case for invading Iraq is still valid

A decade after Saddam was overthrown, why are some progressives still loath to celebrate his demise?

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 3 March 2013

Saddam Hussein during his trial in 2006. 'I can guarantee that you will not hear much about his atrocities in the coming weeks,' writes Nick Cohen. Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

Every few months a member of the audience at a meeting I am addressing asks whether I regret supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The look in their eyes is both imploring and accusatory – "surely you must agree with me now", it seems to say. I reply that I regret much: the disbanding of the Iraqi army; a de-Ba'athification programme that became a sectarian purge of Iraq's Sunnis; the torture of Abu Ghraib; and a failure to impose security that allowed murderous sectarian gangs to kill tens of thousands.

For all that, I say, I would not restore the Ba'ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after 35 years of tyranny. If my interrogators' protesting cries allow it, I then talk about Saddam's terror state and the Ba'ath's slaughter of the "impure" Kurdish minority, accomplished in true Hitlerian fashion with poison gas.

My questioners invariably look bewildered. The notion that, even if they opposed military intervention, they had obligations to support those who suffered under a regime which can be fairly described as national socialist had never occurred to them. No one can say that time's passing has lessened their confusion.

It's 10 years since the overthrow of Saddam and 25 since he ordered the Kurdish genocide. I can guarantee that you will not hear much about Saddam's atrocities in the coming weeks. As Bayan Rahman, the Kurdish ambassador to London, said to me: "Everyone wants to remember Fallujah and no one wants to remember Halabja." Nor, I think, will you hear about the least explored legacy of the war, which continues to exert a malign influence on "liberal" foreign policy.

Iraq shocked liberals into the notion that they should stay out of the affairs of others. Of itself, this need not have been such a momentous step. A little England or isolationist policy can be justified on many occasions. There are strong arguments against spilling blood and spending treasure in other people's conflicts. The best is that you may not understand the country you send troops to – as the Nato governments who sent troops to Iraq did not. But unless you are careful you are going to have difficulties supporting the victims of oppressive regimes if you devote your energies to find reasons to keep their oppressors in power. Go too far in a defence of the status quo and the idea soon occurs to you that an oppressive regime may not be so oppressive after all.

Liberals are always the first to walk into that trap. A conservative nationalist has few problems saying: "My country comes first. If foreigners are in trouble, that's their lookout." Liberals need to dress isolationism in the language of morality. They need to feel righteous, especially when they are being selfish, and nowhere more so than in the Obama administration.

Sharp operator and orator though he is, it is hard to imagine Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton without the help Iraq gave to his 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Since coming to power, he has proved the truth of Karl Marx's warning in the 18th Brumaire that "the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue".

Obama learned that George W Bush's foreign policy was a disaster, and translates each new crisis back into the language of his political childhood. If Bush was against dictatorships, Obama would "reset" relations with Russia and Iran and treat them as partners. The failure of his initiatives never deters him. Despite his efforts, Russia remains a mafia state and Iran remains a foul theocracy determined to acquire the bomb. Their peoples, naturally, are restive. Russians demonstrate against Putin's rigged elections. The Iranian green movement tries to overthrow the mullahs. But Obama and the wider tribe of western liberals have little to say to them. The example of Iraq taught them that it is dangerous to worry too much about oppression, so they treat popular revolts that are liberal in the broad sense with indifference and embarrassment.

Russians and Iranians are not alone in noticing the reactionary strain in western "progressive" thinking. The forlorn figure of John Kerry had to beg Syrian opposition leaders to meet him, only to prove to them that their initial instinct to stay away was well-founded. While Iran, Russia and Hezbollah engage in illiberal intervention on Assad's behalf, Kerry made it clear that the Obama administration is determined that there should be no liberal intervention in the form of arms for the opposition or a no-fly zone. Even David Cameron is keener on taking practical steps to prevent a catastrophe in the Levant than this, and when Syrians can receive a fairer hearing from a shire Tory than an American "progressive" you should have the wit to realise that a sickness has taken hold.

So deep has it penetrated that Arab liberals now want nothing to do with the supposed leader of the world's liberal left. In an open letter to Obama, Bahieddin Hassan of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies explained the hard struggle he and his comrades were fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood. The police murdered demonstrators, he told the president. Theocratic thugs raped women activists – "to break the political will of the victims through profound degradation". Yet, he noted, the Obama administration continued to praise the Muslim Brotherhood and patronise its liberal opponents.

Hassan had met Obama in the White House. But he had no illusions left about winning his support. All he asked was that the president's "liberal" officials bite their tongues and stop providing political cover for reactionaries. If "they cannot speak the truth about what is happening in Egypt," he said, "they should keep silent."

Shut up and stop pretending to be our friends. What an epitaph that makes for the 21st-century's first generation of "progressives". From the start, I wrote that their parochialism would lead them into double-dealing, but Ian McEwan put it better than I ever could. In his Saturday, set on the day of the great anti-war march of 2003, he has the hero, Henry Perowne, argue with his daughter. Perowne, a surgeon, has treated the victims of Saddam's torture chambers and asks her: "Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam."

"He's loathsome, it's a given," she replies.

"No, it's not," says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"

Why I am a Hindu

From Facebook (author unknown and sub edited by me)

A Hindu was flying from JFK New York Airport to SFO San Francisco Airport CA to attend a meeting at Monterey, CA.

An American girl was sitting on his right. It was a long journey that would take nearly seven hours.

He was surprised to see the young girl reading a Bible, unusual for young Americans. After some time she smiled and we he told her that he was from India

Then suddenly the girl asked: 'What's your faith?' 'What?' He didn't understand the question.

'I mean, what's your religion? Are you a Christian? Or a Muslim?'

'No!' He replied, 'I am neither a Christian nor a Muslim'.

Apparently she appeared shocked to listen to that. 'Then who are you?' “I am a Hindu”, he said.

She looked at him as if she was seeing a caged animal. She could not understand what He was talking about.

A common man in Europe or US knows about Christianity and Islam, as they are the leading religions of the world today.

But a Hindu, what?

He explained to her - I am born to a Hindu father and Hindu mother. Therefore, I am a Hindu by birth.

'Who is your prophet?' she asked.

'We don't have a single prophet,' he replied.

'What's your Holy Book?'

'We don't have a single Holy Book, but we have hundreds and thousands of philosophical and sacred scriptures,' he replied.

'Oh, come on at least tell me who is your God?'

'What do you mean by that?'

'Like we have Jesus (he is the son of God) and the Muslims have Allah - don't you have a God?'

He thought for a moment. Muslims and Christians believe in one common God (Male God) who created the world and takes an interest in the humans who inhabit it. Her mind is conditioned with that kind of belief.

According to her (or anybody who doesn't know about Hinduism), a religion needs to have one Prophet, one Holy book and one God. Her mind is conditioned and narrowed down to a notion that anything else is not acceptable. He understood her perception and concept about faith. You can't compare Hinduism with any of the present leading religions where you have to believe in one concept of God.

He tried to explain to her: 'You can believe in one God and he can be a Hindu. You may believe in multiple deities and still you can be a Hindu. What's more - you may not believe in God at all, still you can be a Hindu. An Atheist can also be a Hindu.'

This sounded very crazy to her. She couldn't imagine a religion so unorganized, still surviving for thousands of years, even after onslaught from foreign forces.

'I don't understand but it seems very interesting. Are you religious?'

What could he reply to this American girl?

He said: 'I do not go to a Temple regularly. I do not perform any regular rituals. I have learned some rituals in my younger days. I still enjoy doing it sometimes'.

'Enjoy? Are you not afraid of God?'

'God is a friend. No- I am not afraid of God. Nobody has made any compulsions on me to perform these rituals regularly.'

She thought for a while and then asked: 'Have you ever thought of converting to any other religion?'

'Why should I? Even if I challenge some of the rituals and faith in Hinduism, nobody can convert me from Hinduism. Because, being a Hindu allows me to think independently and objectively, without conditioning. I remain as a Hindu never by force, but choice.' He told her that Hinduism is not a religion, but a set of beliefs and practices. It is not a religion like Christianity or Islam because it is not founded by any one person or does not have an organized controlling body like the Church or the Order, I added. There is no institution or authority..

'So, you don't believe in God?' she wanted everything in black and white.

'I didn't say that. I do not discard the divine reality (You could call it the unknown possibility, the uncertainty or destiny). Our scripture, or Sruthis or Smrithis - Vedas and Upanishads or the Gita - say God might be there or he might not be there. But we pray to that supreme abstract authority (Para Brahma) that is the creator of this universe.'

'Why can't you believe in one personal God?'

'We have a concept - abstract - not a personal god. The concept or notion of a personal God, hiding behind the clouds of secrecy, telling us irrational stories through few men whom he sends as messengers, demanding us to worship him or punish us, does not make sense. I don't think that God is as silly as an autocratic emperor who wants others to respect him or fear him.' He told her that such notions are just fancies of less educated human imagination and fallacies, adding that generally ethnic religious practitioners in Hinduism believe in personal Gods. The entry level Hinduism has over-whelming superstitions too. The philosophical side of Hinduism negates all superstitions.

'Good that you agree God might exist. You told that you pray. What is your prayer then?'

'Loka Samastha Sukino Bhavantu. Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti,'
लोका समस्ता सुखिनो भवन्तु !!! ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः !!!

'Funny,' she laughed, 'What does it mean?'

'May all the beings in all the worlds be happy. Let there be Peace, Peace,and Peace every where.'

'Hmm ..very interesting. I want to learn more about this religion. It is so democratic, broad-minded and free' she exclaimed.

'The fact is Hinduism is a religion of the individual, for the individual and by the individual with its roots in the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. It is all about an individual approaching a personal God (personal truth) in an individual way according to his temperament and inner evolution - it is as simple as that.'

'How does anybody convert to Hinduism?'

'Nobody can convert you to Hinduism, because it is not a religion, but it is a Culture, a way of living life, a set of beliefs and practices. Everything is acceptable in Hinduism because there is no single Authority or Organization either to accept you or to reject you or to oppose you on behalf of Hinduism.'

He told her - if you look for meaning in life, don't look for it in religions; don't go from one cult to another or from one Guru to the next.

For a real seeker, He told her, the Bible itself gives guidelines when it says ' Kingdom of God is within you.' I reminded her of Christ's teaching about the love that we have for each other. That is where you can find the meaning of life.

Loving each and every creation of the God is absolute and real. 'Isavasyam idam sarvam' Isam (the God) is present (inhabits) here everywhere - nothing exists separate from the God, because God is present everywhere. Respect every living being and non-living things as God. That's what Hinduism teaches you.

Hinduism is referred to as Sanathana Dharma, the eternal faith. It is based on the practice of Dharma, the code of life. The most important aspect of Hinduism is being truthful to oneself. Hinduism has no monopoly on ideas. It is open to all. Hindus believe in one God (not a personal one) expressed in different forms. For them, God is timeless and formless entity.

Ancestors of today's Hindus believe in eternal truths and cosmic laws and these truths are opened to anyone who seeks them. But there is a section of Hindus who are either superstitious or turned fanatic to make this an organized religion like others. The British coin the word 'Hindu' and considered it as a religion.

He said: 'Religions have become an MLM (multi-level- marketing) industry that has been trying to expand the market share by conversion. The biggest business in today's world is Spirituality. Hinduism is no exception'

He said "I am a Hindu primarily because it professes Non-violence - 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharma' means - Non violence is the highest duty. I am a Hindu because it doesn't condition my mind with any faith system.

A man/woman who changes his/her birth religion to another religion is a fake and does not value his/her morals, culture and values in life. (I would not go that far!)

Hinduism is the original rather a natural yet a logical and satisfying spiritual, personal and a scientific way of leaving a life..

On Spin Bowling in India - 'You have no idea what you're doing here'

Like other Australian spinners in India, Gavin Robertson finished his tour with a good idea of how to bowl there. Somehow the lessons keep getting lost

Daniel Brettig

March 1, 2013

	Rahul Dravid was one of Gavin Robertson's three wickets in the second innings of the Bangalore Test that Australia won on the 1998 tour © Getty Images  Enlarge

 

Sitting towards the back of a Bangalore function room in March 1998, Gavin Robertson and Steve Waugh shared a glum, quiet dinner. Australia had been overtaken by India in the first Test, in Chennai, and then obliterated in the second, at the Eden Gardens. Robertson's offspin had been toyed with, while Waugh was coming to terms with his first Test-series loss in four years. Noticing the duo away from the gathered dignitaries, the august figure of Erapalli Prasanna ventured over to join the New South Welshmen. By way of a greeting he offered the words: "You have no idea what you're doing here."

Robertson's mere presence in India had been a shock to many. Touring Pakistan in 1994, then opposing Waugh for Australia A in the World Series Cup of the following home summer, Robertson had drifted so far from international reckoning that in the summer preceding the India Tests, he had played only a solitary Sheffield Shield game for the Blues. In it, however, he had taken seven wickets at Adelaide Oval, keeping his name from sliding completely. Shane Warne's desire to be paired with a spinner in the vein of the retired Tim May, and some prodding from Waugh and Mark Taylor subsequently, had Robertson trading his day job managing grocery shelves for a six-week journey through India.

"I was only training two or three days a week, which I almost find hilarious," Robertson recalls. "I wasn't that physically fit, I would eat whatever I had to at work to do long days, and play grade cricket on Saturday. The next thing I knew, I was playing Test cricket in 84% humidity and 44C. I think I lost 8kg on the trip."

Perhaps not surprisingly, given his preparation, Robertson struggled to find the right method, though he fought admirably in Chennai, taking wickets and making stubborn lower-order runs. Despite the team's pre-eminence as the world's top-rated side, there was a lack of knowledge and understanding about India, a country most had visited once or twice at most - this was Warne's baked beans tour, after all.

"It was a rollercoaster three Tests. We didn't really know what we were doing in the first Test, and my pace was wrong, even though I took five wickets. What happened to me the Indians did to both myself and Shane Warne. Every time you'd bowl a good ball they negated it and waited for that patience to go, and then they really went after you. If you had a moment where you bowled two or three bad balls in an over, then you all of a sudden went for 12 or 16 runs. That's where the pressure builds."

So when Prasanna made his challenge about Australia's ignorance of India, Robertson found himself nodding. Waugh was a little more feisty, remonstrating with the man often considered the best of all India's offspinners, and author of the immortal slow-bowling maxim "Line is optional, length is mandatory." Perhaps throwing in a four-letter word or two for emphasis, Waugh asked Prasanna, "Well, if you know so much, how about you tell us?" What followed would change Robertson's tour.

"Prasanna talked about how you've got to understand a batsman," Robertson says. "You want to try to lock the batsman on the crease with the amount of spin you've got on the ball and your pace and dip. You've got to combine that to make sure the batsman feels like if he leaves his crease to take a risk, it's going to drop on him and he'll lose the ball.

"So he'll search quickly to defend, and that will cause him to feel nervous about leaving his crease, and that'll start to get him locked on his crease. Then you'll get him jutting out at the ball and jabbing at it with his hands. Then he'll start trying to use his pad and his bat together to negate a good ball. Finally he said, 'All you have to do is get that right pace and create that feeling, and then you have to do it for 20 or 30 overs in a row, and you'll bowl them out.'"

	"It's about finding the right pace and line that locks the batsman on the crease. If you can do it for long periods of time, you win the pressure battle, you break them down, you get wickets"Gavin Robertson

Subtlety, discipline and consistency. These were not outlandish tactics, but they mirrored what Robertson had seen from his Indian counterparts, both in 1998 and on the tours to follow. Over the next few days before the third Test, in Bangalore, Robertson worked at this method, quickening his pace slightly and seeing useful results in the nets. By the time he came on to bowl again on the first morning of the match, his confidence was restored to a decent level. Flicking the ball from hand to hand, he thought of bowling a couple of tidy maidens before lunch then settling in for the afternoon.

Nathan Lyon is familiar with the sort of thing that happened next. Those two overs went for plenty, leaving Robertson's mind to race again. "I went to lunch with 0 for 31 off two and I thought, 'I'm in real trouble here,'" he says. "When I came back on after lunch Stephen [Steve Waugh] was at mid-off and I said 'I'm going to go for it here, I'm going to try to spin a bit harder and bowl a bit quicker.'

"I added two extra steps to my run-up, which I'd never done. I told myself to bowl like a medium-pace offspinner - you bowl with a quicker arm action and actually get more on the ball. I bowled to Tendulkar and he came forward, it gripped and it spun, went past him, nearly hit Ian Healy in the head and went for four byes.

"I just kept doing it. I went from 0 for 31 off two overs to 2 for 58 off 11.2 overs, and in the second innings I took 3 for 28 off 12 and we won the Test. Those were the lessons. It sounds quite simple, but it's having the experience and the patience to keep doing it. They're not worried about you unless you bowl really well."

Robertson's awakening to what was required to bowl spin effectively in India is a tale that is true for many Australian spin bowlers who have ventured to the subcontinent. Robertson describes it as cases of "failure, failure, then some success by the time you go home". Jason Krejza was all but a lost cause on the 2008 trip until he worked with Bishan Bedi in the Delhi nets, and subsequently harvested 12 wickets - albeit expensive ones - in Nagpur. Nathan Hauritz was never able to settle in 2010 as he entered the tour after injury and then had his bowling style changed, not by the locals but by Ricky Ponting, who desired his tweaker to "bowl more like Harbhajan Singh", whatever that meant. None were granted a second chance to tour India and use the knowledge gained on the earlier visit.

"You could almost have all those learnings on a whiteboard or some sort of document that relays 'This is the plan for this, we know what we've been up against before, knock it over,'" Robertson says. "That's what I thought we were supposed to be doing when we went two and half weeks early. We probably haven't learned from those past tours."

For now, Lyon is trying to work out how best to succeed in Hyderabad, having taken four wickets in Chennai but at an enormous cost. Robertson recalled Prasanna's advice, but also the example set by R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja in Chennai.

"Have a look at the pace the Indian bowlers bowled at in the first Test," he says. "Just over, say, an hour or 15-over period, and watch how many times they're full and they're up outside off stump and spinning back. And then watch us and see how many times in that period we get short and get worked. How many times do we get scored off short balls, and how many times the other way?

"The Indians always bowl full with the right pace, the ball is dropping at sufficient pace and there's not enough time to get down the wicket to it. In Australia, Nathan Lyon can bowl on middle stump and a little bit short. Because the wickets are so quick here, it's so much harder for a batsman to punish it. Over there it's so slow, as soon as you bowl too short and on the wrong line, it just sits up like a cherry and it goes.

"It's about finding the right pace and line that locks the batsman on the crease. If you can do it for long periods of time, you win the pressure battle, you break them down, you get wickets."

Prasanna could not have said it better himself.

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