In My View

The ‘Word’ delivered

The twin oracles have spoken. They have delivered the ‘word’ apportioning blame for the global financial crisis that generated from the USA. Both the World Bank and the New York Times have found the real villain of the piece. And they have produced it signed, sealed and delivered. It almost seems that God (Milton Friedman!) has spoken to them in one bright moment of revelation. The verdict: the person to blame is the ‘small man’ – black, brown or pale (the pallor is from malnutrition).

François Bourguignon, Chief Economist of the World Bank (WB) and Michael Klein, Chief Economist of the International Finance Corporation (WB’s private sector lender) wrote in a recent report of the international financial institution, “Policy makers need to have realistic goals. For instance, while access to formal payment and savings services can approach universality as economies develop, not everyone will or should qualify for credit. There are instances where national welfare has been reduced by overly relaxed credit policies.” There, the ‘word’ is out. The poor do not deserve credit. So don’t give it to them.

The NYT is arguing in the same vein. In a report published on 18 October, 2008 titled, Building Flawed American Dreams, it has found the sex-scandal scarred housing and urban development secretary of the Bill Clinton administration to be the man who loosened the purse strings of the American credit institutions offering ‘sub prime’ mortgages to the poor. The two writers of the report also found the ‘fall guy’ of the narrative, those of the American poor who coveted a house of their own.

The report notes, “Homeownership has deep roots in the American soul. But until recently getting a mortgage was a challenge for low-income families. Many of these families were minorities….” The report later notes in a somewhat bemused tone, “There were real gains during the Clinton years, as homeownership rose to 67.4 percent in 2000 from 64 percent in 1994. Hispanics and African-Americans were the biggest beneficiaries. But as the boom later gathered steam, and as the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s push to amplify homeownership, some of those gains turned out to be built on sand.”

Now that we have the protagonists, antagonists and the plot, the story should gather momentum. Indeed, the WB report quoted above, entitled Finance For All? Policies and Pitfalls In Expanding Access, lays down with great dexterity the grounds for creating barriers towards the poor accessing loans from acknowledged financial institutions. It prescribes higher interest rates and of course, no credit subsidies by governments to the under-privileged. And all this was sugarcoated in the lexicon of the development discourse that the WB extends to befool the common people.

This writer has been arguing since last year that income inequality in the USA has reached such epic proportions that something has to give in. Considering the American elite have developed over a hundred years, failsafe mechanisms to staunch any challenge to the rule of a diarchy, the sheer economic weight of the costs of the inequality would make it untenable for the party to go on.

Let us consider a few facts about that inequality. An analysis of the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data in 2006 revealed that, “Between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income for the top 1% increased by 176%, compared to an increase of 69% for the top quintile overall, 20% for the fourth quintile, 21% for the middle quintile, 17% for the second quintile and 6% for the bottom quintile.” Please note the difference of income growth between the top five per cent and bottom five per cent: 69 per cent and six per cent respectively.

So can one safely argue that the Clinton administration’s policies of making cheap and easy credit available to the American poor was nothing but a ploy to put a salve on a festering wound. Can it also be argued that the American financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – the twin names symbolising the credit blowback – offered sub prime loans to the poor not because of a generosity of their hearts but because there were not enough creditworthy people left in the United States?

The question more pertinent to us Indians is: Do we intend our country to be like the United States of America? That would entail holding 4.6 jobs between the two adult members of a family of four. Your children would have to carry their student loans for the rest of their lifetimes. And your family could get bankrupt paying the medical dues in insurance and bills that the insurance company refuses to pay.

Amartya Sen, India’s only Nobel laureate in economics, and one who ironically delivered the first Prof Hiren Mukherjee lecture at Indian Parliament just a few months ago, talked about a strange notion “controlled greed” to be the driving force for the post-Crash world economy. Unfortunately Sen refuses to acknowledge that monopoly capital – formed in the conjuncture of finance capital and industrial capital – is by its very nature ‘all consuming.’

It is this power of monopoly capital, which keeps the American wheel of global domination chugging. If anyone shows the temerity to control that ‘greed,’ that person is soon removed from the scene. Dr Manmohan Singh, Sen’s friend, is deeply aware of this small fact.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

In My View

Too big to sink

The US cannot be allowed to sink, much in the same way the US central bank, Federal Reserve judged that the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) could not be allowed to sink; thus needs to be nationalised, so to speak. The logic for the latter action by the US Fed was that AIG was too big to be allowed to go bust. For the same reason, the US also is too big to be allowed to go down the tube and become a relic of history, that one of its prized sons had declared having ‘ended.’

One recalls that in the early 1980s, when India hosted one of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) summits in New Delhi, Forbes Burnham, then president of Guyana and a Marxist, had declared, “When you owe a million dollars you are a creditor; when you owe a billion dollars, you are a partner.” The US owes the world trillions of dollars and other immeasurable debts, for which it needs to be held accountable.

So, even though it cannot be allowed to go into oblivion much in the same way the Soviet Union did, but it has to be made to change its past ways. There are many dimensions to this objective: economic, political and strategic. Each needs to be examined at least briefly here.

First, economic. The flurry of nationalisations in the American financial sector underlines the fact that laissez faire capitalism – the form of social organizing principle – which the USA espoused, is in its death throes. One does not need to run to a Paul Kennedy or to a Giovanni Arrighi to know that this cycle of accumulation of the long duration (longue duree) is closest to an end.

Now, one way the world could continue to prop up this US phase was if countries like China continue to shore their huge surpluses in US government papers, supposedly in the logic that the US government was still solvent. This action of theirs would indeed be a travesty of the progression of history because it would, in effect, support the oppressive ways of the US elite and their exploitation of the world’s poor.

In fact, considering that China has developed a major presence in the African continent it should take steps to immediately put a stop to the net outflow of resources in name of aid economics, from that impoverished continent. Already the world’s exporters have come to realise that they could trade in a volatile dollar only to their own peril. They are in search of a global currency; for the time being many of them are insisting on Euros, at least from the European continent.

If one pursues that logic a little further, one would come to the conclusion that unlike the Great Depression of 1929, this current crisis of the US form of capitalism does not have a world war or post-war European reconstruction as a saviour on the horizon. The only manufacturing worth the name remaining in the USA is the armaments sector. So in the near term, the US elite would be bent on starting a major war or wars, be it with Iran or in South America.

This calls for an immediate demand by the countries – those who can think out of their skin – for deep reforms of the institutions born out of Yalta, Potsdam and Bretton Woods agreements. No longer can the United Nations Security Council rubber stamp what is decided at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the US State department and impose it on nations of the world in name of a sham consensus.

Plus, if the US economy is to be bailed out by investing nations, it should be made to reduce its current military expenditure of almost 50 per cent of the world total by half by the next decade, leading to a sharper cut in the next decade. Washington should be desisted from sending single-handedly, expeditionary forces all across the globe as it does now in the name of peace-keeping or nation-building.

At the strategic level, this replacement of the USA as the globe’s ‘final arbiter’ cannot be complete without an attempt to rein in its nuclear weapons inventory. It should be the goal of the major powers of the world that there would be more fund infusions into the US economy, both in terms of cash and commodities only if Washington decides publicly to implement Art IV of the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The article states, “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

At the end, it needs to be said that this is a leadership moment for countries like China that have the muscle both in terms of material wealth, human resources and political capital. They would need to step up to the plate and be counted to make this American crisis into a global opportunity and create an equitable world.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

In My View

To be, or not to be

Shakespeare’s Hamlet faced the dilemma. India’s stated goal for the US-India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement is to tap into the substantial nuclear commerce that can help it build nuclear power. But its US partner has as its goal of bringing India into the nuclear non-proliferation dominant stream and strengthen it. India is thus caught on cleft stick, facing the Hamletian paradox.

Siddharth Varadarajan, reporting for the Hindu newspaper from Vienna’s Nuclear Suppliers’ Group meet, wrote in an opinion piece, “What happened at Vienna, however, was a coordinated attack in which the smaller states were encouraged to do Washington’s business for it.” He called it an American “double-cross.”

This space had earlier argued almost two years ago that the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group is really an organisation where the tasks are divided between the major powers and their ardent followers. The major powers and follower nations have evolved the group out of a consensus on the basis of maintaining the monopoly on nuclear weapons power and nuclear technology. While the major powers ensure the security of minor nations, the latter help them to clamp down on the proliferation of nuclear technology, so that any other nation outside the club cannot barge in through the barn door.

The BJP’s Jaswant Singh had understood this quaint principle quite literally. He had thus thought that India too could shut the barn door behind it, after entering the portals of the club. He had grown that belief on the basis of an understanding that the Indian elite have grown a unity of common interest with the global elite that could transcend the latter’s class consciousness, thus forging even deeper alliances between the two.

But what he failed to realise was that the alliance he, as a member of the Indian elite, sought might not be the alliance the USA sought from India. In the eyes of the USA, India is a ‘wannabe’ power, which could be pandered to only till its limited goals are satisfied.

Take the case of two US Democratic Party legislators. Edward J Markey is the co-chairman of the House of Representatives bi-partisan task force on nonproliferation. And, Ellen O Tauscher is the chairwoman of the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee. They co-wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on 19 August, “India’s nuclear history is checkered at best, and New Delhi has been denied access to the international nuclear market for three decades. The reasons are well known: the country has never signed the nonproliferation treaty or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, it misused civilian nuclear technology to produce its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and it continues to manufacture nuclear weapons to this day.”

They also wrote, “The Indian nuclear deal threatens international security not only by undermining our nuclear rules, but also by expanding India’s nuclear weapons program. That’s because every pound of uranium that India is allowed to import for its power reactors frees up a pound of uranium for its bomb program.”

To ameliorate that stated situation, the US had legislated the Hyde Act. Indian elite believes that they would circumvent the Act by the periodic exclusions that US presidential waivers would entail, as have been included in the presidential “signing statement” of the law. The Indian elite did not tell the Indian public the amount of discretionary power this devolves on the US president over the Indian nuclear programme.

This discretionary power would be wielded only when the interests of the Indian elite would be in line with the interests of the Western elite. In other words, India’s studied silence about the Georgian issue – considering that one of its closest allies, Russia is involved – would be the order of the day.

Another deadline has gone by unnoticed by most on the Iranian gas pipeline deal. India failed to conform to the desire of the Iranian government that the three governments – India, Pakistan and Iran – get together in August to hammer out the final details. Yet, the civilian nuclear deal, for which Manmohan Singh even besmirched his “Mr Clean” image by buying MPs of opposition parties in Parliament, remains undelivered.

New Zealand that is better known for the wool it produces than its nuclear concerns has emerged as the current storm trooper of the US and its other allies, to berate India on its nuclear nonproliferation record. It has now said that, “it wants limits on the scope of the technology that can be given to India and that could relate to nuclear weapons.” What it means in simple language are enrichment and reprocessing technologies, which are dual use technologies.

But what it reflects is the mistrust these nations have about a country that had earlier set aside the arrogance of the nuclear haves, and developed nuclear technology on its own. Now that same country is desperate for entering the ranks of a group that it had once called perpetrators of ‘nuclear apartheid.’ So there is got to be a cost that the Indian elite would have to pay. And that cost is India’s nuclear sovereignty.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in

Sex and the Olympic city-Matthew Syed

A penetrating insight into the humanity of the Olympians.-Sulekh

Matthew Syed-Times Online, UK

I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle.

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses - there to assist the athletes - in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes - literally thousands of them - strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out - in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti. No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers. There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too - but given the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert.

This sex fest was not limited to Barcelona: the same thing happened in Sydney in 2000, my second Olympics as an athlete, and is happening right here in Beijing, where this time I'm a commentator. I spoke to an Aussie table tennis player this week to check out the village vibe and he launched into the breathless patter common to any Olympic debutant: “It is unbelievable in there; everyone is totally crazy once they are out of their competitions. God knows what it is going to be like this weekend. It is like a world within a world.” A British runner (anonymous again: athletes are not supposed to talk to journalists unaccompanied by a PR type, least of all about sex) said: “The swimmers finished earlier in the week and it was like there was an eruption.”

Ah yes, the swimmers. For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier - sexually I mean - than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards, but given his biblical credentials, it became a story about morality. Not that his intervention made a blind bit of difference. There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team's residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex. Here in Beijing, organisers have realised that such prohibitions are about as useful as banning breathing and have, instead, handed out thousands of free condoms to the athletes. If you can't stop 'em, at least make it safe.

Which all begs a question, or possibly many questions. First, and most importantly, how can one get access to the village? The bad news is that you can't, unless, of course, you happen to be an athlete with the relevant accreditation. But secondly, where does this furnace of sexual energy come from? Or, to put it another way, why do sportsmen and women have such explosive libidos? I am not implying, for one moment, that every athlete in Beijing is at it. Just that 99 per cent of them are.

Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it. Not all athletes are finely tuned specimens of perfect physical health, of course. A fair number are smokers, not prepared to give up despite the nagging of coaches and physiologists. At Barcelona, there was an area where the puffers would congregate near the transport mall. At the table tennis events in Beijing, a male player from Serbia and another from Greece have often been out catching a drag during breaks in play.

But let us get back to all the sex going down in the village. One possible explanation centres on the fact that Olympic athletes have to display an unnatural (and, it has to be said, wholly unhealthy) level of self-discipline in the build-up to big competitions. How else is this going to manifest itself than with a volcanic release of pent-up hedonism? It is a common sight to see recently knocked-out athletes gorging on Magnums and McDonald's, swilling alcohol and, of course, shagging like crazy. Sometimes all three at the same time. Yet this can be only a part of the explanation because most of the athletes I know are as up for it before and during competition as they are in the immediate aftermath. It is as if sportsmen and women have a higher base level of sexual energy. But why? Can it be that one of the underlying drivers of sporting greatness is also the very thing that produces an overactive sex drive?

If so, you can bet your Olympic accreditation that testosterone is implicated. Testosterone is the hormone responsible for many of the differences between the sexes and is also a key physiological driver of aggression, competitiveness and virility. This is particularly so with regard to women. The dual effect of testosterone on female sporting performance and sexuality was demonstrated - somewhat sinisterly - during the state-sponsored doping programme in East Germany. An average teenage girl produces around half a milligram of testosterone per day. In the mid-1980s German female athletes were doped with around 30 milligrams of androgenic steroids per day. The effect on sporting performance was breathtaking - East German women dominated the world in swimming and athletics - but it also produced libidos (according to the testimony of the athletes themselves) that spiraled out of control.

This is not to say that the athletes in the village are all on steroids, or that elevated levels of testosterone inevitably lead to lots of sex. It is merely to say that, at a population level, higher naturally occurring levels of testosterone in both genders would provide a powerful explanation for the combination of sporting prowess and sexual potency.

I also think it is significant that, for most athletes, the village is thousands of miles from home. The old “what goes on tour stays on tour” mantra is still alive and kicking, not just in sport but beyond. There is something deepseated in humanity that leads us to play by different rules whenever we leave town, a phenomenon that has caused instances of terrible inhumanity. When it comes to sex, it simply means that those in relationships no longer recognise, or at least ignore, the boundaries of fidelity and honesty that underpin human monogamy. Philosophers call it moral relativism; the rest of us call it hypocrisy.

There is also a Darwinian component to this. Scientists have measured, for example, how male fertility varies with distance from one's habitual partner. And guess what? According to a report in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, a man's sperm count doubles when he spends a lot of time on the road - up from 389 million sperm per ejaculate to 712 million. Which, I am sure you will agree, is a lot of extra sperm.

I suggest that it is the coming together (if you will forgive the expression) of these factors that creates such an explosive sexual cocktail within the security-controlled perimeter of the Olympic village. Not that this is a bad thing. I have always regarded sexual promiscuity - for a single person at least - as a basic human right, even if it is no panacea for happiness or, indeed, anything else. Of course, many athletes will abstain, others may even disapprove. Only one thing is certain: they will never again enter a place quite like the Olympic village. Not, at least, until London 2012.

In My View

Make money talk back

With another $ 450 million dollars added to the initial $ 750 million in aid to Afghanistan, India needs to ask a few billion dollar questions. Taliban was ousted from power in 2002. A new government under Hamid Karzai was put in place in 2003. What has been achieved since in defeating al Qaeda and its religious radical brethren? A prime minister who can show enough guile to make opposition MPs defect before a crucial vote in Parliament, could surely find the gumption to ask a few questions off a new-found ally and a sponsor, the USA.

For, two recent RAND Corporation studies have laid bare the cupboard of the American strategies in fighting the al Qaeda and have found it bereft of any substantial idea that could throw up some hope for an ultimate victory. Now that India under Manmohan Singh has become an active partner in the US-led ‘war on terror’ (WOT) – as a result of which citizens of the country become targets of the terrorists while the prime minister moves around in armoured BMWs and fortified Embraer aircrafts – it behooves upon him that he asks George W Bush what the US is doing.

The two RAND studies – Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and How Terrorist Groups End – Lessons for countering al Qaeda – uniformly say that the military is too blunt a tool to deal with terrorism and insurgency. The first study says at one place, “The most significant lesson from Afghanistan is the importance of encouraging legitimate and effective indigenous governments and security forces.”

The two key words in that sentence are “legitimate” and “indigenous.” Clearly, the study has concluded that the US and allied forces in Afghanistan are neither. The study recommends dramatic improvement in eight ‘key’ areas. They are: police, border security, ground combat, air strike and air mobility, intelligence, command and control, information operations, civil-military activities.

Of these eight, the counterinsurgency (COIN) study suggests indigenous actors to take lead role in seven of them with the US military and civilian agencies taking support roles. The only aspect left to the US to take the lead is air strikes and air mobility.

The study acknowledges that Afghanistan’s devastated state institutions do not yet have the capacity for effective policing. The study notes, “There is currently a plethora of
U.S. government agencies involved in police training and equipping….However, they are plagued by a paucity of funding and civilian police. This forces the United States to either rely on contractors, such as DynCorp, or other states or organizations, such as NATO countries or UN civilian police.” Obviously, however much Bush would like to depend on his cronies in the private sector contracting business like DynCorp, the RAND experts have little faith in their abilities.

Cross border support sustains insurgency and terrorism. The al Qaeda and the Taliban take the permeability of the Durand Line to their fullest advantage, The COIN study notes, “In Afghanistan, the United States and other coalition partners failed to alter the will or capacity of the Pakistan government to decrease cross-border activity.” This has resulted in these groups being able to run their training camps in their sanctuaries and recruit at leisure. Obviously, these need to stop. Two elements in this exercise are, COIN operations against such sanctuaries; and choking off the funding sources for such activities of the al Qaeda. The colossal failure of the US in doing both is for all to see. Is it because it lacks the legitimacy to confront such forces? A question to ask.

How does Terror Groups End –Lessons for al Qaeda notes, “The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim countries, where its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.” This restrained attempt at policy-talk does not hide the fact about how the US forces are viewed in large parts of the world.

Since the time Manmohan Singh’s friends have undertaken their WOT, the RAND study on terror groups computes that the number of al Qaeda attacks have increased manifolds; and so have their reach in geographical terms.

It suggests, “….ending the notion of a “war” on terrorism and replacing it with such concepts as counterterrorism, which most governments with a significant terrorism problem use……Individuals, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, should be viewed and described as criminals, not as holy warriors.”

And the report quotes an unnamed British intelligence official saying, “The notion of a war on terrorism suggests to Muslims abroad that the United States is fighting a war on Muslims. And the response has to be jihad, or holy war. War convinces people to do jihad.”

But these are voices of sanity which rarely breaches the cerebral cortices of the players in Bush administration. Indeed, if one accounts for the strands of logic followed by the US presidential candidates during their campaign pronouncements, one could not be greatly enthused about the future. It is a matter of grave concern for India that Manmohan Singh is most comfortable in their company.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhumi, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in