Category Archives: Ideology

Money Dominates India’s Ruling Class

Posted on by

From Sainath at Counterpunch, an analysis of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok Sabha (the lower house, or House of Commons, as opposed to the Rajya Sabha or House of Lords) in India:

“NEW is a coalition of over 1200 civil society groups working across the country. Their “Analysis of MPs of the 15th Lok Sabha (2009)” makes great reading and is the product of fine research and much hard work.

There were 3,437 candidates in the polls with assets of less than Rs. 1 million, says the report. Of these, just 15 (0.44 per cent) made it past the post. But your chances soar with your assets. Of 1,785 candidates in the Rs. 1 million to Rs. 5 million group, 116 (6 per cent) won. This win-ratio goes up to 19 per cent of candidates for the Rs.5 million to Rs.50 million segment. And of 322 candidates in the Rs.50 million plus or platinum tier, 106 (33 per cent) romped home.

The higher you climb the ladder of lucre, the better your chances. That’s obvious. But what’s striking is how bleak things are for non-millionaires. Even a modest improvement in your wealth helps. Say, you move from the below Rs. 1 million group to the Rs. 1-5 million group — your chances immediately improve at a higher rate than your wealth. (Of course that works only if you are already close to the Rs. 1 million mark.) So it’s not just that wealth has some impact on election outcomes — it influences them heavily and disproportionately as you go up the scale.

All of a piece with a society that only last year had 53 dollar billionaires (pre-meltdown), one that still has 836 million human beings who “get by” on less than Rs. 20 a day and which ranks 66th amongst 88 nations on the Global Hunger Index (just one notch above Zimbabwe). India has plummeted to rank 132 in the United Nations Human Development Index (one slot below Bhutan) as our billionaire count has risen. That wallows below Bolivia, Botswana, the Republic of the Congo and the Occupied Territories of Palestine in the HDI rankings. And never mind being worth billions – 60 per cent of adult rural Indians simply do not have bank accounts….”

Karen de Coster on Matt Yglesias on Public School Funding…

Posted on by

Hmm..some flying fur:

Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.

The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.

Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.

Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It’s not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].

So let me toss my two cents in.

From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.

Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).

He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.

As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..

What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.

Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.

My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.

It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.

Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.

The Political Ideology Behind Swine-Flu Hysteria

Posted on by

A new piece about swine-flu that I’m still working on:

The President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, the creators of the swine-flu scenario, has three co-chairs:

1. John Holdren (Director, White House Office of Science & Technology, Obama’s “science czar”)

2. Eric Lander, (head of the Broad Institute, MIT)

3. Harold Varmus (CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, NY)

A little digging fills in the details.

1. Holdren:

Holdren isn’t just any old bureaucrat. He’s a climate change expert who holds the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

(The ‘Teresa’ is, of course, John Kerry’s wife when she was spouse of Ketchup king, John Heinz)

The support for climate change policies goes hand in hand with support for nuclear technology that Holdren believes is needed for those policies. He also believes all nuclear energy should be under the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy.

Climate change and “peaceful nukes” have been the beneficiaries of a huge PR effort over the last 15-20 years, largely stemming from the Pentagon, specifically, from Andrew Marshall, a charismatic theorist of American dominance whose Office of Net Assessments is the most influential outfit you never heard of. This PR typically derides any dissent from climate orthodoxy and downplays the enormous costs and risks involved in the global move to nuclear energy.

There’s more. As early as 1969 Holdren teamed up with neo-Malthusian doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich to advocate population control to “fend off the misery to come.” In 1977, he and Ehrlich, as well as Anne H. Ehrlich, co-authored a textbook (“Ecoscience”) in which they discussed “a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls…..”

Check out this site for some truly mind-boggling quotes:

Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

George Kennan on the Realities Behind US Foreign Policy (Links added)

Posted on by

I have been meaning to post the surrounding text of the famous passage in which George F. Kennan, a noted Sovietologist, cold warrior, and advocate of realpolitik, expressed his view that US policy in the post-war years should be unsentimental in its attitude toward Asia. As director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 1947 to 1950 (under George Marshall and Dean Acheson), Kennan was one of the principal architects of US post-war strategy and the formulator of the policy of long-term “containment” of the Soviet Union. So the piece makes for interesting reading today, especially in light of the following:

*the destruction of Asian savings by the US government-generated debt & dollar tsunami
*the rise in food prices in Asia
* the ongoing rush by Asian governments (along with everyone else) to buy up world farmland
* the potential for global water-wars in the immediate future.

KENNAN:

II. Far East

“We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

For these reasons, we must observe great restraint in our attitude toward the Far Eastern areas. The peoples of Asia and of the Pacific area are going to go ahead, whatever we do, with the development of their political forms and mutual interrelationships in their own way. This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. The greatest of the Asiatic peoples-the Chinese and the Indians-have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply and their birth rate. Until they find some solution to this problem, further hunger, distress, and violence are inevitable. …..

…In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better……”

— George F. Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS23), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1948

[From Russell Wvong’s website, via
Gilles D’Aymery in a piece on the improper use of this quote by Noam Chomsky and others atSwans Commentary.

Americans Holding Swiss Bank Accounts Being Turned Over to IRS

Posted on by

In the news:

“UBS paid a $780 million penalty earlier this year and turned over names of about 300 American clients in a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. In that case, UBS admitted helping U.S. citizens evade taxes, which experts say is not a violation of Swiss bank secrecy laws.

So far, three UBS customers whose names were divulged under the prior agreement have pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court. Hundreds of others holders of secret accounts at UBS and other Swiss banks have voluntarily come forward to the IRS under an amnesty program that requires payment of taxes and penalties but generally does not include the threat of prison.”

My Comment:

I have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand it bothers me that people who entered into a commercial agreement in which secrecy was part of the explicit deal are being “outed.”

On the other hand, I don’t think you should evade tax (avoidance is different from evasion) in ways that seem less principled than self-interested.

OK, OK, self-interest is a good thing and our taxes do go to fund war, mayhem, and looting…..

But then you shouldn’t accept anything the government’s involved in – not housing loans, not subsidies to business, not policing, not roads….none of them. In that case, I’d say your stand was principled.

Otherwise, it doesn’t look quite so heroic.

Do-Gooding Dimwit?

Posted on by

Meddling and ignorant idealism is never a power for good, as this recent turn of events in Burma illustrates:

It is a remarkable irony that an unknown American, who presumably wanted to champion Suu Kyi’s democratic cause, was the catalyst for her latest troubles. But so go the unintended consequences of political inexperience. “Burma’s pro-democracy movement has long been an attraction for fantasists, fanatics and adventure tourists,” writes Aung Zaw, editor of the respected online news magazine the Irrawaddy, sho covers Burma from neighboring Thailand. “Did John William Yettaw consider the consequences [of his swim]? Did he think for a minute that he would do more harm than good? Probably not.”

One of Suu Kyi’s lawyers branded Yettaw a “wretched American.” Inside the country, it can be easy to spot the foreign idealists masquerading as, say, tourists or teachers, who have made it their mission to change Burma…… As Aung Zaw noted in the Irrawaddy, two British activists who were convicted for staging separate political protests in Burma in 1999 were both released early after serving only a fraction of their jail sentences. Good news for them. But Burmese can hardly expect the same treatment. If Suu Kyi is convicted — and Burmese courts have a frighteningly high conviction rate — few expect the Lady to taste freedom anytime soon. “

More here at Time.

My Comment

Idealists? I wonder. A large number of these do-gooders aren’t idealists so much as vain, self-important no talents, who gain a passing glory by linking themselves to ‘mass movements’ or ‘popular leaders’. In their own countries, they’re nobodies. But in a third-world country, their US citizenship, racial membership in the ‘ruling class,’ and the relative strength of their currency, gives them a status that their own accomplishments cannot. It goes to their head. Pretty soon, they fancy themselves saviors. They interfere, stir up trouble, and then conveniently leave, letting the ‘natives’ take the rap for their arrogant intervention…

On the other hand, there’s something remarkably “stagey” about the whole incident. And when I note that Gordon Brown – he who sold off Britain’s gold at the bottom of gold prices and has now presided over the bankruptcy of its banking system — seems to be throwing righteous and media-genic fits over the Burmese junta’s response, I have to wonder.

I think about Bill Clinton’s miraculous intervention on behalf of the two journalists in North Korea….and in a world of simulation and media myth-making, I have to file this under “What really did happen?”

Libertarian Living: Mirambika – Schooling with Emotional Development

Posted on by

“Fantasy and imagination should be allowed to flower in the child. Talk that may seem without logic may not necessarily be irrational- it could be suprarational,” informs [sic] Dr Ramesh. He further mentions that one of the serious flaws with today’s educational system is that, “emotions are most often ignored in our rigidly regulated and tightly controlled system. But it is essential to transform them to retain the best of the emotions- vitality, love and enthusiasm. This manifestation of our divine essence cannot be nurtured through rote learning. We have to create such situations where this part is also brought forward. Thus, training of the psychic voice is an important task of the teacher”. However, mainstream education completely overlooks this aspect and hence, manufactures emotionally underdeveloped children, who are made to fit into the industrialized society. These children do not question authority, they only follow suit. The result is masses of people who do not think for themselves but blindly obey. It was in reaction to this mass-production approach that the alternative education movement began.

This movement gave an impetus to those people who believed that the child had to be driven by his/her own need to learn and know. “We believe that nothing can be taught. Education is inherent in the child, we only help in stimulating it to bring out the best in him/her”, asserts Sulochana Di, one of the teachers who have spent more than 20 years at Mirambika.”

Kevin Carson on the Revolutionary Potential of Barter

Posted on by

From a Kevin Carson comment on his own blog, Mutualist.org:

“So long as an industry is controlled by a handful of firms with the same organizational culture, using some form of oligopoly pricing, colluding to spoon out incremental improvements, and using push distribution methods for whatever crap they agree is the “new thing” this year, calculational chaos doesn’t cause much of a competitive penalty for any particular firm.

The main thing that will cause them real harm, IMO, that will cause the “walls to come tumbling down” for American state capitalism the same as for the old Soviet system, is the looming singularity in small-scale production technology that will enable much of the population to meet a large share of its needs through direct subsistence production for use in the household/informal/barter economy. (That’s the theme of one of the sections in forthcoming Ch. 15)”

My Comment

Carson is always an interesting and productive thinker, and this snippet is from commentary on a blog post of his about the seizure of some of his writings by the police. The commentary goes from this incident to discuss various other things, including whether big business is really no different from the state, and if it is, how that fact can be squared with the wealth it produces.

Carson argues that its wealth is produced despite the existence of the same “computational chaos” suffered by states, because big business enjoys subsidies, cost-externalizations, and benefits deriving from its size and privileged relationship to the state. That means its wealth isn’t really “its” wealth but the appropriation of wealth actually created by others. (I’ve made much the same argument myself).

Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.

Now, one man’s revolutionary struggle is another man’s budget shopping. but why quibble? The main thing is to reclaim the human being as the focus of economic theory, rather than any spurious “economic man,” “factor of production,” or “felicific calculus”…

Sacrifice and Environmental Ethics

Posted on by

Many libertarians seem to think that environmental concern is “liberal” or “leftist” and that “having dominion” over the world implies that human beings can deal with the natural world indifferently….or even rapaciously.

They forget the notion of “stewardship” which is pervasive in the teachings of Jesus.  Libertarians must balance the language of “ownership” (which they rightly defend) with this equally valuable language of “stewardship.”

Individual responsibility includes the dimension of “responsibility for...”

Reading the late Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the great historians of Christianity, I came across the Patriarch of Constantinople’s address on environmental ethics in 2002:

“We are all painfully aware of the fundamental obstacle that confronts us in our work for the environment. It is precisely this: how are we to move from theory to action, from words to deeds? We do not lack technical scientific information about the nature of the present ecological crisis. We know, not simply what needs to be done, but also how to do it. Yet, despite all this information, unfortunately little is actually done. It is a long journey from the head to the heart, and an even longer journey from the heart to the hands.

How shall we bridge this tragic gap between theory and practice, between ideas and actuality? There is only one way: through the missing dimension of sacrifice. We are thinking here of a sacrifice that is not cheap but costly: “I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24). There will be an effective, transforming change in the environment if, and only if, we are prepared to make sacrifices that are radical, painful, and genuinely unselfish. If we sacrifice nothing, we shall achieve nothing. Needless to say, as regards both nations and individuals, so much more is demanded from the rich than from the poor. Nevertheless, all are asked to sacrifice something for the sake of their fellow humans.

Sacrifice is primarily a spiritual issue and less an economic one. In speaking about sacrifice, we are talking about an issue that is not technological but ethical. Indeed, environmental ethics is specifically a central theme of this present symposium. We often refer to an environmental crisis; but the real crisis lies not in the environment but in the human heart. The fundamental problem is to be found not outside but inside ourselves, not in the ecosystem but in the way we think.

The root cause of all our difficulties consists in human selfishness and human sin. What is asked of us is not greater technological skill but deeper repentance, metanoia, in the literal sense of the Greek word, which signifies “change of mind.” The root cause of our environmental sin lies in our self-centeredness and in the mistaken order of values, which we inherit and accept without any critical evaluation. We need a new way of thinking about our own selves, about our relationship with the world and with God. Without this revolutionary “change of mind,” all our conservation projects, however well-intentioned, will remain ultimately ineffective. For, we shall be dealing only with the symptoms, not with their cause. Lectures and international conferences may help to awaken our conscience, but what is truly required is a baptism of tears…..

…An essential element of any sacrifice is that it should be willing and voluntary. That which is extracted from us by force and violence, against our will, is not a sacrifice. Only what we offer in freedom and in love is truly a sacrifice. There is no sacrifice without love. When we surrender something unwillingly, we suffer loss; but when we offer something voluntarily, out of love, we only gain……