Judah Ben Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince living in Judea under Roman rule, reunites with a friend of his youth, Messala, now a Roman tribune. Judah is delighted, until Messala tells him the reason for his visit – he wants his old friend to inform him about dissidents among the Emperor’s Jewish subjects.

Ben Hur admits there is discontent, but refuses to spy on his countrymen. Messala mocks the invisible objects of Judah’s loyalty, contrasting them with the more tangible realities of ambition and power he seeks. The only true “god” he says is the emperor in Rome.

Judah responds in an impassioned scene that is one of the best in the movie.

“Ben Hur”, a Biblical epic from 1959, was directed by William Wyle and starred screen legend Charleton Heston as Judah, with Stephen Boyd, as Messala. The film was the first and most famous of several based on the novel of the same name by Lew Wallace. Leftist icon Gore Vidal wrote the screen play, but was not attributed. The musical score is by the Hungarian composer Miklos Rozca.

J: What do you think?
M: Magnificent. Arabic.
J: I think he has the look of the breed. I raised him.
M: Let me try him sometime.
J: Whenever you like. He’s yours.
M: You mean you’ll give me this?
M: Judah. You are good. It’s going to be like old times, I know it. Judah, tell me, did you think about what I said yesterday?
J: Yes, I talked to a number of people already. I’ve spoken against violence, against incidents. Most of the men I spoke to agreed with me.
M: Hmm, not all.
J: Not all. There were some who were resentful and impatient
M: Who are they? Yes Judah, who are they?
J: Would I retain your friendship, if I became an informer on my people.
M: To tell me the names of criminals is hardly informing.
J: They’re not criminals, Messala, they’re patriots.
M: Patriots….patriots! Judah, let me explain something to you, something you may not know. The emperor is watching us. At this moment he watches the East. This is my great opportunity, Judah, and yours too. If I can bring order into Judea, I can have any post I want, and you’ll rise with me, I promise. And you know where it’s going to end? Rome. Yes, perhaps at the side of Caesar himself. I mean it, and it can happen, Judah. This is the time. The emperor is watching us, judging us. All I need do is serve him and all you need do is help me serve him.
J: You speak as if he is God.
M: He is god, the only god. He has power, real power on earth, not…(gestures) not that. Help me, Judah.
J: I would do anything for you, Messala, except betray my own people.
M: In the name of all the gods, Judah, what do the lives of a few Jews mean to you?
J: If I cannot persuade them, that does not mean I would help you…. murder them. Besides, you must understand this, Messala. I believe in the past of my people and in their future.
M: Future? You are a conquered people
J: You may conquer the land, you may slaughter the people. That is not the end, we will rise again.
M: You live on dead dreams, you live on the myths of the past. The glory of Solomon is gone, do you think it will return? Joshua will not rise again to save you nor David. There is only one reality in the West today. Look to the West. Judah, don’t be a fool. Look to Rome.
J: I’d rather be a fool than a traitor…or a killer
M: I am a solder.
J: Yes, so kill… for Rome…. and Rome is evil.
M: I warn you…
J: No, I warn you – Rome is an affront to God! Rome is strangling my people and my country, the whole earth….forever. I tell you the day Rome falls, there will be a shout of freedom such as the world has never heard before
M: Judah, either you help me or you oppose me. You have no other choice. You are either for me or against me
J: If that is the choice, then I am against you.

Subramaniam Swamy:

“If the Jews can be transformed from lambs walking meekly to the gas chambers to fiery lions in just 10 years, it is not difficult for Hindus in much better circumstances (after all we are 83 per cent of India), to do so in five years.

Guru Gobind Singh has shown us the way already, how just five fearless persons under spiritual guidance can transform a society. “

Naked Capitalism has a most searching piece by Matt Stoller on Ron Paul. In it Stoller admits that criticism of Paul’s alleged character flaws is really displaced tension generated by the self-contradiction of modern liberalism itself:

“Paul’s office was dedicated, first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him. My main contact in Paul’s office even had his voicemail set up with special instructions for those calling about HR 1207, which was the number of the House bill to audit the Federal Reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fed audit – any competent liberal Democratic staffer in Congress can tell you that Paul will work with anyone who seeks his ends of rolling back American Empire and its reach into foreign countries, auditing the Federal Reserve, and stopping the drug war.

Paul is deeply conservative, of course, and there are reasons he believes in those end goals that have nothing to do with creating a more socially just and equitable society. But then, when considering questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle, and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices into a more public and democratic light…..

…Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.

What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions within modern liberalism.”

Comment:

My hope is that liberals, instead of playing gotcha with Paul, will move their own positions closer to his.  Many people who are comfortable with Paul, but far less comfortable with his supporters, would be happy to vote for Paul minus the Paulbots.

The solution to that dilemma would be for a liberal candidate, more palatable on social issues, to take up Paul’s economic and antiwar/anti-police state positions. Then there need  not be any more hand-wringing about racism, newsletters, charlatan gold promoters, environmental yahoos, and stock-touts.

The only serious criticism of Ron Paul at this juncture is this – he is too much of an ideologue.

Principles are fine.  But knowing how to apply them takes more than theory. We all know not to tell lies and we admire people who don’t. But when a burglar demands your wallet, a fine talent for prevaricating is a very good thing.

A man who condemns an aggressor’s blow and a victim’s retaliation equally is not being principled, but cruel. Someone who applies the law even handedly to an eighteen year old first-time offender and a hardened recidivist of middle years is not just, but unjust.

Israel Matzav, an orthodox Jewish blogger, says that that’s what’s holding back many Republicans with Ron Paul.

“Whether or not Paul is an anti-Semite, I cannot support anyone who would govern based on an absolute, hard and fast philosophy like Paul’s.”

Another conservative blog, articulating a variation of the same criticism,  writes

“Ideologues don’t have a history of fixing systems, they have a history of breaking them in a different way. For all his talk of the Founders, they were men who weren’t rooted to a single way of doing things. Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison had their fundamental differences, but none of them were so rooted in their way of thinking that they were unable to deal with reality.”

That, I think, is a legitimate criticism. The only one, in the dire circumstances we face today.

At a time when the boundaries of the state are porous, when war is low-level insurgency, when the “battle field is everywhere,” the libertarian position that only defensive wars in the traditional sense are permissible needs more clarification and specifics to be defensible politically (Lila: I added the word politically here to clarify what I mean), even if it is the morally correct position.

That is more than many libertarians actually give.

Most of them like to shrug at that point and say, “the market.” or human action will take care of things.

To this, the conservative replies, yes, if there are human beings around. But in the gaping wounds torn by the state, what if the only thing that can survive in the gangrene is maggot life, then what?

That is what Ron Paul needs to articulate more sharply.

And now for 2011’s coveted WHITED SEPULCHRE OF THE YEAR award. Given to the person or persons showing the most uncompromising ability to talk out of both sides of their mouth, and through their posterior, while maintaining at all times the superior air of an Anglican bishop praying for the savages.

The winner is……once again (in fact, as always)….The Mainstream Media.

For its command performance of the exquisite farce, “Ron Paul Is A Racist!”

This notable drama has twice made the final cut in previous years, but it was only in 2011 that it managed to win, ahead of the runner-up, the catchy, “Why Can’t We Just Print It?” (based on the original German novel of the name, screen play by Bill Still, Stephen Zarlenga, and Ellen Brown).

The consolation award (an honorary doctorate in politics) for best effort goes to Harvard University, for the expulsion of Subramaniam Swamy.

The jury made its selection after a review of the following Democrat quotations:

(Hat-tip to Free Republic)

“He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, Yellow men in Asia and White men in Europe and America.”

-Harry Truman (1911) in a letter to his future wife Bess

“You cannot go to a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian Accent.” -Senator Joe Biden

Mahatma Gandhi “ran a gas station down in Saint Louis.”

-Senator Hillary Clinton

“You’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” — Fritz Hollings (D, S.C.)

“Is you their black-haired answer-mammy who be smart? Does they like how you shine their shoes, Condoleezza? Or the way you wash and park the whitey’s cars?”

— Left-wing radio host Neil Rogers

Blacks and Hispanics are “too busy eating watermelons and tacos” to learn how to read and write.” — Mike Wallace, CBS News. Source: Newsmax

Black on Black

“In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and [there] were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master … exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.” — Harry Belafonte

“Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy. They have no love and no joy. They’d rather take pictures with black children than feed them.” — Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s Campaign Manager for the 2000 election

(On Clarence Thomas) “A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.” — Spike Lee

“He’s married to a white woman. He wants to be white. He wants a colorless society. He has no ethnic pride. He doesn’t want to be black.”

— California State Senator Diane Watson’s on Ward Connerly’s interracial marriage

Comments From The Past

“Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

— Former Klansman and current US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”, in a letter written in 1944, after he quit the KKK.

“I am a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County and the adjoining counties of the state …. The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia …. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state of the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan in the Realm of W. Va …. I hope that you will find it convenient to answer my letter in regards to future possibilities.”

— Former Klansman and current US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”, in a letter written in 1946, after he quit the KKK.

“These laws [segregation] are still constitutional and I promise you that until they are removed from the ordinance books of Birmingham and the statute books of Alabama, they will be enforced in Birmingham to the utmost of my ability and by all lawful means.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House”

“There’s some people who’ve gone over the state and said, ‘Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation.’ Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You’re either for it or you’re against it. There’s not any middle ground as I know of.” — Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace (1959)

On Jews

“You f*cking Jew b@stard.” — Hillary Clinton to political operative Paul Fray. This was revealed in “State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton” and has been verified by Paul Fray and three witnesses.

“The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He rose Germany up from the ashes.” — Louis Farrakhan (1984) who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002

“Now that nation called Israel, never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can never be any peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under his holy and righteous name.” — Louis Farrakhan who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002, 1984

‘Hymies.’ ‘Hymietown.’ — Jesse Jackson’s description of New York City while on the 1984 presidential campaign trail.

“Jews — that’s J-E-W-S.” — Democratic state representative Bill McKinney on why his daughter Cynthia lost in 2002

On Whites

“I want to go up to the closest white person and say: ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”

— Charles Barron, a New York city councilman at a reparations rally, 2002

“Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.” — Mary Frances Berry, Chairwoman, US Commission on Civil Rights

(I) “will not let the white boys win in this election.” — Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s Campaign Manager on the 2000 election

“The old white boys got taken fair and square.” — San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown after winning an election

“There are white n*ggers. I’ve seen a lot of white n*ggers in my time.” — Former Klansman and Current US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate” in March of 2001

“The Medicaid system must have been developed by a white male slave owner. It pays for you to be pregnant and have a baby, but it won’t pay for much family planning.” — Jocelyn Elders

The white man is our mortal enemy, and we cannot accept him. I will fight to see that vicious beast go down into the lake of fire prepared for him from the beginning, that he never rise again to give any innocent black man, woman or child the hell that he has delighted in pouring on us for 400 years.” — Louis Farrakhan who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002, City College audience in New York

“There’s no great, white bigot; there’s just about 200 million little white bigots out there.” — USA Today columnist Julienne Malveaux

“We have lost to the white racist press and to the racist reactionary Jewish misleaders.” — Former Rep. Gus Savage (D-Illinois) after his defeat 1992

“White folks was in caves while we was building empires… We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” — Rev. Al Sharpton in a 1994 speech at Kean College, NJ, cited in “Democrats Do the Dumbest Things

“The white race is the cancer of human history.” — Susan Sontag

“Reparations are a really good way for white people to admit they’re wrong.” — Zack Webb, University Of Kentucky NAACP

Panun Kashmir.org:

“Even after attainment of independence and accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India the fundamentalist forces in the Kashmir valley refused to accept the principles of secularism and democratic pluralism and intensified their nefarious designs against the minority community of Kashmiri Hindus and against the Indian Republic. Under a macabre programme, ‘makatabs’ (Religious schools) were established in every nook and corner of the Kashmir valley with the putative aim of teaching religious scriptures to youth but with the real intent of indoctrinating and envenoming these impressionable minds with anti-Hindu and anti-India hatred. Funds were lavished on these schools openly and clandestinely by local patrons as well as Muslim countries espousing Islamic fundamentalism round the world led by Pakistan, and the schools became nurseries for the growth of fundamentalism and terrorism. A ban imposed by the Government of Sheikh Mohd. Abdullah on these schools in 1977 was lifted soon after its imposition under relentless pressure by Jamat-i-Islami and other fundamentalist organisations.

These pressure groups gradually extended their tentacles in every sphere of administration, bureaucracy and judiciary in the State and molded these institutions in a cruel conspiracy against Kashmiri Pandits resulting in discrimination, alienation, denial and deprivation of this community over the years. The process of Islamisation and fundamentalism which started in 1947 took firm roots by 1986 when the fundamentalist/terrorists enacted a dress rehearsal of the present terrorism on a small scale by arson, loot and plunder of Kashmiri Pandit property and their temples in the Anantnag district of the Kashmir valley. No serious effort was made by the administration to bring the guilty to book. This encouraged them to cross the border to attend arms training camps in Pakistan over the next three years during which they brought with them large quantities of sophisticated arms and ammunition to carry on full scale subversion and terrorism. The cataclysmic events leading to genocide and mass exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community from 1990 onwards is the culmination of this long process of regimentation, indoctrination, religious frenzy and terrorism.”

Haindava Keralam.com

“Bharadwaj, a youth from Kanchipuram, Tamilnadu went to Japan in the 10th century (736 AD). To the Japanese he was ‘Baramon’. He taught them Buddhism, Ramayana, Sanskrit, Dharma, Hindu Philosophy and gave them culture, art and music. Today everything with which the Japanese rightly feel proud of as their ancient heritage and culture was given to them by this monk. The Japanese have three scripts – one of them based on Tamil and Sanskrit. That was given by “Baramon Bharadwaj”.

A Japanese delegate Shri Shuzo Matsunoga participated in the Fifth World Tamil Conference held at Thanjavur in 1981 (30 years ago). He presented a paper on ‘Thirukural & Thiruvalluvar in the eyes of Japan’. Muthu, now 91years young, of Omalur off Salem, Tamilnadu came in contact with Sri Shuzo Matsunoga after the Conference. They discussed at length the Tamil culture and literature. Shuzo translated the English version of G U Pope’s Thirukuraal (aphorisms) as guided by Muthu Ji. Shuzo also translated various books of Subramania Bharathi (Kuil Paatu), Naaladiar, Vallalarr poems, Manimegalai and Silapathigaram into Japanese language. Shuzo not only translated the literature but also the culture/rituals of tamils from birth to death, which was greatly relished by the Japanese. Shuzo also bagged a prize for translation of tamil work in 1985 organized by University of Tanjore who also authors a book “My India as seen through letters”.

Now, the Government of Japan has included this Thirukural as a lesson in the text book at college level. To cap it all, when the Japanese Government proposed to release a postal stamp to honour Shuzo Matsunoga for his works, he humbly refused and said, “To translate this tamil literature into Japanese language, Muthu from Salem has helped me. So the credit goes to him”. On his recommendation the Japanese Government released a postal stamp on Muthu (Salem) for 80 Yen (Rs.27/-) in 2007. Muthu, a humble and noble person, did nothing for selfish end. It was all for the Tamil literature. He communicated all this over to his friend in Japan only through 200 letters, while, in the Facebook age, individuals transmit info electronically.”

Comment:

Would that Indian Christians and Muslims were also as respectful and affectionate toward their own Indic and Hindu pasts as the Japanese are, and as Americans are toward their mother culture in Europe, especially Italy and Greece. Instead, many Indian Christians and Muslims (not all) seem to prefer to side with power (both Islam and Christianity are politically powerful on the world stage) rather than truth, setting the stage for foreign powers to exploit local dissension for their own purposes.

Atanu Dey, writing in 2000, on Indian education:

“It was fashionable in the 1970s and 80s to refer to the migration of trained doctors, scientists and engineers to the advanced industrialized countries as a “brain drain.” Actually, it was a “resource drain” rather than a “brain drain.” India never really had a shortage of basic brains. There are hundreds of millions of basic brains in India. However it takes resources to train a basic brain and turn it into a useful brain. These scarce resources are lost to the economy when used to train brains that eventually migrate.

Just like capital flight from poor economies to the rich ones, the migration of trained manpower, human capital flight, is enormously expensive. It is an even more of a burden when the training is publicly funded. When a trained engineer migrates to the US, it is totally indistinguishable from a gift of US$ 100,000 from India to the US. Over the years, the total implicit subsidy from India to the US could be estimated to be of the order of hundred billion dollars.

Losses

When an educated person leaves India, there is a first-order loss to the economy if the education was publicly funded. There is no comparable first-order loss if private resources were involved in the training. But in either case, the economy loses the life-time stream of economic contributions that the migrant would have made. This is a second-order loss. There is what can be considered a third-order loss that is harder to estimate but whose impact may be the most damaging in the long run. This arises from publicly subsidizing higher education at the expense of primary education.

Primary education, somewhat like primary health care, has characteristics of what economists call a “public good.” The positive effects of primary education spill over into the larger economy more than that of higher education, which is more like a private good. Markets efficiently provide optimal quantities of private goods but are known to under-provide public goods.

[Lila: Many libertarians would question whether this is true. I don’t know the research well enough to judge if they are accurate or not]

The market understandably fails in the case of primary education. The solution is straightforward: the public subsidy of primary education.

[Lila: Fortunately, technology and business (the internet), as always, have solved this issue, while the theorists still wrangle about public goods. Thus, contra Dey, the market has already provided the solution.]

The essential point is that the subsidizing higher education is an inefficient use of resources which could have been used for primary education. And this distorted system has real-world consequences: the shameful neglect of primary education.

Dismal Statistics

The Indian constitution mandates universal primary education for all (see Article 8 of the Indian Constitution). Yet, 41% of children do not reach grade 5 in India. Compare that to some other countries:

Gambia 20%
Mali 18%
Senegal 15%
Tanzania 17%
Burkina Faso 25%

[Source: Human Development Report 1999. UNDP.]

Of the countries that rank lower than India in the human development index, only about four have higher percentage of children that do not reach the fifth grade. Mozambique does worse than India, for instance. But never mind small strange sub-Saharan African countries. Take Indonesia for example: only 11% of its children don’t go past the fifth grade. Or take Mexico with its 14% figure. Compare India with neighboring Sri Lanka with its 17%.

The failure of Indian primary education is hard to escape. Sixty years after India’s political independence, India is places 126th out of 175 countries ranked in the 2006 Human Development Report. India’s adult literacy rate is a dismal 61%, below Cameroon (68%), Angola, Congo, Uganda (67%), Rwanda (65%), and Malawi (64%). That 40% of today’s Indian adults cannot even “both read and write a short, simple statement related to their everyday life” implies that they did not get the equivalent of the most basic of primary education. Compare that to China’s 90% adult literacy. [Source: UNDP Human Development Report.]

Successful NRIs

The argument is often advanced that the Indian education system must be world-class. After all, doesn’t it produce world-class NRIs (non-resident Indians) like Vinod Khosla and Rajat Gupta? Yes, of course. And don’t they turn around and give millions of dollars to support the IITs? Yes, of course. Sure the NRIs send some money home. But what is the ratio of the amount India spends on their education to what these worthies send back home?

Even then, who could be so crass as to measure everything in terms of dollars? Surely there is something more important than money. Yes, there is. And it is the untapped human capital that India has in abundance and which it criminally neglects. It neglects them because the powers that be have it made under the current system and it serves their narrow purposes.

In practically every measure of education, India’s rank is so abysmal that it is depressing to even look at the figures. Even if the solution to India’s education problems were as little as a week’s worth of clean drinking water, India would still be in trouble. Around 60% of Indians don’t have access to clean drinking water.

For all our vaunted world-class scientists, doctors and engineers, India ranks miserably in the number of scientists and technicians it has: 0.3 such per 1,000 population. Compare that to: China 0.6, Islamic Rep of Iran 0.7, South Africa 1.7, Korea 2.9.

Hyperbole and Hubris

We in India lack many things. One thing appears not to be in short supply–the hyperbole and the capacity for self-delusion. We have pretenses of being an information superpower. Our IT sector is supposed to make us great. It stretches the imagination beyond belief that this idea can be entertained by anyone. We account for less than 1% of the global $600 billion IT business. Remember we represent 17% of the world’s population. Even if we were to increase our share 10 times (and this is unreasonable by any account) we’d still be below the world average.

Judging the Indian education system based on a Chandrashekhar or a Ramanujan is misguided and delusional. It is like weighing a pinch of mustard seeds against a herd of elephants and declaring that the mustard weighs more. How do we manage to delude ourselves so? I believe that those doing the judging live in very rarefied atmospheres. Their world is populated by jet-setting intellectuals and internet millionaires and H1-B visas and e-commerce and NRIs. Hard evidence to the contrary, it is more comforting to believe that we are not that badly off.

Is there any point in confronting the hard evidence, you may ask. Yes, there is. Unless we recognize the basic problem, examine it dispassionately, we are unlikely to even consider solving the problem. In a sort of defense through denial, we can go on with business as usual by declaring the problem does not exist. But the problem does exist. And the problem is not one that does not have wide ranging implications. The most devastating impact of our dismal educational system is that we are condemning ourselves to a future of exceedingly low economic development. If there is one thing that developmental economists have learned, it is this: education is the most important factor in economic growth. Education has more impact on economic growth than natural resources, foreign investment, exports, imports, whatever. Neglect education and you may as well hang yourself and save yourself the pain of a slow miserable death.

So who paid for my education? It is the poor rural children, thousands of them, who paid for my education by losing their opportunity to become semi-literate. The system is tilted against them and unless there is a radical change in the way that education is funded, they will continue to pay the price for subsidizing the US for decades to come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FULL COST PRICING

A brief solution to the problem of full-cost pricing is easy to state. Price all higher education at full cost. If a year of engineering school costs Rs 3 lakhs, price it at that. Then give loans to every student that needs it to pay the price. The loan is repayable upon employment and in terms commensurate with the level of employment. If you earn big dollars in the US, pay in big dollars. If you work as a doctor in a small village in India, pay small amounts in rupees. Essentially, with the loan system in place, there is no need for public subsidies for higher education.”

[Lila: Better yet, return primary education to private religious groups, who have historically been most effective in that area]

George Monbiot, “Outsourcing Unrest,” The Guardian, June 17 2009:

“In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment … it has also been a very significant factor in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.”

(1) As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others … leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793.”

(2) In France, by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawn notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head.” In 1788, half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: “the American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy”(3).

Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.

Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from places like Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800 tons(4). It was all produced by stolen labour.

Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that Indian wheat exports to the UK doubled between 1876 and 1877 as subsistence there collapsed

(5). Several million Indians died of starvation. In the North Western provinces the famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as their surplus production was exported to offset poor English harvests in 1876 and 1877(6).

Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th Century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French Revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.

In the late 19th Century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white Dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries … braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline.”(7) Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.

Its role in British colonisation was not a passive one. The bankruptcy and subsequent British takeover of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale”

(8). Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in world history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.

We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalisation and its Discontents, the capital liberalisation forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98(9). Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as Trade Related Investment Measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements(10). If you have ever wondered how a small, densely-populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.

But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in his fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded(11). The nation which relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure – three centuries spent pillaging the labour, wealth and resources of other countries – is over. We cannot accept this, and seek gleeful revenge on a government which can no longer insulate us from reality.”

Carl Herman in The Examiner examines the dreadful National Defense Authorization Act (which allows for the indefinite detention without trial of people (including US citizens) suspected of supporting enemies of the US and its allies) and describes just how broad its application could end up being, by showing how the media, under the influence of intelligence, stopped treating water-boarding as torture:

“Let’s consider US corporate media’s “reporting” in more detail. This is essential because if American’s access to accurate information is compromised by government propaganda, then Americans will not have easy access to the facts. This is what the California Framework means when it asks you to guard against propaganda. Doing so requires your real-world critical thinking skills.

“Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media,” a paper published from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that studied the US’ four most-read newspapers, found from the 1930s to 2004 that The New York Times reported waterboarding as torture 82% of the time, and The Los Angeles Times did so 96%. After stories broke that the US was waterboarding “detainees” in current US wars, the papers’ reporting of waterboarding as torture dropped to 1% and 5%, respectfully. [sic] In addition, after the US admitted to waterboarding, The Wall Street Journal called it torture in just 1 of 63 articles (2%), and USA Today never called it torture.

We have verified history of official government propaganda having infiltrated corporate media. The Church Senate Committee hearings had the cooperation of CIA Director William Colby’s testimony that over 400 CIA operatives were controlling US corporate media [20] reporting on specific issues of national interest in what they called Operation Mockingbird. This stunning testimony was then confirmed by Pulitzer Prize reporter Carl Bernstein’s research [21] and reporting. Of course, corporate media refused to publish Bernstein’s article and it became the cover-story for Rolling Stone. For a 13-minute video that includes the President of CBS admitting that their news agency accepted and communicated CIA-generated and planted stories, the CIA Director admitting to the Senate that this is true, examples of widely-reported “news” stories that were total lies from the CIA to foment war support from the US public, watch here. [22]

So which conclusion seems most plausible to you:

1. US corporate media stopped calling waterboarding “torture” because leading and professional reporters of law somehow forgot or found basic legal definitions based on case law no longer important. I like to characterize this as the “Homer Simpson” or “SpongeBob defense.”
2. US corporate media were ordered to change their reporting. Professional writers in law are very aware of looking at case law, and independent legal experts they interview affirm this as basic legal analysis especially when case law is unanimous in verdicts. It’s impossible to explain this removal of reporting waterboarding as legally-defined torture unless the corporate media editors made that conscious decision.”