Why the left and the right are both wrong?

Two long pieces that accurately analyze the problems of the left and the right in the US today. While the two pieces are worth a read, I try and summarize the main points they make which have resonance with me:


Jon Chait takes the liberals to task for their insistence on absolute purity and standards of performance that are unachievable in actual political life. He tells them that "maybe there is something to learn from the frequent (anguished) comparisons liberals make between Obama and FDR. Part of the reason Roosevelt’s record looms so large from a distance is because historians measure these things differently from political activists. Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

By that standard, Obama’s first term would indeed seem to qualify as gangsta shit. His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes—expanding targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (including one that killed Osama bin Laden), ending the war in Iraq, and helping to orchestrate an apparently successful international campaign to rescue Libyan dissidents and then topple a brutal kleptocratic regime. So, if Obama is the most successful liberal president since Roosevelt, that would make him a pretty great president, right?” Liberals and moderates need to learn to honor these achievements and not constantly bewail that perfection has not been achieved.

David Frum in turn takes on the suicidal turn that the republican party has taken over the past few years and shines a bright light on the underlying causes of this malaise. He complains bitterly that “It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies”.. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program."


Why did these dizzying u-turns occur? According to David, there are deep underlying demographic changes as well as the recent downturn in the economy that are the causes of this suicidal turn. The fact is 
 the U.S has entered into “an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. ..Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology."

Another issue is the developing mood of pessimism and anger among the republican constitueancies. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. And “It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base."Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.

And one must not forget the role played by the media- especially on the right “Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). .But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics."

“Outside this alternative reality," David continues, " the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information. This conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society."

A question of honor

I recently returned from a small ceremony in the British Embassy to honor a friend of mine for a thesis that he wrote almost four decades ago. The interesting thing about the ceremony was that it was to honor a Canadian who had written this doctoral work working then as a Hong Kong student in England. How all this came about is a story in itself..

Gerald had come to England as a student from Hong Kong to work on a doctoral program. He was a student in Leeds University in 1966 when he selected a topic to work on for his thesis which was financed on a contract from the Ministry of Defence. He finished his work in the contracted period of three years, submitted his work, was awarded his phD and went to a successful career in Intelsat. A few years ago he retired from Intelsat and took up Canadian citizenship. One day a friend of his from the Intelsat days, Phil was visiting him for dinner who idly asked what Gerald had written as his thesis some four decades ago. Gerald was able to locate the thesis and showed it to his friend. Phil took a long look at it and said that in his view this was a seminal piece of work and that it had probably been used by the UK navy for communication with their nuclear submarines and was a key piece of the deterrent during the days of the cold war. He felt that the work needed to be recognized and set about pursuing the bureacracy in UK. Gerald, of course, knew nothing about what use his thesis had been put to in all those years since 1969 and was delighted to learn that his work may have contributed in no small measure for maintaining the peace during the cold war.

After four years of determined pursuit, the UK Ministry of defence finally acknowledged the author of  the work and its contribution to nuclear deterrence. Apparently the theoritical work Gerald did was on low frequency communications which could penetrate the oceans and connect the headquaters in London with the submerged nuclear submarines without their having to surface.The embassy in Washington arranged a function to give a citation to Gerald for his work at a small dignified ceremony attended by a small group of family and friends.

The really interesting thing about this story is how a friend selflessly chose to pursue this over a period of four years, the willingness of the UK Ministry of defence to acknowledge a long forgotten contribution of a foreign student, and the grace of the Embassy in Washington in organizing this ceremony. What loyalty, what honor and what grace.

It is rare for a country to honor contributions of its own citizens, it is rarer still for them to seek out and honor those who come from other countries.

During his acceptance speech, Gerald added another twist to this unusual story: " The contract of the University for this work was for three years but I still needed another few months to complete it. So I went to the Ministry of defence to ask for an extension but they flatly refused. I was a poor student and did not know how I would complete the work. But then I noticed that I had been paying unemployment insurance during the past few years and so I enquired if I was eligible for unemployment compensation. I was delighted to learn that I was. So I finished the work only because I was on the dole!"

The recipe for happiness

Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into a store and buy a recipe for lifelong happiness?

Recent research seems to suggest that that objective may no longer be out of reach. All you need to do is to follow a few key precepts. Be just, have a goal and be generous. That’s it.

“The just man is happy, and the unjust man is miserable,” Plato declares in The Republic. A noble thought, to be sure, but Socrates’ most famous student didn’t have data to back up his belief. But now the World Values Survey, which has been measuring these parameter in 100 countries since 1981, has the results for happiness.  As part of the 2005-06 wave of the World Values Survey, respondents were asked in face-to-face interviews: On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? There were also four ethics questions that ask how acceptable or unacceptable they felt a particular practice is: claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled; avoiding paying your fare on public transportation; cheating on taxes; and accepting a bribe. The University of Missouri economist “ found a correlation between how people responded to ethics questions and their satisfaction with life. ..generally, people who believe that these particular ethical scenarios are not acceptable also tend to indicate they are more satisfied with life.”


Admittedly, this measure of ethics is less than ideal. It certainly does not reveal the actual behavior of people. However, the four statements have a common, underlying ethical construct, which is that each of them expresses an action that could either directly or indirectly harm others, or society generally. Also, the measure of happiness is relatively crude. If someone asks you how satisfied you are with your life, your answer can be affected by many things that happened to you that particular day or week or month. But still these findings are consistent with the view that happiness is derived from doing well, and from meeting psychological rather than material or hedonistic needs. While income, personal characteristics and societal values play a role in affecting happiness, so do personal ethics. Plato had it right " the just man is happy".

According to a new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies ( yes, there is such a journal), people who engage in activities that increase competency, such as exercising, studying or working, experience decreased happiness, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of stress while doing so. Yet in spite of the negative effects they felt on an hourly basis, the participants reported that they felt happy and satisfied with the same activities when they reflected on them at the end of the day. The study investigated whether people who spend time on activities that fulfill certain psychological needs — the need to be competent, feel connected to others and be autonomous or self-directed — experience greater happiness. They also examined the effects of fulfilling these needs on a person’s moment-to-moment happiness.

It seems that activities promoting autonomy and connectedness increased happiness on an hourly and daily basis, but the greatest increase in momentary happiness was experienced by participants who were involved in something that contributed to their sense of autonomy. It looks like Albert Einstein had it right when he advised, “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal.”

Then there are two new studies that suggest giving to others makes us happy, even happier than spending on ourselves. What’s more, our kindness might create a virtuous cycle that promotes lasting happiness and altruism. In one of the studies, published last year in the Journal of Social Psychology, researchers in Great Britain had participants take a survey measuring life satisfaction, then they assigned all 86 participants to one of three groups. One group was instructed to perform a daily act of kindness for the next 10 days. Another group was also told to do something new each day over those 10 days. A third group received no instructions. After the 10 days were up, the researchers asked the participants to complete the life satisfaction survey again. The groups that practiced kindness and engaged in novel acts both experienced a significant—and roughly equal—boost in happiness; the third group didn’t get any happier. The findings suggest that good deeds do in fact make people feel good—even when performed over as little as 10 days—and there may be particular benefits to varying our acts of kindness, as novelty seems linked to happiness as well.

But kindness may have a longer, even more profound effect on our happiness, according to the second study, published online in the Journal of Happiness Studies in April , where the researchers made two big findings. First, consistent with the British study, people in general felt happier when they were asked to remember a time they bought something for someone else—even happier than when they remembered buying something for themselves. But the second finding is even more provocative: The happier participants felt about their past generosity, the more likely they were in the present to choose to spend on someone else instead of themselves. Not all participants who remembered their past kindness felt happy. But the ones who did feel happy were overwhelmingly more likely to double down on altruism. The results suggest a kind of “positive feedback loop” between kindness and happiness, so that one encourages the other.

So the recipe- be just, have a goal and be kind. Simple isn’t it?

What should we do with the old people?

The world welcomed the 7^th billion baby this week leading to a furor that the earth is unlikely to be able to provide for this growth in population with its limited resources. Clearly the growth in babies is not being balanced with the departure of the old. With medical advances, the old are living longer and longer and the lowering of child mortality further accentuates the problem. And hanging above it all is the cost of medical support for the elderly leading many to proffer, very guardedly, that perhaps the time has come to limit these costs in the waning days of the old. The question is how do various cultures around the world deal with the problem of the aged?

When people grow old in many parts of the world, family and friends care for them at home until the end. In America, the elderly are more typically sent to an assisted living or a skilled nursing facility, a contrast that may appear selfish, uncaring and even callous.

Eastern cultures place enormous value on family and the elderly, often adhering to traditional age hierarchies. The Confucian doctrine of ‘filial piety’ continues to have a strong presence in Chinese and Asian culture. It simply means showing obedience, respect and deference to your elders. It’s considered a privilege to be in the enlightened company of an elder, and ancestral reverence remains vitally important today. In these and other cultures, it is considered utterly shameful not to take care of your aging parents.  

In stark contrast, Western culture encourages families to strike a balance between allegiance to the elderly and individual freedom. Values of Western cultures tend to celebrate youth, self-reliance and individualism. Routinely, seniors do not live with their children and it’s often considered a big hassle to take care of your parents, even if you really want to do so. The “cult of youth” and emphasis on the virtues of independence, individualism and self-reliance also make life hard on older people as they inevitably lose some of these traits. Then, there’s America’s Protestant work ethic, “which holds that if you’re no longer working, you’ve lost the main value that society places on you.” Retirement also means losing social relationships, which, coupled with America’s high mobility, leaves many old people hundreds or even thousands of miles away from longtime friends and family.

While modernization has brought many benefits to the elderly — most notably improved health and longer life spans — it has also led to a breakdown of traditions. Modern literacy and its ties to technology are also putting the elderly at a disadvantage. “Modern literacy means that we look up things in books or on the Internet — we don’t go ask an old person. And lightning-speed technological advances “mean that the things that old people do understand got technologically outdated.”

According to UCLA professor Jared Diamond, “The idea that it’s human nature for parents to make sacrifices for their children and, in turn, for their grown children to sacrifice for their aging parents — turns out to be a ‘naïve expectation,’ This assumption, he said, ignores undeniable conflicts of interest between generations.” From a common sense perspective, “Parents and children both want a comfortable life — there are limits to the sacrifices that they’ll make for each other.”

In a provocative article, sociologist Amitai Etzioni, argues that the Eskimo solution of “putting the old on an ice floe and left to float away into the sunset” is not the right solution. Of course, he would argue that – after all he is 83! But his reasons for dismissing this are cogent and logical.

According to a recent study, Dr. Alvin C. Kwok and his colleagues find that surgery is common in the last year, month and week of life. Eighty-year-olds had a 35% chance of going under the knife in the last year of their lives; nearly one out of five Medicare recipients had surgery in their last month and one in 10 in their last week. Nobody doubts that some of these surgeries were necessary. But major medical and ethical figures argue that they reflect our reluctance to accept death or let go, the surgeons' activist interventionist orientation and the way the incentives are aligned.

As the surgeon Atul Gawande put it in The New Yorker: "Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop."

Focusing on care for the elderly, some others warn that our present attitudes "doom most of us to an old age that will end badly: with our declining bodies falling apart as they always have but devilishly -- and expensively -- stretching out the suffering and decay." They hence call on us to abandon the "traditional open-ended model" (which assumes medical advances will continue unabated) in favor of more realistic priorities, namely reducing early death and improving the quality of life for everyone. They further advocate age-based prioritization, giving the highest to children and "the lowest to those over 80."

The journalist Beth Baker summed up this position: "After people have lived a reasonably full life of, say, 70 to 80 years, they should be offered high quality long-term care, home care, rehabilitation and income support, but not extraordinary and expensive medical procedures."

Etizioni argues that “once we set an age after which we shall provide mainly palliative care, economic pressures may well push us to ratchet down the age. If 80 was a good number a few years ago, given the huge deficit and the pressure to cut Medicare expenditures, there seems no obvious reason not to lower the cut-off age to, say, 70. And nations that have weaker economies, the logic would follow, should cut off interventionist care at an even younger age. Say, 50 for Guatemala?”

But if we do not use age as a criterion for abandoning serious surgical and costly medical interventions, what is the alternative?

Etizioni argues that the correct criterion is the capacity to recover and return to a meaningful. Thus, if a person is young but has a terminal disease, say, advanced pancreatic cancer, and physicians determine that he has but a few months, maybe weeks, to live (a determination doctors often make), he may be spared aggressive interventions and be provided with mainly palliative care. In contrast, an 80-year-old with, say, pneumonia -- who can return to his family and friends to be loved and give love, contribute to the community through his volunteering and enjoy his retirement he earned with decades of work -- should be given all the treatments needed to return him to his life.

The real moral is that we should learn to accept death more readily; we should stop aggressive interventions when there is little hope; we should provide dying people with palliative care to make their passing less painful and less traumatic. And finally we should learn from the Eskimos -- they long ago stopped abandoning their elderly just because they got "too" old.

A few honorable men

In any major crisis in which passions run high and the future seems too grim to accept, there are two streams within the population- one which embraces and indeed leads the movement and the other a few- an honorable few - that emerge as voices of calm and reason. 


Last year saw the rise of the so called Tea party movement in the US. This was accompanied with angry words and vitroil that really were beyond any reasonable discourse. That they covered a subtle racism was a given but that it took over some of the moderates in its ugly wake was even more distressing. In fact at times it looked as if it was what Yeats spoke of:


   "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity."


In recent weeks the world has seen emergence of the Occupy the Wall Street (OWS) movement and its rapid spread throughout the world. This voice from below comes close on the heels of the Arab spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria as well as the populist movement against corruption in India. In all these cases the spirit and the stimulus came from ordinary men and women railing against an unjust system and an unfair distribution of power and pelf. It pitted itself against recalicitrant governments as well an authority ( the Wall street epitomized the financial elite) that was neither honest nor accountable. These untidy movements will inevitable wind through their way as they have  in the past with their heroes and villains. In all these cases we have seen ordinary men being transformed into spearholders of change and in many cases leaders have left their comfortable perches to praise these revolutionary movements.


In the US however, the one element that has been missing even till now has been the unaccountalbe absence of any honorable men standing openly against the tide of hate and disguised racism during the tea pary days. It is so disheartening to see both the republican leadership and the main stream media willingness to tolerate the kind of hatred for their president that has now become commonplace. One group argues that this has always been the case and cite incidents of worst occourennces in the past, the other seeks shelter behind a cowardly plea of objectivity. Here there are no leaders or media editors who will take out one page ads to denounce these descents into hatred as was the case a few years ago in india when the muslim massacres in Gujarat led to a countrywide outcry. Here in the US there has been only silence  broken by the Fox channels anchors and commentators wantonly encouraging hatred. No one but no one dared to challenge the drug induced paranoi of Beck or Rush Limbaugh, certainly no one from the main stream, with a few honorable exceptions in MSNBC, took a stand and there was no one from the elders of the republican party who challenged the birther movement or worse epithets flung at the president of the country. 


The real question in my mind is where were the doyens of the republican party - the senior Bush, the last president, Dole, Danforth? Did they not see the damage these movements were and doing to the party of Lincoln and to the country. Why is it that they did not speak out and still refuse to? And what about the leaders of the various churches - do they think it is all right that the public discourse is now in the gutter? 


The words of Dante spring to mind“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”.

Merging cultures through music

A famous Gujarati bhajan, favorite of Mahatma Gandhiji has been put in Qawwali format by Riyaaz Qawwali.

The slow decay of a once great newspaper

People who read newspapers have started noticing the slow but inexorable decay of a once great newspaper - The Washington Post. The Post has become a surreptitious mouthpiece of the right wing in recent times and the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein has become almost undistinuishable from a Murdoch newspaper- albeit its conversion is more subtle. On a typical day last week, it had three cover stories - two touting the Republican candidates and one condemning the Obama presidency. The problem is not so much in the editorials - which somehow continue to be relatively sane- but in the way the news is slanted and the headlines chosen.


The rot has really spread deep. Last week a Post writer was given two pages to talk about a book on Obama which he admitted he had not even read, but he still waxed eloquent on how they were received in the media and how it showed Obama's team disfunction ! Another Post reporter managed to write a piece on the Job Act without mentioning the reason for its failure - the republican filibuster. It took a respected journalist to point out the "false equivalence"in the piece-- which is really a code word for blatant misrepresentation by the Post. In any other placed, the editor of the paper would have tarred and feathered and driven out of town for his papers continued bias. 


Here is James Fallows "I heard angrily from a number of reporters in the last few days. They are objecting to my claims that mainstream journalism is "enabling" Senate dysfunction by describing it as dysfunction plain and simple, rather than as the result of deliberate and extremely effective Republican strategy. That strategy, over the past four-plus years, has been to apply the once-rare threat of a filibuster to virtually everything the Administration proposes. This means that when the Democrats can't get 60 votes for something, which they almost never can, they can't get nominations confirmed, bills enacted, or most of what they want done.

You can consider this strategy brilliant and nation-saving, if you are a Republican. You can consider it destructive and nation-wrecking, if you are a Democrat. You can view it as just what the Founders had in mind, as Justice Scalia asserted recently at an Atlantic forum. You can view it as another step down the road to collapse, since the Democrats would have no reason not to turn the same nihilist approach against the next Republican administration. But you shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist. 


That was my objection to a recent big Washington Post storyon what is wrong with the Senate, which did not contain the word "filibuster." And there is an example again this very day. I wish to Heaven that the item had appeared somewhere else, but it happens that it's also in the Post. A  story on what happened to Obama's jobs-bill proposal in the Senate concentrates on the two Plains States Democrats, Ben Nelson and Jon Tester, who defected during the cloture vote -- and not on the 100% Republican opposition to even bringing this bill up for consideration. .. I will point out these features:

- Like the previous one, it manages not to use the word "filibuster" while describing why the Administration's programs have not gotten through a Senate that the Democrats "control." The Democrats would actually "control" the Senate if a 51-vote majority were enough to pass most measures. But they don't control it, with 53 Dem+Indep seats, when the 60-vote standard becomes routine. This is too important a fact to be left out of accounts of what is happening in the Senate.

- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it."  No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. .And the story has this virtuoso suggestion that Democratic wavering really explains why the Republicans don't vote for Administration proposals."

It should "come as no surprise" that all the Republicans end up voting against the bill, because that is the Republican strategy. You don't have to present this as some inside-dope subtle game-theory problem, with wavering Republicans watching Nelson and Tester for cues. The explanation is simpler: Mitch McConnell's Senate Republicans have been rock-ribbed in enforcing their strategic choice that opposing the Administration makes policy and political sense. "

The sad fact is that the Post has started hiring reporters who have little regard for truth or objectivity. In truth they are becoming the Fox news of the print media - "fair and balanced" trope included.

A billionaires advises the Wall Street protesters

We have all heard advise from various pundits and professors on the fact that the protesters around the world dont have an agenda, that they are just hippie agitators out for a good time and that these demonstrations will peter out with the onset of colder weather.

So it was refreshing to find a billionaire, Mark Cuban, providing advise to these demonstrators “what I would do if the OWS movement asked for my advice” and he goes on to lay out a few provocative ideas

1. Expose the Great Lie of Wall Street.

Every CEO tells the same great white lie. It is at the heart of every communication. It is at the heart of every financial decision. It is, at it’s very base, the reason why you all are in the 99pct and they are in the 1pct. The Lie ?

Great CEO  White Lie = “We are acting in the best interests of shareholders.”

OWS needs to move really change the prevailing corporate structure and impact the economy, it needs to engage with and talk to the shareholders. Talk to your parents, uncles/aunts, cousins, friends who own shares of stocks either directly or indirectly and have them state loudly and clearly that they would rather have. Even better why not buy a share of stock. Just 1. Maybe you can all pitch in and then go to a shareholders meeting and let them know how you feel about the “best interests of shareholders.”

2.  Push to Make All Financial Institutions Partnerships

We should make all investment banks become reporting partnerships. Those personal guarantees would change everything in the banking industry. It would change the decision making process across the board.  There would be a moral hazard to every decision and it would be the purest having “skin in the game”

3.  Limit the Size of Student Loans to $2,000 per year

If the size of student loans are capped at a low level, you know what will happen to the price of going to a college or university ? It will plummet.  Colleges and universities will have to completely rethink what they are, what purpose they serve and who their customers will be. Will some go out of business? Absolutely. That is real world. Will the quality of education suffer? Given that TAs will still work for cheap, I doubt it. But the impact on the overall economy will be enormous. There is more student loan debt than credit card debt outstanding today. By relieving this burden at graduation, students will be able to participate in the economy

4.  Levy a simple share per share tax on every transaction.

The simplest way to change this is to place a very simple per share tax on every transaction. 10 cents a trade. Every share. Every option. Every Bond. Every currency transaction.  Every trade. It might just put the market back to the basics of what the stock and bond markets are supposed to be, a means of raising capital to support corporate growth and not a casino that it has now become.  

A message for the masses and for financial elites

In recent weeks "occupy the Wall Street" (OWS) protests have captured the public imagination but the punditry is still behind times cavilling at the lack of a clear message.

" What do these protesters want?" they wail. 

The simple answer is less corruption and more accountability among the elites particularly the financial elites. 

But that message seems to not get through to the media coverage which lazily ( in case of the main street media) and deliberately ( in the case of Fox news) refuses to acknowledge the explicit and implicit message of the OWS. Take the case of recent coverage of events: After a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls !

As Matt Taibbi points out in an elegant article in the Rolling Stones, “This reveals the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.”

It is true that the OWS needs to have a clear and cogent message, one that resonates with the people. Some suggestions for these few messages:

1. Make Wall Street pay for its own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay for the bailouts. (As an added benefit, it would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.)

2. Provide incentives to billionaires and Banks to invest in infrastructure. The millionaire surtax of 5 % should be temporary and could be removed as the economy recovers. With every 1% increase in GDP growth, the surtax could be reduced from 5% to an equivalent amount.

3. If Corporations are people, they should be taxed accordingly. Remove the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires.

4. Break up the monopolies. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled by mandating the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

5. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him.

6. No upfront bonuses or exorbitant parachutes for Wall Street titans. These should be directly tied to the performance of the company in creating jobs and shareholder value over the long term.

What brothers and sisters can teach you

In his new book, “The Sibling Effect,” Jeffrey Kluger, explores relationships among brothers and sisters.

It is these relationships, which form the core of our being though they are not as often studied. Which is strange since from the time we’re born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, and sources of envy, objects of pride. They help us learn how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. Bigger sibs learn to nurture by mentoring little ones; little sibs learn about wisdom by heeding older ones.

Kluger, a Time magazine science writer, talks about what years of research have taught him about sibling relationships in general. The interesting part is trying to use this research to make some sense of our own relationships. Did mom really love your eldest brother the best? Was your only sister the apple of your dad’s eye? Are the youngest kids more empathetic and funny? Are only children selfish but adult from an early age? Read on and see if you agree with all this research!

On the rules of birth order. Conventional wisdom is that older siblings are usually conservative, striving, competent and authoritative; youngest siblings are often iconoclasts, artists and comedians; and middle siblings tend to get lost in the thicket.

Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents’ attention. The idea of what businesses call “sunk costs” comes into play here, which means that by the time an older child is 2 or 3 years old, the parents have sunk a great deal of money, time, and physical and emotional energy into them. When a younger child comes along, evolutionarily speaking, it’s like a product that is not as far down the creation and assembly process. So, you put more energy into the product that is further along because that one has the greatest chance of success to thrive in life. There is a lot of parental focus on the older child, even if they’re not aware they’re doing it.

The youngest child has a valedictory quality because he or she is the parents’ final shot. Youngest kids tend to develop a greater ability to use low-power strategies, like getting inside the minds of and charming other people, because they’re the smallest child in the house. When you can’t thump your older siblings to get what you need, you learn to disarm them by being funny, or you learn to have a better intuitive sense.

The middle child seems to get the worst of both worlds. Being neither the oldest of the youngest, they neither get the attention nor do they feel the urge to develop specific strategies to charm other people. The youngest child does eventually become an only child and gets to experience the uniqueness of being the focus of parents’

attention that the firstborn had, if only for a little while, because they’re the last one left in the house. The middle child gets none of this. That’s why they tend to invest in greater ways in friendships outside the home and be much less connected to the family.

On the effects of parental favoritism. Parents do have favorites, Kluger says, but they should deny it with their dying breaths. It's not helpful, he says, and it might be especially harmful for the parental pet. It's what goes on with professional athletes and why they get into so much trouble. They think the rules don't apply to them. No one ever told them 'no.' 

On siblings and risky behavior. The smaller the age differences between siblings, the more likely they are to share friends and bad habits. All things being equal, the younger sib is inclined to pick up the habit. The older brother or sister is the closest model you have to what approaches adult or cool behavior."

On life as a singleton. As only children know, Kluger says, life ain't so bad. In fact, it's just fine. Singletons tend to learn at daycare or camp or school what brothers and sisters learn from each other at home. Indeed studies show that singletons grow up with better vocabularies, more sophisticated humor and a better knowledge of how the world operates.  In the early 20th century, some scientists said things like being an only child is a disease and the world would be better if only children didn’t exist. The idea was that only children learn self-absorption and selfishness when they should learn sharing. They learn entitlement when they should learn earned favors. When you think of an only child, the stereotypical image that comes to mind is of a forlorn figure in a silent house whose parents are occupied by adult chores and who doesn’t know how to play with cousins at Thanksgiving. Yet study after study has found that none of this is true.

Only children tend to exceed other kids in terms of academic accomplishments, sophistication, vocabulary, and often, social skills as well. They have a great ability to make and maintain friends, and to resolve conflict, because they have to be nimble about learning skills outside the home, like in daycare, play groups, and school. One of the advantages of being an only child in the home is that the conversations you hear and participate in, the TV shows you watch, and the vacations you go on tend to skew older. All these things become food for the developing brain, and by the time the child is in first grade, he or she has a background in adult thinking and abstract concepts that children with siblings just don’t get.

On sibling fights. There are so many reasons for sibling fights The most common is, yes, you guessed it, property.  It’s a powerful symbol for kids, since property is a critical way of establishing authority and control over a world in which they have virtually no power. You’re physically little. You don’t have any resources beyond what your parents can and are willing to give you. So, when something is yours, it becomes a real totem of the little bit of authority you have, which is one of the reasons little kids are so terrible about sharing. With very young kids, when researchers look at what the causes of fights are, some 80 percent of all fights in the playroom break out over property disputes. Unfortunately too often this carries on into their adult lives as well. One of the major reasons for family disputes at least in India is property.

Situational fairness. Kids also fight over what Kluger calls "situational fairness." For example, Molly has a fever so she gets to stay home from school and watch cartoons. Betty, her sister, doesn't want to be sick, but she does want to miss school and watch cartoons. What is the first word out of Betty's mouth? "Unfair!"

Our spouses and children arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents leave us too early. But our brothers and sisters are with us for the whole journey. And so learning about these relationships and nurturing them should be important for all of us.

A clash of cultures ( part 3)

Even as I was explaining the clash of cultures in India, my attention was drawn to a new book that attempted to explain the present vitroilic standoffs in US public life. According to Colin Woodard, Americans have never agreed on anything, and that’s not about to change. 

Americans’ fundamental differences go way back, Woodard explains; the original North American colonies were settled by people from completely distinct regions of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands. They were middle-class Calvinists with a missionary zeal to improve the world through education and good government; Scots and Irish rednecks who hated authority in any form; aristocratic slave lords with no use for democracy; English Quakers; Spanish missionaries; northern French peasants. They had no time for each other and they founded very different regional cultures – the “American nations” of Woodard’s title, which don't map exactly onto either the colonies or the early states – that are very much with us today and whose distinctive cultural DNA goes a long way toward explaining why we're still at each others' throats.

Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists seeking to remake earthly society in accord with God's plan, but over time it spread to Midwestern frontier and even, by ship, to the Pacific coast. Yankees have always had a faith in government to improve the world and a drive to improve the world, with the community perfecting itself through individual self-denial – which, when you think about it, is a very un-American idea! Yankeedom has been at the center of many of America’s great moral crusades, from the fight to abolish slavery to Prohibition to the environmental movement. The religious zeal has gone down for various reasons over the years, but not the secular puritan zeal behind it and the drive to somehow improve the world through public institutions.

The Deep South was founded a few generations after Yankeedom around Charleston and the lowlands of South Carolina by English slave lords from the island of Barbados. It was actually referred to as "Carolina in the West Indies," as if it was a Caribbean slave island that just happened to be on the mainland. It was a slave state backed by a racial caste system. The system was extremely authoritarian and marked by staggering differences in wealth and privilege and rights. Its founders considered the slave state to be virtuous; they abhorred democracy and saw themselves as aristocrats and society as being created to serve their interests. They thought that regular people's participation in politics should be limited or nonexistent.

The clash of cultures that we see today is the result of this basic DNA.

Most Yankees, New Netherlanders and Left Coasters simply won’t accept an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics.

Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite a public health-insurance system; a universal network of generously funded, unionized and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities; government-subsidized transportation, high-speed rail and renewable energy projects; or strict regulations on financial services, food safety, environmental pollution and campaign finance.

Hence the vitroil and lack of compromise.

A clash of culture -(contd.)

A reader wrote in after my latest blog on ‘ A clash of cultures” saying that he found the piece “a little confusing. In case of US we are clear you would prefer the idealistic over the mean minded.:  But in case of India one is not clear  whom you prefer: in case of US you give us a blunt black and white divide; in case of India you say the  cultural divide is generational and speak of  strengths and weaknesses  of both. “

If I am not clear which vision or culture I prefer in the case of India, it is because I am genuinely confused. Having been brought up in the western traditions of universality of values and fairness, the present day turn to crass materialism and commercialization jars. Yet the power of capitalism to rapidly erode boundaries of caste and class, bringing in greater societal equality and providing an avenue for innovation and experimentation are sorely welcome in a society that seemed to be decaying. There are two cultures in conflict in modern day India their differences perhaps best captured in their distinct visions of morality.

The first vision, espoused by the older generations who came to power after independence and also by my generation, is more concerned with a universal fairness, no matter who the person, no matter what the context. It has echoes of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition of thought, a society of propriety and principles and ideals. It had clear ideas of right and wrong and the summons to uphold universal principles at any cost. It is true that this morality was not the only, or even the dominant, Indian morality, or that it really was confined to the elite who possessed a disproportionate influence in years since independence, but it was the ethos I grew up in. Public service was a sacred trust, integrity and honesty was to be prized over material wealth and that was the respected Indian way. But the abstraction of these ideals, their universal and civic nature, may have given them an alien and borrowed quality, and in time the indigenous soil below had begun to assert its claims, leading to the emergence in prominence of the second vision of morality.

This second vision is the ethics of dharma and duty, not of abstract rules. Its emphasis is on applying such norms in family situations more than in the public square.  It is more rooted in the Hindu worldview. It is an alternative morality, a context-sensitive morality, and a pattern of moral reasoning in which the calculus of right and wrong is made based on the effect of one’s choices on those one cared about. The universal has given way to the familial. Another aspect of the new morality seems to be its disproportionate emphasis on money and success. The new society has stopped lying to itself and to the world about its ascetic otherworldliness. Rupee had thus finally emerged as God in India, an instant substitute for so many other forms of meaning. Consumption—condemned as futile by the religious texts and strenuously resisted by the older generation, is now paramount. There is a sense now, absent from an earlier generation, that money could solve all problems. If you were wealthy in today’s India, there were no problems that could not be overcome- power outages, land approvals, foreign deals, anything was possible. Capitalism has transfixed the Indian imagination. But this has come at a cost- in the form of rampant corruption at all levels of life, breakdown of family ties, crudeness in political behavior and a general lack of integrity in public life. 

Of the two visions, I would greatly prefer the Tata industrialists than the Ambanis, the BARC  set up by Tata than the $1 billion house of Ambanis. But perhaps there is some middle ground somewhere.

A clash of cultures

It was the autumn of 2008 a few weeks ago before the momentous American election. I was visiting India and I got into a bitter word fight with one of my best friends wives. We were discussing the possible election of Obama as America’s first black president.

“It will never happen”, she said with great certainty, “ I have lived in the U.S and the hatred of the blacks among the whites is so deep that none of them will ever vote for Obama.” She went on to cite chapter and verse to make her point. In a way she was echoing a view that Anand Girdhardas, a reported for the International Herald Tribune, observed about the present day U.S that there is “a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own…Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. ..What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue,” has fallen away.

I argued that Obama would win because the country had changed, that I had been visiting the U.S since 1961 and never had I seen a more tolerant, more charitable and more optimistic people in the world. John Kennedy epitomized the spirit of the country from the creation of the Peace Corps to the harnessing of its innovative genius in  for the moon landing. In the past forty odd years I had travelled all over but had never encountered anything but courteous treatment even in the deep south- albeit their knowledge of the world beyond their county was shaky at best. I was sure that the better angels far dominated the few KKK sympathizers and that the fact that Obama was a candidate of a major party only proved my point.

Three years on, I find that both of us were, tragically, right. While Obama won the election, the hate and bile that followed in the years later were astounding in its intensity and passion. It seems that there were two cultures in the country – one dominated by KKK, racial prejudice, small minded meanness, easily swayed by the braying of Rush Limbaugh and the round the clock drivel peddled by Rupert Murdoch through the Fox channel – and the other which still remained idealistic, optimistic ( though increasingly less so), internationally minded, willing to help others, charitable and altruistic. What we were seeing was a clash of two cultures and which prevailed in the years to come would determine the fate of the country.

In a similar vein, the Anna Hazare campaign against corruption has exposed a clash of cultures in India as well. But here the clash is more dominated by different generations rather than any ideological conflicts. The older generation hangs on to power convinced that it is their right as part of the generation that fought for freedom of the country. In the last two decades, the prime ministers have invariably been in their seventies in country where the average age is less than half that. They still yearn for the time when age was revered and seniority was all-important. There’s was the age when you joined the government service and thought of it as the ultimate public service. In every sphere, you waited your turn and eventually reached the top of the pyramid in due time. The popular saying was that “ to reach the top, you must not do anything”. Doing something exposes you to some risk but if you nothing nobody can fault you. This was the prevailing culture for almost for four decades after independence.

The opening of the economy in the 1990’s however started radically changing this culture. Now the young had other avenues to pursue. Government service fell into disfavour and the best and the brightest went into the private sector. Coupled with this unshackling came others changes in cultural mores – money became the most important indicator of growth, honesty became a game for mugs, business magazines lauded the wealthy and rarely questioned the corrupt, respect for age was still given lip service but. in sotto voices, sons starting mocking their honest parents for their simplicity and naïveté. The heroes of the day changed from freedom fighters like Nehru or scientists like Bhabha or industrialists like Tata to cricketers and film stars.

Here too we are observing a clash of cultures – one pining for the simplicity and honesty of the old ways and the other impatient with the slow pace of change and filled with a willingness to take risks and to cut corners to get to the Holy Grail. The old values are now seen as obstacles to be shunted aside in the race to the top. The older generation has meanwhile forgotten that in their time, the leaders they followed were all young- Nehru was in his early thirties, Subhash Bose was yet to reach forty when he became the Congress President, Jay Prakash Narain too was in his thirties. And with the advent of freedom, the then older generation of Mahatama Gandhi chose to stay away from power but only provided guidance from outside seeking to preserve the values that had won us our freedom.

Which culture will prevail finally in the U.S and India I do not know. I only know which one I would like to prevail and which we should all pull for.