N Ram is the editor of the Hindu, one of India's most influential newspapers. He has very clear views on a number of subjects. He buys the Chinese line on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. He has a strong anti-Islamist line. He also has backed the Sri Lankan government to the hilt. There was nothing that appeared to convince Ram that Sri Lanka had destroyed the LTTE terror machine at a terrible cost. Anyone reading his newspaper would rarely chance upon arguments that might challenge the editor's opinion.
It got to a point where the HIndu published a number of interviews with Sri Lanka's president which must have left readers confused. Was this the press or the press release?
Most brazen was N Ram's take on what some described as "internment camps" where Tamil civilians were dumped in after the end of Sri Lanka's civil war. The headline in July on visiting the Vavuniya IDP camps was that the trip was "an uplifting experience".
So what a surprise to see this story titled Things not all that well in Sri Lanka camps: India in the HIndu's news pages. Tucked away but there none the less. Looks like the editor might be afraid of the light on this one.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Parting pariah
After six years I am leaving Delhi and as fine a send off that this city could give me, I think of no better eulogy than the words of Jay Landsman, the fictional sgt. in the Wire. I am not claiming anything on Det Jimmy McNulty but I can think of no reporter who would not, with some obvious modifications, wear the words below with pride.
"He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman's shield. He brooked no authority.
"He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don't say that about many people, even when they're here on the felt. I don't say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat'ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole."
"And I'm not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion-to-every-other-facet-of-his-humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — 'from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned.'
"He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I'd want it to be you standing over me catchin' the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had."
Thursday, November 19, 2009
China's overwhelming argument of power
India's fragile ego returns.
What has offended Delhi is a line in the communique issued by President's Hu and Obama in Beijing.
"(The US and China) support the efforts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight terrorism, maintain domestic stability and achieve sustainable economic and social development, and support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan," the joint statement said.
In a sign that the US president has a weak hand to play, Washington acknowledged that Beijing has a role in the India-Pakistan relationship. China's sees itself arriving on the world stage thanks to its national power.
Sinologist Alka Acharaya makes the point: "We must realise that China-US have a totally different relationship, they are two of the biggest powers in the world...and will naturally comment on what is happening in the neighbourhood. Instead of making sanctimonious remarks, when the PM goes to Washington we can have a line in the joint statement on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. This would be more meaningful".
India has the power of argument but not the argument of power.
What has offended Delhi is a line in the communique issued by President's Hu and Obama in Beijing.
"(The US and China) support the efforts of Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight terrorism, maintain domestic stability and achieve sustainable economic and social development, and support the improvement and growth of relations between India and Pakistan," the joint statement said.
In a sign that the US president has a weak hand to play, Washington acknowledged that Beijing has a role in the India-Pakistan relationship. China's sees itself arriving on the world stage thanks to its national power.
Sinologist Alka Acharaya makes the point: "We must realise that China-US have a totally different relationship, they are two of the biggest powers in the world...and will naturally comment on what is happening in the neighbourhood. Instead of making sanctimonious remarks, when the PM goes to Washington we can have a line in the joint statement on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. This would be more meaningful".
India has the power of argument but not the argument of power.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Sinners repent
An IMF chief economist says nationalise the US banking system and break it up.
The LSE Fred Halliday sums up Communism's relevance amid a welter of triumphalist clap-trap:
Time for us all to reset our internal political compasses.
From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.
The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response.
...there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity:elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
The LSE Fred Halliday sums up Communism's relevance amid a welter of triumphalist clap-trap:
Communism was not just a utopian project: it was a dramatic response to the inequalities and conflicts generated by capitalist modernity. The continuation of many of these same inequalities and conflicts today suggests that further challenges, of an as yet indeterminate nature, will result.
Time for us all to reset our internal political compasses.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Why climate change is not about being fair. Yet.
Vijay R. Joshi, an Oxford don, makes the case (copy below) for developing countries in climate change negotiations which acknowledges international relations is about power not morals.
This means, he says, that nobody in the rich world can be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors - therefore negating the historical responsibility argument of poor nations. Joshi, also correctly, points out that the earth's resources are not shared equitably so why should poor countries get allocations on the basis on their populations?
But Joshi does argue there is a "minimum requirement of fairness" in global talks.
Interestingly this basically gives poor nations a time frame where they have to erase abject poverty and in return the rich nations bear the burden of climate change mitigation. That is for a period of time wealthy nations either hand out loads of permits, impose a carbon tax on its rich consumers and producers or transfer tech.
But what of the other side of the deal: how do rich nations make sure that poor nations keep their promises? I think it would be only fair that there are measurable aspirations that poor countries need to accept in terms of poverty eradication. The UN's Millenium Development Goals are part of this process.
What Joshi seems to buy is that that rich states, operating in the context of an anarchy and uncertainty, adopt fairness considerations in their strategic interactions. However I think the psychology of poor nations is still that the limited gains won must be "worth it". They must be bought off with enough goodies - a level of compensation that is high enough to signify guilt.
There is a fine balance to be struck here so that a "fair" deal can be struck. Rich countries will do so because they wish for the status quo institutions and regimes to be retained. Poor nations will accept this because it will help entrench fairness as a value to be upheld.
A fairer world? Yes we can.
VIJAY JOSHI
There is now a growing consensus among governments that aggressive climate change mitigation would be desirable, though they remain bitterly divided about how the associated burden should be shared between advanced and developing countries.
Fair distribution of the cost of mitigation is important on moral grounds and for obtaining universal participation. But the concept of ideal fairness is highly controversial, and philosophers have debated it for centuries. Progress in the pivotal climate change negotiations in Copenhagen will require the adoption of a non-ideal but acceptable notion of fairness that could bridge differences in negotiating positions.
Developing countries have two different lines of argument about fair burden sharing. The first concerns “historic responsibility” for the accumulated stock of carbon emitted by the developed economies. These advanced countries have used up a large part of the safe carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere and should, therefore, compensate the developing countries for this “expropriation”. This is a persuasive point. Even so, it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The rich countries did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until quite recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the “expropriators” are mostly dead and gone. Their descendants, even if they could be identified, cannot be held responsible for acts they did not themselves commit. These points do not entirely overturn “historic responsibility” since developed economies benefit hugely from their past carbon-intensive industrialization. Even so, the extenuating factors alluded to above surely count to reduce the fair liability of the advanced countries.
The second line of argument advocated by the developing countries concerns the fair distribution of the burden of reducing the future flow of carbon emissions. Suppose overall global emissions are controlled by issuing tradable carbon permits. The developing countries argue that the permits should be allocated on a population or per capita income basis. The rationale of the former is rights-based. Each human being has an equal right to use global carbon space. The rationale of the latter is egalitarian; permits should be given to the very poor because they are very poor. Both these principles imply that most of the permits should be given to developing economies. This is because these countries contain most of the world’s people as well as most of the world’s poor. The trouble is, however, that the above principles are not generally accepted in international relations. There is no agreement that natural resources should be equally shared. Why should the atmosphere be any different? Nor is there any enthusiasm about stringent egalitarian obligations. Foreign aid has never reached even half the UN target of seven-tenths of 1% of advanced countries’ gross domestic product.
The way out of this maze is to focus on a principle that is widely accepted as a minimal requirement of fairness. The principle is simply “do no harm”.
In the climate change context, doing no harm means that developing economies should be enabled to reduce their cost of mitigation to zero until they have eliminated abject poverty. In practical terms, this would imply allocating enough tradable carbon permits to poor countries to allow them to maintain the growth of their living standards along the business-as-usual path, say, for the next two decades (two decades is an average. The time horizon would be less for China and longer for Africa). After that time, developing countries’ permit allocations would be progressively reduced. Climate models are capable of calculating the requisite time path of permit allocations. (So far, I have assumed that the instrument of mitigation is tradable permits. Alternatively, a worldwide carbon tax could be adopted. In addition, carbon-saving technology could be transferred, when it becomes available. This makes no essential difference to the above argument. There would have to be a revenue or technology transfer to developing economies of an amount sufficient to reduce their cost of mitigation to zero for a defined period.)
The no-harm approach to burden sharing has many desirable features. It takes some account of “historic responsibility”. This is because a significant portion of the damage inflicted by the accumulated large stock of carbon consists of raising the cost of future mitigation for all countries. In the no-harm scheme, however, developing countries’ mitigation costs would be covered for a defined period.
The scheme also takes some account of rights-based and egalitarian arguments by skewing the allocation of permits towards poorer countries, which would result in a significant financial transfer to them, unlike an allocation of permits based on current emissions, which would strongly favour the advanced countries. But the transfer to the developing countries would not go beyond offsetting the welfare cost of mitigation policies for an agreed length of time. This would be more acceptable to the governments and citizens of advanced countries than distributing permits on a population or per capita income basis, which would result in much larger annual financial transfers to developing countries, several times larger than foreign aid flows today.
The stakes in climate change are so high that inflexible bargaining positions would be a recipe for disaster. The “no harm” principle could provide the basis for an acceptable scheme, since it would go some way towards meeting the concerns of all negotiating parties.
Published with permission from VoXEU.org. Edited excerpts.
This means, he says, that nobody in the rich world can be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors - therefore negating the historical responsibility argument of poor nations. Joshi, also correctly, points out that the earth's resources are not shared equitably so why should poor countries get allocations on the basis on their populations?
But Joshi does argue there is a "minimum requirement of fairness" in global talks.
Interestingly this basically gives poor nations a time frame where they have to erase abject poverty and in return the rich nations bear the burden of climate change mitigation. That is for a period of time wealthy nations either hand out loads of permits, impose a carbon tax on its rich consumers and producers or transfer tech.
But what of the other side of the deal: how do rich nations make sure that poor nations keep their promises? I think it would be only fair that there are measurable aspirations that poor countries need to accept in terms of poverty eradication. The UN's Millenium Development Goals are part of this process.
What Joshi seems to buy is that that rich states, operating in the context of an anarchy and uncertainty, adopt fairness considerations in their strategic interactions. However I think the psychology of poor nations is still that the limited gains won must be "worth it". They must be bought off with enough goodies - a level of compensation that is high enough to signify guilt.
There is a fine balance to be struck here so that a "fair" deal can be struck. Rich countries will do so because they wish for the status quo institutions and regimes to be retained. Poor nations will accept this because it will help entrench fairness as a value to be upheld.
A fairer world? Yes we can.
VIJAY JOSHI
There is now a growing consensus among governments that aggressive climate change mitigation would be desirable, though they remain bitterly divided about how the associated burden should be shared between advanced and developing countries.
Fair distribution of the cost of mitigation is important on moral grounds and for obtaining universal participation. But the concept of ideal fairness is highly controversial, and philosophers have debated it for centuries. Progress in the pivotal climate change negotiations in Copenhagen will require the adoption of a non-ideal but acceptable notion of fairness that could bridge differences in negotiating positions.
Developing countries have two different lines of argument about fair burden sharing. The first concerns “historic responsibility” for the accumulated stock of carbon emitted by the developed economies. These advanced countries have used up a large part of the safe carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere and should, therefore, compensate the developing countries for this “expropriation”. This is a persuasive point. Even so, it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The rich countries did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until quite recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the “expropriators” are mostly dead and gone. Their descendants, even if they could be identified, cannot be held responsible for acts they did not themselves commit. These points do not entirely overturn “historic responsibility” since developed economies benefit hugely from their past carbon-intensive industrialization. Even so, the extenuating factors alluded to above surely count to reduce the fair liability of the advanced countries.
The second line of argument advocated by the developing countries concerns the fair distribution of the burden of reducing the future flow of carbon emissions. Suppose overall global emissions are controlled by issuing tradable carbon permits. The developing countries argue that the permits should be allocated on a population or per capita income basis. The rationale of the former is rights-based. Each human being has an equal right to use global carbon space. The rationale of the latter is egalitarian; permits should be given to the very poor because they are very poor. Both these principles imply that most of the permits should be given to developing economies. This is because these countries contain most of the world’s people as well as most of the world’s poor. The trouble is, however, that the above principles are not generally accepted in international relations. There is no agreement that natural resources should be equally shared. Why should the atmosphere be any different? Nor is there any enthusiasm about stringent egalitarian obligations. Foreign aid has never reached even half the UN target of seven-tenths of 1% of advanced countries’ gross domestic product.
The way out of this maze is to focus on a principle that is widely accepted as a minimal requirement of fairness. The principle is simply “do no harm”.
In the climate change context, doing no harm means that developing economies should be enabled to reduce their cost of mitigation to zero until they have eliminated abject poverty. In practical terms, this would imply allocating enough tradable carbon permits to poor countries to allow them to maintain the growth of their living standards along the business-as-usual path, say, for the next two decades (two decades is an average. The time horizon would be less for China and longer for Africa). After that time, developing countries’ permit allocations would be progressively reduced. Climate models are capable of calculating the requisite time path of permit allocations. (So far, I have assumed that the instrument of mitigation is tradable permits. Alternatively, a worldwide carbon tax could be adopted. In addition, carbon-saving technology could be transferred, when it becomes available. This makes no essential difference to the above argument. There would have to be a revenue or technology transfer to developing economies of an amount sufficient to reduce their cost of mitigation to zero for a defined period.)
The no-harm approach to burden sharing has many desirable features. It takes some account of “historic responsibility”. This is because a significant portion of the damage inflicted by the accumulated large stock of carbon consists of raising the cost of future mitigation for all countries. In the no-harm scheme, however, developing countries’ mitigation costs would be covered for a defined period.
The scheme also takes some account of rights-based and egalitarian arguments by skewing the allocation of permits towards poorer countries, which would result in a significant financial transfer to them, unlike an allocation of permits based on current emissions, which would strongly favour the advanced countries. But the transfer to the developing countries would not go beyond offsetting the welfare cost of mitigation policies for an agreed length of time. This would be more acceptable to the governments and citizens of advanced countries than distributing permits on a population or per capita income basis, which would result in much larger annual financial transfers to developing countries, several times larger than foreign aid flows today.
The stakes in climate change are so high that inflexible bargaining positions would be a recipe for disaster. The “no harm” principle could provide the basis for an acceptable scheme, since it would go some way towards meeting the concerns of all negotiating parties.
Published with permission from VoXEU.org. Edited excerpts.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Money Money Money
Could not resist highlighting this from P Sainath in today's Hindu:
Spot on.
Take for instance, the 42 MLAs re-contesting this time in Haryana’s polls. On average, their assets have increased by around Rs.48 million each since 2004. A nice 388 per cent leap. That is to say, each of them added Rs.800,000 a month (£10,000) to their wealth in their last term. Or over Rs.1,100 for every hour that they were MLAs (for five years). A healthy rate of growth. Maybe we need a constitutional amendment requiring every Indian to serve as MLA for one term at least. It could be the biggest poverty reduction programme ever undertaken.
Spot on.
The sinking pound in your pocket
Below is today's Business Standard piece about the UK's increasingly flat-earth view of the pound. The world sees London as a great place to live and do business in but the UK currency is an anachronism.
The British currency does give the government some leeway in spending and borrowing compared to Europe, but I think it won't be long now before the weight of EU makes it a club the Brits will have to get full-membership of. Nobody in Washington, Tokyo, Brussels or Beijing loses any sleep over the pound.
The wider point seems obvious: the old powers have lost their way and need new institutions to keep up with the growing muscle of aspirants on the block. In a way Japan was the country that blazed a trail but really this is about designing the world for the new global power centres.
What this means for British electors is that David Cameron, should he be elected PM, will be forced into some face-saving manoeuvres later this year. He will undoubtedly opt to stay in Europe and fight for a bigger say in the Union. He will have allies in Eastern Europe. In this fight for State rights over the Centre, the UK will have to accept that the sun has finally set on Britain.
The pound without a G-string
The time may have come for Britain to adopt the euro
Nearly eight decades after the pound went off the Gold Standard, has the time come for Britain to consider whether it needs the pound at all? Britain’s euro-sceptics have congratulated themselves ever since they rejected then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s abortive attempt to get the pound replaced by the euro, a move that the then chancellor of the exchequer and present Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had opposed. Indeed, Britain’s euro-sceptics may feel vindicated today as they watch Ireland go into a spin over the decline in its competitiveness vis-à-vis the US because of a strengthening euro (which Dublin had accepted as its currency, replacing the Irish pound). But how long will Britain hold out in the name of its financial district, the City, and because of its desire to remain a global financial centre? Last week’s Irish vote in favour of the Lisbon Treaty, affirming the country’s support for a European Constitution by another name, brings Ireland closer to the European Union at a popular level, even though Britain has also signed onto the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish have demonstrated less discomfort in accepting their European status. Britain’s island mentality may not fit very well with the European integration process, but the City will have to take note of the US’ kite-flying exercise in Istanbul, on a likely four-currency group—yet another ‘G’ to string China along!
An unidentified US participant at the G-7 finance ministers’ meeting in Istanbul has been reported as saying that the US could consider forming a smaller group within the G-20 to take forward the work of the increasingly anachronistic G-7. The G-7 was the ‘management committee of the global economy’ in the old days of the North-South divide. With the eclipse of the G-7 by the G-20, even the US has recognised that it needs a smaller ‘executive committee’ of the ‘management committee’. Who would the US want in such a core group of the world’s key economies? It seems to regard Europe, Japan and China as natural claimants to membership. Hence the suggestion that a G-4 be formed with the managers of the US dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan working together to ensure stable conditions in global currency markets. This is undoubtedly a concession to China, which has aggressively pushed for a larger global role for the yuan. The US needs China to play ball to come out of the global imbalances trap and is, therefore, willing to co-opt it.
Where does this leave Britain and the pound? A bit lost, and nervous, perhaps. British spokespersons have rubbished the idea of a G-4 and the US has officially denied any such move. But the writing on the wall for the pound is clear. Go along with the euro, like the Irish and the rest, or join the likes of the ‘has-been’ rouble and the ‘wannabe’ rupee! The idea that the dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan belong to a special club to which the pound will not be invited must be galling. But this moment was coming, as the once pivotal pound lost its sterling edge three-quarters of a century ago.
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