How isolated is Russia?

With Russia facing sanctions from the US and some other countries after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine, India on Wednesday made it clear that it will not support any "unilateral measures" against Russian government. Times of India

Based on the fact that Russia and Ukraine have deep cultural, historical and economic connections, it is time for Western powers to abandon their Cold War thinking, stop trying to exclude Russia from the political crisis they failed to mediate, and respect Russia's unique role in mapping out the future of Ukraine. Xinhua

I have very little time for carefully constructed posts at the moment, so just a few lines hastily put together. 

Reading the news about American and EU sanctions against Russia, I am beginning to suspect that there is something more cooking here than the "story" we are being fed by the MSM. 

It might be noted that in his big speech, Putin thanked both China and India for their support... Can we say that Russia is "isolated" from the "international community" with 1/2 of humanity on their side?... DS

Ayn Rand's India holds up a mirror for the American right to see itself

  "Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"

 David Seaton's News Links

The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy

To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:

The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.

Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

"It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master."

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. "

Now you may ask yourself, what possible attraction could this sort of  paean to sociopathic selfishness have for the countrymen of that paragon of selflessness, Mahatma Gandhi? How can you revere one and also revere the other?

You can't. Rand is in, Gandhi is out.

How is this put together?

Again from Wikipedia:

A disproportionally large share of poor are lower caste Hindus. According to S. M. Michael, Dalits constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. Many see Hinduism and its subsidiary called caste system as a system of exploitation of poor low-ranking groups by more prosperous high-ranking groups. In many parts of India, land is largely held by high-ranking property owners of the dominant castes that economically exploit low-ranking landless labourers and poor artisans, all the while degrading them with ritual emphases on their so-called god-given inferior status.

"Dalit" is a politically correct term for "untouchable"; to put this into clearer focus, let's hear from Mahatma Gandhi on the subject:

Removal of untouchability means love for, and service of, the whole world and thus merges into Ahimsa. Removal of untouchability spells the breaking down of barriers between man and man and between the various orders of Being."

Now it is obvious that the Dalits (untouchables) and the rest of India's 456 million poor, living on less than $1.25 a day, are not the ones who are googling Ayn Rand, are they? It would be safe to assume, I imagine, that the googlers belong to what the paragraph above calls the "more prosperous high-ranking groups".

The mechanism at work here is also obvious. The  extreme poverty of India  has always been a great embarrassment to Indian yuppies when speaking to foreigners and the cruelty of its ancient caste systems is universally condemned throughout the world by all the other belief systems. Till now untouchability and  the extreme poverty of India have been intellectually indefensible. How to rephrase them for the globalized world, a place where India's elites are hot to trot?

At this point, along comes a prestigious  American, a major cult-figure,  Ayn Rand, the guru of Sri Alan Greenspan no less, someone who with her  indifference to suffering, with the clockwork logic of her exposition and the elaborate intellectual edifice constructed around what boils down to, "bugger you, I'm alright Jack", justifies their system in all its time-hardened egotistical racism.

Not only do they have the absolution of their ancient religious traditions, they now have the apostolic blessing of one of the guiding lights of ultra-modern, western, anarcho-capitalism.

Gotta be a hit.

Something that is fun and often productive is to run things backwards and see what turns up. Let's try that on Ayn Rand in India.

Here is the scenario: Ayn Rand is a big hit with high-caste Indians, who would like to ignore India's racism and justify their indifference to its poverty, but long before she made it in India, she was a big hit in the USA: could it be for the same reasons?

Could Ayn Rand's popularity in India hold the key to her popularity in the United States?

Could India be holding up a mirror for us to contemplate ourselves?

Are we looking to Ayn Rand for the same absolution she gives the Indians?

If you stop to think about, since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

It is curious to observe the relation Rand's "thinking" and her followers to our present predicaments.

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."   Ayn Rand

"You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost." Milton Friedman

"Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the `greed' of the businessman. But it is precisely the `greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." Alan Greenspan in a 1963 article, ``The Assault on Integrity'' for  "The Objectivist" magazine - quoted by Ayn Rand in her 1967 book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal''

One of the upsides of our present predicament has been the defenistration of luminaries like Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and fellow travelers. This from the Financial Times:

The Washington Consensus, the organizing idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried.(...) The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. Phillip Stephens - Financial Times

Or this from BusinessWeek:

The cost included a Hobbesian view of business -- nasty, brutish and every man for himself -- and a rejection of the idea that ultimately we're all in this together. Which is precisely what we do not need at this time of increasing global interdependence. (...) In this worldview, "business ethics" is an oxymoron, not because of bad behavior but because ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else. Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical. Charles H. Green - BusinessWeek

Here, Charles Green, an MBA from Harvard, has gone straight to the heart of the whole matter when he says, "ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else".

That is really what human life is all about. Nothing is more defenseless and miserable than an isolated human being.

Our terror of being the only human on earth is the romance of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's joy at encountering Friday, saving his life and becoming his friend is one of the most powerful metaphors in literature.

The human being is a social anthropoid, whose phenomenal success as a species is due to its unique capacity for empathy, altruism and sacrifice for the common good. If selfishness were such a survival plus, then the common house cat would be the "master of the universe" and not human beings.

Since we wandered over the African savanna in small groups of hunter-gatherers, naked, without even fire, in fear of lions and hyenas, a sprained ankle or a broken bone, during those hundreds of thousands of years, the "common good" existed. If humans hadn't recognized it and sacrificed for it we wouldn't be here today.

Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Selfishness is precisely the least human of our traits and that it has become a driving force in our world is perhaps the central problem we face... our paradox: humans that dehumanize themselves.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Ayn Rand is probably (with Milton Friedman) the most profoundly immoral and destructive thinker that America has ever produced.  Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator and Rand believed that selfishness was. Both considered what western civilization has traditionally marked as deadly sins as virtues not defects. Their followers are legion and we live among the wreckage they and their "virtues" have created. DS

Tales of Globalization: USA and India: a marriage made in... heaven?

"I believe that the relationship between the United States and India will, in fact, be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st Century." President Obama - BBC News

The most dramatic and remarkable improvement in consumption has been of those who were already the richest people in India – that is the top 20 per cent of the urban population. (...)  the most dramatic evidence is for the bottom 80 per cent of the rural population – well more than half of India’s total population. For these people, who now number nearly 600 million, per capita consumption has actually declined since 1989-90. In other words, even the official statistics of the government still show that more than half of India has lower consumption per person than more than 10 years ago, after a decade when national income were supposed to be growing at around 6 per cent!  International Development Economics Associates

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.  Nicholas Kristof - New York Times

"The German export successes are not the result of some sort of currency manipulation, but of the increased competitiveness of companies. The American growth model, on the other hand, is in a deep crisis. The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies. There are many reasons for America's problems, but they don't include German export surpluses." German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble - Der Spiegel

David Seaton's News Links

For me the quotes above tell a story all by themselves... Writing further comment approaches "gilding the lily".  It would be possible to rearrange them in any order and they would always tell the same story. Still, I'll try and riff a little bit on them.

The comparisons between the USA  and India are painfully apt: in the USA the top 1% of the population owns 42.7% of the country's wealth and the bottom 80% of the population owns only 7%. In India the top 1% owns 16% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% owns 30% of India' wealth. So we can see the Indians have some catching up to do, because US income distribution  is more unequal than India's.

What do the top one percent of India and the USA buy with their wealth?

Probably they buy German cars, washing machines, stoves, etc, for their homes and German capital goods for their factories (the American factories are mostly in places like China and Mexico these days). 

Why do the rich buy German stuff?

Because if you can afford it, you want the best and the Germans still make the best. They train their workers so well that despite paying  them high wages they are still competitive. They are competitive because of the enormous added value that well trained workers can add to a well engineered product. 

Once upon a time you could say the same thing about the USA too.

Wolfgang Schäuble is cruel but truthful when he says:

The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies.

He might have added that you can't digitize a BMW or a Miele washing machine and download them from The Pirate Bay. The "intelligence economy" is all very well, but brains are equitably distributed around the world, and computers are cheap and easy to assemble by semi-skilled workers...  but people who can do the fit and finish of a Porsche are neither equitably distributed nor cheap.

So, yes, I am afraid the president of the United States is correct in saying that India and the United States will define each other in the coming century: India reaching America's level of inequality and the USA perhaps developing an Indian-like caste system. DS

India holds up a mirror for America to see itself

  "Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"

 David Seaton's News Links

The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy

To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:

The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.

Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. 

Now you may ask yourself, what possible attraction could this sort of paen to sociopathic selfishness have for the countrymen of that paragon of selflessness, Mahatma Gandhi? How can you revere one and also revere the other?

You can't. Rand is in, Gandhi is out.

How is this put together?

Again from Wikipedia:

A disproportionally large share of poor are lower caste Hindus. According to S. M. Michael, Dalits constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. Many see Hinduism and its subsidiary called caste system as a system of exploitation of poor low-ranking groups by more prosperous high-ranking groups. In many parts of India, land is largely held by high-ranking property owners of the dominant castes that economically exploit low-ranking landless labourers and poor artisans, all the while degrading them with ritual emphases on their so-called god-given inferior status.

"Dalit" is a politically correct term for "untouchable"; to put this into clearer focus, let's hear from Mahatma Gandhi on the subject:

Removal of untouchability means love for, and service of, the whole world and thus merges into Ahimsa. Removal of untouchability spells the breaking down of barriers between man and man and between the various orders of Being."

Now it is obvious that the Dalits (untouchables) and the rest of India's 456 million poor, living on less than $1.25 a day, are not the ones who are googling Ayn Rand, isn't it? It would be safe to assume, I imagine, that the googlers belong to what the paragraph above calls the "more prosperous high-ranking groups".

The mechanism at work here is also obvious. The  extreme poverty of India  has always been a great embarrassment to Indian yuppies when speaking to foreigners and the cruelty of its ancient caste systems is universally condemned throughout the world by all the other belief systems. Till now untouchability and  the extreme poverty of India have been intellectually indefensible. How to rephrase them for the globalized world, a place where India's elites are hot to trot?

At this point, along comes a prestigious  American, a major cult-figure,  Ayn Rand, the guru of Sri Alan Greenspan no less, someone who with her  indifference to suffering, with the clockwork logic of her exposition and the elaborate intellectual edifice constructed around what boils down to, "bugger you, I'm alright Jack", justifies their system in all its time-hardened egotistical racism.

Not only do they have the absolution of their ancient religious traditions, they now have the apostolic blessing of one of the guiding lights of ultra-modern, western, anarcho-capitalism.

Gotta be a hit.

Something that is fun and often productive is to run things backwards and see what turns up. Let's try that on Ayn Rand in India.

Here is the scenario: Ayn Rand is a big hit with high-cast Indians, who would like to ignore India's racism and justify their indifference to its poverty, but long before she made it in India, she was a big hit in the USA: could it be for the same reasons?

Could Ayn Rand's popularity in India hold the key to her popularity in the United States?

Could India be holding up a mirror for us to contemplate ourselves?

Are we looking to Ayn Rand for the same absolution she gives the Indians?

If you stop to think about, since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

It is curious to observe the relation Rand's "thinking" and her followers to our present predicaments.

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."   Ayn Rand

"You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost." Milton Friedman

"Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the `greed' of the businessman. But it is precisely the `greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." Alan Greenspan in a 1963 article, ``The Assault on Integrity'' for  "The Objectivist" magazine - quoted by Ayn Rand in her 1967 book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal''

One of the upsides of our present predicament has been the defenistration of luminaries like Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and fellow travelers. This from the Financial Times:

The Washington Consensus, the organizing idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried.(...) The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. Phillip Stephens - Financial Times

Or this from BusinessWeek:

The cost included a Hobbesian view of business -- nasty, brutish and every man for himself -- and a rejection of the idea that ultimately we're all in this together. Which is precisely what we do not need at this time of increasing global interdependence. (...) In this worldview, "business ethics" is an oxymoron, not because of bad behavior but because ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else. Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical. Charles H. Green - BusinessWeek

Here, Charles Green, an MBA from Harvard, has gone straight to the heart of the whole matter when he says, "ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else".

That is really what human life is all about. Nothing is more defenseless and miserable than an isolated human being.

Our terror of being the only human on earth is the romance of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's joy at encountering Friday, saving his life and becoming his friend is one of the most powerful metaphors in literature.
 

The human being is a social anthropoid, whose phenomenal success as a species is due to its unique capacity for empathy, altruism and sacrifice for the common good. If selfishness were such a survival plus, then the common house cat would be the "master of the universe" and not human beings.

Since we wandered over the African savanna in small groups of hunter-gatherers, naked, without even fire, in fear of lions and hyenas, a sprained ankle or a broken bone, during those hundreds of thousands of years, the "common good" existed. If humans hadn't recognized it and sacrificed for it we wouldn't be here today.

Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Selfishness is precisely the least human of our traits and that it has become a driving force in our world is perhaps the central problem we face... our paradox: humans that dehumanize themselves.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Ayn Rand is probably (with Milton Friedman) the most profoundly immoral and destructive thinker that America has ever produced.  Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator and Rand believed that selfishness was. Both considered what western civilization has traditionally marked as deadly sins as virtues not defects. Their followers are legion and we live among the wreckage they and their "virtues" have created. DS

Mumbai changes the playing field

David Seaton's News Links
As we wait to finally discover who actually organized this bloodbath in Mumbai, I would like to point out something obvious: the Indian economic "miracle" has been more than tempting fate to have created such a growing number of exuberant and ostentatious nouveau riche in a country where hundreds of millions of people are as scandalously poor… Islamist, Maoist or things as yet undreamed of are bound to grow in the gigantic, bubbling petri dish. globalization has created in India.

So if all we had to go on was potential rage and resentment themselves, we would be looking for a needle in a haystack. It would probably be more profitable to look at the wide effects of this attack as a way of narrowing down the list of possible culprits.

Although it does massive harm to India, I don't think this attack was really about India as much as it was designed to throw a monkey wrench in the American strategy of pressuring Pakistan.

The United States wants the Pakistanis to use their army to control the Pashtun areas of their country, the areas which harbor the taliban who attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

If the Pakistani army does this it will mean a civil war, which might lead to the breakup of Pakistan: that is a result that only a drunken neocon could contemplate sanguinely.

Despite this danger to Pakistan's unity, president Bush has been pushing the Zardari government very hard and, if his statements during the campaign are to be taken seriously, president Barack Obama will press them even harder.

What this attack on Mumbai certainly does is to change the subject from America’s problems in Afghanistan to the possibility of an armed confrontation between nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan. This prospect should focus Washington’s mind wonderfully. Both incoming and outgoing presidents will have to everything they can to defuse tension between the countries.

I think by now it is clear that the objective of the attacks is too make it impossible for Pakistan, with India threatening, to collaborate with the USA on its northwest frontier. Certainly the Pakistani army will have no resources to spare for chasing the taliban when a conflict with Indian is in the offing. The pressure on Zardari now from the military will be much too great.

Today some are blaming Al Qaeda for the attacks in Bombay and others are pointing fingers at Pakistan's army intelligence, the notorius ISI. The relation between the ISI and Al Qaeda, or even where one leaves off and the other begins is not really clear. This “joined twin” effect is said to be blowback from the CIA and Saudi collaboration during the USSR’s futile attempts to modernize Afghanistan.

It is my impression that what we call Al Qaeda today is more a general consensus and willingness to collaborate among a very wide number of Islamic activists all over the world than the finite hierarchy that it was in 2001.

Many if not all the diverse jihadist groups now see their local struggles in the context of a wide international one and this multiplies their effectiveness as this leads to a wide consensus on their priorities.

Priority number one is to degrade American influence in the Muslim world and they seem to be having some success. You could say that bin Laden began a "worldwide conversation about killing people and blowing things up" among millions of angry young men. This instrument for building and implementing consensus is his greatest achievement.

The attack in Mumbai has changed the playing field and its scale. From worrying about guerrillas crossing from Waziristan to attack Americans in Afghanistan, we can worry now about the serious possibility of an atomic war in South Asia. DS

A brief note from a changing world

The changing face of piracy

As negotiations started for the release of a Saudi-owned supertanker seized by pirates off Somalia, the Indian Navy said on Wednesday that one of its warships fought a battle at sea with would-be hijackers in the Gulf of Aden, sinking one suspect vessel and forcing the pirates to abandon a second as they fled.(...) Cyrus Mody, of the International Maritime Bureau, which monitors global piracy, said in a telephone interview from London that the shipping industry had been urging stronger naval measures against the pirates’ “mother ships” for some time and would approve of the Indian Navy’s action. “This is the sort of action which should be taken to try to deal with the situation,” he said. Peter Hinchliffe, the marine director of the International Chamber of Shipping in London, said in a separate telephone interview that the Indian Navy’s action “is going to start to bring the message home” to pirates “that the international community really is ranged against them.”(...) This year, at least 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007, according to the International Maritime Bureau. At least 14 of those ships, carrying more than 250 crew members, are still in the control of hijackers. New York Times

David Seaton's News Links
With all the speculations about new presidential appointments, readers may have missed one of those news items that alert the watchful to the arrival of a new era.

An Indian Navy warship has engaged and destroyed a Somali pirate vessel.

Suppressing piracy is perhaps the first job of a standing navy and the ability to keep the sea lanes open for commerce is its fundamental role.

The Indian Navy has taken up "the white man's burden", formerly the exclusive of European empires and on their disappearance, the United States of America.

Much of most of the world's relatively cheerful acquiescence to American military and financial supremacy has always been the guarantee of "law and order" around the world, twenty four times seven, that people thought the US forces provided. Much of the value of the dollar and America's subsequent prosperity is based on the world's trust in that implicit guarantee.

An enormous Saudi oil tanker, the Sirius Star, carrying two million barrels of oil valued at around $100 million to the United States itself has been hijacked off the coast of Somalia. The mastodontic, but overstretched, US Navy itself seems strangely ineffective in this crisis.

People call for the "Seventh Cavalry" and the "Indians" come to the rescue instead.

What could be a clearer sign of a changing world than that? DS

I just couldn't stomach writing about Petraeus today

Jyoti Amge, the world's smallest teenager

David Seaton's News Links
General Petraeus is in Washington and I know I'm going to have to write about Iraq again sometime this week, I'm even going to get paid for it... but I'm going to hold off as long as I can...

Depressing is not exactly the word... The war in Iraq is like... I dunno, writing about Iraq is like... like playing the part of Bill Murray in "Ground Hog Day"... on LSD, or like rowing a boat with a clothes line.

HDS Greenway has got it down pretty good in the Boston Globe:

"The American public hears no realistic plans from Democrats on how to disengage from this fruitless enterprise. McCain talks about a 100-year troop presence as if Iraq were a homogeneous, industrial democracy like Japan, (...) In the meantime, the through-the-looking-glass atmosphere surrounding whatever Bush says about Iraq becomes ever-more bizarre."

After surviving all the atomic perils of decades of cold war, who would have ever thought that the USA would attempt suicide in a place, that if God were to give the earth an enema, he would surely insert the hose?

So today, instead of Iraq, I have decided to pay homage to this lovely little person, Jyoti Amge from India. Here is what the agencies have to say about her:

A teenager from India who stands at a tiny 1ft 11in (58cm) tall is the smallest girl in the world.

Jyoti Amge, 14, is shorter than the average two-year-old child and only weighs 11lb (5kg).

Despite this, she goes to a regular school in Nagpur, central India, where she has her own small desk and chair, and her classmates treat her like any other student.

She said: 'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it.

She will even be releasing an album with her favourite Indian pop star, the bhangra/rap star Mika Singh.

Jyoti is ambitious and hopes to work as a Bollywood actress one day.

She said: 'I would love to work in a big city like Mumbai, act in films and travel to London and America."

I love the line, "'I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I'm not scared of being small and I don't regret it." She is obviously intelligent and from the expression on her face sitting next to the baby, she also has a mischievous sense of humor and must be full of fun. Irresistible!

Personally, I think that if a drip like Paris Hilton can get all the attention she gets, this adorable tiny creature is going to be a (adjective that means "big" or "huge" without being a joke) star.

Jyoti Amge should be making a world tour, not Alan Greenspan. DS

To die of success

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically(...)That will be done with more fertilizer, with genetically modified seeds, and with advanced machinery and technology". BMO strategist Donald Coxe

The latest generation of Chinese-Americans, many of whom grew up in the restaurants their parents worked in, are increasingly choosing legal and medical careers over the kitchen. As a result, Chinese restaurants have been relying even more on imports from Hong Kong, Taiwan or mainland China.

But the sizzling economy in China has raised the incomes and profiles of the best chefs, who now find it less desirable to leave their families and friends halfway around the world.

Several major restaurant owners in the city said salaries for Chinese executive chefs range from $42,000 to $50,000, depending on the size of the business, a 30% rise in the past five years. In China, top chefs are getting close to those amounts, while the cost of living in cities like Beijing and Shanghai is still a lot lower. New York Daily News

David Seaton's News Links
When I was a little boy, oh so long ago, my grandmother, who followed in the great culinary traditions of Scotland and Ireland, used to encourage me whenever I refused to eat some little horror that she had dished up, by saying, "think of all the starving millions in China!". Think indeed.

It is true that in the last two hundred years countless millions of Chinese have starved to death in many famines that swept that country. The same of course was true of the other Asiatic giant, India. Both countries were synonymous with dramatic poverty or at the best a picturesque, austere simplicity. Certainly western imperialism had much to do with the poverty of countries that had been prosperous for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

Globalization has changed all that, instead of simply providing raw materials and captive markets for our manufactures China and India, and the rest of Asia, have become seamlessly integrated into our economies and hundreds of millions of their citizens are now part of a global middle class with middle class aspirations. Naturally the new middle classes of China and India want to eat the same food as the American and European middle classes eat -- they probably always did -- but now they can pay for it.

I stood in Zhang Meidi's cabbage patch, kicking the dirt with my boots.(...) This is China's bread basket. Wheat has been grown here for thousands of years. But Zhang Meidi has given up on it(...) The prices in the market were good these days, she said, but not for wheat.(...) She started by giving me a lesson on China's food chain. First, she explained, people in China now had more money so they wanted to eat better things, more meat and more fruit and vegetables. That is why she is growing cabbages. Her little handkerchief of land would grow enough wheat to earn about £200 ($395) but, by planting cabbages, she had almost trebled her earnings. And, in the summer, she would grow tomatoes and earn almost £700 ($1,300).(...) Zhang Meidi and her neighbours were being swallowed up by the city. Urbanisation and the creeping desert in the north mean that China is losing 25 million acres (10m hectares) of farmland a year. And just as the amount of land is shrinking, the demand for food is getting greater. When she was younger, Zhang Meidi explained, her family would only have meat on special occasions. Pork would be served when guests arrived or during China's big national holidays. Now it was on their dinner table two or three times a week.(...) Over the next 12 years, an estimated 320 million people will move to cities. As one analyst put it, a country larger than the United States will be created by new urban Chinese by 2020. And when they come to the cities, these new arrivals - almost instantly - start eating more protein. Now that they no longer grown their own food, and with more wages in their pocket, their diet changes. So Chinese people are eating less wheat and fewer grains in general because they are upgrading to meats, especially pork. But that pork comes from hungry pigs who consume a lot more grain.(...) And other crops will follow. The days of food self-sufficiency in China are numbered. So, like the rest of us, China will turn to Australia, Africa and South America to fill its belly. It is small wonder that food prices are climbing everywhere, not just here in China. BBC News

And it isn't just food.

Virtually every automaker on earth will keep a close eye on the Indian Auto Show in New Delhi, where Tata plans to introduce what it's calling the People's Car on Jan. 10. The industry is looking to emerging markets for growth, and many companies are gearing up to build cars that can be sold at rock-bottom prices—in both developing countries and more established markets. Toyota and Volkswagen's Skoda subsidiary are planning small cars for India. Suzuki says it will soon cut the price of its cheapest model in India. And Renault-Nissan has teamed up with Indian motorcycle maker Bajaj Auto to launch a $3,000 car next year. "If Tata can do it, we can do it," says Renault-Nissan Chairman Carlos Ghosn. BusinessWeek

Is there enough oil on earth to fuel an India with as many cars per capita as the USA or Europe? Is there enough air in the world to breathe after those cars pour their exhaust fumes into it. Is there enough grain in the world to feed all the pigs that the Chinese could eat? Is there enough water to water that grain? Are we about to run into the theories of Karl Marx like a speeding truck running into a wall of cement?

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

It took along time, but that prophesy has finally been fulfilled. We are very, very close to finding out now whether or not our immense well being has always been predicated on the misery of others. And we are also close to finding out whether or not the whole thing will come crashing down around our ears if the others come to live as well as we do or even dream of doing so. DS

China's aging population

David Seaton's News Links
An aging population is a problem, but it is also a sign of other more positive factors: it show that less children are needed because infant mortality is low and fewer need be born in order to reach adulthood and that women are educated and can thus control how many babies they have. It shows that general health and medical services are good and thus people live longer.

It is safe to infer that good health and education services are the product of an educated and energetic populace.

A low birthrate and a large number of older people shows a society where there has been a great improvement in health and educational services in only a few generations. Obviously, if fewer babies are born in developed countries, in only a few generations the problem will have solved itself. The old people will gradually die off and there will be fewer younger people to replace them, but better educated and more productive.

In the article I quote below, Niall Ferguson gives India's 46% population increase by 2050 as a plus for India. Really? What sort of education will they have? How healthy and energetic will they be? What kind of contribution will they be able to make?

No matter how much it "shrinks", China, where education is not confined only to the upper castes as in India, will surely have a huge mass of literate people by 2050. As one observer put it, "if you are one in a million in China, there are a thousand like you". There are more "honor students" in China than normal students in the USA. The most probable outcome will be that by 2050 there will be a lot of young Africans and Indians doing unskilled jobs in China and paying into the Chinese social system. I wouldn't count the Chinese out, not just yet. DS

Niall Ferguson: Will an aging population defang China? - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: The rise of China is the single most important historical phenomenon of our time. A fifth of humanity is on the march -- or, rather, behind the wheel. Yet there is a need to look closely at Chinese power before concluding that it is all over for the West and our dreams of a free world with a stable climate. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the environmental damage China is inflicting on itself in the breakneck dash for industrialized wealth. Now let's consider the demographic side of the story. On close inspection, China's population of 1.3 billion may not be as big a source of power as many commentators assume. According to U.N. projections, the world population will increase from 6.5 billion to 9.2 billion between now and 2050. But China will account for just 4% of that increase. The most rapid growth will be elsewhere. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world, the population will more than double; India's will be up 46%; and the United States, up by more than a third. India's population will overtake that of China around 2025. As well as ceasing to be the world's most populous country, China will become almost as elderly a society as Europe. Today, less than 8% of China's population is 65 or older. By 2050, that proportion could rise to as high as 24%. The equivalent figure for Europe is 28%, and for the U.S., 21%. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the proportion will rise from 3% to less than 6%. READ IT ALL

The monks march up, the monks march down, the monks march around and around...

David Seaton's News Links
The monks march up, the monks march down, the monks march around and around... What does it all mean?

Condoleezza Rice is scandalized by the lack of democracy in Burma, Bush is pushing for sanctions. That alone should put us on our guard.

As we saw in pre-war Iraq, international sanctions only hurt the ordinary people of the country sanctioned, the leaders of such countries are hardly inconvenienced at all. I agree with this reading of the Burmese situation from the German business daily Handelsblatt:

"The sanctions, demanded by human rights activists and increased gradually over the last two decades by the West, have proven themselves to be largely useless. They merely crippled the economy and hurt ordinary people. For those in power, the sanctions have been like water off a duck's back; they continue to flog Burma's oil, gas, gemstones and rain forests off on China. Beijing expresses its gratitude with weapons and with vetoes against threatening UN resolutions. Out of fear that its neighbor will turn into a Chinese protectorate, India has also been courting the junta instead of supporting the opposition as it used to do. Thailand and Russia are likewise eagerly trading with the pariah state."

"It is naïve to hope that all countries might join in an effective embargo. But especially now that internal opposition is raising its head, the world should take the opposite tack and integrate the isolated country into world trade and into the processes of globalization. Western countries wouldn't just be able to help minimize poverty. They would also provide a better example than the Chinese when it comes to fair treatment of workers and the environmentally sustainable exploitation of resources. But Western democracies score more points on the home front with permeable embargoes than with politically motivated trade agreements. But trade has, on the long term, more promise of success -- and will cause less damage to the innocent. For the moment, in any case, Burma is so poor and so isolated from the global economy that its dictators have little to lose from sanctions."

Some think that with the Beijing Olympics just around the corner the Chinese will discourage a brutal response from the Burmese regime. I think that the exact opposite could very well be true. A great part of recent Chinese geopolitical success is due to their willingness to trade with countries the United States and the European Union sanction for their human rights abuses, such as Iran, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Supporting the Burmese junta through thick and thin would send a message to commodity-rich authoritarians that they can always count on China in a pinch and since unfortunately many of the countries of the world most endowed with natural resources are cursed with nasty regimes this could be an immensely profitable stance. DS

India, the enternal land of the future

David Seaton's News Links
Anyone who knows and loves India is always impressed by the intelligence and talent of her people, but often at the same time skeptical of their steadiness. They have an explosive addiction to overdecorating everything, even their hopes and fears. They seem to be all full of the joy of expression, of fantasy and imagination.... even down to their bookkeepers.

They have little of the down to earth, "eat, drink, man, woman", pragmatism of the Chinese. And they have not done enough to educate and elevate their masses. They depend too much on a tiny elite of scientists and engineers, which is in contradiction with their being "the world's largest democracy". The enormous, illiterate, voting, masses of India are resentful and restless. The new middle class could turn out to finally be the "new British". DS

Philip Bowring: A closer look at India - International Herald Tribune Abstract: I've been bullish on India for the past 17 years, but now I'm nervous. One does not need to be in the country to be deluged by "India rising" triumphalism. The BBC World Service is providing an endlessly repeated series on the subject. Morgan Stanley's star economist Stephen Roach has followed the crowd and returned from the subcontinent with "great enthusiasm" for the "magic of its entrepreneurial spirit." Fortune magazine advises us to look out for more multibillion-dollar acquisitions by globalizing Indian companies.(...) there are too many signs of an overconfidence that looks more and more like hubris. If suddenly deflated it could undercut the basis on which Indian optimism is built — that India can compete in a globalizing world and one day equal China in economic weight. The hype about ethnic Indian talent is a reminder that a decade ago much the same thing was being said of ethnic Chinese. Back then, the world was caught up in the "miracle" of Southeast Asian growth, fueled, it was said, by the business skills and networks of overseas Chinese. Success was attributed to the culture of Confucius, who believed in a hierarchical society directed by a wise elite. "Asian values" were equated with Confucian ones. The "global Chinese" story — while not a myth — was overblown and finally punctured by the Asian economic crisis. There are other reasons to worry now about the India hype. It is all very well for Indians to express racial pride over the success of Mittal in gaining control of European Arcelor to become the world's biggest steelmaker. But why, it might be asked, has the Indian-born, London-dwelling Lakshmi Mittal invested so little in India itself? And where would India be if its markets were as open as those of Europe, an openness which enabled Mittal to buy Arcelor?(...) Indian companies are investing more overseas than foreigners are investing in India. Of course some acquisitions are in fields where India does lead — software and generic pharmaceuticals. Some are driven by business logic. But others do more to swell Indian pride than boost the Indian economy. At home, Indian investors have been helped by an unsustainable rate of growth in bank credit — 20 percent last year. The fact is that India remains a capital-short country. The growth of its gross domestic product has been stimulated by a rise in the investment rate from around 25 percent of GDP to 30 percent. But even more is needed to sustain growth, and even the present rate may prove hard to maintain when global conditions become tighter. As it is, India's private-sector savings surplus has fallen sharply while the public-sector deficit remains very high. The serious deterioration now occurring in the current account will probably crimp India's growth, push interest rates back up and prick the stock bubble. READ IT ALL

Speaking of India...

David Seaton's News Links
We've just came home from seeing a film, "Darshan - The Embrace", about Amma, India's "hugging guru"...

According to the film Amma sees the divine in everyone and loves them... and so she hugs them. I think her record was on her 50th birthday, when she hugged over 29,000 people in 21 hours! Everybody looked like they were having a wonderful time and she didn't even charge admission.

India is to religion what Argentina is to soccer. Almost everybody, everywhere plays soccer reasonably well, and almost everybody, everywhere, worships in some way. Some people play soccer as well or better (sometimes) than the Argentinians, but nobody, but nobody anywhere, ever, talks and plays soccer better than Argentinians. And nobody, but nobody anywhere, ever, worships and talks religion like the Indians. Nobody, anywhere has as much fun with God as Indians do. DS

India is running on empty

David Seaton's News Links
A News Links reader kindly sent me a link to this article in last September's New York Times as a comment to my last post on the "new" Indian economy. And it reaffirms me in my feeling that India's English speaking, computer savvy, "new middle class," may literally end up having to flee India for their very lives... And not in some far, distant, future.

And India is such a great and powerful and articulate place, in every sense, that such a collapse and such a catastrophe would be the "Berlin Wall" of globalization. DS

India, the Thirsty Giant - New York Times
Abstract: Bhanwar Lal Yadav, once a cultivator of cucumber and wheat, has all but given up growing food. No more suffering through drought and the scourge of antelope that would destroy what little would survive on his fields. Today he has reinvented himself as a vendor of what counts here as the most precious of commodities: the water under his land. Each year he bores ever deeper. His well now reaches 130 feet down.(...) Efforts like his — multiplied by some 19 million wells nationwide — have helped India deplete its groundwater at an alarming pace over the last few decades. The country is running through its groundwater so fast that scarcity could threaten whole regions like this one, drive people off the land and ultimately stunt the country’s ability to farm and feed its people. With the population soaring past one billion and with a driving need to boost agricultural production, Indians are tapping their groundwater faster than nature can replenish it, so fast that they are hitting deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs. “What we will do?” wondered Pavan Agarwal, an assistant engineer with the state Public Health and Engineering Department, as he walked across a stretch of dusty fields near Mr. Yadav’s water farm. “We have to deliver water.” He swept his arms across the field, dotted with government wells. This one, dug 10 years ago, had already gone dry. In that one, the water had sunk down to 130 feet. If it were not for the fact that electricity comes only five hours a day, every farmer in the area, Mr. Agarwal ventured, would be pumping round the clock.(...) It was not always this way. Once farming made sense. Many of the women digging on a recent morning remembered growing their own food — peas, tomatoes, chili peppers, watermelons — and selling it, too, at the nearest town market. Year by year, the wells began to run dry. And there were several years of little to no rain. Meera, a mother of three who uses only one name, who is lucky enough to come from a landowning family, still watched her husband leave the village to find work in a cement factory. There were times, she acknowledged, when it became difficult to feed the children. Now she finds herself digging ponds for a bag of wheat. And praying for rain. “Our life is not life,” Meera said. “Only when it rains, there’s life.” READ IT ALL (bootleg)

India: the next great power?

300 million Indians live on less than US$1 a day, compared to only 85 million in China, which has a bigger population. Forty-five per cent of Indian children under the age of five are malnourished. Less than a third of India's homes have a toilet. Less than half of its 500,000 villages are connected to the electricity grid. Despite the explosion of consumerism and capitalism in India's booming cities, more than half of all Indians still live in rural areas. Farmers are committing suicide because they can't compete in a globalised market. BBC

David Seaton's News Links
India, as this article I'm quoting from the BBC points out,"has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany?". Is that the future. Are social relations irrelevant?

Let me tell you an American in India story to give you some perspective. An American I heard speak, was telling of a spiritual trip he made with a group of young American students to India to visit ashrams. Among the young people was a young woman, a university student, who happened to be a dark complected, African-American. She was thrilled and excited to be going to India. When she got there, however she received a terrible shock, despite being an affluent American, because of her dark skin, she was refused entry into many holy places and also refused service in many restaurants. This story underlines the fact that India's caste system is in fact an age-old, color based, apartheid. Think Alabama, 1955.

We saw what happened in Birmingham Alabama. The irony of the Indian "civil rights" struggle is that India's masses don't have to fight for the right to vote as southern blacks did: India's "blacks" vote massively and the "new middle class" is well aware of it. Another ironic comparison with Alabama is that the resistance techniques that Dr. Martin Luther King taught the American civil rights activists were lifted directly from Mahatma Ghandi's play book. Indians are past masters of the general strike, slowdowns, sit-ins, road blocks and demonstrations. They are sophisticated and experienced politically, in short

The English speaking, computer savvy "new" middle class detests and fears these people much as Bull Conner doted on his "nigras". What I think we'll see before too long is some attempt at a coup d' etat, on the Chilean model, some General Chandra Pinochet. The US government will probably be "understanding". All hell will then break loose.

I have great faith in India's people... all of its people and if a small minority of them, although they number "twice the population of Germany" tries to leave the majority behind, there will be much blood and strife, unless, of course, the new middle class chooses to finally leave India, just as the English did. DS

Will India make the breakthrough? - BBC News
Abstract: How do you summarise a country which is home to one in six members of the human race, which contains a third of the world's poorest people and yet has an increasingly consumer-oriented middle-class twice the size of the population of Germany? And which - according to predictions by the CIA and investment bankers Goldman Sachs - could, along with China, come to dominate the global economy in the next few decades?(...) The question now, as one long-time observer puts it, is whether India will emerge as a major power, or whether it will remain "forever arriving". Despite endemic problems of poverty and disease, major changes have already occurred. Unshackled by the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s, India is already poised to overtake Japan as the world's third largest economy. It is also strutting its stuff on the world stage. Its nuclear status has now been formally acknowledged by the US. And, when the UN is finally reformed, it's likely to land a permanent seat on the Security Council. All this adds up, to use the slick advertising slogan coined a couple of years ago by the then governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a new India: India Shining. But hang on. Wasn't that slogan exposed as an empty boast, when - despite presiding over a period of unprecedented economic growth - the BJP was decisively rejected by India's have-nots at the last general elections? Amidst all the buzz about the vibrant, new India getting ready for take-off, is the old India still capable of dragging it back, aborting the countdown? Consider a few statistics: 300 million Indians live on less than US$1 a day, compared to only 85 million in China, which has a bigger population. Forty-five per cent of Indian children under the age of five are malnourished. Less than a third of India's homes have a toilet. Less than half of its 500,000 villages are connected to the electricity grid. Despite the explosion of consumerism and capitalism in India's booming cities, more than half of all Indians still live in rural areas. Farmers are committing suicide because they can't compete in a globalised market. "India doesn't live in its villages," says author and activist Arundhati Roy. "It dies." Having shed its old commitment to state-directed socialism, critics argue that the Indian state is failing to provide the most basic necessities to its poorest citizens: health care, education, drinking water. As the gap between rich and poor widens, Naxalite militants have spread their doctrine of Maoist revolution, now making their presence felt in more than a quarter of the country. Maoism, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by India.
READ IT ALL