Three ills

That afflict the country. And the third one is not any less dangerous than the other two:

Red tape tops the list of reasons for this comatose state, and is widely cited. The second reason for this is what only I seem to talk about, and that is a most extraordinary and appalling incompetence. The third is talked about by only those in the know, namely, the influence of business lobbies.
...
Incompetence and corruption have combined to produce the third element, lobby power of big business. Go to any ministry today, even something as noble as the ministry of women and child welfare, and you will see how the lobbies have moved in.

It is they, who along with the think tanks assist the senior bureaucracy in justifying decisions that the Minister wants taken. In far too many instances the staff-work is now done by the lobbies.

We are slowly moving the way of all democracies. Laws get written by lobbies in the US. Even if not, they get neutered by the lobbies who add/delete whatever the concerned industry biggies want. It is going the same way here.

Erasing The Difference

Between itself and the other parties. That is what the BJP has done according to one of its own leaders in the state.

Stating that party workers were of the view that the BJP had ceased to be a party with a difference, he said dynastic rule, casteism and electoral malpractices were the issues with which the Congress and the JD(S) were being targeted. "However, by fielding the kith and kin of sitting ministers, the BJP has lost the moral authority to take on other parties over this issue," he said.

Referring to allegations of the party employing money and liquor to woo voters during elections, Eshwarappa said he would appeal to State President Sadananda Gowda to constitute a committee of senior leaders to look into the charges.

"I am elated that the party won 19 seats in the elections. But, I do believe that means are as important as the ends. More than development and ideological issues, distribution of money and liquor were prominently discussed during elections in Shimoga.

Loyal BJP voters who were not used to this political culture, lost motivation to turn up at polling booths. The party had similar experience in other constituencies also."

I confess I never bought into the 'party with a difference' bs even as far back as 1990. When you haven't tasted power, you tend to be a bit different. After all, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely etc. But I did think it stood for 'partying with a difference'. With a saffron tinge if one may put it that way. And one did hear about the parties during the Pramod Mahajan days. However, the blatant use of liquor and money in the recent polls as reported in the newspapers did surprise me.

We live and learn.

Movement

The CM visits the Beggars Colony in the city and which ultimately results in headline from DH:

Plight of beggars in colony moves CM

So one expects a lot of sympathy and a firm commitment to help improve the plight of the people in the colony. Instead one realises that the CM was so moved that all he could think of was to move the colony to some other, "better", place:

The government is now contemplating to shift the Colony to a new location, a better place. The Chief Minister has now proposed to shift the Beggars’ Colony and establish a ‘Mini-Lalbagh’ along with a government hospital on a five acre land in the location.

“Being in the centre of the City and worth around Rs 1,000 crore, the land can be used for various purposes. This would be decided in the next Cabinet meeting,” he said.

Land worth Rs 1000 crores! The possibilities are endless and the imagination goes wild. Will be interesting to see how and to whom they sell it off.

America: Where Even The Prostitution Is Better

From the NY Times:

Prostitution in America isn’t as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed).

But the only problem is, it isn't!

“If you don’t earn enough money, you get beat,” said Jasmine, an African-American who has turned her life around with the help of Covenant House, an organization that works with children on the street. “If you say something you’re not supposed to, you get beat. If you stay too long with a customer, you get beat. And if you try to leave the pimp, you get beat.”

The Nuclear Deal

And all that it was to do for the Indo-US partnership are in reality far from the touted ideal. Who could have known!

The United States-India nuclear deal was promoted as a transformative initiative — one that would put the bilateral relationship on a much-higher pedestal. In his valedictory speech, President George W. Bush declared: “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.” By contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not made a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — ever since the vaunted deal came to fruition, othe r than to admit recently that he got his party to back the deal by threatening to resign.
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Seven months after the deal’s realisation, there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, doubts have arisen over the supposed “global strategic partnership” with America. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters of vital interest to India, the U.S. has sought to ignore New Delhi or pursue antithetical policy approaches. To the chagrin of Indian neocons — who ingenuously marketed the nuclear deal as a U.S. move to build India as a world power and counterweight to China — Washington has declared that its “most important bilateral relationship in the world” is with Beijing.

Link.

The Class Dialectic

Class:

Declasse:

It's Official, The Banks Own the US Government

DURBIN: And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.

And that's a serving Senator speaking, no conspiracy theorist. Link.

Update: And the Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway thinks so too:

May 2 (Bloomberg) -- Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman Charles Munger, whose company is the largest private shareholder in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., said banks will use their “enormous political power” to prevent changes to the industry that would benefit society.

“This is an enormously influential group of people, and 90 percent of that influence is being spent to gain powers and practices that the world would be better off without,” Munger, 85, said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “It will be very hard to accomplish the kind of surgery that would be desirable for the wider civilization.”

...

Munger said the financial companies spent $500 million on political contributions and lobbying efforts over the last decade. They have a “vested interest” in protecting the system as it exists because of the high levels of pay they were earning, he said. The five biggest U.S. securities firms, only two of which still exist as independent companies, paid their employees about $39 billion in bonuses in 2007.

Our Media

From The Hindu:

Over the last few months, just as the economy entered its current recessionary phase, the mainstream media, which till then had been uniformly unswerving in their antipathy to NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), suddenly began to sing its praises.

Because rural people don't really matter till they are required to bail out the economy!

Talking Movies (Not Really)

It may seem tame considering what has come since, but Henry Levin's 1960 teen romantic comedy Where the Boys Are was fairly revolutionary for its time.

... the movie tells the tale of two college co-eds, Merritt (Dolores Hart) and Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Merritt hesitates on taking the penultimate step in the game of what she calls "backseat bingo" in order to win the heart of a special beau; Melanie fairly explicitly affirms (for the time, anyway) that she intends to show no such restraint.

Of course, it ends very badly for Melanie. Lured to a party at aroadside motel where she believes that her new boyfriend will be present along with other desirable young Ivy League "Yalies", she is next seen wandering aimlessly in the middle of a busy highway, hair and clothes disheveled - as the then movie morals code would not allow the word that described her obvious violation to be explicitly uttered, the audience was left to draw the obvious inference as to the terrible price she paid for her licentiousness.

She gets hit by a car; in the hospital, she confesses the worst part of her sin to Merritt. "They weren't even Yalies!" she sobs.

But it is not really about the movie.

Thirty eight years later, in 1998, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairwoman Brooksley Born, in seeking to uphold the integrity of the financial system, was similarly accosted. However, in contrast to poor Melanie, the gang that attacked her possessed just about the highest imaginable academic pedigrees. They were the then deputy secretary of the Treasury (and now the chair of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council) Laurence Summers (BA Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Phd Harvard); Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan (BA, MA Columbia, Phd New York University); and the leader of the gang, Treasury secretary Robert Rubin (BA Harvard, LLB Yale - yes! he was even a Yalie). After the attack on chairwoman Born, the gang carelessly hopped into their souped-up hot rod and proceeded to further make the preparations for their rich-kid, thrill-kill firebombing of the world financial system we see occurring today.

Lessons From The Crisis

One interesting thing about the global screw-up is that one sees how things work more clearly. One sees what clothes the various emperors are wearing, with the help of people in the know. Like former IMF chief economists.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.