IRS writes up $70-million tax bill for Conrad Black
Conrad Black leaves the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse after being sentenced to 78 months in prison Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, in Chicago.
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U.S. taxman alleges that he failed to pay taxes on $116-million in income; Lord Black challenges assessment
Paul Waldie
From Friday’s Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Jul. 15, 2010 11:12PM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 15, 2010 11:14PM EDT
Conrad Black has been hit with a $70-million (U.S.) tax bill from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which claims he failed to pay taxes on more than $116-million in income.
In a series of notices filed in the United States Tax Court, the IRS alleges that Lord Black did not pay taxes on a variety of payments he received between 1998 and 2003 while running Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc.
The payments cited by the IRS include management fees, dividends, non-competition fees and an assortment of taxable benefits such as use of the Hollinger jet, use of a company-owned apartment in New York and Hollinger’s purchase of historical papers related to Franklin D. Roosevelt, which Lord Black used to write a book on the former president. The IRS is also going after money paid to Lord Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel-Black. The tax agency is seeking $47-million in unpaid taxes and more than $22-million in penalties.
Lord Black has challenged the assessment in court, arguing that he was “neither a citizen nor a resident of the United States” and was not obliged to pay taxes in the U.S. The lawsuit was first reported Thursday by Forbes.com.
In his suit, Lord Black alleges that the IRS based its case on a 2004 report by a special committee of Hollinger directors. That 500-page report became the basis for a number of allegations against Lord Black and other former Hollinger executives. It also underpinned the bulk of the criminal case against Lord Black and four others. Lord Black was ultimately convicted in 2007 of three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice, but most of the criminal charges based on the committee’s report were either dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by the jury.
Lord Black is serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence in a Florida jail but the U.S. Supreme Court recently ordered a lower court to reconsider fraud convictions in the case (four others were also convicted of fraud).
“These allegations [in the committee’s report] were hopelessly biased, ignored critical facts, and were the product of sloppy and careless investigative work by the special committee,” Lord Black says in his tax challenge. “Unfortunately, they form the predicate for many of the ‘tax deficiencies’ now asserted by the [IRS].”
Bryan Skarlatos, a New York lawyer representing Lord Black, accused the IRS of “piling on.” In an interview Thursday, Mr. Skarlatos said: “They are rehashing many transactions for which he has been acquitted.” He added that he is confident Lord Black will win the case.
This isn’t the first tax problem for Lord Black. He settled a dispute with the Canada Revenue Agency three years ago. It’s not clear what that case involved but the CRA had put a $14-million (Canadian) lien on his mansion in Palm Beach, Fla. The lien has been removed.
It was Canadian tax authorities, not the IRS, who figured prominently in Lord Black’s criminal case. Many of the allegations against Lord Black and the others centred around their re-characterization of payments as non-competition fees in order to avoid paying taxes in Canada. At one point, the CRA was even named as a victim in the case, although prosecutors later dropped the reference.
Lord Black’s ties to the U.S. have been limited over the years. While Hollinger International was based in Chicago, he controlled the company through Ravelston Corp. Ltd., a privately held Canadian company. He was forced to give up his Canadian citizenship in 2001 in order to sit in the House of Lords as a British citizen.
Former Hollinger executives David Rader and Peter Atkinson, also convicted of fraud, have filed similar challenges to IRS notices that they also failed to pay taxes. Both are Canadian and live in Vancouver and Toronto, respectively.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/irs-writes-up-70-million-tax-bill-for-conrad-black/article1641911/
Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 14, 2010 Federal authorities detained a 12th person in their investigation of a Russian spy ring in the United States, and he has been deported to Russia, U.S. law enforcement officials said Tuesday. This Story * U.S. deports an alleged 12th Russian spy * Anna Chapman, alleged Russian spy, posts photos online * SpyTalk Blog: Chapman’s Moscow tweets The man, Alexey Karetnikov, entered the United States in October and was living in the Seattle area, where he worked at Microsoft, according to federal officials and the company. Karetnikov, a Russian citizen in his early-to-mid-20s, had been held on immigration violations because there was insufficient evidence to charge him with a crime, the government officials said. “He was just in the early stages; had just set up shop,” said one senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the case were closely held. The official added that the FBI was monitoring the Russian almost immediately upon his arrival and that he had “obtained absolutely no information.” An immigration judge issued an order Monday for Karetnikov’s removal from the United States, said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. The Russian admitted he was illegally present in the country and agreed to the deportation in lieu of further court proceedings, said Chandler, who added that Karetnikov “would face criminal and civil penalties if he returned without express U.S. government permission.” U.S. officials said Karetnikov was sent home Tuesday. Database searches show that someone with Karetnikov’s name had been living in an apartment in Redmond, Wash., since October. That man’s Facebook page says he worked for Microsoft and a Romanian-based software company called Neobit. Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman, confirmed that Karetnikov had worked at the company for about nine months as a software tester. He said Karetnikov is the man whom authorities deported on Tuesday but would not comment further. The latest detention added a new wrinkle to a case that has fascinated Americans since 10 people were arrested June 27 and charged with working as deep undercover Russian spies. The 10 sleeper agents pleaded guilty Thursday to acting as unregistered agents for Russia and were then “swapped” for four Russian prisoners in a deal reminiscent of the Cold War. An 11th man charged in federal court in New York remains at large. ad_icon Details about the 12th alleged spy came as information emerged on how the 10 agents involved in the swap are faring in Russia. Russian news media reported that they have applied to a witness-protection program and are seeking to change their names. Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Russian newspaper, reported that the 10 agents are being debriefed at a Russian intelligence facility on the outskirts of Moscow. They are not allowed to leave the premises, but family members are allowed to visit, the newspaper said. The reticence that most are showing might not apply to Anna Chapman, who became a tabloid sensation in the United States when sultry photographs of her were posted on the Internet after her arrest. Russian news media reported that Chapman is willing to sell her story to journalists. Chapman had told her U.S. attorney, Robert M. Baum, that she may want to relocate to Britain, where the Russian acquired dual citizenship in 2002 through her marriage to a British businessman, Baum said Tuesday. But he said the British government has stripped Chapman of her citizenship and revoked her passport, citing the spy case. In the United States, officials indicated last week that the case had effectively shut down the spy ring. But law enforcement officials said Tuesday that Karetnikov was not part of the same ring and had no direct ties to the other spies, although his name came up in the broader investigation. It was unclear when Karetnikov was detained, although an official said he was in custody by last week. He was apparently not part of the swap because unlike the other 10 agents, he was not charged with a crime. One official said Karetnikov was “just doing the things he needed to do to establish cover,” including holding down a job. Asked whether further arrests are possible, one official said U.S. law enforcement authorities are closely monitoring all potential espionage activity but added, “I don’t think there will be a 13th or a 14th arrest here.” Special correspondent Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi in London, special correspondent Julia Ioffe in Moscow, and staff writer Walter Pincus and research editor Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Federal authorities detained a 12th person in their investigation of a Russian spy ring in the United States, and he has been deported to Russia, U.S. law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
“He was just in the early stages; had just set up shop,” said one senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details of the case were closely held. The official added that the FBI was monitoring the Russian almost immediately upon his arrival and that he had “obtained absolutely no information.”
An immigration judge issued an order Monday for Karetnikov’s removal from the United States, said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. The Russian admitted he was illegally present in the country and agreed to the deportation in lieu of further court proceedings, said Chandler, who added that Karetnikov “would face criminal and civil penalties if he returned without express U.S. government permission.”
U.S. officials said Karetnikov was sent home Tuesday.
Database searches show that someone with Karetnikov’s name had been living in an apartment in Redmond, Wash., since October. That man’s Facebook page says he worked for Microsoft and a Romanian-based software company called Neobit.
Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman, confirmed that Karetnikov had worked at the company for about nine months as a software tester. He said Karetnikov is the man whom authorities deported on Tuesday but would not comment further.
The latest detention added a new wrinkle to a case that has fascinated Americans since 10 people were arrested June 27 and charged with working as deep undercover Russian spies. The 10 sleeper agents pleaded guilty Thursday to acting as unregistered agents for Russia and were then “swapped” for four Russian prisoners in a deal reminiscent of the Cold War. An 11th man charged in federal court in New York remains at large. 
Details about the 12th alleged spy came as information emerged on how the 10 agents involved in the swap are faring in Russia. Russian news media reported that they have applied to a witness-protection program and are seeking to change their names.
Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Russian newspaper, reported that the 10 agents are being debriefed at a Russian intelligence facility on the outskirts of Moscow. They are not allowed to leave the premises, but family members are allowed to visit, the newspaper said.
The reticence that most are showing might not apply to Anna Chapman, who became a tabloid sensation in the United States when sultry photographs of her were posted on the Internet after her arrest. Russian news media reported that Chapman is willing to sell her story to journalists.
Chapman had told her U.S. attorney, Robert M. Baum, that she may want to relocate to Britain, where the Russian acquired dual citizenship in 2002 through her marriage to a British businessman, Baum said Tuesday. But he said the British government has stripped Chapman of her citizenship and revoked her passport, citing the spy case.
In the United States, officials indicated last week that the case had effectively shut down the spy ring. But law enforcement officials said Tuesday that Karetnikov was not part of the same ring and had no direct ties to the other spies, although his name came up in the broader investigation.
It was unclear when Karetnikov was detained, although an official said he was in custody by last week. He was apparently not part of the swap because unlike the other 10 agents, he was not charged with a crime. One official said Karetnikov was “just doing the things he needed to do to establish cover,” including holding down a job.
Asked whether further arrests are possible, one official said U.S. law enforcement authorities are closely monitoring all potential espionage activity but added, “I don’t think there will be a 13th or a 14th arrest here.”
Special correspondent Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi in London, special correspondent Julia Ioffe in Moscow, and staff writer Walter Pincus and research editor Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
Recession Is Not Over Yet, Americans Say
More than 70% of Americans think that the country is still in a recession, according to a new Bloomberg survey. Only 17% of those surveyed believe they are better off now than when President Obama took office.
Is it any wonder? Americans face unemployment that is just below 10% and may remain there for several more months, perhaps longer. The housing market is still troubled with 11 million or more home loans underwater — about 25% of all mortgages. Foreclosures are still near record highs. Consumer credit is tight.
The amazing thing about the study is that it shows the divide between Wall Street economists and White House financial experts on the one hand and Main Street on the other. While many economists have said the recession is over, the general public says not so fast. Of those surveyed, 13% feel “the economy is faltering and will dip back into recession.”
One of the most important things that economists fail to note is that in addition to unemployment — and underemployment at nearly 17% — a large number of employed are worried about the future of their jobs. The number cannot be accurately calculated, but when those with jobs see neighbors and relatives out of work and unemployment benefits running out, it’s only natural that concern about permanent work should spread.
Workers know that some companies will squeeze what they can out of their current workforce rather than risk hiring while the economy is still shaky. And the same firms often turn to part-time workers to avoid full salaries and expensive benefits.
“Running Out of Patience”
The Bloomberg study also shows that people are torn, as many politicians are, over the issues of reducing the deficit and stimulating the economy to create jobs. More than half of those polled said that the deficit is “dangerously out of control.”
“They’re just running out of patience,” says J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based company that conducted the survey. “The number they’re seeing change is the deficit. It’s rising at what seems like an astronomical rate. The number that seems intractable is the unemployment rate.”
When asked to identify the cornerstones of the economic malaise, unemployment and the federal deficit dwarfed all other concerns of those surveyed.
The Bloomberg National Poll is based on interviews with 1,004 U.S. adults ages 18 or older. Percentages based on the full sample may have a maximum margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: geishaboy500, marttj)
We live at a time that might be appropriately called the age of the disappearing intellectual, a disappearance that marks with disgrace a particularly dangerous period in American history. While there are plenty of talking heads spewing lies, insults and nonsense in the various media, it would be wrong to suggest that these right-wing populist are intellectuals. They are neither knowledgeable nor self-reflective, but largely ideological hacks catering to the worst impulses in American society. Some obvious examples would include John Stossel calling for the repeal of that “section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination in public places.”[1] And, of course, there are the more famous corporate-owned talking heads such as Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, all of whom trade in reactionary world views, ignorance, ideological travesties and outlandish misrepresentations – all the while wrapping themselves in the populist creed of speaking for everyday Americans.
In a media scape and public sphere that view criticism, dialog and thoughtfulness as a liability, such anti-intellectuals abound, providing commentaries that are nativist, racist, reactionary and morally repugnant. But the premium put on ignorance and the disdain for critical intellectuals is not monopolized by the dominant media, it appears to have become one of the few criteria left for largely wealthy individuals to qualify for public office. One typical example is Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who throws out inanities such as labeling the Obama administration a “gangster government.”[2] Bachmann refuses to take critical questions from the press because she claims that they unfairly focus on her language. She has a point. After all, it might be difficult to support statements such as the claim that “the US government used the census information to round up the Japanese [Americans] and put them in concentration camps.”[3] Another typical example can be found in Congressman Joe Barton’s apology to BP for having to pay for damages to the government stemming from its disastrous oil spill.
This “upscaling of ignorance”[4] gets worse. Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post about Sen. Michael Bennett, was shocked to discover that he was actually well-educated and smart but had to hide his qualifications in his primary campaign so as to not undermine his chance of being re-elected. Cohen concludes that in politics, “We have come to value ignorance.”[5] He further argues that the notion that a politician should actually know something about domestic and foreign affairs is now considered a liability. He writes:
[W]e now have politicians who lack a child’s knowledge of government. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has won the GOP Senate nomination espousing phasing out Social Security and repealing the income tax as well as abolishing that durable conservative target, the Education Department. Similarly, in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, a former pro wrestling tycoon, is running commercials so adamantly anti-Washington you would think she’s an anarchist. In Arizona Andy Goss, a Republican congressional candidate, suggests requiring all members of Congress to live in a barracks. This might be tough on wives, children and the odd cocker spaniel, but what the hell. Nowadays, all ideas are equal.[6]
The embrace of a type of rabid individualism, anti-intellectualism and political illiteracy is also at work in the Tea Party movement. As social protections disappear, jobs are lost, uncertainty grows and insecurity prevails, Tea Party members express anger over a weakened social state that represents one of the few institutions capable of providing the capital, policies and safety nets necessary to protect those who have been shaken by the economic recession. And, yet, in light of what Bob Herbert calls “the most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans,”[7] the Tea Party movement wants to abolish government and expand even more the deregulated capitalism that has unsettled the lives of so many of its members. Ignorance prevails around both the movement’s policy recommendations and its often racist protest against “the election of a “foreign born’ – African-American to the presidency.” As J. M. Bernstein pointed out in a New York Times opinion piece:
When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy.[8]
As the belief in the libertarian agent, free of all dependencies and social responsibilities blows up in the face of the current economic meltdown, anger replaces critique and ignorance informs politics. Bernstein thinks that members of the Tea Party are angry because they have been jolted into recognizing how fragile their so-called individual freedom actually is and that it is the government that is somehow responsible for making them feel so vulnerable. Maybe so, but there is also something else at work here, less metaphysical and more pedagogical – a kind of intellectual vacuum produced at different levels of American society that cultivates ignorance, limits choices, legitimizes political illiteracy and promotes violence.
Another version of anti-intellectualism prevails in universities where students are urged by some conservative groups to spy on their professors to make sure they do not say anything that might actually get students to think critically about their beliefs. At the same time, faculty are being relegated to nontenured positions and because of the lack of tenure, which offers some guarantees, are afraid to say controversial things inside and outside the classroom for fear of being fired.[9] Moreover, as the university becomes more corporatized, intellectual and critical thought is transformed into a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. I am not suggesting that so called professed intellectuals are not influencing policy, appearing in the media or teaching in the universities, but that these are not critical intellectuals. On the contrary, they are accommodating ideologues, content to bask in the politics of conformity and the rewards of official power. Underlying this drift toward the disappearing critical intellectual and the erasure of substantive critique is a regime of economic Darwinism in which a culture of ignorance serves to both depoliticize the larger public while simultaneously producing individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression. The cheerful robot is not simply an opprobrium for ignorance, it is a metaphor for the systemic construction in American society of a new mode of depoliticized and thoughtless form of agency.
With the advent of neoliberalism, or what some call free-market fundamentalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption throughout society of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinism. As a theater of cruelty and a mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity while simultaneously promoting the logic of unrestricted individual responsibility. But there is more at stake here than an unchecked ideology of privatization.[10] For example, as the welfare state is dismantled, it is being replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state as social problems are increasingly criminalized and social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened. The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons and state policies that bail out investment bankers, but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair and insecurity. But it can also be seen in the practice of socialism for the rich. This is a practice in which government supports for the poor, unemployed, sick and elderly are derided because they either contribute to an increase in the growing deficit or they undermine the market-driven notion of individual responsibility. And yet, the same critics defend, without irony, government support for the rich, the bankers, the permanent war economy, or any number of subsidies for corporations as essential to the life of the nation, which is simply an argument that benefits the rich and powerful and legitimates the deregulated wild west of casino capitalism.
Of course, this form of economic Darwinism is not enforced simply through the use of the police and other repressive apparatuses; it is endlessly reproduced through the cultural apparatuses of the new and old media, public and higher education, as well as through the thousands of messages and narratives we are exposed to daily in multiple commercial spheres. In this discourse, the economic order is either sanctioned by God or exists simply as an extension of nature. In other words, the tyranny and suffering that is produced through the neoliberal theater of cruelty is unquestionable, as unmovable as an urban skyscraper. Long-term investments are now replaced by short-term gains and profits, while compassion is viewed as a weakness and democratic public values are scorned because they subordinate market considerations to the common good. Morality in this instance becomes painless, stripped of any obligations to the other. As the language of privatization, deregulation and commodification replaces the discourse of the public good, all things public, including public schools, libraries and public services, are viewed either as a drain on the market or as a pathology. At the same time, inequality in wealth and income expands and spreads like a toxin through everyday life, poisoning democracy and relegating more and more individuals to a growing army of disposable human waste.[11]
The giant oil spill in the Gulf is rarely viewed as part of a much broader systemic crisis of democracy. Instead, it is treated as an unfortunate disaster caused by corporate greed or negligence. Celebrity culture puts much of the population in a moral coma and perpetual state of ignorance. Coupled with a pedagogy of economic Darwinism that is spewed out daily in the mainstream media, large segments of the population are prevented from connecting the dots between their own personal troubles and larger social problems. In this case, the larger structural elements of a corrupt economic system disappear, while the suffering and hardship continues and the bankers and other members of the financial criminal class run to the banks to deposit their obscene bonuses.
Under such circumstances, to paraphrase C. W. Mills, we are seeing the breakdown of democracy, the disappearance of critical thought and “the collapse of those public spheres which offer a sense of critical agency and social imagination.”[12] Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to the logic of privatization, efficiency, flexibility, consumerism and the destruction of the social state. Tied largely to instrumental purposes and measurable paradigms, many institutions of higher education are now committed almost exclusively to economic growth, instrumental rationality and preparing students for the workforce.
The question of what kind of education is needed for students to be informed and active citizens is rarely asked.[13] Hence, it not surprising, for example, to read that “Thomas College, a liberal arts college in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job!”[14] Faculty within this discourse are defined largely as a subaltern class of low-skilled entrepreneurs, removed from the powers of governance and subordinated to the policies, values and practices within a market model of the university.[15] Within both higher education and the educational force of the broader cultural apparatus – with its networks of knowledge production in the old and new media – we are witnessing the emergence and dominance of a form of a powerful and ruthless, if not destructive, market-driven notion of governance, teaching, learning, freedom, agency and responsibility. Such modes of education do not foster a sense of organized responsibility central to a democracy. Instead, they foster what might be called a sense of organized irresponsibility – a practice that underlies the economic Darwinism, public pedagogy and corruption at the heart of both the current recession and American politics.
The anti-democratic values that drive free-market fundamentalism are embodied in policies now attempting to shape diverse levels of higher education all over the globe. The script has now become overly familiar and more and more taken for granted, especially in the United States and increasingly in Canada. Shaping the neoliberal framing of public and higher education is a corporate-based ideology that embraces standardizing the curriculum, supporting top-down management, implementing more courses that promote business values and reducing all levels of education to job training sites. For example, one university is offering a master’s degree to students who commit to starting a high-tech company while another allows career officers to teach capstone research seminars in the humanities. In one of these classes, the students were asked to “develop a 30-second commercial on their ‘personal brand.’”[16]
The demise of democracy is now matched by the disappearance of vital public spheres and the exhaustion of intellectuals. Instead of critical and public intellectuals, faculty are increasingly defined less as intellectuals than as technicians, specialist and grant writers. Nor is there any attempt to legitimate higher education as a fundamental sphere for creating the agents necessary for an aspiring democracy. In fact, the commitment to democracy is beleaguered, viewed less as a crucial educational investment than as a distraction that gets in the way of connecting knowledge and pedagogy to the production of material and human capital. In short, higher education is now being retooled as part of a larger political project to bring it in tune with the authority and values fostering the advance of neoliberalism. I think David Harvey is right in insisting, “the academy is being subjected to neoliberal disciplinary apparatuses of various kinds [while] also becoming a place where neoliberal ideas are being spread.”[17]
As a core political and civic institution, higher education rarely appears committed to addressing important social problems. Instead, many have become unapologetic accomplices to corporate values and power and, in doing so, increasingly make social problems either irrelevant or invisible. Steeped in the same market driven values that produced the 2008 global economic recession along with a vast amount of hardships and human suffering in many countries around the globe, higher education mimics the inequalities and hierarchies of power that inform the failed financial behemoths – banks and investment companies in particular – that have become public symbols of greed and corruption. Not only does neoliberalism undermine civic education and public values, confuse education with training, but it also treats knowledge as a product, promoting a neoliberal logic that views schools as malls, students as consumers and faculty as entrepreneurs. Just as democracy appears to be fading in the United States so is the legacy of higher education’s faith in and commitment to democracy. As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic and moral supports.
Higher education has a responsibility not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead, but also to educate students to make authority and power politically and morally accountable. Though questions regarding whether the university should serve strictly public rather than private interests no longer carry the weight of forceful criticism they did in the past, such questions are still crucial in addressing the purpose of higher education and what it might mean to imagine the university’s full participation in public life as the protector and promoter of democratic values.
What needs to be understood is that higher education may be one of the few institutions we have left in the United States where knowledge, values and learning offer a glimpse of the promise of education for nurturing public values, critical hope and a sense of civic responsibility. It may be the case that everyday life is increasingly organized around market principles; but confusing a market-determined society with democracy hollows out the legacy of higher education, whose deepest roots are moral, not commercial. This is a particularly important insight in a society where the free circulation of ideas are not only being replaced by ideas managed by the dominant media, but where critical ideas are increasingly viewed or dismissed as banal, if not reactionary.
But there is more at stake than simply the death of critical thought, there is also the powerful influence of celebrity culture and the commodification of culture, both of which now create a powerful form of mass illiteracy that increasingly dominates all aspects of the wider cultural educational apparatus. But mass illiteracy does more than undermine critical thought and depoliticize the public; it also becomes complicit with the suppression of dissent. Intellectuals who engage in dissent or a culture of questioning are often dismissed as either irrelevant, extremist, or un-American.
Anti-public intellectuals now dominate the larger cultural landscape, funded largely by right-wing institutes, eager to legitimate the worst forms of oppression as they nod, smile, speak in sound bites and willingly display their brand of moral cowardice. At the same time, there are too few critical academics willing to defend higher education for its role in providing a supportive and sustainable culture in which a vibrant critical democracy can flourish.
As potential democratic public spheres, institutions of higher education are especially important at a time when any space that produces “critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question” is under siege by powerful economic, military, and political interests.[18] The increasing disappearance of any viable public sphere coupled with the reduction of the university to an outpost of business culture represents a serious political and pedagogical concern that should not be lost on either academics or those concerned about the purpose and meaning of higher education, if not the fate of democracy itself.
Democracy places civic demands upon its citizens and such demands point to the necessity of an education that is broad-based, critical and supportive of meaningful civic values, participation in self-governance and democratic leadership. Only through such a formative and critical educational culture can students learn how to become individual and social agents, rather than merely disengaged spectators, able both to think otherwise and to act upon civic commitments that “necessitate a reordering of basic power arrangements” fundamental to promoting the common good and producing a meaningful democracy. The current neoliberal regime that is wreaking havoc on the planet and the lives of millions cannot be addressed by future generations unless they have the capacities, knowledge, skills and motivation to think critically and act courageously. This means giving them the knowledge and skills to make power visible and politics an important sphere of individual and collective struggle.
One measure of the degree to which higher education has lost its moral compass can be viewed in the ways in which it disavows any relationship between equity and excellence, eschews the discourse of democracy and reduces its commitment to learning to the stripped down goals of either preparing students for the workforce or teaching them the virtues of measurable utility. While such objectives are not without merit, they have little to say about the role that higher education might play in influencing the fate of future citizens and the state of democracy itself, nor do they say much about what it means for faculty to be more than technicians or hermetic scholars.
In addition to promoting measurable skills and educating students to be competitive in the marketplace, academics are also required to speak a kind of truth, but as Stuart Hall points out, “maybe not truth with a capital T, but … some kind of truth, the best truth they know or can discover [and] to speak that truth to power.”[19] Implicit in Hall’s statement is an awareness that to speak truth to power is not a temporary and unfortunate lapse into politics on the part of academics: it is central to opposing all those modes of ignorance, whether they are market-based or rooted in other fundamentalist ideologies, that make judgments difficult and democracy dysfunctional.
In my view, academics have not only a moral and pedagogical responsibility to unsettle and oppose all orthodoxies, to make problematic the commonsense assumptions that often shape students’ lives and their understanding of the world, but also to energize them to come to terms with their own power as individual and social agents. Higher education, in this instance, as Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire, Stanley Aronowitz, and other intellectuals have reminded us, cannot be removed from the hard realities of those political, economic and social forces that both support it and consistently, though in diverse ways, attempt to shape its sense of mission and purpose.[20] Politics is not alien to higher education, but central to comprehending the institutional, economic, ideological and social forces that give it meaning and direction. Politics also references the outgrowth of historical conflicts that mark higher education as an important site of struggle. Rather than the scourge of either education or academic research, politics is a primary register of their complex relation to matters of power, ideology, freedom, justice and democracy.
Talking heads who proclaim that politics have no place in the classroom can as Jacques Ranciere points out “look forward to the time when politics will be over and they can at last get on with political business undisturbed,” especially as it pertains to the political landscape of the university.[21] In this discourse, education as a fundamental basis for engaged citizenship, like politics itself, becomes a temporary irritant to be quickly removed from the hallowed halls of academia. In this stillborn conception of academic labor, faculty and students are scrubbed clean of any illusions about connecting what they learn to a world “strewn with ruin, waste and human suffering.”[22]
As considerations of power, politics, critique and social responsibility are removed from the university, balanced judgment becomes code, as the famous sociologist C. Wright. Mills points out, for “surface views which rest upon the homogeneous absence of imagination and the passive avoidance of reflection. A … vague point of equilibrium between platitudes.”[23] Under such circumstances, the university and the intellectuals that inhabit it disassociate higher education from larger public issues, remove themselves from the task of translating private troubles into social problems and undermine the production of those public values that nourish a democracy. Needless to say, pedagogy is always political by virtue of the ways in which power is used to shape various elements of classroom identities, desires, values and social relations, but that is different from being an act of indoctrination. Writing about the role of the social sciences, Mills had a lot to say about public intellectuals in the academy and, in fact, directly addressed the argument that such intellectuals had no right to try to save the world. He writes:
I do not believe that social science will ‘save the world’ although I see nothing at all wrong with ‘trying to save the -world’ – a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. Such knowledge as I have leads me to embrace rather pessimistic estimates of the chances. But even if that is where we now stand, still we must ask: if there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them? … It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to the great problems must now lie.[24]
A large number of faculty exist in specialized academic bubbles cut off from both the larger public and the important issues that impact society. While extending the boundaries of specialized scholarship is important, it is no excuse for faculty to become complicit in the transformation of the university into an adjunct of corporate and military power. Too many academics have become incapable of defending higher education as a vital public sphere and unwilling to challenge those spheres of induced mass cultural illiteracy and firewalls of jargon that doom critically engaged thought, complex ideas and serious writing for the public to extinction. Without their intervention as engaged intellectuals, the university defaults on its role as a democratic public sphere capable of educating an informed public, a culture of questioning and the development of a critical formative culture connected to the need, as Cornelius Castoriadis puts it, “to create citizens who are critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes society’s movement.”[25]
For education to be civic, critical and democratic rather than privatized, militarized and commodified, educators must take seriously John Dewey’s notion that democracy is a “way of life” that must be constantly nurtured and defended.[26] Democracy is not a marketable commodity[27] and neither are the political, economic and social conditions that make it possible. If academics believe that the university is a space for and about democracy, they need to profess more, not less, about eliminating inequality in the university, supporting academic freedom, preventing the exploitation of faculty, supporting shared modes of governance, rejecting modes of research that devalue the public good and refuse to treat students as merely consumers. Academics have a distinct and unique obligation, if not political and ethical responsibility, to make learning relevant to the imperatives of a discipline, scholarly method, or research specialization. But more importantly, academics as engaged scholars can further the activation of knowledge, passion, values and hope in the service of forms of agency that are crucial to sustaining a democracy in which higher education plays an important civic, critical and pedagogical role. If democracy is a way of life that demands a formative culture, educators can play a pivotal role in creating forms of pedagogy and research that enable young people to think critically, exercise judgment, engage in spirited debate and create those public spaces that constitute “the very essence of political life.”[28]
Economic Darwinism shapes more than economies; it also produces ideas, values, power, morality and regimes of truth. Most importantly, regardless of its arrogance, it has to legitimate its power and theater of cruelty. Challenging its modes of legitimation and misrepresentations at the point of production is precisely an important task and mode of politics that should be addressed by critical intellectuals. Central ideological issues pushed by the advocates of neoliberalism extending from the myth of free markets, free trade, the limitless power of individual responsibility, the evils of the welfare state, the necessity of low taxes, the economic benefits of a permanent war economy, deregulation, privatization and commodification, along with the danger of giving the government any sense of public responsibility should be challenged head on in numerous venues by critical intellectuals.
As David Harvey points out, academics have a “crucial role to play in trying to resist the neoliberalization of the academy, which is largely about organizing within the academy … creating spaces within the academy, where things could be said, written, discussed and ideas promulgated. Right now those spaces are more under threat then they have been in many years.”[29] All the more reason for academics to view the academy as a viable sphere worth struggling over. Intellectuals outside of the academy can also work to use their specific skills at various points of production to raise consciousness and the level of intellectual discourse in the spirit of creating agents capable of challenging and seeing beyond the existing neoliberal mode of economic Darwinism. Such actions not only help intellectuals to engage in self-critical reflection, play a viable role in creating the conditions for emergent critical public spheres, but they also contribute to a formative culture of change that enables the development of a broad anti-capitalist movement.
What Harvey is rightfully suggesting is that academics can do more than “teach the conflicts” and provide the conditions that enable young people to speak truth to power. They can also organize within the academy to prevent the ongoing militarization and neoliberalization of higher education. They can work together with staff, students, part-time faculty, and other interested parties to form unions, embrace a notion of democratic governance and help to position the university as public sphere that can become a vital resource in which people can think, engage in critical dialog, organize and connect to a broader public and movements eager for economic and social transformation. Academics can work to develop diverse intellectual institutes, sites and organizations both within and outside of North America to contest the right-wing media machine and its army of anti-public intellectuals. Intellectuals trade in ideas, help to raise consciousness and are crucial to offering new coordinates for how to think about freedom, justice, equality, sustainability and the elimination of human suffering.
Jacques Ranciere is informative here in his call for intellectuals to engage in a form of dissensus, which he defines as an attempt to modify the coordinates of the visible and ways of perceiving experience. Dissensus is an attempt “to loosen the bonds that enclose spectacles within a form of visibility…. within the machine that makes the “state of things” seem evident, unquestionable.”[30] Ideas matter not only because they can promote self-reflection, but because they can reconstitute our sense of agency, imagination, hope and possibility. And it is precisely in their ability to extend the reach and understanding of how ideas, power and politics work not simply in the interest of domination, but also critical hope and collective struggle that the importance of ideas and the role of intellectuals matter in such dark times.
As the commercial machinery and repressive apparatuses run by the neoliberal and right-wing zombies undermine public space and condemn more and more people to the status of disposable populations, it is all the more crucial that academics, artists, and other intellectuals mobilize their resources in order to fight the loss of vision and the exhaustion of politics that has paralyzed American society for decades. As stated in the manifesto from “Left Turn,” the key here is to “link struggles that have for decades been seen as discrete, with a broad anti-capitalist project whose objective is the radical transformation of economic, political, personal and social relations.”[31]
It is precisely over the creation of alternative democratic public spheres that such a struggle against neoliberal, economic Darwinism can and should be waged by academics, intellectuals, artists, and other cultural workers. Higher education, labor unions, the alternative media and progressive social movements offer important sites for academics and other intellectuals to form alliances, reach out to a broader public and align with larger social movements. Critical intellectuals must do whatever they can to nurture formative critical cultures and social movements that can dream beyond the “mad-agency that is power in a new form, death-in-life.”[32] At the same time, they must challenge all aspects of the neoliberal disciplinary apparatus – from its institutions of power to its pedagogical modes of rationality – in order to make its politics, pedagogy and hidden registers of power visible. Only then will the struggle for the renewal of peace and justice become possible.
Footnotes:
1. Danila Perdomo, “Is John Stossel More Dangerous Than Glenn Beck,” Alternet (July 3, 2010). Online here.
2. Michael Leahy, “Michele Bachmann is Cool to Mainstream Media, and an Increasingly Hot Property,” The Washington Post (June 4, 2010), p. CO1.
3. Ibid.
4. The term upscaling of ignorance was posted to my Facebook page by David Ayers.
5. Richard Cohen, “When Politics Goes primitive,” The Washington Post (July 6, 2010), p. A13.
6. Ibid.
7. J. M. Bernstein, “The Very Angry Tea Party,” New York Times (June 13, 2010). Online here.
8. Ibid.
9. Robin Wilson, “Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Higher Education,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 4, 2010. Online here.
10. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Art of Life,” (London: Polity Press, 2008), p. 88
11. On the pernicious effects of inequality in American society, see Tony Judt, “Ill Fares the Land,” (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). Also see, Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” Open Democracy (April 6, 2009). Online here.
12. C. Wright Mills, “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 200.
13. Stanley Aronowitz, “Against Schooling: Education and Social Class,” (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. xii.
14. Kate Zernike, “Making College ‘Relevant’,” The New York Times, (January 3, 2010), p. ED16.
15. While this critique has been made by many critics, it has also been made recently by the president of Harvard University. See Drew Gilpin Faust, “The University’s Crisis of Purpose,” The New York Times, (September 6, 2009). Online here.
16. Kate Zernike, “Making College ‘Relevant’,” P. ED 16.
17. Harvey cited in Stephen Pender, “An Interview with Davidy Harvey,” Studies in Social Justice 1:1 (Winter 2007), p. 14.
18. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4:1 (1997), p. 5.
19. Stuart Hall, “Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” in “Brian Meeks, Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall,” (Miami: Ian Rundle Publishers, 2007), pp. 289-290.
20. See also Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, “Take Back Higher Education,” (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
21. Jacques Ranciere, “On the Shores of Politics,” (London: Verso Press, 1995), p. 3.
22. Edward Said, “Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 50.
23. C. Wright Mills, “Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch,” “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills,” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 199.
24. C. Wright Mills, “On Politics,” The Sociological Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 193.
25. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime,” Constellations 4:1 (1997), p. 10.
26. See, especially John Dewey, “The Public and Its Problems,” (New York: Swallow Press, 1954).
27. John Keane, “Journalism and Democracy Across Borders,” in Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. The Press: The Institutions of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 92-114.
28. See, especially, H. Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” third edition, revised (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968); and J. Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” orig. 1935 (New York: Prometheus Press, 1999).
29. Cited in Stephen Pender, “In Interview with David Harvey,” Studies in Social Justice 4:1 (Winter 2007), p.14.
30. Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum, (March 2007), pp. 259-260.
31. Manifesto, “Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals,” (New York: The fifteenth Street Manifesto Group, March 2008), p. 6.
32. I have borrowed this term from my colleague David L. Clark.
http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287
Political Language, Demystified
Have you ever listened to someone talk about politics and wondered what they are talking about? What is an “October surprise”? What is a “motor voter”? Politics creates the worst kind of inside jargon imaginable, because it’s a jargon that describes important processes affecting how things are run, whether the U.S. invades other countries, and what our tax rates are. A particularly apt observer once referred to the dialect on Capitol Hill, where all 535 lawmakers are referred to by last name only (sort of like at all boys prep school), as “hobbit speak”; that’s about how esoteric political conversations can get.
Farley fileA Farley file is a log kept by politicians on people they have met previously.It’s named for James Aloysius Farley, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager and later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Farley kept a file on anyone Roosevelt met allowing him to “remember” key personal details such as the name of their spouse and children or anything useful which might have come out of earlier meetings.Farley files are now commonly kept by politicians.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/07/political-language-demystified/59583/
Interview: How Our Economy is Killing the Earth
Times Books
When Bill McKibben first sounded the alarm about global warming 20 years ago, he was something of a voice crying in the wilderness. Now McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy, is issuing an even more dire warning. His new book, with the science fiction-y title Eaarth, paints a picture of a depleted, overheated planet no longer suited to its inhabitants. That planet is our own, the time is now, and the book is non-fiction.
Laying the blame for climate change squarely at the feet of the growth economy, McKibben proposes a new, robust, “mature” economic model centered on localized energy, food production, and capital. McKibben, founder of the climate change action group 350.org, spoke to The Atlantic about the way our energy sources dictate our economy—and how we might yet live “lightly, carefully and gracefully” in a hotter and leaner world.
Sure. It’s very hard for any of us to take on the notion that the thing that’s been central though the course of our whole lives, the political idea that whatever kind of ideology we’ve tended to embrace may no longer be serving us. It’s especially hard to take on because it’s an idea that, at some point, did serve us well. So yes, there’s lots of resistance—an inability, almost, to hear or to understand the basic idea.
It’s not really all that new, you know. When Limits to Growth was published in 1972 it got a really powerful hearing; millions of people bought the book and thought about the idea, and millions of them were convinced. But in the end I think the crucial moment was the election of Ronald Reagan; that was really a kind of debate about whether we were going to entertain the idea of limits. We decided not to, and we’ve never looked back.
Now we’re reaching the point, I’m afraid, where it’s no longer going to be an optional exercise. When the Arctic melts, that’s a bad sign.
I can see the transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure based on solar panels on rooftops, mini-wind turbines in every yard, local food plots. It’s harder for me to see the transition to a non-growth-based economy.
In a sense, they go hand in hand. The single most important part of that growth economy has been access to really cheap, plentiful fossil fuel. And if for a combination of the fact that we’re running out of it and environmentally we can’t afford to burn it anymore we switch off of that, then the fuels that replace them will come with more inherent limits and that they’ll help reshape the world just in and of themselves. I don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of agro-industrial complex that we have at the moment without endless amounts of cheap energy.
If I were an economist or finance minister reading your book, I might wonder how the economic infrastructure might make this shift. We have so much invested in the old economy.
I think there are things that we’re not going to need anymore. And huge Wall Street banks are fairly high on the list.
So whither Wall Street?
Hopefully over time, Wall Street will indeed wither. And that will be useful because we’ll be moving capital back to much more localized sources. It’s putting money to use in the same way that we’re doing with energy and with food—much closer to home. And in a much less overheated way, too, where people aren’t demanding 17 percent returns to make things happen. Where people are investing in their communities and doing fine by it.
Can you give me some examples of support you’ve received from Wall St.?
Uhhhh…no.
Many of the examples you use in your book are in Vermont, where you live. Is the model of self-sufficiency of Vermont farmers, businessmen, and energy producers applicable to other parts of the country that are quite different? New York City or Los Angeles, for instance?
Concentration actually makes many things easier. I describe a guy doing a compost route through rural Vermont and he can make it work and make it pay, but the distance between stops adds up the cost, you know? It’s a whole different deal on the Upper West Side.
Think about New York 100, even 75 years ago. Its population was roughly the same as it is now, but it supported itself largely on the agriculture of the surrounding area. That’s why we call New Jersey the Garden State. Much of that land is still there and ready to go in upstate New York, for instance. And it’s beginning to happen—it’s a very good piece of news that for the first time in 150 years the number of farms in America is increasing rather than decreasing. And most of that increase is coming around metro areas as people begin the process of building these markets, aggregating demand for good, local food.
Cities and rural areas each offer huge opportunities. The hardest place to make things happen is in the suburbs.
What do you see as the future of suburbs in the next 20 years? Do you think they’ll simply go away?
The outer ring of suburbs is already in huge trouble. I think that many of the inner suburbs will do well because they are places that have held their value and are on rail lines and commuter lines. My guess is that we’ll see a lot of experimentation with people growing something other than grass on their lawns.
I was in Ann Arbor the other day, and people were completely excited about putting up front-yard, raised-bed gardens throughout one neighborhood after another. Suburbia also has a lot of rooftops. And that’s one of the places where we’re going to find our power.
With 350.org you have done a lot of lobbying and advocacy in Washington. Do you feel there’s a growing understanding of these issues in Congress?
No, I don’t. I feel that we are losing on the most important issues in Congress, and I think the reason is that we haven’t built a big enough, powerful enough movement to demand change. We’re seeing next to no coherent action on climate change. If any kind of bill emerges, it’s going to be a very watered-down and tepid one.
At a certain level you can blame all the senators and representatives for it, but I think it’s also fair to blame those of us who care about this issue—because we haven’t built the kind of political power that we should. We assumed that because scientists had said the world was coming to an end that that would be enough to motivate our political system to act.
As it turns out, that’s not how politics works. You need to meet power with power. We’re never going to compete in terms of money; the fossil fuel industry is the most profitable enterprise humans have ever undertaken. So we’re going to have to compete with bodies and with spirit and with creativity.
I’d be remiss not to ask your response to the ongoing disaster in the Gulf.
For us, it’s a real contradiction to be talking about taking on the climate challenge at the same time as you’re talking about searching out ever more hydrocarbons in ever more difficult places. We didn’t anticipate the Deepwater Horizon spill, of course, but it certainly proves the point. There are two things to take away from it.
Number one, how desperate we are for energy right now, drilling for oil a mile beneath the surface of the earth. It shows we have run out of the last drops of easy oil on this planet.
Number two, we can directly see the damage the oil is doing to the environment now because the water is turning black. But the Gulf, and every other ocean on earth, is also already 30 percent more acidic from absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. Even if that oil had made it to shore and into the gas tanks of our cars, it still would have done huge environmental damage.
In Hot, Flat and Crowded, Tom Freidman calls for a “green revolution” not just to help the environment, but the economy—with new industries, new technologies, and many new green collar jobs. What’s your take on that?
Some of it is real—as I say in the book I’m all for pursuing it. But it’s folly to just pull the internal combustion engine out of the machine, toss in a wind turbine, and keep rolling on as before. I think there are more systemic and profound changes coming.
I think it’s going to be a tough stretch—for many reasons, including the fact that global warming just keeps happening faster and faster. In the last six weeks we’ve set new, all-time high-temperature records for seven different nations around the world. We were talking with our 350.org organizers in Pakistan on a day when the mercury hit 129ºF, an all-time Asia record. This is happening very, very quickly, and we don’t have generations in which to transform the world. We need to get to work in every way that we can think of right now.
Maybe I’ve seen too many movies set in a post-apocalyptic future where civilization has had to return to its agrarian, muscle-powered past. But isn’t Eaarth‘s vision of where we’re headed in some ways dystopian?
I think it’s quite possible that we could be headed for a serious collapse if we don’t get to work right away. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that civilizations can cope with a temperature increase of 4º or 5º or 6º—the 1º we’ve done so far is straining us in huge ways. But I do my best to outline what kind of world might work, within limits. I think it is more agrarian than the one we have now; I don’t think we’re going to have 1 percent of our population producing our food—that number will go up.
I also think that that world can be considerably sweeter than the one we live in. At the moment if we’re both lucky and alive, as we move towards a world that values community, that values relationship ahead of consumption, we’ll find some benefits to counteract the very real losses we’ll encounter along the way.
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/interview-how-our-economy-is-killing-the-earth/59440/
India Reacts To Its Own Honor Killing
We are afraid of the unknown; however the greatest danger often leaps at us from the known – often what we call our own. Such was the case with Nirupama Pathak, a 22-year-old Hindu woman from eastern India.
Nirupama came from a Brahmin family, the highest in the age-old Hindu caste system. When she fell in love with a man from a lower caste, she earned her family’s ire. The family accused her of bringing dishonor to them and tarnishing their religion. They mounted pressure on her to break off her relationship.
A few days after Nirupama returned from her school in the capital city, New Delhi, she was found dead in her bedroom. The police arrested her mother, Sudha Pathak, and charged her with Nirupama’s murder. The autopsy conducted on Nirupama’s body revealed that she was pregnant, thereby giving fuel to the suspicion that the family killed her for fear of being ostracized by society.
Honor killing is generally associated with the Muslims, as an overwhelming number of such cases happen in the Muslim countries. Nonetheless, Nirupama’s case highlights that other societies are not immune from this loathsome tradition.
India is a strange country. Some of its urban population lives in the twenty-first century and tolerates unmarried couples living together. In the villages, however, there are places with no paved roads, no electricity, and people living in the medieval time with medieval cultures and values. In between these extremes lie myriad variations, but regardless of where or how they live, there are still many Indians that believe in the caste system.
Nirupama‘s death has raised a huge outcry in the nation. People filed in candlelight watch, such as this New Delhi photo shows, demanding her death to be prosecuted as an honor killing.
What is most heartening is that the Indian Prime Minister, Man Mohan Singh, took note of the people’s uproar and ordered a cabinet-level commission to consider tough penalties in honor killings.
This is the difference between civilized nations and Muslim countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and a host of other nations, who turn blind eyes to the perpetrators of honor killings, and whose officials obliquely endorse the practice.
New rules, big changes coming for financial world
WASHINGTON -Big changes are in store for the financial world from a government crackdown more than a year in the making.
Democratic leaders in the Senate are trying to secure the final votes needed to pass legislation this coming week that would impose the most sweeping rules on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression. The financial industry and consumers already are anticipating — in some cases bracing for — the impact.
Banks might see their bottom lines suffer. Lenders will have to disclose more information. Borrowers will have to prove their ability to repay. The masters of high finance will find it harder to sidestep regulations. Government watchdogs will be under orders to look more suspiciously at risky behavior.
Not all the changes will occur overnight once Congress gets the legislation to President Barack Obama. Throughout the 2,300-page bill, federal monitors are given one to two years to write the new rules of the road for Wall Street. In some instances, the timing isn’t even specified.
Diana Farrell, deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, says some adjustments already are under way as big banks re-examine their trading business and prepare for a new oversight system that will require them to write their own funeral plans in the event of failure.
“There is some immediate impact,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president at the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group representing some of the bigger banks in the United States. “But it will take about two years before the full impact is felt, before the uncertainty starts to dwindle.”
“Overall,” said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, “starting with the consumer regulations, this is landmark legislation.”
Votes on the bill have broken along highly partisan lines. The House passed it June 30 with only three Republicans voting in support.
It needs 60 votes in the Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., delayed a final Senate vote until after the July Fourth holiday because of the death of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and hesitation from three Republicans who previously had supported the legislation. One of those Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has since announced her endorsement.
The other two Republicans — Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine — said they wanted to study the bill over the holiday break. Both have indicated the bill is more to their liking after House and Senate negotiators dropped a plan to impose a $19 billion tax on large banks and hedge funds to pay for the bill.
Also, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who had voted against a Senate version of the legislation in May, has said she will now vote for the bill.
But a fourth Republican who supported the Senate version — Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa — has reservations about the alternative financing mechanism negotiated by Senate and House Democrats and the White House. The new method of covering the cost of the bill would use $11 billion generated by ending the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bank bailout created in the fall of 2008 at the height of the financial scare. Democrats also agreed to increase premium rates paid by commercial banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to insure bank deposits.
Grassley’s spokeswoman, Jill Kozeny, said the senator is concerned using the FDIC fees as a credit to the FDIC and as an offset, and prefers that the remaining bailout money help pay down the debt.
That leaves little room for error in the vote counting. Without Grassley and with the timing of seating a replacement for Byrd still uncertain, Cantwell, Collins, Snowe and Brown would give the bill exactly the 60 votes needed to overcome potentially fatal procedural delays.
The finished legislation hews closely to the plan that Obama’s administration released in June 2009.
“That’s been one of the most pleasant surprises of this process,” Farrell said in an interview.
In some instances, the final bill is even tougher. The administration and Democrats in Congress squabbled over details on capital standards for banks and the breadth of restrictions on their derivatives business. Derivatives are financial instruments whose values change based on the price of some underlying investment. They were used for speculation, fueling the financial crisis.
The most symbolic and high-profile defeat for the president was an exception in the bill carved out for auto dealers, who won’t fall under the supervision of a new consumer protection bureau. Obama had looked upon consumer protections for home and auto buyers as features that would sell the bill to the public, but auto dealers proved to be a tough lobbying and political foe, pressing their case with lawmakers that they merely assembled loans and didn’t administer them.
While Obama would have preferred an earlier conclusion for the bill, its passage less than four months from the general election is as good as it can get politically.
The partisan lines will lead Democrats to cast Republicans as the party of Wall Street, exploiting a populist, anti-big bank sentiment among voters. Republicans will portray it as big government overreach.
The legislation is a blend of specific prescriptive remedies that regulators must undertake and broader regulatory guidance.
For example, it spells out what the Federal Reserve must take into account in setting new limits on the fees that banks charge merchants who accept debit cards.
At the same time, it gives regulators leeway in such areas as the definition of a commercial user of complex derivatives — typically large manufacturers and industries such as airlines that use derivatives as hedges against market fluctuations. Regulators also would decide how much money those users should put up to cover their bets.
The bill directs regulators and other government agencies to undertake more than 60 studies that will determine if or how new rules will be put into place.
—
Online:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/wallstreetreform
House Financial Services Committee: http://tinyurl.com/37e65h8
Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee: http://banking.senate.gov/public/
Financial Services Roundtable: http://www.fsround.org/
Consumer Federation of America: http://www.consumerfed.org/
China says exports up 35 percent in June
BEIJING -China’s customs agency on Saturday said exports were up 35 percent in June from a year ago, while imports rose almost 53 percent. The figures showed the largest monthly trade surplus so far this year, $20 billion, despite the debt problems of China’s largest trading partner, the European Union.
That should keep international pressure on China to further allow the value of its currency to rise, after China last month relaxed the yuan’s two-year peg to the dollar.
The report said exports rose 35.2 percent in June, higher than expected, while imports were up 52.7 percent. That’s compared with the same period a year ago.
“Data for June shows China’s trade account continuing to defy gravity, with exports strong despite mounting evidence of a faltering global recovery, and imports strong despite expectations of slowing domestic investment growth,” said a research note from Tom Orlik, an analyst in Beijing for Stone & McCarthy Research Associates.
Export growth slowed from its May level of 48.5 percent, while import growth speeded up from its May level of 48.3 percent. The figures were posted on the customs agency’s website.
Beijing is closely following the debt problems of its largest trading partner, the 27-nation European Union. The debt problems are expected to hurt consumer spending and overall demand, and analysts continue to worry that Europe’s debt crisis is likely to hurt the recovery in trade.
Demand for China’s exports plunged after the global crisis hit in 2008, forcing thousands of factories that made shoes, toys and other low-cost goods to close and throwing millions of migrant laborers out of work.
Exports have rebounded at least temporarily to pre-crisis levels, hitting $137.3 billion in June, up from $117.3 billion in the same month two years ago.
“This is a symbol that China’s foreign trade has returned to where it was before the financial crisis,” Zheng Yuesheng, chief of statistics for the customs agency, told China Central Television. “China’s foreign trade is still moving toward basically balanced development.”
Exports to Europe were up 36 percent in June from a year earlier while those to the United States rose 28.3 percent. China’s politically sensitive trade surplus with the United States was $17.6 billion.
Exports to some developing markets rose much faster, reflecting the uneven recovery of global demand. Shipments of Chinese goods to Brazil jumped 103.7 percent and to Russia by 59.2 percent.
China’s imports totaled $117.3 billion in June, growing more rapidly despite government efforts to cool a boom in the real estate industry, one of China’s top customers for steel, copper and other building materials.
“The quantity of iron ore and copper imported fell for a third month in a row, though the fall in the quantity of iron ore imports was disguised by an increase in prices,” Orlik’s note said, adding that it could indicate slowing demand in the near future.
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(This version CORRECTS amount in first paragraph to $20 billion instead of $20 million)
Books@Daily Finance: The Rise and Rise of the World’s Greatest Tea Mogul
There will always be an England, they say. But where would the sceptered isle be without its tea? Sans Early Grey, would Churchill have been as staunch a warrior or Laurence Olivier as nimble a thespian?
Around the year 1700, tea was effectively a controlled substance. It was heavily taxed by the government, costly to import from China, and sometimes illicit, having been smuggled in by criminal gangs. Not until the last quarter of the 19th Century did tea become a British household staple, after a Scottish adventurer stole some heavily guarded seedlings from China and facilitated the development of tea plantations in British-controlled India.
By the late 1880s, the average Briton drank thirty-five gallons of tea each year. But even then, much of it was low quality, often moldy and musty-tasting.
From Glasgow to Riches
Enter Thomas Lipton, the subject of Michael D’Antonio’s entertaining and instructive new book, A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton’s Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America’s Cup (Riverhead Books). The Glasgow native who’d briefly lived in America was the owner of some 150 bright and attractive food shops — the application of merchandising methods he’d picked up from such Yanks as department-store magnate A.T. Stewart. Lipton attracted customers with low prices, superior goods, and virtually constant promotion and advertising. In one stunt, he paraded through the streets bearing signs with such slogans as: “Lipton’s: The Best Shop in Town for Irish Bacon.”
Lipton entered the tea market with gusto: He received sizable discounts from the controlling 
middlemen in exchange for bulk purchases. He obtained high-quality stuff, advertised heavily in newspapers, and priced his tea well below that of competitors. And he branded his wares, offering Lipton Tea in bright yellow paper packages rather than selling it loose as most others did.
Lipton Tea became the company’s signature product and, alongside Cadbury chocolate, one of the earliest consumer brands. And in 1890, the merchant solidified his position by purchasing thousands of acres of tea plantations in Ceylon. Soon, Lipton took on the U.S. market and, employing the same promotional methods, taught Americans to sip what they’d previously regarded as an alien brew. Before long, he had new products and new stores — from Newfoundland to New Zealand — and a sprawling 14-acre factory-and-office complex in London. The Lipton name was everywhere — on ads in train stations and in shop windows, and on the sides of a fleet of company motor trucks. Asked the secret of his success by a journalist, Lipton replied: “Secret of it? Make no secret of it. Advertise all you can.”
Boating Consumes Him
Much like Lipton’s life, D’Antonio’s stimulating and informative volume falls into two parts. With his fortune secure, and after receiving a knighthood in 1897 thanks to his much-publicized charitable works, Lipton made himself into an international sportsman. There was little in the way of big-time athletics during that era; the biggest sporting event in the world was the America’s Cup, a series of sailing races pitting one British yacht against one American, and held at irregular intervals off the New Jersey shore. The New York Yacht Club entry was the perennial winner, with the 1893 British defeat marred by post-race accusations of favoritism and cheating. Lipton, who knew as much about yachting as about igloo-making, determined to take up the baton.
In a series of five Cups held between 1899 and 1930, Lipton repeatedly challenged the Americans — and never won. He spent millions upon millions of dollars on the design and construction of a new, presumably faster ship for each race. The New Yorkers were, of course, spending equivalent amounts of money and effort, even into the early years of the Great Depression.
D’Antonio offers exciting accounts of each race. The author describes the design and building of Lipton’s Shamrock I through Shamrock V, and the various American craft, Columbia, Reliance, Resolute, and Enterprise. The first contest proved dramatic. Thousands of visitors descended upon New York, where two days of banquets, concerts, fireworks displays, and oratory celebrated the event. Perhaps coincidentally, Admiral George Dewey, fresh from the U.S. triumph in the Spanish-American War, arrived on the scene, accidentally met up with Lipton, and became a pal to the Briton. The races were initially frustrated by an absence of wind, but this changed, and on the morning of the second heat, Shamrock’s topmast snapped in the wind. The American ship won all three heats decisively.
“The Good Millionaire”
Lipton was ever gracious in defeat — perhaps because he had a broader agenda. Win or lose, he was using the contests as a way of building recognition for his tea and other wares. The tony America’s Cup, accompanied by lavish society balls and attended by princes and Presidents, became just one more advertising opportunity. Equally significant, Lipton was turning himself into a recognizable brand. Consistently attired in an open frock coat, yachting cap, white high-collared shirt, and polka-dot bow tie, the tall, mustachioed gent became, over the decades, as recognizable as Theodore Roosevelt — or Mickey Mouse. In contrast to such Robber Barons as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Lipton was “the good millionaire,” in D’Antonio’s words – a paragon who’d risen from Glaswegian poverty to riches via his exemplary personal attributes. And anticipating such figures as Noel Coward and Alistair Cooke, the much feted and congratulated Lipton became America’s professional Englishman — a worthy candidate for a special relationship.
Lipton was treated like royalty during trips to the United States. A 1931 visit, though, was special, as Lipton was presented with a “loser’s cup” fashioned by Tiffany. Given a police escort to New York’s City Hall, cheered by thousands outside and inside the building, he was praised by Mayor Jimmy Walker as “the greatest sportsman of our time.”
But he didn’t have long to bask in the afterglow of Walker’s praise. Lipton died that fall, felled by a respiratory infection. You can, of course, still buy Lipton’s primary product, and many, many people do. With $3.5 billion in annual sales, the brand commands a tenth of the global market for tea.
