FOCUS | Tax Cheats Rule, OK?

FOCUS | Tax Cheats Rule, OK?:

Corporate tax cheats bankrupting the USA. (photo: US UNCUT)

'via Blog this'Tax Cheats Rule, OK?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

08 June 13

re you pissed off by Apple, Google, Starbucks, GE, Exxon, and all the other multinational giants that rake in multi-billions every year and pay little or nothing in corporate income taxes, either in the United States or anywhere else?

Do you feel disgusted by all the corporate and personal taxes you've had to pay to finance the Internet, the education, transportation and legal infrastructures, the medical and scientific research, and the military and diplomatic interventions that made possible all those multi-billions in corporate profits, and now have to pay again to make up for what the multinationals fail to pay in current corporate taxes?

I've expressed these feelings in my columns for years. But the time has come for those of us who share the disgust to follow some Boston Irish advice attributed to either Joseph P. or Robert F. Kennedy: "Don't get mad. Get even!"

The global tax cheats - a precise description, as the evidence will show - may look too big to beat. They certainly appear especially well-connected to strategically placed officials like Obama's new Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker, the head of the Senate Finance Committee and Joint Committee on Taxation Max Baucus, and the often feuding leaders of the United Kingdom and European Union.

They multinationals have the cleverest legal hacks, gold-plated bean-counters, and a sophisticated new breed of in-house bankers to shift their corporate money from wherever they actually earn it back and forth between Ireland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Bermuda or whatever other mix of tax havens with or without palm trees and sandy beaches.

They pay polished PR flacks to teach them to say "transparency" and "good governance" without giggling, and they can always count on learned free market economists to explain to the rest of us

• Why legally avoiding taxes is not at all the same as illegally evading taxes
• Where corporate executives have a legal responsibility to maximize returns to shareholders and pay as little in taxes as possible
• How all this brilliantly thought-out chiseling grows stable economies and creates lasting jobs.

It's all blarney that can easily corrupt entire societies, as the Irish learned when their once-envied Celtic Tiger turned belly up. But any movement for truly democratic change in the trans-Atlantic world will have to cut through a lot of crap, and - like it or not - we will not find much help from the writings of Karl Marx or the contributions of modern-day anarchists like the indispensable Noam Chomsky.

The best place to start, in my opinion, is to listen again to the tax-cheating corporate executives testifying to legislative committees in both the U.S. and the U.K. Hear them utter as if in unison, "We pay every cent of the taxes we owe." What brass balls! The execs never mention the fortune they spend on lawyers, lobbyists, and legislators to write highly favorable tax laws full of so-called "loopholes." The multinationals pay to get those loops and holes written into law precisely to reduce or eliminate their corporate tax bills. This is where their cheating begins, though many politicians and journalists can't wait to join the tax cheats in proclaiming that no one is breaking any laws.

Talk about a rush to non-judgment!

Such denials, however hurried, contain a kernel of truth. Why should the multinationals bother breaking laws tailor-made to their specifications? The cheating here comes from the routine working of "political democracy" when its excesses are not dampened by strong social and economic democracy. This is the situation now in the U.S. - and in most of Europe, where once vigorous labor unions, left-wing political parties, educational systems, cooperative movements, and public media are generally losing their independence and strength.

A more awkward kind of cheating is even more obvious, though often complex and confusing, as its creators intend it to be. To move their money to a low- or no-tax haven, the multinationals generally have to perform outright fraud in a series of traceable steps:

1. The executives and their accountants redefine as much of their business operations as they can in expanded terms of intellectual property (IP), which includes patents, copyrights, and trademarks. For example, Starbucks might place greater value on its brand name and less on its coffee beans, or place greater value on its knowledge of where, how, and from whom to buy their beans, how to process them, even how to transport and store them.

2. The multinational then sells its greatly expanded IP to one or more of its foreign subsidiaries, but for how much? U.S. tax law requires the multinational to charge itself a "transfer price" no lower than it would charge a separate company in an arms-length transaction. But most analysts believe that the multinationals charge themselves far less, which greatly reduces the profits on which they have to pay corporate taxes. It's even doubtful that the IRS has the resources or the will to make the multinationals pay what they should.

3. Once the multinational has its profits overseas, they no longer have to pay any U.S. taxes on that money or how they use it, unless and until they return it to the U.S. In another form of cheating, corporate lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which allowed the multinationals to repatriate their money at a bargain basement rate of 5.25%. The corporations promised to use the money to create jobs. They did not, according to a report from the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies. "Instead of creating jobs, the biggest beneficiaries downsized," wrote IPS. "Pfizer, for example, cut more than 10,000 US jobs in the six years after it repatriated $40 billion."

This is how the tax cheats rule. When will the rest of us reject their lies, take away their tax benefits, and - as former labor secretary Robert Reich has suggested, refuse them access to our market and consumers? That is the way to get even. More important, it's the way to force the cheats to change their ways and pay their fair share.

Denying Immigrants Health Care Is Cruel Politics - Bloomberg

Denying Immigrants Health Care Is Cruel Politics - Bloomberg:

Denying Immigrants Health Care Is Cruel Politics

By the Editors Jun 2, 2013 3:00 PM PT

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As if immigration and health-care reform aren’t sufficiently daunting in their own rights, the two issues are now joined.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would give the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a chance to become citizens. Immigrants who meet a series of conditions would be granted provisional legal status, allowing them to work in the country legally.

Audio Download: Denying Immigrants Access to Health Care Is Cruel: View

The legislation would prevent those immigrants from receiving federal benefits for at least 10 years. The prohibition includes qualifying for Medicaid and getting federal subsidies to purchase health insurance.

Excluding such immigrants from government health assistance has its appeal. Although the cost of extending such benefits is hard to estimate -- the Congressional Budget Office hasn’t analyzed the issue -- it’s likely to be expensive. In addition, some critics view subsidies for immigrants as a perverse reward for breaking immigration laws.

Yet withholding health benefits is even more problematic. First, legalizing immigrants without providing access to health care will give employers an incentive to hire immigrants over American citizens. The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more employees either to provide health insurance or pay a penalty as high as $3,000 per uninsured worker. Employers could avoid doing either by hiring immigrants that are excluded from the program.

In addition, excluding immigrants will weaken the new health-care system, which is predicated on bringing healthy young people into the insurance market, both to balance the risk pool and to reduce expensive (and publicly funded) emergency care. If that economic logic holds for citizens and legal residents, it should also apply to undocumented immigrants. (Actuarial tables don’t care about your immigration status.)

In fact, the economic argument for bringing immigrants into the health-insurance market is strong. The median age of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is 36 -- 10 years younger than the median age of citizens, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Younger people are generally healthier, and young immigrants, in particular, typically use fewer health-care services than nonimmigrants. More than two-thirds of adult immigrants working without authorization had no insurance in 2011, according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute. Their participation in insurance pools would help keep costs down for everyone.

That argument was recently underscored by some House Republicans, who propose that immigrants with provisional status be required to carry health insurance. (If this sounds like the individual mandate enshrined in the Affordable Care Act, welcome down the partisan rabbit hole that is Washington.)

Requiring immigrants to buy insurance -- with limited access to employer-based coverage, and without access to federal subsidies -- imposes a large burden on a population in which 32 percent of adults and 51 percent of children live in poverty. If we want these future citizens to contribute to their communities, saddling them with steep financial obligations probably isn’t the best start.

Instead, Congress should ease their access to the health-insurance market. At a minimum, that should include access to coverage for the estimated 1 million undocumented immigrants younger than 18, and enabling immigrants to purchase insurance on state exchanges with their own money -- even if Congress unwisely blocks subsidies. If no subsidies are available, a mandate to carry insurance can’t be justified.

Giving 11 million undocumented immigrants a chance at legal status makes economic and ethical sense. Denying them the chance to get affordable health coverage in the meantime does not.

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Communalism Watch: The contest between secular and communal India (Seema Mustafa)

Communalism Watch: The contest between secular and communal India (Seema Mustafa):

June 15, 2013

The contest between secular and communal India (Seema Mustafa)

By Seema Mustafa

The writer is a consulting editor with The Statesman and writes widely for several newspapers in India

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has finally subsumed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). By installing Gujarat Chief Minister Mr Narendra Modi as the symbol of Hindutva, the RSS has done to death whatever little pretensions the BJP might have had of wooing the minorities, or, at least, presenting a more liberal, less communal face. In doing so, the RSS, in its limited wisdom, has decided to take the BJP back to the roots of its birth wherein it seeks to replace democratic, secular India with a ‘Hindu nation’.

The last few days have revealed a great deal really. One, the obvious, that all is not well in the BJP, with party stalwart Mr LK Advani leading a revolt of sorts to prevent himself from being marginalised. His decision to resign had the RSS and BJP leaders running to make peace and, in the process, Mr Advani endorsed Mr Modi’s elevation in the party but also ensured that he was kept in the loop. It is no secret that Mr Advani was not being consulted by the RSS on matters of top urgency and the details of the current pact suggest that he will not be so totally sidelined now.

Secondly, it is clear that the RSS now finds in Mr Modi all that it lost with the Babri Masjid and more. The demolition of the mosque had left the RSS and the BJP without an issue, and efforts to milk it over subsequent years had failed considerably as the mosque was no more. The disarray visible in the BJP over the last few years is a direct result of this absence of effective symbols and issues. Mr Modi symbolises all that the BJP had lost, in that he has the credentials that make him an effective symbol. He comes from a Hindutva background and demonstrated it in 2002, when hundreds of Muslims were killed under his watch in Gujarat; he gives the impression of being a ruthless administrator and a disciplinarian; and he has the personality and the support from the influential corporate and media sectors that place him ahead of all other competitors.

Third, his apparent popularity, at least in some sections of society, have encouraged the RSS to discard its no-one-individual rule to embrace the individual Mr Modi and allow him to breathe larger-than-life air into the balloon that is being created for national consumption.

Four, the RSS trusts Mr Modi to take the hard right ideology forward to a point where a Hindu state at least does not appear as just a mirage in the distance, and begins to acquire some contours of reality.

And five, in the RSS assessment, the BJP has a chance of winning the next elections only under Mr Modi, and no chance at all without him. The patience of yesteryear RSS leaders has been replaced by the impatient younger lot today, who have decided to ride roughshod over anyone (and this includes Mr Advani) who has reservations about Mr Modi and are determined to push the BJP to take a real shot at winning the elections. The general elections will thus be fought by the RSS as it strives to place its man in the seat of power.

The RSS sees in Mr Modi the magic bullet that it hopes to turn the tide with; but there is still little indication that he is regarded as such by the Indian masses living outside Delhi. Except for one regional party, namely the AIADMK, that has praised Mr Modi, the others are all keeping a distance, with some like the Biju Janata Dal and the JD(U) trying to place themselves in a pre-poll advantageous position to benefit from the counterreaction that is bound to follow Modi’s high-pitch campaign across the country.

The RSS is thus playing for high stakes in the hope it will win what is little more than a gamble at this stage. It has thrust a highly divisive individual to lead the BJP in the general elections, to test the waters as it were. It is using the gambit of development and growth and good administration to hide an essentially Hindutva agenda, with the drum beating by the media and big industry creating the necessary smokescreen. The contest thus is not between a Modi and a Rahul (Gandhi), or between an Advani and a Modi; it is between secular India and communal India with the vote in 2104 determining the direction of the nation’s polity.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 15th, 2013.

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FOCUS | Connecting the Dots on PRISM

FOCUS | Connecting the Dots on PRISM:

Connecting the Dots on PRISM

By James Bamford, Wired Magazine

12 June 13

hysically, the NSA has always been well protected by miles of high fences and electrified wire, thousands of cameras, and gun-toting guards. But that was to protect the agency from those on the outside trying to get in to steal secrets. Now it is confronting a new challenge: those on the inside going out and giving the secrets away.

While the agency has had its share of spies, employees who have sold top-secret documents to foreign governments for cash, until the last few years it has never had to deal with whistleblowers passing top-secret information and documents to the press because their conscience demanded it. This in a place where no employee has ever written a book about the agency (unlike the prolific CIA, where it seems that a book contract is included in every exit package).

As someone who has written many books and articles about the agency, I have seldom seen the NSA in such a state. Like a night prowler with a bag of stolen goods suddenly caught in a powerful Klieg light, it now finds itself under the glare of nonstop press coverage, accused of robbing the public of its right to privacy. Despite the standard denials from the agency's public relations office, the documents outline a massive operation to secretly keep track of everyone's phone calls on a daily basis – billions upon billions of private records; and another to reroute the pipes going in and out of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and the other Internet giants through Fort Meade – figuratively if not literally.

But long before Edward Snowden walked out of the NSA with his trove of documents, whistleblowers there had been trying for years to bring attention to the massive turn toward domestic spying that the agency was making. Last year in my Wired cover story on the enormous new NSA data center in Utah, Bill Binney, the man who largely designed the agency's worldwide eavesdropping system, warned of the secret, nationwide surveillance. He told how the NSA had gained access to billions of billing records not only from AT&T but also from Verizon. "That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five," he said. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a day." Among the top-secret documents Snowden released was a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order proving the truth to Binney's claim and indicating that the operation was still going on.

I also wrote about Adrienne J. Kinne, an NSA intercept operator who attempted to blow the whistle on the NSA's illegal eavesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 attacks. "Basically all rules were thrown out the window," she said, "and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal conversations." She only told her story to me after attempting, and failing, to end the illegal activity with appeals all the way up the chain of command to Major General Keith Alexander, head of the Army's Intelligence and Security Command at the time.

Without documents to prove their claims, the agency simply dismissed them as falsehoods and much of the mainstream press simply accepted that. "We don't hold data on U.S. citizens," Alexander said in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute last summer, by which time he had been serving as the head of the NSA for six years. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made similar claims. At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee last March, he was asked, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" To which Clapper responded, "No, sir." The documents released by Snowden, pointing to the nationwide collection of telephone data records and not denied by government officials, prove the responses untrue.

The deception by General Alexander is especially troubling. In my new cover story for Wired's July issue, which will be published online Thursday, I show how he has become the most powerful intelligence chief in the nation's history. Never before has anyone in America's intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world's largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy's 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.

The article also sheds light on the enormous privatization not only of the intelligence agencies but now also of Cyber Command, with thousands of people working for little-known companies hired to develop the weapons of cyber war, cyber targeting, and cyber exploitation. The Snowden case demonstrates the potential risks involved when the nation turns its spying and eavesdropping over to companies with lax security and inadequate personnel policies. The risks increase exponentially when those same people must make critical decisions involving choices that may lead to war, cyber or otherwise.

At a time when the NSA has lost its way and is increasingly infringing on the privacy of ordinary Americans, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that NSA employees —  whether working for the agency or for one of its contractors — would feel the obligation to alert the public to the secret acts being carried out in its name. The only surprise is that we haven't seen more such disclosures. General Alexander will surely use all his considerable power to prevent them. Don't be surprised if he fails.

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The Rachel Maddow Show: NSA power augmented by weak Congress

The Rachel Maddow Show: NSA power augmented by weak Congress:
(James Bamford)
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The Rachel Maddow Show: Families divided by immigration law anxious for reform

The Rachel Maddow Show: Families divided by immigration law anxious for reform:
(Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer prize winner journalist and undocumented dreamer)
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FOCUS | The Quiet Closing of Washington

FOCUS | The Quiet Closing of Washington:

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

The Quiet Closing of Washington

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

09 June 13

onservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.

It's as if an entire branch of the federal  government - the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law - has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester" that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.

The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.

But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November's elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor's offices in all but 13 states - the most single-party dominance in decades.

This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.

Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85%, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.

California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a vote is likely in November).

On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Governor Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state's income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state's already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education by almost 5 percent.

Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving $12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income depend residents depend on. Missouri's transportation budget is half what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay for improvements.

The states are splitting as dramatically on social issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in twelve states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.

Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.

Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who's, say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go to Texas, where it's legal to shoot someone who's committing a "public nuisance" under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas, which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed firearm onto a college campus.

The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue you can imagine. If you're an undocumented young person, you're eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in fourteen states (including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally.

And if you're poor and lack health insurance you might want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that's refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will be picking up almost the entire tab.

Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on central issues affecting Americans.

Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn't work at the state level, where it's affected only a fraction of the population, than after it's harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once said, our states are "laboratories of democracy."

But the trend raises three troubling issues.

First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of "one nation" means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.

Second, it doesn't take account of spillovers - positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.

Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century "states rights" has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.

A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.

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The Murthys and the Maoists | The Hindu

The Murthys and the Maoists | The Hindu:

The Murthys and the Maoists

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HARISH KHARE

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Between the relentless demands of corporate leaders and the capacity of the underclass to match the state’s violence, India needs a vision for itself that is morally defensible

In the first week of 2011, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh allowed himself to be persuaded to accept N.R. Narayana Murthy’s invitation to travel to Mumbai to preside over a function to give away the Infosys Social Science Prizes. The Prime Minister even agreed to attend a dinner that Mr. Murthy wanted to host in his honour after the function at the Taj Mahal Hotel. So far so good. A few days before the event, there was a massive behind-the-scenes dust up between the Prime Minister’s staff and Mr. Murthy. The rub was that Mr. Murthy thought that since he was paying for the dinner, he had a right to dictate not only the guest list but even the seating arrangement. However, there is something called protocol and the dignity of constitutional offices. If the Governor and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra were to be at the dinner, they had to necessarily be seated on either side of the Prime Minister, whereas the host thought he ought to be sitting next to Dr. Singh. Mr. Murthy, however, was not one to be so easily rebuffed. As soon as the first course was served, he sought to convert the evening into a grand intellectual conversation and proceeded to invite his son to open the bowling. And the young son wanted to know from the Prime Minister what the government proposed to do so that young men like him could come back to India.

All this is recalled because the young man is now back in India, as executive assistant to his father, who in turn has allowed himself to be persuaded to take charge of Infosys again. Nepotism, did you say? No; no sir. A private company is free to hire anyone. Fair enough, but not exactly.

Mr. Murthy is not just a private businessman, minding his own business. He has often sought to inject himself into the public domain, telling a thing or two to the political class about how to behave. He has been serenaded as an “iconic” entrepreneur. During the heyday of civil society triumphalism two years ago, there was even a suggestion that Mr. Murthy be made President of India. That was the time when India’s corporate leaders thought they had the ethical credentials to write open letters to the Prime Minister and preach virtues of good governance.

Like other corporate leaders, the Murthys, father and son, represent an unrepentant ideological approach to the Indian state, its morals, manners and policies and purpose, but they are not the only ones to do so. The Maoists — who once again made their presence felt last month when they massacred the Congress top political leadership in Chhattisgarh — too have a list of ideological claims of their own on the Indian state. Both groups are relentless; both are unforgiving.

The May 25 attack was the boldest ideological challenge that the Maoists have posed to the country’s political leadership. Violence makes a demand on all stakeholders. It was no surprise, then, that as soon as news trickled in of the attack on the Congress convoy in Bastar, the party’s vice-president, Rahul Gandhi, should have taken off for Raipur. It was a commendable journey of political solidarity. It would be interesting to find out if the bloody massacre in Sukma has helped Mr. Gandhi re-set his ideological compass.

Let it be recalled that this is the same Mr. Gandhi who had allowed himself to be persuaded in August 2010 to travel to the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa, where he told the adivasis that he was their “sipahi,” or soldier in Delhi. Only two days before that visit, the Central government had pointedly withdrawn environmental permission to the Vedanta Group to mine the area for bauxite. For good measure, the young Gandhi had proclaimed that development meant that “every voice, including that of the poor and adivasis, should be heard.” It would be nice to know if Mr. Gandhi has resolved his ideological equivocations in the aftermath of the Chhattisgarh violence.

For two decades the Indian political class has gone about believing that “development” and “growth” are innocuous and painless. The prevailing orthodoxy insists that the Indian state has one and only one business: to get out of the businessman’s way. There is an unwillingness to acknowledge the basic nature of power: irrespective of its political arrangement, every society plays host to a ceaseless struggle over who gains what at whose expense. Growth and development invariably produce dislocation and dispossession. Good politics in a democratic idiom can go a long way in ameliorating the alienation and anger.

PRO-POOR INITIATIVES

The UPA’s approach has been to let the corporate marauders run amok while salving its democratic conscience with a slew of pro-poor, aam aadmi-centric initiatives. In the process, for the past nine years, the country has periodically been treated to a mock controversy over whether Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council was usurping the government’s space and prerogatives, or, when this or that NAC member walks out in a huff, whether the government is not being sufficiently pro-poor. The UPA’s approach neither mollifies the corporate buccaneers nor satisfies the poor and the disadvantaged.

The corporates, however, have sized up the divided political leadership across the spectrum. They have finessed their tactics. If a government is slow to give them the policy breaks that they demand, the democratic space and its anarchic habits will be creatively used to unleash civil unrest on this or that pretext. There is always the age old anger against “corruption” to be tapped. And, as it were, one can always rely on an auditor or a judge to step in to divert attention away from corporate misdemeanours of the most serious kind.

PINCER MOVEMENT

No wonder, then, that the Indian state is caught in a pincer movement. From one side, the ideologues and practitioners of “growth” are unrelenting in their insistence that the country’s natural resources and citizens’ savings be made available to them for exploitation; and, from the other direction, the state is confronted by a vast underclass that is unwilling to see any reason to sacrifice its land and forests so that some others can enjoy the benefit of “progress.” Just as the corporates have served sufficient notice that they have no qualms in taking the state on and causing misery to its political functionaries, the underclass, too, is willing to match the state’s capacity for violence, bullet for bullet.

Both the Murthys and the Maoists are forcing the Indian state to take a stand. For too long, the Indian political leadership has refused to confront the Grand Conundrum: for whom does the state exist, whom does the state seek to reward and whom does it strive to protect against whom. The UPA leadership has neither the appetite for a brutal repression of the angry tribal, nor is it likely to be able to lure the Naxalites into a democratic engagement without a demonstrable capacity to stand up to corporate greed. A kind of alternative arrangement is already on the drawing board: the Gujarat model of no dissent, no trade unions, no civil society, no Medha Patkar, no tribal resistance, no protests.

The great sociologist, Edward Shils, once observed that every society needs grandiose visions and austere standards; the political and intellectual leadership is obliged to prod society to its own historical ideals — “elements which must be recurrently realized without even being definitively realizable, once and for all.” Perhaps we should be thankful that both the Murthys and the Maoists are inviting us to find a vision for India that is morally defensible.

(Harish Khare is a senior journalist and a former media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh)

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