Saturday, March 21, 2009

Burn the house to roast the pig?

And the US Govt. spurred by general outrage, again does exactly the wrong thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/business/20bailout.html?hp

Why would you amend the Tax code to do this? The tax code has nothing to do with this and has to be constantly simplified and not added to. The tax code should be relooked at only to reflect socio-economic changes and not political ones. Its a socio-economic tool and not a political tool.

IF (and its a big one) there are employees at the firm actually doing a good job of clearing up the mess, THEY deserve a bonus,if not now, maybe in the future, and they too will come under this net. And there are a million loopholes to worm out of a "bonus". The ideal way would be to cap payouts and go through tight regulations and approval process for every bonus. As nationalised (lets get real... yeah nationalised) firms, this CAN and SHOULD be done. I'm sure taxpayers would'nt mind paying people at these firms who really deserve it, for these few would be the one who're actually protecting the bailout money. For all my ranting, I still believe in people and I do believe that some that really do a good job do exist.

And American taxpayers shouldn't have to resort to changes in tax code to get the money back. They simply ought to demand 100% of it back without a tax code change. They deserve the money back. The money has been stolen from them and doesn't require a change in law to get it back. A tax code change implies that many other institutions honestly restructuring and have the potential to turn a corner this year or the next will also be affected. It also implies that a government can be a vindictive and petty institution and I thought that was thrown out with Bush and his minions.

For once I agree with the minority Republicans who oppose this
"Led by Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the party leader, several House Republicans assailed the legislation, calling it a diversion by Democrats eager to escape scrutiny for failing to block the bonuses."

The Govt. had an opportunity to block such unfair payouts
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/business/20bonus.html?hp
...and they didn't. Its a Govt. screw up and it is acknowledged that people in the know, knew. Most of the payouts went out last week and the week before and the govt. could very well have blocked it.

As of now, employees of firms with bailouts should be considered public servants. The thieves should be punished and the ones doing the protecting effectively can be rewarded. Changing tax codes takes care of the former but restricts the latter.

Scorn Trails A.I.G. Executives, Even in Their Driveways
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/nyregion/20siege.html?ref=business

And this is completely wrong. The executives should be taken as a collective and dealt with in that way. Hounding individuals is simply not the way to go.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Randism Rocks the world... literally

The case for Paying out AIG Bonuses
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/17sorkin.html
There is simply no case. Any and all arguments are superficial and do not hold up to even the simplest scrutiny.



Argument 1. Sanctity of Contracts.

There is no such thing as sanctity of contracts as far as "retention bonuses" for any AIG employee goes unless he or she is a PR agent. Retention bonuses are for people to stay back. And as the author himself describes, many have already packed up and still received their so called retention bonuses and you and I know that the minute they receive the money, so will the rest. Moreover, by definition a bonus is a share of the profits from a profitable company that goes to an employee for having made a significantly positivie contribution to that company's profits. Hmm.. AIG has plunged depths that even the Dutch East India Company didn't and not only did these employees NOT contribute anything, they were directly party to the mess the world financial markets are in.
The emotional would also add that if the sanctity of contracts is not upheld for the millions of middle class workers in the Auto, IT, Manufacturing etc. etc. sectors, why in the bloody hell is it important to uphold it for incompetent fatcats?
If Auto contracts are only under "negotiation" so are these. We know finally how the blue collars at GM & C etc. will fare. So please spare us the hijinks.

Argument 2. A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it. taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats.

Bollocks. First AIG didn't build it. It was a second rate party that gave the people who built it, the erstwhile Wall Street, the rating organisations and the Main Street divisions, the bulwark to keep going at it by insuring possible defaults to the main culprit, CDOs, by issuing CDSes.

Now... the people who created CDOs.. you gotta admire them ... give loans, chop em up and sell them and other parties make CDOs and spread it around till no one can actually see any risk. Now on the other hand how can anyone who insures these things be anything but a complete and utter idiot?

These are no "brainiacs". If they were, they wouldn't have been party to this "risk mitigation" scheme in the first place. Any brainiac would've known that this was in fact a brush the risk under the carpet scheme. Problem of course was that the lump of risk was big enough to trip the whole world's economy. And any brainiac would've at the right time, maybe mid or late 2007, skipped out of AIG and traded against AIG's books. These are no brainiacs, these were incompetent fools with inflated egos for whom innovation was not about creating money or empowering people with it but thieving it.

Argument 3. A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

So? They'll leave irrespective of what you offer them. Which you already have. And quite a few have already left. This goes against the grain of market economics. So you'll pay significantly HIGHER for incompetent people to work in a failed firm propped up by tax dollars? Umm.. how really does this work?
AIG fuelled by incompetent and greedy fools, requires tax money to keep it afloat. And then you give the same fools Higher than usual pay to KEEP them? So that this incompetent organisation doesn't get into a depper hole... which it will manage to do by paying the same fools to do the same job? Wow! that blows my mind!


Dear Mr. Sorkin. You seem earnest in your arguments. From 13000 kms across the world, maybe seeing it from here gives me a more objective perspective than one who's in the thick of things. Or maybe I'm just a guy who like black and white or maybe its because I'm from a country where politicians and fatcats are honestly acknowledged to be thieves. Here's my two pence or 10000 shares of AIG - What we're seeing here is a kleptocracy run by thieves who've been discovered because they grabbed too much too fast and are making a last ditch attempt to distribute the loot.And it seems to me that its not just AIG but endemic to all the bailouts that the US Govt. is offering.

All of this of course is assuming what seems to be taken for granted... the world will collapse if not for AIG, and the other bailed out minions. I still haven't seen one good case... hell! ANY case.. for the people who vote in your country to pay for this world-saving gesture even as they battle lay offs and erosion of their property values. Its always been implied and no one, not even Jon Stewart, who I suppose is the only remaining person in your country with a modicum of intelligence has tried to prove it.


All this only serves to demonstrate, quite dramatically, in fact that the current system, constructed and encouraged by Messrs. Reagan and Greenspan and Paulson bowing to the Goddess Rand does not favour merit and rewards incompetents who had parents rich enough to pay for Harvard. Everything that critics had to say about Ayn Rand zealots has come to pass. Does the egg in your face and the peasants with pitchforks at your door force the least bit of remorse on you people?
If I were anyone with authority, I'd take my chance with "government appointed financial people" ,that some NYT reader contemptuously labels them, trying to disentagle this. They may not be Harvard or Wharton but I'm assuming that there's every chance that they're not inbred boston brahmin neanderthals and can tell a loan from a deposit.

Has anyone thought how satisfying it would be to actually hold these people accountable? To make them live in an industrial town and sign up with the UAW and get 200 days of work a year where they actually make a nut or a bolt instead of weaving themselves money from other people's entrepreneurship and work for the simple service of moving money from one place to another?

Sunday, March 15, 2009

India Dancing

Never ever ever did I think I'd ever write something on an Indian dancing show... in complimentary terms.
But I gotta say this about the Zee TV Dance India Dance show. Just absolutely amazing. Everything about the show except maybe for the sets.. which aren't bad really, they just don't do justice to the amazing dancers, the really good judges, decent anchors and the fantastic fantastic Mithunda who does one helluva job being the "grandmaster".
I don't give out compliments easily but where it is deserved, they go.
I've never seen a show on a Hindi GE channel that I was fascinated by. Never. Vijay TV has some innovative shows like Ipadikku Rose and a few others including comedy shows like *Lollu Sabha which have really good concepts and pretty good implementation and I don't watch other language GE channels of course. And I do a lot of browsing and I'm pretty sure I've seen at least two or three episodes of every show on Hindi and Tamil GE channels (except for the completely irredeemable ones).



First things first; Zee's Dance India Dance has simply the most amazing dance and dancers I've seen on TV, including "So Yo Think You Can Dance" that draws from the most vibrant dance community, the US. Its gratifying to see such amazing dance and variety among Indian dancers. I did think what next for these guys? But then I put it aside because the dancing was just too fascinating to think too much during the show.

Next comes the best job I've seen done by an anchor judge, Mithunda. Crisp with very little or no flabby gyaan, incisive comments and ones that even a layman like me can see matter and pertinent. And he is great fun too!

And then there are the three judges who each mentor a certain number of dancers, choreograph and choose styles for the dancers' efforts. Do I credit them or the dancers with the really innovative dances and the introduction of never before seen styles into Indian TV? They do a great job of mentoring and judging. The non-existence of a point system and a simple elimination system seems to help their objectivity too. Remo, Terence and Geeta gave me a measure of faith that there can be sanity in the crap that is the usual dance TV.

This is also one dance show that has very little flab in the way of useless drama, the crafted behind-the-scenes bitching, the mummy-daddy sentiment etc. etc. It does, of course, but its kept to a bare minimum. Also we've a wide selection of people from various places, even one who doesn't speak Hindi at all and speaks only Malayalam, which ... Mithunda translates for us :D. The diversity immediately speaks in terms of competence of dancers who introduce to us diversity in styles and moves. Its a wonder that the incredibly stale punjabi staple of both people and dance still finds takers among the producers of other shows. Its automatically assumed that for any dance or reality show you need a vast majority of participants from Punjab and Delhi the concept which this show uncerimoniously flushes down the toilet. The best dancer here so far being a Muslim from Bangalore, Salman. I'm assuming that these guys will mine even better showstoppers if they reach into TN, Andhra and the NE.

Even the onscreen histrionics you see on dance shows and reality TV is helluva lot better. Its not over the top and seems to have very little scripting. I might be wrong but is it real embarrassment I see in the anchors' faces when they announce an elimination? The responses to winning a certain round or a spot prize or losing also seems pretty raw and un-scripted and Mithunda's zingers are definitely un-rehearsed.

All in all, from locking-popping to madhuri jhatkas, from pole dancing to belly dancing, from staid tangos to item numbers the dancing has taken my breath away and is as of now the ONLY show I watch on a Hindi GE channel.

Mebbe I should buy some UTV and Zee shares. The disclaimer being ... the episodes that have the auditions are nothing to write home about.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

I Bourgeois

Untouchable women enjoy a night of fashion
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/untouchable-women-enjoy-a-night-of-fashion/#comment-336791


Why the hell wasn't this reported in Indian media? Because the indian media is more concerned with suppressing the acknowledgement of the existence and treatment of dalits than in bringing it to light. Why? Because its audience, the "great" Indian Middle Class is more embarrassed than shameful of its treatment of the Dalits. They'd rather not acknowledge their existence than do anything to better the "untouchable"'s lot. A dramatic example of this of course is the middle class student's protests over Mandal 1 & 2. Obvioulsy all of the students were upper caste and it was such a blatant upper caste movement that they didn't even try to prove otherwise that it was a pan-class movement. In their disgusting diplay, the upper caste students and their parents brandished brooms and rakes to tell the media what they thought their under-privileged brethren should rather be doing.

Our NRI brethren are of course, as is their wont, even more vocal about their objections to reservation and they don't care enough to make a distinction between SC/STs and OBCs. NRIs are almost exclusively upper caste excluding at the most a few OBCs from TN/Andhra, Punjab and Gujarat. A quick run-through of the common surnames will tell you the truth.

A run through of the NRI demonstrations on the 2006 reservations issue.
http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/caste/reservations/PressRelease_060906.html
The author writes about the hypocrisy of the demostrators far more effectively and in fewer words than I can

An IIT defending its reticence to reservations
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/badge-of-iit-is-talent-not-privilege-or-caste-iit-kanpur-staff/5246/

Sure, you can be agnostic to caste and privileges if you're an Amity University or an IIPM but you're an IIT. If the Govt. forces Air India to fly to Aizwal for all of two passengers and we look at that as a public service, how is an IIT/IIM/DU any different? An IIT is our government's construct. Our government is Our societal construct. A society that has over 160 million Dalits, over 80 million Tribals constituting a good quarter of our poulation and a wide variety of lower castes estimated at 52% of pop. by the Govt. and quoted at 35% by the National Statistical Organisation, which figure obviously the anti-reservationists use (they selectively don't use the 28% of SC/STs)

If an IIT's job is to take children of traditionally privileged parents who can afford an education in a DPS or a DAV, the extra tuitions, the Kota classes and Brilliant's tutorials and turn them into exemplars of talent, why don't we simply outsource the job to SRM university? For if it were not for these consequences of privilege, many of the IITians and DU students would find that their "merit" is the same as the the son or daughter of their sweeper. Their SC/ST brethren also labour under the stigma that their surnames produce automatically and the fact that their parents are usually blue collar or menial workers who can neither afford nor understand what their children need to succeed academically. IIT Kanpur is mistaking the symptom of its existence to its cause.

The atrocities against Dalits, Tribals and minorities aren't just systemic and institutional but also violent.
http://www.sikhtimes.com/news_012806a.html
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2323/stories/20061201004713000.htm
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/779892.cms
http://www.aiccindia.org/news/gohana_incident_probe_panel_seeks_action_against_district_officials.htm
http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/lsdeb/ls10/ses1/0409089101.htm

As one would notice, the violence isn't random but is brought to bear brutally when the oppressed stand up for their rights or show cognisance of their rights or show improvement in their lot beyond what is judged by the upper castes as agreeable.

The Indian Middle class is rife with hypocrisy. So are its constructs like the Indian media. Unlike Engels idea of the bourgeois, I refuse to give the Indian Bourgeois the credit for breaking down barriers and dismantling feudalism. The Indian bourgeois is more interested in keeping those barriers and constructing a modern version of feudalism.