As Paul Krugman has pointed out, Americans are finally getting angry at the right people - the financial and corporate elites that currently govern the United States, and who have caused the ongoing economic crisis. Anger and protests can be effective at bringing the current system into question. But they do little, by themselves, to lead the way to a better future - for that we need a compelling shared vision and a focus on solutions.
In 1776, a group of rebels had such a vision - a government of, by and for the people. Notwithstanding the rather narrow definition of "the people" they had in mind, this shared vision had profound implications and helped to solve some fundamental problems of human well-being; by spreading participation in governance to the population and rewarding intelligence, hard work and innovation.
A Barisan Nasional (BN) government is the ideal choice to lead the country, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin was reported by Bernama Online as saying here today.
The deputy prime ministersaid Malaysians are better cared for and thrive under a BN-led administration, adding that the country had progressed considerably since achieving independence.
As a leader in the movement to protect the civil rights of corporations, Murray Hill Inc., the first corporation to run for Congress, regards the growing Occupy Wall Street movement with amused indifference. How quaint and quixotic these raggedy radicals are, with their sleeping bags, day-glo banners and consensus decision-making. They don't stand a chance against the unchecked power of we the corporations.
We often hear that we have "the best Congress money can buy" but sadly this ideal remains unrealized. That's why, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations have the same rights as individuals (or, as we call them, "bodied humans") to participate in political campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. decided to take the logical next step.
For too long, corporations had to rely on campaign contributions, lobbying, influence peddling and secret deals to get their way in Congress -- and they stillcouldn't count on the politicians they financed to reliably vote their way.
Why not, we reasoned, eliminate the middle man and run for office ourselves? By removing the human interface from electoral democracy we can save money, increase efficiency and achieve more transparency in government. Our message promoting enlightened self-interest and corporate accounting has been warmly received by more than 225,000 viewers on YouTube and readers of news accounts like this front-page storyin the Washington Post.
With a corporation, what you see is what you'll get. There is no ambiguity over how a corporate member of Congress will vote -- it will always be in support of its shareholders' interests. For example, a senator from Exxon will be a reliable vote for oil exploration, and a representative from R.J. Reynolds will have a predictable position on public health.
What's more, a fully-corporate Congress will have no need of lobbyists, political fundraisers, campaign consultants -- even political parties. All of the back-door shenanigans that make people so cynical about politics will be things of the past, as power is openly sold and accessed through the front door of the U.S. Capitol.
Indeed, it would be an easy fix for our nation's budget woes to offer naming rights to rickety old edifices like the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there -- sooner or later it adds up to real money!
Ronald Reagan had faith in the "magic of the marketplace" to solve society's ills, but theOccupy Wall Street crowd is acting like a bunch of Muggles.
It's unfortunate that the misfits and malcontents marching on Wall Street and other cities this week wail about the so-called liberties being threatened by capitalism, but fail to see what is in fact the great civil rights struggle of our time: the fight for the rights of corporate persons. There can be no place in modern America for such blatant anti-corporate bigotry.
As the leader in corporate democracy, Murray Hill Inc. exhorts our fellow multinationals and monopolies to stand tall and stay strong. We wrote in this space recently of our disappointment in self-hating corporations like Howard Schultz' Starbucks, who would rather boycott political contributions than continue to wield the unchecked power most Americans expect from their corporate overlords.
Noisy sideshows like Occupy Wall Street will come and go, but the hegemony and wealth of America's great corporations will always endure. The "99 percenters" don't understand that the way we've managed to win political clout and get people to vote against their own self-interest is by convincing voters that anyone can cross over to the golden land of the one-percent and become a millionaire themselves.
No doubt about it -- as that pin-striped mascot for a brethren corporate giant would say:
"Greed is Grrrrreat!"
He also said that the prevailing peace, stability and prosperity were the result of “the wisdom of our leaders” as supported by those who “uphold the principles of cooperation, unity and mutual respect”.
BN leaders had recognised early on that cultural and religious diversity was a strength that aided in the country’s development and that their success in uniting and bringing about positive improvements to the population had been lauded the world over, he added.
Muhyiddin said BN leaders had proved political theorists, who claim that plural societies are backward and riddled with strife, wrong.
He also said Malaysians had accepted their inherent differences in order to move forward and embrace development.
The deputy prime minister added that the country’s poverty rate had been reduced since independence as a result of BN policies implemented to counter “the greed of colonialists” who had siphoned away its wealth.
Muhyiddin also reiterated that the government continues to bear the cost of basic goods through subsidies in order to counter the rising cost of living currently faced by Malaysians, stressing that Malaysia is the only country in the world to do so.
In 1945, the fundamental problems had to do with rebuilding the nations devastated by the depression and World War II. The vision that emerged from the baby boom generation involved a focus on built capital, economic production and consumption, full employment and an expanded middle class.
The "great acceleration" that occurred starting then, largely driven by the consumption of oil and other fossil fuels, had profound implications and helped to solve some fundamental problems of the time. But single-minded pursuit of this vision also created a new set of problems.
In 2011, the fundamental problems have to do with the vast gap in incomes within and between nations, the planetary boundaries we are bumping into (climate change and biodiversity loss, among others), the peaking of global oil production, the deterioration of natural and social capital, and the consequent threats to human well-being and sustainability that these all imply.
What we need now is a new vision and a generational commitment to finding real solutions.
The "solutions generation" needs to think outside the box to create a vision of a better, more sustainable world for themselves and their children. They will have to design new technologies, new institutions and new societal norms in order to get there. This includes new political and economic systems that can create shared prosperity without growing demands on a finite environment.
A shared vision
This cannot be a top-down corporate or government vision. It must be built and it must be shared. If anything, it will be "bottom-up" decision making - an approach that reflects the needs of the vast majority of the people, not just the economic elites.
Probably the most important element of the new vision is a refocus on sustainable human well-being as the goal, rather than maximising conventional economic production and consumption.
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As many have noted, including the Sarkozy Commission headed by Joseph Stiglitz, and the environmental economist Tim Jackson, GDP is fatally flawed as a measure of progress. We desperately need new measures of well-being. We know from both ancient wisdom and the latest psychological research that well-being and happiness depend on the appropriate balance of assets and opportunities. These include those supplied by marketed goods and services, but also those supplied by social and natural capital.
It is clear, for example, from the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett that countries with big income gaps have higher rates of a whole range of social problems, from crime rates to imprisonment to shorter life spans. Higher income gaps make building social capital harder, and that ultimately leads to lower societal well-being.
Likewise, it is clear that natural capital provides a range of ecosystem services that are hugely important, but largely unrecognised contributors to sustainable human well-being. These include everything from maintaining a stable climate to producing soil and water to providing spectacular and inspiring views.
A new vision of societal goals and the technical and institutional solutions necessary to get there will thus have to created. It will involve a better understanding of what actually contributes to human well-being and its sustainability. It is a huge challenge that will require a generation to accomplish - the solutions generation.
There are many groups and communities around the world already involved in building this vision and working out real solutions. There are far too many to list, but some include The Transition Town Movement, The Great Transition Initiative, Wiser Earth, and The Center for a New American Dream.
It might be worth pointing out in closing that nature operates with a subtle dynamic between competition and cooperation. In "empty world" times of resource abundance, competition was favoured. The "great acceleration" period in which fossil fuels were abundant favoured individualism, competition, and greed-based capitalism.
The coming "full world" favours cooperation and networking. We can now, as a global society, communicate, network and cooperate as never before in the history of the planet. It will be the great work of the solutions generation - Gen S - to use this new capacity to envision and build a better, more sustainable, just and prosperous society within the planetary boundaries of earth.
Prime minister Najib Razak’s obsession with foreign consultants to boost his image is a waste of money, according to PAS vice president Salahuddin Ayub. (pic)
Reacting to a claim by the website Sarawak Report that Najib had recently engaged Alastair Campbell, who once worked as public relations head for Britain's Tony Blair, Salahuddin said if the report was true, Najib would be guilty of using public funds to boost his image.
The portal also claimed that Campbell had been spotted in Kuala Lumpur as part of his assignment to advise Najib on strategies to win the upcoming general election.
“Najib doesn’t have to go that far and waste public money hiring foreign consultants to understand the people’s acceptance towards him and his government.
"Just look at Bersih 2.0 and Himpun (Gathering of a Million Muslims) as an example,” said Salahuddin, in apparent reference to the well-attended Bersih rally of July 9 as opposed to the latter, an UMNO-endorsed rally which only attracted some 5,000 people.
“There is no need to waste money to hire people like Campbell. One finds true the saying that even foreign consultants can’t turn a frog into a prince,” he quipped.
The report has been denied by Campbell, who claimed that he had not been in Malaysia as alleged.
“I see I have been spotted in Malaysia. Therefore I must be advising the government. Must have a double. Not been. Not advising. End of story,” he remarked.
If the RSS supports vegetarianism, will all vegetables become communal? Absurd as that might sound, it is pretty much the argument some critics of the Anna Hazare-led movement are making when they seek to tar it with the RSS brush. The notion that since the RSS is a communal organisation, anything it touches becomes communal is not an argument that rests on logic but superstition built on an idea of sympathetic magic. Nothing in the Jan Lokpal bill suggests an agenda with a communal element; there has admittedly been a visible presence of religious leaders around the movement but this has in no way influenced the draft of the bill itself. The argument is nothing but an exercise in name calling, and uses voodoo logic to make its case.The lack of logical rigour is a running feature of the UPA's effort to attack the Jan Lokpal movement. For instance, if one were to accept that the RSS was backing the cause, would it not imply that it was more serious about getting rid of corruption than the Government, which is doing everything in its power to discredit the protest? Or for that matter, if we were, for the sake of argument, to accept that all members of Team Anna are corrupt in one way or another, does their version of the bill become flawed as a result? Does it mean that we don't need to do anything about corruption, given that even the anti-corruption activists are not completely clean themselves? It is striking that we are seeing little debate on the bill itself, but only a sustained campaign of superficial name calling that has virtually no implications on any core issue at stake. The issue is no longer the Jan Lokpal bill; Team Anna is being taught a lesson for having the temerity to rise against the political establishment
Troubling as this is, the real problem lies much deeper. The fact that the state is able to use its vast powers to single out each member of Team Anna and do so as deliberately and openly as it has tells us that any form of dissent is likely to attract fierce retribution. And the media, far from protecting us against such attacks might well become an instrument in the hands of the powerful, both deliberately in some cases and unwittingly in others.
This pattern is not restricted to this case alone. We saw it at work in as naked a form when the Vajpayee government went after Tehelka and everyone it could associate with it in the aftermath of the sting operation. We see it when a Narendra Modi repeatedly goes after dissenters who are inconvenient. We see it in the way the Congress turned the CBI loose on Jagan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh when he became troublesome. Indeed, it has become standard practice to use the machinery of the government to attack dissenters in unrelated cases so as to undermine them personally instead of trying to rebut the argument they make. The brazenness of the actions taken by the state is what is deeply troubling for it suggests that tomorrow anyone in a position to challenge the state will face all-out attacks of similar ferocity.
This is where the role media plays needs to come under greater scrutiny. When it allows itself to be diverted every time a Digvijay Singh says something outrageously provocative or when an IT case against Arvind Kejriwal is dug up, it is following a baser instinct and sacrificing a larger principle. It can be nobody's case that media should not have reported or commented on the Kiran Bedi episode, for instance. Of course, the fact that she was presenting bills of a higher amount than what she spent was newsworthy given that she is such an impassioned anti-corruption crusader, but it is equally important to acknowledge that in the overall context of corruption in India, this can only be a minor footnote, an interesting sidelight if you will. Padding travel bills is not the same as the CWG scam, and Kiran Bedi, however visible she might be as a person is not accountable to the public in the same way as an elected representative or a minster is; these are false equivalences that must be exposed. There is a difference between the interesting and the important, the distracting and the dangerous and a key role of media is to accord differential priorities to events rather than paint them all with a uniform brush. The revelation that a self-righteous crusader is less than transparent in her personal dealings is interesting, but not earth-shakingly important. But the manner in which she and others have been targeted is not only important but dangerous in a way that goes way beyond this specific case.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the price that is being extracted for dissent is the absence of an independent voice that rises above ideological considerations and works towards upholding the key principles that every democracy must cherish. In this case, for instance, those opposed to Team Anna's methods tend to make light of the state's deliberate and unprincipled targeting of key individuals just as in the case of Sanjiv Bhatt and other dissenters in Gujarat, the supporters of Narendra Modi justify the need for the state action. Increasingly, ideology tends to overwhelm principle; the desire to support any action, however unsavoury if it happens to be aligned to one's own views, is visible on both sides. The result is that the political system feels free to take revenge for any act of dissent, secure in the knowledge that it will receive some support for its actions.
In a court of law in the US, illegally obtained evidence, what ever it might be, is generally not admissible on grounds of being the 'fruit of a poisonous tree'; the idea being that the individual must be protected against acts of bad faith. When the state dredges up unrelated cases against a dissenting individual, it is acting in bad faith. By engaging in a discussion about what it finds as a result of its fishing expeditions, we end up legitimising its actions. And the consequences of that are far more severe than a mere bill, no matter where one stands on its merits.
