Healthcare is a Human Right, a Civil Right

Healthcare is a Human Right, a Civil Right
Sarita Sarvate
August 14, 2009

Like millions of Americans, I have been waiting with bated breath for the healthcare reform that candidate Obama promised during his fall campaign.

It is not me I am worried about, but my sons, who have mild learning disabilities. I do not know what the future holds for them. All I know is that they are not following in the footsteps of stereotypical Indian American youths, winning spelling bees, attending Ivy League colleges, and producing 2.4 over-achieving children.

So President Obama has exactly one year to put a national health plan into place, by which time my oldest will turn twenty-three, becoming ineligible for his parents’ plan.

I know plenty of young people who, learning disabled or not, face similar prospects.

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a friend’s daughter came home for treatment after quitting law school, only to discover that she needed to stay in college to use the university’s insurance. So this brave young woman did her assignments while undergoing chemo.

Isn’t there a better way to fight cancer than having to take tests while looking death in the eye?
Luckily, the girl recovered, but the episode was sobering.

After graduating from college, the daughters of two other friends are doing part-time jobs with no benefits, joining the ranks of America’s fifty million uninsured.

Watching TV images of people screaming insults at town hall meetings, I wonder, do these citizens not have children?

Or do they hate Obama more than they love their sons and daughters?

Ironically, Obama’s New Hampshire town hall meeting to address health care reform happened the same day that Eunice Kennedy Shriver(President John F. Kennedy’s sister) passed away. It was then I learned that she had been responsible for creating the Special Olympics and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Shriver had succeeded, I was told, because she had focused the conversation about disabled people on civil rights, not charity.

Obama: take note.

Just as a handicapped person has an equal right to amenities that a healthy person has, a sick person should have a right to become healthy via treatment, right?

Why does this simple premise elude so many Americans?

The short answer? Because they are ignorant of their own history.

In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on the verge of signing into law a national healthcare system as a part of his “New Deal.” But the usual suspects, including the American Medical Association, raised Cain, supporting private plans that ensured profits for doctors, pharmaceutical corporations, and insurance companies.

Ironically, services like electricity and natural gas have long been labeled “basic necessities,” in our society, with the proviso that they will be made available to every citizen at “just and reasonable rates.” Over a century and a half, regulatory precedents were established to provide these commodities to every consumer regardless of economic status, so that today, the poor qualify for utility subsidies, both at the state and the federal level.

So, if electricity and natural gas are basic necessities, doesn’t it logically follow that medical care should be a fundamental right of every citizen too?

Yet no law of Congress has ever made it mandatory for American citizens to receive this most basic of human rights.

Right wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation have long cast the issue in terms of economics, not civil or human rights. They have also successfully mobilized their largely ignorant and uninformed base. Driving through Oregon on a recent business trip, I heard talk radio inciting people to raise hell at town hall meetings. There might only be a handful of people opposed to Obama’s plan, but the republican party has made sure they will all show up at every event.

Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to organize the silent majority;the uninsured are not marching in the streets; the poor who can’t afford to buy private insurance are not showing up at town hall meetings; the seriously ill who have been denied treatment are not insisting on a single payer system.

Alas, those who need healthcare reform are too busy making ends meet.

It is clear to anyone with a half a brain that our healthcare system is broken. A system that focuses on expensive treatment rather than inexpensive prevention, a system which pays paltry sums to primary physicians but millions to specialists, a system which puts insurance clerks in charge of deciding who gets care, will never truly care for patients, will never create a healthy society, will never be cost-effective.

I, for one, don’t understand what value the insurance middle man adds to our well being. Every time I need a specialist, my doctor has to fill out an HMO referral form, the utility of which I have yet to fathom.

So I am wondering, why are so many people suspicious of government bureaucrats but don’t mind HMO hacks deciding whether they live or die?

It was George Bernard Shaw who wrote nearly a century ago that a medical system which profited from people’s suffering would never be humane.

That axiom holds true today more than ever before.

Sarah Palin and other extreme right wingers are scaring people by alleging that Obama’s healthcare plan contains death panels. Never mind that our society already has death panels in the form of insurance bureaucracies who doom people by denying them treatment in case of pre-existing conditions or inability to pay.

The only way to get rid of the middle man would be to turn to a single-payer system, the idea of which Obama has long abandoned as being politically impractical, thanks to the influence of powerful lobbyists on our representatives, who depend on them for their campaign funds.

What remains on the table is a governmental system in competition with private plans. And the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical corporations are battling this much-diluted proposal too, on the grounds that industry will not be able to compete with the government. Is this the same corporate sector that usually claims that competition is good, not bad for business?

The AMA, which is dominated by specialists, is also resisting reform, even though my own doctor supports it. The reasons are obvious. The organization doesn’t want to cap doctor’s salaries and charges.

The United States stands today at a crossroads. One fork leads to a society in which a select few squander money on unnecessary procedures while many others suffer from curable conditions due to lack of treatment.

The other road leads to a civilized society in which healthcare is a basic human right, a civil right.

The choice is yours. If you wish to live in a society where this basic human and civil right is offered to every citizen, you need to contact your senator now so your voice will not be drowned out in the static of media noise.

Sotomayor v. Retro White Males

Sotomayor vs. Retro White Male.

SARITA SARVATE, July 22, 2009

The confirmation process for Judge Sonia Sotomayor has demonstrated once again that we have a long way to go in achieving racial and gender neutrality in America. Why else would a high achiever like Sotomayor be forced to reassure people that her background wouldn’t affect her decisions as a judge? Has a white male ever been required to issue such a declaration prior to assuming any office?

Even the New York Times has written an editorial that insists upon a higher scrutiny for Sotomayor than any prior nominee to the Supreme Court has been subjected to, as if the very phrase “Latina Judge” would send shudders through American society. Perhaps it raises the specter of a jurist who would be sympathetic to allowing millions of illegal immigrants across the border.

It is especially saddening when I recall the contrasting confirmation hearings of Chief Justice Roberts a few years ago, when conservative and liberal commentators alike lavished praise on the candidate’s impeccable pedigree.

It seemed to me then that anything Roberts said in his confirmation hearings was interpreted in his favor, as long as it was not overtly reactionary. Yet, if Congress had studied the memos Robert wrote as associate counsel to Ronald Reagan, it could have predicted his latest decision favoring white firefighters in New Haven; for he wrote back then that “affirmative action required the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates.” He also narrowly interpreted Title IX which gives equal rights for women in college sports and rejected proportional racial representation in voting.

Moreover, Roberts is a self-professed “originalist,” which means that he interprets the constitution according to the norms of the society in which the founding fathers, who were all white male property owners, constructed it in 1777. “Originalist” therefore translates into “white male retrogressive values.” What could be more biased than that?

Yet, many congressional representatives are using a double standard in telling Sonia Sotomayor that she should not use her experience and perspective as a Latina in giving her opinions from the bench.

If Sotomayor has a defect, it is that, unlike Roberts, she has been candid about her origins and their influence on her. After growing up in the Bronx, after battling prejudice and inequality, after building an illustrious career, she perhaps felt she had earned the right to speak her mind.
I, for one, applaud her for it.

But I suspect there is another subtext to Sotomayor’s story; namely that she is a single woman and therefore severely handicapped. Battling Type 1 diabetes for 47 years has been a cinch for this woman, but not fighting the stigma of being a middle-aged single woman. David Brooks’ column in the New York Times labels her a workaholic, and points out her inability to sustain romantic relationships. This focus on her personal life has highlighted yet another double standard applied to women nominees versus men.

Shouldn’t her personal life be irrelevant to her performance as a Supreme Court justice? Why did her questioners feel free to take the liberty of making patronizing remarks unrelated to her professional career?

It seemed as though Sotomayor felt pressured to bend over backwards to please the ruling elite in Congress, to the point of having to avow that she would resist empathy while judging from the bench and that she would interpret the constitution strictly, and follow precedent. Through the three days of hearings, she sat impassively, delivering emotionless answers, that gave away little of her inner thoughts.

I wish Sotomayor could have defied the Republicans in Congress by attesting to the quality that Obama, while nominating her, named as essential in a Supreme Court Justice, namely, empathy.
Perhaps Sotomayor believed she had no choice. Perhaps women still need to hide their genuine feelings and opinions in order to rise to the highest ranks in this country. And Sotomayor's ethnic background made it even more imperative that she "fit in" in a predominantly Caucasian court.

The good news is that to get confirmed, Sotomayor does not need the votes of those Republicans whose attacks on her have bordered on racism.

The bad news is that we have reached a new low in the evolution of the Supreme Court in which no future nominee will be able to articulate any passionate opinions on any subject, but will have to emulate instead the Roberts model of cold blooded, calculated, covert, right wing activism.

Slumdog's Millionaire-makers?

Slumdog's Millionaire-makers?

SARITA SARVATE , Jul 08, 2009

Ever since the movie Slumdog Millionaire was first released, many people have asked me the question, “What did you think of it?”

And I have sincerely answered, “I liked it.”

Alas, an Indian guy at work got outraged at my “thumbs up” for the movie. “Not one adult character was shown in a positive light,” he fumed, “Everyone was just bad.”

Before he could go on a predictable rant about the racism implicit in such stark depiction of India’s poverty, I cut him off with a simple, “I don’t agree with you.”

I did not really want to bother to explain that political correctness did not enter into my assessment of the movie. But I was tempted to ask, “So how many beggars have you helped on the streets of Kolkata?”

I also did not take the trouble to say that I like movies for all sorts of reasons. Slumdog was, like my coworker, predictable, but its unusual intensity, speedy sequences choreographed to rhythmic music, breathless cinematography, and a very sad story, put me so much on the edge of my seat that for once in my life I was hoping for a happy ending.

But more importantly, I liked the movie because it did not sugarcoat India’s poverty with the usual tamarind-mango-henna flavoring used in so much of Indian middle class fiction written by hyphenated and non-hyphenated desis.

Both Amitabh Bachchan and Salman Rushdie have criticized the movie; the former for revealing India in a less than favorable light, the latter for its clichéd plot. I suspect the real reasons behind Amitabh’s dislike for the movie are that (a) he prefers the Bollywood version of poverty which has never included an on-screen latrine and (b) he likes Indian movies with himself as their star.

As for guessing what motivates Rushdie, who knows.

I missed the entire buzz prior to the Oscars and watched only a part of the show in Spanish simultaneous translation, sitting in a seedy hotel room in Guatemala, so it took me weeks to discover the real life drama that was happening to the child stars of the movie.

And now I wonder, should Danny Boyle have used professional actors rather than children of the slum? It is hard to answer that question, knowing that without Slumdog, the movie’s child stars, Rubiana Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, would have languished in poverty anyway. At least the movie has given them a chance to rise out of it. The sad thing though, is that it is only a chance and a slim one at that.

For, unfortunately, life is now uncannily mirroring the movie. In an ironic twist, the film that exposes the exploitation of children has ended up exploiting its child stars. It is sad that unlike the children in the movie, the real life child actors have not been guaranteed a happy ending by its director Danny Boyle. They may or may not have a trust fund. They may or may not have a home. They may or may not get an education. But the movie, as of May, 2009, was reported to have made $326 million at the box office. Which makes one wonder; why don’t the children get a good lawyer and claim a share of the profits the movie has made?

This sad saga has demonstrated that sixty years after the end of colonization, the colonial mentality lingers, both in the minds of the colonizers as well as the minds of the colonized. As many experts have pointed out, the centuries-long colonial experiment of the British Empire would not have been successful without the mindsets of the rulers and the ruled. Literature has long demonstrated this premise, starting with E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India, which portrayed the classic dark male as a colonial victim. Since then, television productions like Jewel In The Crown, while criticizing colonialism, have also depicted the colonized as shadowy figures, serving their English masters, so that the very act of subjugation and marginalization berated in the story is mirrored in its production, in an odd phenomenon I will call the self-fulfillment syndrome.

Slumdog has shed a long-overdue light on the poverty and the slums of India, which are a disgrace.

Traveling to other third world countries, I have been unable to find the kind of degradation of the human condition that is clearly visible on the streets of India. Yet, most middle and upper class Indians have blinders on; they don’t see the mass of humanity literally suffering at their feet even as property barons continue to exploit precious land to line their pockets and manage to deny the poor basic amenities like roofs over their heads.

The last straw for me was the recent news that Rubiana Ali’s autobiography will soon be peddled, ghost-written no doubt, to make further millions for some globalized business somewhere.

It is not too late to remedy the situation. The producers of the movie would seem more genuine if they revealed what exactly they paid the children, how much they have put in trust funds, and how they plan to look after the children’s interests. And given the millions that Slumdog continues to rake in, it would seem reasonable for the producers to do something long lasting such as starting a movement to remove people out of the slums and eradicate poverty.

If they don’t take such steps, I am afraid the child stars of Slumdog will always be remembered as “Slumdog's millionaire-makers,” an epithet that would not reflect positively on Danny Boyle or Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Fellini the Ageless

Ageless

Sarita Sarvate , Jun 30, 2009

While critics are still talking about Slumdog, I have been watching two old masters at work.Federico Fellini began making films only a few years before Satyajit Ray started working on his debut film, Pather Panchali (1955). Yet, as I watch the early Fellini films, the one director they remind me of is Ray.

Working independently in two opposite corners of the globe, Ray and Fellini invented modern realist cinema. Like Ray, Fellini overlooked no social aberration, concealed no human folly. Poverty, indulgence, eccentricity, human fantasy, and tragedy were all scrutinized by his camera.

If you want to study Fellini, you should start with Amarcord (1973), or I Remember, his intensely autobiographical coming-of-age film. A chronicle of seasonal festivals and daily rituals of life in rural post-Second World War Italy, the film has the dreamlike quality of our own childhood memories, complete with their exaggerations and incredulities.

The Catholic Church is always a character in Fellini films, complete with its outlandish parades and displays.

Another “character” is music. In this one respect, Ray and Fellini were soul mates; both loved music and used its rhythms to syncopate scenes and move viewers deeply. The scenes in Amarcord in which the town’s oversized blond beauty has an assignation with a handsome military officer in its castle-like hotel, while a peacock flares its feathers in a snow storm outside, are laced with luxurious longing and yet stop short of becoming seedy, acquiring instead the quality of magical realism.

Pather Panchali also portrayed a child growing up in a hamlet. But while Fellini’s scenes vacillated from absurd and hilarious to melodramatic, Ray’s were more controlled. His characters’ emotions were subtly displayed, his art evenly paced and steady.

Fellini became famous for his outlandish films like La Dolce Vita (1960), in which he coined the word “paparazzo,” and 8-1/2 (1963), in which he portrayed his egocentric fantasies. Ray, by contrast, never succumbed to such indulgence.

While Ray depicted India’s downtrodden in his first film, as well as in Ashani Sanket, or Distant Thunder (1973), many of his works focused on the middle or upper class, never scouring the depths of a Calcutta slum, say. In contrast, Fellini was unflinching in exposing the haunting degradation of the human condition.

My favorite Fellini film is Nights of Cabiria (1957), starring his wife Giulietta Masina. The movie opens with Cabiria in the midst of an amorous rendezvous with her beau. In a brilliant bit of foreshadowing, the next moment we see Cabiria being thrown into a canal by her companion, who runs away with her purse. This kind of close encounter with death and treachery does not steel Cabiria’s heart; on the contrary, it makes her more romantic than ever, even though she is a mere prostitute.

Again and again, Fellini returns to the theme of Italy’s religious fervor. In a haunting scene, Cabiria joins other street walkers and the infirm to beg salvation at a shrine. Caught up in the moment, Cabiria earnestly beseeches deliverance. But when a cripple attempts to stand, only to collapse, Cabiria wails at the hoax played on the poor.

More than 50 years later, that one scene remains fresh and relevant in its depiction of the Catholic Church.I cannot think of an equivalent scene in a Ray film. Although Ray explored religion in Aparajito (1956)—the second film in the Apu trilogy, set in the holy city of Varanasi—his depiction of the sacred rites were depicted matter-of-factly, lacking the irony that Fellini highlighted.

While both Fellini and Ray exposed the squalor, the deprivation, the poverty and inequity of their post-war worlds, their depictions of human pathos mirrored their cultural contexts. Ray’s characters rarely explode with fury or disillusionment, containing their emotions within the boundaries of their agrarian and feudalistic societies. Fellini’s characters seem quintessentially Italian, vacillating from joyous rapture to debilitating grief.

Fellini was attracted to the bizarre and the fantastic; he was drawn time and again to magicians and circus artists. His film La Strada (1954) is a haunting meditation on street performers, epitomized by a young woman who is sold to a traveling street artist. The Italian countryside, with its quaint seaside towns, snowy mountains, and arid planes, is beautifully filmed in black and white.

Ray portrayed people out of step with their times or their milieu. The one Ray film that reminds me most of Fellini’s works is Jalsaghar, or The Music Room (1958), which depicts a man obsessed with music to the point where his life is destroyed.

Yet, the two artists had other things in common. Pather Panchali almost did not get released because of the Indian Government’s objections to its portrayal of the country’s poverty until Jawaharlal Nehru intervened. A crucial scene in Nights of Cabiria which depicts a man distributing food and clothing to Italy’s poor was likely censored by the Catholic Church, which claimed to be the only righteous donor of largesse; the scene was restored in a recent DVD release.

Ray and Fellini: who was the better director? Is it possible, or necessary, to compare? If you only saw La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and Amarcord, you would have to say Fellini. Alas, the problem is that once Fellini became famous, he seemed to be at a loss for topics and started to focus on his own fantasies, prompting the adjective “Felliniesque.”

Ray was a much more consistent director, making masterpiece after masterpiece; the only flaw in his portfolio was the Chessplayers, or Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977), a largely wooden film that did not evoke the same level of sentiment or subtlety as his other films.

Still, it is miraculous that nearly five decades after they first started making films, both Fellini and Ray remain ageless.

The United Republic of America?

The United Republic of America?

SARITA SARVATE, May 04, 2009

Driving home from work the other day, I heard an interview on NPR with a woman who had lost her job, run out of unemployment benefits, and was on the verge of losing her home.

“I don’t know what I am going to do,” she said. “I am willing to work for any amount.”
I began to sob. And once I started, I could not stop.

Later that night, I tuned into the Real Housewives of New York, a “reality show” (an oxymoron), and saw a housewife named Jill buy herself a birthday present of an $18,000 custom-made red horror of a handbag.

And then I realized why, for the last few weeks, I have been hooked on this mind-numbing show in which women spend their lives attending fashion shows wearing Manolo Blahnik shoes.

All along, my subconscious had been computing the disparity between the world’s rich and poor.
And now my conscious mind was wondering if the price of that one bag might have been enough to save the about-to-be-homeless woman from utter calamity.

The next day, over tea, a co-worker said, “We know the capitalist system has failed; we just don’t know what to replace it with.” This from a guy whom I have always thought of as having pretty moderate political views!

A week before, a friend from Texas had called to say, “You know, I am glad all the stuff about these high salaries is coming out. After all, how much money does a human being really need?

After the first few millions, does it matter?” This from a woman who watches Fox News, who thinks kids should not be shown Michael Moore’s films.

The writing on the wall is clear.

Public sentiment in the U.S. is rapidly shifting in favor of caps on corporate salaries. There also seems to be unanimity that in a civil society, socialized medicine is a must. Education, too, the public is realizing, is something that only the government can provide to the masses. Cleaning the environment and protecting the planet, too, are things only national and international governments can address. Yet, our leaders at the G-20 summit resisted salary caps.

For months, Paul Krugman and others have been proposing nationalizing the banks, yet Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers are throwing good money after bad into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which is clearly protecting the rich and beautiful people of AIG and Goldman Sachs.

Are our leaders in Washington totally out of touch with the nerve of the planet?

The majority of Americans today seem to realize that the capitalist system is, if not a total failure, then seriously flawed. We no longer tolerate racial slavery, but curiously, economic slavery has been acceptable to us so far.

Yet, a consensus is emerging that some level of socialism is necessary for us to survive as a planet, if for no other reason than to remove the glaring inequality that persists throughout the world today. The voices of dissent indicate that we are on the verge of a new era in which the debate will focus not on whether to have socialism, but on what kind and level of socialism to accept.

Distinguished people like Bill Moyers and economist Joseph Stiglitz are noting that Adam Smith’s invisible hand has failed to protect us from being robbed blind.

Adam Smith propounded that in a free market, if consumers and producers chose what to buy and what to produce and sell, the resulting prices and product distributions would be beneficial to the community. Sadly, this model works for potato chips but not much else these days.

But perhaps it was not entirely the fault of Smith, who could not have imagined the evolution of the military-industrial-governmental complex and the resulting oligarchy, in which power is concentrated in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the majority.

Smith was well aware of the limitations of his theory. He predicted that the invisible hand would destroy the possibility of a decent human existence “unless government took pains to prevent” such an outcome. He warned against the tendencies of the business class, which called for state intervention to protect it from market forces in his day, just as it does today. Take GM, for example.

Smith’s theory’s paradoxical consequences were evident even in his day. There was the tragedy of the commons, for example, in which two shepherds competed using the same grazing grounds until the commons were overgrazed and ruined. We are, in fact, facing the same dilemma today—except it is our planet, not the commons, that is threatened.

Classical economists always treated all these exceptions as “externalities.” Environmental effects were externalities, so were the self-interest-driven lobbyists, who continued to strike blows to the invisible hand of economics almost from its very inception.

If you watched Alan Greenspan’s testimony to Congress a few months ago, you would have seen him hanging his head in shame and admitting that the model of economics he had relied upon had utterly failed to materialize. He had apparently believed that CEOs of corporations would work in their self-interest, which would coincide with the interests of their shareholders, consumers, and society at large.

Greenspan should have known that since CEOs were allowed to earn billions regardless of performance, and could leave their companies unscathed in case of trouble, they had zero incentive to worry about the common good.

Which brings me to socialism. Sean Hannity of Fox News will tell you that it is a dirty word. But that is because he doesn’t know what it means.

Socialism today is defined as “a liberal social democracy which retains a commitment to social justice and social reform, or features some degree of state intervention in the running of the economy.”

I don’t know how anyone could argue that we don’t want that or don’t already have some of it now.

Let us not persist with a failed system. Let us instead put our intellectual energy into creating a new economic system for the new millennium.

As If People Mattered

As If People Mattered

Enough is enough—it’s time for a protest on Wall Street.

SARITA SARVATE, Apr 04, 2009

Even as Congressmen are asking A.I.G. executives to commit hara-kiri, even as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are contemplating strangling the throats of or taking pitchforks to these greedy crooks, Thomas Friedman is urging Americans to support Obama’s plan to fork out another $250 billion to A.I.G. to remove toxic assets from its books.

I say enough is enough. Let’s stage a revolution on Wall Street. Let’s protest in front of the skyscraper of A.I.G. in New York. Let’s tell Obama in no uncertain terms that this top-down, trickle-down rescue is not the way to go about saving the world.

Now I am no economist, but I recently heard former hedge fund manager Raj Bhatia and mortgage broker Albert Behin present a plan to rescue the economy on NPR that made utter sense. What is attractive about their plan is that it is a grass-roots effort directed at each house and each consumer. Their plan to buy toxic assets goes something like this: They have formed a company that goes from neighborhood to neighborhood and house to house to restructure each mortgage based on the new value of the house at a reduced payment per month. The bank which owns the house has already lost a lot of money, so it can afford to cut its losses and sell it back to the original holder of the mortgage or to the new company for a reduced price. The company could then negotiate a lower payment with the borrowers in exchange for a cut of the action. Or, the company could simply own the house and rent it to the original mortgage holder.
The point is, if thousands of companies like theirs can find investors, the mortgage crisis will go away and the economy will recover, because the mortgage holders and consumers will be able to get their feet on the ground. And the companies who invested in this worthy venture will create new jobs in an entirely different type of a finance sector.

Now this is the kind of plan toward which at least some of Obama’s $250 billion could be targeted.

Their plan got me thinking: if they know who the mortgages belong to, how come the banks say they don’t?

In fact, simple logic defies the banks’ claims that they can’t track the toxic assets. After all, if you are one of the holders of a toxic mortgage, you know who you were sending your monthly payments to, right? All you have to do under this new grass-roots plan is to sort out the business between the person paying the mortgage payment and the person receiving it.

What would happen to A.I.G., Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup under this plan, you ask?
Frankly, to answer that question and to commit further billions, we taxpayers would need to know exactly what these dysfunctional giants did before. I mean, if gambling in toxic assets is what they used to do, we probably won’t need them in the future. In any case, whatever it is they do, if Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers cannot understand it, it is probably something they should not be doing. At the very least, they should not get the money until Congress, Obama, and the business reporter from the New York Times can explain it to all of us in simple terms.

I stand behind the plan proposed by Bhatia and Behin because I believe that small is still beautiful. I am referring to Small is Beautiful, a book that British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote in the 1970s with the subtitle “Economics as if people mattered.” It propounded the notion that small, centralized development was better than large scale industrialization. Schumacher passionately advocated sustainable development at a local level.

He wrote, “[N]o system or machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man’s basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose.”

It is too late to undo the metaphysical foundation of our past economic fallacies, which were clearly based on false ideals of greed, exploitation, and inequality.

But the rescue plan does not have to be based on the same unethical foundations.

And what of the executives who caused the world economy to collapse and then shamelessly took $165 million home in bonuses? When he suggested that these greedy executives should “resign or go commit suicide,” Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa took the words out of my own mouth. In Japan, to be shamed is a fate worse than death. Dignity, pride, and honor are prized in that society, even by business executives. In America, on the other hand, to be successful is to be shameless and arrogant.

Example: After creating the Iraqi disaster, after ruthlessly trampling on our constitutional rights, after pressuring the Republican former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to ignore the housing bubble in order to re-occupy the White House in 2004, George W. Bush is now shamelessly embarking on a speaking circuit. One can only imagine the possible topics for his oratory: “How to Accelerate the Second Coming by Bringing the World to the Brink of Ruin” could be one. “How to Become the Leader of the Free World without Intellectualism, Self Examination, or Knowledge” could be another.

If Wall Street executives and Bush and his cronies will not be ashamed by their actions, we must bring them to shame. How? By boycotting, by booing, and by simply refusing to abide by their false paradigm.

So start writing to your Congressmen now, get on Obama’s website and let him know that you don’t want a dime more of your money to go to the crooks, and most importantly, start organizing protests against Wall Street.

The End of the World We Know

The End of the World We Know

SARITA SARVATE, Mar 07, 2009

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, paints a bleak picture of a post-apocalyptic earth in the grips of a freeze akin to nuclear winter, much talked about in the ’70s. The sun’s rays cannot penetrate the grey cloud around the planet; the soil, covered with ash and soot, cannot grow vegetation; and all non-human animals are long gone. What trees are left standing are slowly disintegrating, crashing to the ground in the dark of the night. Marauding gangs of survivors are scavenging the remnants of cities, first for supermarket leftovers, and then for human prey.

At a superficial level, the story evokes a pessimistic scenario, but as one reads on, one begins to identify with the father and son pair carrying the human genus into an unknown future.
Reading the book as the economic crisis was deepening and George Bush was being booed out of Washington, I could not help wonder if The Road was not one of the best parables ever written about the fragility of planet earth and its civilization.

Alas, so wedded are most people to their cushy lifestyles and the fruits of capitalism that, in their vocabulary, the stock market decline is not a crash but a “correction,” the Iraqi war is not a sorry spectacle of human arrogance but a noble effort at restoring democracy to an ignorant people, and climate change is something that might or might not happen in the distant future.
But, as I travel through deserted Mayan empires, writing this column on the road, I cannot but wonder, is America past its zenith? Are we seeing not only the fall of the American empire but also the defeat of the American paradigm?

“You want the Chinese empire instead?” a young English woman I meet in Guatemala on Lago de Atitlan asks, scandalized by my comment. “Do you want to learn Mandarin instead of English?”

I shudder at the thought. The Chinese, with their totalitarian capitalism, paranoia about individuality, and demonstrable disregard for the environment, would perhaps be a worse superpower to be subjugated by, but are these the only two options? Can we not have a world without superpowers, without hegemony, without an economic system that measures prosperity in terms of GDP, which roughly translates into how many material goods a person has rather than the well being a person enjoys?

Many so-called experts have been extolling the virtues of globalization, with Thomas Friedman in the vanguard, so much so that I finally borrowed the audio version of The World is Flat. Alas, so annoying was Friedman’s exuberant tone that I could not stick with it. What I found ironic was that while Friedman was lauding the idea that a person in an Indian village could enjoy a high standard of living off work outsourced by American companies, he was ignoring the reality that this sort of economic dependence on a country halfway around the world could also mean that the same villager could lose his or her livelihood in recessionary times.

Even more ironic was the fact that Friedman never stopped to consider that perhaps he himself was an overpaid wordsmith who could easily be replaced at one-tenth of his price. If you do not believe me, just look at the financial jeopardy the New York Times is currently in.

Why did Friedman not consider such a scenario? Because, his book, from what little of it I was able to stomach, seemed to rely on the false premise that India is a nation of techies and number crunchers, capable only of following orders from American intellectuals higher up on the evolutionary ladder.

Friedman’s failure hints at a deeper problem: a world reliant on flawed assumptions.
As the world became small, or flat as Friedman claims, it lost many of its redundancies that, as any engineer will tell you, are necessary for any system to function without failure. So the world became vulnerable. Now, there is nowhere one can hide one’s money safely; there is nowhere one can simply go to get away.

The current economic crisis has revealed the fragility of our planetary system. Turns out Wall Street is nothing but a gigantic Ponzi scheme. Once people lose their faith in the system, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down because the companies they are buying stocks from have no real worth. Instead, they are depending on China to produce more junk to fill more landfills.

I do think the economic crisis will not go away as easily as people wish. Something fundamental has shifted. We are on the verge of environmental, economic, political, and social calamity caused by inequity, greed, disregard for natural resources, and hunger for power.

Almost 200 years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would soon grow out of resources because of population pressures.

Our so-called gurus have long pooh-poohed Malthus, but today many people believe that Malthus will ultimately be proven right. Among these believers are people known as dystopians, who foresee, not a utopia, but an imminent world collapse.

The Popol Vuh, the Mayan Bible, long ago predicted that the great cycle of life, which began around 3,000 BC, will end on December 21, 2012.

Could it be that the current economic crisis, death and destruction in Iraq, global climate change, ongoing blood bath in Palestine, ceaseless bombings in India and their repercussions, all point to the fast approaching end of the world?

I think so.

But that may not be such a bad thing.

After all, things can scarcely continue the way they are. The end of the world as we know it could also mean the birth of a new world, a new system, a new vision.

That is, if we take up the challenge to create a new human civilization!

But that would mean creating a new paradigm to defeat Cormac McCarthy’s stark vision.

The Obamas - The First Modern First Couple?

The Obamas - The First Modern First Couple?

SARITA SARVATE, Feb 05, 2009

One of the benefits of having the Obamas in the White House is that we will now have a couple we can all look up to as role models. In the age of divorce and single parent families, it is nice to look at Michelle, Barack, Malia, and Sasha and be moved by their beautiful family. Of course, almost every president who has moved into the White House has had a wife and children. But Jack Kennedy’s womanizing, Nancy Reagan’s unhealthy adoration of Ronald, Bush’s daughter’s drinking citations, and Bill Clinton’s Troopergate made them less than idyllic symbols of the American family.

Public interest in the Obamas is heightened because they are an intact African American family. But America’s focus on their marriage also stems, I think, from the fact that Barack and Michelle Obama have a more modern partnership than we have ever witnessed before from a First Couple. If Barack is a post-racial guy, Michelle is a post-feminist gal.

In the ’60s, American women like Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem were writing feminist manifestos and encouraging women to burn their bras, even as Jackie Kennedy was speaking in a soft falsetto about White House china. There seemed to be a disconnect between the American common woman and the First Lady. I wasn’t in the States then, but I can sense it when I watch old films of Jackie, the surrogate queen, seemingly trying to play the part of the royalty America never had.

That disconnect between First Ladies and common American women continued into the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. American First Ladies were ceremonial figures, dainty and well-groomed, somewhat like lilies of the valley.

Michelle is a different story all together. She seems physically, intellectually, and psychologically strong. She exudes confidence. Her relationship with Barack seems to be grounded, earthy, secure, and based on something much more real, day-to-day, and wholesome.
Barack does not seem to suffer from the kind of angst many intellectuals seem to possess. Michelle does not seem to sport the huge ego that normally goes with an Ivy League education, a law degree, and a successful career.

Barack could have had any number of girls but chose Michelle because she was the place where his search for identity ended. Michelle could have been a single, successful career woman like Condi Rice, but was lucky to run into Barack, for whom she became the earth mother.

What is fascinating for me to watch in Michelle’s eyes is the gratitude that seems to shine through, and the acceptance of the love that Barack showers on her.

When quizzed as to what she wanted to ask former First Ladies, Michelle simply responded that she wanted to know how to raise well-grounded children in the White House. She is a woman who knows she can have it all but has deliberately chosen to focus on her daughters.

I suppose baby boomer women like Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, had seen their mothers’ ambitions and dreams get suppressed and could not settle into contented maternity. Michelle’s generation has overcome that pressure. They know they can have a career and a marriage. They are not forced to choose between the two. And their husbands know how to listen. Men of the prior generation did not have a clue as to what women wanted.

Thankfully, neither Barack nor Michelle seems to have any black sheep in their family or skeletons in their closets. Jimmy Carter had his drunken brother Billy, Reagan was famous for his icy relationship with his children, Bill Clinton had a dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, W. had drinking problems and an Oedipal complex.

Michelle and Barack, ironically, have that picture perfect family life that the “family values” proponents are always hollering about.

More importantly, Michelle seems to have escaped the curse of hating her mother.
When I first came to America, I was surprised to hear my female classmates speak of their mothers as if they were hysterical, unreasonable, mentally unstable basket cases. Perhaps such attitudes were justified back then. Some mothers, I learned, had had drinking problems; others had suffered from depression.

I immediately began to identify with my classmates. After all, on the other side of the earth, my mother, too, had suffered from a “nervous breakdown” brought on by the suppression of her ambition and spirit.

The hip thing in the ’70s and ’80s for us women to do was to deny any affection or liking for our mothers. Now that my mother has passed away, I cannot write these sentences without a gut-wrenching sorrow welling deep within me. Michelle, I sense, did not suffer from our curse.
Mothers like me who raised their children without the help of their mothers look upon Michelle and her mother, Marian Robinson, who is moving into the White House to help her daughter raise her children, with envy.

Feminists and liberals have long asserted that personal character is not important in a president. Perhaps the hippie “me-generation” felt compelled to put personal pleasure above the common good. But I beg to differ. The way our leaders live their personal lives affects us all in a very deep way, I think. There is a difference between a policy wonk and a leader. The former can develop brilliant proposals for healthcare, welfare, economic stimulus. The latter can inspire and motivate and set an example.

The picture of a bony, broad-shouldered Michelle can only encourage women to stop worrying about their weights and to focus on their health. The sight of a happy, loving, supportive family in the White House can only uplift our children and teach them how to love.

The personal and the political are, after all, two facets of a person, a country, a world. You can never entirely separate the two. Fortunately, in the Obamas, we have a beautiful melding of the two.

The next eight years should be a treat to watch.