Spincycle

The romance of a Delhi summer can be savored by conjuring up just one image – the vast cool corridors of Connaught Place.

The Raj era building, built between 1928 and 1934 – though formally opened in 1931, was based on the designs of World War I veteran Robert Tor Russell, Chief architect to the Public Works Department. Russell had worked in India before the War as an assistant to the famous John Begg, who along with George Wittet is generally credited for developing the Indo-Sarcenic style. Thankfully, due to exigency or choice, none of the Begg’s influence invaded Russell’s design aesthetic, which was dominated by the understated yet stately stucco neo-classical style popularized by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Russell’s aesthetic however did carry distinct echoes of Italian architecture- The opulent gracefully executed Tuscan loggias on both on both levels (the upper level structures have been increasingly converted into offices) being the defining features of Connaught Place.

Growing up in the eighties, Connaught Place, with its massive arcaded colonnades, circular columnar geometry which was never oppressive, upscale if slightly dowdy shops (as opposed to ‘upscale’ shops now which have interior designs that are almost always preternaturally youthful) with humming air conditioners (when air conditioners were a rarity) – was a constant source of wonder and awe. It was also the only place where one saw foreigners in Delhi – they, almost always in their sunglasses and shorts, walking unhurriedly yet purposefully.

Going to Connaught Place meant going through India Gate and parts of Lutyens Delhi. As we neared India gate, the temperature dropped a few degrees as bus gathered pace and air shed its molten edge in the leafy embrace of trees, and over the grassy expanse of the maidans. Suddenly the furrowed brow of the bus passengers relaxed as we entered the non-gridlocked, beautiful, stately, tree lined Delhi, and a near bonhomie was restored.

Getting down at Barakhamba Road, I remember always taking a few seconds to take in the faint yet pleasant excitement of being in this glorious commercial hub, feeling happy, and almost dreamily becoming aware of the pleasant rush of traffic and how the car horns sounded different – more sonorous, here. However, the two things that I remember most about going to Connaught Place are the shoe shops and Nirula’s. If mom wanted a sandal, it had to be from the Liberty shop in Connaught Place, and the Bata shop there was considered absolutely irreplaceable for men’s shoes. The air-conditioned Nirula’s with its exotic pizzas, which never tasted good but were ravenously consumed, and burgers, and ice-creams was heaven, albeit a heaven in which the feet and heart were as timorous as excitement complete.

On the way back home at night, happy with the day, the relatively empty bus with its dull yellow light seemed positively romantic. As we passed the ice-cream wallahs with their fluorescent lights covered in colored cellophane, and the strolling families, near India gate, the adventure was complete.

Roughly one third (fifty five) of Frida Kahlo’s paintings were self-portraits. The sheer number and preponderance of self-portraiture in her body of work is unmatched excepting perhaps Munch, Rembrandt, and Gogh. Comparing her output of self-portraits to other artists however does little to shed light on the particularities of her self-portraiture – which is deeply self-involved, celebrity like, romantic (if tragically), directly asking for viewer’s sympathy in ways that drain the viewer, and sprinkled with carefully orchestrated artifice and exaggeration - the conjoined brow, the carefully painted hair over the lip, the Tehuana dress – all of which serve as contorted symbols of personal need (and delusion) than anything broader.

Frida Kahlo was born to a wealthy German father and a Spanish-American mother in 1907. (It is hence unsurprising that Salma Hayek, a rich dilettante of mixed ancestry with little trace of native blood – Hayek is the daughter of a rich Lebanese father and Spanish mother - played her in a popular movie biopic.) The point about non-native bourgeoisie ancestry is important because Kahlo so self-consciously and unceasingly peddled the native roots in her dress, and her art.

For years rumors swirled (no doubt sustained by her) that her father was Jewish. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, instead, was a born in 1871 in Pforzheim, Germany to Lutheran parents, whose similarly Lutheran antecedents have been traced back to the 16th century by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle in their book, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo. (Reviewing the book for JPost, Meir Ronnen, wrote – ‘Frida’s favorite subject was herself (she made a trademark of her eyebrows).’ Never perhaps has a simpler formulation of Frida been offered – the childish self-regard, and the commercialism.)

Biography

Kahlo grew up in a gorgeous colonial house, one she returned to during the last years of her life, with access to all the contemporary amenities, the only dark stain being her contracting polio at the age of five. Polio however didn’t leave her handicapped, or her legs as grotesquely disfigured as it does for countless other poorer people.

Coursing through her solidly bourgeoisie life, at 15, Kahlo entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. At 18, she had a catastrophic street car accident suffering multiple fractures including damage to the spine, a damaged uterus, and a punctured pelvis. Kahlo never really recovered from the horrific injuries even after going through as many as 35 operations, and continued to live in pain.

Three years after her accident, during which she had started to paint, she met Diego Riviera, the celebrated muralist, and soon after started a romance with the 42 year old artist. A year later, the two were married. The major (and minor) events of the dramatic relationship between Kahlo and Riviera with its numerous infidelities - including Diego’s affair with Frida’s sister Christina, and Frida’s relationship with Trotsky - are well known and well documented. Riviera had a significant impact on her art and politics and politics in art. The crisp outlines to her figures are much in the style of Diego Rivera. Similarly, the way she colors some her paintings echoes the flat coloring in Rivera murals.

The other significant aspect of her life was the political environment that she grew up in. Kahlo grew up at a time when Mexico was in turmoil. Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 and continued to fester far after 1920. Influenced partly by the politically charged communist learning environment and her association with Riviera, a painter of ‘heroic’ murals with folk art echoes, her paintings incorporated techniques from native Mexican art, and used it to offer none particularly incisive political commentary.

Echoes of Kahlo

“Frida Kahlo has been the right artist at the right time,” said Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in California in his 2002 interview with Stephanie Mencimer of the Washington Monthly.

For an era so dearly in search of unimpeachable arty exotic celebrity ‘progressive’ symbols, Kahlo is indeed perfect. Her bisexuality makes her ‘progressive’, her clothes, jewelry and her ‘looks’ make her lusciously ‘exotic, her connections and flirtations with communism and communists make her more appealing still, and her being an artist does nearly everything else.

Kahlo excels as the embodiment of symbolically political hippy chic enmeshed with the exotic romanticism of a Mediterranean country. The fact that her art is transparent is an additional perk. What is left for denouement and understanding, then, is the artist herself, and there the store is rich and endless. But that is saying things somewhat incorrectly- it isn’t due to absence of complexity that people yearn for biography, people yearn for biography when faced with images of celebrity. Her recognizable self-portraits with the repeated motifs of conjoined brow, hair over the lip, the native dress, the hairstyle, and traditional jewelry, work well in an era of celebrity.

After disappearing from the mainstream art world, Kahlo was rediscovered by the feminists in the late 1970s. Soon after, Kahlo got a more popular audience through Hayden Herrera’s famous 1983 biography. Since then, an explosion of Kahlo-inspired films, plays, clothing, and jewelry have transformed the artist into a ‘veritable cult figure’. (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

Exhibitions of her art, including one at SF MoMA, continue to propagate the part celebrity, part artist understanding of hers by blurring lines blurring lines between her personal life and her art. They do so by simultaneously exhibiting family photos, and details of her life. This all means that Kahlo today is more of a (pop) cultural statement than an artistic one.

Kahlo’s Art

Kahlo is a reasonably good painter. That is if you accept that her paintings will always carry marks of self-absorption, plaintiff psychological overtones, melodrama, and celebrity. In fact, her paintings are seen best with those afflictions. She is best when she captures the pathos and melodrama like she does in ‘The suicide of Dorothy Hale’. The painting, drawn on commission from the dead girl’s dad, shows the girl falling from the building but always looking at the viewer, accusing. It is only occasionally that Kahlo is capable of moving beyond that limited oeuvre as she does with ‘Portrait of Dona Rosita Morillo’ where she presents an old matriarch with solemn respectability though with a strangely distracted expression. Perhaps the answer to the distracted expression lies with some psychologist, as it does for many other things that pertain to Kahlo and her art. I for one have only limited interest.

It is hard if not impossible to tolerate, much less empathize, and patently ridiculous to even think to romanticize, a rich philistine with a paunch. This feeling is shared by not only certain sections of the high society – the only part of society that gets to write, express, and define contempt for all of ‘us’, but by all society.

Among the people of these ‘subaltern’ groups, the ones who haven’t been cleansed by the washcloth of high culture, there is a feeling of inadequacy if not disgust with oneself. They must acknowledge the impossibility of ever joining the erudite, English speaking, trim, Westernized, ever progressing and ever progressive, posh group. The chasm only seems to grow wider every day. Sometimes that impossibility takes the form of anger – who are these people feeling so uppity about their new found pretensions? Their beginnings were probably as vulgar than mine. (Caste and class – the last refuge of the bastards. ) It is as if caught in their pretensions – they have executed a double exile – alienating themselves from their roots, and sending us prematurely to our cultural exiles. But then ‘culture’ was largely lost – if not in migration then in constant contortions needed to feed the ‘family’ since then – so what is left now is an idea of culture, and this hunger - this vast orifice that wants to go on consuming. There is no escaping from it. Perhaps these kids are right, we have nothing to offer. So if they find pretensions of West and find home in it, then so be it. If only, they didn’t humiliate us. How dare they?

Among the manicured words crafted by high intellect, a philistine is ever so precisely caught in a pincer like grip, stripped, and exposed for who he is for who he is – a rat, a cheat, a miser, someone who is ugly, fat, debased, lustful, probably impotent, unblinking and stupid. There is nowhere to run.
We have all seen likes of him for the one thing about philistines is that they all look alike. In the oily paunchy sunburned carcass, there is no vestige of culture, no literacy in the “in” books, and no appreciation of the finer aspects of life. I can sympathize with the poor. They may be romanticized for their ‘simplicity’ and their poverty. They at least don’t invade. But how can one live with people with such overreach, such humdrum mediocrity, such precocious grabbing lust, such vulgarity, such hunger? Where does one go to soothe his cultivated sensibilities?

A philistine is like a ‘ghee’ stain on a Dostoevsky. It defines my connection to all that is vile and deformed, all that I want to escape for the safety of harmonic refinement. When did these people become so vile? How did I not notice before how they had encroached on culture and the air itself, and carved up their names on it like low class Romeos. (Accusations of caste and class fly back.) They are like cockroaches on the bathroom drain cover - too filthy to be squished, too filthy to be tolerated, forever to be despised.

Will they find me out? I torture over whether there exists the possibility of being good enough, whether one so completely learn all the parlor tricks that it iron outs the ugly wrinkles of low breeding, whether I can stand any scrutiny and be affirmed of higher birth, higher learning, one of them. There is always that wracking doubt that somehow the occasional word in the wrong accent, the inability to use chop sticks, will conspire and give away the years of low existence and expose you for the philistine you are. There is always that threat, if one grows up and takes up the pretensions. It is one thing if you grow up with it. Otherwise you grow up anxious and eager to stamp every little echo of your own vile history, eager to disassociate with all that is debased in your own bloodline. That is all you can do.

One day, they catch themselves staring at the mirror, and find a tired sunburned unhealthy face, the distorting paunch, their brow wrinkles when they think about the constant demands of family and friends caught in their own vicious cycles, and realize the absolute impossibility of doing better. To be branded a philistine is much like being accused of the original sin – however much you may try, you cannot rinse it off. You must acknowledge the impossibility of transcending it.

It is infinitely easy to be casually vicious, and generally feted if done with faux consideration. But writing hence pursued is a failed enterprise. It then becomes nothing more than carrying class pretensions. The mark of good writing may not be redeeming humans, whom the dominant cultural script has left warped, but bringing to light the lived emotional and social experience of people, and the historio-socio-cultural contexts remains the key to it. This ability - to write well- continues to rest upon both ones’ ability to look into oneself, and into others, and ability to look from other person’s perspective.

Investment in education, especially in developing countries, has long been shown to produce a variety of socially desirable outcomes including reduction in child mortality (esp. maternal education), lower fertility rates, better environment, and increases in gender equality etc.

Funding for education however suffers deeply, especially in South Asia. What the politicians haven’t accomplished in deed, they have accomplished in words. For example, in 2002, India enacted a constitutional amendment making education a fundamental right for all children between 6 and 14. Pakistani leaders have been no less ambitious and nor has the lack of commitment of resources needed to make those policies a success, any less mocking.

Given that Education is an extremely broad area, I have split the analysis into three non-exclusive parts – funding for education, literacy, and primary education.

For my analysis, I rely upon three data sources - Statistics Division of Government of Pakistan (Federal Bureau of Statistics); Ministry of Economic Affairs and Statistics, Government of Pakistan; and Institute of Statistics at UNESCO (World Bank, UNDP use its data). Data from the sources is sometimes conflicting, and in a small majority of cases wildly irreconcilable.

Funding for Education

While the exact figures differ (details below), all data show that Pakistan between 1999 and 2006 spent on average spends less than 2.5% of its GDP on education as compared to 3.6% average expenditure by countries in South Asia, and a combined average of 3.4% of other “low income countries”.

Education expenditure under Musharraf rose – though only eventually – from the low of 1.84% of GDP in 2000 to a still low but higher figure of 2.25% in 2005, rising to 2.59% in 2006. Expenditure on education (as percentage of GDP) under Musharraf compares poorly not only cross-nationally but also historically. The average expenditure in education stood at 2.7% plus under Bhutto’s second term between 1993 and 1996. Musharraf‘s regime however did do better than Sharif’s regime during which expenditure had plummeted to below 2% of GDP. Cross-nationally, Pakistan compared poorly to its South Asian neighbors (about a percentage below India, and generally below Bangladesh during the Musharraf era), and lagged significantly behind countries as varied as Iran, and United States.

Education expenditure measured as percentage of government expenditure rose appreciably between 2004 and 2005 from about 6.4% to nearly 10.5%. However in 2006, when the expenditure rose again to 12.5%, it was about 6 percentage points behind Iranian expenditure, a narrower gap than the 12 point wide chasm in 2005. Musharraf government’s spending on education averaged 4% behind Bangladesh’s expenditure, which remained steady between 14 and 15% points from 1999 to 2005.

Education expenditure is by no means uniform across the country and aggregate statistics hide much of the regional and within-region variation. Expenditure in education in Pakistan is the prerogative of the provincial government. Punjab government which swam in money during the Sharif era and allocated up to 31% of its budget on education, spent a declining proportion on education under Musharraf. Reflecting American money and priorities, investment in education by Balochistan’s provincial government went up post 9/11. Most budgetary allocation to education was spent on furnishing recurring expenses, and only a small proportion (less than 8%) on development. (Husain etc., 2003)

Adult Literacy Rate

Increases in literacy have been a major success of the Musharraf era. The overall literacy rate (10 years & above) was 54 percent in 2005-06, an increase of 9.0 percentage points over five years. (The more conventionally reported 15+ year literacy rate is slightly lower at around 50%. Increase in that statistic is unknown.)

The literacy rate for non-poor went up from 51 percent in 2001 to 59 percent in 2005 whereas for poor it improved from 30 percent to 40 percent in the same period. Gender gap however remained significant and persistent – the 26 percent gap between male and female literacy rates at 2001-2002 was only marginally higher than the 23 percent gap in 2005-2006. As always, regional literacy rates varied widely. Female literacy rate in Balochistan was a shocking 15% in 2001-2002 and only rose to 20% by the end of 2005-2006. NWFP fared slightly better with an increase from 10 percent from the abysmal 20% rate in 2001-2002. The literacy rates compare quite badly with countries like Iran where the corresponding figure are 82% for men, and 76% for women. India’s literacy rates were at least 10% higher, and the growth in literacy rates (after accounting for differential starting points) more impressive. The Musharraf era growth in literacy rates however compares favorably historically within Pakistan.

Primary Education

Only 60% primary age children in Pakistan attend school, a much lower rate compared to neighboring countries. Moreover, the gender gap is large. There are only 56 girls to every 100 boys enrolled in primary education.

Average new enrollment in primary schools was about 3.42 million in 2000 and 5.04 million in 2005-2006. Growth in primary education enrollment, after accounting for population growth, stands at about 1.4 times. However, the situation still remains stark. Out of the 20 million children between five and nine years of age only about half of them are currently enrolled in primary school. And girls make up much less than half of that number, according to the figures.

Nearly 80% of the students who enroll in primary school ever reach Middle School and only about half of the students who reach Middle School go to the High School. This attrition rate has remained about constant under Musharraf.

Sukhdev Sandhu, a literature professor at NYU, has a superb article in the London Review of Books on Hanif Kureishi. Sandhu expertly weaves in a realist matter-of-fact account of British Asian immigrants in his tribute to Kureishi.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n10/sand01_.html

Politics begets cynicism, especially during the campaigning season when each politician tries to outdo the other in spouting disingenuous and sometimes patently false statements. Cynicism in turn becomes the aegis with which we defend our apathy. (“It’s all the same”, “Why bother when nothing changes.”) But are our peregrinations into indifference, well founded? I gather not for things do change - like they have over the past eight years under Bush. There exist not only a strong imperatives to prevent the ‘worse’ choice from getting elected - for cost of such misadventures is often great (at least $4 trillion has been added to the deficit in the past 8 years to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and Iraq War), but more optimistically the rewards of having someone sensible (when the off chance arrives as it has with Barack Obama’s candidacy) in a leadership position are often as large as the costs of electing an imbecile. Here below, I briefly document the policy achievements of two leaders (Kevin Rudd and Zapatero), to corroborate the claim made above.

Kevin Rudd, leader of the Australian Labor Party, was elected to the Prime Minister’s office about five months ago, on 3rd December, 2007. His first ‘official act’ on taking office was to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and mandate Australia – the largest per capita polluter in the world – to deal with the biggest crisis in the world today. With that signature, Rudd not only wiped clean the Howard era moral bankruptcy, but also put Australia firmly on the path of enacting a progressive climate policy. A few days later, Rudd de facto scrapped “Pacific Solution”, the ignominious Howard era policy that sent all asylum seekers arriving by boat to remote islands for ‘assessment’. Rudd’s policy agenda has been far more ambitious than merely rolling back the perverse policies of Howard regime. Rudd committed his government to tackling homelessness, a growing and salient problem in Australia. In February, Rudd offered a short but unambiguously worded apology on behalf of the government and the Australian parliament for the shameful the treatment of the aborigines.
[Read more at BBC News]

Zapatero’s achievements as head of Spain may have been slower in coming than Rudd’s whirlwind pace, but they have been no less momentous. In his four years at the helm, he “legalized gay marriage, brought in fast-track divorces and laws to promote gender equality and tackle domestic violence. He also introduced an amnesty for undocumented workers.” (BBC. He has introduced “targeted measures to raise the female employment rate (which is still comparatively low in Spain)”, “established the legal right to paternity leave”. Under Zapatero’s capable finance minister, Pedro Solbes, Spain “declared a budget surplus for a third consecutive year, topping 2 per cent of gross domestic product for 2007.” Policy Network

The impact of electing someone like Obama would be similarly momentous for the US, and the penalties for electing McCain (running for the third term of Bush), or Clinton (who is planning to “obliterate” Iran) severe.

Kevin Rudd - White paper on first 100 days (pdf)

The military regularly ranks as the most trusted institution on public opinion surveys. Veterans are regularly deified by politicians of every stripe as heroes rendering extraordinary service to the country. Even when politicians are articulating their dissent for the Iraq War, they frequently find time to issue a short sermon praising the heroes, and reiterating America’s commitment to its veterans.

The unique status of the veterans and the military in the modern American consciousness can be traced to the revolutionary origins of the United States. The military success in the “War of Independence”, and the “Second War of Independence” (War of 1812), and the heroism of the ‘founders’, is an essential part of America’s collective memory, along with being an essential part of the school history curricula. Tony Judt, in his superb column for The New York Review of Books, writes that one of the reasons militarism continues to persist in US is because -

“Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. [Judt makes a reference here to South's defeat in the Civil War and subsequent reaction as exception that proves the rule] Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly “good wars.” The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.”

Vinay, a regular contributor here, adds to the above argument, articulating that the other possible reason for this continued ‘heroification’ of military and veterans is because as a country of immigrants, people in US have often found it hard to find things (like common history) to rally around. In absence of those themes, people have opted to rally behind things that exclude no one. That latent tendency has been buttressed by generations of strategic political actors, and mass culture producers.

The other unique fact that brings the above arguments in sharp relief is the disproportionately (as compared to other countries – excepting ones with mandatory military training) large number of veterans in the US. According to the Statistical Abstract of United States for 2004-2005, the country had 24.9 million veterans. The large veteran population is a result of two things – having one of the largest standing armies in the world, and the preponderance of personnel who serve the army only for a few years (generally as a way to have their college tuitions paid.)

Given the factors outlined above, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the American residency has been dominated by men with prior military experience. However the sheer number is still surprising – for 137 of the 219 years the country since its independence, the country has had a veteran as a president. Associatedly 29 of its 43 presidents have been veterans. There are at least three caveats about the numbers provided above– Eight years of George W Bush’s ’service’ in the National Guard have been excluded; the five years of Lincoln presidency have been included (Lincoln participated very briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832), and Millard Fillmore’s tenure isn’t included as his experience in the military was after he had left his presidency. One can raise questions about inclusion of some other presidents including Madison (whose service was brief again), however, as one can see, such tinkering is unlikely to impact the numbers much.

The longest time American’s went without electing a veteran was the 32 year period starting with Taft in 1913, and ending with Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Incredibly, during this time, the country took part in the two World Wars.

Perhaps the subsequent question we may want to ask is what impact has election of presidents with prior military experience had on the country. The lessons there remain less clear.

US President mil experience summary table[1] - Get more documents

In David Fidanque and Janet Arenz, Petitioners on Review, vs. State of Oregon, Oregon Supreme Court (1998) defines lobbying as “influencing, or attempting to influence, legislative action through oral or written communication with legislative officials, solicitation of others to influence or attempt to influence legislative action or attempting to obtain the good will of legislative officials.”

The proponents of lobbying argue that any law curtailing it impinges on two core First Amendment clauses - that Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, or curtailing “freedom of speech”. In return, states have argued that they have substantial interests in preventing actual corruption, and perception of corruption, and given lobbyist’s common perception of being dishonest, and a vast array of empirical evidence as to the actual incidence of corruption, they have interests in placing restrictions on lobbying.

Courts have for long upheld citizen’s rights to petition the government taking note that the idea of democratic government implies in part a right of the citizen to petition. (Capps, 2005) The “right to petition”, as numerous legal scholars have noted, predates the Bill of Rights and hence is sacrosanct. Furthermore, Courts have also for long upheld the idea that lobbying, in essence, is a way of petitioning one’s representatives. In Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Pearson (390 F.2d 489, 491, 492 (D.C. Cir. 1967)) [For details on case citation], the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that peopleinvolved in trying to effect congressional action by engaging in lobbying activities were exercising their right to petition.

However the courts have long also recognized that while the right to petition is an essential one, it is also a limited one. (Capps, 2005) Hence, the courts have ruled that there is no absolute right of a citizen to speak in person with public officials. In absence of absolute rights, and citing countervailing interests like state’s interest in preventing corruption given the likelihood that lobbying will “promote the temptation to use improper means to gain success”, and maintaining confidence in the public decision making process, the courts have sided with the government in a host of cases to restrict contingency fee arrangements, impose registration and disclosure requirements on lobbyists, prohibit lobbyists from making political contributions when legislature is in session (N.C. Right to Life, Inc. v. Bartlett, 168 F.3d 705, 717-18 (4th Cir. 1999)), among others. Courts, while ruling in these decisions, have noted that barring such practices do not substantively curtain the right to petition as they don’t impose a significant (or merely unsubstantiated) burden on the petitioning process, and should a law do so, it may be grounds for it being invalid. For example, in the Oregon Supreme Court decision cited above in the definition of lobbying, the Court found that the biennial registration fee imposed by the state on the lobbyists to be in excess of costs of registration itself, and hence invalid.

The underlying strain in these cases has been the need to balance the needs of the citizenry to openly petition its representatives in line with the basic tenets of a representative government, and the needs of the executive and legislative branch to safeguard the system itself from threats of corruption. While deciding on these cases, the courts have always been keenly cognizant that in line with the constitution’s dictum of three equal and separate branches of the government, they have limited rights in imposing the standards of operation within each branch of governance, for as long as they do not violate the freedoms and rights guaranteed in the constitution. Simultaneously, the court has recognized in the past the merit of not only reducing the actual occurrence of corruption, but also reducing the perception of corruption. In both Buckley v. Valeo (424 U.S. 1 (1976)), and McConnell v. FEC (540 U.S. 93 (2003) - brought after the enactment of McCain-Feingold or BCRA/Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) the Court has recognized the need to mitigate perceptions of corruption and actual incidence of corruption, and congressional authority to pursue legislation towards that purpose. The Court’s arguments, offered on maintaining the sanctity of the election process of legislators, should theoretically apply to the legislative process as well.

The “freedom of speech” arguments for lobbying stand on less firmer grounds. The right to “freedom of speech” is not and should not be seen as a law guaranteeing the “right to be heard”. Similarly, there is no law protecting the right of a citizen to have a private hearing with the legislator, or more broadly speaking, private speech.

The Courts have sided with the government in a significant number of cases where the state has shown a plausible case for restricting lobbying based on corruption concerns, and wherever they have found that the restrictions don’t disadvantage some content over other. However there are legitimate important rationales that undergird the right to lobby (petition) and courts have been cognizant to not support legislation that is overly broad. The law however doesn’t provide guidance on voluntary disavowal of money from lobbyists for campaigning (without the “magic words” that breach express advertising standard), and nor does it restrict lawmakers from running on a platform that upfront states that the said candidate will not accept ‘favors’ (legal ones) from lobbyists, or will not join a lobbying firm if his or her reelection bid fails (close the “revolving door”). Congress and the Executive - both have significant leeway in enacting significant ethics reforms that will likely sharply curtail the power of “special interests”, and a myriad options (including the one chosen by Edwards and Obama) remain open remain for lawmakers to not ‘choose’ to be influenced by ‘lobbyists’. Combating the influence of special interest would however require more widespread measures – especially as public opinion polls become the key determinants of candidate policy positions and as lobbyists’ influence in manipulating opinion through media or ‘astroturfing’ increases. Fewer options exist to combat that except perhaps a more active citizenry.

Last thoughts - “Democratic Senator Max Baucus, the new chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is offering special interests a chance to go skiing and snowmobiling with him - $2,000-dollars a head, or $5,000-dollars from a political action committee.” reports ABC 7. (pdf)

Citation -

“Gouging the Government”: Why a Federal Contingency Fee Lobbying Prohibition is Consistent With First Amendment Freedoms”. 58 Vanderbilt Law Review 1885. Meredith A. Capps. (2005)

The following tables tally up the articles that mention “Barack Obama” or “Hillary Clinton” in their body or title. The results show that both New York Times and Washington Post cover Obama at much lower rates than average rate of coverage in “US Newspaper and Wires.”

The differences are particularly significant given that most articles follow the “horse race” format, and hence mention both Obama and Clinton.

*Article count from LexisNexis Power Search with search term “Barack Obama” and “Hillary Clinton” respectively. The source field was constrained to “New York Times”, “Washington Post”, and “US Newspaper and Wires” respectively.

Supreme Court’s business turn

Jeff Rosen covers Supreme Court’s pro-business turn in a lengthy article for the NYT. He also sheds light on the cottage industry of industry financed scholars engaged in churning out pro-business propaganda.

“After the verdict, Exxon began providing money for academic research to support its claim that the award for damages was excessive. It financed some of the country’s most prominent scholars on both sides of the political spectrum, including the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. (Sunstein says he accepted only travel grants, not research support, from Exxon; and Kahneman stresses that the financing had no influence on the substance of his work.) In a 2002 book, “Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide,” Sunstein studied hundreds of mock-jury deliberations and concluded that jurors are unpredictable and often irrational in punitive-damage cases. Jury deliberations, he found, increase the unpredictability, as well as the dollar amount of the final awards. Sunstein concluded that a system of civil fines determined by experts, rather than punitive damages determined by juries, might be more sensible. When Exxon appealed the $5 billion verdict in 2006, it was reduced by an appellate court to $2.5 billion. The reduced verdict is once again being challenged as excessive.”

“Churnalism”
“The team looked at a fortnight’s production from the posh papers and the Daily Mail, and analysed in the process 2207 UK news pieces. They focused on two things: the number of stories that were derived directly from press releases; and the number that were taken straight from the main British news agency, the Press Association. The results were amazing, and not in a good way.

They found that a massive 60 per cent of these quality-print stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20 per cent contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added. With 8 per cent of the stories, they were unable to be sure about their source. That left only 12 per cent of stories where the researchers could say that all the material was generated by the reporters themselves. The highest quota proved to be in the Times, where 69 per cent of news stories were wholly or mainly wire copy and/or PR . . . The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70 per cent of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12 per cent of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked.”

Lanchester reviews Davies book, ‘Flat Earth News’ on LRB.

Confirms Vs Claims

Another superb article on the malaise in journalism -this time about Israel. Yonatan Mendel: Diary, LRB.

“I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’’
…
“In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.”
…
“When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.”
…
“The IDF, as depicted by the Israeli media, has another strange ability: it never initiates, decides to attack or launches an operation. The IDF simply responds.”
…
“Israeli men up to the age of 50 are obliged to do one month’s reserve service every year. ‘The civilian,’ Yigael Yadin, an early Israeli chief of staff, said, ‘is a soldier on 11 months’ annual leave.’ For the Israeli media there is no leave.”

The big bailout
Krugman writes that the big bailout for financial institutions is coming. Once again tax payers are going to be stuck with the tab of failed government oversight.

“The U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ended up costing taxpayers 3.2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of $450 billion today. Some estimates put the fiscal cost of Japan’s post-bubble cleanup at more than 20 percent of G.D.P. — the equivalent of $3 trillion for the United States. If these numbers shock you, they should. But the big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.”

Gretchen Morgenson, Assistant Business and Financial editor at NYT, - argues the Bear bailout is costly and unwarranted.

“WHAT are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in?”
…
“But why save Bear Stearns? The beneficiary of this bailout, remember, has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach. Until regulators came along in 1996, Bear Stearns was happy to provide its balance sheet and imprimatur to bucket-shop brokerages like Stratton Oakmont and A. R. Baron, clearing dubious stock trades.
…
And as one of the biggest players in the mortgage securities business on Wall Street, Bear provided munificent lines of credit to public-spirited subprime lenders like New Century (now bankrupt). It is also the owner of EMC Mortgage Servicing, one of the most aggressive subprime mortgage servicers out there.”
”

Barack Obama on race in America
Obama has delivered probably the best speech that on race in well over forty years. Read it in full.(pdf)

Wasteful spending on anti-terrorism efforts

“First, the number of lives lost or ruined by transnational terrorism is rather minor compared with other challenges considered by the Copenhagen Consensus. On average only 420 people are killed and another 1249 are injured each year from transnational terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, the public in rich countries views transnational terrorism as one of the greatest threats. This is rather ironic since over 30,000 people die on US highways annually, yet highway safety is not as much of a public concern.

Second, protective or defensive counterterrorism measures may merely deflect attacks to softer targets. For example, the installation of metal detectors in airports in January 1973 decreased skyjackings, but increased kidnappings and other hostage missions; the fortifications of US embassies reduced embassy assaults, but increased assassinations of diplomatic officials (Enders
and Sandler, 1993, 2006a). Unlike other challenges, countermeasures may have unintended harmful consequences: strong offensive measures against terrorists can lead to backlash attacks as new grievances are created.

Third, guarding against transnational terrorism can utilize resources at an alarming rate without greatly reducing the risks. In contrast, terrorists require moderate resources to create great anxiety in a targeted public.

Fourth, transnational terrorism poses a real dilemma for liberal democracies: responding too fully compromises democratic principles and gains support for the terrorists, whereas responding too meekly loses constituency support and exposes the government’s failure to protect lives and property (Wilkinson, 1986, 2001). Thus, government actions can become the root of future attacks.”
..

From: Sandler, Arce, and Enders article: Transnational Terrorism (pdf) [Copenhagen Consensus]

Economist article on the study: Most anti-terrorist spending is wasteful, claims a new study