Rachel Maddow: Debunking the GOP’s ‘Vouchercare’ plan

Rachel Maddow: Debunking the GOP’s ‘Vouchercare’ plan:

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Communalism Watch: Modi’s murderous minister

Communalism Watch: Modi’s murderous minister:

August 29, 2012

Modi’s murderous minister

 

By Aakar Patel

Published: August 29, 2012

(The writer is a columnist. He is also a former editor of the Mumbai-based English newspaper Mid Day and the Gujarati paper Divya Bhaskar )

What can be said of civil society in Gujarat when its minister for women development and child welfare is convicted of rioting against women and children?
On August 29, for the first time in India, a sitting MLA (what is called MPA in Pakistan) was found to have instigated violence in the worst of the 2002 incidents.
Twelve people testified to minister Maya Kodnani assisting and egging on the rioters in the Ahmedabad suburb of Naroda Patiya. A total of 96 Muslims were killed that night, 34 children including a newborn, 32 women and 30 men. Kodnani supplied the killers with kerosene and swords, according to testimony. Judge Jyotsna Yagnik found 32 people guilty of the massacre. The fearsome Babu ‘Bajrangi’, the man accused of forcibly undoing marriages of Hindu girls to Muslim boys, has also been convicted in the case.
Kodnani, a Sindhi, whose family migrated at Partition, was an MLA when she participated in the violence and, despite the grave allegations against her, was made minister by Narendra Modi later. When she was charge-sheeted by an independent agency, she was dropped as minister but retained her seat as MLA. She is a qualified doctor, a gynaecologist, showing that higher education is no barrier to bigotry.
Though she denied being present at Naroda Patiya when the killings happened, Kodnani was proved to be there by her cell phone records. These had been gathered and submitted by an exceptional officer in the Gujarat police force. Shamefully, that officer, Rahul Sharma, from the elite Indian Police Service, is being tried by Modi’s government for misconduct. His crime was to have taken the initiative to get these phone records from the various cell phone companies and hand them over to independent investigators instead of the state. I think he did the right thing because under Modi (who was and remains the state’s home minister) investigations were so sloppy that the Supreme Court brought in an outside agency to take over. Kodnani’s conviction is because of that outside investigation team and not through the work of Modi’s government.
The phone records Sharma collected showed both Kodnani and Bajrangi in areas where they claimed not to be. They also show that the then deputy home minister, Gordhan Zadhafiya, was in the police control room. He has been accused of directing the violence and ordering the police to go easy on the rioters, though he also denied being there. Zadhafiya, who like Bajrangi is from the peasant Patel community, is today a rebel against Modi’s government.
The cell phone records indicate that Modi’s office was in touch with the rioters. Officers in the CMO — as the office is called — who phoned those now convicted of rioting, include Tanmay Mehta, Sanjay Bhavsar and Anil Mukim. When I visited Modi’s office a couple of years ago, I remember Bhavsar and Mukim being there. The records also indicate that phone conversations happened from the chief minister’s residence.
Modi speaks often about the inability of the Congress to protect India’s citizens from terrorist violence. He will not be able to deflect the truth that his own minister was responsible for the killing of Gujaratis easily. Modi’s record at protecting his citizens has been poor. Another of his deputy home ministers, Amit Shah, is barred from entering Gujarat today because of the charges he faces. Modi’s anti-terrorism force chief, DG Vanzara, is in jail for murder, also the result of an independent investigation.
It is astonishing, given the failures, that Modi continues to keep the portfolio of the home ministry. He has publicly attackedTeesta Setalvad, the Gujarati activist whose persistence has been crucial in bringing about all these convictions. But it is true that Gujaratis like me, who are still ashamed for our conduct of 10 years ago, are today proud of her and what she has achieved.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 30^th, 2012. 

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British Threat Against Ecuadorean Embassy Was a Diplomatic Blunder:

British Threat Against Ecuadorean Embassy Was a Diplomatic Blunder

By Associated Press

18 August 12

t was a warning meant to remind Ecuador that Britain's patience has limits. But as the stalemate over Julian Assange settled, it appeared London's veiled threat that it could storm Ecuador's embassy and drag Assange out has backfired - drawing supporters to the mission where the WikiLeaks founder is holed up and prompting angry denunciations from Ecuador and elsewhere.

Experts and ex-diplomats say Britain's Foreign Office, which warned Ecuador of a little known law that would allow it to side-step usual diplomatic protocols, messed up by issuing a threat it couldn't back up.

"It was a big mistake," said former British ambassador Oliver Miles. "It puts the British government in the position of asking for something illegitimate."

Britain's warning was carried in a set of notes delivered to Ecuadorean diplomats Wednesday as they tried to negotiate an agreement over Assange, who has spent nearly two months holed up at the Latin American nation's London mission in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted over allegations of sexual assault.

The notes, published by Britain on Thursday, said ominously that keeping Assange at the embassy was incompatible with international law. They added: "You should be aware that there is a legal basis in the U.K. - the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act - which would allow us to take action to arrest Mr. Assange in the current premises of the embassy."

Britain passed the law in 1987, after a deadly shooting in 1984 in which a Libyan diplomat opened fire on demonstrators from within his country's London embassy, killing a British police officer.

The Ecuadoreans were outraged by the notes, accusing Britain of threatening to assault their embassy and calling a crisis meeting of the Union of South American Nations. The ripples from the controversy continued to spread Friday, with Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying in a brief message posted to Twitter that the issue raised questions about diplomatic protections.

Britain's Foreign Office insists its missive was "not a threat," something that Miles dismissed with a laugh.

"If I tell you, ‘I'm not threatening you but I DO have a very large stick here,' it's a question of semantics," he said.

Assange, who has been holed up inside Ecuador's small embassy since June 19, claims the Swedish case is merely the opening gambit in a Washington-orchestrated plot to make him stand trial in the United States - something disputed by both Swedish authorities and the women involved.

In a radio interview Friday, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa said he feared that Assange could face a possible death penalty if he was prosecuted and convicted in the United States.

"I am not in agreement with everything that Julian Assange has done but does that mean he deserves the death penalty, life in prison, to be extradited to a third country? Please! Where is the proportionality between the crime and the punishment? Where is due process?" Correa said.

Correa insisted that his nation was not seeking to undermine Sweden's attempts to question Assange over allegations made by two women who accuse him of sexual misconduct during a visit to the country in mid-2010.

"The main reason why Julian Assange was given diplomatic asylum was because his extradition to a third country was not guaranteed, in no way was it done to interrupt the investigations of Swedish justice over an alleged crime. In no way," Correa said.

Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who is representing Assange pro bono, would not disclose his legal team's next steps now that Britain has refused safe passage.

"It's something we have to study and evaluate, that in the coming days or weeks we will have to decide," he told The Associated Press by phone in Colombia.

He said it would be up to Ecuador, as a sovereign state, to decide whether to appeal to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in order to compel Britain to grant Assange safe passage out of the country.

With negotiations continuing between Britain, Sweden and Ecuador, diplomats and legal experts said that the U.K. should never have raised its legal threat to barge into Ecuador's embassy to detain Assange.

Some lawyers have pointed out that the act itself notes that an embassy's diplomatic status can only be revoked if the move is "permissible under international law" - a high hurdle to jump given the age-old deference given to foreign embassy buildings.

Rebecca Niblock, an extradition lawyer, said it was tough to see how Britain could follow through on the threat to nab Assange from inside the embassy, while staying true to what she called "a fundamental premise of international law."

Extradition expert Julian Knowles was a dissenting voice, saying that he believed the Brits could, and would, be able to revoke Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status if Assange persisted in what Knowles described as "abuse of the rule of law."

Knowles, who has been critical of Assange, said British officials could arrest the Australian once the diplomatic and media ferment faded.

"I think they'll take the view that within a few days or weeks it will all blow over," he said.

But most observers backed the sentiment expressed by Britain's former ambassador to Russia, Tony Brenton, who told BBC radio that the Foreign Office had "slightly overreached themselves here."

"I fear the government roared rather like a mouse in this case, and would be best not to have made that threat," lawyer Alex Carlile told Sky News.

Britain's government seems to have toned down its rhetoric. Speaking to reporters Thursday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted that Britain would act within the law.

"We are committed to working with them amicably to resolve the matter," he said. "There is no threat here to storm an embassy."

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Rachel Maddow: Dissecting the details of ‘Romney-care’

Rachel Maddow: Dissecting the details of ‘Romney-care’:
(Clarification by Prof. from MIT & Harvard on Affordable care Act.
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Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan keeps his links with Vadodara alive - Times Of India

Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan keeps his links with Vadodara alive - Times Of India:

Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan keeps his links with Vadodara alive

Sachin Sharma & Prashant Rupera, TNN Oct 8, 2009, 02.53am IST

Tags:

• Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

VADODARA: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan left Vadodara almost four decades ago. But, it's a city he could never forget. From helping girls of the minority community affected in the 2002 riots to lecturing at the MS University, where he studied as an undergraduate, Venky has kept the links alive. He even inquires about the old servant at his house whenever he calls friends here.

When Venky heard that the riots had left Professor JS Bandukwala of MSU's physics department distressed, with mobs attacking his house here, he asked him to leave Vadodara and join him in Seattle.

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So concerned was he that Venky helped Bandukwala in a programme he ran for the welfare and education of Muslim girl students. ''He used to send cheques to me regularly for financing the education of such underprivileged girls,'' said Bandukwala.

In fact, Bandukwala is one of the few persons who has kept in touch with the scientist until very recently on a personal level even as others had academic interactions with him. A couple of months back, the Nobel laureate had asked Bandukwala to visit him at Cambridge.

While Bandukwala joined the university soon after Venkatraman passed out, he had known him as the former was close to Venkatraman's father CV Ramakrishnan. ''Venky was always a person who liked to work in different fields and it is no wonder that he researched chemistry extensively after graduating in physics. His interest in science was total,'' said Bandukwala.

But above all, Bandukwala said, Venkatraman was a thorough gentleman and a caring person. ''He used to inquire about the servant, who used to take care of him when he stayed with his parents at the JM Hall on the university hostel campus,'' he added.

Some of his teachers recall how Venkatraman had visited MSU to deliver a lecture on January 31, 2005, on 'Biophysical approaches in deciphering the structure of molecular macromolecules and macromolecular complexes'. His teacher and retired professor Madhu Shah said she was proud that she attended a lecture of her student. ''We are proud of him and he deserved it,'' she said about Venkatraman bagging the Nobel Prize.

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FOCUS | Inequality Undermines Prosperity

FOCUS | Inequality Undermines Prosperity:

Economist Joseph Stiglitz. (photo: Roosevelt Institute)

Inequality Undermines Prosperity

By Joseph Stiglitz, Los Angeles Times

28 July 2012

To fix the economy, we must boost demand. To do that, we have to address inequality.

espite what the debt and deficit hawks would have you believe, we can't cut our way back to prosperity. No large economy has ever recovered from serious recession through austerity. But there is another factor holding our economy back: inequality.

Any solution to today's problems requires addressing the economy's underlying weakness: a deficiency in aggregate demand. Firms won't invest if there is no demand for their products. And one of the key reasons for lack of demand is America's level of inequality - the highest in the advanced countries.

Because those at the top spend a much smaller portion of their income than those in the bottom and middle, when money moves from the bottom and middle to the top (as has been happening in America in the last dozen years), demand drops. The best way to promote employment today and sustained economic growth for the future, therefore, is to focus on the underlying problem of inequality. And this better economic performance in turn will generate more tax revenue, improving the country's fiscal position.

Even supply-side economists, who emphasize the importance of increasing productivity, should understand the benefits of attacking inequality. America's inequality does not come solely from market forces; those are at play in all advanced countries. Rather, much of the growth of income and wealth at the top in recent decades has come from what economists call rent-seeking - activities directed more at increasing the share of the pie they get rather than increasing the size of the pie itself.

Some examples: Corporate executives in the U.S. take advantage of deficiencies in our corporate governance laws to seize an increasing share of corporate revenue, enriching themselves at the expense of other stakeholders. Pharmaceutical companies successfully lobbied to prohibit the federal government - the largest buyer of drugs - from bargaining over drug prices, resulting in taxpayers overpaying by an estimated half a trillion dollars in about a decade. Mineral companies get resources at below competitive prices. Oil companies and other corporations get "gifts" in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in corporate welfare, through special benefits hidden in the tax code. Some of this rent-seeking is very subtle - our bankruptcy laws give derivatives (such as those risky products that led to the $150-billion AIG bailout) priority but say that student debt can't be discharged, even in bankruptcy.

Rent-seeking distorts the economy and makes it less efficient. When, for instance, speculation gains get taxed at a lower rate than true innovation, resources that could support productivity-enhancing activities get diverted to gambling in the stock market and other financial markets. So too, much of the income in the financial sector, including that derived from predatory lending and abusive credit card practices, derives not from making our economy more efficient but from rent-seeking.

If we curbed these abuses by the financial sector, more resources (especially the scarce talent of some of our brightest young people) might be devoted to making a stronger economy rather than to exploiting the financially unsophisticated. And the banks might actually go back to the boring business of lending rather than high-risk and often opaque speculation.

Curbing rent-seeking is not that complicated (aside from the politics). It would take better financial regulations, fairer and better-designed bankruptcy laws, stronger and better-enforced antitrust laws, corporate governance laws that limit the power of CEOs to effectively set their own pay, and, in all of these areas, more transparency. Because so much of the income at the top is from rent-seeking, more progressive taxation (and in particular, taxation of capital gains) is necessary to discourage it. And if the additional revenue is used by the government for high-return public investments, there are double benefits.

Countries with high inequality tend to underinvest in their collective well-being, spending too little on such things as education, technology and infrastructure. The wealthy don't need public schools and parks. That's another reason economies with high inequality grow more slowly. Indeed, the United States has grown much more slowly since the 1980s, while inequality has been growing more rapidly than it did in the decades after World War II, when the country grew together.

Public investments are of particular importance today; they increase demand in the short run and productivity in the medium to long term. Increasing public investment would help make up for continued weakness in the private sector. Investments in training for new jobs could facilitate the economy's structural transformation, helping it move from sectors with declining employment (like manufacturing) to more dynamic sectors. Strengthening education would help restore the American dream and help make the country once again a land of opportunity where the talents of our young people are fully utilized.

The right says that we can achieve greater equality only by belt-tightening. But that vision would result in a slowdown of the economy from which all would suffer. Because so much of America's inequality arises from rent-seeking and other activities that distort the economy, curtailing inequality would actually strengthen the economy. Investing public money in the collective good rather than allowing it to be captured by rent-seekers would enhance growth at the same time it reduced inequality.

By giving priority to the austerity/deficit cutting agenda, we'll fail to achieve any of our goals. But by putting the equality agenda first, we can achieve all of them: We can have both more equality and more growth. And if we get better growth, our deficit will be reduced - it was weak growth that caused the deficit, not the other way around. We can achieve the kind of shared prosperity that was the hallmark of the country in the decades after World War II.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was chief economist of the World Bank. His latest book is "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future."

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