Archive for the ‘David Brooks’ tag
The Death of Common Sense
http://thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=147364
The Death of Common Sense
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
by Mosharraf Zaidi
Common sense must have died and gone to heaven. If it has indeed died, we can be sure it rests peacefully in heaven because anything that is violated as frequently as common sense has been deserves nothing but five-star treatment from the Lord. Unbridled corporate greed and public policy for lunatics may partially explain the global financial markets mess, and its national subtexts in countries far, wide and diverse, from Hungary to the United States, from Iceland to Pakistan. The real story, however, is the globalisation of an unmitigated culture of direct and obvious violations of the rule of common sense.
The common sense rule has always been pretty simple. If something doesn’t make sense, it is not worth doing. It is the ruthless insistence on doing things that don’t make sense that has got global and local markets where they are today. When economic and cultural gurus continue to peddle this bankrupt ideology of senselessness, it is incumbent on all the simple people to ask for a timeout, and insist on common sense for a change.
Let us leave aside the comedy. To watch bankers and television anchors try to sell the idea that the IMF has endorsed government “policy” as an achievement of the government is hilarious. To watch them try to imply that an IMF endorsement is a stamp of some sort of highly sought-after approval, even more so. But let us leave aside the comedy.
Countries go to the IMF because if they don’t they would default. Not wanting to default is understandable, but the real question is how countries end up in a situation where the choice is between the IMF and default. This is not complicated. When countries spend more than they have, they need to borrow money. When they don’t look like they can pay off that money, the usual lenders stop lending money. That’s when countries are faced with the choice of going to the IMF–which is a lender of last resort–or defaulting.
Solving a problem requires knowing what the problem is. The problem is not that no one but the IMF will lend Pakistan any money. The problem is that Pakistan spends more money than it has.
In the last month, Pakistan is not the only bankrupt country that has needed the assistance of the IMF. Much smaller countries have in fact managed to get much more money out of the IMF–including Hungary and Ukraine. Forget measuring size by population, where Pakistan (at 172 million) is a monstrously larger country than most. Even by the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) measure, Pakistan’s brilliant IMF cheerleaders have managed a paltry $7.6 billion loan against a quota of 1,033.7 SDRs. How does this compare with Hungary (population 10 million) or Ukraine (population 46 million)? Well, with a marginally higher quota of 1,372 SDRs Ukraine has managed to score a dramatically bigger loan of $16.4 billion–more than double Pakistan’s. And Hungary, with almost the exact same quota of 1,038.4 SDRs, has scored a $15.7 billion loan; again, nearly double what Pakistan’s IMF cheerleaders managed.
Before Pakistan’s fringe rightwing gets all excited, it’s important to note the real reasons why Ukraine and Hungary (and even Iceland, in terms of its quota) did dramatically better in securing a serious loan than Pakistan. It has got nothing to do with race, religion, or the clash of civilisations that rightwingers would love to blame.
The real reason Pakistan got a second-rate deal from the IMF is that Pakistan has second-rate perception management and third-rate economic management. If I were desperate for a loan, I wouldn’t go around the neighbourhood with a begging bowl and a loudspeaker. I would hire a lawyer, an accountant and an image consultant. What did Pakistan do? It cheated the lawyers by not restoring the judiciary, it let the accountant (Ishaq Dar) walk away, and it put its best image consultant (Hussain Haqqani) in the most unwinnable job in Pakistani politics (ambassador to the US).
The only thing that Pakistan, Hungary and Ukraine have in common, other than a culinary obsession with red meat, is a lack of common sense. Common sense is universal, whether you were raised as an Orthodox Christian in Kiev, a Jew in Budapest, or a Muslim in Karachi. If you were fortunate enough to have a mother and father when you were growing up, then one value you were taught, irrespective of faith, geography or race, was to live within your means. Countries that are running to the IMF are countries that live beyond their means. But even in this list of budgetary infamy, Pakistan is animatedly larger-than-life. While Ukraine has a budget deficit of 1.7 percent, Pakistan’s budget deficit is over 7 percent. Next year, the IMF expects Ukraine to balance its budget, but it only expects Pakistan to reduce its deficit to around 4 percent.
Pakistanis should not be celebrating the IMF loan. They should be asking their representatives in Parliament why Pakistan needs all this money. This too is no mystery. It needs the money to pay off previous loans, and to pay for its security. Again, common sense suggests that once you are in a hole, you need to stop digging. Instead, by getting the IMF loan, Shaukat Tareen has just provided Pakistanis more shovels to dig with. So, more loans to pay off earlier loans. Common sense this is not.
For all the ridiculous and comedic scenes Pakistan-watchers get to indulge in, the truth is that the grandest violation of common sense is being engineered in a post-modern America that, as David Brooks rightly noted a couple of weeks ago, is unable to deal with scarcity. Almost a quarter century after Lee Iacocca managed to massage massive loan guarantees out of the Reagan Administration, Congress is now examining the umpteenth bailout for the hopeless Big Three pygmies of the US automobile industry. President-elect Obama could hardly have inherited a worse economic situation. Moscow, Mirpur or Michigan, more of the same just won’t do. Of course, we know common sense has died and gone to heaven when Thomas Friedman, the otherwise hugely reasonable globalisation guru, decides to dedicate a Sunday column and an appearance on “Meet the Press,” to the passionate advocacy of more spending as a solution to too much spending.
The solution to spending too much is to spend less. That’s what Shaukat Tareen, Thomas Friedman, and every IMF cheerleader alive was taught as a child. Pakistani and global financial markets don’t need more hot money to fill the gaping hole that a generation of greed and excess has left behind. Common sense dictates that the markets need a righteous spanking. But common sense has died, and gone to heaven. Inna lillahay…
Obama and the Revenge of Democracy
Thursday, November 06, 2008
by Mosharraf Zaidi
Perception is reality. So while there is an almighty chorus of those that are warning the people of the world to be cautious and not invest so emphatically in the hope that the US election result has inspired, it is important to listen not only to our heads, but also to our hearts. Barack Hussein Obama’s ascension to the office of President of the United States is the most globally transcendent political moment of our time. His name, race, class, education, temperament and intelligence represent the most powerful counter-narrative to the global anti-Americanism at the heart of so much of the world’s violence and conflict. The vast stock of stimulus for hatred of America has just shrunk–who he is ensures this much. The challenge is whether or not a President Obama will actualise the potential for change that the candidate Obama inspired. We don’t know everything about the future, but we do know some things. America will not anytime soon give up its position as the dominant global power.
While the contours of US foreign policy and the exercise of US military power will not significantly change during President Obama’s first term, the narrative and counter-narrative between America and the rest of the world in general, and the Muslim world in particular, will. There are several reasons why the conversation will shift, from a conversation between civilisations (us and them), to a conversation within one civilisation (human).
The first reason is Obama himself. The intensity with which African Americans and Americans in general will feel a sense of history is one thing. The sense of global connectivity that Obama inspires among people all over the world is entirely another. Obama is the face of a new world. He is uniquely American in a way that no president before him has been. The ingredients are so unmistakably global and new-age that for most analysts beyond a certain age it is fundamentally incomprehensible just how global his brand is and what’s inside the box: his Kenyan father, his Indonesian stepfather, his banker grandmother, his soldier grandfather, his Jewish chief strategist, his African American wife, and his post-iPod and post-Pokemon daughters. In the conversation between Bush’s “us,” and Bin Laden’s “them,” nobody outside the Fox News tent wanted to be counted among the “us.” That tent and the label outside have changed for the better. Africans, Russians, Dalits, Venezuelans, Scots, Marxists and Muslims may not want to live in the new tent, but they sure are more likely to want to peek inside. Obama can dissolve the lines between Huntington’s and Bush’s two civilisations because he is a product of one, more germane human civilisation.
The second reason is that his election was made possible because of a new set of cultural and demographic realities that define the 21st century. At the core of the electorate that has delivered the White House to Obama is a fundamentally un-racial America. It is not pre-racial, racial, or post-racial.
The analysts and pundits have beaten the race piñata to death. Yet there is no racial candy to be found. Newly registered voters, first-time voters and voters who were tired of Bush voted for Obama with about as much a degree of consciousness about race as they demonstrate when they purchase, and listen to, Eminem and Kanye West–that is, not very much at all. Are the wounds of racism and the legacy of slavery all sorted out with Obama’s election? Of course not. But how the US deals with race has been fundamentally altered by all the antecedents of this election–American’s first black family is not the Obamas, it is and will forever be the Huxtables. The journey from there to here has been long, but ever-progressive. From the urban realities that NWA and 2 Live Crew forced American parents to confront, to the hope that a genuinely post-racial Tiger Woods and Oprah inspired for the fit and the overweight all around the world. From America’s warm embrace of a sick and fading Muhammad Ali to the manifest racial generation gap that David Chappelle’s comedy exploited. As this journey has progressed, so too has the world. This is an American phenomenon at its core, but it has global reach. The best way to understand this is to watch MTV in any country, anywhere in the world. Young people around the world simply do not carry the racial, ethnic and nationalist baggage that their parents, or even their elder siblings, do. This will lubricate and enrich the project of a conversation within one human civilisation.
The third reason a president Obama will bridge the divides of Bush’s “us vs. them” narrative is that this US election is an almighty slap in the face of democracy-cynics (and military dictatorships) all around the world. Its sheer magnificence, in terms of a procedural manual for how to rejuvenate and electrify a democracy, is unparalleled. Pakistanis, especially the politically disengaged educated middle class, should pay close attention to what their more numerous, more engaged and more mature counterparts have pulled off in this election. The record turnout that enabled Obama to win this election took place on a platform that had three very important and achievable (for a developing country) qualities. First, the voters’ lists in the United States are almost entirely automated, and they do not misrepresent the population of the US. Second, Election Day security was not a defining issue for voters in determining their willingness to vote. And, third, that the voter mobilisation, early voting and the get-out-the-vote efforts of civil society groups (like ACORN) were a clear and present threat to the Republican and neo-conservative establishment. By the time the votes are all counted up, the actual turnout for this election might be above 65%, representing as many as 135 million voters. That’s just short of the entire population of Pakistan. There are two lessons Pakistani democrats (and those all around the world) need to learn here. First, that voter turnout is a vital determinant of whether entrenched elites (like the Republican neo-cons that ruled the US for the last eight years) continue to hold power in a country. And the second, that democracy really is the best revenge, not just against dictatorships, but against failed democratically elected governments–like George W Bush’s. If Pakistanis think they’ve no options besides the current government, they are wrong. There may only be one Barack Obama, but change is an inevitable and irresistible political slogan. It must be given a chance to emerge. A President Obama that has been elected through such a grassroots movement will be a much more credible advocate for “bringing about democracy in the Middle East” and regime change there than President Bush was.
Finally, and perhaps most ironically, the most important reason that President Obama will help shift the global conversation from one between civilisations to one within a single human civilisation is the same reason he has won the election. It really is the economy. Conservative columnist David Brooks (of The New York Times) has written this week about the challenge of scarcity that the Obama administration will face. US trade and foreign relations with the rest of the world will be defined, for President Obama and beyond, by the limitations of US economic power, and its dependence on natural and human resources that are outside America, from Indian technology, to Middle Eastern oil, from Israeli and Irish innovation to Chinese productivity. The humility inspired by a genuine and irreversible alteration of global economic power dynamics will be a powerful informant of President Obama’s ability (and compulsion) to transcend the civilisation schisms that Bush soiled the world with.
Will Obama end US engagement in Iraq in 16 months, as he once promised to do during the primary campaign? Very unlikely. Will he change the strategy in Afghanistan? Or hesitate from approving hot pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban into Pakistani territory? Very unlikely. The real lesson for other countries from the US election is not only just that an Obama presidency is more enabled to deal with global challenges in the 21st century, but that the kind of change Obama has brought about is anchored in the right processes.
If Iraqis want the GI Joes out, they should seek such change too. And while Pakistanis can be forgiven for being appalled by David Ignatius’s revelations in The Washington Post this week, about the “wink-nod” agreements between the Pentagon and the PPP government, they cannot be forgiven for giving up on democracy, especially the ones that never vote. February 2008 was not the last election in Pakistani history.