Barackface

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Does The World Government Have To Await A Total Spread Of Democracy?

English: Emblem of the United Nations. Color is #d69d36 from the image at http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/flag.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Global Poverty, World Government, Soft Racism

A representative for every country on the planet so as to cover all of the land surface on the planet, voting in New York City, hosting regular parliamentary debates, voting for leadership --- what are the problems?

Will it be one country one vote? That might not be democratic. Voting has to reflect the populations in those countries.

Bill Gates is right. The only way to truly tackle global disease is by creating a world government, and no, the UN in its current form is not it. Somebody tell the powers that be, World War II has long been over. Need to reset the pieces on the board.

You could create two chambers. The lower chamber would have one country, one representative, with each representative getting a vote that is in direct proportion to that country's population.

There would be an upper chamber. There it is one country, one vote, regardless of population. But this would be a much weaker chamber, mostly casting symbolic votes.

There would be a Security Council, one representative for each continent: Asia, Africa, North America, South and Central America, Europe, represented by the most populous country on each continent. Another five seats would be reserved for the most populous countries not thus covered.

There would be an Economic Council, representing the 10 largest economies on the planet. The World Bank and the IMF would be under this Council. The Council would report to the General Assembly.

What seems to be the problem? That many participating countries are not even democracies? Bob Dole once laughed out loud that Gaddafi's Libya seemed to be chairing the Human Rights Council. "You hear many jokes about the UN, but nothing beats the real thing!"

This is a tricky one. Does the world need to wait for a total spread of democracy to have a genuine world government? Or can it go for it now?

I'd argue the world does not need to wait for that moment, instead it can hasten that moment by creating a genuine world government, that works in total transparency, and through regular democratic voting.

How will this world government fund itself? Each member country would be required to give 1% of its GDP to this world government. That is the tax you pay to be a member.

The International Court in Hague would become the judiciary limb.

The Secretary General would be elected by the two chambers through majority vote. One country nominating a person, another seconding her/him makes you a candidate. If no candidate gets a majority in the first round, the top two vie again. Once elected, the Secretary General forms a cabinet. Each continent must be represented. One would think a 10 member cabinet would suffice.

Creating this world government would be the fastest way to create a world where there is a rules based order. Right now we have an order based on armies. Very expensive armies.

This world government would have an army, and a police. Done right countries like America suddenly will need a much smaller defense budget. It will see a huge peace dividend with which to build infrastructure. It has ageing roads and bridges. It could start paying down on its huge debt. I am sure China would appreciate.

This is not a loss of power for America. The false power of white supremacy that bemoans 3,000 dead at the World Trade Center and goes ahead and kills a million people in Iraq!

This world government through its heartthrob of democracy and transparency would be the fastest way to wipe out global poverty and disease, and that is before it even spends any of its money.

Note that in this model you are not creating constituencies and holding elections to a world parliament. Each sovereign country participates. And the UN bureaucracy is rebuilt along meritocratic lines. The quota system that allows member countries to populate the ranks has led to a bloat. No wonder Bob Dole cracked jokes.

The UN bureaucracy has to be rebuilt along meritocratic lines.

Done right, this world government takes the sting out of regional trade deals. The WTO should be a wing of this world government. This world government would be the best way to deal with climate change. With terrorism. Terrorists thrive in the huge blind spots that exist between sovereign countries. You need not dilute that sovereignty. But you do need to get rid of the blind spots. A world government does that.

What would it take? Who will tie the bell round the cat's neck?

This will also create space for a new global reserve currency. China came up with a pretty good idea early in 2009. The US shot it down. And so now the Chinese currency competes with the dollar in places like Africa.

A world government taken to its logical conclusion will create a world by as early as 2030 where people move around from country to country, like goods do today, and that does not seem to create problems. Immigration is like terrorism, it exists in the blind spots between sovereign nations. In a global world, there should only be travel, no immigration.

A world government is long overdue. There is no need to wait for a total spread of democracy before we can make it happen. Like Amartya Sen said, "A country does not become fit for democracy, a country becomes fit through democracy."

The world government idea will not become possible because there has been a total spread of democracy, but creating a world government will hasten that total spread of democracy on the planet.

Why does the world need to wait for a major Climate Change related disaster before it can whip up a world government? Why can't it be done by world leaders who will see the light? It will save America hundreds of billions of dollars. Every year. We will conquer poverty and disease.

The world government's Health Department will do work that the Gates Foundation can only dream of. Rich white guys have their limitations.

Imagine that world government putting money into R&D on Energy. We will see nuclear fusion happen. The world government's space agency will take humans beyond the solar system. Scoot over, Elon Musk.

How about having two chambers? In the lower chamber, each country's vote is according to its population. In the upper chamber, each country's vote is proportional to its GDP, the GDP calculated for PPP (purchasing power parity). Will that make America feel better? Both chambers would have equal power. I am sorry if it sounds like campaign finance gone horribly wrong. I am just trying to get America to come on board.

I think there is a way to blow up China's internet firewall. You do that (use Musk's internet satellites) and there is no way China can stay away from fundamental political reform. Free speech is the most important of all human rights. You put that into play, and all other parts of democracy follow very quickly. That and that leaves only Africa as a big chunk without democracy. Arabs will also come along. With fracking and green energy, the House of Saud does not have that kind of muscle any more. It will fall and make way for democracy. Why can't they take about 10 billion for themselves and let the country be?

Scarface

Al Pacino Interview

all 5ft 7in of him .... he is charismatic – in life, as on screen, you can’t take your eyes off his face. Yet he is low-key, easygoing and incongruously humble. Pacino still appears genuinely bemused by the commotion he has caused since he became the poster boy, along with Robert De Niro, of the golden age of US cinema in the 1970s. ..... In the space of five years, he conquered a series of self-eviscerating outsider roles that are still considered some of the greatest in film history: the inscrutable, passive-aggressive Michael Corleone in The Godfather I and II ..... Out of step with the power franchises of the next decade, he fell out of favour in the 1980s – though the operatic paroxysms of Scarface struck a popular chord. His box-office weight was reinvigorated in the more nuanced films of the 1990s, with Carlito’s Way, Heat and Donnie Brasco ..... Great parts, he says, like great loves, are very rare. 'Most of the time you’re just trying to survive. All the work isn’t the same. Sometimes there’s only so much you can do in it. You reconcile yourself to that. Only occasionally you find a role that really asks you to go there.’ ...... He has performed in about 100 films and plays, has been nominated for eight Oscars – he won for The Scent of a Woman in 1993 – and has been awarded numerous Emmys and Golden Globes. He also has two Tonys and was nominated in 2010 for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on Broadway. He is not the kind of guy to 'sit back and smell the golf balls’. ...... Pacino gives no sense that he has in some way 'arrived’ anywhere or, indeed, that he is a master of anything – he is still 'striving’ for all of that, he says. He is insatiably questioning, grappling for the right words to accurately express what he feels more as instincts; conveying his meaning instead with a glance or a pause. As the director Mike Nichols has said, 'Al is consulting somewhere else. ...... ’ He prefers the certainty of a text on which to project his emotions; it 'frees him up’, he says. 'It’s all about the play for me,’ he declares with the zeal of a wide-eyed undergraduate. It is remarkable that he is so unjaded. It was his 75th birthday only a few days ago. His girlfriend, the actress Lucila Solá, 36, and his children, 14-year-old twins Olivia and Anton, threw him a party. ....... after a few films in the past four years taken on for financial reasons. (He lost millions in 2010 when his business manager was found to be embezzling his money.) His recent work heralds a potential fifth-act renaissance where he is once again emotionally in tune with his material. ....... late last year he delivered a self-reflective performance in the darkly comic The Humbling, about the sixtysomething actor Simon Axler, who, having lived vicariously through his roles, finds that, when forced to abandon the theatre, he has no real life left to speak of. ..... by his own acknowledgement acting is the very life-giving force of his existence. 'It’s sort of like breathing to me. It gave me life. It educated me, as little as I am educated. It saved me.’ ......... Like the young Dylan, Pacino was a 'purist,’ a South Bronx street kid turned ardent theatre actor who was entirely unprepared for the distorting lens of fame that The Godfather brought him in 1972. 'I had a strange reaction to it. The reaction wasn’t positive. I was catapulted out of a cannon.

People are more accepting of fame today because of all the media outlets. Young people even aspire to it,’ he says with incredulity.
........ Pacino 'felt bombarded by life’ and by people who approached him on the streets. 'I became more aware of myself, constantly reminded that I had this name because [strangers] kept calling me by it.’ Pacino says he has always been 'a loner’, 'very sensitive’ – he still is. 'Being an outsider is part of being an artist. You try to conform. But some of us just can’t. I didn’t know what was expected of me. I still don’t.’ ...... he was drinking, seeking 'an anodyne’ to fame and a respite from the exhaustion of assuming his characters’ identities. 'That’s how I played things then. I had to absorb the character. I never protected myself. Michael [Corleone] affected me for quite a few years afterwards. I sort of kept that internal thing.’ ......... 'I like it here, where my senses are. I don’t need to be “put out” any more.’ The steadiness of therapy, which he still does several times a week, also helped to support him. 'I’d be on seven times a week if I could,’ he says, chuckling. ......... 'Sonny’ (Pacino’s nickname; he was christened Alfredo) was instead close to his grandfather, a plasterer, and – above all – his mother. Her various jobs included cinema usher; sometimes she took him to work with her. An only child, he retreated into his imagination, re-enacting scenes from the cinema to 'fill up the loneliness’. At five, he was doing some of Ray Milland’s most dissolute alcoholic scenes from Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. ...... 'She was very well read, sensitive and intuitive, but troubled.’ He sighs. 'She suffered from depression on and off.’ ...... By the age of nine he was smoking and, at 13, was supplied with booze by the local cop. His baseball team doubled as a quasi-street gang. 'They were the best friends I ever made. A lot of them died very young with the needle, heroin.’ (In his first film, The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, Pacino played a junkie, a role that he based on his lost friends.) ......... He left school at 16 and moved to the West Village, working odd jobs to save for drama school, and joining the 'fervent’ cafe theatre scene. It was here, at 17, that he met Laughton, who would become a crucial professional and emotional fulcrum for Pacino, helping to shoulder the catastrophic blows of the deaths of his mother, when he was 21, and of his grandfather the following year. ....... He channelled his disorientation and grief into his performances at the Actors Studio, which he joined at 23, under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, who encouraged him to mine the emotion of real-life experiences. The class was predominantly 'educated’ students. Pacino hints at lingering feelings of inadequacy at that time. 'I knew I was this vagabond kid,’ he says. ........ he had to fight. He auditioned three times for the role of Michael Corleone – Francis Ford Coppola alone wanted him. Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Warren Beatty – until Marcia Lucas, the wife of George, who edited the multiple screen tests, told them, 'Cast Pacino. He undresses you with his eyes.’ ...... Through them alone, Pacino would drip-feed us glimpses of what lurked beneath Michael’s froideur. None of this Pacino can explain. Acting, for him, is 'freeing the unconsciousness, allowing it to take over. Mostly consciousness gets in the way.’ ........... 'I was blinded by the spotlight on my face. ....... In 1989 Diane Keaton, his then girlfriend ...... Their 20-year on-off affair, like most of his relationships, was 'complicated’. In her 2014 memoir Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, she wrote, '… those eyes! I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine… For the next 20 years, I kept losing a man I never had.’ ...... A lone wolf, Pacino has never married any of his girlfriends, a long list of strong, smart, generally unstarry women including Jan Tarrant, the acting coach with whom he has a 26-year-old daughter, Julie, and the actress Beverly D’Angelo, the mother of Olivia and Anton. He has been with Solá for the past seven years. ........ New York, where Pacino is still stalwartly based ...... 'My kids are part of why I’m still here. When you have children you attack roles differently. They become the priority.’ He tells me his 'bunker’ at his home in Beverly Hills, a Pacino-esque version of a garden shed where he goes to focus, has been taken over by them. 'So now I’m pottering around the house trying to find new corners to work in. They just bought me a rocking chair for the porch.’ He beams. ......... he is in talks over a script about Napoleon’s final days ...... 'I’m a New Yorker. I drive like a cabbie’ ...... He is fired up after seeing a production of Hamlet last night. 'It’s so wild that play. I’ve read it since I was a boy, but I still can’t get over it. I could see it a 1,000 times a year. The joy! And I’m not even in it.’ ....... 'The theatre is the flashlight for me. It’s done everything for me since I was three years old. I’m not in the playpen now. But I’m still playing.’

Friday, May 15, 2015

Indian Farmers And The Land Bill

English: Daytime scene showing the pre-monsoon air over India. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Modi were to ditch the land bill, that would not have any impact on an unfriendly monsoon, that would not have any impact on the unfavorable global conditions. The land bill impacts less than 1% of the land owned by Indian farmers, maybe 0.1%. But Modi's land bill is bearing the brunt of what is happening to all the land held by all Indian farmers. Farmers are 60% of India, and India is a democracy. The Chinese Communist Party never had to pass any land bill. They took what they needed, as they needed them.

The Indian farmers' concerns need to be addressed, even though they are largely independent of the land bill. They are legitimate voters with legitimate concerns. There is very little to do on the monsoon front in the immediate term, but major irrigation projects must be in the offing for the long term, there is not much that can be done to bring the global markets in favor. So what to do?

Communication is key. They have to feel the empathy. This is where leadership comes into play. Modi's megaphone comes handy here. So far the attempt has been to say the land bill is not anti-farmer. Well, what is the opposition to the land bill is only a symptom. The real issue is the farmers do have genuine concerns. Modi could do well to talk about the monsoon and the global markets.

Even on the land bill, the talk has been about infrastructure and industry. Irrigation has to be talked about in the same breath. Indian farmers understand irrigation even more than they understand rural infrastructure. Irrigation also speaks to the monsoon woes.

When Gandhi asked the Indian people to come forward, he did not offer lollipops. He asked for sacrifice. Modi can also ask people for sacrifice. If you want a better future for your children, this land bill needs to be passed. The next generation can not be as dependent on agriculture as this one. Usi mein bhalai hai. People will understand.

But talking about the next generation is not enough. Farmers are not going away any time soon. They have concerns just like the industrialists and anyone else. They are also voters. They are also consumers. The government in Delhi has to make its very best attempts to do right by them. In the immediate term. There is no skipping that part. They voted for you with expectations. Those expectations have to be met.

Indian Farmers Going Through A Downturn

The land bill, even if passed, will impact a very small part of land held by the farmers in India. But a bad monsoon or an unfavorable global market, neither of which are the doings of the government, can drag the government down, because India is a democracy, and one of the ways voters vent their anger is by voting one way or the other. The farmers of India are going through a downturn right now, and the land bill has become the punchbag for it.

For Modi's year-old government, storm brewing in rural India

From the start of the crop season last October through March, India's farm exports have fallen more than 11 percent to $15 billion, as the impact of the global commodities glut has been sharpened by events like Iran's nuclear talks and a currency dip in Brazil......... The fall in exports has depressed domestic farmgate prices just as unseasonal rain damaged winter crops such as wheat, potato, chickpea and rapeseed. Farmers have little money now to buy seeds for the summer sowing, and meteorologists have predicted the annual June-October monsoon will be below par, which means the next crop may also fail. ..... some of the events that have led to the crisis are beyond the government's control....... Until last year, for example, Iran paid a premium for Indian sugar, soymeal, barley and basmati rice. Now, with the easing of some Western sanctions, Iran is looking to buy elsewhere........ Cotton exports have been hit by China's decision to abandon a stockpiling plan, while non-basmati rice shipments face headwinds after Thailand decided to run down its stockpiles....... On the other side of the world, a decline in the Brazilian real following a scandal at oil giant Petrobras last year has weighed on sugar prices, making Indian exports uncompetitive......... Meanwhile, the fall in global crude oil prices has depressed prices of grains and oilseeds used for biofuels. It also trimmed freight rates, making imports of commodities such as corn and soymeal from South America cheaper for Asian buyers........ A strong rupee - despite a fall last week - has further made India's farm exports uncompetitive and imports cheaper......... A major commodities trader has said the decline in agricultural exports could be as much as $5 billion, or nearly 20 percent, for the crop year to September, which would be the steepest on record....... In the villages, farmers struggle to understand why they are earning less. "How come prices of all crops are going down?" asked Anil Sathe, a farmer in Kamargaon who said he has had to start working as a part-time labourer to make ends meet........

Farming accounts for only 15 percent of India's $2 trillion economy but provides a livelihood to 60 percent of its 1.25 billion people. A crisis in the countryside would have severe political impact.

India's powerful farming lobby turns on Modi

Farmer Tarachand Mathur was one of millions of Indians who voted Narendra Modi into power last year, but the government's push to make it easier for big business to forcibly acquire land means he won't be backing the premier again. .... "The rain gods don't hear us and Modi has also turned deaf to our cries.".... "We thought Modi's government would address our problems, that is why we voted for him. But look what he is doing. We will not back him again," said the 70-year-old as he smoked a hookah pipe.

Rahul Gandhi asks ‘visiting’ PM to meet farmers

"Our PM is on a tour of India right now. He has come here for some days. ..... The insinuation that Modi was jet-setting around the globe while farmers were committing suicides forms part of Rahul's now-familiar attacks at the PM in his post-sabbatical avatar.

Land bill: I live for the poor, says PM Modi

Talking in the context of the government's affordable housing scheme and that land acquired under the new law would benefit the poor, Modi asked, "Who is going to live in them? Are industrialists going to stay there... will Mukesh Ambani live there?" ...... "the US President (Barack Obama) as also the head of the World Bank and IMF all accept that India is the fastest growing economy of the world".

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Barack Obama Africa Foundation

English: Barack Obama delivers a speech at the University of Southern California (Video of the speech) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have no advice for how Hillary should run for president, but I do have advice on how Barack Obama could retire. I think he should launch, wait. There was speculation somewhere that he could become Supreme Court Justice. I don't believe that rumor. There was a similar rumor in Bill Clinton's final year in office. So I don't believe. But I would like to believe. I think Barack Obama becoming Supreme Court Justice would be awesome, for the black community. The constant reminder that this dude was in the White House might impact an entire generation. Heck, he might even become Chief Justice some day.

But he should do what would make him happy. And, perhaps, just like Billie Clinton, Barack Obama is a little too kinetic to sit on the Supreme Court.

My advice is, he should launch a Barack Obama Africa Foundation. Africa is the last continent. There is still so much political chaos on that continent. Much of the poverty and disease emanates from that chaos. As a former POTUS he might have both the stature and the distance to be able to bring people together. The foundation would be dedicated to (1) a total spread of democracy on the continent through peaceful means, (2) strengthening of democracies, (3) rooting out corruption, (4) attracting large scale FDI into the emerging economies, and to (5) eventually bring about an economic union of the continent.

That is my advice for Barack Obama.

I said very early on, the best thing Barack Obama can do as president for the black people, is to do the very best he can do as president. Just do your job. Now I am saying, in retirement he should perhaps consider giving himself fully to the continent of Africa.