Attacks on Indians in Australia- what gives?

Type in the word "attacks" on Google and the first three suggestions that appear are variations of "attacks on Indians in Australia". Not a day goes by without an Indian student, worker, or resident of Australia being attacked-- often very brutally and violently-- by Australians. And yet, some (though not all) Australian officials and politicians insist that the attacks are not indications of racism, they are functions of the fact that Indians live in sketchy neighborhoods and the like. What is the fear and worry on the part of Australians in admitting that these are racist attacks? Would doing so mean acknowledging that this ugliness is part and parcel of Australian society?

I cannot help think that if Australians or Westerners had similarly been targeted in India, there would have been a spate of articles attributing it to India's backwardness, stagnation, lack of civic values, and the like. One such incident involving a Muslim or country with a Muslim population, and the press in the US, UK, Australia, and other Western nations goes beserk with sweeping generalizations about Islam and the Muslim world. Yet the same generalizations are never offered about Western nations-- we are told that such incidents are always exceptions to a general ethos of civility, never that they are proof of lack of such civility.
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Dog earns MBA online

There has been a lot of hype in recent times about the virtues of online learning; a triumphal narrative that is inevitably accompanied by predictions about the decline of the traditional higher education model and a listing of its faults.

Here from the Chronicle of HIgher Education is a cautionary tale, about the quality of some of these online 'colleges' and 'universities'--"Unmuzzling Diploma Mills: Dog Earns M.B.A. Online"

"...The Vermont pug earned his tassles by pawing over $499 to Rochville University, which offers 'distance learning degrees based on life and career experience'.... He got back a package from a post-office box in Dubai that contained a diploma and transcripts, plus a certificate of distinction in finance and another purporting to show membership in the student council."
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The realpolitik argument for healthcare..

is raised by Greg Mankiw in an Op-ed, "Why Health Care Will Never be Equal" in The New York Times where the Harvard economist talks about cost-benefit calculations in deciding which lives might be saved through healthcare. Mankiw does not take a position on how health care should be rationed out or the value of a life calculated, but suggests that such rationing is not unreasonable, even if it makes many squeamish. I quote two paragraphs from the article: one where Mankiw, through his own example, raises the question of value, and two, the inevitability, in a sense, of inequality in healthcare.


"An optimist might hope that my doctor, or someone higher up in the health care hierarchy, made a rational cost-benefit calculation on society’s behalf. To figure out whether my treatment makes sense, one would have to weigh the cost of the drug against the benefit of an extended life. And to do that, one would have to put a dollar value on my life — the kind of calculation that makes everyone but economists squirm."

The push for universal coverage is based on the appealing premise that everyone should have access to the best health care possible whenever they need it. That soft-hearted aspiration, however, runs into the hardheaded reality that state-of-the-art health care is increasingly expensive. At some point, someone in the system has to say there are some things we will not pay for. The big question is, who? The government? Insurance companies? Or consumers themselves? And should the answer necessarily be the same for everyone?"

But, there is another ready example we can find in the US where such realpolitik calculations do not apply in the name of cost-saving--- and that is the justice system. We do not say that some lives are worth less than others and that, accordingly, it is okay for such people not to get justice or to get a lesser quality of justice.

Obviously, the justice system functions differently from the healthcare system, but justice (and the larger machinery of law and order) is not a profit-oriented system in the way that healthcare is, even though there are plenty of private agencies that make a fortune off the criminal justice system. The justice system does incur significant costs- the cost of housing one prisoner in California, I learnt from the local news yesterday, is $ 49,000 per year. The state of California spends this money even as it cuts funding for teachers, education, mental health patients and the like.

The justice system is not perfect, but-- and this is key-- it aspires to perfectability, to the ideal of justice for all. And American society seems to agree that this is a worthwhile objective. Why not treat healthcare the same way? Better still, why not treat healthcare as a matter of justice?
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Global Crisis, Global Consumption, Global Citizenship

The start of another academic year, a couple of book and journal projects in the pipeline, and running Interjunction mean that blog stamina is a little low. For the next few months, I plan to post one longish reflection every two weeks or so, and otherwise keep to short comments and sharing interesting things encountered in various media.

For some time now, I've been trying to grasp the big picture about the global, comprised of the many causes and issues about our 'global' destiny that occupy so many of us, in media, academia, activism, and various professions. The global financial crisis, the global poverty crisis, the global war on terror, notions of global civil society and so on. The basic question I have been trying to find an answer to is whether there is any coherent, internally consistent sense of the global at work in these different engagements with the global, especially as they are explored in what may be called public discourse (the category of the global has received significant academic attention, but that is not my focus here). The more I read and think about it, though, the more it seems to me that there are deeply contradictory and inconsistent notions of the global at work in the various initiatives that engage with the category. There is no coherent vision of what our shared global destiny might mean either. Indeed, as I hope to illustrate in this sketch, which here can be no more than an outline of connections and reflections, some of these understandings of the global carry with them highly problematic political implications.

One message that has repeatedly been emphasized in the last several years is that, for various reasons, individuals in prosperous societies need to reduce the amount that they consume-- of energy, plastic, fuel, cards, and everything that you can find in a Target or Walmart. The argument, and it surely bears merit, is that the levels of consumption of people in the West are simply unsustainable when projected globally. But that Western economies and the global economy are highly dependent on Western consumption. So despite all the talk about a radical shift of a way of life in the West, consumption-oriented paradigms of life are going away nowhere anytime soon.

Which, I think, is precisely why we are seeing a lot of emphasis on 'smart' consumption, 'smart' energy and the like. Which is also why every energy industry--- solar, wind, coal, oil--- has been on an advertising and PR blitz in the last year or so, trying to build public support that it is the best option, that it is deeply concerned about innovating, being 'smart' and so on.

The problem, of course, is that there is very little information on exactly how this innovation will solve energy problems or bring down consumption to optimal levels. It is an optimistic wager on the future. Which is all very well-- except that it will also be very profitable for whichever energy industry or combination of energy industries gets to be the privileged leader (in terms of government policies and initiatives for instance) in the race for the new energy paradigm.

The same ambivalence about consumption is also seen in the attitude of first world agencies, businesses, corporations, and policymakers toward the third world. On the one hand, there is the great fear that the hordes in China, India and the developing world more generally will suck the world dry of energy (even though one American consumes as much energy as 19 Indians or 10 Chinese). On the other hand, there is an anxiety that unless these very hordes-- including the poor of these countries and not just the middle classes--- start consuming, Western corporations or West-based multinationals will simply not be able to keep up their profitability.

It is a truism that Western consumers are more or less saturated, and that much of their expenditure goes in paying off existing debt including colossal amounts of interest accumulated as a result of credit card debt, etc. It is also a truism, I think, that the kind of lifestyle that large numbers of people in the West lead is simply unsustainable in the long run: it can only be predicated on low-cost goods and services provided by the rest of the world and the US, whether it is call centers in India or illegal immigrants who provide services at very inexpensive rates. For these reasons, among others, the West will keep knocking at the markets or potential markets of the non-West. The paradox here is that even as levels of prosperity in the West are much higher than elsewhere in the world, the West now does not have the luxury of ignoring the rest of the world (and perhaps it never did: think of the exploitative nature of colonialism masquerading as benevolence)

I do not mean to be cynical about the war on global poverty but this is exactly why, in my view, so many projects of fighting global poverty depend on teaching the world's poor habits of capitalism or, to borrow a phrase from the title of my dissertation co-chair, Professor Allen Tullos' book on labor history, Habits of Industry. In this it seems, the multinationals, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs are united: people in the developing world must be taught a lifestyle where the value of profit, markets, and efficiency and productivity are paramount. The fight against global poverty then becomes a pedagogical project or remaking human habits and practices across the world.

And, it seems that participation in the world as a global citizen is increasingly linked to these practices of consumption. To be a global citizen means learning habits of industry and consumption; it means entering into a set of economic relations with corporations or institutions in the West.

Now, there may be good reasons advanced for this position. But these practices cannot simply be grafted on to existing ways of life without radically altering them (I owe this insight to Prof. Ravi Rajan, where he shared it in the context of a panel discussion). The argument often advanced in favor of such interventions through capital is that 'they', i.e., the poor want televisions and do not want to work in the fields, where in an argument based on a perhaps problematic dichotomy televisions stand in for modernity, capitalism, and industrialization and fields stand in for tradition, premodern life, and so so. Whatever the merits or demerits of the argument, it is one where others speak for 'them'. To be fair, the counter-argument, i.e., 'they' are happy working in the fields, which often romanticizes wretchedness and poverty, also speaks for 'them.' The only viable position is to offer people in positions of poverty the same set of choices that everyone else has, and then letting them choose what they want--- TVs, working in the farms, or both.

Given the problems of untrammeled consumption, however, it is not clear how this pedagogical project of global capitalism will define, dictate, or restrict consumption for the masses in the developing world. Who will decide who consumes how much, of what, when, and for what reasons? Will the process be equal? Who will ensure that?

On a somewhat related note, there also appears to be emerging, in the arena of scholarship, a project of rehabilitating free markets by making the case that colonialism had nothing to do with free markets! It is not surprising that these arguments emerge typically from forms of knowledge, such as certain strains of economics, which are resolutely ahistorical, for they fly in the face of
A brilliant analysis of the relationship between the British colonial state and free market ideology, for instance, can be found in historian Sudipta Sen's book, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace.

And, as a thought experiment, a question: one routinely encounters cliches in the Indian and US media about the natural affinity between the two nations, the world's two largest democracies and so on. If India shut its markets to the US, though, as it did for some 40-odd years after independence, would we still hear these platitudes?
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