Saturday, January 14, 2012

Oakland to lay off workers; America isn't a corporation; Austerity deepens European crisis; India media under fire; India PM: Reformer who never was

1 Oakland to lay off workers. (San Francisco Chronicle) In a drastic move to prepare for the loss of millions of dollars in state redevelopment funds this year, Oakland will hand layoff notices to 1,500 city employees next week, and 200 will eventually be dismissed, city leaders have said. The unusual move is necessary because, unlike some cities, Oakland uses redevelopment funds to help pay for the salaries of more than 200 workers in nearly a dozen city departments, including police, fire, City Council members, public works and the mayor's office. But to comply with seniority layoff rules, the city must give notice to half of its 3,000-worker force. Only police and firefighters will be exempt from receiving notices. The cuts are so deep, they will force a complete overhaul of City Hall, said Sue Piper, spokeswoman for Mayor Jean Quan.

2 America isn’t a corporation (Paul Krugman in The New York Times) There’s a problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company. Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers. And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. We’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

3 ‘Austerity deepens European crisis’ (The Guardian) Europe has been plunged into a fresh crisis after France was stripped of its coveted AAA credit rating in a mass downgrade of nine eurozone countries by the ratings agency Standard & Poor's. S&P said austerity was driving Europe even deeper into financial crisis as it also cut Austria's triple-A rating, and relegated Portugal and Cyprus to junk status. The humiliating loss of France's top-rated status leaves Germany as the only other major economy inside the eurozone with a AAA rating, and rekindled financial market anxiety about a possible break-up of the single currency.

4 Why Indian media is under fire (Soutik Biswas, BBC) Has the explosion of media in India been a mixed blessing? With more than 70,000 newspapers and over 500 satellite channels in several languages, Indians are seemingly spoilt for choice and diversity. India is already the biggest newspaper market in the world - over 100 million copies sold each day. Advertising revenues have soared. In the past two decades, the number of channels has grown from one - the dowdy state-owned broadcaster Doordarshan - to more than 500, of which more than 80 are news channels.

But such robust growth, many believe, may have come at the cost of accuracy, journalistic ethics and probity. Economist Amartya Sen wrote in a recent article, that there are at least two huge barriers to the quality of Indian media. One is about professional laxity which leads to inaccuracies and mistakes. The other, he says, is a class bias in the choice of what news to cover and what to ignore. Class bias in newsrooms, say media pundits, is prevalent in big media all over the world. But class bias in reporting on a country where more than a third of its people live in abject poverty has more serious implications. Journalists can easily become uncritical cheerleaders for a high growth, low equity society.

Dr Sen actually misses the bigger crises in Indian media. There are serious concerns about trivialisation of content and the increasing concentration of media ownership in the hands of large corporate groups. There is now the culture of non-stop breaking news and, some fear, the transformation of news into a commodity. Most seriously, there is the scourge of what is called paid news, which involves influential people - mainly politicians - paying newspapers and news channels for positive coverage. It became widespread in the run-up to the 2009 elections.

5 Self-publishing is finding its feet (BBC) Tailored services like Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu and Smashwords have put creating and distributing a book firmly into the hands of anyone and everyone. Self-publishing specialists not only make unleashing a book into the world a free, five-minute process - but they also give authors the lion's share of the profits, in some cases as high as 80% or 90%. Traditional publishers, meanwhile, are more likely to give their authors around 25%.

6 Indonesian factory workers win against Nike (The Dawn) A Nike factory has agreed to pay $1m overtime back pay to Indonesian workers in a move that could force other suppliers of multinational companies to follow suit. Nearly 4,500 employees at one of the sportswear group`s suppliers, the PT Nikomas shoe plant in Banten province, will be compensated for close to 600,000 hours of overtime clocked up over the past two years. The out-of-court settlement, reached after nearly a year of negotiations, set a precedent for other workers, said Bambang Wirahyoso, national chairman of the trade union serikat Pekerja National. `This has the potential to send shockwaves through the Indonesian labour movement`, he said, adding that the victory had prepared the union to take on the fight for any workers who had been forced to work overtime without pay. Seattle-based Nike has been accused in the past of using child labour in its supply chain and in relation to working conditions in its 1,000 overseas supplier factories, which the company has taken steps to address.

7 How US leads the world in giving (Khaleej Times) After the 2008 financial crisis, economic growth took a tumble, and charitable giving would be expected to decline. Indeed, after the global recession, giving dipped in the US. Yet US giving to charities international in scope rose an estimated 15.3% in 2010 – the largest percentage increase of all categories, including religion, health or education. The trend also reveals America’s individualistic streak and near reverence for high-profile donors like former President Bill Clinton or Microsoft mogul Bill Gates who identify and solve problems. Topping the list of most generous companies with cash donations, compiled by Forbes magazine and the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is Walmart followed by Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. The three corporations gave $319 million, $315 million and $219 million, respectively. Overall, US charitable giving has steadily climbed, from less than $25 billion in 1970 to $290 billion in 2010, both in current dollars, reports Giving USA.

8 Early trouble for world’s youngest nation (Sydney Morning Herald) The trail of corpses begins about 270 metres from the corrugated metal gate of the UN compound and stretches for miles into the bush. There is an old man on his back, a young woman with her legs splayed, skirt bunched up around the hips and a whole family - man, woman, two children - all face down in the swamp grass, executed together.

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge. Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it would overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias, the size of small armies, are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent. Eight thousand fighters just besieged this small town in the middle of a vast expanse, razing huts, torching granaries, stealing tens of thousands of cows and methodically killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of men, women and children hiding in the bush. The raiders had even broadcast their massacre plans in advance.

9 India’s year without polio (Wall Street Journal) On January 13, 2012, India achieved a new milestone, completing one year without any reported cases of the wild polio virus. This means that for the first time, this country might be removed from the list of polio-endemic countries, the only nations which haven’t stopped the transmission of the indigenous wild polio virus, which include Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. In India, the last reported case was that of a two-year-old girl in West Bengal’s Howrah district in 2011. For the country that recorded the highest number of polio cases in 2009, this is a remarkable achievement, say health experts. Going forward, health specialists say that India will still be vulnerable from threat of importing the virus from neighboring countries. For instance, China, where the last indigenous polio case was recorded in 1994, had a polio case last year, which was traced to a visitor from Pakistan.

10 India PM Manmohan Singh: The reformer who never was (Sadanad Dhume in The Wall Street Journal) When Manmohan Singh was sworn in as India's 13th prime minister in 2004, few would have guessed that the country's highest political office would end up diminishing a leader widely admired at home and abroad. But today with GDP growth slowing, the rupee softening and the stock market in a funk, it's time to reassess the prime minister's record. Instead of using his position as a bully pulpit for reform, the 79-year-old presides over a government synonymous with policy paralysis and reckless populism. Its best known ideas include an unwieldy make-work scheme that distorts labor markets and breeds corruption, a misguided education policy that threatens to drown India's few excellent private schools in a sea of mediocrity and an ill-conceived food security bill proposal that will funnel subsidized grain toward the majority of the country's 1.2 billion citizens.

Yet if we remember, most people expected Mr. Singh to cut through red tape and unshackle the private sector. For many Indians, Mr. Singh, a soft-spoken economist with a reputation for probity, stood apart from the assorted ruffians and rabble rousers who make up the bulk of the political class. In hindsight, the prime minister ought to have been seen all along as less of a reformer and more of a faceless technocrat. Yes, as the finance minister who kicked off reforms in 1991, Mr. Singh scrapped industrial licensing, slashed import duties and made room for the private sector in businesses once reserved for government. But he did so in the face of a severe foreign-exchange crisis and under a prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao, who saw how the socialist pieties of his Congress Party had kept India poor.

Before becoming finance minister, Mr. Singh actually showed little promise as a reformer. He had spent much of the previous two decades—as chief economic advisor to the government, head of the Soviet-style Planning Commission and governor of the Reserve Bank of India, among other positions—propping up the very socialist edifice he later sought to dismantle. If observers had taken a close look at the nature of this long career, they would have had more realistic expectations. They should have seen that in 1991, Mr. Singh pushed reforms because his boss told him to. Put simply, his programs reflect his boss's priorities and always have. So since 2004, the prime minister has done what he usually does: take cues from his current boss.

11 Chennai’s IT dream turns turtle (Jayaraj Sivan in The Times of India) It makes good business sense to tear down an unoccupied Rs 200m IT park building and work up a high-value residential complex in its place. But it tells badly on the Tamil Nadu government’s IT policy. The demolition of the 19-storey IT park on LB Road in Adyar, Chennai for redevelopment is a reflection of such a flawed IT policy. Many builders in Tamil Nadu are stuck with completed or half-built standalone IT parks following the slump in the IT sector and the federal government’s policy shift from IT parks to special economic zones. Going by industry estimates, about 10 million sq ft of such concrete structures are available across Chennai, which carry a dead investment of Rs 20bn to Rs 25bn. Most of them are on the Old Mahabalipuram Road, which had shot into fame as the IT destination of Chennai.

12 Overstaying Indian journalists (The Hindu) The Madhya Pradesh government is owed Rs 180m in rent by journalists staying in government bungalows in the state capital. One hundred and eighty-seven journalists, representing the biggest media houses in the country, are living as “unauthorised occupants” in government bungalows in the most posh areas of Bhopal, otherwise home to cabinet ministers and top bureaucrats. According to the Directorate of Estates (DoE), the journalists collectively can be evicted immediately if the government gives the “green signal.”

The occupants include the biggest names in the business — correspondents and bureau chiefs of Press Trust of India, United News of India, Star News, Zee News, ETV, Sahara Samay, The Times of India, The Economic Times, The Week, Indian Express (former journalist), Hindustan Times, The Statesman, The Hitavada, India Tv, Dainik Bhaskar, Rajasthan Patrika, Hindustan, Dainik Jagran, Rashtriya Sahara, Jansatta, Nai Duniya, Swadesh, Lokmat, Deshbandhu and Navbharat Times — and a host of lesser known local media houses. “The houses are allotted for a year, with a maximum extension of two years. So, yes, they are all illegal occupants,” says Niyaz A. Khan, Joint Collector, DoE. However, the signal, says another official on condition of anonymity, may never come because the government does not want to “mess with the press.”

13 India could beat China in remittance game (Business Line) The amount of money sent by NRIs is likely to be $58 billion in 2011, slightly ahead of China's estimated receipts of $57 billion, says the World Bank. With this, India would beat China in receiving the highest remittances globally for five years in a row, from 2007. Countries such as Mexico and the Philippines were among the other top recipients of remittances from their respective emigrants.

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