Bernanke backs stimulus; China's brutal one-child policy; Google's 'information tax'; Pakistan and the personality cult; No takers for Gandhi's blood

1 Bernanke backs stimulus (BBC) US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has told Congress that it is too soon to end the central bank's monetary stimulus programme or raise interest rates. He said the Fed's policies were "providing significant benefits" and changing course now could harm growth. He warned that a "premature tightening of monetary policy" would risk "slowing or ending the economic recovery". US rates have been between 0% and 0.25% since December 2008.

However, the minutes of the Fed's last meeting were released, highlighting divisions on the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee over when the Fed should start to wind down its $85bn-a-month asset purchasing programme..

Shares have been hitting record levels in recent weeks, held up by the prospect that monetary policy would remain generous to help strengthen the weak economy. At the same time, the Fed's willingness to continue its support underlines the weakness of the US economy and is causing some investors to fear company profits may be held back by tepid growth. The Fed has pledged to keep US interest rates at their record low level until the US unemployment rate falls below 6.5%.

2 China’s brutal one-child policy (Ma Jian in The New York Times) Internet users in China condemn the unequal application of a 1979 law that stipulates every couple may have just one child (or two for ethnic minorities and for rural couples whose first child is a girl). The truth is: for the rich, the law is a paper tiger, easily circumvented by paying a “social compensation fee” — a fine of 3 to 10 times a household’s annual income, set by each province’s family planning bureau, or by traveling to Hong Kong, Singapore or even America to give birth.

For the poor, however, the policy is a flesh-and-blood tiger with claws and fangs. In the countryside, where the need for extra hands to help in the fields and the deeply entrenched patriarchal desire for a male heir have created strong resistance to population control measures, the tiger has been merciless. According to Chinese Health Ministry data released in March, 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations have been carried out since 1971. (Though the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, other, less-stringent family planning policies were in place before it.)

These figures are easy to quote, but they fail to convey the magnitude of the horror faced by rural Chinese women. During a long journey through the hinterlands of southwest China in 2009, I was able to find some of the faces behind these numbers. Almost every one of the pregnant women I spoke to had suffered a mandatory abortion. One woman told me how, when she was eight months pregnant with an illegal second child and was unable to pay the 20,000 yuan fine (about $3,200), family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and injected a lethal drug into her abdomen.

For two days she writhed on the table, her hands and feet still bound with rope, waiting for her body to eject the murdered baby. In the final stage of labor, a male doctor yanked the dead fetus out by the foot, then dropped it into a garbage can. She had no money for a cab. She had to hobble home, blood dripping down her legs and staining her white sandals red.

Baby girls are also victims of the policy. Under family pressure to ensure that their only child is a son, women often choose to abort baby girls or discard them at birth, practices that have skewed China’s sex ratio to 118 boys for every 100 girls. The Communist Party argues that the means justify the ends. When Deng Xiaoping and his fellow economic reformers introduced the one-child policy as a “temporary” measure in 1979, after Mao’s death and the end of the calamitous Cultural Revolution, they claimed that without the one-child policy, the economy would falter and the population would explode.

Ending this scourge is a moral imperative. The atrocities committed in the name of the one-child policy over the last three decades rank among the worst crimes against humanity of the last century. The stains it has left on China may never be erased.

3 Google’s ‘information tax’ (McKenzie Wark in The Guardian) Of course Google doesn't want to pay its taxes to the British crown, like a loyal corporate subject. In Google's mind it secretly thinks that it is now something like a state, and we are all its subjects. It is we who should pay tribute to it – and we do. We pay it a sort of information tax. Google is the Ministry of Information Retrieval. If you want some data, you have to give up some, about who you are, what you do, what your movements are. Like most other states, Google will then sell access to you to other interested parties.

Just like any state, Google has its spies. Its Street View cars snoop the world's high-value streets. All the better to help us citizens of Google-land do what we are supposed to do there – which is shop. If Google succeeds in selling us its Google Glass, then we all become its agents. We would be a sensory apparatus for a vast computer database whose mission is to take our perceptions, thoughts, feelings or discoveries and turn them into money.

As with any state, there's another side. The British government at least notionally acts in the interests of its citizens. There is at least some transparency, some checks and balances. But in Google-land none of this applies. It acts in the interests only of its shareholders, and that perhaps only notionally.
There used to be all sorts of criticisms of the old "culture industries" like Hollywood and the top 40, which entertained us with stories or songs that always ended on an upbeat note, no matter how false. But at least the culture industries went to the bother of entertaining us. Their replacements don't even bother. They expect us to entertain each other, and pay a tax for it.

4 Pakistan and the personality cult (Rafia Zakaria) Often, history is made, but some would argue that little changed after its momentous making. Actual change, perhaps, is not the point of charismatic leadership. In the late ’60s, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was able to mobilise in one half of the then two-part country, a leadership wrought on a particular strategy. The slogan of bread, clothing, and housing was central, and a cult of leadership developed around his image.

In more recent times, Imran Khan, former cricket captain and now the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, has emerged as the nation’s latest charismatic leader. Through a slogan for change and a capitalisation on the vast stores of frustration, helplessness and hopelessness faced by the country’s youth, he has been able to mobilise the sentiments of many.

There is nothing inherently duplicitous about charismatic leadership, but as in the case of the PPP and numerous others that have relied on the identity of a single leader as their trademark, the challenge before this latest Pakistani specimen is to resist the temptation of making it a political party’s eternal script.

It is precisely this reliance that could be blamed for the failure of Pakistan’s political parties to develop solid organisational structures that can go beyond the cult of personality and become effective machinery that can translate charismatic leadership into meaningful change. After the demise of memory or man, the country is left simply waiting and wanting the next heady mix of emotion and passion and tragedy, while denied the practical translation into something longer-lasting, less dramatic and more real than just the illusion of greatness.

5 No buyers for Gandhi’s blood (Joanna Sugden in The Wall Street Journal) It seems there isn’t as much appetite for Mahatma Gandhi’s blood as auctioneers had hoped.  A specimen of the Father of the Nation’s blood failed to reach its reserve price of £10,000 ($15,197) at auction.

Mullock’s Auctions, a UK-based firm that specializes in selling historical artifacts, said the highest bid for the blood was £7,000 and the vendors didn’t sell. He added that, since the sale, an Indian buyer has made an offer for the blood. The offer, which is lower than the reserve price, is under consideration, Mr. Westwood-Brookes said. He refused to disclose the amount being offered.

Gandhi’s will, written in 1921, sold for £55,000 to an Indian phone bidder who also bought Gandhi’s power of attorney document, signed by one of his nephews, for £25,000. The will achieved the highest price of all the items on sale in the auction, which in addition to Gandhi memorabilia had 250 lots. Gandhi’s leather sandals fetched £19,000, exceeding their expected selling price of £15,000. They, along with the specimen of blood, were given by Gandhi to the family he stayed with near Mumbai in 1924 while recovering from an illness.

Some items did far better than expected. Gandi’s three wise monkeys statues were expected to make £10,000 but went for over four times that amount at £44,000.