In India, it didn’t hurt when the farmers were dying. Over 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past 15 years, and more than 40 percent of India’s 600 million farmers want to quit agriculture to look for menial jobs in the cities.
The national media kept quiet.
Now that the markets are crashing, the media is up in arms. “Act fast, go big. It is not only about bulls and bears anymore. It’s about India. And it’s hurting,” says a lead story in a national daily. But it didn’t hurt when the farmers were dying.
There is blood on Dalal Street (India’s Wall Street). Yet throughout all these years we refused to acknowledge that farmers were dying, and agriculture was bleeding. Farmers are children of a lesser God, it seemed, who do not belong to India. They only live in Bharat, the countryside.
Just a few months back, when the day Finance Minister P Chidambaram in his budget speech announced a Rs 60,000-crore* loan waiver for the beleaguered farming community, there was an orchestrated outcry: “Where will this money come from?” Television anchors were visibly angry at this supposed ‘windfall’ for the farmers, the print media was outraged at this ‘political and not economic’ decision just before the ensuing elections, and the industry leaders were seen sulking.
Six months later, no one is asking the same question. With the global financial crisis failing to work itself out, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is under pressure to intervene. Soon after the Wall Street mayhem, the RBI had pumped in Rs 84,000-crore in the domestic banking system through liquidity facility adjustment. An additional Rs 20,000-crore has been released through a 0.5 percent reduction in a cash reserve ration (CRR), to be further slashed by 100 basis points. It took RBI five years to make the first cut in CRR on Monday, and the next cut comes five days later. That sure is some urgency.
Sounds technical, but let me simplify. Liquidity in layman terms means ‘fund availability’ or, in simple words, making available more cash. All over the industrialized world, governments are stepping in to provide more cash in the hands of the private banks, and India is no exception.
Despite the Finance Minister saying that the fundamentals are strong, the banks are on a massive borrowing spree. In the first week of October alone, they borrowed Rs 90,075-crore every day from RBI through liquid facility adjustment. In the days to come, the RBI is under pressure to release another Rs 30,000-crore through the CRR, and also to cut the repo rate — the rate at which it lends to banks. And thanks to the loan waiver, the banks will receive another Rs 50,000-crore in the coming weeks as part reimbursement for the farm loan waiver and fertilizer loan.
Isn’t it a fact that Rs 60,000-crore loan waiver (later enhanced to Rs 71,000-crore) was actually a relief to the banks? What seemed to be a ‘political’ decision in the name of pulling out the indebted farmers was actually meant to maintain and sustain the health of the banking system. If the government had not provided the loan waiver, banks would have been in a terrible liquidity crisis. With farmers unable to repay, these banks would have been saddled with massive non-performing assets (or a shortfall in liquidity) or non-availability of Rs 71,000-crore in cash.
In other words, the loan waiver was a partial bailout for the banks. Now no one is asking: “Where will this money come from?” On the contrary, most analysts are asking for more ‘speed and sagacity’ to tide over the crisis. The industry has already demanded a bailout package of Rs 100,000-crore.
If only such ‘speed and sagacity’ was shown to tide over the terrible agrarian crisis sweeping throughout the country for over a decade now, thousands of farmers would have been saved from committing suicide. If only the RBI had stepped in to make more cash (or liquidity) available, the nation could have easily provided an assured employment to each and every Indian, not only for 100 days but for all the 365 days in a year. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGA) can be easily extended to bring every unemployed Indian under its gambit.
It is here that I fail to understand the sagacious logic of keeping the poor hungry, and then expecting a higher economic growth trajectory; of paying a multi-million dollar salary (in addition to lucrative perks) to the bosses of the banks and corporate houses, and then to make the man on the street pay for the losses; in other words, the logic behind privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.
Take the case of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers. While the shareholders in the company have been wiped out, Richard Fuld, its chief executive, walked away with US $480 million as his personal remuneration over eight years, which includes a $14 million ocean-front villa in Florida, and a home in an exclusive ski resort. Lawmakers investigating the bailed out insurance company AIG were shocked to learn that days after the government rescued the company, it unashamedly spent US $44,000 on a posh California retreat for its executives, complete with spa, banquets and golf outings.
Why blame the American corporate leaders when US president George Bush himself had given them a free rope: “Government should not decide the compensation for America’s corporate executives.” What he probably meant was that come what may, the US government will continue to provide funds to meet obscene corporate salaries and perks.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had also removed the upper ceiling on corporate salaries. According to Merrill-Lynch and Capgemini, driven by impressive economic gains and robust market capitalism growth in 2007, India led the world in high net worth individual (HNWI) population growth at 22.7 per cent. Two year earlier in 2005, there were 83,000 high net worth individuals with a wealth of at least $1 million (without including immovable property). And you guessed right – the number of millionaires has gone up quite considerably in the meantime.
This brings me back to the same question. How long will the world go on encouraging an economic system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer? While 36 billionaires in India have a collective economic wealth equivalent to one third of the country’s GDP, the country’s 600 million farmers collectively account for only a 17 percent share. With every passing year, the share of agriculture in GDP continues to slide down even further.
The average monthly income of a farm household (which includes five members of a family and two cattle) does not exceed Rs 2,400 (US $60). The value erosion in real farm income over the past few decades has never been discussed, but the erosion in paper wealth of shareholders is being projected as a national disaster.
Bailing out the farmers from a distressing situation is always considered to be bad economics. It is branded as a political compulsion, and the sooner politicians emerge out of it the better it is supposed to be for economic growth and development. This economic prescription, which every economist worth his title is willing to endorse, is invariably given for the farming community, the landless workers and the marginalized communities. They need to learn to be enterprising, is the assumption, and therefore must stop living on government subsidies.
But when it comes to the enterprising millionaires — corporates and leading bankers — government bailouts are not only a must, but should be done speedily. ‘Where will the money come from?’ is not a question to be asked when you are subsidizing the rich and the elite. That, we must understand, is their birthright.
* one crore = 10 million
Peace and Justice Post 
Hidden toll of US wars: 18 veterans commit suicide daily
April 29, 2010By Bill Van Auken, wsws.com, April 28, 2010
An average of 18 US military veterans are taking their lives every day as the Obama administration and the Pentagon grow increasingly defensive about the epidemic of suicides driven by Washington’s wars of aggression.
The stunning figure was reported last week by the Army Times, citing officials in the US Veterans Affairs Department.
The department estimates that there are 950 suicide attempts every month by veterans who are receiving treatment from the department. Of these, 7 percent succeed in taking their own lives, while 11 percent try to kill themselves again within nine months.
The greatest growth in suicides has taken place among veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who accounted for 1,868 suicide attempts in fiscal 2009, which ended on September 30. Of these, nearly 100 succeeded in killing themselves.
The connection between the “surge” in military suicides and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undeniable. The suicide rate within the military doubled between 2001 and 2006, even as it remained flat among the comparable (adjusted for age and gender) civilian population. And the numbers continue to rise steadily. In 2009, 160 active-duty military personnel killed themselves, compared to 140 in 2008 and 77 in 2003.
Many have blamed the increasing number of suicides on the repeated combat deployments to which members of the all-volunteer US military are subjected, with the so-called “war on terrorism” approaching its 10th year and nearly 200,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The effect of the repeated deployments is compounded by the shortness of so-called “dwell time”—the interlude at home bases between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over most of the two wars, this has been limited to just one year because of personnel pressures. While it is now closer to two years, psychological research has indicated that at least three years are necessary to ameliorate the psychological stress inflicted by these deployments.
The military command has tried to obscure the connection. Last month, for example, the Army’s surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, told a Senate committee that the most common factor in military suicides was “fractured relationships of some sort.” Clearly, however, the multiple deployments and the psychological impact that they have upon soldiers is the leading cause of broken marriages and mental health problems that lead to the breaking off of relationships.
Craig Bryan, a former Air Force officer and University of Texas psychologist who advises the Pentagon on suicides, linked the phenomenon to the training given by the military itself.
“We train our warriors to use controlled violence and aggression, to suppress strong emotional reactions in the face of adversity, to tolerate physical and emotional pain and to overcome the fear of injury and death,” he told Time magazine earlier this month. These qualities, designed to prepare soldiers to kill unquestioningly, “are also associated with increased risk for suicide,” he said. He added that these psychological traits cannot be altered “without negatively affecting the fighting capability of our military.” To put it bluntly, suicide, according to Bryan, is an occupational hazard. “Service members are, simply put, more capable of killing themselves by sheer consequence of their professional training,” he said.
The same training, combined with traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, has created severe difficulties for many veterans of the two wars trying to re-integrate themselves into civilian society. While the suicides are the most glaring and tragic indicator of these problems, there are many others.
Last month, the jobless rate for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan reached 14.7 percent, nearly 50 percent higher than the official nationwide unemployment rate in the US.
According to one recent Veterans Administration estimate, 154,000 US veterans are homeless on any given night, many of them living on the streets. Increasingly, the ranks of this homeless army are being swelled by those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
General Schoomaker, the Army’s surgeon general, was compelled to acknowledge on Monday that the military’s response to soldiers returning from combat with psychological problems has been one of “over-medication.”
“I can tell you that we are concerned about over-medication,” the general said, adding that “we’re very concerned about the panoply of drugs that are being used and the numbers of drugs that are being used.”
According to a report in the Military Times last month, one in six members of the US military is using some form of psychotropic drug, while 15 percent of soldiers admitted to abusing prescription drugs over the previous month.
Schoomaker’s comments came at a press conference called to respond to an article published in the New York Times Sunday exposing a so-called “warrior transition unit” at Fort Carson, Colorado. It referred to this facility and similar units as “’warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers.”
Soldiers interviewed in the article said that they were given pain pills to which they became addicted as well as sleeping pills and other medication, while alcohol and heroin were readily available in their barracks. Little or no therapy was on offer, however.
At least four soldiers sent to the unit at Fort Carson have committed suicide there since 2007.
On April 16, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, testified on Capitol Hill on veteran suicides, providing equally telling numbers. He reported that VA suicide hotlines were fielding 10,000 calls a month.
Shinseki told a congressional panel that he was haunted by two images of US military personnel. The first was that of new recruits who “outperform all of our expectations, great youngsters.”
The second is that of veterans who make up a “a disproportionate share of the nation’s homeless, jobless, mental health (problems), depressed patients, substance abusers, suicides.”
“Something happened” along the way, said Shinseki, “and that’s what we’re about is to try to figure this out.”
It is not a great mystery. These “great youngsters” are thrown into wars of aggression and colonial-style occupations where they are exposed to horrific violence and employed in the subjugation of entire populations, with the inevitable killing of civilian men, women and children. Those who acknowledge the mental and emotional trauma created by these conditions are treated as pariahs and weaklings
On the same day that Shinseki was testifying in Washington, 27-year-old Jesse Huff, an Iraq war veteran, killed himself outside a Veterans Administration medical facility in Dayton, Ohio, where he had been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Huff, who had been injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, shot himself twice in the head with an assault rifle at the foot of a statue to the Union soldiers of the Civil War. A cousin told the Associated Press that he “hadn’t been the same” since returning from Iraq, while the father of a young man with whom he lived said that Huff was “really hurting.”
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Tags:American wars, Army Times about the suicides, Bill Van Auken, suicides, US military veterans, Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
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