Destiny Dynasty & Stagger Lee

Destiny, Dynasty & Stagger Lee


The Legend of Stagger Lee, slyly beloved of Black Bluesmen and colour-blind, cross-over White musicians; is about the White Man’s waking nightmare; that sort of Black Man, who refuses to bow down to a self-evident, all-powerful, call a spade a spade, White Supremacy.

The Stagger Lee legend was launched in the 1930s, when a Black Labourer killed a White Cab Driver for insulting him, in a New York Bar; and for spitting into his Stetson Hat! It made for small news items in the inside pages about how the Black Man shot the White Man, three, four times, unmoved by his pleadings, caring nothing about a po’faced wife and hapless children three!

But this, in itself, the triviality of the provocation, the unjustified and fatal outcome, for victim Billy Joe; did some kind of macho trick to enhance the legend of Stagger Lee. He’s been immortalised ever since, in song, some 266 versions and varieties. Stagger Lee has been nuanced by Bluesmen and turned into a recurring favourite on the R&B (Rhythm & Blues) Charts.

But it didn’t stop there. Stagger Lee, for all his innate menace and Black swagger, crossed over, to the other side of the street; grabbing the sensibilities of main-stream Rock & Rollers; who don’t, we know, hesitate to come in White, Black, Chocolate, Yellow and Tutti Frutti topped with Ostrich feathers. But then, Rock n Roll is a confluence. It was begat by the fortuitous and decidedly joyous coupling of White Country Music and Black Blues. That’s how it got its vitality, and did a world of red-blooded, cross-fertilising good, to both.

Rock n Roll was, is, integrating, nation-building, anti-racial--a spontaneous phenomenon, in America, aided and abetted by the forced proximity of the races in WW II, The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the bits and pieces since. The Indian nation-building parallel would have to be Cricket and Bollywood; Sachin, Saurav, Dhoni, Bhajji etc. as much as “Bharat” Manoj Kumar and the current Khan series.

But Stagger Lee, the spirit in the song, didn’t leave well enough alone. He wouldn’t stop, gliding like the ghost he became, beyond those decidedly unromantic gallows he went to in real life. Stagger Lee was resurrected, and lives on still, seventy, eighty years on, too bold and proud to be constrained by the Devil that took his misguided soul.

The legend of the Black murderer, who killed a White Man for spitting in his Stetson Hat, has gone decidedly walkabout: it fraternises with exclusionist, conservative, segregationist, “Aw Shucks” do se do-ing , square bashing, Baptist Whites. It moves Dylan/Baez originally “folk” Jewish. It moves on to other points improbable and bizarre. Such as the genetic impossibility of expressing Black Anger in the All-White Country and Western (C&W) idiom!

Stagger Lee made it to C&W Country, and has been sung about in the Grand Ole Opry, as if he were one of their very own. How the heartless, merciless, borderline sadistic Black Labourer, with zero by way of social graces did it; is, was, and will be, a mystery, as dark as Stagger Lee’s sexy, black, transmigrating, soul.

In any case, he is enjoying another turn in the sun; in the midst of the thrust and parry of a struggle between a White Woman with an offensive sense of entitlement, almost dynastic in its hubris, and a suave Black Man challenger, hugely inspirational and attractive, articulate as only a Harvard educated Lawyer can be. One witty commentator word-painted the Ganga-Yamuna Obama and his engaging smile with the perfect teeth as, “The Halle Berry of Black Politicians”.

But lurking in the equation, like an unmentionable elephant in the room, is the Stagger Lee matter of his colour, his look-you-in-the-eye attitude, his integrity, his well-fashioned conservative suits, his maddening, atypical Blackness. And since all of this is underpinned by his “God Damn America” spouting Black Pastor; his Canada trade gaffe; his sometime dubious Black financier; and other potentially threatening baggage; life for Candidate Obama could yet come to sudden death in a predominantly White America.

But Barack Obama, with his genetic reality of a bridging conjunction, could also shine on for the majority of Democratic voters, but is he still just fit to be hung in the end? Is his attitude of refusing to be relegated to second place, or oblivion, just one more twirl in that spat-in Stagger Lee Hat all over again?

There is no dead and unfortunate Billy Joe victim in Obama’s life, it is true, but is the “Yes We Can” daring of Obama as good as an insult? And is his basic stand-uppishness just so much offensive effrontery as bad as spitting in White America’s Stetson Hat?

The educated White Man, the University Man, the Young Woman and the Young in general, do not, thank God, think so; and neither do almost all Black Americans, 13% of the US population, and a far more potent percentage of Democrats; without whom, no Democratic candidate can win the Presidency. Hispanics too are warming to Obama, particularly, after the only sitting Hispanic Governor, (of New Mexico), endorsed Obama recently.

But sadly, we can see Hillary Clinton and her two-terms former President husband, once indulgently called America’s “First Black President” by Black Literature Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison; attacking Obama’s Blackness. But is this former President, with his office situated in the Black district of Harlem, in New York, justified in abusing the trust, affection and faith long reposed in him by millions of Blacks?

Because, despite the innuendo, Barack Obama is no casual murdering Stagger Lee Black Labourer; Black Pride to Obama is not a hidden agenda of hate and bitterness like his Pastor. Obama can be trusted to preside over White, Hispanic, Brown, Yellow, Native American and Black America. So, will the Clintons succeed? No they won’t.

Stagger Lee may be a mean metaphor for a Black Man’s bid in today’s Presidential Race. I would wager Stagger Lee never expected a Black Man to be a contender, let alone a better, visionary, Black Kennedy-grade prospect, so early into the 21st century. But those dark Blues notes, that first lyric about a Bull Dog’s baritone warning bark; the song’s amplifying psychosis, irrational as the fear of night’s darkness, is definitely, if sadly, part of the opposing pitch.

(1,050 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Tuesday 25th March 2008

Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard


There is a much-aired notion, particularly in “liberal” circles in the United States, that those who have been financially reckless should be held to the fire in order to suffer the “moral hazard” of their actions. This Bible-thumping “fire and brimstone” idea must be working in their craniums at a subliminal level. Because, otherwise, it is of a piece with such out-of-date nostrums as: “from each according to his ability and to each according to his wants,” and other such Marxist babble.

While it is abundantly clear that the US financial sector and that of the developed world has been revealing gut-wrenching bad news with sickening regularity; it is equally true that the governments of all the affected countries are doing their utmost to stem the bleed. So far, they have been forced to write down more than USD150 billion in assets. And the International Herald Tribune estimates that the total write-offs to come, may yet amount to USD 600 billion. Still, to put it in perspective, the contemplated cost of this economic tsunami is trifling when compared to the cost of a war, even a limited, one country adventure, as one-sided as Iraq.

India’s financial markets, struggling suddenly with Sensex and Nifty levels of a year ago, brought about in 60 days from an all-time high; was thought to be decoupled from much of the carnage in the linked economies of the West. We are not in very deep with the convertible currency world’s banking systems. Nor do we mostly partake of its dominoes-style credit risk sharing ways. Also, we are not so dependent on exports except for the prominent IT sector and our domestic economy is in comparatively good shape. However, we have been psychologically feeding on Foreign Institutional Investor (FII) confidence to drive our markets. Our local conviction in the India story suffers from a typical, if sad, post-colonial inferiority complex. India is only good in Indian eyes, if the foreigner, especially the Western foreigner, says it is so.

So, since the Western foreigner is a little busy putting out his own economic fires, we are left rudderless and panicky. We are also further disheartened whenever the FII is forced to sell to make good losses elsewhere. In a matter of days, from a state of mental buoyancy, we find ourselves unable to take any succour from our plusses, as sentiment, such as it is, is ravaged. Witness, most recently, Bear Stearns, the erstwhile 5th largest investment bank on Wall Street, fire-selling Rs. 900 crores worth of Indian equities, catalysing a 950 point single day plunge in the Sensex.

But perhaps the tide is turning. Bear Stearns has been swiftly bought over by Morgan Stanley, albeit at 10 cents on the dollar, but backed by promptly provided American tax dollars. Also, two others, namely Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, among Wall Street’s big five investment banks, have actually beaten performance expectations in their first quarter results. This, on top of yet another rate cut from the Federal Reserve, this time of 75 bps, is great for sentiment, and possibly growth, in a global marketplace cringing from one body blow after another.

But the true long term significance of every fresh piece of bad news and its aftermath is that a USD 14 trillion real economy (backed resolutely by its Western Allies and a few oil-rich Sovereign Funds), and a USD 23 trillion financial economy, similarly backed, is willing to stand up and be counted in every one of its critical hours. Thanks to this fact, the beleaguered economies of the world will be saved in 2008.

The rest of us, the emerging ones, should not complain, because we have someone to answer the ‘phone at 3.00 a.m., as we sleep. But perhaps Desi Dalal Street “Tigers” need to show some grit for a time. We have benefited shamelessly from five growth years on the trot on the back of FII exuberance, and should not grudge a limited period of pain. Since we manifestly cannot pull our own wagon, let us simply wait for the great FII driving engine to return.

But let us hope, meanwhile, that the advocates of the moral hazard line of economic thinking in the US do not gain any traction. They tend to be mercilessly unrelenting when it comes to the rich, the font, it is thought, of financial excess. The implication is that these well-heeled people are driven to diabolical excess by their insatiable greed and deserve to be brought down. That this category of “indiscriminate” lender to the “dodgy prospect” include transformational entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is, of course, conveniently ignored.

These economic fundamentalists resent institutional and government action to shore up troubled banks, securities firms and lending institutions, oblivious to their enabling function. And now that they appear to be stumbling, and in some cases tumbling, in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Japan and the United States alike, their antipathy only seems to grow. They demand that these banks and lending institutions should be left alone to stew in their own retributive juices. They want government largesse to flow “directly” and waiver-style to the hard-pressed defaulting borrower and the individual or family facing foreclosure.

These righteously indignant personages seem to have no fear of what can happen to an economy, indeed all the leading economies of planet earth, if its financial institutions are allowed to collapse. These latter-day keepers of the “true” economic faith have clearly chosen to ignore the Great Depression of 1929 which threatened the very anchor bolts of Capitalism, that too just twelve years after the Russian Communist revolution of 1917. They ignore the copious retrospective analysis that suggests that the Great Depression could have been totally avoided with a timely series of affordable bailouts to a small clutch of beleaguered banks on Wall Street.

The fact is the moral hazardists are resolutely against the kind of action that the US Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury Department is taking now, again and again and as often as need be, to help the institutions survive and work to stimulate the economy afresh. But it makes you wonder which anarchist’s version of economics moral hazard expertise draws its inspiration from, and whether such apparent friends of the poor aren’t actually their worst enemies.

(1,050 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Wednesday, 19th March 2008

Also published in The Pioneer in the Leader Edit Slot on March 26th 2008 as"Moral Hazard? Ah Well..." see www.dailypioneer.com

Promises and piecrusts

Promises and piecrusts


In the chilling way that Communists manage to look at conventional, what they call “bourgeois” morality, Vladimir Illyich Lenin is attributed with likening promises to piecrusts--made to be broken! In Mother Russia, the European part of the Tsarist Empire, and the succeeding USSR, baked dinners were commonplace; and so, Lenin’s meaning was not lost, even on the most prosaic mind.

However, the metaphor turns into the soggy pathos of a suet pudding if the promise is not intended to be broken, as in, say, Finance Minister(FM) P Chidambaram’s 2008 budgetary main plank, namely the waiver of Rs. 60,000 crores worth of bank borrowings by small and medium scale farmers. The waiver, such as it is, will provide only crop loan relief, which is not the main source of rural indebtedness anyway. People borrow for weddings and feasts, home improvements and medical emergencies in the villages, just like in the cities. But still, this proposed waiver will help some 4 crore small and marginal farmers with landholdings below five acres, averaging out to a paltry Rs. 9,000 each. Additionally, it will help 1 crore large farmers. All the farmers have loans which were due to be paid on December 31st, 2007.

But, this populist little waiver is hardly enough to scratch the surface of the hefty rural indebtedness problem. After all, there are some 60 crore people living in rural India. But it is nevertheless hoped that it will carry the UPA, probably on the back of the imaginary winged steed of political momentum, to a sweep of the forthcoming Assembly and General Elections. But, as a classic opportunistic move reminiscent of VP Singh’s Mandal Commission debacle; the waiver has the potential of backfiring because it is far too little in the face of far too much! The aam aadmi does not like to be mocked as the now infamous “India Shining” poll campaign of 2003 will also bear out.

Proposals such as this have a way of stoking appetites that cannot be readily sated, and in the event, history tells us, they can turn into unintended nightmares. And this one may be getting itself off to an early start with the farmers and their mouthpieces starting to grumble already. This, even as the Congress Party and its President begin to highlight the “farmer-friendly” move in the first of a series of political rallies.

But the negative murmurs are growing, partially because the analytic classes are unable to explain how the waiver will be funded, even over the three years indicated by the FM. Or indeed whether it is really just a spin being put on writing-off unrealisable PSU bank farmer debt. Could this be just the Indian government variation on the sub-prime crisis that is exercising so much of the world economy?

Nevertheless, the government does not see why it should not attempt to turn the deed of accounting adjustment into a virtuous vote magnet at the same time. But let us remember that VP Singh also wrote off farm loans amounting to Rs.10,000 per farmer in 1990 without making good the monies and caused the collapse of numerous co-operative banks as a consequence. Likewise, if this government, or its successor, because this waiver will reach out for at least two years after the end of this government, fails to make good the monies to the PSU banks, there could be a palpable weakening of the country’s banking system as a whole.

Also, none of this waiver money will go towards the creation of productive assets for the farmer or any useful mechanism for tomorrow. Its clearly short-term political thrust as a sop to garner the farmer’s vote is borne out by the fact that it was announced separately a couple of days before Budget Day by UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh; both photographed wearing their most delighted smiles.

Some commentators have started pointing out that Rs. 60,000 crores is not a whole lot of manna when you apply it to some 60 crore farmers and other rural denizens in varying degrees and types of debt. These farmers and rural folk are in debt not just to PSU banks, whose irascible, often bored, sometimes bitter officialdom, they allegedly have to “induce” and “motivate”; but also to the less red-tape ridden traditional village moneylenders.

The PSU banks, in fact, are accessible mainly to those who have the wherewithal to “induce”. The traditional moneylender on the other hand knows you by name and descent, is a fellow village resident, more personalised, flexible, innovative, responsive and immediate. But both sources of rural finance have a way of exchanging the sorely needed cash for the land deeds as collateral. And this makes it very difficult to arrange for an encore in the face of inclement weather, crop failure, pestilence, unexpected developments, family celebrations or crises and so on.

This waiver, being offered ostensibly in response to a persistent wave of farmer suicides, is nevertheless unproductive, no more than a populist gesture that does nothing to tackle the root causes of the phenomenon of rural indebtedness. It is, however, of a piece with the long-standing and prevalent practice of providing the farmer with free electricity, free water, subsidised fertiliser, controlled, if inadequate, crop off-take pricing, and, of course, zero income taxation.

None of these measures, practiced now over sixty years of independent India, have helped in developing widespread rural prosperity among the medium, small and marginal farmers. In the absence of decent state created infrastructure, including adequate and consistent electricity, water, roads, cold chain, mechanised inputs and other value addition facilities, it is difficult for the Indian farmer to derive the benefits of modernity. But instead of tackling any of the substantive issues of rural India, this waiver proposal does no more than blunder its way behind the Bharat Nirman programme, which is limping along in shambles owing to woeful implementation.

The 2008 Budget also hints, a little unconvincingly, given the strangle-hold that the Left has over this government, in the direction of listing valuable PSU firms on the bourses and even a new wave of disinvestment. There is little hope of this being implemented in the remaining time left to this government and practically no chance of unlocking any value that could contribute to its coffers from this source.

(1,050 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Tuesday, 11th March 2008

Also published in The Pioneer on 14th March 2008 on the OP-ED page as "promises and piecrusts" www.dailypioneer.com