Pakistans elites are still living in the 15th century when land was conceived as an asset that one must have to be in the rich category. It is true that land is an asset in perpetuity and that the rural poor have it in them to eke out a living from that land.
The colonial legacy was such that land was allocated to the poor on a tenancy basis and not as a freehold. This has led to subsequent issues of grave nature in the country. The Maurusi tenants and the tenants at will [two categories] have been disposed by the powerful ever since the era of Ayub and the emergence of dictatorial rule.
Although not quite so brutal as the Latin American tyrannical governments where torture and brutal murders, not to speak of rape, were the order of the day and where museums of torture have been developed so that people never forget history and they do not repeat the mistakes of the past, we in Pakistan have been more subtle in as much as we have usurped the lands of the poor. The collective we means that as Pakistanis very few raised their voices at this outrage.
To help mitigate [but actually make it worse] the uninitiated decided to go for these landed assets while the more sophisticated and articulate [for want of a better word] went to the modern institutes and did what they wanted with the one most glaring perversion in capitalism-money. The institutions they created or they reformed were sinister and tyrannical. It was all governance by vandalism.
The Security Exchange Corporation of Pakistan came in for massive reforms to help the then PM make money and when the created and appointed Chief spoke out at the way the stock markets were looted he was booted out. Why did the last PM or pm [according to the way he acted] break with the crony he brought back from NY? The bank reforms led to what have you.
The example quoted was of his First National City Bank [FNCB] and we now know the kinds of activity that their CEOs were committing. Is it any wonder that we have not committed those kinds of crimes and taken bonuses that were bogus and not warranted? Yet there was no outrage in Pakistan and bank chiefs kept on taking these bonuses without letting that great institution, the SBP, doing little to regulate.
Now consider the farmers plight. Nobel laureates would have us believe that the modern way to farm is through the use of chemical agriculture and they laid great store by the use of increased productivity to feed the teeming and starving billions in the third world. Did they attend to the unintended consequences of what they were asserting? No, they did not and they keep on asserting those through the commercial ventures that they have created.
This was the wests way to imperialism in the new millennium. It took them sometime and then some Farishta suggested how they could get to the developing world-keep the moral high ground but work as a demon. The chemical fertilisers and pesticides were a disaster that Pakistan could well have averted.
The disasters were costly not in terms of output but in terms of inputs as well. All kinds of new institutions were created to help the chemical industry of the west through either the WB, ADB or through the well meaning but ignorant policy makers of the developing countries which in our case was the tyrannical powers of a colonial legacy.
The ethics that the modern capitalistic system has given to the world is amplified by the current modern financial crises that led Gordon Brown, British PM to stand at the pulpit of St. Pauls cathedral in London to seek that the banking sector and the financial system show moral courage and to be ethical in their approach.
Wherever finance has been seen as an end in itself we have a moral issue for the one thing that does pervert ethics is money more than one needs. The salaries and the bonuses that these senior managements give to themselves irrespective of their performance has led to the financial crises of a level that has led the world into crises.
Now they talk of concrete regulations. Were they blind when they were cheating the third world? Is it recompense for their previous actions? The corporate governance that they have given to the third world is even worse for these guys in monopoly situations want to be subsidised by the budgets of the third world. Their view of profit is based on greed. Is this what profit to them is?
Well, let them go back to none other than G.B. Shaw who wrote ...the civilisation produced by capitalism is a disease due to short-sightedness and bad morals; and we should have all died from it but for the society having been built on the Ten Commandments. Gordon Brown has done the right thing? In seeking the moral rearmament of the financial world how does he see the immoral rearmament of the Iraq and the Afghanistan war?
Why forget the reasoning of the gospels and the jurists and the philosophers all of whom were opposed to the kind of capitalism that was preached. G.B. Shaw goes on ...it is out of innocent looking beginnings that our huge burden of poverty and misery and drink and crime and vice and premature death has grown. Why did G.B. Shaw have this vision about him that is so strikingly relevant in modern times. Spare money he feels is the root of all evils and can you fault him.
Remember the advertisements in the leading newspapers pertaining to providing women for short periods of time. All these activities come from the spare money concept. What is spare money? It is the money that you have left when you have bought everything you need to keep you becomingly in your station of life. Now look at the becomingly of these corporate goons.
The salaries they are drawing in Pakistan are eight digits with everything found. Why do they need spare money, is it for committing the seven deadly sins? Consider the micro finance institutions and see how they are ripping the hides of the farmer community, especially the poor who have been deprived of their right by some silly legislation some where in time.
The tyrannical regimes gave birth to the micro-finance system and what a mafia they have turned out to be. The CEOs think they are gods and that they are not answerable to any one. The MNCs CEOs are in line with them. It is an unholy alliance between the ones with some birthright that they have not lived up to.
Since birth right allows them a network with the powerful Mummys and daddys friends they think they have the right to run amok in the poor farmers fields. Look at the other end of the spectrum. Can these farmers to whom the micro finance people should have shown a duty of care for they are unable to clothe themselves and are unable to even feed themselves according to the minimal requirements.
The mighty of the community development keep on telling them that they must save. Save from what? The SBP has erred and has erred in mighty ways. The regulations that they ought to have put in place are not there or if they are there why have they not been implemented in letter and in spirit. Are the loans of the rich and the mighty industrialist written off and if so why not those of the small farmers.
Spare money as such stinks. Food does not stink but will not keep for many days. So money for the poor buys them the most perishable items that is meant for keeping body and soul together. While all kinds of hoarders have been put in jail how about the hoarders of money going the same route? That would be some kind of just recompense. In Pakistan, as elsewhere, bad advice always wins and these advisors of sorts are visible by the manner of walking and speaking. Such has been the doings in Pakistan.
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