Thursday, September 12, 2019

Imran Is Playing A Very Difficult Game



Imran Khan is like Michael Corleone right after his father died, one hand tied. He is in a very tight spot. He is head of state in a country where Benazir Bhutto was assassinated and Pervez Musharraf almost was: two attempts in one week while he was military dictator. Those who propose he take the terrorist bull by the horns should take note.



“For teams like Pakistan, India, and the West Indies,” Khan writes in his autobiography, “a battle to right colonial wrongs and assert our equality was played out on the cricket field every time we took on England.” Into this gladiatorial arena, shirt open, eyes bedroom-y, hair long and tousled, stepped Khan. He was one of those rare figures, like Muhammad Ali, who emerge once a generation on the frontier of sport, sex, and politics. “Imran may not have been the first player to enjoy his own cult following,” writes his biographer Christopher Sandford, “but he was more or less single-handedly responsible for sexualizing what had hitherto been an austere, male-oriented activity patronized at the most devoted level by the obsessed or the disturbed.” In 1996, after years of turning down pleas from established politicians and military dictators eager to align themselves with his celebrity, Khan launched his own political party. In its first election, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI—which translates as the Movement for Justice—won zero seats in parliament. Five years later, Khan won one seat, his own. Even by 2013, with his personal popularity at an all-time high, the PTI won only 35 seats. For 20 years, he had been telling his friends and well-wishers that “the next time you come to Pakistan, I will be prime minister.” But four elections had come and gone, two marriages had collapsed in their wake, and the quest of this aging playboy to be his country’s premier was no nearer its end. armor Pakistan against its own elites, whose “slavish” imitation of Western culture had instilled in them a “self-loathing that stemmed from an ingrained inferiority complex.” “An emotion that he feels very strongly about is that we should stop feeling enslaved to the West mentally,” said Ali Zafar, Khan’s friend and Pakistan’s biggest pop star. “He feels that since he’s gone there—he’s been there and done that—he knows the West more than anybody else over here. He’s telling them, ‘Look, you’ve got to find your own space, your own identity, your own thing, your own culture, your own roots.’ ” I first spoke with Khan at a party in London, when I was 25. At the time I was dating Ella Windsor, a minor member of the British royal family who was a family friend of the Goldsmiths. To see Khan out and about in London—the legend himself—was to understand how truly at home he was among the highest echelons of British society. The English upper classes adore cricket—it is one of the many coded ways in which their class system works—and the allure of the former captain of the Pakistani cricket team was still very real. The night we met, in late summer 2006, Khan had come to a party at a Chelsea studio overlooking the Moravian burial ground. On that balmy evening, surrounded by the silhouettes of plane trees, it was clear that Khan, five years after 9/11, was in the throes of a religious and political transformation. ...... He said he believed that suicide bombers, according to “the rules of the Geneva Convention,” had the right to blow themselves up. Here, I remember feeling, was a man who had dealt so little in ideas that every idea he had now struck him as a good one. Khan has a commanding presence. He fills a room and has a tendency to speak at people, rather than to them; never was there a greater mansplainer. What he lacks in intelligence, however, he makes up for in intensity, vigor, and what feels almost like a kind of nobility. ...... “You might say he’s a duffer; you might say he’s a buffoon,” his second wife, Reham, told me over lunch in London. “He doesn’t have intelligence of economic principles. He doesn’t have academic intelligence. But he’s very street, so he figures you out.” Like his coeval in the White House, Khan has been reading people all his life—on and off the field. This knowing quality, combined with the raw glamour of vintage fame, creates a palpable tension in his presence. The air bristles; oxygen levels crash. The line is taut, if no longer with sex appeal, then its closest substitute: massive celebrity. But to see him two years later in the old city of Lahore, doing more dips in the gym at 55 than I could do at 27, watching him fawned over by young and old men alike, was to feel myself in the company of a demigod. Alone with him, I was struck by that mixture of narcissism bordering on sociopathy that afflicts those who have been famous too long. His utter lack of emotion when it came to Bhutto—whom he had been at Oxford with, and had known most of his life—was startling. “Look at Benazir,” he told me as we drove through Lahore one morning, past knots of mourners and protesters. “I mean, God really saved her.” Then he began fulminating against Bhutto for having agreed to legitimize General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator, in return for the government dropping corruption charges against her. Now it is Khan who has been appointed, presiding over a government in which there are no fewer than 10 Musharraf-era ministers. Khan, Rushdie said, was “placating the mullahs on one hand, cozying up to the army on the other, while trying to present himself to the West as the modernizing face of Pakistan.” “You know me,” he said. “I’m a liberal; I’ve got friends in India; I’ve got friends who are atheists. But you’ve got to be careful here.” My uncle—the grandson of Muhammad Iqbal, Khan’s political hero Like evangelicals in the United States, in whom a politicized faith conceals an uneasy relationship with modernity and temptation, Khan’s contradictions are not incidental; they are the key to who he is, and perhaps to what Pakistan is. His hatred of the “ruling elite,” to which he belongs, is the animating force behind his politics. He faults reformers, such as Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi, for falsely believing that “by imposing the outward manifestations of Westernization they could catapult their countries forward by decades.” Khan may be right to critique a modernity so thin that it has come to be synonymous with the outward trappings of Western culture. But he is himself guilty of reducing the West to little more than permissiveness and materialism. When it comes to its indisputable achievements, such as democracy and the welfare state, Khan conveniently grafts them on to the history of Islam. “Democratic principles,” he writes, “were an inherent part of Islamic society during the golden age of Islam, from the passing of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and under the first four caliphs.” Khan is not the first Islamic leader to insist that all good things flow from Islam and that all error is the fault of the West. But to do so is to end up with a political program that is by necessity negative, deriving its energy not from what it has to offer but from its virulent critique of late-stage capitalism. “The life that had come to Islam,” V.S. Naipaul wrote almost 40 years ago in Among the Believers, for which he traveled extensively in Pakistan, “had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilization.” Khan’s repurposing of Iqbal serves in part as an inoculation against the West, and in part as a cudgel with which to beat Pakistan’s elite. But it does not amount to a serious reckoning with the power of the West, or with the limitations of one’s own society. As such, it cannot bring about the “cultural, intellectual, and moral renaissance” that Khan yearns for. Under his version of khudi, people genuflect toward Islam but quietly continue to lead secret Western lives. “He’s a stooge of the army,” a journalist in Islamabad told me. The journalist, who has known Khan for years, once counted himself among the cricketer’s greatest fans. “I consider myself to be that unlucky person who built a dream about an individual and saw it shattered before my eyes,” he said. In 2013, after years of military rule, Pakistan finally achieved what it never had before: a peaceful transfer of power. These signs of a maturing democracy, however, posed a direct threat to the power of the military, which began, in the words of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, to develop the art of the “non-coup coup.” That, the journalist said, is “where the unholy alliance between Imran Khan and the establishment began.” The following year, Khan led what are called the dharna days—months of protest calling for the overthrow of Pakistan’s democratically elected government.

Whatever else can be said about Khan, he inspires hope the likes of which Pakistan has not known for a long time.

...... “Up until that point,” Noon said, “we had no hope in the system. We all felt that this guy means well, but he’s not going to get anywhere.” “From the generals’ point of view, things could not be better,” observed Haqqani, the former ambassador. “They have an ostensibly civilian government in place, which can get the blame for Pakistan’s myriad problems, while the generals run the government.” Khan has called out the army on its support of terrorist groups and was nothing short of statesmanlike earlier this year in calming tensions between India and Pakistan. In late July, Khan scored another coup during a White House meeting with Trump. The dynamic between the two philandering narcissists was positively electric.

The greatest challenge of Khan’s tenure, however, is whether he can find a way to get his debt-ridden country out of the doldrums of economic despair.

“The pattern we see again and again,” Hamid said, “is the rise of the charismatic leader who thinks he knows best—even better than the military—and then is undone by the military.” In 1981, Naipaul wrote of Pakistan, “The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith.” Now, almost 40 years later, Imran Khan is once again making the case for a society founded on the principles of the Koran. But religion, far from being the solution to Pakistan’s problems, appears to be an impediment to a society struggling to make its peace with modern realities. The country that banned pornography in the name of faith also happens to be among its most voracious consumers; gay dating apps like Grindr flourish, but homosexuality is on paper punishable by death; Pakistan is dry, but behind closed doors its elite consume great quantities of alcohol and cocaine. In such a place, it is but a short step from distorted individual realities to a distorted collective one. To visit Pakistan is to inhabit an alternate reality; the great majority of people I spoke with, from Lahore drawing rooms to the street, believe that 9/11 was an American conspiracy.
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Elizabeth Warren: Plus 10 Points

This would be my first choice ticket. Warren Harris 2020. Because, as far as I am concerned, gender is the number one issue. Bigger than inequality, bigger than poverty, much bigger than Donald Trump. It is about time. UBI is an idea whose time has come, true. But I don't see how President Warren could avoid that.

My current lineup:

President: Elizabeth Warren
Vice President: Kamala Devi Harris
Secretary of Labor: Andrew Yang
Secretary of Urban Affairs: Pete Buttiegieg
Senate Lion: Bernie Sanders
Chancellor of the Obama Library: Joe Biden
Texas Governor: Beto (I will make no attempt to spell out his last name.)
UN Ambassador: Tulsi Gabbard
New Jersey Senator: Corey Booker
New York Senator: Kristen Gillibrand

Elizabeth Warren's top quality for 2020 is that there is no way she will be bullied by Donald Trump. She will go toe to toe. She will fight. She will turn Trump into mush. And she will swamp him with her ideas.

She will not be bullied. She will not be denied.

When it comes to the wealth tax, Larry Summers is a bonehead.



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“I feel really accepting of the things I used to be insecure about. I have gone through eating disorders and body shaming, and here I am today doing this shoot for millions of people to see.” ~Katelyn Ohashi (Gymnast; @katelyn_ohashi) . Katelyn, a 2018 NCAA team champion with UCLA, shares a sentiment that resonates with all of us, athletes and non-athletes alike. As an athlete, I work hard to get where I have gone and have to work harder to get where I will go. I’m not naturally muscular, I’m not naturally fat adapted. It takes months and years of endurance and strength training and constant mindful nutrition. I struggle, as everyone does, with how my body doesn’t fit into the box. These images of great athletes are not just a nod to those who are in the spotlight, but also a nod to those that aren’t. The silent crushers that no one has heard of in *all* sports. It’s also a nod to all that struggle daily through insecurity, self-doubt, the mental training to get through that no one sees… We all have it in us to be exceptional, and we all have it in us to find excuses not to show up and do the work. . So, as I board a flight now to speak on a panel for @ESPN, I complete yesterday’s accolades to all the athletes and photographers highlighted in this years issue, and end these series of posts by giving respect to all those out there who try just as hard, who work for it. Who earn it regardless of whether they are seen or not. . ▪️Katelyn Ohashi (@katelyn_ohashi) by Dana Scruggs (@danascruggs) ▪️Nancy Lieberman (@nancylieberman) by Ramona Rosales (@ramonarosales) ▪️Amanda Nunes (@amanda_leoa) by Marcus Smith (@marcus.chi) ▪️Kelley O’Hara (@kelleyohara) by Heather Hazzan (@heatherhazzan) ▪️Chris Paul (@cp3) by Gary Land (@garyland) ▪️Lakey Peterson (@lakeypeterson) by Sarah Lee (@hisarahlee) ▪️Michael Thomas (@cantguardmike) by Peter Hapak (@peterhapak) ▪️Christian Yelich (@christianyelich by Joe Pugliese (@joepug
A post shared by Cory Richards (@coryrichards) on





Warren is the only winner in polls after previous Democratic debates
Warren unveils far-reaching Social Security plan
‘Why Are You Pissing In Our Face?’: Inside Warren’s War With the Obama Team “I was not going to set that agency up asking Tim Geithner every day ‘Mother may I?’” Warren says now. “It just wasn't going to work.” ..... she reserved her real fury for Geithner and White House National Economic Council chief Larry Summers, whom she regarded as predisposed towards big banks over families struggling to save their homes....... the conviction at the heart of her presidential candidacy: that the system is rigged. ..... while former Vice President Joe Biden often boasts on the campaign trail that his and Obama’s efforts saved the economy from another Great Depression, Warren regards the Obama administration’s top-down response to the financial crisis as part of the reason a man like Donald Trump won the White House eight years later. ...... As for the Obama team’s arguments that the financial rescue was a success -- the bank bailouts ultimately made a profit, a depression was averted, and GDP growth resumed faster than the aftermath of most financial crises -- Warren considers them obscene self-congratulation. ....... “When I raised it with Tim, he reassured me that they'd done the calculations and it was all going to work out. And what he meant was the survival of the banks,” Warren says, recalling a meeting in the Treasury building in the fall of 2009. “He says ‘We’ve foamed the runway -- enough that the big banks can land.’ And the fact that millions of families were losing their homes, that millions of people lost their jobs, you know, savings, just wasn't part of that calculation.” ...... “Tim and Larry and those guys, they are the villains of the Woody Guthrie song,” says one, a reference to the lyric “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen” in ‘Pretty Boy Floyd.’..... top administration officials remember Obama spending an inordinate amount of time going back and forth about what to do with Warren...... she “broke a lot of eggs.” ...... “That the survival of the big banks is not the measure of recovery.” ....... “I started to understand in that process, how the only way to get Congress on the side of families that were broke was to bring public pressure on them. So in that space of time, during the ‘Bankruptcy Wars,’ I must have spent a million hours on the telephone with reporters

starting with ‘B is for bankruptcy.’”

...... “If you've got no stories to tell, there are a lot of reporters who won’t talk about it,” she explains. “And if the reporters won’t talk about it, then the world isn't going to hear about it.” ....... It would begin before dawn with an aide bringing her an Egg McMuffin but no coffee (

“Can you imagine me on coffee?!,”

she once explained to an aide who asked how she didn’t drink it.) ........ Warren surprised members of her own staff by producing monthly videos of herself explaining each report. She and aides also created a comprehensive website with a regularly updated “blog.” Commonplace now, these digital tools weren't being used by many members of Congress in 2008. ..... “He meets with bankers. He doesn’t meet with me.” ....... Her national profile reached the point-of-no-return in April 2009 after an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “That is the first time in six months to a year that I felt better,” Stewart said after she summed up the financial crisis. “I don’t know what you did just there but for a second that was like financial chicken soup for me.”........ A former student once dubbed Warren’s teaching method as “Socratic with a machine gun,” and in 2009 and 2010 Geithner was at the end of the barrel. Her questioning was so brutal at times that it stunned some of the Republicans working on the oversight panel. ....... As Obama positioned himself between the bankers and the pitchforks and took a hard turn from campaign poetry to governing prose,

Warren’s furious rhetoric filled a populist void that many on the left had hoped Obama would occupy.

Her response to the financial crisis led New York Magazine to declare in 2011 that “in large swathes of blue America, Warren’s star actually eclipses Obama’s.” ........ Reid, who appointed Warren to the oversight panel and has been an admirer of her presidential run, says he thought Warren clashed so fiercely with Geithner and Summers in part because she understood financial markets well enough that they couldn’t condescend to her......... Warren came from a working-class family in Oklahoma that faced its own micro financial crisis when her father had a heart attack. She earned a debate scholarship to George Washington University, but dropped out to marry her high school boyfriend whom she later divorced. She ultimately graduated from the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School and worked her way up to the highest rungs of legal academia -- from teaching at the University of Houston to Harvard and becoming one of the country’s foremost experts on bankruptcy. ..... She spoke unapologetically and bluntly....... When the crash came, Warren saw a reckoning for a system she had long said was fraudulent and the chance to revamp it entirely. Geithner felt his first, second and third priority was to save that same system from collapse because then no other goals were possible. ...... “After the rush-rush-rush to bail out the big banks with giant buckets of money, this plan seemed designed to deliver foreclosure relief with all the urgency of putting out a forest fire with an eyedropper,” Warren wrote in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance. ....... One former Treasury official says people in the department were glad Warren addressed the letter to Obama so he could finally understand what it was like to have to deal with her on a daily basis. ....... Warren insists that she doesn’t question the motives of the people who served in Obama’s Treasury Department. But asked if she thought they had been “sort of captured by the system--” Warren jumps in: “That’s it. They just they saw the world differently. They had spent all their time with giant banks and their representatives. This is my point about how Washington works.” ....... Beyond the question of her loyalty, some question the soundness of her ideas. Summers, for one, has co-written two op-eds arguing against the underlying math in Warren’s wealth tax, the central means for how she says she will pay for her ambitious liberal agenda. ...... “Ironically, and I give her credit on this, part of the reason she’s doing well politically today is that she has put forward plans that have details,” the former official says. “I certainly like this Elizabeth Warren more than the Elizabeth Warren of that era."


Hillary Clinton reads her emails at Venice art exhibit
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Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Universal Basic Income (aka Freedom Dividend) Is Not Free Money



Somebody built the road in front of your house. You did not. Is that a "free" road? Does that road make you lazy? Is that road bad karma?

The road is infrastructure. For most people that is easy to grasp because it is physical, it is there. You see it.

Education and health are also infrastructures. But they are less concrete. You can't build a knowledge economy unless you make massive investments in education and health.

UBI, Universal Basic Income, is similarly infrastructure. It is just like the road. Before the UBI, poverty starts at zero. When you are poor, you are desperate. With UBI, you are still poor. But now poverty starts at 12,000 dollars as per the Andrew Yang proposal in circulation right now. You are no longer desperate. For a couple, that is 24K a year. That is not luxury income, but at least you can hope to get by.

But that's a lot of money in aggregate. It comes to trillions of dollars.

That is the thing.

(1) The income and wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is too wide, in this country as well as globally. That wide gap is not healthy for democracy. It is not healthy for the market economy. In fact, left to its own devices, that gap will keep getting wider and wider until there is a collapse of civilization. This is existential. And so a wealth tax makes sense. Elizabeth Warren is taking the lead on this one. She proposes that you pay two cents for every dollar you have above 50 million.

(2) Andrew Yang talks about a VAT, Value Added Tax, hardly an original idea. Most countries already have it. Instead of taxing income or wealth, you tax every business transaction, not just between companies and consumers, but also between companies. B2B as well as B2C.

(3) All the money that the government is already giving out to people comes to something like almost two trillion. But now, instead of making people fill out forms and harass them and humiliate them, you just give it to them. Cuts out a lot of red tape. Slims down the bureaucracy. Republicans should love this.

(4) My personal favorite that I don't see anyone on the campaign trail talk about is that all data generated by one person is that person's own personal oil well. Data is the oil. Companies may collect it, but they may not own it. Individuals own their data. This data is lucrative enough that it can fund the UBI for all humanity. But I am not at all opposed to the first three.

Humanity is about to enter an Age Of Abundance, mostly technology-driven.

Just like the industrial revolution brought to an end numerous jobs in agriculture, the fourth industrial revolution is about to wipe out sector after sector of jobs. Handled well, we all can be better off. We could see interesting developments like shorter work weeks, longer vacations, people spending more time with family and friends.

I see numerous new jobs being created. People will have their UBI, that might start at 1K a month, but will gradually go up. On top of that, they will have jobs that pay them another 50K or 100K or 200K. These will be jobs that we have not even begun to imagine yet.

Just like a taxi driver does not have to build a car, and so can just focus on driving, think of robots and Artificial Intelligence as the new car. You can always do a value add on top of that.

People having more time for worship is not a bad idea. People having more time to spend with their parents, with their children is not a bad idea. There are tremendous unmet needs in education and health. New service sector jobs will get created. Art will flourish like never before. There will be a music and movies boom. People will travel more and there will be a greater cross-cultural understanding.

UBI is just basic infrastructure for the fourth industrial revolution.

Yang Warren 2020

Nobody is saying American Basic Income (ABI) though. UBI means universal. It can only work if it covers all humanity. It can be rolled out in stages.







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