How the media spins Chavez

The Guardian, a highly respected left-of-center British newspaper, still has on its Web site an uncorrected report about Hugo Chavez's notorious speech at the UN in September 2006, during which he had held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and recommended it to the audience. Towards the end of the report, Rory Carroll writes:

Last week the former paratrooper lamented not meeting Prof Chomsky before he died.

Of course, Chomsky was alive and well and The Guardian's readers would have taken away from the smirk in Carroll's report a portrait of Chavez the ignoramus, of Chavez the buffoon. At that time, many other reports had gleefully amplified the alleged flub. I had read about it in The New York Times and had seen gleefully condescending reports on TV.

Sadly for Chavez haters, the report, it turns out, was false, made up, spun out of whole cloth. Prof. Chomsky explained it all in a recent interview on C-SPAN. Reporters who later went back to the text of Chavez's speech found that Chavez was lamenting the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith and regretting not having had the opportunity to meet the famous liberal economist. Some reporter then substituted Chomsky for Galbraith and wittingly or unwittingly set off a viral lie.

The New York Times later corrected the error but, as is usually the case with such corrections, in a way that guarantees that not two in a hundred readers, if even that, would see it.

So, what does Bill Clinton think of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev?

If you haven't done so yet, please read After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton, By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr., in yesterday's The New York Times. In September 2005, Clinton accompanied a Canadian businessman named Frank Giustra to a meeting with Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president-for-life. Nazarbayev's brutal suppression of dissent notwithstanding, Bill was positively effusive, according to the article, in his praise for his dinner host:

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy [the OSCE].

Within forty-eight hours, Frank Giustra got the lucrative rights to a Kazakh uranium mine. Later, out of the goodness of his heart, Giustra donated $130 million to Clinton's charitable foundation.

As I was working my way through the article, I felt a certain pressure on the back of my neck, as if a few blood vessels back there were about to explode. Luckily, I then came upon the following passage:

After Mr. Nazarbayev won [another elcetion in December 2005] with 91 percent of the vote, Mr. Clinton sent his congratulations. “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,” Mr. Clinton wrote in a letter released by the Kazakh embassy. Last September, just weeks after Kazakhstan held an election that once again failed to meet international standards, Mr. Clinton honored Mr. Nazarbayev by inviting him to his annual philanthropic conference.

Laughter had once again been proved to be the best medicine, in this case, for high blood pressure.

Murky Water

Liberal people in the West and elsewhere are often justifiably critical of the unfair treatment of women in some Muslim societies. But the even more egregious unfairness towards women in the Hindu societies of India has not provoked proportionately vocal censure. Deepa Mehta’s recent film Water, which was nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar but lost, could help to remind the world of the unusually cruel treatment that women in general and widows in particular have had to endure in Hindu societies.

Unfortunately, Mehta’s film is set in 1938 and, consequently, it cannot highlight the awful fact that Hindu widows continue to this day to be treated with a malevolence that is unimaginable in civilized nations. Even today the remarriage of widows remains exceedingly rare.

An aunt of mine became a widow in the late 1970s when she was in her twenties. None of the elders in our family considered, even for a second, the possibility of arranging a second marriage for her. I remember asking my grandmother why no arrangements were being made for my widowed aunt’s remarriage. With some amusement at my naïveté, my grandmother pointed out that given the abundance of never-married girls to choose from, no man would ever consider marrying a widow.

(In case you are puzzled by references in the last paragraph to marriages being arranged, let me clarify that most marriages in India are “arranged marriages.” The parents of the boy or the girl advertise in the classifieds, responses are screened, astrological charts are compared, meetings are arranged, terms are negotiated, and, if all goes well, the wedding takes place on a date judged auspicious by the almanac or the family priest or astrologer. Arranged marriages are by no means peculiar to India. In fact, many non-western societies continue to have arranged marriages. When I joined Long Island University in 1990, I shared an office with Prof. John Petrakis who told me that he had had an arranged marriage back in his native country, Greece.)

Maybe my grandmother was right. Maybe as the Indian sex ratio, which is currently about 930 women for every 1000 men, continues to fall (as a result of—it is widely speculated—selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect and murder of female infants) a time will come when the marital prospects of widows will improve to a point where it would be the conventional social expectation that a widowed woman would remarry.

Another reason for optimism is that, as the institution of arranged marriages frays and Hindu men and women begin to emulate western mores and actively seek out their mates, the remarriage prospects of widows will very likely improve. The family grandees who arrange Hindu marriages have been keeping widows out of the mating game. When arranged marriages crumble and disappear, never-married boys and girls, divorced men and women, and widows and widowers, will all jump in together into the mate-finding mosh pit and every widow will finally be able to play the game on the same terms as everybody else.

Let me wind up this post by drawing attention to a few historical references in Water that I thought were quite shaky.

First, in at least two references, the film singles out Raja Rammohan Roy, a Hindu reformer, as the leading crusader for the right of widows to remarry. This is not quite true. Roy (1772–1833) had led the fight against sati, a horrendous Hindu institution whereby women were forced to burn themselves to death on the fires that were lit to cremate their just-deceased husbands. (If you are asking yourself what kind of people could even conceive such a thing, the answer is: My kind of people!)

The fight for the legalization of widow remarriage was waged primarily by Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891). Vidyasagar was a reformer from within, in the sense that as the Principal of Sanskrit College, Kolkata, he led a group of scholars who went through Hindu religious texts to prove that the subjugation of women in Hindu societies had no religious sanction. According to Wikipedia entry on Vidyasagar,

Vidyasagar proposed and pushed through the Widow Remarriage Act no XV of 1856. In December of that year Shreeshchandra Vidyaratna, a teacher at Sanskrit Colege and Vidyasagar's colleague, contracted the fist marriage with a widow under the Act. Vidyasagar was materially involved in arranging this wedding, and he campaigned tirelessly to implement the Act in society, offering to officiate as priest at the marriage of widows since orthodox priests refused. He encouraged his son to marry a widow and established the Hindu Family Annuity Fund to help widows who could not remarry. He financed many such weddings, sometimes getting into debt as a result.”

Water should be congratulated for reminding people about Raja Rammohan Roy. But its historical error manages to simultaneously devalue Roy’s far greater achievement in putting an end to sati and at the same time deny Vidyasagar the credit he deserves on the widow remarriage issue.

The film ends on an upbeat note with a collage of scenes evoking a wave of optimism linked to the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, and the imminent departure of the British from India. The impression is created that things would finally change for Hindu widows when the British packed their bags and left. This struck me as an absolutely risible howler in addition to being an unworthy attempt to end an otherwise unremittingly gloomy film on a high note. The plight of the Hindu widows had nothing to do with the presence of the British, and the departure of the British from India—momentous as it was in numerous ways—could not seriously have been expected to make any difference to the oppression of Hindu widows. The mistreatment of Hindu widows is one sin that Indians can never blame the Brits for. This particular cross is for Indians alone to bear.

Investing is Easy!

Let’s say you have come upon some money and would like to invest it. You may be thinking that you are in need of professional advice. You may be thinking that if you need professional help to get the sink unclogged, you’d certainly need a certified financial analyst to make sure that you don’t flush your money down your recently unclogged drain.

With all due respect, I am here to tell you that you are … nuts! You’d have to be certifiable to spend any money on the advice of a certified financial analyst. You can definitely do it yourself. There’s loads of evidence that simple—even-a-child-can-do-it simple—investment strategies work at least as well as the strategies of most so-called experts on Wall Street. If you don’t believe me, read The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read by Daniel R. Solin, Penguin, New York, NY, ISBN-13: 978-0399532832.

Here’s how to do it, in a few easy steps:

1. Find out how much money you have. Let’s call it M.


2. Let’s say you are A years old. Calculate A percent of M. This is simply A ÷ 100 × M. For example, if you are 19 years old, calculate 0.19 × M.


3. With this money, buy one of the bond index funds in the table below. If you are nineteen and have $1000 to invest, you should spend $190 on a bond index fund. You’ll have $810 left. By the way, you can do all your investing online.


4. Calculate 70% of whatever is left. This is 0.70 × [M – (A ÷ 100 × M)]. With this money, buy one of the domestic stock index funds in the table below. In our example, 70% of $810 is $567. After buying a domestic stock index fund with this money, you’ll have $243 left.


5. With the remaining money, buy one of the international stock index funds in the table below. Done!

Mutual Fund Ticker Symbols
	Bond Index Fund	Domestic Stock Index Fund	International Stock Index Fund
Vanguard	VBMFX	VTSMX	VGTSX
Fidelity	FBIDX	FSTMX	FSIIX
T. Rowe Price	PBDIX	POMIX	PIEQX

Warning: Like all mutual funds, these funds charge fees. But, in general, the ones listed here are low-fee funds. Also, these funds have minimums. Follow the Web links to find out more. It is also a good idea to call and ask for more info; all three companies tend to have well-staffed phone banks. Their toll free numbers are: 877-662-7447 (Vanguard), 1-800-fidelity (Fidelity), and 1-800-225-5132 (T. Rowe Price).

Another warning: There is nothing sacrosanct about the strategy outlined above. You can choose different funds instead of those in the table; each of the three companies has numerous funds in each category. Just remember to stick to index funds. You may even choose to go with mutual fund companies other than the three in the table. Daniel Solin has deliberately been very specific, not because there are no other valid choices, but because he wanted to emphasize the simplicity of investing. When you no longer need his training wheels, you can experiment all you want.

The three key points to keep in mind are:

1. Wealth invested in stocks tends to grow faster on average, but there is a higher risk of a big loss of wealth. Wealth invested in bonds tends to grow slower on average, but there is a lower risk of suffering a big loss.


2. The older you are the bigger should be the percentage of your wealth that is invested in bonds. This means that you need to periodically—say, twice a year—adjust the money you have invested in the three index funds to conform with the strategy described above: that is, you need to ensure that the percentage of your wealth in bonds remains approximately your current age, and that, of the wealth invested in stocks, 70% is in domestic stocks and 30% is in foreign stocks. (Actually, to be quite honest, you should feel free to stray from the 70-30 split between US and foreign stocks; there’s nothing really wrong with 60-40 or 50-50.)


3. Whether you want to buy stocks or bonds, buying index funds is way better than buying individual stocks or bonds. Nobody knows how to pick the right stocks or the right bonds. So, buy index funds instead.

That’s it. Happy investing!

Inside Man: Film Review

I saw Spike Lee’s new film Inside Man this Tuesday (May 2, 2006). I had read reviews of the film by the critics Anthony Lane and Roger Ebert and they had alerted me to two inconsistencies in the script by newcomer Russell Gewirtz. It is always fun to look for dumb mistakes in plot-heavy movies and I managed to find a few that neither Lane nor Ebert had mentioned. I then went to imdb.com to see if other reviewers had spotted the errors. I read the first dozen reviews of Inside Man listed on the site and found no mention of ‘my’ inconsistencies. So, I thought I should list them here. (Spoiler Alert: I will be revealing parts of the plot.)

A robber, named Dalton Russell, and his accomplices have taken over a bank and are holding hostages. They are after the ill-gotten gains of Arthur Case, the bank’s founder, who had made his money during World War II by collaborating with the Nazis and cruelly ripping off vulnerable Jews.

Roger Ebert has pointed out that this would make Arthur Case a nonagenarian, which is certainly not what the on-screen Case, as played by the patrician Christopher Plummer, looks like. (By the way, this plot line itself came as a small surprise: given the themes and preoccupations of Lee’s earlier movies, I would have expected the baddie to have got rich by collaborating with South Africa’s apartheid regime to bust sanctions restrictions.)

Russell, the robber, knows all about Case’s past and about the safe-deposit box in which Case has lovingly preserved the incriminating evidence: Lee shows us nasty-looking documents with large swastikas and other Nazi markings.

As Anthony Lane and others have pointed out, the movie is silent on how the robber found out about Case’s past and the safe-deposit box and on why Case didn’t burn the documents five seconds after having laid his hands on them.

Russell’s first demand to Frazier, the NYPD hostage negotiator (played by Denzel Washington), is for food for the hostages. Frazier—clever dick!—bugs the pizza boxes to listen in on Russell’s strategy sessions. Russell—cleverer dick!—finds the bug and hooks it to an iPod that plays a marathon speech by the late Albanian Marxist dictator Enver Hoxha. (The iPod’s screen helpfully says, “Enver Hoxha, Speech”.) The language sounds vaguely Russian to Frazier and the other cops. They bring in a Russian speaker and he says that the language being spoken is definitely not Russian: maybe Polish or Hungarian, but definitely not Russian, probably Central European. At his wit’s end, Frazier plays the bug intercept over the public address system for the crowd of onlookers to hear, thinking that polyglot New York would throw up someone who knew the mysterious language being spoken by the robbers. Predictably, a hard-hatted worker walks up and volunteers that he is “one hundred percent sure” that the language being spoken on the bug intercept is Albanian: he doesn’t know any Albanian but used to listen to his Albanian ex-wife speak Albanian with her relatives. Frazier tries the Albanian embassy for an interpreter, but to no avail. So, he gets the worker to call his ex-wife. She shows up and tells Frazier that he has been listening, not to the robbers, but to a recording of a speech by Enver Hoxha. Frazier is despondent at having been taken for a ride.

Before I get to the inconsistencies, let me describe my general frustration with this part of the movie. As soon as Dalton Russell (played by Clive Owen) had made his demand for food for the hostages, I knew that Frazier would bug the food; it was entirely predictable, this is what happens in all hostage movies. But I soon realized that the robber would have to anticipate the bug because, were Frazier’s bugging strategy to succeed, the heist—and, quite possibly, the movie—would be over in two minutes because the cops would then have an overwhelming advantage. As you can see from the plot summary in the last paragraph, this is exactly what happened, except that Lee took forever to tell the tale. Imagine my frustration: I anticipated the bugging and the pointlessness of it and had to sit through a very long drawn out scene to have my instincts confirmed!

Now for the plot inconsistencies! First, why would Frazier play the bug intercept over the PA for the people in the street to hear? At that point he did not know that the robber was aware of the bug. It would be in Frazier’s interest for Russell and his accomplices to not know that they were being bugged. If the bug intercept is played out on the street over loudspeakers would there not be a big risk that the robber would hear it from inside the bank and realize that he was being bugged? Of course there would.

Second, given that the robber was playing a speech—and not a recording of a faked conversation—to the police bug, why would it be necessary for Frazier to figure out the meaning of the words being spoken to realize that his bugging plan had failed? A speech sounds a lot different than a conversation among multiple people. One wouldn’t need to know Albanian to figure out that the speech was a speech and not a conversation among the robber and his accomplices. Cops listening to a speech on a bug intercept would quickly figure out that they were listening to a speech and not to a strategy discussion among a bunch of robbers.

Third, given the inconsistency discussed in the last paragraph, why would Russell, whom the film builds up to be some sort of criminal genius, play the recording of a speech to the police bug? Yes, he may be entitled to a low opinion of the intelligence of New York cops, but why would he take a risk by playing a speech to the bug? I would have thought that he would be ready with a recorded conversation that would plausibly resemble a strategy session between the baddies. That way, he could be sure that the NYPD would spend a lot of time figuring out that their bug had been found out and that they had been played for fools.

In short, Russell Gewirtz’s script of Inside Man was a big disappointment. I did not care for Spike Lee’s unusually leisurely direction either. I did, however, like Matthew Libatique’s pristine cinematography.

The comedian Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, on Saturday, April 29, was easily the high point of the evening. But the press coverage the next day essentially ignored it and focused only on the pre-Colbert stuff. Standing just a few feet away from George W. Bush, Colbert let loose with one lacerating attack on Bush’s policies after another. What made it a truly exhilarating event was precisely that Bush was sitting a chair or two away from Colbert. Had Colbert made the same jokes on his hit TV show “The Colbert Report” or some comparable venue they would not have had nearly the same effect. But here he was, saying it right to Bush’s face. And all Bush could do was to try lamely to laugh along so as not to appear totally bereft of a sense of humor.

Coming back to the mainstream press’s Stalinist attempt to airbrush Colbert out of existence, I certainly was not surprised. As it is not easy to quantify these things, one has to rely on one’s own instincts. Mine tell me that precisely at those points at which you most need the TV—and, more broadly, the press—coverage to be fair, the media will subvert the truth to help the right. Having done the right’s bidding at a crucial juncture—say during the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns that I followed somewhat closely—it will then take a few superfluous jabs at the right to have something ready to throw at anyone on the left who may dare to accuse the media of right-wing bias.

Thank God for the Internet, however! In this instance, thank God for YouTube.com. For the time being at least, you can watch Colbert’s speech at that Web site: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

"Japanese Story": film review

Last Sunday (April 16), I saw "Japanese Story", a 2003 film by the Australian director Sue Brooks, on DVD. Toni Colette plays Sandy Edwards, a geologist who works for a coal mining company, recently purchased by the Japanese. The Head Office sends over Hiromitsu, a young sarariman, to familiarize himself with the new acquisition and Sandy is told to pick him up at the airport and drive him to the coal mine, which is somewhere in the middle of a god-forsaken desert. Thus enfolds an archetypal story of a culture clash that turns first into a hope-inducing cultural thesis-antithesis-synthesis and finally into a downbeat meditation on the difficulties of cultural outreach.

With the clueless Hiromitsu insisting—over the protests of Sandy, whom he perhaps is unable to take very seriously—that he be taken to a part of the mine that can only be reached by a dirt road, their SUV gets stuck. There is no one to help for miles around. Their cell phones can't find a network. They must light fires and try to sleep in the freezing desert night and then try to free the car again next morning. In this way, this odd couple is thrown together in the middle of the desert, forced to help each other and to rely on each other. Gradually the cultural walls between them disintegrate and they fall very naturally and sweetly in love.

Then, out of the blue, disaster strikes. The giddy and squealing Sandy races towards and then dives into a shallow, muddy pool of water, and before she can warn Hiromitsu about the shallowness of the pond, he dives in too. Possibly having hit his head on the floor of the pond with the force of a vigorous dive, Hiromitsu dies. His wife comes from Japan to take the body home. She sees the pictures of Hiromitsu and Sandy, ecstatic together in the vast Australian desert. Nevertheless, the film ends in a respectful—perhaps even friendly—parting at the airport between Sandy and Hiromitsu's wife, who hands over the pictures to the deeply apologetic Sandy and leaves with a sincere "Thank you".

The film is beautifully acted and directed. But the third act (Hiromitsu's death and after) left me bored. It is undoubtedly legitimate for a film to take a hesitant view of the possibilities for a genuine bridging of the East-West gap, but unfortunately the film doesn't have any interesting observations on that theme: it is content to simply assert that theme.

Finally, let me touch upon this film's distinctive approach to the intimate scenes between Hiromitsu and Sandy. There are perhaps just two of these scenes and they are very understated. What struck me as exceptional, however, was the reversal of roles in these scenes. The slightly built and delicate-looking Hiromitsu lies absolutely motionless and expressionless on the ground, with only his eyes—wide open and very still—expressing some desire and anticipation, while Sandy, who is physically the bigger and built, as they say, like a truck, crouches over him and gradually lowers her body to his.