Life and art: Morgan Freeman in the 1998 film Deep ImpactAnyone with a healthy appetite for transient terror loves a disaster movie, but being trapped in the reality version appears to be less fun than it is at the flicks. Gazing across the Atlantic as the US debt crisis countdown clock clicks remorselessly towards Doomsday on August 2, ghoulish fascination mingles with mounting panic, and I find myself thinking about the first black president of the United States.
I refer not to Barack Obama, of course, but to Morgan Freeman’s Tom Beck in Deep Impact. That 1998 disaster movie seems a handy reference point for the crazy melodrama in Washington, where at the time of writing ever more frantic Congressional wrangling is no closer to producing even a short-term postponement of the coming apocalypse.
The plot concerns a comet hurtling towards the Atlantic seaboard with every intention of doing for humanity what a predecessor did for the dinosaurs. The problem for Beck, in facing this “extinction-level event”, is that even the most bipartisan of presidents cannot reason with a comet.
In a striking instance of life imitating art, President Obama has the identical problem. The Tea Party may technically be an umbrella term for a ragtag coalition of self-styled patriots, but in political terms it is a ball of raging, all-consuming fire that exists to obliterate whatever lies in its path. If that includes the US’s AAA credit rating, with God alone knows what consequences for an already stagnant US economy and a petrified world beyond, so be it. There is no compromising with a comet. All you can do is try to destroy it before it destroys you.
This President Beck attempted to do by sending astronauts to implant nuclear warheads at its core. Now President Obama is advised to take the nuclear option himself. If no deficit reduction deal can be struck, his supporters urge, he should use the 14th Amendment to bypass Congress and raise the debt limit above its $14.3 trillion limit himself.
Bill Clinton says that he would use the 14th, if it will forgive the familiarity, in a trice. But Obama is hardly a nuclear kinda guy, and the erstwhile constitutional law professor in him doubts that section 4, which states that “the validity of the public debt… shall not be questioned”, covers the unilateral raising of the debt ceiling by executive order. If he relied on the 14th, an inevitable referral to the Supreme Court might be the least of it. Congressional Tea Party hostages, feigning Stockholm Syndrome in the hope of persuading their captors not to shoot them by way of primary challenges, would seek to impeach him for acting unconstitutionally. He would be heading towards the battle of his life.
The obvious answer to that objection is, in the argot of George W Bush, bring it on. Obama has offered Republican negotiators huge cuts in welfare benefits and a delay in entitlement to Medicare until the age 67, regardless of the political price to be levied in the 2012 election for further alienating his base. This was rejected. He has asked that roughly one dollar in every three of the deficit reduction come from tax hikes for the very rich. Also rejected. Although this may change (and may, for all I know, have changed overnight), there currently appears to be nothing he could offer that would be acceptable to the Tea Party and its stooges on Capitol Hill.
How long must this appeasement continue before Obama tires of the Neville Chamberlain tribute act and moves that bust of Churchill back into the Oval Office? If that analogy seems as laughably hysterical as the Deep Impact one, maybe it is. This being virgin territory, no one can predict the precise outcome of a default. But nor does anyone quite believe that it would represent an existential threat. Life, as President Beck put it after the chunk of comet not destroyed by the nukes hit the Atlantic seaboard, must go on.
Meanwhile, the Tea Party, for all its neo-fascistic overtones and the “resistance is futile” motto engraved below the wrecking ball rampant on its metaphorical heraldic crest, is not Hitler.
What it is, however, is an insanely purist anti-democratic menace that disdains any compromise, even when almost entirely on its own terms. Its members are enslaved to a warped, Manichean ideology, mingling elements of anarchism and nihilism with ferociously un-Christian disregard for those in greatest need, which holds that taxation and government are evils in themselves. They could not care less about a default, whether or not that result is sharply raised interest rates that will cripple their personal finances, along with those of their country and the wider world. Quite the reverse: they embrace the prospect. Regardless of collateral damage to themselves, war is what they crave.
So this is not the time for a pacifist president. This is the time for the President to slip the deadening shackles of academic aloofness, and go to war. But does Obama have a warrior within? If the party of “Hell, no! Now what was the question?” continues to hold sway through the weekend, we will find out soon enough. He has the codes and the warhead is primed. Upon whether he has the balls to activate it before the comet scorches past the point of no return, and deploys the 14th to avert the cataclysm, rather more than his own place in history will depend.
Home, auto and personal loan borrowers will have to shell out more in their EMIs as three more banks, including the second largest state-run lender Bank of Baroda , increased their lending rates by 75 basis points.
The RBI Governor had said after the policy announcement on Tuesday that bankers had told him that they would increase their lending rates following the 50 bps repo hike.
Bank of Baroda became the third bank today to increase its base and lending rates by 50 basis points each to 10.75% and 15% respectively, effective August 1, the bank informed the exchanges.
The bank also revised the rates on some term deposits below Rs 1 crore and on term deposits of Rs 1 crore by a similar amount. The new rate will be applicable from August 1.
Earlier in the day, two other public sector lenders, Central Bank of India and IDBI Bank , too had hiked their interest rates by 75 bps in their base rates.
While the Mumbai-based Central Bank of India effected a steep 75 bps hike in its base and lending rates to 10.75 and 15% percent respectively, IDBI Bank also hiked its base rate and lending rates by 75 bps each to 10.75% and 15.25%.
Yesterday, the Bangalore-based Canara Bank (50 bps)and the Mumbai-based Bank of India (75 bps) too had upped their base rates.
Other lenders which had acted on cue from RBI include the Bangalore-headquartered private sector lender ING Vysya and the Maharashtra-based private lender Ratnakar Bank.
This leaves the industry leaders like SBI , ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank still to follow the cues from the central bank.
Both Central Bank and IDBI Bank attributed the steep hikes as response to the 50 bps hike the RBI effected in the first quarter monetary policy announced on July 26 to fight inflation, and also to the fact that these banks did not pass on the 25 bps increase that RBI effected in mid-June review.
The hikes have been done "keeping in view the measures announced by RBI, inflation and liquidity scenario," an IDBI statement said.
Both IDBI and Central Bank of India said the hikes are effective August 1.
On July 26, RBI had increased its short-term lending and borrowing rates by a higher-than-expected 50 bps to 8% and 7% respectively, saying inflation is the biggest threat to the economy and not a moderation in growth numbers.
The very same day private sector Yes Bank had raised its rates by 50 bps.
The Central Bank, which declared a 17% drop in Q1 results to Rs 281 crore today on higher provisioning, increased its lending lending rate by 50 bps to 15%.
On the deposit rates side, Central Bank upped it by 40 basis points in a short term bucket, leaving the rest unchanged. IDBI Bank increased deposit rates by 25 to 150 bps in different maturity buckets.
There’s cowboys outfitted with six shooters, aliens that have an inner pair of arms, Native Americans who appear midway through the film and a scantily-clad Olivia Wilde emerging from a fire. The year is 1873, aliens arrive in their spacecraft to mine for gold, taking the occasional human as a prisoner.
For a film entering the Western genre, there’s no Monument Valley. Directed by Jon Favreau the 118-minute film and stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.
TIRUMALA: Governor ESL Narasimhan on Thursday launched biodegradable bags near laddu counters, prepared by mentally challenged students of Akshaya Kshetram.
The governor appreciated this `specially-abled children’ for their service to god. It may be mentioned here that the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) has decided to replace plastic bags with bio-degradable bags for laddus.
The TTD has allotted counter No. 34 in the laddu complex for sale of these bags.
TTD executive officer LV Subrahmanyam, joint EO Tirumala K Srinivasa Raju, CVSO MK Singh, temple deputy EO Munirathnam Reddy and other officials were present.
B.Ed. Examination 2011
