Feast for Thought

Our daily newspaper carries Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's column, and I used to wonder why the happenings in Wall Street and Washington DC should jostle with much more serious local issues in the op-ed page. For a change, today's piece (a part of it placed below), " Who cooked the planet? " is more globally relevant than the other pieces in that column thus far. (it appears that the online version of this newspaper no longer carries the same column, only the print edition does) "....it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it? The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice. If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom line...

Why is that - invariably - concerned persons are never the persons concerned? If you follow Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman's columns on the US economy, you'd think - why isn't he in Barack Obama's team? Then the US President could have avoided such sittings with the ever-hungry media. (though it was refreshing to see a famous political figure admitting mistakes - see Obama on his selection of tax defaulters for his team ). Only then would the power - to do the right thing by the masses (not the classes) - would be in the right hands, and the 'person concerned' is actually a 'concerned person'. There are many such examples - Follow P Sainath's studies and articles and the painful statistics put together by him, and you'll wonder - why is he not the Minister for Agriculture? (conversely of course why is the Minister of Agriculture not the one doing all those studies and following up on them?) And another - Sunita Narain and India's Centre fo...