Removing the excise duties and other charges on petroleum ?

Rishi Sunak is expected to cut fuel duty by at least 5p and is considering lifting tens of thousands of low earners out of paying national insurance altogether to help tackle the cost-of-living crisis.

France is also taking further action aimed at addressing the continued rise in fuel prices . “We are already protecting people in France with relation to gas prices," said Ecological Transition minister Barbara Pompili .

Why can’t we ?

Our fuel taxes are a tax on production as transport costs are an important element of the cost of production. Gasoline prices on the average over the past few years around the world show that our fuel prices are much higher than many of our competitive textile producers. Thus the fuel taxes are harming our industry’s competitiveness.

Moreover, fuel taxes are really just like another VAT that adversely affects the middle class and the poor. It increases the regressivity of our already unfair tax system impacting far more heavily on both the middle class and the poor. (The poor spend a larger portion of their income on driving than the rich do). It also has a trickle-down effect on inflation, higher fuel prices mean higher freight, and higher freight makes transportable goods more expensive thus driving up the prices of goods and services throughout the economy.

And a good chunk of the gains for the lower middle class and the poor via the populist measures of Minimum Wages , NIT and increase in the BRP have already been snatched away at the gas pump and by inflation.

So why can’t we reduce at least the excise duties and the other charges on petroleum ?

Because this regime's management of our public finances has been catastrophic. On the basis of our own estimates for Budget 2021-22, revenue may experience a shortfall of Rs 4 bn , expenses lower by some Rs 2 bn and capital expenditure by some Rs 6 bn. Thus the budget deficit will be lower by some Rs 4 bn; that is by -0.8% of GDP; the budget deficit may turn out around 4.2 % of GDP below the estimated 5%.

But if

- the Rs 8 bn of withdrawal of income from quasi corporations is considered as withdrawal of equity not revenue- Note: IMF GFS manual says that Funds withdrawn by liquidating large amounts of accumulated retained earnings or other reserves of the quasi-corporations are recorded as withdrawals from equity,

- expenses include the Rs 12 bn invested in Airport Holdings - a bail out like BAI, and not considered as equity and

- expenses also include other equity investments, especially Rs 2.4 bn in National Property Fund - continued BAI bail out.

the BUDGET DEFICIT SHOOTS UP TO MORE THAN -10% OF GDP.

(That will not necessarily raise debt by that amount ; on the contrary it will reduce debt. But, the underlying fiscal situation and our level of debt are not sustainable. We are among the top 5 African countries with the highest debt-to-GDP ratios.)

Please note that even if Govt is showing a limited budget deficit, excluding the above-mentioned items, in the current year by reaping revenue gains from taxation as consumption expenditures rise with inflation, this is likely to be short-lived. Govt expenditures are bound to increase in the coming financial years as a result of higher prices, but Govt will in the current budget try to ride on the delay between the inflation effects on govt revenue and expenditure.

As you see, Govt is doing everything, even manipulating the figures to ensure that its budget deficit and debt figures are on target, "sinon rotin bazar" from IMF and Moody’s….they have little choice; If they reduce the excise duties on petroleum, they will have to continue decreasing capital spending and raise taxes-increase VAT, introduce progressive taxes, a wealth tax and carry out some essential reforms on the expenses side...etc.

Will they have the guts to defy the 'Juncker Curse’ ?

"We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it."

(Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the Eurogroup. The Economist (2007), "The Quest for Prosperity", March 15th.)

Or is it more likely that some big populist policies/measures coming to fruition just in time for the election, given their recent efforts to build up a war chest -the commissions from Air Mts, housing and infrastructural projects and not to forget the off-budget special funds !!!

There is still hope for grassroots journalism !!!

“Never before has the so-called free world been deprived to this extent of full information, non-partisan analysis and the “other point of view”. For years, people who see themselves as liberals and democrats have railed against the firewalls that China erected around what its citizens are allowed to know, banning media like Facebook, Google, Twitter and The New York Times. But today, we who don’t live in China are also being firewalled and our access to information and different opinions is being cut off and most of us don’t even realize it.

Our knowledge about the world today is to a large extent controlled by a handful of media organizations, which trumpet their liberal values and claim to have zero-tolerance policies on misinformation. Yet, right now, they are acting as political instruments. I am certain that currently, common Russians have no access to any information that is not approved by Vladimir Putin and his men. But Putin’s Russia is an autocracy which scorns human rights and freedoms. We expect no better from it. Russians know this too. But when powerful corporations in the democratic world turn into propagandists for the countries where they are headquartered, it should worry us."

But there is still hope when we watch this Indian documentary “Writing With Fire” which earned a nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category for the 94th Academy Awards,2022 Oscars, becoming the only Indian film to earn a nod this year.

This rousing documentary follows the reporters of India’s only all-women news outlet as they pivot to digital journalism while battling personal and political challenges.

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, a group of women set up India’s only newspaper run entirely by women. All of them are from the lowest caste, Dalit, and are expected to fail, but instead they stir a revolution.This Oscar-nominated film follows chief reporter Meera and her team of journalists as they break with tradition to work on the frontlines of India’s biggest issues.

Find below this review published in the New York times in November of last year.

'Speaking Truth to Power

Several times in the documentary “Writing With Fire,” we see women reporters standing alone in a crowd of men — cops, miners, political rallyists — asking gentle but firm questions. The women’s grit in the face of palpable hostility is impressive, and it becomes more so when you learn that they’re in Uttar Pradesh, an Indian province known for crimes against women, and that they are Dalits, or members of the country’s so-called untouchable caste.

These are the reporters of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only women-led newspaper. In “Writing With Fire,” the directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh follow the outlet’s pivot to digital coverage in the lead-up to the general election in 2019. Many of the women have never used smartphones or cameras, and for much of the film, the reporters train each other and exchange feedback in heartening displays of sororal solidarity.Scenes from the reporters’ home lives emphasize how trivial these technical challenges seem compared to domestic ones.

Meera, a veteran, tough-as-a-nut journalist, was married at 14 and earned three degrees while raising her children; the feisty Suneeta cannot get married because her parents can’t afford the dowries charged by men who would not allow her to work.

But Thomas and Ghosh focus on arcs of resistance rather than repression, tracing how, as Khabar Lahariya’s YouTube channel rapidly gains followers, its stories achieve real results: a neglected town receives medical attention; a rapist is prosecuted. If the film’s brisk telling sometimes presents these victories as too easily won, it’s a necessary corrective to the skepticism the women still face (“They’re destined to fail,” Meera’s husband scoffs).

And at a time when the profession faces increasing dangers ....., the film’s faith in the powers of grassroots journalism is nothing short of galvanizing."

The Kashmir files

I’m keen to know their stand on the Kashmir files, the very people who raised the issue of Kashmir during the last election campaign , more eager on tapping their communal vote bank than promoting their development and governance agenda.

They are so caught up by their communal politics/scientific communalism that they are not even aware that the politics of dynasty, religion and opportunistic alliances no longer cuts ice with the electorate.

Didn't hear them, though so vocal about the double standards of the West on the Russian invasion of Ukraine !!! Sorry , the Russian "special operation in Ukraine " (sic)

The Kashmir files! - they are likely to dismiss it as another creation of them versus us ....of conspiracy theorists...

Added: An observation-from the vantage point of our much-desired, national dream of Mauritianism- on our hypocritical mores and petty politicisation of identity which actually divides rather than unites us. …there are more important issues that affect the daily lives of the Mauritian than taking up a complex foreign issue like Kashmir to assert one’s communal identity.

Note : lir today’s Hebdo, see how this newspaper glisse ça subtilement “mé mo pas coné si tou seki inn arrivé li vré “ and ‘un film controversé’ ; call it a Modi product and hang it! In many genocide cases-the indigenous people of Americas,Australia,Africa and Asia and recently Cambodia,Darfur, the Tutsis, the Armenians…it’s difficult/distressing for the perpetrators and their sympathizers to acknowledge/accept it!

We had hopes ....Putin and the West !!!

To a Friend

Tks for your consistent arguments which has led me to dig deeper to try to see the multiple sides to this complex issue . The little that I could make out -picking out the genuine pieces from the vast literature, mosty biased and partisan including some well-targeted misinformation stuff- is that our Kremlin bandit Putin is a creation of the West. ( During that period which they termed the “end of history” and glasnost, we are told now that Putin did make request to join the EU).

They are the good guys and he is the evil one and now we have to be grateful that they are tackling this "war criminal". This is “so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it masquerades as common sense.”

What about our bandit ? He played his role with perfection, according to the scripts drafted by the West. He fitted perfectly in the role they have cast for him, he played by their rules …”the politics of inevitability, its predictability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.”

Did our despot in the Kremlin have a choice ? Yes, there was an alternative; he could have reassembled as much of the former Soviet Union as possible with Russia and creating a better interaction and fairer exchange system (less exploitative and more of sharing) that extends through all of the eastern European states that joined Nato from the 1990s onwards, built on compromise, on democratic principles , on sustainability, on broader societal objectives such as health ,happiness and inclusiveness...while promoting nuclear disarmament and the whole of Europe as a zone of peace,…and developing a credible alternative to the current global economic system.

He would have obtained overall support- including a major chunk of the developing world- to tackle the media conglomerates' indoctrination and misinformation and the growing imperialist tendencies of the West imposing their New World Order and asserting the subservience of Russia to western imperialism.

Russia failed us- it turned up to be a failed regime. Putin recoiled into the trap set for him by the West; thus only empire can justify his rule. "Russia’s commodity-dependent economy has fallen far behind Poland for example . It is a rentiers’ paradise. Today, those rentiers are Putin’s thugs and the Boris Yeltsin-era “oligarchs .”

The West ultimate goal is Russian destruction ; Putin will go down taking with him our audacity to have hoped that it could have been different if...

Watch out for the local scene where similarly our Machiavellic strategists will be trying to convince us that there is no alternative to "Juggernaut " and/or the dinosaurs propped by some young turks or vice versa...(the old guards playing by the same archaic rules, the politics of inevitability, never questioning the economic model of development or the communal divide..)...And we will end up as the "dindons de leur farces" , as usual !

11Rajni Rajoo, Cheeko Mauritius and 9 others

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Vladimir Pozner: How the United States Created Vladimir Putin

On September 27, 2018, Yale's Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Poynter Fellowship for Journalism hosted Vladimir Pozner, the acclaimed Russian-American journalist and broadcaster.

Pozner spoke on the impact of US foreign policy towards Russia after the Soviet Union has been disbanded, and shared his opinions on a range of issues raised by the audience, from the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections, to Skripal poisoning, to the state of independent media in Russia and the US.

The politics of inevitability .

Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans

“Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done,” writes the Yale historian Timothy Snyder in his 2018 book, “The Road to Unfreedom.”

The central thesis of “The Road to Unfreedom” is that different understandings of the past, its myths, histories and memories create radically different politics. Snyder wrote the book as a way of understanding Vladimir Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and the West’s response, but its argument has become only more salient in recent weeks. You can’t understand Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine without understanding his metaphysical attachment to the era of empire, his mythological telling of Russian-Ukrainian history, and his semi-mystical construction of what constitutes the Russian nation.

But Snyder’s more radical argument is that the West is also operating under its own mythological understanding of time — one that is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it masquerades as common sense. And that understanding the influence of the “politics of inevitability” is essential to make sense of everything from the West’s misreading of Putin’s motivations to the internal fracturing of the European Union to the decline of liberal democracy across the globe.

So that’s where we start: with the central myths at the heart of the modern Western project — and the blind spots they have created. But Snyder is also a renowned historian of European great-power conflict who has written six books entirely or partly about Ukraine. So we also discuss the chasm between the radicalness of European integration and the tedium of European governance, why Snyder thinks Putin’s invasion is fundamentally the product of a Russian identity crisis, Ukraine’s unique history as a battleground for a great-power war, how Ukrainian identity transcends ethnicity and language, why Western leaders and analysts consistently fail to decipher Putin’s intentions, the huge difference between a Russian nation premised on myth and a Ukrainian nation forged by collective action, how Ukrainian resistance could inspire a Western vision for the future and more.

A deeper and balanced conversation

PODCASTS.GOOGLE.COM

The Ezra Klein Show - Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans

“Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I will call the _politics of inevitability,_ a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothin...

“Russia: The state media lying to its own population !

Interesting article from the “The Conversation” titled “Russia: the west underestimates the power of state media”

While it is true that Ukraine has exposed the biasedness , racist double standards and the discriminatory coverage of some Western media outlets, it is to be noted that “many western countries have a wide range of news sources that are free from direct government interference. From the development of multi-channel television, rolling 24-hour news journalism, to the ever-expanding choice, immediacy and reach of online and social media, the infrastructure of western national media systems makes it hard for states and a few media conglomerates to seize control of the news agenda."

Some American journalists and researchers -Michael Arlen, Walter Lipmann and Anne-Marie Slaughter- have noted that “….during the Vietnam war,…the western media moved away from its position as a governmental mouthpiece, and began to adopt a more watchdog approach . It was this change, combined with the graphic reporting of the war, which has since been accredited with the thwarting of American victory. The media’s role is seen to have stoked domestic anti-war sentiments in the American public by presenting them with the atrocities of war into their own living rooms. This occurrence shows a decline of the media’s role in maintaining antagonism and public support for conflict …”

The basic desire for democratic liberties, including access to honest and fact-based journalism, can never be extinguished.

“Academics have even begun to talk about a ……..new communications environment where audiences are often celebrated for being savvy and active – and able to resist media power and influence. But in Russia, with a state-controlled information environment and limited access to independent journalism, the digital age of communications has not delivered the kind of freedoms associated with 21st-century western media.”

The article warns us that in Russia , the power of state-controlled media is absolute, we are back to cold war years of sensational propaganda and politicised reporting developing a societal fear of imminent destruction and severe paranoia.

Mr Putin has told his nation that Ukraine’s drug-addled neo-Nazi elite has been perpetrating genocide and that Ukrainians, especially Russian-speaking ones, needed saving.

“A Moscow news correspondent ..revealed six days into the invasion of Ukraine, Russian people’s reliance on state television appears to have influenced their response to warfare. He interviewed a Russian pensioner who depended on state TV to understand what is happening in the world and her response was chilling: A lot of what they say on TV, it’s truth. It’s true… You know, when I read in a foreign newspaper that Russians bomb Kharkiv and so on, I know that it’s not true because they promised not to do this and they will never do this.

In another story, it was reported that Oleksandra, a young Russian woman living in Kharkiv, called her mother in Moscow to tell her the city was under heavy artillery attack, and that Ukrainian civilians were being killed. But her response was it had probably happened by accident because the Russian military would not deliberately target civilians. According to Oleksandra, her “mum exactly quoted Russian TV. They are just brainwashing people. And people trust them”. Interviews with ordinary Russians on the streets also reinforce Putin’s narrative and justification for warfare”

“Russian authorities have tightly controlled Putin’s narrative by limiting people’s access to media that challenges his perspective and ensuring that state media closely follows the Kremlin’s script.

But how long Putin can control the narrative of his “special operation” remains to be seen. Once the west’s sanctions begin to hit ordinary Russians and their social and cultural isolation from the world cuts through, they may want to search for themselves a new reality independent of state media.”

Hats off to the Russian journalist ,Marina Ovsyannikova ,who burst on to a live TV news programme to protest against the war in Ukraine ,holding an anti-war sign.

The sign, clearly visible for a few seconds, read: "No war, stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, they are lying to you here."

She has been missing since. Her whereabouts are now unknown. Her calls have gone unanswered.

Before the incident she recorded a video in which she called events in Ukraine a "crime" and said she was ashamed to work for what she called Kremlin propaganda. "I'm ashamed that I allowed myself to tell lies from the television screen. Ashamed that I allowed Russians to be turned into zombies," she explained. "We just silently watched this inhumane regime