Cost of Corruption: Open Letter to Kalpana Kochhar, Director of HR at the IMF – IX, Part 16 in the IMF/WB Annual Meeting 2016

My last 2 blogs (Cost of Corruption: Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama – VI, Part 14 in the IMF/WB Annual Meeting 2016, and Cost of Corruption: Open Letter to Sharmini Coorey, Director of the Institute for Capacity Development – VI, Part 14 in the IMF/WB Annual Meeting 2016) explored some of the “darker secrets” of home and workplace, and why western feminists failed to develop a holistic construct, rhetoric and ideology regarding women as workers, as well as mothers and wives. The narcissistic, alpha-male construct that the western feminist have developed, and been promoting for the past decades, has not only had a detrimental impact on women, but a detrimental impact on men, as well. Susan Faludi in Stiffed, explains the issues, and I quote,

If, as men are so often told, they are the dominant sex, why do so many of them feel dominated, done in by the world? Anyone who reads a magazine, watches a TV talk show, or listens to a radio call-in program has heard the evidence: America is having a masculinity crisis. Angry White Males have become a voting bloc. Dads are deadbeat. Boys are on the rampage. And with each schoolyard shooting and presidential peccadillo, with each corporate sexual harassment lawsuit and laid-off worker gone berserk, the media offer up the stock pronouncements: Men are out of control, overcontrolling, dangerous, violent, and even, it has been written, obsolete. Their troubles are said to be internal, the result oftestosterone poisoning, Y chromosomes, attention deficit disorder, a warlike nature. Furthermore, it’s charged, men have only themselves to blame, for aren’t they the ones in control of the culture?

Or are they? In Stiffed, Susan Faludi, the acclaimed author of Backlash, the convention-smashing manifesto on women’s embattled status, turns her impressive powers of reporting and analysis to the problems of men and comes up with a revolutionary diagnosis. Men’s problems aren’t the product of biology, or of such trumped-up enemies as feminism and affirmative action, but of a modern social tragedy. By listening to men’s stories in their own voices, by taking them on their own terms, Faludi uncovers a buried history—the untold story of how America made a glittering set of promises to the men of the baby-boom generation… and proceeded to break every one of them.

The betrayal of the American man has been perpetrated on many front from the boardroom to the football stadium, from the army recruitment center to the suburban living room. Stiffed takes us on a journey through a contemporary masculine landscape littered with broken promises and into the lives of individual men whose accounts reveal the heart of the male dilemma. With an empathetic vision that breaks down the familiar lines of gender battle, Faludi travels deep into the meaning of male anguish. She intimately chronicles the struggles of industrial workers, sports fans, combat veterans, evangelical husbands, media executives, movie stars, porn actors, militiamen, astronauts, and “bad” boys—whose sense that they’ve lost their skills, jobs, civic roles, wives, teams and secure futures is only one symptom of a larger and more profound collapse. Faludi pinpoints men’s greatest antagonist and discovers that it is not what conventional wisdom would have us believe.

What keeps men from revolting against their circumstances? Faludi’s explanation for that mystery opens up the possibility that men’s coming rebellion could emacipate both sexes from their true and mutual enemy, a cultural force that constrains us all. Stiffed is a major reassessment of what it is to be a man in modern America. The national discussion it will surely provoke could shatter the old paradigm of men versus women and lay the groundwork for a culture that affirms the needs of everyone.

The western feminists were so concerned with self-promoting and grappling-up the “corporate” ladder that they produced an exclusively “career-oriented” construct “forgetting” the economic, as well as social reality of the majority of women in society. The self-importance and egoism amongst female PhDs and MBAs in the “Corridors of Power” and “House of Cards” that permeate Washington is AS BAD IF NOT WORSE, than the Pompous arrogance of the ‘grey-haired’ old men of the ‘Old Guard’ that has been Ruling “This Town” since, at least the ‘80s. The Fractured Fairytale construct of a Broken American Dream (an American Dream, that never was), must be debunked at the international, as well as national level. The elevated level of mis-management within all of the agencies in Washington must be addressed without delay.

One of the more comical aspects of my cousin’s contentions, that I need to “read the Bible, and ‘find’ Jesus,” was the further insinuation that my ideologies are “communistic” (with this rhetoric surely coming from input from my mother and sister—who is always calling me a socialist, without understanding anything I am talking about.) First, any contention that countries such as the USSR, Cuba, China, etc. were based on Marxist communism (whose genesis came from Thomas More and his book Utopia), I contest; as I contest that the USA, or any of the other “democracies” in the world are Democracies. I do not support any of the ideological constructs at presents—constructs which have been so twisted over the years that NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IS GOING ON. I have been listening to Fareed Zakari’s interview with Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sacks, and his level of Denial as to the need for “criminal intent” in holding bankers accountable for decades of irresponsible behavior is ERRONEOUS. The only thing he is right about, is to be afraid—afraid not that HE will do something wrong, but that the thousands of employees underneath him will do something wrong. As he well should be!

The reason that NO ONE in the financial markets, banking systems, and political systems are BEING HELD accountable is that those who are supposed to be assuring Accountability and Transparency are at the HELM of the COVER-UPS for UNBRIDLED NEGLIGENCE AND CRIMINALITY, as seen in the smoking-gun case against Olivia Graham, Ethics Advisor; Geetha Ravindra, Mediator; Lois Petholz, Ombudsman; and Kalpana Kochhar, Director of HR at the IMF; noting that all of these women, except Olivia Graham who is black, are Indian nationals. Laura Nadar in The Life of Law, explains the problems created by the over-reliance on “mediation” and “harmony ideologies,” and I quote,

It began to look very much as if [Alternative Dispute Resolution] ADR were a pacification scheme, an attempt on the part of powerful interests in law and in economics to stem litigation by the masses, disguised by the rhetoric of an imaginary litigation explosion. Unfortunately, those who went along were often unable to distinguish ADR’s psychotherapy-influenced forums from “traditional” legal mediation in the style of Professor Lon Fuller.

…Sociologist Judy Rothschild’s (1986) study of a neighborhood justice center in San Francisco concluded that the ideology of medication depends upon a negative evaluation of a traditional legal system, an evaluation that does not pursue root causes. Disputants are trained to associate litigation with alienation, hostility, and high cost and to look upon mediation as a process that “encourages” civic and community responsibility for dispute resolution. When disputes are framed as communication problems,” disputes about facts and legal rights become disputes about feelings and relationships. A therapeutic model replaces the legal one, and justice is measured by implicit standards of conformity. Social justice as generally understood (for the good of the whole) then becomes irrelevant….

…None of these criticisms, nor similar ones made by law professors and social scientists, stemmed the tide of an expanding ADR movement. There was an ADR explosion.

By the early 1990s, in a weird contradiction, ADR became mandatory in many states. People were not flocking to use ADR; they had to be coerced into using it. The movement for voluntary mediation of divorce disputes began several decades ago as lawyers and therapists offered to help clients settle their cases in a nonadversarial manner. In 1991, the late Trina Grillo, a law professor and mediator, published in the influential Yale Law Journal a seething critique of mandatory mediation in relation to “process dangers” for women. Central to Grillo’s critique was the relation of law to the promises of mediation in family disputes and the “promise” in the form. Mediation promised to take context into account: it would allow room for emotion as well as rationality, and partners would have a say in determining their futures. On the contrary, as Grillo showed, mediation operates as control in defining the problem, limiting speech and expression, and narrowing the public record, since mediation is confidential rather than public. She was most concerned with what happens when mediators frame cases between partners as equals when there is unequal responsibility, and when female anger is suppressed. She concluded that the presumption of equality destroys social context, rights, and especially discussion of fault and limits past the expression of facts in the case. The model that Grillo attacked is less one of law than of therapy: Some conclude that the movement is characterized by forum fetishism, others that it supports soft partriarchy.

Mandatory mediation abridges American freedom because it is often outside the law: it is generally hidden from view, and it eliminates choice of procedure, removes the right to equal protection before an adversary, and furthermore, like pssycho-therapy, provides for little regulation or accountability. Here again the civil plaintiff becomes a patient, and as Grillo said, mediation becomes a “mutually regulated dance between oppressor and oppressed,” a dance that obscures issues of unequal social power, ADR operates as a condition of “moral minimalism,” one in which people dislike confrontation and prefer the least extreme reaction to offenses are reluctant to exercise and social control against one another at all. Moral minimalism, according to MP Baumgartner (1988), is found where social interaction is diffuse; it is a result of atomization and transiency in suburbs, for example. Restrained response to grievances is the norm

…many other actors [drawn to ADR] were, [] large corporations that saw it as a cheaper and faster alternative to the courts. Others, such as the religious conservative Southern Baptists that Carol Greenhouse studied, found ADR attractive for nonmaterialistic value reasons. The most striking incentive was for those who were either therapists or patients of therapists. Since the latter are widely spread throughout the country, especially on the coasts, this ready-made constituency gave ADR a boost…

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF ADR

 My first indication that transnational ADR had spread to the international arena came when I was invited to address a workshop for Southeast Asian mediators from places like the Philippines, China, and Thailand, who were brought to the United States to learn about “modern” mediation. I was struck by the absurdity of an American teaching the Chinese how to mediate when mediation was far more traditional and ubiquitous in China than in the United States. The intent of the workshop was to modernize and professionalize mediation in places like China. It occurred to me that Chinese mediation was different from “modern” mediation and also different from the legal idea of mediation. American ADR has its own cultural baggage in hegemonic characteristics independent of ethnic or legal mediation practices elsewhere. Apparently there was a need to universalize mediation practices…

The popularity of ADR as policy in the 1980s and 1990s signified a paradoxical switch from the more civilized processes of dispute resolution to “softer,” nonadversarial means such as mediation or negotiation…

…Just as ADR in the United States moved the rhetoric from justice to harmony, so too at “the international level has the notion of “mature” negotiation, conceived as the “standard of civilized behavior” been replacing the World Court. Why this international valorizing of negotiation? Edward Said (1978) acknowledged in his notion of “flexible positional superiority” that the valorization of one cultural form over another is frequently linked to imbalances in power: once the “primitives” had courts, we moved to international negotiations or ADR.

Not only were mediation and negotiations valorized, but American ADR was thought to be cross-culturally usable…

… The influence of the Third World in the court began to take effect after 1964, when there were a number of ruling in favor of Third World and postcolonial states… Both the Soviet Union, in the mid-1960s, and the United States, in the mid-1980s, withheld dues, evincing a position of indifference to international law. Some noticed that the court’s clientele was vanishing (Franck 1986).

Under the stimulus of ADR, the United States turned instead toward international negotiation teams drawn from a new professional class of negotiators and mediators from the fields of law, economics, social psychology, political science, and psychotherapy—few came from anthropology. What was new about these negotiators was not that they were practicing mediation or negotiation—after all, such modes of dispute processing had been around for a long time. What they had in common was a distate for confrontational adversarial processes, for courts as a way to handle the problems of the masses, for justice over compromise.

Those who write about the emerging system of international negotiations totally ignore the World Court and focus instead on the functions of a system of negotiation: that system should contribute to the stability and growth of the system of international relations. For such people, international conflict no longer involves government-to-government negotiations but rather international cooperation between governments negotiating in the name of stability. Certainly, international stability may be a good thing, but it can also mean injustice and continuing inequities that in the long run promote more instability. The overall implication in much of this Euro-American literature is that anything can and should be negotiated to keep peace. Yet not everyone agrees. The failure to address inequities often leads to the opposite of peace—war and violence. The negotiation model has a serious flaw if it is cast as the only avenue and not part of an appeals structure—instead of being adjudicated in the international court, disputes are to be settled by “mutual learning,” “information sharing,” “harmonizing,” and “cooperation”; zero-sum settlements become “hostile,” and information, analysis, and solution get in the way of constructive dialogue.” There is a psychologizing of phenomena that have nothing to do with the psyche and a great deal to do with power relations formed by means of intense influencing. Under such conditions, mind games become a central component of this ADR negotiation process….

Harmony ideology is significant in the light of expanding Protestant fundamentalism in the United States and in the light of an ADR law-reform program that may silence disagreement for the sake of achieving consensus and adopting a worldview that transforms facts and legal rights into feelings, relationships, and community writ small. One might argue that since the 1960s, Americans have been “civilized” in a process not so very different from that which Merry (2000) describes for the Hawaiians. By positioning culture in history, Greenhous and Merry show that cultural rationalities stem from social practices, but they also discover the depth of interconnections between religion, law, and order, interconnections that might be obvious to scholars who are practicing believers rather than secular academics….

THE BERKELEY VILLAGE LAW PROJECT

The Berkeley Village Law Project (Nader 1995; Nader and Todd 1978). Already in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread controversy over the fairness of the American justice system and similar controversy over the fate of indigenous legal systems in the newer nations adopting Western notions of development made the cross-cultural study of law processes a significant and timely subject….

The resulting book, The Disputing Process (Nader and Todd 1978), is about what people in different cultures do with their “legal” problems in the context of nation-state law. The work was not limited to the study of official legal procedure available to litigants; it was delimited by the avenues actually chosen or developed by the litigants themselves…

…Our most important findings centered on conditions under which different forms or styles of dispute management occur. For example, mediation between parties of greatly unequal power does not work. Again, context provided clues as to why styles of conflict decision-making varied within each culture, as well as between cultures. In the process, it also became clear that rapidly developing countries were changing anthropological views that the local level was in any way isolated from the impact of larger political and economic structures.

…focusing on dimensions of disputing as they affected the litigant’s choice of remedy agent: the network of social relations, the control of scarce resources, the distribution of power, the aims of the participating actors, access to forums, timing, cost, the cultural dimension, and the degree of incorporation into national legal systems….

…. Each study analyzes the ways in which disputes are settled primarily from the point of view of the litigant(s). And while much of the behavior is familiar and linked to the concerns of people in modern nation states, the authors set out to explain why the disputing process looks different to each of the participants, how different procedures are limited, what factors affect access, and the manner in which nation-state law intersects with local-level law. The Berkeley project was an achievement in systematic intrasocietal comparison. By probing agency and power relationships within these various societies, the work provides pointed contrasts on how law functions in more-complex arenas…

 MOVING ON: THE BERKELEY COMPLAINT PROJECT

I then turned to disputes between people who were strangers to each other. This study, based on work in the United States between 1970 and 1980, again involved numerous researchers who looked at what Americans did when they had or perceived that they had no access to law. Central to the organization of this project was the complaint letter. Americans are probably the most prolific complaint-letter writers in the world.

…I was given the opportunity to examine a large corpus of letters written by people who felt they had been shafted by the system, and I realized that these letters threw a powerful searchlight onto what was happening as Americans faced the evolution of a system of justice in a world in which face-to-fact relationships were almost non-existent. Some of my colleagues argued that there was no way anyone could turn such material into the basis for ethnographic inquiry; the challenge for me was to find one…when an anthropologist enters new territory, he or she must master a new body of literature….

The extended case histories of these complaints indicated a legacy of frustration, of mistrust, of apprehension. The implications of the uneven struggle that took place daily in a million ways between individuals and institutions, I observed, were adding up to no less than what someone called the “slow death of justice” in the United States. Those complaining were, after all, believers in “the system,” and as one complainant said in the Little Injustices film, “There’s gotta be some justice somewhere.”…

…Our investigations revealed a mass phenomenon in which large segments of the population, reflecting all socio-economic groups, are exposed to low-profile, undramatic, petty exploitations that may not have serious consequences: a defective stove that burns down a home or a lemon car that leave the family breadwinner paralyzed. When there is no access to law, extrajudicial processes develop directly in response to the decline in activity of the civil plaintiff. The US courts have so far refused to extend to civil litigants the constitutional right to counsel that is guaranteed to criminal defendants.

Our conclusions were not relevant solely to United States citizens. Struggles in our highly evolved industrial country over the problems of how to achieve consumer satisfaction in terms of health and safety as well as dollars invested were emerging in similar ways worldwide with the global spread of consumerism…

Much had been written about the problem of no access or delayed access to US courts, and various remedies had been offered, some leading to the development of small claims courts, regulatory agencies, and public interest law firms. Bu with the exception of Gellhorn (1966) and a small number of other researchers, few had asked exactly how people with no access to law handled their complaints. What we began to uncover was only the tip of the iceberg. Much has been written about alienation but not much about the actual means by which people became alienated. Much has been written about the silent majority, but no one knew whether Americans were silent or whether they were silenced, for we had no adequate knowledge about where Americans spoke and were heard.

…Typically, consumers who did complain had begun their search for remedy as firm beleivers in “the system”; they believed it would give them redress enduring rebuff and getting the runaround, they lost faith, often retreating into anger, or apathy. But sometimes they went all the way, learned about the system, and won. Although our research was geared to discover instances in which third-party handlers were successful, we concluded that our society had not evolved effective systems for dealing with grievances that may be small but have critical consequences. In other words, law had not adapted to the transformation of a rural society into a mass industrial society.

As seen in the analysis above, the essential problems of people in the daily lives, and their ability to seek “justice” (vs. rhetoric) has a profound effect on the daily lives of the masses—as well as the level of anger or apathy the aggregate torts against them produces. The crux of Good Governance lies in transparent and accountable courts—with one of my primary “pet-peeves” is that ALL litigants have competent, affordable legal representation in civil AS WELL AS criminal courts. The response of litigants to the dire crisis in the legal community, caused by unbridled negligence, stupidity and game-playing of lawyers everywhere, to represent themselves pro se, IS ONLY CREATING MORE HAVOC AND PROBLEMS. From a purely fiscal perspective assuring COMPETENT legal representation for ALL would in the END be more COST EFFECTIVE for governments, and their taxpayers, than the TOTAL CHAOS that reigns at present.    

The problems of implementation of progressive ideologies (under human rights standards) can be seen in political, as well as religious institutions, for the past 500 years (at least). In my blogs for Sean Penn,Economic Stability, the Puritan Manifesto and the Two Mr. Penns – Part 1, and Economic Stability, the Puritan Manifesto and the Two Mr. Penns – Part 3, I explored how the early development of the Puritan, and then Quaker movement, lagging a century behind (examining the works of Thomas Wilcox, and the Puritan Manifesto (1572), and William Penn’s work in England and the USA (the creation of Pennsylvania)), were very similar in rhetoric and ideologies. However, the other similarity was that the original ideologies became “corrupted” by extremism within the clergy and their communities—with the most dramatic example that of the Salem Witch Trials in (1692-93). (My cousin’s contention that I need to “find” Jesus, is comical because as I told her “Jesus would be considered a communist today, if alive” and the Puritan, and other backlash religions in Europe at the time were in response to “corruption” and oppression from the Catholic Church. lol) This same “corruption” can be seen in implementation of political systems under democratic rule, due to a failure of institutions to modernize, with all of them infected with nepotistic networks, responsible for the TOTAL LACK OF GOVERNANCE in countries around the world.

Additionally, in my research for my blogs for Sean Penn at the beginning of the year, I found once again trends of these “exalted” leaders, who history may have been kind to, but who experienced great personal suffering and persecution, by even their allies, in their fight for Truth and Liberty, if not Justice in this world when they were alive. John Paul Jones (see Outlaw Heroes, Drug Lords, and International Trade – Part 2) lay in an unmarked grave in Paris, until the American government wanted a “hero” for the newly forming Marine corp, with Thomas Wilcox out-casted, and black-listed from preaching for his “subversive” thoughts. And, William Penn finished his life a broken man—a man who befriended the Indians in part because of his physical fitness, and the local Indians admiration of his ability to run and hunt as well as they. The paradigm where “intellectual property theft,” back-stabbing and back-scratching are considered NORMAL, and encouraged by ostrich-playing of everyone involved; destroy not only the most imaginative and ethical members, but the entire society from within.      

This is why the Institute for Capacity Development (ICD) in the IMF IS NOT an “insignificant” “Arm” of the IMF. It is vital that NOT ONLY the IMF, World Bank, and UN (etc.) take draconian measures in cleaning-house of the old guard support staff, as well as upper managements, but that the White House, Congress and the State Department do the same. As panelist Sean Hagan pointed out in the seminar Cost of Corruption: A Youth Perspectiveand a case study in India, the Minister fired just about everyone from the old guard. (See my blog, Cost of Corruption: Open Letter to Lead Counsel at the IMF, Sean Hagan – IV, Part 12 in the IMF/WB Annual Meeting 2016. ) And, instead of turning a blind-eye to my complaint for Bullying in the Workplace at the IMF, the Director of HR, Kalpana Kochhar, should SHOW LEADERSHIP and USE IT to take appropriate action against implicated parties.

The misogyny and discrimination that I have experience in the past 7 years in my employ in the IMF is NO DIFFERENT in its rhetoric or intent as the misogyny and rhetoric of Donald Trump’s in the Press at present. IT IS TIME FOR LEADERS TO SHOW LEADERSHIP AND TRANSFORM THEIR RHETORIC TO REALITY.