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Who does not like to have a long vacation? But time has come for us to have a closer look at this ‘culture of long holidays’. As it is we have too many festival holidays, religious holidays, national holidays, closed days declared through executive orders including two New Year’s days, so on and so forth. Just consider this, during the last Eid, like in previous years most of the establishments, private, government or otherwise, including some financial institutions remained closed for several days with government offices being closed for the longest period of time. A friend of mine made a calculation of the holidays and explained to me that for all practical purposes there will be work stoppage all over the country for as many as 11 days.
   Holidays are important, of course, but the way the culture of holidays in our country is completely out of all proportion compared to what is being practiced in developed countries all over the world. Even within the country various donor agency offices and international organisations, to the best of my knowledge, follow a schedule of holidays that does not exceed a total of ten days a year excluding weekends. Nearly all of these local offices of the various UN agencies follow the same schedule. Interestingly enough, over 90 percent of the work force of these offices are Bangladeshi nationals. The saga of holidays particularly during the two major festivals of the year is of real concern here. At the backdrop of the deteriorating state of our overall economy, the fluid state of our governance, can we really afford the luxury of these long holidays? As it is the overall output of our workforce, professional or otherwise, slows down quite significantly during the month of Ramadan.
   I find it absurd that during these festivals, even daily newspapers close their publications from anywhere between two to four days. I cannot imagine as to how a country in these modern times can run without a daily newspaper? Surely under some special arrangement, newspapers could be brought out in reduced form say from the regular 20 pages to ten or twelve pages. In the meantime, the very idea that commercial banking operations will be suspended for three full days is rather disturbing. As it is the state of our economy and trade are but too well known.
   There is no denying the fact that we have one of the poorest work cultures in this region and this sort of long holidays, if anything, is in no way helping to improve the situation. On the contrary, it is bound to send wrong signals to our entire work force, professional or otherwise.
   On the other hand long holidays on such occasions also mean, if I may say so, extended unproductive expenses and buying of merchandise or consumer goods that most people could do without. As it is slowly and surely the entire nation has already plunged into a consumerist culture like most other developed countries that we can ill afford. Conversely the indirect and long- term negative impact is that it leads people into a false sense of ‘well-being’ and security both at national and personal levels. As it is our rate of savings nationwide is one of the lowest. The emphasis should be on savings through prudent investments in any form.
   Also, each year one finds office after office with poor attendance way beyond the holidays with the authorities endorsing such laxity as a ‘normal phenomenon during Eid’. I am almost certain that if a survey is taken as to the loss of man-hours due to these long holidays and its impact on our economy and trade, the revelations will be rather shocking.
   It is time that either the government of today or an elected government should seriously review this aspect of holidays including the issue of two-day weekends, not on political considerations but keeping in view our national interests. There was a time when people lived their lives with one day weekend. On the other hand in terms of religious festivals, people belonging to different religions should be granted leave without overlapping one another, which means when the Muslims are granted holidays on account of the Eid for people belonging to other religions it will normal working days. Likewise, the principle will apply equally in the case of the Muslims. If one felt the need for additional holidays let that be deducted out of his or her yearly annual leave entitlements. Having done that, let the rule apply equally across the board and enforced strictly.

The banking system is fundamental to everything we do. Every family and every business in Britain depends upon it. That is why, when threatened by the global financial turmoil that started in America and has now spread across the world, we in Britain took action to secure our banks and financial system.
   The stability and restructuring programme for Britain that we announced this week is the first to address at one and the same time the three essential components of a modern banking system - sufficient liquidity, funding and capital.
   So the Bank of England has pledged to double the amount of liquidity it provides to the banks; we have guaranteed new lending between the banks so that we can get the banks lending to each other again; and at least £50 billion will be made available to recapitalise our banks.
   We will take stakes in banks in exchange for a return and will guarantee interbank lending on commercial terms. And at the heart of these reforms are clear principles of transparency, integrity, responsibility, good housekeeping and co-operation across borders.
   But because this is a global problem, it requires a global solution. Indeed this now moves to a global stage with a range of international meetings starting this week with the G7 and the IMF and, we propose, culminating in a leaders meeting in which we must lay down the principles and the new policies for restructuring our banking and financial system all around the globe.
   When I became Prime Minister I did not expect to make the decision, along with Alistair Darling, for the Government to offer to take stakes in our high street banks, just as nobody could have anticipated the action taken in America. But these new times require new ideas. The old solutions of yesterday will not serve us well for the challenges of today and tomorrow.
   So we must leave behind outworn dogmas and embrace new solutions.
   Of course, the policies each country pursues will need to be suited to its particular circumstances. But based on the British approach, I believe through wider European co-operation and also co-ordination among the leading economies, there are four broad steps we must now all take to restore our international financial system.
   First, every bank in every country must meet capital requirements that ensure confidence. Just as in the UK we have made at least £50 billion of new capital available, so other countries where banks have insufficient capital will need to take measures to address this. Only strong and solid banks will be able to serve the global economy.
   Secondly, short-term liquidity is simply a means of keeping the system going. What really matters for the future is to open the money markets that have been closed for medium-term funding from the private sector. Until only a few weeks ago few, if any, appreciated the real significance of the money markets within the wider global financial crisis and the importance of trust in these markets. But the freezing of the market for medium-term funding reflects a total loss of trust between banks.
   The potential economic consequences cannot be understated. The role of banks is to circulate the savings from deposits, our pensions and from companies to those that need to spend or invest them. The cost at which banks can borrow this money directly affects the costs of mortgages for homeowners and of lending for business. This paralysis of lending from loss of confidence jeopardises the flow of money to every family and every business in the country.
   Our guarantee to restart wholesale money markets in exchange for a fee has, I believe, broken new ground in restarting our financial system.
   Thirdly, we must have stronger international rules for transparency, disclosure and the highest standards of conduct. Successful market economies need trust, which can only be built through shared values. So as we reform our financial system we should encourage hard work, effort, enterprise and responsible risk-taking - qualities that markets need to ensure, so that the rewards that flow are seen to be fair. But when risk-taking crosses the line between the responsible entrepreneurship, which we want to celebrate, and irresponsible risk-taking, then we have to take action to see that markets work in the public interest to reflect our shared values.
   And fourthly, national systems of supervision are simply inadequate to cope with the huge cross-continental flows of capital in this new, ever more interdependent world. I know that the largest financial institutions will welcome the proposed colleges of cross-border supervisors that should be introduced immediately. The Financial Stability Forum and a reformed International Monetary Fund should play their part not just in crisis resolution but also in crisis prevention.
   And action for financial stability should be accompanied by the wider international economic co-operation such as that which began on Wednesday with co-ordinated action on interest rates.
   I have said all along that we will do whatever it takes to secure the stability of the financial system. And we have not flinched from taking the bold and far-reaching decisions needed to support British families and businesses through these extraordinary times.
   We must now act for the long term with co-ordinated national actions.
   The resolve and purposefulness of governments and people across the world is being put to the test. But across the old frontiers we must now redouble our efforts internationally. For it is only through the boldest of co-ordinated actions across the globe that we will adequately support families and businesses in this global age.
   The Times, October 10, 2008. Gordon Brown is prime minister of the United Kingdom

‘I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America.’ So said Sarah Palin about Barack Obama on October 6 as she attacked him for his decision to ‘pal around’ with Bill Ayers. With Obama back in the lead, the new, harsher Republican line surprised almost nobody. The Obama campaign declared it a distraction before it even arrived.
   But seen in historical perspective, the McCain campaign’s strategy against Obama is actually kind of shocking. For years, the recipe for injecting race into a political campaign has been clear. First, invoke the spectre of black crime, as Lee Atwater did in 1988 when he vowed to turn murderer Willie Horton into Michael Dukakis’ ‘running mate.’ Second, attack lazy people in the inner city, as Ronald Reagan did in 1976 when he condemned a Chicago ‘welfare queen.’ Third, bash affirmative action, as the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms did in 1990 when he ran an ad showing white hands crumpling a job rejection notice.
   Historically, this stuff has often worked, even against white candidates considered too solicitous of African-American concerns. And yet this year, with a black man actually running for president, the old recipe has been shelved. John McCain hasn’t run ads on crime, welfare or racial preferences. At the Republican convention, the subjects barely came up.
   Does that mean race doesn’t matter this year? Hardly. It just matters in a different way. In the past, Republicans often used race to make their opponents seem anti-white. In 2008, with their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn’t, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they’re using race to make Obama seem anti-American.
   To grasp the difference, imagine if the Democrats had nominated Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Republicans would have slammed them as profligate, divisive and militant but not as foreign. Even racists couldn’t deny that Jackson and Sharpton are fully American. In fact, because slavery ruptured ancestral ties of language and culture, African Americans often have fewer transnational connections than Americans whose forebears travelled voluntarily to these shores. Our national vernacular is filled with anti-black euphemisms, but cosmopolitan isn’t one of them.
   Yet when critics attack Obama, that’s the word that keeps popping up. Rudy Giuliani mentioned it in his convention speech. So has Rush Limbaugh, along with several national conservative columnists. Ever since the primaries, Obama’s detractors have tried to depict him less as threatening to white America than as distant from America itself. This wasn’t a solely Republican idea. In March of last year, Democratic campaign guru Mark Penn urged Hillary Clinton to exploit Obama’s ‘lack of American roots’ and ‘limited’ connection to ‘basic American values and culture.’ Clinton, he advised, should add the tagline American to everything she did. Fox News and its friends spent most of the spring linking Obama to Jeremiah Wright and thus painting him as a closet racial militant. But in the general election, McCain has hewed closer to Penn’s advice. One Republican commercial touted the Arizona Senator as ‘the American President Americans have been waiting for,’ as if there were another kind. Over the summer, McCain unveiled a new slogan: ‘Country first.’ When Obama travelled abroad in July, a McCain ad showed images of him addressing a Berlin crowd alongside the words ‘The biggest celebrity in the world.’ And now Palin is suggesting he doesn’t feel the same way about America that most Americans do.
   Even though Obama is ahead, the attacks have taken their toll. Polling by the Pew Research Center last month reveals that only 63% of white voters say Obama is patriotic. (That’s 32 points fewer than McCain, and 13 points fewer than Hillary Clinton got among all voters in March.) When asked by Pew in May what they dislike about McCain, the overwhelming majority of respondents cited his political views. In Obama’s case, however, nearly a third also mentioned ‘the kind of person he is.’
   Partly, of course, this is a response to Obama’s unusual biography: his African Muslim father, his foreign-sounding name, his childhood outside the continental US. But it’s also a measure of the times. The racial wedge issues of the 1970s and ‘80s – busing, crime, welfare, affirmative action –have all but disappeared. When pollsters compile lists of Americans’ top concerns, those barely register. What is on the rise is anxiety about globalisation. Support for unregulated free trade has cratered on the Democratic left. Hostility to illegal immigration is red hot on the Republican right. And beyond the partisan divide, it’s the same demographic that is most upset about both: working-class whites.
   In the primaries, Obama tried to assuage these concerns by bashing NAFTA and other trade deals, but he largely failed. In states where globalisation has hit hard, such as Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, he lost working-class whites. And one reason is that globalisation anxiety is not merely economic; it is cultural. In recent decades, the face of America has changed. At one end of the class ladder, low-wage workers have streamed in from Latin America, transforming parts of the country that hadn’t seen significant immigration in a century. At the other, America’s economic élite has become far more multicultural, as Indians, Koreans and Russians flood state universities and private colleges, hedge funds and Internet start-ups. Partly as a result, interracial marriage is way up, especially among college graduates. There were more than 3 million mixed-marriage couples in the US in 2005, 10 times as many as in 1970. Author Richard Rodriguez, the son of Mexican-American immigrants, not long ago wrote that America’s new national colour is neither black nor white but brown.
   Whether he wants to or not, Obama has come to personify this more globalised, multicultural – yes, cosmopolitan – America. It’s one reason many liberals love him: he embodies a new America, more diverse, more tolerant and more open to the world. But as Penn’s memo implied, that’s also his Achilles’ heel. As the face of America has changed, so has the face of American racism. Old-fashioned anti-black bigotry still exists, but today, far more than 20 years ago, white Americans are likely to associate dark skin with foreignness. When Americans complain about school integration now, they’re often referring to the children of immigrants, who are forcing their school boards to spend millions of dollars on English-as-a-second-language programs. Were Helms alive today and updating his notorious ‘white hands’ ad, he might blame not African Americans receiving racial preferences but Salvadorans or Somalis working for minimum or below-minimum wage. Since 9/11, these fears have often fused – in not entirely rational ways – with fears of terrorism. Anti-illegal-immigration activists often cite the threat of jihadists creeping across the Rio Grande. Two years ago, when a company from Dubai tried to take over the operation of some US ports, both Democratic and Republican politicians erupted in a demagogic frenzy.
   It is these 21st century anxieties – nxieties about changes from outside America that seem beyond average Americans’ control – that represent the Republicans’ best shot at unhorsing Obama now. In March, Pew found that 56% of high school educated white voters see newcomers as threatening, compared with less than a third of those with a college degree. White voters who haven’t graduated from college, according to a Pew poll in September, were more than twice as likely to think Obama is Muslim as those who have. And not coincidentally, it is among these less educated white voters that McCain is strongest. Among non-Hispanic whites who have attended graduate school, according to Gallup this month, Obama leads McCain by 13 points. Among those with a high school diploma or less, he trails by 12.
   Fifty years ago, America’s racial challenges came largely from within, as black Americans demanded full equality in the country they had inhabited for hundreds of years. Today many of America’s racial challenges come from without, as Third World immigration transforms the nation and US workers and leaders struggle to come to terms with China and India, the emerging, non-white superpowers. If Martin Luther King Jr. symbolised that earlier transition, Barack Obama may have inadvertently come to symbolise this one. How he fares on November 4 will be a sign of America’s willingness to embrace the realities of a new age.
   Time, October 9, 2008. Beinart is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations

‘Banning of Islam as state religion’

In our dream of Bangladesh it has no state religion. All religions are religions of peace, it is the people who do evil. That is not a rationale for having a state religion — it is like having a state-approved skin colour or ethnicity. How absurd! If Habibur Rashid Ismail (October 8) was born a Christian, he would have possibly demanded Christianity be made the state religion.
   Akmol
   Via e-mail

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This is a good move. But if it is limited to only Miyanmar it will yield marginal benefit. To make it more productive and cost effective we should insist on adding Kunming/China with the project. Besides having scope of extending business with China a day may come when we can offer Kunming the use of Chittagong port. China, of course, will have to support us in improving the functioning of the port.
   Haq
   Via e-mail

We should not expect a paradigm shift in American policy, irrespective of whoever wins the US presidential election. Neither of the two candidates shall carve out a new direction for the USA or the American people.
   The American century of glittering achievement and overwhelming force is coming to an end. It has happened many times in the past ––– the Pharaohs, the Romans, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Mughals and the British to name a few, who reached a nadir, to be eclipsed rapidly by still more dominant people, and we are watching the same phenomenon unfold once again.
   History repeats itself again and again and nothing can be done about it.
   AA
   Via e-mail

I am sure this recent 16 per cent price hike of power will be an excuse for another price hike of all goods in the market but it was a decision long overdue. We should pay the real price for power. The government should minimise subsidising power sector from our national budget.
   Nevertheless, the government should pay more attention on reducing systems loss and eliminating corruption in the power sector. There should be zero-tolerance regarding power theft.
   Kamil Khan
   Varby, Sweden

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a. Tigers’ first-ever ODI win over Kiwis (New Age, October 10) b. Exporters fear tough times ahead amid financial meltdown (New Age, October 10) c. Market crisis deepens: European stock markets plunge as trading starts, after further falls across Asia (New Age, October 10)