Power play

This refers to the news story titled “Banking services paralysed” ( Business Line , August 6).

Bank employees' strikes (a minimum of two in a year or even more) are just to remind the customers, particularly the banks' depositors, that they (the banks' customers) are, and always would be, at the mercy of the powerful cartel of employees.

Ironically, all the strikes are claimed to be for the benefit of customers and in national interest. Never mind if customers suffer in the process! Citizens are just poor pawns in the game of these employees and their employers, the bank managements. Is there any way that the customers can assert themselves and claim their rights? Who bothers about them anyway?

Narendra M. Apte

Pune

Who's paying?

This is with reference to the editorial “US' debt pangs” ( Business Line , August 3). The United States had a budget surplus when President Clinton left office. But President Bush, a Republican, with his two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax-cuts, and the financial bailouts, turned that into a deficit at the end of his term.

Now, with unemployment stuck at 9.2 per cent in the US, and the economic recovery fragile, the Republicans, including the far-right Tea Party, who control the House of Representatives, don't seem to have struck the middle ground. Even after months of wrangling, the proposed $2.2-trillion cuts in federal spending fall short of the $4 trillion that the rating agencies were hoping for. Indirectly, this will also increase interest rates on the US consumers' debt.

While many pundits are debating whether Democrats were the losers in these negotiations, the real losers are the American people, mainly the young, who contribute a percentage of their paycheck to entitlements such as social security, in the hope that they will get it back when they retire. But, in the current scenario, that looks grim.

Varad Seshadri

e-mail