Libertarianism destroys people's savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidised by responsible citizens.
GEORGE MONBIOT
"The little-known ninth law of thermodynamics states that the more money a group receives from the taxpayer, the more it demands and the more it complains." Thus wrote Matt Ridley in 1994(1). He was discussing farm subsidies, but the same law applies to his chairmanship of Northern Rock. Before he resigned on Friday, the bank had borrowed £16 billion from the government and had refused to rule out asking for more. Ridley and the other bosses blamed everyone but themselves for this disaster.
I used to read Ridley's columns religiously. Published by the Telegraph in the 1990s, they were well-written, closely-argued and almost always wrong. He railed against all government intervention and mocked less enlightened beings for their failure to understand economics and finance. The right-wing press loved him because he appeared to provide a scientific justification for the deregulation of business.
Ridley's core argument, which he explains at greater length in his books, is that humans, being the products of natural selection, act only in their own interests. But our selfish instincts encourage us to behave in ways that appear altruistic. By cooperating and by being perceived as generous, we earn other people's trust. This allows us to advance our own interests more effectively than we could by cheating, stealing and fighting. To permit these beneficial genetic tendencies to flower, governments should withdraw from our lives and stop interfering in business and other human relations(2,3). Ridley produced a geneticist's version of the invisible hand of the market, recruiting humanity's selfish interests to dole out benefits to everyone.
Dr Ridley, who has a D Phil in zoology, is no stranger to good science, and his explorations of our evolutionary history, which are often fascinating and provoking, are based on papers published in peer-reviewed journals. But whenever a conflict arose between his scientific training and the interests of business, he would discard the science. Ignoring hundreds of scientific papers which came to the opposite conclusion, and drawing instead on material presented by a business lobby group called the Institute of Economic Affairs, he argued that global temperatures have scarcely increased, so we should stop worrying about climate change(4). He suggested that elephants should be hunted for their ivory(5), planning laws should be scrapped(6), recycling should be stopped(7), bosses should be free to choose whether or not their workers contract repetitive strain injury(8) and companies, rather than governments, should be allowed to decide whether or not the food they sell is safe.(9) He raged against taxes, subsidies, bail-outs and government regulation. Bureaucracy, he argued, is "a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them."(10)
I studied zoology in the same department, though a few years later. Like Dr Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. Ridley believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well-known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another).If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You'll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening.
Dr Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether or not this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe that they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.
I can offer nothing more than speculation, but Ridley has had the opportunity to test his beliefs. He took up his post--which was previously held by his father, Viscount Ridley, in 2004. Under his chairmanship, the Economist notes, Northern Rock "pushed an aggressive business model to the limit, crossing its fingers and hoping that liquidity would always be there"(11). It was allowed to do so because it was insufficiently regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. When his libertarian business model failed, Dr Ridley had to go begging to the detested state. If the government and its parasitic bureaucrats had not been able to use tax-payers' money to clear up his mess, thousands of people would have lost their savings. Northern Rock would have collapsed and the resulting panic might have brought down the rest of the banking system.
The £16bn bail-out is not the end of the matter. Last week the Treasury granted Northern Rock's customers a new tax break(12). Now one of the north-east's leading businessmen, Sir Michael Darrington, is calling for the bank's full-scale nationalisation in order to prevent further crises(13). So much for the virtues of unregulated free enterprise.
Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people's resources, they will dump their waste in other people's habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.
The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.
I doubt that Dr Ridley would be able to sustain his beliefs in a place where the state has broken down. Unless tax-payers' money and public services are available to repair the destruction it causes, libertarianism destroys people's savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidised by responsible citizens. As biologists we both know what this means. Self-serving as governments might be, the true social parasites are those who demand their dissolution.
'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
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Saturday 27 October 2007
You don’t get rich by paying what they ask
You don’t get rich by paying what they askSathnam Sanghera: Business Life
As the son of Punjabi immigrants, I was not surprised to read a report from the Financial Services Authority showing that among Britain’s major faith groups, Hindus and Sikhs are the best at making ends meet. Of course they are! They never go on holiday. They never eat out. And they haggle over everything: I spent my childhood being dragged around Wolverhampton as my mother bartered over everything from secondhand sofas to sultanas.
I kept the most excruciating of these memories suppressed until I read the results of another study this week, showing that most business negotiators are bad at bargaining. Researchers divided 266 Chicago MBA students into either buyers representing a motorcycle maker, or sales reps for a parts supplier. After three negotiations lasting 45 minutes each, they compared the deals that had been struck against the limits that the teams had decided in advance and found that each side had underestimated how much the other was willing to give away.
While these Chicago MBAs may have been bad at haggling, they at least tried, which is more than can be said for most British people. Apparently only two out of five British consumers ever try to barter and failing to haggle when buying a new car costs British consumers £512 million a year. Research has found that one of the reasons why women get paid less for doing the same jobs as men is that they are less likely to try to negotiate pay rises.
Are Brits simply too embarrassed to haggle? Or do they just not know how to do it? In case it is the latter, I thought I would provide a four-point Punjabi guide to haggling, the basic principles of which, I would argue, are applicable to negotiations everywhere, from the boardroom, to the corporate purchasing department, to your local branch of Greggs:
Ham it up. A typical negotiation should follow this basic pattern. Vendor: “That will be £20.” You: “How about £6?” Vendor: “Don’t mock me.” You: “Bye then.”
If the vendor has any nous, he will at this point produce an offer. But the key thing to remember through the procedure is to maximise the drama: avoid eye contact when entering the shop; try not to show too much initial interest in an item; express astonishment at the first price in the form of wild laughter and the slapping of thighs. And if the vendor starts to give you a sob story about how he is saving up for a liver transplant, respond in kind, perhaps with a story about how you are saving up for a set of wheelchairs for your three children.
Negotiate for as long as you can. Travel guide books and websites such as Howtohaggle.com will tell you that you should never barter at length “it only creates an angry mood”. But they are wrong. As any trade union will tell you, sheer persistence is an important part of deal-making. You can exhaust people into a bargain. And it helps if you are dressed slightly eccentrically as you go on and on. It’s amazing the deals people are prepared to offer simply to get a wildly gesticulating Sikh woman in a salwar kameez out of a store.
Do not pick your battles. Again, the guidebooks and websites will suggest otherwise, claiming that there is something undignified and cheap about trying to haggle over bus tickets. But as anyone who has been to the Asian subcontinent will know, this is not the Indian attitude at all: we would try to haggle down the price of a Big Mac, if consuming the Holy Cow was allowed. And anyone who thinks such behaviour is cheap should remember that researchers have found that high earners are far more likely to barter when shopping than modestly paid workers: more than half of those on salaries in excess of £100,000 say that they frequently quibble over store prices.
Use a child as an intermediary. In the case of my family, this was a necessity: my mother doesn’t speak English, so her kids were frequently called on to translate her unrealistic demands. But I was intrigued to read Michael Donaldson, an American entertainment lawyer, remark in a book called Fearless Negotiating that children make the best negotiators. “They state clearly what they need and want, speak with a genuine voice and they are persistent.” This is true, but in my case, standing in Dixons at the age of ten as my mother instructed me to find out the “real price” of a video recorder from a sales assistant, I think it was my visible mortification and the pity it inspired that led to better deals.
Of course, I realise that some of these tips may be difficult to apply in certain negotiating scenarios. Spending an entire afternoon haggling over a box of staples may be unrealistic. Conveying messages through a child during merger talks may be slightly eccentric. Suddenly appearing in a salwar kameez or a turban to ask for a pay rise may raise a few eyebrows. But the potential rewards are enormous and anyone doubting the power of haggling should take inspiration from the story of Mohammed Shafiq, an Asian off-licence owner, who, when faced a couple of years ago with a raider wielding a 12in knife and a demand for £500, remarked: “I can’t afford that; how about £10 and a drink?”
According to reports, the disoriented raider responded by saying he would accept £50 and as Mr Shafiq considered the figure, Mrs Shafiq sneaked up and whacked the robber with a rolling pin. Mr Shafiq then clubbed him over the head with a brass-handled walking stick before calling the police, the exchange having cost him not a single penny. That’s what I call a deal.
As the son of Punjabi immigrants, I was not surprised to read a report from the Financial Services Authority showing that among Britain’s major faith groups, Hindus and Sikhs are the best at making ends meet. Of course they are! They never go on holiday. They never eat out. And they haggle over everything: I spent my childhood being dragged around Wolverhampton as my mother bartered over everything from secondhand sofas to sultanas.
I kept the most excruciating of these memories suppressed until I read the results of another study this week, showing that most business negotiators are bad at bargaining. Researchers divided 266 Chicago MBA students into either buyers representing a motorcycle maker, or sales reps for a parts supplier. After three negotiations lasting 45 minutes each, they compared the deals that had been struck against the limits that the teams had decided in advance and found that each side had underestimated how much the other was willing to give away.
While these Chicago MBAs may have been bad at haggling, they at least tried, which is more than can be said for most British people. Apparently only two out of five British consumers ever try to barter and failing to haggle when buying a new car costs British consumers £512 million a year. Research has found that one of the reasons why women get paid less for doing the same jobs as men is that they are less likely to try to negotiate pay rises.
Are Brits simply too embarrassed to haggle? Or do they just not know how to do it? In case it is the latter, I thought I would provide a four-point Punjabi guide to haggling, the basic principles of which, I would argue, are applicable to negotiations everywhere, from the boardroom, to the corporate purchasing department, to your local branch of Greggs:
Ham it up. A typical negotiation should follow this basic pattern. Vendor: “That will be £20.” You: “How about £6?” Vendor: “Don’t mock me.” You: “Bye then.”
If the vendor has any nous, he will at this point produce an offer. But the key thing to remember through the procedure is to maximise the drama: avoid eye contact when entering the shop; try not to show too much initial interest in an item; express astonishment at the first price in the form of wild laughter and the slapping of thighs. And if the vendor starts to give you a sob story about how he is saving up for a liver transplant, respond in kind, perhaps with a story about how you are saving up for a set of wheelchairs for your three children.
Negotiate for as long as you can. Travel guide books and websites such as Howtohaggle.com will tell you that you should never barter at length “it only creates an angry mood”. But they are wrong. As any trade union will tell you, sheer persistence is an important part of deal-making. You can exhaust people into a bargain. And it helps if you are dressed slightly eccentrically as you go on and on. It’s amazing the deals people are prepared to offer simply to get a wildly gesticulating Sikh woman in a salwar kameez out of a store.
Do not pick your battles. Again, the guidebooks and websites will suggest otherwise, claiming that there is something undignified and cheap about trying to haggle over bus tickets. But as anyone who has been to the Asian subcontinent will know, this is not the Indian attitude at all: we would try to haggle down the price of a Big Mac, if consuming the Holy Cow was allowed. And anyone who thinks such behaviour is cheap should remember that researchers have found that high earners are far more likely to barter when shopping than modestly paid workers: more than half of those on salaries in excess of £100,000 say that they frequently quibble over store prices.
Use a child as an intermediary. In the case of my family, this was a necessity: my mother doesn’t speak English, so her kids were frequently called on to translate her unrealistic demands. But I was intrigued to read Michael Donaldson, an American entertainment lawyer, remark in a book called Fearless Negotiating that children make the best negotiators. “They state clearly what they need and want, speak with a genuine voice and they are persistent.” This is true, but in my case, standing in Dixons at the age of ten as my mother instructed me to find out the “real price” of a video recorder from a sales assistant, I think it was my visible mortification and the pity it inspired that led to better deals.
Of course, I realise that some of these tips may be difficult to apply in certain negotiating scenarios. Spending an entire afternoon haggling over a box of staples may be unrealistic. Conveying messages through a child during merger talks may be slightly eccentric. Suddenly appearing in a salwar kameez or a turban to ask for a pay rise may raise a few eyebrows. But the potential rewards are enormous and anyone doubting the power of haggling should take inspiration from the story of Mohammed Shafiq, an Asian off-licence owner, who, when faced a couple of years ago with a raider wielding a 12in knife and a demand for £500, remarked: “I can’t afford that; how about £10 and a drink?”
According to reports, the disoriented raider responded by saying he would accept £50 and as Mr Shafiq considered the figure, Mrs Shafiq sneaked up and whacked the robber with a rolling pin. Mr Shafiq then clubbed him over the head with a brass-handled walking stick before calling the police, the exchange having cost him not a single penny. That’s what I call a deal.
Truth Matters
By Charles Sullivan
26 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
I have been writing political essays for a few years now. I do so as a reluctant enthusiast, not because I wanted to write on these themes; but because, it seemed to me, that professional journalists were not telling the whole story; that significant parts that would allow people to connect the dots and understand what is happening from a historical perspective, was being deliberately omitted from the official version of current events, and from history.
As propaganda, the elements that are deliberately left out of media are as important as those that are retained. It is propaganda by omission, as much as by content. What people are not told shapes their world view and influences their behavior, as surely as what they are told. Imposed ignorance and selective knowledge go hand in hand to forge public opinion and to shape cultural identity. These conditions set the stage for belligerent government and aggressive nationalism.
It is not coincidental that professional journalists, those who write
for profit in the mainstream media, are the least likely to tell us the
truth, the whole truth; whereas, free-lance writers, who operate under a different set of rules and out of the mainstream, are more likely to serve the public interest, and tell us what we need to know in order to be a free people, and good world citizens.
Professional journalists are beholden to a code of ethics and personal conduct that free-lance writers are not. Namely, they are part of a fraternity, a part of the cultural orthodoxy, with an incentive in maintaining the established order. The incentive is always financial and professional, and involves creating the acceptance and trust of those in power, which may, when properly executed, even result in the celebrity status of the journalist.
Journalists who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or advancing their careers do not operate in the public interest. Their purpose is not to inform but to deceive.
When a major news anchor reports upon the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, uncritically putting forth pentagon propaganda as justification for the attack, he or she is in essence acting in the manner of a celebrity athlete endorsing a product. The basketball star may endorse Nike sneakers, manufactured by indentured servants in foreign sweatshops; while the news anchor is endorsing war and disaster capitalism projected around the world by Lockheed Martin and the Carlyle Group. Both are prostitutes.
Mainstream corporate journalism is not about speaking truth to power, it is about selling products and perceptions. It is about creating a culture of ignorant consumers incapable of distinguishing between propaganda and news, fact and fiction.
This is marketing and perception management masquerading as unbiased, objecting reporting. I call it the big lie.
If the mainstream journalist wants to prosper, if they want to have
access to the inner circles of power, they must play the game according to the established rules. They must toe the corporate line, and provide cover for the corporate assault on human freedoms, and the conquest of nature, while keeping hidden agendas concealed from public view. Journalists must be able to sell widely objectionable concepts to the people, packaged in the garments of seductive—often patriotic language, in order to make them palatable.
How many soldiers, outside of those under the private contracts of firms like Blackwater, would voluntarily stake their lives for corporate profits, and the subjugation of a sovereign people, if they knew that is what they are really fighting for, rather than the more popular and desirable goal of freedom or democracy?
Freedom, liberation, and democracy have never been corporate objectives; nor can they ever be the objective of corporate governance. They are only selling points that conceal hidden corporate agendas; the attractive packaging for war, occupation, and privatization, obtained at pubic expense.
If news stories are not believable to the multitudes, if they fail to
garner popular support by masking corporate agendas behind deceptive language, the majority of governmental polices and private agendas could not be enacted. If the people knew what was being done in their name, and who is profiting from those policies, there might be widespread opposition and even social upheaval. It would be difficult to field a voluntary military that knows it is fighting for the bottom line of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, rather than for freedom and democracy, as they are told.
Thus those who would serve in the military as self-ordained patriots are sold a bill of goods. By invading and occupying Iraq, they are, in effect, undermining the very principles they claim to hold sacred, including those set forth in the Constitution and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, the average US citizen is sold a similar bill of goods in order to garner support for policies they would, presumably, never voluntarily sustain, if they understood them better.
That is the genius of modern capitalism and its impressive marketing apparatus. The results have been breathtaking.
Skillful perception management always precedes empire. Well presented propaganda allows history to be presented as a kind of fairy tale that ignores the horrible things the government has always done in our name, at the behest of corporate America and our wealthiest citizens, which should be too well known to bear reiteration here.
In our capitalist culture, journalism must not be thought of as a
reporting of facts, but as marketing propaganda—the selling of ideas that might not otherwise be embraced by those who must carry out hidden agendas, or the people on the receiving end of them. Seen in this way, the US soldier and the Iraqi citizen are both pawns in a rich man’s game: the former as the implementer of unjust war and occupation, the other as the unwilling recipient of them.
The end result for both soldier and Iraqi citizen is tragic: the soldier is told that he or she is protecting their country from foreign threats, something that is patently false; while the innocent Iraqi citizen, defending his or her home from foreign occupation, knows that she or he is not a terrorist, but is treated like one, nevertheless.
Both occupier and the occupied share a common foe, but it is not each other; it is the criminals, aided and abetted by the corporate media, who put them in formal opposition to one another for financial gain.
Our recent history would have been impossible without the consolidation of the media that occurred during the Clinton presidency, and has continued ever since. The entire spectra of mainstream media are now under the control of only four or five corporations. We no longer have reporting on local issues stemming from diverse perspectives rooted in local communities, but a monoculture of state and corporate propaganda that betrays the public trust in its pursuit of corporate profits.
Aided by the president and congress, the public owned airwaves were hijacked and are being used against the people by giant multinational corporations.
The result of this media monoculture, as purveyed by the likes of Judith Miller and Tom Brokaw, and countless others, is tragic. And they represent only the tip of the mainstream iceberg. Think of the horrible and shameless lies, the baseless fear and hate that are continuously voiced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and the hateful broadcasts that emanate from Bob Jones University, masquerading as Christian theology.
Corporate media is the vanguard of empire and environmental destruction on a global scale.
Unlike its corporate counterpart, reporting truth requires people of
unassailable integrity. It requires a thirst for justice with the strength of character to oppose the powerful undertow of manufactured perception and conformity, and the seductive language created to execute the hidden agendas of corrupt governments. Uncovering truth requires commitment to the people, rather than to profit driven corporate agendas.
Only a handful of professional journalists have attained the kind of
stature that makes such reportage possible in the United States. Their names are not at all well known, with the possible exception of Seymour Hersch, Robert Fisk, Bill Moyers and Greg Palast.
More often than not, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of
independent journalists and unpaid free-lancers. The professional
journalist must answer to his/her boss, and portray the corporation that employs them in a favorable light, even if they are profiting from unprovoked war and occupation. In contrast, the free-lancer is bound only by the constraints of conscience, imagination, and ability.
Occasionally, an astonished responder to one of my more poignant essays will tell me that I should forward the piece to the New York Times: to NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, or even the BBC. I never have.
It would be hard for me to imagine any corporation undermining its own profitability by exposing its hidden agendas, and denouncing itself as a commissioner of murder and mayhem, motivated by insatiable greed and a lust for wealth and power that would astonish even the staunchest mafia don. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen! Snowballs in hell have a better chance.
Its not that free-lancers like me wouldn’t like to get paid for what we do; it’s that our views do not enhance the bottom line of corporate giants and, in many cases, actually undermine them. Thus it behooves the professional journalist and the corporate media to ignore or discredit us as purveyors of truth and seekers of justice.
Soon it will be an act of sedition to speak truth in this country. Yet,
truth will continue to exist, despite all attempts to destroy it.
Whether they admit it or not, virtually all of the best known
journalists in the US subscribe to the racist and sexist ideologies of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and they go to great lengths to advance these ideas, by presenting them as something other than what they really are. Slight of hand is the rule of mainstream journalism, not the exception.
Conversely, by serving the people, free-lance journalists are, of
necessity, undermining the corporate agenda. Thus they are treated as enemies of the state, which has become indistinguishable from the corporation itself. We live in a culture where one cannot value truth and carry forth corporate agendas. Truth is the enemy of empire.
This might also explain why so many unembedded journalists have been deliberately killed in Iraq and the Gaza strip by US and Israeli snipers. The world must not know what the occupiers do, or the propaganda veneer may no longer have its intended effect on the consumers of media.
Speaking truth to power, especially corrupt power, is dangerous
business— particularly in war zones and fascist states, like the one evolving in the US.
Corporate media is the vanguard of colonialism and imperialist policy. It plays a key role in preparing the public mind for imperialist wars and occupations and their subsequent puppet governments; it also serves the emerging police state at home that erodes our freedoms, until there is nothing left of them.
Yet, occasionally, even in this artificially constructed myth loving
culture, truth wins out simply because someone cares enough to tell it like it is, without sugar coating. Truth matters; and that is—and always will be—of primal importance to some people. Let future historical records show that there was opposition to what was being done in our name, that there were people willing to speak truth to power, to stem the evil tide by standing up for justice, cost what it may.
Future historians of the dominant culture are likely to cast these
accounts into the memory hole and pretend that they never existed, carrying forth the myth that the people were always united behind the injustice and tyranny of our time. We saw this in Nazi Germany in the buildup to World War Two, and we are seeing it now in the US.
But a culture that does not value truth and justice is not worth
preserving. Such cultures will self destruct and implode upon
themselves; the world will eventually unite against them and bring them down. All of the military might in the world, all the subterfuge, is not powerful enough to overcome simple truth.
Any individual who values truth more than lies, who keeps truth alive in his or her heart, despite all efforts to dislodge it from its ethical moorings, is more powerful than even the most advanced weapons systems. Truth emerges unscathed from the rubble of fallen empire as immutable as an inviolable law of nature. Nothing can bring it down because it is real.
If we are to evolve into a justice loving people, truth must become our moral foundation, the basis of our existence as a people. Truth and justice are inseparable partners on the road to liberation from tyranny and fascism.
Concord’s greatest citizen, the poet-philosopher, Henry D. Thoreau, summed it up well: “The one great rule of composition…is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not.” Perhaps more than anything, that simplistic ability to speak plain truth, and in all languages, is what I most admire about Thoreau. There is much to admire and respect in a man who spoke in those terms, and lived by that simple credo.
Truth is simple and uncomplicated, whereas lies and distortions are complex. Truth stands strong and unwavering without artificial support; lies and propaganda require elaborate schemes and constant propping up, the mask of deception.
More of us must learn the language of truth; we must be its faithful
guardians, if we are to be valuable citizens in this world, rather than the useful idiots of empire. By holding truth and justice in the highest regard, we demonstrate that another world is not only possible, but highly probable.
As voracious consumers of media, we must be as careful about what we admit into our minds, as the food we put into our bodies. Food can nourish and sustain us, or it can produce disease and decay. And so it is with media.
To date, we have not been very discriminate, and the result is that we have become a culture of the mentally obese, fed on junk media. Our minds, our souls, have been deliberately poisoned; our perceptions twisted and distorted, our humanity abandoned to the quest for profits and power.
We must purge our minds of junk media and replace it with something more nutritious, if we favor health over disease. Peace is not possible without two essential ingredients: truth and justice. Neither is possible in the absence of the other. We must live as if truth still matters.
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and
community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of
geopolitical West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at
csullivan@phreego.com.
26 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
I have been writing political essays for a few years now. I do so as a reluctant enthusiast, not because I wanted to write on these themes; but because, it seemed to me, that professional journalists were not telling the whole story; that significant parts that would allow people to connect the dots and understand what is happening from a historical perspective, was being deliberately omitted from the official version of current events, and from history.
As propaganda, the elements that are deliberately left out of media are as important as those that are retained. It is propaganda by omission, as much as by content. What people are not told shapes their world view and influences their behavior, as surely as what they are told. Imposed ignorance and selective knowledge go hand in hand to forge public opinion and to shape cultural identity. These conditions set the stage for belligerent government and aggressive nationalism.
It is not coincidental that professional journalists, those who write
for profit in the mainstream media, are the least likely to tell us the
truth, the whole truth; whereas, free-lance writers, who operate under a different set of rules and out of the mainstream, are more likely to serve the public interest, and tell us what we need to know in order to be a free people, and good world citizens.
Professional journalists are beholden to a code of ethics and personal conduct that free-lance writers are not. Namely, they are part of a fraternity, a part of the cultural orthodoxy, with an incentive in maintaining the established order. The incentive is always financial and professional, and involves creating the acceptance and trust of those in power, which may, when properly executed, even result in the celebrity status of the journalist.
Journalists who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or advancing their careers do not operate in the public interest. Their purpose is not to inform but to deceive.
When a major news anchor reports upon the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, uncritically putting forth pentagon propaganda as justification for the attack, he or she is in essence acting in the manner of a celebrity athlete endorsing a product. The basketball star may endorse Nike sneakers, manufactured by indentured servants in foreign sweatshops; while the news anchor is endorsing war and disaster capitalism projected around the world by Lockheed Martin and the Carlyle Group. Both are prostitutes.
Mainstream corporate journalism is not about speaking truth to power, it is about selling products and perceptions. It is about creating a culture of ignorant consumers incapable of distinguishing between propaganda and news, fact and fiction.
This is marketing and perception management masquerading as unbiased, objecting reporting. I call it the big lie.
If the mainstream journalist wants to prosper, if they want to have
access to the inner circles of power, they must play the game according to the established rules. They must toe the corporate line, and provide cover for the corporate assault on human freedoms, and the conquest of nature, while keeping hidden agendas concealed from public view. Journalists must be able to sell widely objectionable concepts to the people, packaged in the garments of seductive—often patriotic language, in order to make them palatable.
How many soldiers, outside of those under the private contracts of firms like Blackwater, would voluntarily stake their lives for corporate profits, and the subjugation of a sovereign people, if they knew that is what they are really fighting for, rather than the more popular and desirable goal of freedom or democracy?
Freedom, liberation, and democracy have never been corporate objectives; nor can they ever be the objective of corporate governance. They are only selling points that conceal hidden corporate agendas; the attractive packaging for war, occupation, and privatization, obtained at pubic expense.
If news stories are not believable to the multitudes, if they fail to
garner popular support by masking corporate agendas behind deceptive language, the majority of governmental polices and private agendas could not be enacted. If the people knew what was being done in their name, and who is profiting from those policies, there might be widespread opposition and even social upheaval. It would be difficult to field a voluntary military that knows it is fighting for the bottom line of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, rather than for freedom and democracy, as they are told.
Thus those who would serve in the military as self-ordained patriots are sold a bill of goods. By invading and occupying Iraq, they are, in effect, undermining the very principles they claim to hold sacred, including those set forth in the Constitution and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, the average US citizen is sold a similar bill of goods in order to garner support for policies they would, presumably, never voluntarily sustain, if they understood them better.
That is the genius of modern capitalism and its impressive marketing apparatus. The results have been breathtaking.
Skillful perception management always precedes empire. Well presented propaganda allows history to be presented as a kind of fairy tale that ignores the horrible things the government has always done in our name, at the behest of corporate America and our wealthiest citizens, which should be too well known to bear reiteration here.
In our capitalist culture, journalism must not be thought of as a
reporting of facts, but as marketing propaganda—the selling of ideas that might not otherwise be embraced by those who must carry out hidden agendas, or the people on the receiving end of them. Seen in this way, the US soldier and the Iraqi citizen are both pawns in a rich man’s game: the former as the implementer of unjust war and occupation, the other as the unwilling recipient of them.
The end result for both soldier and Iraqi citizen is tragic: the soldier is told that he or she is protecting their country from foreign threats, something that is patently false; while the innocent Iraqi citizen, defending his or her home from foreign occupation, knows that she or he is not a terrorist, but is treated like one, nevertheless.
Both occupier and the occupied share a common foe, but it is not each other; it is the criminals, aided and abetted by the corporate media, who put them in formal opposition to one another for financial gain.
Our recent history would have been impossible without the consolidation of the media that occurred during the Clinton presidency, and has continued ever since. The entire spectra of mainstream media are now under the control of only four or five corporations. We no longer have reporting on local issues stemming from diverse perspectives rooted in local communities, but a monoculture of state and corporate propaganda that betrays the public trust in its pursuit of corporate profits.
Aided by the president and congress, the public owned airwaves were hijacked and are being used against the people by giant multinational corporations.
The result of this media monoculture, as purveyed by the likes of Judith Miller and Tom Brokaw, and countless others, is tragic. And they represent only the tip of the mainstream iceberg. Think of the horrible and shameless lies, the baseless fear and hate that are continuously voiced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and the hateful broadcasts that emanate from Bob Jones University, masquerading as Christian theology.
Corporate media is the vanguard of empire and environmental destruction on a global scale.
Unlike its corporate counterpart, reporting truth requires people of
unassailable integrity. It requires a thirst for justice with the strength of character to oppose the powerful undertow of manufactured perception and conformity, and the seductive language created to execute the hidden agendas of corrupt governments. Uncovering truth requires commitment to the people, rather than to profit driven corporate agendas.
Only a handful of professional journalists have attained the kind of
stature that makes such reportage possible in the United States. Their names are not at all well known, with the possible exception of Seymour Hersch, Robert Fisk, Bill Moyers and Greg Palast.
More often than not, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of
independent journalists and unpaid free-lancers. The professional
journalist must answer to his/her boss, and portray the corporation that employs them in a favorable light, even if they are profiting from unprovoked war and occupation. In contrast, the free-lancer is bound only by the constraints of conscience, imagination, and ability.
Occasionally, an astonished responder to one of my more poignant essays will tell me that I should forward the piece to the New York Times: to NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, or even the BBC. I never have.
It would be hard for me to imagine any corporation undermining its own profitability by exposing its hidden agendas, and denouncing itself as a commissioner of murder and mayhem, motivated by insatiable greed and a lust for wealth and power that would astonish even the staunchest mafia don. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen! Snowballs in hell have a better chance.
Its not that free-lancers like me wouldn’t like to get paid for what we do; it’s that our views do not enhance the bottom line of corporate giants and, in many cases, actually undermine them. Thus it behooves the professional journalist and the corporate media to ignore or discredit us as purveyors of truth and seekers of justice.
Soon it will be an act of sedition to speak truth in this country. Yet,
truth will continue to exist, despite all attempts to destroy it.
Whether they admit it or not, virtually all of the best known
journalists in the US subscribe to the racist and sexist ideologies of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and they go to great lengths to advance these ideas, by presenting them as something other than what they really are. Slight of hand is the rule of mainstream journalism, not the exception.
Conversely, by serving the people, free-lance journalists are, of
necessity, undermining the corporate agenda. Thus they are treated as enemies of the state, which has become indistinguishable from the corporation itself. We live in a culture where one cannot value truth and carry forth corporate agendas. Truth is the enemy of empire.
This might also explain why so many unembedded journalists have been deliberately killed in Iraq and the Gaza strip by US and Israeli snipers. The world must not know what the occupiers do, or the propaganda veneer may no longer have its intended effect on the consumers of media.
Speaking truth to power, especially corrupt power, is dangerous
business— particularly in war zones and fascist states, like the one evolving in the US.
Corporate media is the vanguard of colonialism and imperialist policy. It plays a key role in preparing the public mind for imperialist wars and occupations and their subsequent puppet governments; it also serves the emerging police state at home that erodes our freedoms, until there is nothing left of them.
Yet, occasionally, even in this artificially constructed myth loving
culture, truth wins out simply because someone cares enough to tell it like it is, without sugar coating. Truth matters; and that is—and always will be—of primal importance to some people. Let future historical records show that there was opposition to what was being done in our name, that there were people willing to speak truth to power, to stem the evil tide by standing up for justice, cost what it may.
Future historians of the dominant culture are likely to cast these
accounts into the memory hole and pretend that they never existed, carrying forth the myth that the people were always united behind the injustice and tyranny of our time. We saw this in Nazi Germany in the buildup to World War Two, and we are seeing it now in the US.
But a culture that does not value truth and justice is not worth
preserving. Such cultures will self destruct and implode upon
themselves; the world will eventually unite against them and bring them down. All of the military might in the world, all the subterfuge, is not powerful enough to overcome simple truth.
Any individual who values truth more than lies, who keeps truth alive in his or her heart, despite all efforts to dislodge it from its ethical moorings, is more powerful than even the most advanced weapons systems. Truth emerges unscathed from the rubble of fallen empire as immutable as an inviolable law of nature. Nothing can bring it down because it is real.
If we are to evolve into a justice loving people, truth must become our moral foundation, the basis of our existence as a people. Truth and justice are inseparable partners on the road to liberation from tyranny and fascism.
Concord’s greatest citizen, the poet-philosopher, Henry D. Thoreau, summed it up well: “The one great rule of composition…is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not.” Perhaps more than anything, that simplistic ability to speak plain truth, and in all languages, is what I most admire about Thoreau. There is much to admire and respect in a man who spoke in those terms, and lived by that simple credo.
Truth is simple and uncomplicated, whereas lies and distortions are complex. Truth stands strong and unwavering without artificial support; lies and propaganda require elaborate schemes and constant propping up, the mask of deception.
More of us must learn the language of truth; we must be its faithful
guardians, if we are to be valuable citizens in this world, rather than the useful idiots of empire. By holding truth and justice in the highest regard, we demonstrate that another world is not only possible, but highly probable.
As voracious consumers of media, we must be as careful about what we admit into our minds, as the food we put into our bodies. Food can nourish and sustain us, or it can produce disease and decay. And so it is with media.
To date, we have not been very discriminate, and the result is that we have become a culture of the mentally obese, fed on junk media. Our minds, our souls, have been deliberately poisoned; our perceptions twisted and distorted, our humanity abandoned to the quest for profits and power.
We must purge our minds of junk media and replace it with something more nutritious, if we favor health over disease. Peace is not possible without two essential ingredients: truth and justice. Neither is possible in the absence of the other. We must live as if truth still matters.
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and
community activist residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of
geopolitical West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at
csullivan@phreego.com.
The politics of hypocrisy
The politics of hypocrisy
UK business interests in Burma are more important to this government than justice
John Pilger
Saturday October 27, 2007
The Guardian
The news is no more from Burma. The young monks are quiet in their cells, or they are dead. But words have escaped: the defiant, beautiful poetry of Aung Than and Zeya Aung; and we know of the unbroken will of the journalist U Win Tin, who makes ink out of brick powder on the walls of his prison cell and writes with a pen made from a bamboo mat - at the age of 77. These are the bravest of the brave. What shame they bring to those in the west whose hypocrisy and silence helps to feed the monster that rules Burma.
Condoleezza Rice comes to mind. "The United States," she said, "is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma." What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma's offshore oilfields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labour and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice-President Cheney was chief executive.
For many years, the Foreign Office in London promoted business as usual in Burma. When I interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi a decade ago I read her a Foreign Office press release that said, "Through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles." She smiled sardonically and said, "Not a bit of it."
In Britain, the official PR line has changed; Burma is a favourite New Labour "cause"; Gordon Brown has written a platitudinous chapter in a book about his admiration of Suu Kyi. On Thursday, he wrote a letter to Pen, waffling about prisoners of conscience, no doubt part of his current empty theme of "returning liberty" when none can be returned without a fight. As for Burma, the essence of Britain's compliance and collusion has not changed. British tour firms - such as Orient Express and Asean Explorer - are able to make a handsome profit on the suffering of the Burmese people. Aquatic, a sort of mini-Halliburton, has its snout in the same trough, together with Rolls-Royce and others that use Burmese teak.
When did Brown or Blair ever use their platforms at the CBI and in the City of London to name and shame those British companies that make money on the back of the Burmese people? When did a British prime minister call for the EU to plug the loopholes of arms supply to Burma. The reason ought to be obvious. The British government is itself one of the world's leading arms suppliers. Next week, the dictator of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, whose tyranny gorges itself on British arms, will receive a state visit. On Thursday the Brown government approved Washington's latest fabricated prelude to a criminal attack on Iran - as if the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan were not enough for the "liberal" lionhearts in Downing Street and Whitehall.
And when did a British prime minister call on its ally and client, Israel, to end its long and sinister relationship with the Burmese junta? Or does Israel's immunity and impunity also cover its supply of weapons technology to Burma and its reported training of the junta's most feared internal security thugs? Of course, that is not unusual. The Australian government - so vocal lately in its condemnation of the junta - has not stopped the Australian Federal Police training Burma's internal security forces.
Those who care for freedom in Burma and Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia and beyond must not be distracted by the posturing and weasel pronouncements of our leaders, who themselves should be called to account as accomplices. We owe nothing less to Burma's bravest of the brave.
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Public spending run mad or right-wing propaganda?
Public spending run mad or right-wing propaganda?
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Published: 27 October 2007
The West Lothian Question is like something out of 1066 And All That. It is a very, very difficult question that was first asked by Tam Dalyell, before he began to ask difficult questions about the sinking of the Belgrano. It was such a clever question that it scuppered the Callaghan government's attempt to give Scotland its own devolved government. Even after Labour succeeded in setting up a Scottish parliament in 1999, the Conservatives continued to think it was such a clever question that it would, if they went on asking it, eventually unravel the policy.
The trouble is, no one can remember what the West Lothian Question is. You have to look it up on Wikipedia and then five minutes later, you have forgotten it again. Nobody genuinely thinks it matters very much if some MPs can or cannot vote on measures that affect different parts of the country. Recently, however, some clever people have changed the question. Some journalists on the Daily Mail and some Conservative MPs have started to ask about money.
So it is not called the West Lothian Question any more. It is called the Altrincham and Sale, West, Question. It was asked by Graham Brady, the Tory MP for that constituency, in the House of Commons on Wednesday. It went like this: "Why should my constituents pay more tax so that the Prime Minister's constituents pay no prescription charges?"
It is a stupid question, really, although it turns out to be quite clever in a different way. It is a question that English voters think they understand and do not like. It is a question that has been asked repeatedly by the Daily Mail in recent months, not least because some of its staff think it is a way of embarrassing Gordon Brown. This is odd, because Paul Dacre, the editor, and the Prime Minister are such good friends that Dacre has just been appointed by Mr Brown to review the official secrets rules.
What is so clever about the new question is that it implies that every time Scottish voters appear to gain something, the English taxpayer loses. So when the Scottish National Party abolishes prescription charges in Scotland, Tories and the Tory press conspire to pretend that this is an extra charge on the English.
The truth is, as Brown tried to tell the House of Commons this week, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament make decisions within their own budgets. "No more money goes to Scotland or Wales as a result of their decisions on prescriptions," he said. Or tuition fees, or "free" personal care, or bus passes. If the Scottish parliament abolishes charges, it has to find the money from somewhere else in its budget.
True, public spending is higher in Scotland than in England, but this is not a decision taken by the SNP or the Labour-Lib-Dem coalition that governed Edinburgh before. It was a decision taken by Joel Barnett, Labour chief secretary to the Treasury in the 1970s and maintained by the Tories throughout their 13 years in power.
John Rentoul is chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday
The trouble is, no one can remember what the West Lothian Question is. You have to look it up on Wikipedia and then five minutes later, you have forgotten it again. Nobody genuinely thinks it matters very much if some MPs can or cannot vote on measures that affect different parts of the country. Recently, however, some clever people have changed the question. Some journalists on the Daily Mail and some Conservative MPs have started to ask about money.
So it is not called the West Lothian Question any more. It is called the Altrincham and Sale, West, Question. It was asked by Graham Brady, the Tory MP for that constituency, in the House of Commons on Wednesday. It went like this: "Why should my constituents pay more tax so that the Prime Minister's constituents pay no prescription charges?"
It is a stupid question, really, although it turns out to be quite clever in a different way. It is a question that English voters think they understand and do not like. It is a question that has been asked repeatedly by the Daily Mail in recent months, not least because some of its staff think it is a way of embarrassing Gordon Brown. This is odd, because Paul Dacre, the editor, and the Prime Minister are such good friends that Dacre has just been appointed by Mr Brown to review the official secrets rules.
What is so clever about the new question is that it implies that every time Scottish voters appear to gain something, the English taxpayer loses. So when the Scottish National Party abolishes prescription charges in Scotland, Tories and the Tory press conspire to pretend that this is an extra charge on the English.
The truth is, as Brown tried to tell the House of Commons this week, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament make decisions within their own budgets. "No more money goes to Scotland or Wales as a result of their decisions on prescriptions," he said. Or tuition fees, or "free" personal care, or bus passes. If the Scottish parliament abolishes charges, it has to find the money from somewhere else in its budget.
True, public spending is higher in Scotland than in England, but this is not a decision taken by the SNP or the Labour-Lib-Dem coalition that governed Edinburgh before. It was a decision taken by Joel Barnett, Labour chief secretary to the Treasury in the 1970s and maintained by the Tories throughout their 13 years in power.
John Rentoul is chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday
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Friday 26 October 2007
The Nuke Deal Is Dead
By Vijay Prashad
24 October, 2007
Counterpunch
On October 12, 2007, the Congress Party threw in the towel. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the leader of the United Progressive Alliance Sonia Gandhi told the press that they would step back from the US-India nuclear deal. "If the deal does not come through," Singh said plaintively, "that is not the end of life. In politics, we must survive short-term battles to address long-term concerns."
The short-term battle was won by the Communists, who led the opposition to the deal and winnowed regional parties away from the Congress and toward their position. The Communists' stance is that the nuclear deal (set in motion in 2005) is only one part of a wider embrace between the Indian and US governments, and between Indian and US-based corporations. Apart from nuclear cooperation, the alliance is geared toward partnership between India and the US in democracy promotion, the opening up of the Indian economy to unleashed turbo-capitalism, and a strategic military alliance. The US architects of this linkage saw the last point as the lever: US State Department official Christina Rocca said (in 2002), "Military-to-military cooperation is now producing tangible progress towards [the] objective [of] strategic, diplomatic and political cooperation as well as sound economic ties." Wal-Mart would follow the USS Nimitz into Chennai harbor. Seen in this way, the Communist challenge is not restricted to the nuclear deal, although its defeat gives momentum to wider struggles against the drawing in of India to the platform of US-led imperialism.
From 2005 onward, the Communists led a nation-wide fight to reveal the class basis of these deals. They are not without their benefit to a certain kind of India. Entrepreneurs would get quid pro quo tie-ins with US firms, and Indian arms dealers and nuclear businesses would benefit from the commerce. The fact of an alliance would give a cultural fillip to the growing Indian middle class, for whom its "arrival" on the world stage could be signaled by this deal. Faced with its defeat, the Indian Ambassador to the US Ronen Sen spoke for the class that hoped it would come through, "I can understand [such a debate over the deal] immediately after [India's] independence. But sixty years after independence! I am really bothered that sixty years after independence they are so insecure that we have not grown up, this lack of confidence and lack of self-respect."
As the debate over the deal heated up in India, the navies of the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the US) held a war game off the western coast of India. The Communists used this act to highlight the implications of the deal. One jatha (column) left Kolkata and the other left Chennai to converge on the port city of Vishakapatnam on September 8 for a massive rally. This was a contemporary version of Gandhi's Salt March. Back in Delhi a few days later, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s General Secretary, Prakash Karat, led a march to parliament and said, "we demand that the government not proceed with the deal unless it satisfies the people's objections." A month later, this is just what the Congress Party had to do.
Satrapies.
If you land in Tbilisi, Georgia, the road that takes you into town from the airport is named the George W. Bush Avenue. It is not the only one. In Baghdad, the benighted throughway parallel to Haifa Street has the same name (a suicide bomber destroyed the MacDonald's on it in 2004). One of these roads, the latter, is a consequence of an imperial occupation. The US viceroy could as easily have named the street for George Bush's cat (named India, by the way). The other road, the one in Georgia, comes from the condition of satrapy: Georgia has troops in Iraq (guarding the Green Zone), and its current President Mikheil Saakashvili is eager to join NATO, the European Union, and to be in any way helpful to the US as possible.
India's elite desperately sought this kind of Georgian servility. From 1947 to 1991, the Indian elite and nascent middle class were constrained by a compact to fashion a national economy and strategic autonomy. In the 1980s, for a variety of reasons, the Indian elite and now a fairly confident middle class broke away from the shackles of the national compact and sought to assert itself both on the domestic and international stage. The patriotism of the bottom line predominated over that of the national imaginary. A crippled exchequer took the Indian government to the International Monetary Fund, which demanded a turn to the market and the cannibalization of a state structure geared (in some small measure) to provide some benefits across class.
The elite and middle class had, largely, relieved themselves from the past even if the institutions still held them back. This class was both born of and raised by the import-substitution industrialization policies of the earlier national compact. A highly educated group of people, they burned for upward mobility. The attachment of this class to the graded inequality of the global capitalist system is driven by its own aspirations to rise up the ladder. These interests coalesced with much more powerful forces: the ruling classes in places such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, the organized might of the Group of Seven, the various international financial conglomerates. This class has its annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland. Its mouthpiece is Thomas Friedman.
As the Indian psychologist Sudhir Kakar put it, "This class somehow has the ability to transmute a flame into a blaze." The biographer of this class, Pavan K. Varma, writes that although it "thinks out of the box," and is "a hugely entrepreneurial class," it "may be bent on cloning itself on the West." At the same time, in India there are now more people in extreme poverty than before 1991. In 1995, the World Health Organization reported that a single ailment "conspires with the most deadly and painful diseases to bring a wretched existence to all who suffer from it": this silent ailment is Z59.5, the WHO's code for "extreme poverty."
In a parliament of 545, the Communist bloc is only sixty. These parliamentarians come in the main from West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the three areas where the Left has a very strong presence. Elsewhere in the country, the Left has pockets of influence (Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra), but is unable to translate this in electoral terms (drawing in about 2% of the votes at most). The bulk of the parliament is divided between two blocs, the soft right Congress and its allies (217 seats) and the hard right BJP and its allies (185 seats). Regional parties that do not line up with these three major blocs hold the remaining 78 seats (among them, the largest is a party close to the Left, the Samajwadi or Socialist Party, with 36 seats; although it has long since jettisoned its socialism for a corrupt populism). The elite and middle class are split between the hard and soft right on such issues as their attitude toward what in India is called communalism (fundamentalism: the ideology of Hindutva). On issues of social and economic welfare, the two blocs are virtually indistinguishable, except that the Congress has within it an old Gandhian section that is yet to be extinguished and that enabled the otherwise party of free markets to be held to a Common Minimum Program with the Left on issues such as agrarian policy, this so that the Left would support the Congress government from the outside. The Left, therefore, was the only brake against the enthusiasm of the elite and middle class, both of whom wanted to drown themselves in Bush's spittle.
Dollars from Rupees.
In the early 1990s, the U. S. administration read the shift in India quite correctly. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen observed the middle-class of 60 million, the size of France, and salivated. For Bentsen, and for the Clinton administration, the existence of this class and its hitherto suffocated desires meant that there existed a market to help contain the crisis of over-accumulation to which "globalization" was to be the answer. A decline in the annual rate of growth of the global Gross Domestic Product from the 1960s (5.4%) to the 1980s (3%) offered evidence of the crisis, but nothing was as stark as the falling profit rate of the 500 U. S. transnational corporations (4.7% in the late 1950s to -5.3% in the 1980s). Walden Bello recites these figures and concludes, "Oversupply of commodities and inadequate demand are the principle corporate anomalies inhibiting performance in the global economy."
Bentsen's comments had a concrete purpose: the US administration hoped, in essence, that India's middle-class might absorb this oversupply. The Indian government began a long process to dismantle various kinds of social protections for both the national economy and for the dispossessed and exploited classes. This process did not come easily, since the newly confident dominant classes had yet to settle accounts with powerful institutions of the working class and peasantry (trade unions, political parties, socio-political organizations, peasant groups, and on). Nevertheless, by 1994, large sections of industrial production, the extraction sector, utilities, transportation, telecommunications and finance found themselves prey to private investors.
In Washington, DC, the US-India Business Council (USIBC) emerged from hibernation (it was formed in 1975) in the 1990s to lobby for US business interests in India. The USIBC is housed, conveniently, in the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, from where it pushes against the walls erected in India to protect the national economy from those who want to make dollars out of rupees. For the nuclear deal, the USIBC and the US Chamber of Commerce's Coalition for Partnership with India drew upon the lobbying expertise of Patton Boggs and Stonebridge International. They had a vested interest in the deal, because it would have allowed U.S. firms to gain contracts in the Indian nuclear sector. In March 2007, the USIBC hosted a 230-member business delegation to India, the Commercial Nuclear Executive Mission. Tim Richards of General Electric (GE) gingerly said of the trip, "We know India's need for nuclear power" (there is, in fact, no such need; nuclear power would only cover a maximum of seven percent of India's energy needs). Ron Somers, president of USIBC, said of the purported $60 billion boondoggle that would have come as a result of the deal, "The bounty is enormous."
As the deal fizzled out, the nuclear moneymen grieved. Russia and France had also already lined up to supply India, and both had begun to lobby the Nuclear Suppliers Group to give the deal a free pass. A few days after Singh told Bush their deal was in cold storage, seventy French delegates from twenty-nine nuclear firms met with three hundred Indian delegates in Mumbai for a discussion on a potential France-India nuclear deal. French Ambassador to India Jerome Bonnafont eagerly anticipated the restarting of nuclear cooperation between the two states, which would provide substantial contracts for the French nuclear industry. They want to make Francs out of Rupees.
Chicken-Head.
India's ambassador to Washington, Ronen Sen, fretted about the US-India deal's failure. The Bush team has approved the deal, and so has the Indian cabinet, he carped (he seems to have forgotten his elementary civics: it is parliament that has authority over such deals, not the cabinet a distinction that does not operate so effectively in the US, for all its constitutional checks and balances). "So why do you have all this running around like headless chickens, looking for a comment here or a comment there, and these little storms in a tea-cup." The parliament has now demanded that Mr. Sen be recalled to India and face questions for his disrespect to the elected officials who opposed the deal.
On the same flight as him will be a delegation from the USINPAC, the face of the new "Indian Lobby" in Washington, who is eager to take lessons from and mimic the Israel Lobby. Robinder Sachdev, who founded the group, told the Press Trust of India, that the emerging opposition to the deal within the US Congress startles him. "It is like being penny wise and pound foolish," he said. "The US industry will benefit from the nuclear deal." This is an honesty descried by his friends in the nuclear commerce world. As GE India's chief executive officer T.P. Chopra told a Wharton periodical, "The last thing we want is to give ammunition to the Left-wing parties. They would love to project the U.S. as greedy capitalists selling the country for a few dollars more. Business will keep silent until it's signed, sealed and delivered."
In Mumbai, as the French-Indian delegations met, the Communists held a public rally where they condemned all talk of a nuclear deal. In terms of the US-India deal specifically, Karat of the CPI(M) said, "it is part of the strategic and military relations that the US wants to have with India." It would never be allowed. In Delhi, meanwhile, Prime Minister Singh said, "I have not given up hope yet." Hope is all that remains for the convenience seeking bourgeoisie: the spectacle of advanced capitalism beckons, even if the price is to be paid by the millions of people who suffer the trials of Z59.5.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu
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Thursday 25 October 2007
America's lifestyle is paid for by savers in poorer nations – but for how long?
Hamish McRae:
Published: 25 October 2007
Bahrain: Even brief visits give you a feeling for changes of mood. And the mood yesterday at a conference for investment advisers, not just from Bahrain but from all over the Gulf, was that they should be looking at as diversified a portfolio as possible, and particularly should be thinking about investment in Asia.
This is important because, of course, the United States has been relying on savings from the oil producers in the Middle East, along with Asian savings, to offset its current account deficit. One of the reasons why the dollar has been so weak in recent days has been the sense that the commitment of the international community to the US and to dollar assets has weakened. The US current account deficit has actually begun to narrow through the earlier part of this year, yet the dollar has become progressively weaker. Meanwhile, continuing rapid growth in China and the rest of the newly developing world has sustained demand for oil, pushing the price up and further boosting the balances of the oil exporters.
To put this into context have a look at the two graphs, which come from the latest World Economic Outlook, produced by the International Monetary Fund. As you can see in the first graph, the US current account deficit is more than 1.5 per cent of world GDP; yes, that is world GDP, not US GDP. On the other side of the balance sheet, the surplus of the oil producers is more than 1 per cent of world GDP. Thanks to the high oil price that surplus is at a sweet spot. It has shot up suddenly and the IMF thinks it will come down, at least as a share of world GDP. Elsewhere in the report the IMF predicts that the oil price will come slowly down, so it follows that if the present price levels are maintained it may be understating the size of the oil exporters' surpluses.
In the other graph you can see what these flows are doing to the stock of foreign assets. The net asset position of the US gets worse and worse not just in absolute numbers but as a percentage of world GDP, while the surpluses of the oil producers and to an even greater extent, the emerging Asian economies (actually, mostly China) keep on growing.
Now whenever you see a graph like that you have to ask whether it is credible. Is it really likely that the rest of the world will allow the US to accumulate net debts equivalent to 12 per cent of world GDP? Would the US itself be prepared to see itself become so indebted, particularly since so much of the debts will be to China and the Middle East? Surely not.
But if you don't believe this will happen you have to ask what sequence of evens might stop it. I happen to think that the US current account may correct rather more swiftly than the IMF expects. I also suspect that the investment community in China and the Middle East may seek to diversify their portfolios more swiftly, too. If the second happens faster than the first, the dollar becomes vulnerable. It does not need foreign investors to stop investing in dollar assets for the dollar to fall; it just needs them to build up dollar assets rather more slowly.
Pause for a moment. The US will remain a relatively attractive place for international investment funds for the foreseeable future. It is a huge and transparent market and at some level, dollar assets will always be attractive. So that is not going to change.
What is interesting, though, is the extent to which Middle Eastern investors are now interested in alternative assets classes. These include property, residential as well as commercial, various forms of infrastructure, and resources. The drying up of liquidity for venture capital and private equity investments, which seen from London or New York is a problem, from the perspective of the Gulf is an opportunity. The tighter the money markets, the more expensive it is to borrow, the greater the opportunities for Middle Eastern investors who are generating huge amounts of cash. That 1 per cent plus of world GDP has to find a home somewhere. India appears a particular beneficiary, more indeed than the rest of Asia. The point was made to me by a Qatari banker that India had many attractions for Gulf investors. It was close. There were strong cultural and personal links. And India needed investment in infrastructure as it had lagged behind China in that regard. It was a natural fit.
That must be right. We are also going to see much more Gulf money in Britain and Europe. You can see what has been happening to the euro as a result of this rebalancing of the flow of investment between dollar and euro assets, but Britain will also remain attractive because it remains extremely open to international investment.
That leads to what seems to me to be the biggest issue of all: how open will the US remain to foreign investors?
There is one particular area of current concern, which is the extent to which the so-called sovereign investment funds – funds accumulated by countries rather than private investors – are allowed to invest freely. The US in particular is concerned about such investment, particularly since some of the countries concerned are regarded as hostile to American interests.
There are quite legitimate reasons for concern. Foreign governments not only can mobilise funds on a huge scale; they can also have different objectives from private sector investors. But restrictions on sovereign funds can scare off private investors, too, particularly if they appear to be applied in a capricious manner. I don't think people in the US have any idea of the long-term damage done by the blocking last year by Congress of the bid for P&O by Dubai Ports, on the grounds that the former controlled a number of ports on the US East Coast.
From Dubai's perspective, these were not particularly important assets and they were duly excluded from the sale. But learning that you were not welcome by people you had assumed were your friends was a salutary experience for investors throughout the region.
The result will not be that Middle East investors shun the US. Rather it will be that investment in the US will carry a handicap. The US has the advantage of the size of its market and the general predictability of its legal system. These have enabled it to offer lower returns to international investors than would otherwise be the case. Now it is fairly clear that some of that advantage will be offset by this sense that foreign investment may be unwelcome. So the US will have to offer higher returns to attract international savings. A lot of the dollar's decline this year, in the face of an improving trade position, may be the result of this handicap. That will force a faster adjustment on the US than would otherwise be the case.
This may be no bad thing. It is not reasonable that the world's richest country should rely on the savings of other poorer countries to maintain its lifestyle. The decline in the dollar may force countries that have linked their currency to it to cut loose. That is gradually happening in China and it is a big issue, by the way, in the Gulf. But you don't want adjustment to be too sudden. It is in no one's interest that the dollar should fall in an uncontrolled way – and that danger will remain until the US becomes less reliant on savers in the rest of the world, including the Middle East.
This is important because, of course, the United States has been relying on savings from the oil producers in the Middle East, along with Asian savings, to offset its current account deficit. One of the reasons why the dollar has been so weak in recent days has been the sense that the commitment of the international community to the US and to dollar assets has weakened. The US current account deficit has actually begun to narrow through the earlier part of this year, yet the dollar has become progressively weaker. Meanwhile, continuing rapid growth in China and the rest of the newly developing world has sustained demand for oil, pushing the price up and further boosting the balances of the oil exporters.
To put this into context have a look at the two graphs, which come from the latest World Economic Outlook, produced by the International Monetary Fund. As you can see in the first graph, the US current account deficit is more than 1.5 per cent of world GDP; yes, that is world GDP, not US GDP. On the other side of the balance sheet, the surplus of the oil producers is more than 1 per cent of world GDP. Thanks to the high oil price that surplus is at a sweet spot. It has shot up suddenly and the IMF thinks it will come down, at least as a share of world GDP. Elsewhere in the report the IMF predicts that the oil price will come slowly down, so it follows that if the present price levels are maintained it may be understating the size of the oil exporters' surpluses.
In the other graph you can see what these flows are doing to the stock of foreign assets. The net asset position of the US gets worse and worse not just in absolute numbers but as a percentage of world GDP, while the surpluses of the oil producers and to an even greater extent, the emerging Asian economies (actually, mostly China) keep on growing.
Now whenever you see a graph like that you have to ask whether it is credible. Is it really likely that the rest of the world will allow the US to accumulate net debts equivalent to 12 per cent of world GDP? Would the US itself be prepared to see itself become so indebted, particularly since so much of the debts will be to China and the Middle East? Surely not.
But if you don't believe this will happen you have to ask what sequence of evens might stop it. I happen to think that the US current account may correct rather more swiftly than the IMF expects. I also suspect that the investment community in China and the Middle East may seek to diversify their portfolios more swiftly, too. If the second happens faster than the first, the dollar becomes vulnerable. It does not need foreign investors to stop investing in dollar assets for the dollar to fall; it just needs them to build up dollar assets rather more slowly.
Pause for a moment. The US will remain a relatively attractive place for international investment funds for the foreseeable future. It is a huge and transparent market and at some level, dollar assets will always be attractive. So that is not going to change.
What is interesting, though, is the extent to which Middle Eastern investors are now interested in alternative assets classes. These include property, residential as well as commercial, various forms of infrastructure, and resources. The drying up of liquidity for venture capital and private equity investments, which seen from London or New York is a problem, from the perspective of the Gulf is an opportunity. The tighter the money markets, the more expensive it is to borrow, the greater the opportunities for Middle Eastern investors who are generating huge amounts of cash. That 1 per cent plus of world GDP has to find a home somewhere. India appears a particular beneficiary, more indeed than the rest of Asia. The point was made to me by a Qatari banker that India had many attractions for Gulf investors. It was close. There were strong cultural and personal links. And India needed investment in infrastructure as it had lagged behind China in that regard. It was a natural fit.
That must be right. We are also going to see much more Gulf money in Britain and Europe. You can see what has been happening to the euro as a result of this rebalancing of the flow of investment between dollar and euro assets, but Britain will also remain attractive because it remains extremely open to international investment.
That leads to what seems to me to be the biggest issue of all: how open will the US remain to foreign investors?
There is one particular area of current concern, which is the extent to which the so-called sovereign investment funds – funds accumulated by countries rather than private investors – are allowed to invest freely. The US in particular is concerned about such investment, particularly since some of the countries concerned are regarded as hostile to American interests.
There are quite legitimate reasons for concern. Foreign governments not only can mobilise funds on a huge scale; they can also have different objectives from private sector investors. But restrictions on sovereign funds can scare off private investors, too, particularly if they appear to be applied in a capricious manner. I don't think people in the US have any idea of the long-term damage done by the blocking last year by Congress of the bid for P&O by Dubai Ports, on the grounds that the former controlled a number of ports on the US East Coast.
From Dubai's perspective, these were not particularly important assets and they were duly excluded from the sale. But learning that you were not welcome by people you had assumed were your friends was a salutary experience for investors throughout the region.
The result will not be that Middle East investors shun the US. Rather it will be that investment in the US will carry a handicap. The US has the advantage of the size of its market and the general predictability of its legal system. These have enabled it to offer lower returns to international investors than would otherwise be the case. Now it is fairly clear that some of that advantage will be offset by this sense that foreign investment may be unwelcome. So the US will have to offer higher returns to attract international savings. A lot of the dollar's decline this year, in the face of an improving trade position, may be the result of this handicap. That will force a faster adjustment on the US than would otherwise be the case.
This may be no bad thing. It is not reasonable that the world's richest country should rely on the savings of other poorer countries to maintain its lifestyle. The decline in the dollar may force countries that have linked their currency to it to cut loose. That is gradually happening in China and it is a big issue, by the way, in the Gulf. But you don't want adjustment to be too sudden. It is in no one's interest that the dollar should fall in an uncontrolled way – and that danger will remain until the US becomes less reliant on savers in the rest of the world, including the Middle East.
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