Does Anything Matter?

Does Anything Matter?

By Tarun Tejpal
10 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The last time we broke a story that rumbled the jungle that is Delhi's power elite, we were condemned to a three-year walk over burning coals. The story, peration West End, an exposé of the rampant corruption in arms procurements, was first aired in March 2001, and almost immediately two things happened. The first was a groundswell of public applause and affection that did not abate for a long time. The second, fairly predictable — though not in its ferocity and longevity — was an immoral and unconstitutional assault on our work and lives. That too did not abate for a long time — not till the state's entire ammunition was spent, and there was nothing more to throw at us.
At the time, six years ago, we were, in succession, accused of being Congress stooges, agents of Dawood Ibrahim, on the payroll of the Hindujas, connected to the ISI of Pakistan, responsible for crashing the stock market, and in possession of hundreds of crores in payoffs. The estimates varied from twenty to two hundred. Narendra Modi — yes the same one — was at the time I think a general secretary in the BJP, and I will never forget a television interview in which both of us were doing phone-ins and he was spewing lies with the stentorian voice of a Supreme Court judge. A day later he was to issue printed pamphlets with ten facts about me. The first and most crucial was that I was the son of a contractor who was a close aide of veteran Congress leader Arjun Singh from Madhya Pradesh.
Delhi's perennially skewed elite — a relic of the Mughal durbar, pathologically fixated on its positioning on the social and power chessboard — relished every floating accusation and relayed it with embellishments. Even friends and acquaintances whispered. They had never seen anyone do anything but for a sweet personal reason. It was fair to assume that, similarly, we had many or at least one. Now that the state was hunting us with all its hounds it was only a matter of time before the truth was out. Having said that — a great job still, much needed, and most courageous!
As it were I had never met any of the Hindujas.
As it were I had never bought or sold a single share on the stock market.
As it were I'd never had anything to do with the Congress, never having been a political reporter in my career. (For record's sake let it be said TEHELKA must be the only company in India which has three CBI cases — all trumped up and lodged during the time of the NDA government — still going on against it, three years after the UPA came to power. We routinely go to court to seek bail on them.)
As it were we were not in possession of a single illicit rupee, else the hounds of the state that were panting after us around the clock would have locked us up and thrown away the keys. At the time there were just four of us left, down from 120, officed in a small borrowed room in the village behind South Extension. The money we borrowed then, running into tens of lakhs, to wage our legal and public battle, much of it from luminous Indian names, is still being repayed.
And of course, as it were — despite our exposé on cricket matchfixing, which badly hurt the underworld — none of us had ever met Dawood Ibrahim or any of the star-struck bhais.
Illustration: Anand Naorem

More absurdly still, leave alone my father I too had never met Arjun Singh at the time. Not to add that my father far from being a contractor had spent his life in the Indian army, wearing olive, and fighting in the two Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971. Yet Modi had thought nothing of throwing a blatant untruth into the public space, amid all the others listed above that were being flung about. And the media — more giddy than the Sensex — had refused to clarify and rebut.
And unrebutted and unclarified lies — like an unpoliced Sensex — have the ability to swell to dangerous proportions, deforming reality and ushering in chaos. The core fascist axiom is a cliché: the whisper campaign of lies that soon becomes the truth or at least drowns it out. We saw that in 1984 as the Sikhs were put to the sword, and we saw it in 2002 as Gujarat was set to burn with a mishmash of false information and ill-intent. Mostly the media relayed unchecked versions, but sometimes it unearthed the truth. But truth by then had ceased to be a factor. The strategy of those exposed was to ratchet up the public noise till everything was drowned — good, bad, true, false. With our present exposé it has been: but why have you left out Godhra? Whereas the truth is we haven't. In fact 30 pages of our issue were devoted only to the Godhra investigation!
Noise as strategy when faced with serious charges may be smart if deplorable political tactics, but what is mystifying is the Indian elite's penchant for the conspiracy theory. It smacks of a self-serving culture where the greater good is seen as no motive at all. Over the years I have had the bizarre and nauseating experience of the well-heeled casting aspersions on the financial integrity of fantastic public warriors like Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy. To differ in thought is one thing, but to automatically assume corruption of those who take up public causes says grim things about the kind of people we are. Some of this deformity may have to do with our colonial past: the desperate urge to please the white master engendering corrosive emotions of envy, cunning, plotting, backbiting and betrayal.
This time — with our investigation into the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 — the conspiracy-seekers scaled new heights. While the BJP attacked us for working for the Congress, the Congress spread the word that we were working for the BJP! Clearly we were doing something right. In all this the battle for the idea of India was left to Laloo Yadav, Mayawati and the Left. The Congress one presumes knows the phrase — since its forebears literally coined it — but they can't anymore seem to remember what it means.
It's extraordinary that more than a week after the Gujarat massacre exposé, the prime minister and the home minister had not made a single statement. For the first time in the history of journalism, mass murderers were on camera telling us how they killed, why they killed, and with whose permission they did it. Nor were these just petty criminals; these were fanatics, ideologically driven, working the most dangerous faultline of the subcontinent, revealing the truth of a perilous rupture fully capable of tearing this country apart. But that was clearly not enough for the good man of Race Course Road. Had the CII burped loudly, the PMO would have issued a clarification. Had they then organised a seminar on the untimely burp, the prime minister would have addressed it.
It may be unfair to pillory the prime minister, a man given responsibility without power, the honest man sitting atop a dishonest hillock. Let us then look at the grand strategists of the Congress who cannot win an election themselves but know the secret of winning elections for the many. On their perverse abacus, exposing Modi's hand in bestial murders and rapes was designed to convince the Gujarati Hindu that this is precisely the kind of leadership it wanted! It never struck them that they could use the evidence of violence to shape a stirring dialogue against it.
THE FACT is the Congress is today run by petty strategists who no longer know what it is to do the right thing. They possess neither the illuminations of history, nor a vision for the future. They fail to see that once great men sutured a hundred fault-lines — of caste, religion, race, language, class — to create the idea of India out of a diverse, colonised, feudal subcontinent. Foolishly they preside over the reopening of these fault-lines, unable to see the chaos that will ensue. They do not know how to wield morality as a weapon in politics, and they lack the courage to walk any high road. At best they are vote accountants who waver between the profit and the loss of various elections.
The present Congress brings grief to the liberal, secular, democratic Indian who needs a political umbrella under which to wage the civilisational battle for India's soul. By not saying the right thing, by not doing the right thing, it weakens the resolve of the decent Indian, who lacks the stomach for conflict and seeks affirmation of his decency. The vacated space is then colonised by poisonous ideologies based on exclusion and a garbled — pseudo-religious, pseudo-historic — hunt for identity.
And all this is happening while the elite Indian behaves like the elite American during the gilded age, the 1920s — glitz, glam, champagne times — even as the ground shifts beneath its feet. The latest statistics show the numbers living in abject poverty are actually growing in five major states. In 30 percent of India's districts Naxalite insurrections, rising from crushing poverty, are on the upswing. Can Manhattan and sub-Saharan Africa exist in the same space endlessly without some resulting cataclysm? The fact is India needs not just economic tinkering but great political vision. And there are no signs of it. The apathy of Gujarat tells us that the most complex country in the world faces its most complex challenges ever.

 

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Indian government pledges lavatories for all in a bid to keep private acts behind closed doors

 By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi

Published: 02 November 2007

The Indian government has vowed to eradicate the all-too-common phenomenon of open-air defecation by building environmentally friendly lavatories for hundreds of millions of its poorest citizens.
The Rural Development minister, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, claimed that within five years, the government will have built sufficient facilities for everyone – many years ahead of an international deadline.
He revealed that the government would spend around £125m on rural sanitation projects this year, a increase of 43 per cent on last year. He said: 'By 2012, India will be free of defecation in the open and will meet international commitments in this regard.'
The minister's pledge was delivered at the 4th World Toilet Summit in New Delhi which has brought together experts from more than 40 countries to discuss ways of providing affordable sanitation for the world's poorest people. The conference is largely the result of campaigning by Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of a charity that provides public lavatories.
Mr Pathak told delegates: 'To achieve the goals, what is essential is that technology needs to be urgently developed that is suitable and simple of implementation. Sewers or septic tanks are not the solutions. Doctors around the world now say that better sanitation and public hygiene are key for improving public health.'
Since the 1970s, his organisation, Sulabh International, has developed simple composting toilets that turns waste into water, fertiliser for crops, and biogas that can be used to run generators or cook. His organisation has provided 6,500 public toilets, most recently in Kabul.
To prove the effectiveness of the Sulabh system, each of the delegates received, along with the usual commemorative pens and stickers, a sample of composted human waste recovered from a Sulabh toilet that had been mixed with glue and fashioned into a paper weight. They also received a small sachet of nitrogen-rich manure made from human waste. The World Health Organisation has estimated that around the globe up to 2.6 billion people – one third of the planet's entire population – do not have access to proper toilet facilities. More than half of them live in China and India, with the latter accounting for around 700 million people. The UN's target for providing proper facilities for all people is 2015.
Up to half a million people in India are engaged in 'manual scavenging' – cleaning toilets that have no sewage system and carrying away waste or 'night soil' on their heads or in carts. The practice has been officially outlawed but persists because in many places there are no alternatives.
One former scavenger, Sushila Chauhan from Alwar in Rajasthan, told delegates how, unlike most people in her dry, desert state, she hated the rain which spilled the waste she was carrying in a metal tray on her head all over her. She was 'rehabilitated' by a training and education scheme provided by Dr Pathak's organisation. She said: 'The nauseating acidic smell of human waste used to remain with me throughout the day, even hours after I would return from work. But worst of all there was a lack of appetite for food and everything good in life.'
India's minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, Meira Kumar, told the conference that the government would provide more resources for the rehabilitation of women such as Ms Chauhan.
Ms Kumar said: 'We have banned the practice of manual scavenging and the government will complete the rehabilitation of all scavengers by March 2009. We launched a scheme for these people in January 2007 and the focus is to train scavengers for self-employment.

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The True Social Parasites

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.

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.

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.

 

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?

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

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