Indian business is in supremely self-confident mood. But is its optimism justified? Corruption remains a key restraint on progress. By Jeremy Warner in Delhi
Published: 12 December 2007
Now what credit crisis is that? There could scarcely be a better antidote to the gloom which grips Western markets than a visit to India, where the mood among business leaders in sharp contrast to the downbeat pessimism of the developed world is one of rampant self-confidence and can-do determination to succeed. If the world economy has indeed "decoupled", with the fast growing developing economies of Asia able to remain largely immune to the slowdown in the US, then India perhaps more so even than China is the living embodiment of the breakdown of these linkages.
To bankers and business people here, the credit crunch is but a scarcely noticed rumble of distant thunder of little, if any, significance to an economy whose annualised rate of growth is now kissing 10 per cent.
At last week's India Economic Summit, organised by the World Economic Forum in association with the Confederation of Indian Industry, the mood was one of unbridled optimism, despite the country's many economic and social challenges.
In a mark of this new found self-confidence, India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, predicted that next year outward bound investment by Indian companies would for the first time exceed fast-growing inward investment by foreigners keen to tap into India's explosive growth story.
The two front-runners for Jaguar and Land Rover, which have been put up for sale by Ford with an expected price tag of $1.5bn to $2bn (£980m), are both Indian – Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra. One of these is likely to be named preferred bidder at some stage in the next month or two, with the effect that together with the steel maker Corus, bought earlier this year by Tata, a very substantial part of Britain's remaining manufacturing base will have passed into Indian ownership.
Nor could anyone have failed to notice the takeover by the flamboyant Vijay Mallya of the scotch whisky company Whyte & Mackay. Mobbed in the manner of a Bollywood film star as he struts the conference rooms of the India Economic Summit, he has become the living embodiment of the self-belief, verging on arrogance, of India's new business élite.
Less well-reported examples of Indian acquisitiveness overseas are the pharmaceuticals company Ranbaxy Laboratories, whose chief executive Malvinder Singh, points out that he has done 18 overseas acquisitions in the last two years, and India's world-class IT services industry, which has been similarly active overseas. Indians are these days more likely to be found rubbing shoulders with the élite of global business than their counterparts in China.
Yet the emergence of India as a serious player in global M&A, though undoubtedly indicative of the country's new-found influence on the world economy, is no substitute for economic development at home. With some 80 per cent of a population of 1.1bn living on 25 rupees a day or less (30p), there is plainly still a way to go before the geo-economic power shift from west to east that so many now talk of becomes a reality.
In most respects, the idea is still little more than fanciful. The "inclusive" growth that India aspires to is also at this stage just a pipe dream.
The development challenge for India is not the 250 million people officially defined as middle class – those with sufficient income for discretionary spending – but the much greater numbers which are still dependent on subsistence farming or eeking out a living in the slum dwellings of India's major cities.
The economic anomaly that India has to confront is that the more than half the population which is still rural accounts for just 20 per cent of the country's output, with the infrastructure of the cities already so stretched and broken by migration from the land that they cannot without risk of extreme social dislocation absorb any more.
Perhaps oddly, the effect so far of the Western credit crunch on India has been mildly positive. Some of the excess liquidity which otherwise would have flowed into complex western debt instruments has instead been diverted into emerging market equities, helping to feed the boom in the Indian stock market.
It's a funny old world that sees Indian equities as lower risk than previously triple-A-rated Western debt markets, but for the time being that's the way of it.
Yet whatever the protestations of its business leaders, it seems unlikely that India can altogether escape the adverse consequences of the Western credit crisis. India is more "coupled" to what's going on in Western economies than it would like to think. The credit crunch will for starters quite severelylimit India's new-found penchant for foreign acquisition making. India is just as affected by the closure of debt markets to leveraged finance as privateequity.
Ranbaxy has already had to pull one major transaction because of prohibitive financing costs. Speculation in the Indian press that Tata might counter BHP Billiton in the bidding for Rio Tinto, thus shoring up the country's need for iron ore supplies to feed its fast-growing steel mills, are frankly just delusional in today's markets.
Tata would have struggled to finance the acquisition of Corus had it been trying to do so today. The infinitely larger amounts necessary to acquire Rio are a non starter.
Meanwhile, Indian exports are likely to be hard hit by any generalised economic slowdown in the West. The booming IT sector will also find its growth crimped by more difficult trading conditions in the US.
Ambitious government plans to increase infrastructure spending by some $500bn over the next five years, much of it slated to be privately financed, is likely to be quite significantly affected by the freezing up of global credit markets.
The bigger constraints on Indian development are nonetheless of the more home-grown variety. India's notoriously poor infrastructure of power, water, sanitation, roads, rail and airports – together with the apparent inability of government to do anything about it – is just the half of it. Nor are the extreme challenges around education, training, health and nutrition the biggest bug-bear.
Rather, it is corrosive, debilitating corruption, which runs through all levels of society from the lowest to the highest, and creates a massive barrier to the deployment of foreign capital and the development of efficient markets. Yet it is an issue few Indian business and political leaders are prepared to even talk about let alone confront.
There was, for instance, no session amid all the self-congratulation of the India Economic Summit on corruption, though in fairness it was referred to in a breakout debate on the difficulties of introducing Western standards of supply chain management into India.
Low levels of public sector pay have helped make bribery a part of everyday life. Only very slowly has private sector development, which brings with it Western standards of pay and best practice, begun to make inroads into a pattern of behaviour still widely thought of as perfectly normal.
A common observation among Western business people with experience of working in both India and China is, yes, India with its fast-growing, youthful population and relatively high levels of consumption, is a terrific market opportunity, but – and here the aside is whispered behind the hand – "it is so much better in China" .
There is of course plenty of corruption in China, too, but the difference is that in China a real effort is made, from the top down, to engage with business and address its problems. If a road needs to be built to facilitate an investment, it gets built to order and on time.
Against China's forced march, India has more chaotic, private sector-driven approach to development. This may have the merit of being more consensual, but it also makes the system more open to abuse.
India is said to have more than 250,000 separate democratic institutions. Against China's rule of the gun, India is ruled by the ballot box. In such a paradise of representation, national priorities become eclipsed by regional concerns, interests and sovereignties. In any system where there is debate and room to object, progress is bound to be slower and more cumbersome. What should be a democratic dividend, making India a more obviously attractive destination for Western investment and know-how than the one-party state of China, instead frequently becomes a positive liability.
Yet it requires only the briefest of visits to India to understand that it is not democracy as such which is at the root of the problem. Rather it is powerful vested interest and corruption which through high levels of loyalty and deference down through the matrix of society that have become entrenched in the democratic process.
Says one leader of a multi-national company with extensive interests in India: "You know, India is a wonderful country, but it is a bugger of a place to do business in, a real bugger, worse than anywhere else I've had experience of, worse than the Middle East.
"The market is huge and fast growing, but every step of the way it is a struggle. It shouldn't be so difficult. It could be made so much better. But nothing is going to change in a hurry".
This may be an unduly pessimistic prognosis, but it contains large elements of truth. Corruption of the commercial and political process is present at all levels of society, from the free services and goods that street traders are obliged to give local police and officials to prevent crippling bureaucratic interference to the protections and barriers to entry that are enjoyed by some of India's leading business dynasties.
Rules and regulations are routinely changed or tampered with to favour one commercial interest over another, depriving the market of the level playing field it needs to develop internationally competitive industries. This may not be corruption as such, and all political systems however sophisticated, are to some extent prone to such manipulation. Yet it is more overt and wide-ranging in India than perhaps anywhere else.
One current example is the row over new mobile phone spectrums, which had been promised to existing GSM operators but which two of India's most powerful business dynasties, Anil Ambani's Reliance and the still family controlled Tata, are trying to muscle in on.
Mobile telephony has been one of the great Indian success stories of recent years, hugely innovative and adaptive as penetration spreads beyond India's urban middle class down into the lower income groups, where the cost of both handsets and call charges have to be kept to a bare minimum to gain traction.
Handsets can be bought for as little as $20 and pre-paid top ups are sold in 10 rupee chunks, enabling 5-7 minutes of airtime. The mass provision of connectivity is an essential element of the social and economic empowerment that India so desperately needs to lift its population out of poverty. The mobile phone companies are making extraordinary progress in helping bring this about, yet at every turn their progress is hampered by bureaucratic interference.
Unlike other forms of infrastructure, there is no problem of lack of investment in mobile telephony. Vodafone Essar, the second-biggest operator, is spending at the rate of $2bn a year, while the largest, Sunil Mittal's Airtel, will be spending even more.
Existing capacity is already stretched to breaking point. To keep growing as planned, the GSM operators need more. Yet here comes Messrs Ambani and Tata, both of whom have mobile companies licensed to use the alternative, and as it has turned out more expensive, CDMA operating standard, to argue that in order to create more competition in the market, the promised extra GSM spectrum should go to them instead.
Having essentially chosen a technological cul-de- sac as their way into mobile, their natural sense of entitlement makes them think the rules should be changed to give them access to the faster-growing GSM market, too. Never mind the billions of investment by the likes of Mr Mittal predicated on understandings that were meant to be set in concrete, or the fact that if scarce capacity is shared between multiple operators, it is much more likely to create an unsatisfactory oligopoly than more competition.
Mr Mittal has expressed outrage at what government-controlled regulators seem minded to do. Their decision will be a test case of public policy as it relates to business in India. Without certainty as to the public policy framework, business can't and won't invest.
In China, it is often said, business succeeds because of government; in India, it is in spite of government. The challenge of dealing with often corrupt bureaucracy in itself helps create a hugely entrepreneurial and inventive society. Yet it is also a profound barrier to change, which left unaddressed, will continue to cost India dear.
As one of the co-chairs of the India Economic Summit, Ben Verwaayen, chief executive of BT, says he feels more inspired about the need for corporate change by coming to India than ever he does sitting in his office back in London.
This is the future, he says, gesturing to the world outside – a fast-growing middle-class consumer market that will soon be bigger in terms of numbers than the European Union.
But to achieve its proper potential it must rise to the challenge of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty so that they too can join the burgeoning ranks of Indians already bought into the global economy.
Connectivity, in his view, provides many of the answers to India's economic and social challenges, including perhaps, ultimately, corruption, too. There is nothing like communication to make people realise they are being disadvantaged.
India is at least 10 years behind China in terms of its development profile. The free market reforms that led directly to the explosive growth we are seeing today throughout much of the developing world came later in India than China. Yet India's market opportunity is potentially much bigger, with a faster-growing and more youthful population.
These characteristics have the potential to be as much of a curse as a blessing. Yet whatever the outcome, no business which still expects to be around in 20 years time can afford to ignore the challenges they represent.
Wednesday 12 December 2007
Tuesday 11 December 2007
Cost-Benefit Analysis - Olympics
Leading article: A winning performance
Published: 11 December 2007
Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, is clearly trying for a gold medal. The 2012 London Olympics are on budget and on schedule, she told Parliament yesterday. Unfortunately the only sport for which she would qualify is that of goal-post moving.
Those with long memories may recall that "being on budget" back in 2003, when the consultants Arup first costed the games, involved laying out a mere £1.8bn. Within a few months Ms Jowell had revised that to £2.4bn, including an apparently generous 50 per cent contingency fund. The UK record remained at that level for a full two years until 2006, when a new one of £3.3bn was set, again by that Olympic financing veteran Ms Jowell. Now it is going to cost us, including contingency, security and tax, some £9.3bn.
Clearly Ms Jowell is going for a world record here. The Olympics are on budget only in the sense that they seem not to have gone up again since March when, after a "thorough assessment of all potential risks", she first announced the £9.3bn total.
The Olympics will be good for London and for the entire nation. But what is not good is this unedifying inability to control the costs. It is a household truism that whenever you get the builders in it costs twice as much and takes twice as long as the estimate sets out. Yet even by that yardstick, this is an overspend on the overspend.
Things are unlikely to get better. This will be Europe's largest public construction development initiative, which includes rebuilding large sections of run-down east London in disused industrial sites surrounded by some of Britain's poorest neighbourhoods. The House of Commons public accounts committee has suggested that ministers have "over-planned" and "grossly underestimated" foreseeable costs. What was good about Ms Jowell's announcement yesterday was that it sets out the most detailed breakdown of expected costs to date, with the promise of updates every six months. Yet that is not enough. If we are to keep on top of costs, ministers must disclose more budget information, including a breakdown of contingency spending and monthly cash flows.
Ms Jowell was asked yesterday whether it was likely any of the £2bn Olympic contingency fund would remain unspent. She had "grounds for optimism"" on that she said, even as the BBC was reporting the existence of a confidential report to ministers which suggests there is a 20 per cent chance the budget will rise yet again. The sad likelihood is that this is one Olympic sport in which the record will be broken again and again – and all before the games have ever begun.
Published: 11 December 2007
Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, is clearly trying for a gold medal. The 2012 London Olympics are on budget and on schedule, she told Parliament yesterday. Unfortunately the only sport for which she would qualify is that of goal-post moving.
Those with long memories may recall that "being on budget" back in 2003, when the consultants Arup first costed the games, involved laying out a mere £1.8bn. Within a few months Ms Jowell had revised that to £2.4bn, including an apparently generous 50 per cent contingency fund. The UK record remained at that level for a full two years until 2006, when a new one of £3.3bn was set, again by that Olympic financing veteran Ms Jowell. Now it is going to cost us, including contingency, security and tax, some £9.3bn.
Clearly Ms Jowell is going for a world record here. The Olympics are on budget only in the sense that they seem not to have gone up again since March when, after a "thorough assessment of all potential risks", she first announced the £9.3bn total.
The Olympics will be good for London and for the entire nation. But what is not good is this unedifying inability to control the costs. It is a household truism that whenever you get the builders in it costs twice as much and takes twice as long as the estimate sets out. Yet even by that yardstick, this is an overspend on the overspend.
Things are unlikely to get better. This will be Europe's largest public construction development initiative, which includes rebuilding large sections of run-down east London in disused industrial sites surrounded by some of Britain's poorest neighbourhoods. The House of Commons public accounts committee has suggested that ministers have "over-planned" and "grossly underestimated" foreseeable costs. What was good about Ms Jowell's announcement yesterday was that it sets out the most detailed breakdown of expected costs to date, with the promise of updates every six months. Yet that is not enough. If we are to keep on top of costs, ministers must disclose more budget information, including a breakdown of contingency spending and monthly cash flows.
Ms Jowell was asked yesterday whether it was likely any of the £2bn Olympic contingency fund would remain unspent. She had "grounds for optimism"" on that she said, even as the BBC was reporting the existence of a confidential report to ministers which suggests there is a 20 per cent chance the budget will rise yet again. The sad likelihood is that this is one Olympic sport in which the record will be broken again and again – and all before the games have ever begun.
Monday 10 December 2007
'If IT Is Going To Take Away Our Values, Burn Bangalore, Burn IT'
IT squeezed Bangalore dry, hasn't given anything in return. The signs are worrying.
C.N.R. RAO
| I am a real Bangalorean. I was born in Basavangudi. The greatness of Bangalore was that it allowed simplicity and enjoyment—a cup of coffee and a masala dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan kept you happy. I don't see that Bangalore anymore. It is now an awful city. There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom. The city we have created in recent years is rotten—highly polluted, garbage strewn everywhere, including the intellectual garbage dumped on this city by the IT industry. Bangalore was always a highly intellectual city. Though people called it a garden city, there was more science here than anywhere else in India. Nowadays, nobody talks about it. They only call it an IT city. When it all started, I thought it was a good thing because so many people were getting jobs. Over the years, it has created a large upper-middle-class population who crowd the malls. There is nothing wrong in that, but what is really serious is the influence this has had on Bangalore's intellectual content. It is wonderful to have a lot of young people getting big salaries, provided they don't take away the essential lifeblood of other professions. Bright people at a very young age, before they are even 20, think of IT as an option because they can make quick money. Lots of intelligent people are doing jobs that are much below their intellectual capabilities. They are like coolies who are working for wages and not producing great intellectual material. Can an India of the future afford a highly skewed growth like this? All the humours should be balanced—we must also have good poets, good economists, fine historians, quality scientists and top-class engineers. An nri recently asked me, if India is so great in IT, how come it produces only 25 PhDs in computer science per year? That's a very good question. Right in the beginning, the IT industry should have planned their campuses in towns like Ramanagaram (40-odd km from Bangalore). They should have created IT satellite towns, but they all wanted land inside the city. They not only took away that land, they also complain about not getting enough. They say they want better roads, but why should we create them? IT people have a responsibility that they are yet to fulfil. If they're making so much money, why shouldn't they create an outstanding private university equivalent to Stanford or Harvard? Had they done something like that they would have compensated for the other problems they have created. If IT people are making money, what do I get out of it, unless I am employed in Infosys with Narayana Murthy? The trouble is, we have given them a lot, but have got nothing in return. Our society has created a bunch of icons and role models who are distorting not just the future of this city but of all India, and of our sense of values. Our people have lost respect for scholarship. Money and commerce has taken over. If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT. (As told to Sugata Srinivasaraju) C.N.R. Rao, a world-renowned solid state and materials chemist, is chairman, Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister | |
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Saturday 8 December 2007
Idle Worship, Or The Non-Resident's Role Play
Come winter, and Indians will genuflect before the visiting hordes of NRIs
RAMACHANDRA GUHA A new festival has been added to the Indian ritual calendar. Like Dussehra and Diwali, it is a winter festival, but unlike them the gods it honours are living beings, who appear before us in flesh and blood instead of being frozen into stone. This relatively new addition to our lives is called NRI puja. It takes place in December, a time when thousands of Non-Resident Indians briefly become Resident Non-Indians.
As a middle-class, English-speaking South Indian, I am always part of these festivities myself. For half my family serve as deities; the other half as worshippers. Whether I like it or not, I am placed by default in the second class. Fortunately, whatever personal apprehensions I have about participating in this annual puja are overcome by the force of professional obligation. As an Indian who chose to live in India, I might affect scorn for the migrants, but as a social scientist I must take cognisance of a phenonemon whose social significance grows with every passing year.
The first thing to note about this puja is that it has space only for a certain kind of NRI. Those who live with Arabs in the Gulf or with Fijians in the South Pacific do not qualify; still less those who have made their home with humans of African descent in the Caribbean. To be worthy of worship, an NRI must live with people whose skin pigmentation is, in the Tamil phrase, paal maadri, literally, the colour of milk.
Among the gods who visit us every winter, three deities tower above the others. Analagous to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, we have Salman the Creator, Amartya the Preserver, and Sir Vidia the Destroyer. Just as Brahma gave birth to the world, Rushdie gave birth, through his magnificent novel Midnight's Children, to an innovative and globally influential school of Indian writing in English. Like the god he resembles he appears to have done little since—but, for that first and fundamental act of creation, we worship him still.
Vishnu the Preserver is supposed to have had 10 avatars. His successor probably exceeds him in this regard. Sometimes he comes to us as a Bangladeshi (by virtue of the fact that he was born in Dhaka), at other times as a Bengali, at still other times as a Global Indian. Other roles he has assumed include economist, philosopher, sociologist, historian, and seer. Like the god he resembles he comes to cheer us, to console us, to chastise us.
Siva could set the world ablaze with a mere blink of the eyelids. His modern successor can destroy a reputation by a word or two said (or unsaid). As with Siva, we fear Sir Vidia, we propitiate him, and we worship him. Who knows, if we are diligent and devoted enough, he may grant us some favours in this world (or the next).
In the Hindu pantheon there are three main Gods as well as 33,000 lesser ones. Through the month of December, the Holy Trinity are sighted from afar—prayed to, occasionally touched, but rarely spoken to. But how many Indians get to go to Badrinath anyway? Their regular prayers are offered to more modest deities who live in or visit the smaller shrines in their own villages or towns.
Among these lesser gods, the first and by far the most numerous category consists of the Family Show-Off. This is the man—less often, the woman—who went early to the West, usually the United States, to study, work and earn. He makes trips home every few years—at first coming alone, then with Indian wife acquired through traditional channels, and finally with one or two brats in tow. When these family NRIs appear, we, mere permanent residents, are obliged to pay homage, altering our own lives and work schedules to do so. It is striking how naturally we slip into the role of worshippers; they, as naturally, into the role of the worshipped.
The Family Show-Off is more than willing to speak of the upward curve of his own life: of a better-paid job, a bigger car, a house on the coast. He is certain to note the very different conditions of your life—the traffic jams, the power cuts, the credit card machines that don't work, the water fit only for animals to drink. Some visiting NRIs express anger at these conditions. Others express sympathy, which yet comes with a very large dose of self-satisfaction.
Sometimes the Family Show-Off takes on a second role, that of the Non-Resident Religious Radical, or nrrr. The nrrr tells you that the only way to build a strong, self-reliant nation is to marry Faith with State. Like exiles everywhere, he yearns for the restoration of a pure, uncontaminated, national culture, which in his rendering can only mean a Hindu culture. These nrrrs have been to the Sangh parivar what North Americans Jews are to the Israeli Right and what Irish-Americans have been to the ira—that is, an important source of moral and (more crucially) material support.
When the BJP was in power, much attention was paid to the diasporic fundamentalist. But few, it seems, have noticed the steady growth in influence of another kind of diasporic extremist, whom I call the Non-Resident Political Radical, or NRPR. While the nrrrs tend to come from the commercial and professional classes—they are typically doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—the NRPR are located chiefly in the American academy, as students and professors. They are fervently against 'lpg': liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. This, despite being beneficiaries of L, P, and G themselves. Some NRPR offer socialist Cuba as an alternate economic model; some others, the Gandhian ideal of the self-sufficient village economy. Where the nrrrs support a political party, namely the BJP, the NRPR are more prone to support, and influence, those social movements which share their distaste for the state, the market, the establishment; for, it seems, everything - and - everyone - but -themselves.
Both kinds of radicalism stem from a deep sense of alienation. The Hindu professional might live in suburban America but he shall never be of it. His neighbours can't pronounce his name, have never heard of his place of origin, don't warm to his music and are uncomprehending of his religion. Back home, however, there are people who both understand him and need him. So he writes cheques to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, thus to preserve the essence of a culture too elevated for his narrow-minded neighbours to appreciate.
The university radical, for his part, also finds himself pyschologically out of place in America. His fellow dons all know their Marx, but in the wider society the ruling deity is Mammon. The only hope is to take succour in oppositional movements within India. When George Bush's America is so ferociously devoted to consumer capitalism, thank God for the desi leftists, who so heroically keep out the market and keep flickering the fading light of socialism. The Mother Country to the rescue, again.
Both kinds of radicals are hypocritical. Living under a Constitution that separates Church from State, the religious radical yet wishes to convert India into a Hindu Pakistan. Living in an open, free society that encourages innovation and enterprise, the political radical yet wants to refashion India into a Burma writ large, into an isolated, autarkic autocracy that shall pass itself off as a socialist utopia.
To be fair, and for the sake of completeness, I must note that there are many Anglo-American NRIs who do not fall into the categories identified above. These are human beings and not deities, as unsure as normally resident Indians normally are about how to improve the country or settle the fate of the world.With these ordinary NRIs our relationship is rather more equitable—for they talk to us, rather than down at us.
When was the first ever NRI puja held? I think I can say without too much fear of contradiction that it was not before the 1960s—when the first big wave of professional emigration into the US began—that this particular festival entered our ritual calendar. At first it was observed in isolated pockets, chiefly in south India. But over the years the number of deities grew and grew. Besides, they now came from every state of the Union, returning each winter to show their face and receive devotions in return.
However, it is just conceivable that the festival has peaked, that its most glorious days are behind it. With the surge in the economy, the previously disadvantaged worshipper has disposable cash of his own; now, come late December, he seeks to holiday in Bali or New Zealand rather than stay back for the rituals at home. In any case, repeated contact with the deity has led to a certain disenchantment. Some of us cannot wait now for the New Year to ring in and the flights to New York to take off, so that we can turn, with relief and anticipation, to worshipping those Gods—Shahrukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar pre-eminent among them—who come not on fleeting annual visits but are with us (and in us, and for us) always.
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Milked! Supermarkets admit secret price-fixing
Milked! Supermarkets admit secret price-fixing
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 08 December 2007
Some of Britain's biggest supermarket chains admitted yesterday that they had secretly swapped information with each other to make shoppers pay more for milk and cheese in a £270m scandal that represents one of the worst examples of price-fixing in British corporate history.
Asda, Sainsbury's and Safeway agreed in principle with the anti-cartel watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) , that they acted covertly against the interests of consumers while publicly claiming that they were supporting 5,000 farmers recovering from the foot-and-mouth crisis.
The multiple confessions - which will limit the stores' exposure to fines of £116m – are the latest twist in a three-year investigation that has deeply embarrassed a sector that purpots to be fiercely competitive. Campaigners said it would damage the reputation of the £90bn-a-year grocery giants at a time when they are under investigation by the Competition Commission for threatening suppliers and stifling rivals.
All the major store chains with the exception of Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are embroiled in the OFT inquiry into milk prices in 2002 and 2003 which has been ongoing since the beginning of 2004. Britain's biggest store chain Tesco, and Morrison, are accused of collusion too, but vigorously deny they took part in the swindle. The allegations against Tesco involve cheese as well as milk and butter.
If the OFT proves its case, the retailers could theoretically face fines of up to 10 per cent of their worldwide turnover, which in Tesco's case would amount to £4.3bn, though in practice, any fine would be much smaller.
As a result of the price rises, several pence was put on a pint of milk and 15p on a quarter-pound pack of butter, costing consumers an estimated extra £270m.
Carl Belgrove, the National Consumer Council's competition expert, said: "Without the OFT's investigation this shameful episode would not have come to light. It will do enormous damage to the reputation of supermarkets.
"Consumers have always trusted supermarkets to provide value for money, but they will be more sceptical about their claims in the future."
The OFT's charges vary for each supermarket. In general it is alleged – and accepted by Asda, Sainsbury and Safeway – that, during 2002 and 2003, stores increased the price of milk as a result of collusion. The large dairy processors allegedly acted as middle men, passing on sensitive information about prices to their supposed rivals.
In their defence, the supermarkets said they had been under political pressure to help farmers hit by foot-and-mouth which closed down the countryside for months in 2001.
While acknowledging the laudable aim, the OFT said that it could find "no evidence" that the money from increases had been passed on to farmers.
Sainsbury, Asda, Safeway, two major dairies – Dairy Crest and Wiseman – and a cheesemaker The Cheese Company confessed their guilt, which was announced yesterday. The Office of Fair Trading told them they faced maximum fines of £116m, though the final figure may be as low as £80m as a result of their co-operation.
Sainsbury's told the London Stock Exchange that its fine was £26m. The fine for Safeway is thought to be between £8m and £10m; £9m for Dairy Crest and £6m for Robert Wiseman.
It is unclear who blew the whistle on the price-fixing but Arla, the dairy processor, will escape a fine after fully co-operating with authorities.
Sainsbury's chief executive, Justin King, said: "We are disappointed we have been penalised for actions that were intended to help British farmers, but recognise the benefit of a speedy settlement with the OFT."
Asda, which has built its reputation on low prices, expressed its "regret" about the episode and said it was working with the OFT to ensure better practices so that it could not happen again.
The OFT will not disclose the precise dates on which the prices rose. But figures from the Milk Development Council show that the price farmers received for milk in January 2002 was 18.7p per litre and that, in December 2003, at the end of the period under investigation, it was up by less than half a penny to 19.1p.
Andrew Groves, team leader of the OFT investigation, said: "I think it is reasonable to say we don't doubt the purpose initially was to pass money back to farmers but, in general, there is no evidence that farm-gate prices increased as a result of the initiative. We don't know what happened to the money."
Joanna Blythman, author of Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, claimed the scandal underlined a mismatch between the impression of good value in the chains and the reality. "What some have been doing behind the scenes is to fix the prices so that they make fat profits and the farmer gets ripped off at the same time ..."
The British Retail Consortium, which represents the stores, insisted there was clear evidence that the increases in milk prices introduced by supermarkets had benefited farmers.
A Friends of the Earth spokeswoman, Sandra Bell, said: "This is just another reason why we need an independent regulator to oversee the grocery market. That could come out of the Competition Commission. Tweaking the new code of practice won't work."
Which? complained that, despite overpaying, consumers would not receive refunds.
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 08 December 2007
Some of Britain's biggest supermarket chains admitted yesterday that they had secretly swapped information with each other to make shoppers pay more for milk and cheese in a £270m scandal that represents one of the worst examples of price-fixing in British corporate history.
Asda, Sainsbury's and Safeway agreed in principle with the anti-cartel watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) , that they acted covertly against the interests of consumers while publicly claiming that they were supporting 5,000 farmers recovering from the foot-and-mouth crisis.
The multiple confessions - which will limit the stores' exposure to fines of £116m – are the latest twist in a three-year investigation that has deeply embarrassed a sector that purpots to be fiercely competitive. Campaigners said it would damage the reputation of the £90bn-a-year grocery giants at a time when they are under investigation by the Competition Commission for threatening suppliers and stifling rivals.
All the major store chains with the exception of Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are embroiled in the OFT inquiry into milk prices in 2002 and 2003 which has been ongoing since the beginning of 2004. Britain's biggest store chain Tesco, and Morrison, are accused of collusion too, but vigorously deny they took part in the swindle. The allegations against Tesco involve cheese as well as milk and butter.
If the OFT proves its case, the retailers could theoretically face fines of up to 10 per cent of their worldwide turnover, which in Tesco's case would amount to £4.3bn, though in practice, any fine would be much smaller.
As a result of the price rises, several pence was put on a pint of milk and 15p on a quarter-pound pack of butter, costing consumers an estimated extra £270m.
Carl Belgrove, the National Consumer Council's competition expert, said: "Without the OFT's investigation this shameful episode would not have come to light. It will do enormous damage to the reputation of supermarkets.
"Consumers have always trusted supermarkets to provide value for money, but they will be more sceptical about their claims in the future."
The OFT's charges vary for each supermarket. In general it is alleged – and accepted by Asda, Sainsbury and Safeway – that, during 2002 and 2003, stores increased the price of milk as a result of collusion. The large dairy processors allegedly acted as middle men, passing on sensitive information about prices to their supposed rivals.
In their defence, the supermarkets said they had been under political pressure to help farmers hit by foot-and-mouth which closed down the countryside for months in 2001.
While acknowledging the laudable aim, the OFT said that it could find "no evidence" that the money from increases had been passed on to farmers.
Sainsbury, Asda, Safeway, two major dairies – Dairy Crest and Wiseman – and a cheesemaker The Cheese Company confessed their guilt, which was announced yesterday. The Office of Fair Trading told them they faced maximum fines of £116m, though the final figure may be as low as £80m as a result of their co-operation.
Sainsbury's told the London Stock Exchange that its fine was £26m. The fine for Safeway is thought to be between £8m and £10m; £9m for Dairy Crest and £6m for Robert Wiseman.
It is unclear who blew the whistle on the price-fixing but Arla, the dairy processor, will escape a fine after fully co-operating with authorities.
Sainsbury's chief executive, Justin King, said: "We are disappointed we have been penalised for actions that were intended to help British farmers, but recognise the benefit of a speedy settlement with the OFT."
Asda, which has built its reputation on low prices, expressed its "regret" about the episode and said it was working with the OFT to ensure better practices so that it could not happen again.
The OFT will not disclose the precise dates on which the prices rose. But figures from the Milk Development Council show that the price farmers received for milk in January 2002 was 18.7p per litre and that, in December 2003, at the end of the period under investigation, it was up by less than half a penny to 19.1p.
Andrew Groves, team leader of the OFT investigation, said: "I think it is reasonable to say we don't doubt the purpose initially was to pass money back to farmers but, in general, there is no evidence that farm-gate prices increased as a result of the initiative. We don't know what happened to the money."
Joanna Blythman, author of Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, claimed the scandal underlined a mismatch between the impression of good value in the chains and the reality. "What some have been doing behind the scenes is to fix the prices so that they make fat profits and the farmer gets ripped off at the same time ..."
The British Retail Consortium, which represents the stores, insisted there was clear evidence that the increases in milk prices introduced by supermarkets had benefited farmers.
A Friends of the Earth spokeswoman, Sandra Bell, said: "This is just another reason why we need an independent regulator to oversee the grocery market. That could come out of the Competition Commission. Tweaking the new code of practice won't work."
Which? complained that, despite overpaying, consumers would not receive refunds.
Friday 7 December 2007
Never solidarity before criticism!!!!
A Forgotten History
In 1932, a young woman named Rashid Jahan was denounced by some clerics and threatened with disfigurement and death. A doctor by training like Taslima Nasreen, she too had written about seclusion, sexual oppression and female suffering in a patriarchal society...
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
In 1932, a young woman named Rashid Jahan was denounced by some clerics and threatened with disfigurement and death. She and three others had just published a collection of Urdu short stories called Angarey in which they had robustly criticized obscurantist customs in their own community and the sexual hypocrisies of some feudal landowners and men of religion. The colonial state, always zealous in its support of authoritarian religious chauvinists over dissenting voices, promptly banned the book and confiscated all copies under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. Rashid Jahan, as a woman, became a particular focus of ire. A doctor by training like Taslima Nasreen, she too had written about seclusion, sexual oppression and female suffering in a patriarchal society.
What has changed in three quarters of a century? Periodically, we witness zealots of all faiths shouting hysterically about 'insults' to religious sentiments and being backed by the state while little is done to address more serious material injustices that affect members of their community.
But in the light of the Taslima Nasreen controversy, the Angarey story has particularly ironic resonances. For Rashid Jahan and two of her co-contributors, Mahmuduzzafar and Sajjad Zaheer, were members of the Communist Party of India who would go on to help found the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1936. The PWA was to be a loose coalition of radical litterateurs, both party members and 'fellow travelers', who would challenge all manner of orthodoxies and put social transformation on the literary map of India. Unsurprisingly, many PWA-linked writers had run-ins with the law, constantly fending off charges of obscenity, blasphemy and disturbing the peace. Challenging these attacks with brave eloquence, they defended the task of the writer as one of pushing social and imaginative boundaries. The then beleaguered undivided CPI too faced constant attacks, including censorship, trials and an outright ban.
Today, heirs of that same Communist party, the CPI(M), find themselves on the same side with the state and religious orthodoxies whose excesses they once challenged. Their actions shore up anti-democratic authoritarianism, whether this takes the form of corporate land-grabbing, the suppression of popular protest, or religious chauvinism. In response to criticism from progressive quarters, they invoke the subterfuge of 'left unity' which forbids criticism because this will provide grist for the opposition's mills. A pro-CPI(M) statement signed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali (with, one can only presume, the airy historical carelessness that even the best intellectuals in the West are sometimes prone to) warns against 'splitting the left'. With the unmistakable timbre of a Party pamphlet, it goes on to suggest that all is now well in Nandigram and 'reconciliation' with the dispossessed is fast being effected. (How do they know?). Meanwhile, many CPI(M) leaders parrot the conservative statist line that Taslima is free to stay in India if she behaves herself and refrains from 'hurting religious sentiments'. But those oppressed by religious orthodoxies, like women and Dalits, often have no choice but to speak of how those very sentiments are used against them.
Although laden with irony, this sorry state of affairs is not an altogether unexpected development in the cultural history of the official left in India even if it is less shocking than the thuggish assistance provided to big global corporations in Singur and Nandigram by the leaders of the proletariat.As the PWA gained strength and became one of the most influential cultural movements of its day, a rift developed between increasingly authoritarian Party members like Sajjad Zaheer and writers like the doughty Ismat Chughtai and maverick, Saadat Hasan Manto, neither of whom would ever agree to have their imagination and critique constrained by a party line.
Both Chughtai and Manto insisted on intellectual independence and the continuing need to address gender and sexuality, subjects which the Party began to frown upon. Accordingly, they found themselves attacked not only by the state but also by hardliners in the PWA who dutifully denounced the 'perversions' of writing about the body and its desires as well as prostitution and sexual violence. Justifiably annoyed, Manto (who fought five cases on 'obscenity' charges) wrote an essay sharply titled 'Taraqqi-Pasand Socha Nahin Karte' [Progressives Don't Think] in which he deplored the unthinking adherence to prudish literary categories which allowed him and others to be denounced as 'individualists' and 'pornographers.'
Of obscenity charges Chughtai asks: 'Don't you see that the writer himself is trembling fearfully and is terrified of the world's obscenity? All he's doing is converting events that are taking place in the world into words.'
Today, this unwillingness to examine received ideas emerges in party leader Sitaram Yechury's firm endorsement of 'certain conditions' on Taslima if she is to stay, including 'refraining from…activities and expressions that may hurt the sentiments of our people', whatever 'our' means in a remarkably heterogeneous society that can take pride in allowing dissent. The obviously opportunistic attack from the BJP allows more relevant criticism of the CPI(M) from progressive people and the broad, non-party left to be ignored, all of it thrown into the same basket of 'belittling…the present-influence of the Left in the country.' Used in this self-exculpatory way, 'anti-communist prejudice' is no more meaningful a mantra than 'anti-American' enabling all criticism to be dismissed as malicious. This denigrates not only those on the left who are unwilling to countenance the CPI(M)'s recent betrayals of humane values and social justice goals, but also older communists like Rashid Jahan who came under vicious attack precisely for speaking their mind against injustices, including those inflicted by religion. However much we may deplore the BJP's obvious hypocrisies in denouncing 'pseudo-secularism', the fact remains that the actions of the CPI(M) serve to undermine the credibility of those who have stood up more consistently for pluralism and secularism. Moreover, the depredations of the right-wing should not serve as an alibi for misconduct by those who rightly oppose them.
These are difficult times for progressive people who are aware of the ways in which Islam and Muslims are under siege both from Hindu majoritarianism and Bush's 'War on Terror'. Confronted with a similar colonial situation and accused of betraying their community, Rashid Jahan and her comrades maintained that criticism and self-criticism could not be shunted aside in the name of battling a greater enemy; the two are not mutually exclusive. Mahmuduzzafar, another communist and contributor to Angarey, refused to apologise for the book and wrote that he and his co-authors, all Muslim, chose Islam 'not because they bear it any 'special' malice, but because, being born into that particular society, they felt themselves better qualified to speak for that alone.' Taslima Nasreen is exercising a similar privilege.There's an odd kind of condescension in maintaining that some sentiments are more fragile than others and that some forms of belief are less resilient and, therefore, beyond questioning. Critique and dissent are essential, particularly when they come from those most affected by particular forms of religious and political practice.
When CPI(M) leaders commend the withdrawal of passages from Taslima's book and insist on the objectionable nature of some of her writing, they would do well do remember that a good many people in this world claim to find communism profoundly objectionable, even deeply offensive to their most cherished sentiments. The right of the left more generally to articulate critique and opposition has been hard won and remains under siege in many parts of the world.
India needs nothing more than a genuine and strong left. But this will not be forged by dishonouring one's own more radical past, covering up mistakes and rewriting recent history. In a second, modified statement, Chomsky et al have qualified their support for the CPI(M) and indicate that they were simply exhorting the left in India to 'unite and focus on the more fundamental issues that confront the Left as a whole'. In theory, this is a goal devoutly to be wished for. And yet, it is not one that can be accomplished at the cost of self-criticism and silence. We can do no better than to follow the principle always advocated by the late Edward Said, a left intellectual and activist of the highest integrity in these matters: 'Never solidarity before criticism.' It is only in so doing so that we honour the history of genuinely oppositional movements in India and elsewhere.
Priyamvada Gopal, the author of Literary Radicalism in India, is Senior Lecturer of English, University of Cambridge
In 1932, a young woman named Rashid Jahan was denounced by some clerics and threatened with disfigurement and death. A doctor by training like Taslima Nasreen, she too had written about seclusion, sexual oppression and female suffering in a patriarchal society...
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
In 1932, a young woman named Rashid Jahan was denounced by some clerics and threatened with disfigurement and death. She and three others had just published a collection of Urdu short stories called Angarey in which they had robustly criticized obscurantist customs in their own community and the sexual hypocrisies of some feudal landowners and men of religion. The colonial state, always zealous in its support of authoritarian religious chauvinists over dissenting voices, promptly banned the book and confiscated all copies under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code. Rashid Jahan, as a woman, became a particular focus of ire. A doctor by training like Taslima Nasreen, she too had written about seclusion, sexual oppression and female suffering in a patriarchal society.
What has changed in three quarters of a century? Periodically, we witness zealots of all faiths shouting hysterically about 'insults' to religious sentiments and being backed by the state while little is done to address more serious material injustices that affect members of their community.
But in the light of the Taslima Nasreen controversy, the Angarey story has particularly ironic resonances. For Rashid Jahan and two of her co-contributors, Mahmuduzzafar and Sajjad Zaheer, were members of the Communist Party of India who would go on to help found the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1936. The PWA was to be a loose coalition of radical litterateurs, both party members and 'fellow travelers', who would challenge all manner of orthodoxies and put social transformation on the literary map of India. Unsurprisingly, many PWA-linked writers had run-ins with the law, constantly fending off charges of obscenity, blasphemy and disturbing the peace. Challenging these attacks with brave eloquence, they defended the task of the writer as one of pushing social and imaginative boundaries. The then beleaguered undivided CPI too faced constant attacks, including censorship, trials and an outright ban.
Today, heirs of that same Communist party, the CPI(M), find themselves on the same side with the state and religious orthodoxies whose excesses they once challenged. Their actions shore up anti-democratic authoritarianism, whether this takes the form of corporate land-grabbing, the suppression of popular protest, or religious chauvinism. In response to criticism from progressive quarters, they invoke the subterfuge of 'left unity' which forbids criticism because this will provide grist for the opposition's mills. A pro-CPI(M) statement signed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali (with, one can only presume, the airy historical carelessness that even the best intellectuals in the West are sometimes prone to) warns against 'splitting the left'. With the unmistakable timbre of a Party pamphlet, it goes on to suggest that all is now well in Nandigram and 'reconciliation' with the dispossessed is fast being effected. (How do they know?). Meanwhile, many CPI(M) leaders parrot the conservative statist line that Taslima is free to stay in India if she behaves herself and refrains from 'hurting religious sentiments'. But those oppressed by religious orthodoxies, like women and Dalits, often have no choice but to speak of how those very sentiments are used against them.
Although laden with irony, this sorry state of affairs is not an altogether unexpected development in the cultural history of the official left in India even if it is less shocking than the thuggish assistance provided to big global corporations in Singur and Nandigram by the leaders of the proletariat.As the PWA gained strength and became one of the most influential cultural movements of its day, a rift developed between increasingly authoritarian Party members like Sajjad Zaheer and writers like the doughty Ismat Chughtai and maverick, Saadat Hasan Manto, neither of whom would ever agree to have their imagination and critique constrained by a party line.
Both Chughtai and Manto insisted on intellectual independence and the continuing need to address gender and sexuality, subjects which the Party began to frown upon. Accordingly, they found themselves attacked not only by the state but also by hardliners in the PWA who dutifully denounced the 'perversions' of writing about the body and its desires as well as prostitution and sexual violence. Justifiably annoyed, Manto (who fought five cases on 'obscenity' charges) wrote an essay sharply titled 'Taraqqi-Pasand Socha Nahin Karte' [Progressives Don't Think] in which he deplored the unthinking adherence to prudish literary categories which allowed him and others to be denounced as 'individualists' and 'pornographers.'
Of obscenity charges Chughtai asks: 'Don't you see that the writer himself is trembling fearfully and is terrified of the world's obscenity? All he's doing is converting events that are taking place in the world into words.'
Today, this unwillingness to examine received ideas emerges in party leader Sitaram Yechury's firm endorsement of 'certain conditions' on Taslima if she is to stay, including 'refraining from…activities and expressions that may hurt the sentiments of our people', whatever 'our' means in a remarkably heterogeneous society that can take pride in allowing dissent. The obviously opportunistic attack from the BJP allows more relevant criticism of the CPI(M) from progressive people and the broad, non-party left to be ignored, all of it thrown into the same basket of 'belittling…the present-influence of the Left in the country.' Used in this self-exculpatory way, 'anti-communist prejudice' is no more meaningful a mantra than 'anti-American' enabling all criticism to be dismissed as malicious. This denigrates not only those on the left who are unwilling to countenance the CPI(M)'s recent betrayals of humane values and social justice goals, but also older communists like Rashid Jahan who came under vicious attack precisely for speaking their mind against injustices, including those inflicted by religion. However much we may deplore the BJP's obvious hypocrisies in denouncing 'pseudo-secularism', the fact remains that the actions of the CPI(M) serve to undermine the credibility of those who have stood up more consistently for pluralism and secularism. Moreover, the depredations of the right-wing should not serve as an alibi for misconduct by those who rightly oppose them.
These are difficult times for progressive people who are aware of the ways in which Islam and Muslims are under siege both from Hindu majoritarianism and Bush's 'War on Terror'. Confronted with a similar colonial situation and accused of betraying their community, Rashid Jahan and her comrades maintained that criticism and self-criticism could not be shunted aside in the name of battling a greater enemy; the two are not mutually exclusive. Mahmuduzzafar, another communist and contributor to Angarey, refused to apologise for the book and wrote that he and his co-authors, all Muslim, chose Islam 'not because they bear it any 'special' malice, but because, being born into that particular society, they felt themselves better qualified to speak for that alone.' Taslima Nasreen is exercising a similar privilege.There's an odd kind of condescension in maintaining that some sentiments are more fragile than others and that some forms of belief are less resilient and, therefore, beyond questioning. Critique and dissent are essential, particularly when they come from those most affected by particular forms of religious and political practice.
When CPI(M) leaders commend the withdrawal of passages from Taslima's book and insist on the objectionable nature of some of her writing, they would do well do remember that a good many people in this world claim to find communism profoundly objectionable, even deeply offensive to their most cherished sentiments. The right of the left more generally to articulate critique and opposition has been hard won and remains under siege in many parts of the world.
India needs nothing more than a genuine and strong left. But this will not be forged by dishonouring one's own more radical past, covering up mistakes and rewriting recent history. In a second, modified statement, Chomsky et al have qualified their support for the CPI(M) and indicate that they were simply exhorting the left in India to 'unite and focus on the more fundamental issues that confront the Left as a whole'. In theory, this is a goal devoutly to be wished for. And yet, it is not one that can be accomplished at the cost of self-criticism and silence. We can do no better than to follow the principle always advocated by the late Edward Said, a left intellectual and activist of the highest integrity in these matters: 'Never solidarity before criticism.' It is only in so doing so that we honour the history of genuinely oppositional movements in India and elsewhere.
Priyamvada Gopal, the author of Literary Radicalism in India, is Senior Lecturer of English, University of Cambridge
Sunday 2 December 2007
Ten Reasons Why “Save Darfur” Is A PR Scam
30 November, 2007
Black Agenda Report
The regular manufacture and the constant maintenance of false realities in the service of American empire is a core function of the public relations profession and the corporate news media. Whether it's fake news stories about wonder drugs and how toxic chemicals are good for you, bribed commentators and journalists discoursing on the benefits of No Child Left Behind, Hollywood stars advocating military intervention to save African orphans, or slick propaganda campaigns employing viral marketing techniques to reach out to college students, bloggers, churches and ordinary citizens, it pays to take a close look behind the facade.
Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused upon the "Save Darfur" lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here present ten reasons to suspect that the "Save Darfur" campaign is a PR scam to justify US intervention in Africa.
1. It wouldn't be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told us to justify a war.
Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the struggling infant "democracy" in South Vietnam, and the still useful "fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here" nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll as necessary to "get Bin Laden" as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take "the world's most dangerous weapons" from the hands of "the world's most dangerous regimes", as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi "democracy" stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it's still better to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here".
2. It wouldn't even be the first time the U.S. government and media elite employed "genocide prevention" as a rationale for military intervention in an oil-rich region.
The 1995 US and NATO military intervention in Kosovo was supposedly a "peacekeeping" operation to stop a genocide. The lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the US's secret prison and torture facilities.
3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?
"The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd," according to Congolese activist Nita Evele. "What's happened and what is still happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it's not a civil war. It is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering Congolese mineral and natural resources."
More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the term "genocide" to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the "Save Darfur" movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.
Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese "genocide" worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.
4. It's all about Sudanese oil.
Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil. But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet's energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that problem for U.S. planners.
5. It's all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.
Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this commodity are 80% of the world's supply. When comprehensive U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.
6. It's all about Sudan's strategic location
Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large fraction of the world's easily extracted oil will be for a few more years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan water resources of regional significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the politics and ecocomies of Africa for a generation to come.
7. The backers and founders of the "Save Darfur" movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.
According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer
"The "Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum…
"The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year…
"Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars."
Though the "Save Darfur" PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manfacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.
8. None of the funds raised by the "Save Darfur Coalition", the flagship of the "Save Darfur Movement" go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.
None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act.
9. "Save Darfur" partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur.
Even pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.
The PR campaign which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs, who are generally despised in the US media anyway, are exterminating the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and attractive, and seems to leave no room for negotiation. But in fact, many of Sudan's 'Arabs", even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to disarm them if it chooses, and refusing to talk to that government's negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.
10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.
"Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a database of thousands of former police and military officers for security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government and attacks villages on camelback."
Apparently Blackwater doesn't need to come to the Congo, where hunger and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.
Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of Africa that U.S. strategic planners call "ungoverned spaces". Just don't look expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.
Bruce Dixon is the managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, where this article first appeared.The next generation of MSN Hotmail has arrived - Windows Live Hotmail
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