Impact of water privatisation!

 

Mark Steel: You can't bath with one jug of water?

 

A vital commodity will soon only be available to the privileged few

 
If this was a business column I'd suggest one industry to invest in would be bailiffs. A few years ago it was hard work to be so late in paying a bill that you'd get referred to bailiffs, but now if you're 15 minutes late paying your gas bill or council tax, you get a letter saying "IF YOU DO NOT PAY THE SUM OF £253.74 PLUS £8,000 COSTS WE WILL REMOVE YOUR FLOORBOARDS, HOUSEHOLD PETS, DIALYSIS MACHINES, AND SOUL... DO NOT IGNORE THIS NOTICE."
 
But for Thames Water, it seems even this practice isn't threatening enough. They're pressing the Government to change the law, to allow them to punish late-payers by cutting off their water. In case we consider this a tad harsh they explain they wouldn't cut it off altogether, just "reduce it to a trickle," of around a jugful a day. Because they're full of compassion. They'll probably add, "There's no reason why this would prevent children from washing. If you look at cats for example, they lick themselves spotless, and we don't charge them anything (though we are looking at demanding a nominal charge from April next year)."
 
They also emphasise removing the water supply would only be a "last resort". That's reassuring, although even that's probably because if cutting you off was the first thing they did they wouldn't be able to move on to waterboarding, as they'd be holding you down while trying to wet the rag and grumbling, "This trickle's taking ages – I think we're doing this the wrong way round."
Also, anyone who's had to contact a utility about a problem with their bill knows the frustration of trying to reach them at all. We'll soon be forced to listen to a silky voice between hours of Vivaldi, telling us, "We are currently receiving a high level of calls from dying customers. Why not try later, or log on to our cholera information website."
 
With superb timing, this tweak to the law was suggested on the same day that Thames Water announced record profits of £605m, along with a rise in charges of around 17 per cent, from a company that in 2007 was fined £12.5m by the regulator for providing a dreadful service, and then lying about their performance on their reports. But back then they had a more liberal attitude to the law, objecting that the fine was ridiculous because, "That money could be spent improving the service for customers." Which is like someone who's fined for mugging an old aged pensioner saying, "That's ridiculous, I was planning to spend that money on improving the life of that old aged pensioner."
 
Maybe there's a logic to their outlook. For them water isn't so much an essential substance, it's a commodity to be sold to satisfy shareholders. Walter Letwin, the investment banker, told a conference recently that "investors will embrace this opportunity to invest in companies involved in one of the world's most vital industries – water, with its positive price dynamic, limited global supply and increasing global demand". Or he could have just said, "It's drying up but the bastards die without it – WE CAN'T LOSE – YAHOOOO!"
 
So before long water will be a privilege for those who can afford it, with Thames Water offering gold accounts for customers who wish to enjoy skinny latte showers, or their toilet flushed with holy water so their waste is redeemed of sin. Then Thames will branch off into life-support machines, calmly suggesting they should be allowed to turn them off if the bill isn't paid, because, "those people not paying are causing prices to rise among the honest coma community."

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An Iraq inquiry should examine Murdoch’s role

 

Stephen Glover: 

Some newspapers, various ex-generals and assorted other worthies have complained about the Government's decision to hold an inquiry into the Iraq war in private.
 
The Times, however, thinks there should not be an inquiry at all. In a first leader last week the paper grumbled that there had already been two of them, and it doubted that a third could tell us anything we don't already know.
 
I disagree. There are many aspects of this affair that remain unexamined. One of them is the attitude of some newspapers, in particular the Murdoch-owned Times and Sun, in uncritically promoting the Government's flawed case for war, and defending, or even omitting to report, its mistakes.
 
The new inquiry is unfortunately most unlikely to investigate the role of these powerful newspapers in legitimising the war. It is true that Tony Blair was supported by other titles, but one wonders whether Britain could have gone to war at all unless the US-based Rupert Murdoch had thrown his powerful divisions behind the Government.
 
For many months before the invasion in March 2003 both papers repeatedly told their readers that Saddam Hussein possessed potentially lethal weapons of mass destruction. Admittedly there was then a widespread view in Britain and other countries that Iraq had WMD, but there was room for reasonable doubt which neither The Sun nor The Times chose to reflect.
 
In the months leading up to war The Sun regularly reported every British or American claim about WMD without the slightest
reservation, and a succession of editorials declared that these weapons existed. On 10 September 2002 – a couple of weeks before the Government's infamous, mendacious dossier – the paper wrote that, "recognition of the necessity of an allied air strike is growing as more chilling details of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are revealed". A week before the invasion The Sun stated that, "Saddam has stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, and he's not going to give them up".
 
The Times was scarcely less categorical about the existence of WMD, though it did run occasional columns, including ones by Simon Jenkins and Timothy Garden, expressing doubts. On 7 September 2002 the paper referred to, "Saddam's current drive to create even more terrible weapons of mass destruction". The 2002 dossier I have mentioned was greeted by a story describing it as "sober" beneath the headline "Blair dossier proves Baghdad's 'lies' ".
 
The BBC's Andrew Gilligan was almost entirely right about the "sexed up" 2002 dossier. During the row between the Government and the BBC in July 2003, both papers took the Government's side. After No 10 had revealed the identity of the weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, subsequently found dead near his home, they attacked the Corporation. The Times's Tom Baldwin, a friend of Alastair Campbell, shamelessly wrote that, "some BBC journalists seemed to have abandoned objectivity".
 
The Sun was even more aerated, suggesting that, "this is the time for root-and-branch reorganisation of the news department at the BBC." This from a newspaper which in February 2004 did not even report Tony Blair's amazing confession that when Britain went to war he did not know that so-called WMD ( had they existed) were considered by the western military to be battlefield weapons which could only be fired a relatively short distance.
 
The Times complains that every aspect of the Iraq war has already been discussed. No. Rupert Murdoch's role as chief cheerleader for the war has hardly even been considered.

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Oil rush: Scramble for Iraq's wealth

 

Critics said the war was all about the nation's lucrative fuel industry. Are they now being proved right? Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad

 

For many Iraqis, the reason the US invaded their country in 2003 was to get control of their oil. I never believed this at the time. I thought that the US overthrew Saddam Hussein and occupied Iraq primarily because it wanted to reassert its power after 9/11 and believed the war in Iraq would be easily won.
 
It is only now, six years after the American invasion, that the battle for the control of Iraqi oil production is moving to the centre of politics in Baghdad. On 29 and 30 June, the Iraqi government will award contracts under which international oil companies will take a central role in producing crude oil from Iraq's six super-giant oilfields over the next 20 to 25 years. By coincidence, 30 June is also the date on which the last American troops will be leaving Iraqi cities. On the very day that Iraq regains greater physical authority over its territory, it is ceding a measure of control over the oilfields on which the future of the country entirely depends.
 
The contracts have been heavily criticised inside Iraq as a sell-out to the big oil companies, which are desperate to get back into Iraq – oil was nationalised here in 1972, and Iraq and Iran are the only two places in the world where immense quantities of oil might still be discovered. Several of those criticising the contracts work in the Iraqi oil industry. "The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years," said Fayad al-Nema, head of the state-owned South Oil Company, which produces 80 per cent of Iraq's crude. "They squander Iraq's reserves."
 
The government made a serious miscalculation last year. It believed the oil price would stay around the $140-a-barrel mark. It raised government salaries and hired more employees – who now total at least two million, double the level under Saddam Hussein. Some 600,000 people work in the army, the police and the security apparatus. Expensive contracts were signed for the supply of electric plants and aircraft.
 
When the price of oil unexpectedly collapsed – though it has risen again in the past few months – the Iraqi government found itself broke. Its revenues are being swallowed up by the higher salaries, the rationing system and recurrent costs. It has frozen government hiring, but it dare not cut the number of state employees because the availability of new jobs is one reason that levels of violence have fallen. Cut-backs might damage the government's prospects in the crucial parliamentary election next January that will decide who holds power in Iraq for years to come.
 
Government in Iraq is all about oil, because it produces 95 per cent of the state's revenue. Saddam accused Kuwait of deliberately driving down the price of oil in 1990 to wreck the Iraqi economy, and this was one of the reasons he gave for invading the emirate.
The fall in the price of oil is bad news for Iraq, but more disastrous is the decline in its output, which has been dropping sharply owing to years of neglect. Out of 1,400 oil wells in southern Iraq – an area responsible for 80 per cent of production – a third are no longer working. "It's a fearful situation," says Jabbar al-Luaibi, a former head of the South Oil Company and a government adviser.
Iraqis and non-Iraqis alike have come to think of crises in Iraq in terms of people slaughtering each other. This has been the pattern over the past six years. But Iraqis are now waking up to the fact that they face a different type of crisis, one that will profoundly affect their future. Aside from oil, Iraq exports very little apart from dates. Most of the crude is pumped out of super-giant oilfields such as Kirkuk and Bai Hassan in the north and Zubair, Rumaila, Missan and Qurna in the south. It is their output which is now in disastrous decline.
 
In the last year of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, and despite UN sanctions, the country produced 2.6 million barrels a day of crude. This compares to 2.4 million today, and both these figures are well down on the 3.5 million Iraq produced in the 1970s.
The government's desperate need to increase oil output, at a time when it does not have any money to invest, has given it no option but to turn to the international oil companies. The Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussain Shahristani, says he needs $50bn for investment which he does not have. Under the service contracts to be signed at the end of the month, the companies do not get a share of Iraq's oil, but they will get a fee for halting the fall in output and then increasing production. The deal is not perfect from their point of view, but such is their eagerness to return to Iraq that they will go along with it.
 
The government feels it has no choice but to give up a measure of control over its one asset in return for expertise and investment – though this situation is partly of its own making. The economy is a barely floating wreck. It has suffered from 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation. For six years the US and successive Iraqi governments have talked about reconstruction, but they have done little. I long ago developed a simple test for propaganda claims about reconstruction: I climb on the roof of my hotel in the Jadriyah district of Baghdad and study the skyline to see if any cranes are visible. To this day there are almost none – aside from a few rusting ones where Saddam was building a giant mosque, and, until recently, a cluster where the US was erecting a giant new embassy.
 
There are improvements in Baghdad: security is much better than last year. But the two million refugees abroad are still not coming back in large numbers, and it is easy to see why. There is more electricity, but still less than in Amman or Damascus. The petrol supply is better and you only occasionally see long queues of vehicles outside petrol stations. But not all the change is in the right direction. Iraq now has about 18 million mobile phones compared to none under Saddam Hussein. They are essential for communication in a country where violence, checkpoints and traffic jams make it difficult to see people in person. But over the past six months, the mobile phone system has got worse and worse. Often I dial half a dozen times before getting through, and then it is like talking to somebody at the bottom of a mineshaft.
 
I have been driving around Baghdad to see how far ordinary life is returning. I live in Jadriya, in a loop on the river Tigris, which I always hoped was as safe as Baghdad was ever going to get because it is overwhelmingly Shia – the uprising against the US in 2003-07 was Sunni – and President Talabani has his own heavily guarded district across the road from my hotel. These days there are people on the streets at midnight sitting in simple cafes with glaring lights. The same is true in parts of the Karada district where shopkeepers normally live above their shops. But this is not typical. On the other side of the Tigris, in mixed or Sunni areas, restaurants close at nine in the evening. This is inconvenient as people in Baghdad used to be nocturnal at this time of year, to avoid the intense summer heat.
 
I am wary about what restaurants I go to. This is partly because I am invariably the only foreigner. Many of them also have bad memories. I have started going again to the White Palace restaurant, which I had deserted after an Iraqi journalist was shot and wounded there a few years ago. In west Baghdad the Sumad, a Kurdish-owned restaurant, was hit by a car bomb and several killed, but they have reopened with a comforting brick wall just inside the plate glass window.
 
Some areas have gone up and others down in the years of violence. Shurja, once the centre of Baghdad's great markets, is much emptier these days and the big merchants supplying Iraq often live in Dubai. Everywhere there are signs of poverty. In the centre of the city my car had to manoeuvre between a donkey cart and a tricycle rickshaw, one of many being imported from China. Almost nothing is made in Iraq. Even the heaps of watermelons by the fruit stalls are often imported from Syria.
 
Only the rationing system has kept many Iraqis from starvation in recent years, and this alone costs $6bn annually. The government cannot afford to see its oil revenues go down, which explains why it is ignoring criticism of the new oil contracts. The US may not have invaded Iraq in order to control its oil reserves, but a consequence of the invasion has been to bring back the international oil companies.

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Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

  

By James Petras

20 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org

 

"Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation…Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion."
Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

 

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an 'electoral success' in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

 

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes). Iran's presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA's 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the opposition's claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators' efforts to overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama's proposed dialogue with Iran as 'dead in the water'.

 

The Electoral Fraud Hoax

 

Western leaders rejected the results because they 'knew' that their reformist candidate could not lose…For months they published daily interviews, editorials and reports from the field 'detailing' the failures of Ahmadinejad's administration; they cited the support from clerics, former officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites fluent in English, to prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the 'voices of moderation', at least the White House's version of that vacuous cliché. Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris. Other academics claimed that the 'youth vote' – based on their interviews with upper and middle-class university students from the neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the 'reformist' candidate.

 

What is astonishing about the West's universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western media believed their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral process was described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their favored candidate would win.

 

The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad. Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the competing demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.

 

Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital – few venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition's supporters were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street activities, while Ahmadinejad's support drew on the majority of working youth and household women workers who would express their views at the ballot box and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics.

 

A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting behavior rather than other social or class interests. A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and the middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt, obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

 

The careless and distorted emphasis on 'ethnic voting' cited by writers from the Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad 's victory a 'stolen vote' is matched by the media's willful and deliberate refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted by two US experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences than 'generational life style'. According to this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian youth were too poor to have access to a computer and the 18-24 year olds "comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups" (Washington Porst June 15, 2009). The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The 'youth vote', which the Western media praised as 'pro-reformist', was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the 'North Tehran Syndrome', for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.

 

In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers' opposition to the 'reformist' program, which included proposals to 'privatize' public enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening national security from US and Israeli threats in light of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan, which have killed scores of Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which has not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up to the elections.

 

What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad's strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.

The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare system, with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by Western-oriented privileged youth who prize individual life styles over community values and solidarity.

 

The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income, free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working class, low income, community based supporters of a 'moral economy' in which usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the 'market', which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition's attack on the regime's 'intransigent' foreign policy and positions 'alienating' the West only resonated with the liberal university students and import-export business groups. To many Iranians, the regime's military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or Israeli attack.

 

The scale of the opposition's electoral deficit should tell us is how out of touch it is with its own people's vital concerns. It should remind them that by moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices that make life tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside the privileged gates of Tehran University.

 

Amhadinejad's electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than 60% of the vote in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries prefer social welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with military empires.

 

The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an abandonment of Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium is not an existential threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow Israel's lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an 'illegitimate' government in Tehran which 'stole an election'.

 

Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of 'stolen elections'. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed 'serious concern about violence' and called for the "aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected" (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.

 

The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response: Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should use the hoax of 'electoral fraud' to exert maximum pressure on the Obama regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad regime.

 

Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.

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Beijing, USA, Iran, Thailand, Moldova.....in perspective

Beijing cautions US over Iran
By M K Bhadrakumar

China has broken silence on the developing situation in Iran. This comes against the backdrop of a discernible shift in Washington's posturing toward political developments in Iran.

The government-owned China Daily featured its main editorial comment on Thursday titled "For Peace in Iran". It comes amid reports in the Western media that the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is rallying the Qom clergy to put pressure on the Guardians Council - and, in turn, on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - to annul last Friday's presidential election that gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad another four-year term.

Beijing fears a confrontation looming and counsels Obama to keep the pledge in his Cairo speech not to repeat such errors in the US's Middle East policy as the overthrow of the elected government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953. Beijing also warns about letting the genie of popular unrest get out of the bottle in a highly volatile region that is waiting to explode. Tehran on Friday saw its sixth day of massive protests by supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom they say was cheated out of victory.

A parallel with Thailand
Meanwhile, China's special envoy on Middle East, Wu Sike, is setting out on an extensive fortnight-long regional tour on Saturday (which, significantly, will be rounded off with consultations in Moscow) to fathom the political temperature in capitals as varied as Cairo and Tel Aviv, Amman and Damascus, and Beirut and Ramallah.

Beijing also made a political statement when a substantive bilateral was scheduled between President Hu Jintao and Ahmadinejad on Tuesday on the sidelines of the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Conceivably, Hu would have discussed the Iran situation with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev during his official visit to Moscow that followed the SCO summit. Earlier, Moscow welcomed Ahmadinejad's re-election. Both China and Russia abhor "color" revolutions, especially something as intriguing as Twitter, which Moscow came across a few months ago in Moldova and raises hackles about the US's interventionist global strategy.

China anticipated the backlash against Ahmadinejad's victory. On Monday, The Global Times newspaper quoted the former Chinese ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, that the Iranian situation would get back to normalcy only if a negotiated agreement was reached among the "major centers of political power ... But, if not, the recent turmoil in Thailand will possibly be repeated". It is quite revealing that the veteran Chinese diplomat drew a parallel with Thailand.

However, Hua underscored that Ahmadinejad does enjoy popularity and has "lots of support in this nationalist country because he has the courage to state his own opinion and dares to carry out his policies". The consensus opinion of Chinese academic community is also that Ahmadinejad's re-election will "test" Obama.

Thus, Thursday's China Daily editorial is broadly in the nature of an appeal to the Obama administration not to spoil its new Middle East policy, which is shaping well, through impetuous actions. Significantly, the editorial upheld the authenticity of Ahmadinejad's election victory: "Win and loss are two sides of an election coin. Some candidates are less inclined to accept defeat."

The daily pointed out that a pre-election public opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post newspaper showed Ahmadinejad having a 2-1 lead over his nearest rival and some opinion polls in Iran also indicated more or less the same, whereas, actually, "he won the election on a lower margin. Thus, the opposition's allegations against Ahmadinejad come as a trifle surprising".

The editorial warns: "Attempts to push the so-called color revolution toward chaos will prove very dangerous. A destabilized Iran is in nobody's interest if we want to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East, and the world beyond." It pointedly recalled that the US's "Cold War intervention in Iran" made US-Iran relationship a troubled one, "with US presidents trying to stick their nose into Iran's internal business".

Theocracy versus republicanism
Beijing understands Iran's revolutionary politics very well. China was one of the few countries that warmly hosted Ruhollah Khomeini as president (in 1981 and 1989). In contrast, India, which professes "civilizational" ties with Iran, was much too confused about Iran's revolutionary legacy to be able to correctly estimate Khamenei's political instincts favoring republicanism. Most of the Indian elites aren't even aware that Khamenei studied as a youth in Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University.

Be that as it may, the Hu-Ahmadinejad meeting in Yekaterinburg on Tuesday once again shows Beijing has a very clear idea about the ebb and flow of Iran's politics. Hu demonstrably accorded to Ahmadinejad the full honor as Beijing's valued interlocutor.

Chinese media have closely followed the trajectory of the US reaction to the situation in Iran, especially the "Twitter revolution", which puts Beijing on guard about US intentions. Indications are that the US establishment has begun meddling in Iranian politics. Rafsanjani's camp always keeps lines open to the West. All-in-all, a degree of synchronization is visible involving the US's "Twitter revolution" route, Rafsanjani's parleys with the conservative clergy in Qom and Mousavi's uncharacteristically defiant stance.

Obama faces multiple challenges. On the one hand, as Helene Cooper of The New York Times reported on Thursday, the continuing street protests in Tehran are emboldening a corpus of (pro-Israel) conservatives in Washington to demand that Obama should take a "more visible stance in support of the protesters". But then, a regime change would inevitably delay the expected US-Iran direct engagement and upset Obama's tight calendar to ensure the negotiations gained traction by year's end, while Iran's centrifuges in its nuclear establishments keep spinning.

Also, a fragmented power structure in Tehran will prove ineffectual in helping the US stabilize Afghanistan. However, top administration officials like Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like the US to "strike a stronger tone" on Iran's turmoil. Cooper reported they are piling pressure on Obama that he might run the risk of "coming across the wrong side of history at a potentially transformative moment in Iran".

A Thermidorian reaction
No doubt, the turmoil has an intellectual side to it. Obama being a rare politician gifted with intellectuality and a keen sense of history would know that what is at stake is a well-orchestrated attempt by the hardcore conservative clerical establishment to roll back the four-year-old painful, zig-zag process toward republicanism in Iran.

Mousavi is the affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that another four years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested interests. Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the clergy from the sinecures of power and the honey pots of the Iranian economy, especially the oil industry.

The struggle between the worldly mullahs (in alliance with the bazaar) and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian revolution, where the fedayeen of the proscribed Tudeh party (communist cadres) were the original foot soldiers of the revolution, but the clerics usurped the leadership. The highly contrived political passions let loose by the 444-day hostage crisis with the US helped the wily Shi'ite clerics to stage the Thermidorian reaction and isolate the progressive revolutionary leadership. Ironically, the US once again figures as a key protagonist in Iran's dialectics - not as a hostage, though.

Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as an independent force to ensure the mullahs didn't hijack the revolution. Equally, his preference was that the government should be headed by non-clerics. In the early years of the revolution, the conspiracies hatched by the triumvirate of Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster of the secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Khomeini's protege), had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic state. These are vignettes of Iran's revolutionary history that might have eluded the intellectual grasp of George W Bush, but Obama must be au fait with the deviousness of Rafsanjani's politics.

If Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would at best bear resemblance to a decadent outpost of the "pro-West" Persian Gulf. Would a dubious regime be durable? More important, is it what Obama wishes to see as the destiny of the Iranian people? The Arab street is also watching. Iran is an exception in the Muslim world where people have been empowered. Iran's multitudes of poor, who form Ahmadinejad's support base, detest the corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They don't even hide their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family.

Alas, the political class in Washington is clueless about the Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli lobby, it is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will be to engineer a "color revolution". But the consequence will be far worse than what obtains in Ukraine. Iran is a regional power and the debris will fall all over. The US today has neither the clout nor the stamina to stem the lava flow of a volcanic eruption triggered by a color revolution that may spill over Iran's borders.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey

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Boss-class hypocrisy

 

 

Managers who have long defended their huge pay have a cheek asking staff to work for nothing

 

Mark Lawson

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 June 2009 23.00 BST

 

There's a cheery ­cliche popular with top ­entertainers and sports stars: "I love this job so much that I'd still do it if they didn't pay me." But people only say this if they know there's no risk of it happening. Those British ­employees now being asked to come in and work for nothing would never have thought to make the offer.

 
The novelty of the economic crisis has been a series of schemes encouraging staff to take unpaid leave, salary reduction or to work for a month without money as an alternative to being laid off. In the most high-profile example, British Airways has won substantial pay cuts from its pilots while encouraging other staff to work gratis for part of the year.
 
In some cases – principally, the ­highest-paid radio and TV presenters – the victims of thrift simply have to accept that their losses will be widely viewed as a necessary market ­correction. In the same way, the only rapid way for MPs to begin to restore public confidence would be to vote through a self-flagellating pay cut.
 
But the obvious objection to this popular gateau analogy is that the plates were not equally filled before the redistribution began. As BA staff have pointed out, a hairshirt month for the airline's senior management still leaves them with as much annual cash as the lowest names on the payroll would earn in a decade. At different ends of the corporate pyramid, there is a vivid difference between putting on hold plans for a second holiday house and being unable to pay the mortgage on your only home.
 
Even without the understandable fear that those who insist on keeping their contracted wad may later be punished with redundancy, there is something fundamentally queasy about presenting as equality a scheme in which the impact varies so widely.
The biggest obstacle to these pain-sharing schemes is the instinctive psychological and moral resistance that most people have to the idea of working for nothing. From Dr Johnson's ­frequently-quoted advice that only blockheads write for anything but money to the Roman Catholic catechism's warning that one of the highest sins of all is to "defraud labourers of their wages", respectable economies have been built on the concept of turning brain or muscle power into spending power.
 
One of the great shames of the past decade – most prevalent in the media sector – has been the practice of using young people on unpaid or barely-paid "work experience", sometimes extending for months or even years as tolerated slave labour in a post-union world. So we should flinch at the idea that such sneaky cheapskating may now become an accepted corporate tactic.
Inconveniently for the managers now promoting the benefits of ­allowing the bank account some downtime, the ­captains of industry are lengthily and noisily on record with the idea that there is a direct relationship between income and incentive.
 
For decades, these bosses have argued against higher taxation on the grounds that a reduction in take-home rewards would result in the drivers of society idling at their desks because there was no longer any point in making money. Yet now they have harnessed precisely the argument previously used against them – that work can have a larger purpose than personal gain – to propose what amounts to a recession tax on their employees. People who refused to earn less for the good of ­society now preach the beauty of taking a cut for the company.
 
At the risk of encouraging my employers and enraging my agent, I probably would be prepared, having had some very good and lucky years, to do much the same work next year for less than the fees paid this. But I would agree to this from the visceral, Dickensian fear of all employees that the workhouse looms as the alternative, and would nurse the angry suspicion that the superiors benefitting from our sacrifices were not suffering as much themselves. When the upturn comes, will they raise the payments or smirkingly continue with a cheaper workforce? (The BA pilots have at least been given shares as the price of their privation.)
 
Horrible as high unemployment is, an economy that suffers it is at least being honest about the gap between supply and demand and the failures of its systems. A state that reclassifes salary as charity is simply disguising its failures. Except for the super-rich who can do it as a populist gimmick, there is nothing to be said for working for nothing.

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Iraq is handing over control of its fields to foreign companies

 

Iraqi Oil Minister accused of mother of all sell-outs

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

 

Furious protests threaten to undermine the Iraqi government's controversial plan to give international oil companies a stake in its giant oilfields in a desperate effort to raise declining oil production and revenues.
 
In less than two weeks, on 29 and 30 June, the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussain Shahristani, will award service contracts to the world's largest oil companies to develop six of Iraq's largest oil-producing fields over 20 to 25 years.
 
Senior figures within the Iraqi oil industry have denounced the deal. Fayad al-Nema, the director of the South Oil Company, which comes under the Oil Ministry and produces most of Iraq's crude, said on the weekend: "The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years. They squander Iraq's revenues." Mr Nema is reported to have since been fired because of his opposition to the contracts, which he says is shared by many other officials in Iraq's state-owned oil industry.
 
The government maintains that it is not compromising the ownership of Iraq's oil reserves – the third largest in the world at 115 billion barrels – on which the country is wholly dependent to fund its recovery from 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation.
But the fall in the oil price over the past year has left the government facing a financial crisis; 80 per cent of its revenues go to pay for salaries, food rations and recurrent costs. Little is left for reconstruction and the government is finding it hard to pay even for much-needed items such as an electrical plant from GE and Siemens.
 
The development of Iraq's oil reserves is of great importance to the world's energy supply in the 21st century. They may be even larger than Saudi Arabia's, as there was little exploration while Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein. International oil companies are desperate to get their foot in the door.
 
"Everyone wants to be in Iraq," says Ruba Husari, an expert on Iraqi oil. "Together with Iran, this is the only oil province in the world that has great potential. It is a great opportunity for oil companies because nobody knows the size of Iraq's reserves. Iraq itself needs to know what is under its soil."
 
But Iraqis are wary of the involvement of foreign oil companies in raising production in super giant fields like Kirkuk and Bai Hassan in the north and Rumaila, Zubair and West Qurna in the south. They suspect the 2003 US invasion was ultimately aimed at securing Western control of their oil wealth. The nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry by Saddam Hussein in 1972 remains popular and the rebellion against the service contracts has been gathering pace all this week.
 
Parliament is demanding that bidding be delayed. MPs summoned Mr Shahristani, a nuclear scientist imprisoned and tortured under Saddam Hussein, to answer questions about the service contracts and the fall in Iraq's oil production and exports. Jabir Khalifa Kabir, the secretary of parliament's oil and gas committee, says the contracts will "chain the government with complex contractual terms" and will abort South Oil Company's own plans to raise production. The government says the bidding must go ahead.
The contracts are not particularly favourable to the international oil companies. They are rather the outcome of the companies' extreme eagerness to get into Iraq and the government's attempt to obtain expertise and investment without ceding control. The companies will be paid a fee linked to first restoring and then increasing oil output. They will, however, have greater control when there is a second round of bidding for oilfields which have been discovered but not yet developed. Separate again is the question of exploration for as yet undiscovered oil reserves.
 
Critics of the deal in parliament say that Iraq has already invested $8bn (£4.9bn) in developing its super giant fields. But Mr Shahristani needs $50bn over the next five or six years to raise current production levels from 2.5 million barrels a day of crude and knows the money and expertise can only come from outside Iraq.
 
The government in Baghdad may be near broke but Iraqis ask whose fault that is. The Oil Ministry, like much of the government, is dysfunctional when it comes to carrying out long-term projects. Mr Shahristani is blamed for poor management skills, though he eloquently defends himself by saying that when he took over the ministry in 2006, he had to cope with attacks by guerrillas who once were blowing up a pipeline every day.
 
This explains Mr Shahristani's problems in northern Iraq, where the Sunni Arab insurgency of 2003-08 was strong, but not in the far south, where the Shia community is dominant and there was no uprising.
 
Jabbar al-Luaibi, the former head of the South Oil Company, who battled to maintain oil production in these years, gave a devastating interview detailing the failings of the Oil Ministry to provide the most basic equipment needed to monitor the oil reservoirs.
 
"It's like driving your car without any indicators on the dashboard," he said, adding that if mismanagement continued in the same way as in the past "who knows, we might have to start importing crude oil".
 
The Iraqi government made two other mistakes for which it is now paying. It optimistically believed the price of oil would stay high at $140 a barrel. Instead of investing extra revenues by paying for outside expertise and equipment to raise production in the oilfields, it spent the money on raising the pay of government employees and increasing their number.
 
This increased Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's popularity in the provincial elections in January but left the government short of cash when oil prices collapsed. Prices have risen since then, but not nearly enough to solve the government's problems.
In June 2008 the Iraqi oil industry seemed poised to receive foreign help by signing two-year technical support contracts with oil companies. Control would have remained with Iraq. However, at the last minute, the contracts were cancelled despite being supported by Mr Shahristani and the council of ministers. The reason why this happened explains much about why the state machine is unable to carry out long-term policies. Jobs are allocated to members of political parties regardless of their experience or abilities. After 2003 the Oil Ministry had been the fief of the Fadhila, a Shia Islamic party strong in Basra, and, though it left the government, it never wholly accepted Mr Shahristani as minister.
 
Showing a certain cheek, Fadhila members – having sabotaged the plan to acquire foreign expertise when money was available to buy it last year – now criticise the government for being forced to accept worse terms because it cannot invest itself.
Many Iraqis will be angered to see their historic oilfields being partially run by foreign companies. But the government believes it has no choice.

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