When people care about elections

Unlike Gore, who gave in timidly, and Kerry, who did not even entertain the idea of a fight following the Ohio fraud, here's what happens when a candidate stands up. The scene (picture from the New York Times) is a rally addressed by Lopez Obrador, the candidate who says he was cheated f victory by election fraud.

What if Gore and Kerry had been more like Obrador? This is the title of an article some weeks back by Terry Curtis Fox. A great piece which makes the point that leaders are supposed to lead. Leaders of the people are supposed to lead people, not talk at them from behind a phalanx of focus group runners, ad mavens and pollsters. Fox makes the point that, even if Gore's public rallies, protests, boycotts, etc. had failed and Bush ended up becoming president anyhow, it would have chastened the administration. As it was, the meek concession spurred them to on to greater levels of brazenness.

An old article by Niranjan Ramakrishnan, "The Silence of the Lambs", written shortly after the 2000 elections, makes the same point. Democracy flourishes when people demonstrate that they have a stake.

NYT Endorses Lieberman's Opponent in CT Primary

Editorial

A Senate Race in Connecticut

Published: July 30, 2006

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

•

But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.

As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”

That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.

Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.

At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.

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On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

From counterpunch.com, July 21, 2006.

The Power of Arrogance

The Power of Arrogance

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Despite all the cries of outrage and shock over what is happening in the Middle East, is there really any difference between the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon? A parody of the Cartesian mindset of recent vintage is in play once more -- I can get away with it, therefore I do.

The United States destroyed huge parts of Afghanistan after 9-11. Thousands were rendered homeless, large numbers were killed and maimed. In the end, Bin Laden, the purported quarry, was never found.

Then came Iraq, where there was not even the fig leaf of hot pursuit. A warmed over dish of fear, concocted from the embers of 9-11, old UN resolutions (proving in the process that some UN resolutions are more important than others), fake intelligence reports and journalistic fabrications, was enough to get a nod from a craven and petrified Congress. Thousands perished as a result. And along with the usual toll of infrastructure, a deliberate American negligence caused priceless museum artifacts belonging to all mankind to be lost forever.

The engagements in Afghanistan or Iraq are far from over. Already, here comes the third volume in the series: Lebanon. Watch out, JK Rowling.

Hezbollah is holed up in Southern Lebanon, lobbing missiles on Israeli border towns. Hezbollah guerrillas have kidnapped Israeli soldiers. The stated objective is to remove the threat of missiles and recover the captives. Fair enough. But why bomb Beirut, 100 miles to the north, and Tripoli, another hundred miles farther? Why destroy dozens of bridges, airports and seaports, oil depots and power plants? Why punish the people of all Lebanon? Because the terrorists are hiding everywhere, comes the answer. The United States is on record supporting this logic. Quite naturally, too, for it applies an identical reasoning to justify its own actions.

If this rationale is accepted, an impartial observer might wonder, could one justify the bombing of the World Trade Center? Did not the CIA have offices in one of the collapsed buildings, and was it not well known that the CIA had orchestrated coups, assassinations, riots, military takeovers, etc. in several parts of the world? If the Israelis could bomb Lebanese army bases without any provocation from the Lebanese army, and the US could defend such an act, on what basis could they oppose someone crashing a plane into the Pentagon, undoubtedly a military target?

Something to think about, perhaps, but even such introspection is persona non grata in our times. We like to keep it simple: I can get away with it, therefore I do. The same powers that chided Russia for its actions in Chechnya, and bombed Serbia into submission for its moves against Kosovar drug runners, today make the all-purpose claim that "Israel has a right to defend itself", ranking right up there on the inanity scale with such gems as, "We are a nation of immigrants". Of course every country has a right to defend itself. But by bombing power plants and bridges all across a non-combatant state? By demolishing residences and roads? All for the actions of one group? Israel, of all countries, should know that that mass punishment of populations is a war crime.

Both Democratic and Republican worthies dutifully thronged the microphones this weekend, many to aver that bombing civilian targets is justified; for the terrorists are holed up among civilians. An even more amusing (if sad) variant of their plaint was "But Hezbollah does it". Is the standard for a modern, democratic, state the same as it is for terrorists and warlords? But who would ask that question? They never raised it when Bush rammed through the Patriot Act, not when it became known that their government was spying on its citizens and prying into their financial transactions, not when Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo surfaced. Why should they raise it now?

Clearly, Israel's actions were not spur-of-the-moment, far from it. Several commentators have said the Israelis had planned for precisely such an opportunity for years. That's merely a tactical element. As a strategic backdrop, it was America that provided the enabling logic with its two singular examples of attacking non-combatant countries with not a whimper from the world. Lebanon's prime minister this week called Israel a major perpetrator of terror, saying Israel had set his country decades back in time.

Now another country has employed the same logic to justify the same tactic. More world silence. Wasn't the UN created for just such occasions? Deconstructionists may ponder the significance of the term "United Nations" sounding so much like "Eunuch Nations". It is further a hallmark of our times that the worst presidency of US history coincides with the tenure of the most spineless UN Secretary General in the organization's life. That line about the age bringing forth the man takes on a whole new meaning.

Much has been made of how the Israeli public is solidly behind Ehud Olmert. It might help to recall how solid American public support once was for going into Iraq, and how high Bush's approval was as he first bombed Afghanistan. It was said of the intrepid scooter wallah of New Delhi that if the front wheel could make it, he would proceed boldly into the narrow lane, forgetting the rest of the vehicle was wider. That's public opinion in a nutshell.

If the US has demonstrated anything during the past three years, it is that today, after spending a half-trillion dollars (eleven million dollars an hour, to quote Rep. John Murtha), it is unable to prevail in a contest with a ragtag band of insurgents with no overt support from any major power (unlike its opponents in the Vietnam or Korean wars, who were backed by China and the USSR). An honest reflection might have led to a sober view of the current crisis. Instead, Bush is busy rattling his sabers against Syria and Iran, trying to widen the conflict. Rather than calling for an immediate cease fire (a reasonable step even while condemning Hezbollah), he has justified the destruction of Lebanon, a friendly country whose government was installed at his own behest.

It is tempting to hang the well-worn phrase, "The Arrogance of Power" on Israel's attitude and on America's. But realistically, it is rather more a case of the Power of Arrogance. Consider this spectacle: The biggest debtor in the world tacitly encourages the destruction of an entire nation, by another nation whose defense budget is largely underwritten by itself. Guess who is going to pay for the reconstruction aid to Lebanon that must inevitably ensue? The American Taxpayer, it would seem, is the world's perennial dupe. In an article (How Time Flies), Michael Neumann captured this paradox well, "America's weakness is not a problem; the problem is that it acts as if it were strong..." Arrogance has the power to sideline reality and embark on ever more ambitious projects. Let's not forget the words of a White House official quoted in Ron Susskind's book, boasting that the White House created its own reality.

The consequence of silent acquiescence in aggression three times in five years will take the whole world, not just Lebanon, back into the dark ages. The clearest lesson of all this is that the collective deterrent of world opinion exists no longer. A very real proliferation has resulted -- that of the idea that powerful nations can attack others without fear of consequence -- unless...

Welcome to the New (clear) World Order.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the USA. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com.

Joe Bageant

Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven

Democracy rots from the inside out as a nation of telemarketers and war criminals parties on amid the stench.

A spring Sunday morning and I am at the politically incorrect 7-Eleven buying my cholesterol loaded half-and-half for my peasant slave labor grown coffee. In the parking lot, car speakers blare out Bob Marley from a grungy 1987 Olds Cutlass (the last year GM made 'em), while the owner, a Haitian guy, sits on the curb eating his Smokey Big Bite hot dog, sunshine pouring over the whole world sweet as that quart of chocolate milk he is going to wash it all down with. Bob Marley is singing "One Love" and that Smokey smells so damned good I order one for myself and settle in next to that Haitian dude. And I think, "Is this a great fucking country or what? Yessiree, the world's best hope."

And it is. Or was. Or something. Ask any poor suffering bastard in the garbage dumps of Mumbai or Caracas to name the best place in the world to live and most will answer "The United States." Maybe it's for all the wrong reasons. And surely the image is driven by the global hype and bullshit of an America that cannot get over itself -- cannot pause from its huckstering long enough to see that the America of both John Wayne and FDR quit circling the drain thirty years ago. It has since been pulled asunder by spectacular greed and the learned helplessness of the consumer state. And denial. The kind that allows us to sanctify the young men starring in that horrific snuff flick over in Iraq as "heroes." But we were talking about the third world weren't we? Where if you are eating spoiled cat meat and getting raped nightly in a Bangkok slum, things like a Cutlass gunboat with busted springs and a Smokey Big Bite on a Sunday morning look good. Damned good. There is not much that cannot be explained by population geography and proximity to basic goods and services. This is not wasted upon the predatory few among us concerned with capturing, holding and blackmailing others for access to them under our free market system. It's a brutal process, one we can only coexist with through ironclad denial. Did free people make your clothes? Mine neither.

My Dutch friend Bram is mystified at our denial, which he says "is spooky." "How can anyone sustain such a thing?" Well, it's easy when you are born numb. Most of us born under American extremist capitalism are inured to its sheer brutality. To Americans, it's just the way things are. The world is a tough place. We agree that god has blessed us; we deserve what we have and let it go at that. Citizens born under the Third Reich felt the same way about their consensual reality. Not many of us can grasp the national hubris involved, thanks to the heady patrio-religious mythology of American exceptionalism in which we were spawned and educated in preparation for adulthood as citizens of the consumer state. Collectively, we feel exempt from human folly because our particular god, the Christian God, the Jewish God, The Mormon God, the Seventh Day Adventist God, Muslim God or whatever one's cult deems divine, has chosen us. Whatever we think we are as liberals, your nation and mine, the government we are responsible for has always acted on these beliefs, destroying whole nations, peoples and the planet under that exceptionalist banner. At some point, liberals and neocons and the apolitical alike, are going to have to own all of America's history, not just the parts we prefer. For instance, it was FDR who packed off all those decent Japanese families off to internment camps. Abraham Lincoln loved his nigger jokes. Bram remains mystified.

Mercifully enough, the same predatory American capitalism that generates so much of the world's misery renders its own citizens irrelevant save for their purchasing power, to the entire process and therefore guiltless -- in their own minds at least -- of the empire's crimes. Such is the unburdened material happiness granted us. It is not hard for Americans to conclude that we are outside of, and therefore irrelevant to global events or changes. We are waaaaay over here on this vast continent with only a media generated holograph to tell us who we are as a people and as individuals. And it tells us we foremost are citizens of a state which suffers no diversion from profitability. The vast majority of Americans don't even know there is a global reality, except in the sense that the price of gasoline is affected by some swarthy peoples living in a sandy place full of terrorists somewhere else on the globe. We know the price of gas and we know what we are going to rent at the video store on Friday. We know what we will eat at the restaurant on Saturday and when the game is televised on Sunday. Personally, I also know that four blocks from where I sit writing this an old man named Virgil pulled one of his own teeth last week because he cannot afford a dentist. Rather than kick out a little dough Virgil's way, I poured a shot of Woodford Reserve and was grateful I have dental insurance. Being "grateful for what we have" is the time honored American mantra used to mask denial.

Thus we express gratitude for what the corpocracy bestows us, convinced that we are flourishing in those big box store isles of Kansas or in the soft leather booths of the martini bar off Central Park, depending upon one's class. It only took a couple of generations to accept and then enjoy the reduced humanity but increased flood of material stuff as a bona fide life experience. Beat off to internet porn and NFL football while the wife sleeps alone. The state generated hologram IS reality. Reality IS the image, not the flesh. It's true of all of us. I have done it and still do it. I know. And you more than likely do too. Let's not kid ourselves here.

Even as the empire is coming down around us all very few can possibly believe it. Why should they? Nothing seems to have changed their particular religious or political camps. Literate and thoughtful liberals can still watch Brit coms and send their kids to Shakespeare camp. Less than literate Fox Network watching worker bee Republicans can still sup on the easy piety of cross and flag…ogle Anne Coulter's boney ass. And Joe Six-pack still scratches his belly in irrelevance as the elites of two political priesthoods struggle, one to get their mitts deeper into the national treasury, the other to convince us that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden actually have blood in their veins. The next elections, both parties tell us, will determine the fate of our nation. Really? Regardless of who wins, Joe Six-pack will lose. Virgil will lose. The rest of us will continue being carried along by the media hologram of political lies and profitable illusions that hold it all together. Today I read a news story about how the massacre of Iraqi families in Hidatha "traumatized" our heroes. What do you call a republic that dishes up such shit up to its citizens? What do you call the citizens who mindlessly swallow it? What do you call people who do not march in the streets and start fires in protest of a horrific regime that guts small democracies, slaughters whole families and villages abroad and rigs the ballot boxes at home? What do you call such deniers of the obvious? Of course we can safely call the latter modern Democrats, but that is another story.

In any case, most liberals/leftists/progressives, or whatever the hell one calls such an ineffectual bunch of twits, refuse to even consider open resistance. They exist in the same prison of learned helplessness and planet devouring gluttony as conservatives, but with New Age or pseudo-leftist wallpaper. I have an awful suspicion they will never be brave again in their lives, assuming they ever were.

There seems to be no warning people of the lie they have swallowed, the black thing they have eaten and which now devours them from within. The "American lifestyle," the "good life," was such a comfortable lie to swallow. And because the material world trumps the mind and therefore trumps less quantifiable stuff such as freedom and insight quite easily, the black thing is now chewing at the Constitution which, being essentially a property document, was never all that strong to begin with. But it's all we have. As resident bully of human consciousness, the reptilian brain so easily slashes and chaws through the limbic one, announcing the supremacy of the fist and the gullet over the higher self. "I can eat these tortilla chips (or perhaps nine dollar a pound organically pastured chicken breast, or whatever it is that socially responsible rich people eat) and watch plasma TV right now. But I would have to go to the library to get On Walden Pond, which I never heard of anyway. Take to the streets? What for? "Pass me the salsa, honey." I do this myself almost nightly. There may be no saving me or the world, or mankind in the world from itself. Realization will come the hard way, which is how humanity learns. Too late and at a terrible cost.

Meanwhile, we remain obedient, not disturbing of our comfort, save maybe once a year for a rote "demonstration" downtown for or against something or other, the school bond or the war in Iraq, during which we are flushed with joy at the site of so many of our own kind, but having demonstrated only that such displays are just that -- displays. Toothless displays in a predatory system that respects only the fang and the claw. The newspapers print a photo next day, we dispute their estimated number of demonstrators, and then we settle back into obedience.

Americans have always been an obedient people, proud to be answerable and obedient to the nation's law and god, with one reinforcing the other somehow in the national mind. Obedient people do not look up from their assigned cubicles; do not ask if their work is meaningful or contributory to mankind. Never question the way things are. Not in church, nor in daily life. And if the air reeks of a republic rotting from the inside out, you just hold your nose.

Consequently, we are we forced to acknowledge the fiction of self governance, though voting power never gets in the way of elite agendas such as tax breaks and war profits (though it may slow them down at times, giving the illusion of voting power to a nation with no memory whatsoever.) The pretense reaches its most absurd levels during national elections, where self-governance is put to the test. For instance, no matter who won in the 2004 presidential elections, this country would still have been lead by a member of the Skull and Bones Society. What are the odds of that happening? In a nation of 295 million people our choice came down to two members of one of the most exclusive and secretive clubs on the planet. Do you really believe in coincidences like that? I don't. Nobody does. But we pretend to because the truth is just too awful for anyone with more than an inch of forehead to contemplate.

Yet, unimaginable as it may seem, there are even worse things afoot to contemplate. Forces such as the emerging Christian militia, the Joshua generation, a runaway military establishment, to name a few, working fanatically to make our obedience ever more lethal. Yesterday I saw a photo of 25,000 young fundamentalist Americans marching in Philadelphia and San Francisco in support of a theocratic state. I can honestly say I was completely unnerved by it. Those little electrical nerve waves went through my entire body, the kind that happen when you see a car wreck take place. I live around fundamentalist Christians, my whole family is fundamentalist Christian and I know what they are capable of and indeed are planning to do given the chance. They are being led by the same types who formed the old white militia movements in the Seventies and Eighties before Timothy McVeigh rendered their public position untenable. I couldn't shut up about it and friends. But even the most "informed" ones looked at me like I was crazy, or at the very least, weirdly obsessive. These are not stupid people. They are simply Americans. And because we are friends, we moved on to another topic. This is the sort of strange national disconnect that has so many folks like myself silently screaming inside our heads.

And that is when we must do something something to stop the screaming, something utterly mundane and completely oblivious to break free of the hysterical grimness of it all. Like sit in the sun with a Smokey Big Bite and let Bob Marley "Stir it Up" right there in the parking lot. Grin along with some Haitian dude and watch a white trash mama in ridiculously tight shorts step around you, inches from your face on that curb by the 7-Eleven door, an ankle tattooed, cheap perfumed angel of god sent to remind us that, "Politics ain't everything Buster, and the world ain't all bad. Not by a long shot! Now finish that chowing down dog, get off your ass and go do the right thing."

Yo mama!

Whither Zarqawi?

Or was it "Wither, Zarqawi. Silently."?

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

This is how the Washington post reported it:
In the hours leading up to the attack, "we had absolutely no doubts whatsoever that Zarqawi was in the house," (Maj. Gen.) Caldwell said, adding that the tips leading to the safe house had come from within Zarqawi's network. "It was 100 percent confirmation. We knew exactly who was there, we knew it was Zarqawi, and that was the deliberate target that we went to get."

And the New York Times:

Several weeks ago, someone inside the Zarqawi network turned the military's attention to the spiritual adviser, identified as Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the senior military spokesman in Iraq... last night was the first time that we have had definitive, unquestionable information" where Mr. Zarqawi was, the general said. "Therefore, the decision was made to strike."

Unasked and unanswered, as usual, is the key question: If an alleged lynch pin of Al Qaeda such as Zarqawi was in your net, what would you, an administration with a professed one-point agenda of fighting terrorism, do? Ensure his death? Or try your best to reel him in alive? Dropping two five hundred pound bombs on his abode practically guarantees the former, although Zarqawi, like Rasputin, seems to have survived even such a drastic effort, succumbing to his wounds subsequently. Would you not think it was worth almost any price to keep such a high-value target alive, so that he could talk?

Despite the 1000 pounds of ordnance expended on Zarqawi's villa, a great deal of information was yet recovered: a "treasure trove", to quote US officials. This was followed, they added, by dozens of other raids on other suspected Al Qaeda locations all across Iraq, leading also to a number of arrests and other veins of intelligence. But why could all this not have been done after securing the mother lode, the reputed center of the web of terrorism in all of Iraq, Zarqawi himself?

This question does not even appear to have been raised with any seriousness.

Zarqawi was an American original, so to speak. No one had heard of him prior to Colin Powell's awarding him top terrorist status during his United Nations presentation (sic) en route the quick march to the Iraq War. Whether this was just one more embellishment in Powell's wholesale foray into fiction that morning is more than academic. The fact that the Bush administration chose to assassinate him rather than capture and bring him to trial, only serves to increase curiosity about American connections with Zarqawi, adding to the pile of questions assembled by Congressman John Conyers and others to see whether there is a fit case for impeachment. Several writers have pointed out that if Zarqawi was in Iraq prior to 9-11 (thereby establishing an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, as per the Bush administration's argument), he was in the Kurdish territories, whose government was favorable to the US and outside of Saddam Hussein's control. He became a monstrous feature of Iraq proper only following the Occupation.

What does this policy of "Dead-or-Alive-but-preferably-Dead" vis-a-vis Zarqawi say about the lagging pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, a 6-foot-4-inch figure who has managed to remain incognito now for close on five years?

Shouldn't every White House correspondent be seeking an answer to this question of why dead rather than alive? And while we're at it, should not senators and representatives raise this too, at every conceivable forum?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan lives on the West Coast. he can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

A Fein Idea

Say we've Had it. Ha! Send them Du Jail!

Two things are infinite -- the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. --Albert Einstein

Time moves at a less frenetic pace on C-SPAN than elsewhere on television. Yesterday they were showing four law professors appearing before the House Judiciary Committee testifying about the FBI raid on Capitol Hill. Bruce Fein, Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan was, as usual, brilliant. Putting his finger on a central weakness of our style of discourse, cause of many a derailed public discussion after 9-11, he pointed out the perils of forgetting the essential in pursuit of the incidental. Fein emphasized that the principle was key. If you let a (bad) principle stand and challenge only the incident, it is like ignoring a loaded weapon which can be brought out and used later.

Fein was talking about the principle of separation of powers, admonishing the committee to be firm in addressing the violation of this 'principle', instead of getting caught up in whether, in this instance, Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) hid money in his refrigerator, etc.

His advice is more widely applicable. A few months ago, I had pointed out in an article, "Gonzales Channels Mark Twain how, in answer to a question by Chuck Schumer whether the Executive had the authority to tap the phones of its political opponents, Alberto Gonzales gave this answer, "We're not going to do that". Schumer and the other members simply moved on, apparently satisfied. Gonzales did not reject such a course on principle, only on the specifics as they existed at that point.

Everyone is now talking about Haditha. It is the Abu Ghraib of 2006. We've progressed from reports of systematic torture to stories of systematic murder. A perennial stock-in-trade here is 'innocent civilians' (see also Civilians and Combatants), which leads one to ask, if these were innocent civilians, what crime did the other 100000 Iraqis, who have been killed, maimed and displaced by Bush and Blair's war, commit? Or the half-million children estimated to have died during the sanctions preceding the invasion?

Here too Fein's point is valid: if we were not in Iraq, there would be no Hadithas and no Abu Ghraibs. It is the principle of the thing. In all the millions of words expended on Iraq War by Senators and Congressmen, commentators and journalists, a basic question seldom finds a place: How was it correct to invade a country that had not attacked us? If only we had persisted with this simple point of principle...It never featured in the Senate or any other debate.

Similar is the answer to charges of warrantless wiretapping: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. That this does not trouble most Senators is bad enough; that this point is actually advanced by some of them is astonishing. It is unnecessary to stress that if this is acceptable, so is the prospect of the local cops breaking into your home or car and searching it. Once you give up the principle of due process the road downhill beckons.

The administration is not averse to principle when convenient, pointing to Saddam Hussein's trial as upholding the principle of "no one is above the Law". Saddam Hussein and his colleagues are being prosecuted for deaths of people in Dujail. No one alleges that Saddam Hussein personally executed anyone. One more principle is then invoked, executive accountability. If these principles are applicable and celebrated by America and Britain, when will Bush and Blair be put in the dock for Haditha?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com/.

Bush and Blair despondent

In their press conference yesterday, Bush and Blair are reported to have been less gung-ho than previously. I was reminded of the old Irish joke: An Englishman laughs at a joke three times -- first when he hears it, second when it is explained to him, and finally, when he understands it. Yesterday, they seemed to have got it. Not all of it, and neither is it a joke. But their own defeat and three years of waste are finally sinking in. I don't think they still are able to see the tragedy of thousands of people dead, lives broken, families ruined, children maimed, soldiers warped, all the things that war brings. WW1 and WW2 and Vietnam should have provided ample understanding of that. Paul Krugman has written an op-ed in the NYT about Gore's new film, and the loss of not having a thinking person as president at this crucial time. That's ok for Bush. But Blair is a thinking person? What explains his enthusiasm for the Iraq project? Tariq Ali said in an interview about a year ago on NPR that it was his evangelistic predeliction. Blair is a staunch evangelical.

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The Democrats and the flight from 9-11

Making Hay(den) While They Shun Signs

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Bertie Wooster: Were you frightfully bright as a kid, Jeeves?

Jeeves: My mother thought me intelligent, sir.

Bertie Wooster: You can't go by that. My mother thought me intelligent!
(from a PG Wodehouse novel, a rough recollection)

If I am one of the 200 million whose phone records have been tracked by the government, General Michael Hayden has probably heard of me, but I am unable to say I reciprocated his interest. He only came up on my radar screen when he made his strident and unapologetic defense a few months ago of the warrant less phone tapping program.

It says something about a country when a president at 34% approval can nominate a confessed lawbreaker to one of the most powerful offices in the nation. (Hayden's assertions that he didn't think he broke the law is rather like Wooster's mom marveling at her child's intellect). It says even more when he encounters anything other than scornful indignation at his hearings. That he should be acclaimed and endorsed by the Senate panel speaks volumes about the Senate's own self-confidence. There was a time when Congress would bristle at the merest presumption upon its powers of oversight. Now it overlooks the most brazen usurpation's with a practiced acquiescence honed by five years of cowering.

The law be damned, the hell with freedoms, what we we need is "competence" in this age of terrorism, you say. And this is the standard Bush argument too, for anything and everything after 9-11.

So let's talk competence. Didn't Gen. Hayden lead the NSA before and during 9-11? How could anyone who held a high position in national security on that day be even considered for further office? Richard Reeves wrote that if 9-11 had happened in Japan, there would be no one left in the government to turn off the lights.

Let us accept that shame is not in our DNA. Corporate executives layoff poeple, export jobs, make losses, all while raising their own salaries and pensions. A leader who presided over two national disasters continues along as if he has invented sunlight. A Congress which signed on to starting an uprovoked war cannot bring itself to do anything to end the catastrophe it has wrought. We are all-forgiving. We are, after all, a compassionate people.

Democrats, particularly, pride themselves as the keepers of compassion. Nowhere is their claim more evident than with their deference to people like Hayden, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, all of whom were in charge when the greatest disaster in American history (per the administration's repeated assertion) struck. Perhaps a need to demonstrate bipartisanship might explain their reticence to seek prosecution of these officials for incompetence and criminal negligence. But why lionize them, vote to keep them in their posts, give them promotions, or participate in ceremonies to pin medals of honor on them?

Julius Caesar spoke of the brave dying but once and the cowardly dying repeatedly. One always assumed suicide was a one time affair, but the Democrats have long exploded that canard, elevating suicide to an art form. They refused to raise 9-11 as a Republican failure in 2002, and lost. Kerry refused to touch the issue in 2004, and lost. The Democrats still run from it in 2006...

What credibility can they have on national security when they bolster the same individuals and teams that were in charge on 9-11? And with what voice could they challenge the administration's precept and practice of obedience to the law being optional, a mere courtesy, dependent entirely upon the pleasure of the executive, when they praise and vote for those who take pride in such an attitude?

As a purely political act, every opposition normally attempts to distinguish itself in the public mind by positioning itself against the ruling party. Even an opposition without principle would instinctively seek to challenge any senior appointee, just to increase the administration's discomfiture. That's politics. In this case, a proven incompetent and confessed lawbreaker should have received no votes, from either party. That's principle. In fact, principle should dictate that everything that Bush does should be opposed, with assent being the rare exception. A look at the polls would suggest that's the conclusion the country has reached.

When the Democrats voted 4-3 in favor of such a nominee, it shows not just their complete bankruptcy of both political instinct and moral principle. Even more, it shows that they are ignoring the signs from their own constituents, who are way ahead in their unbelief in the very bona fides of this administration.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

The Miasma of Progress

What Exactly is "Development"?

By P. SAINATH

India's development debate has actually regressed this past decade. For one thing, a single, homogenised view of development is being shoved down from above. Whether it works or does not work is not the issue. Any departure from it is heresy. If you oppose the draining of people's water by Coca Cola and the poisoning of their wells, that's anti-development.

Until ousted in the recent elections Kerala's Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy used to correctly assert that his State has very serious problems like joblessness. But then he suggested the United Democratic Front wants to make Kerala like Bangalore, [prime city of the neighboring state of Karnataka, endlessly feted by such touts of neoliberalism as Flat Earther, Thomas Friedman. Editors] That was his vision. That's development. Fact: there is no major indicator of human well being on which Kerala does not outrank Karnataka by miles. Life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality ratio, sex ratio or schooling. Or even nutrition, health, equity, and the ending of child labor. But Mr. Chandy's view revolved around express highways, flyovers, enclave smart cities, and the rest of it. Kerala has few of those.

Kerala has a good network of village roads, though. When you drive from Mysore to Wayanad and back, it's easy to tell when you've crossed the border. If the roads are awful, that's Karnataka. But good village roads are not a sign of development. Massive traffic jams are. Bangalore's techno triumphs are undermined by the chaos of its traffic, poor public transport, and gross private "cities" High tech cohabits with low efficiency in a deepening urban nightmare.

Kerala's people have had the best access to education and health. This is one State in the country that turns out more nurses than doctors. Kerala nurses are everywhere. Highly educated, efficient, and indispensable. The products of a once-fine schooling system. This might well break down as the poor lose access to such training. For some time, Kerala has mimicked Karnataka by trying to commercialize education. The case that Mr. Chandy makes was clear. Our students are going to Karnataka for such costly courses. Why should Kerala lose this money? Let's mop it up right here.

There are saner options. Expand and improve the public systems that made Kerala a success in the first place. But that would be anti-development. Meanwhile, the farm crisis has seen hundreds of suicides in Kerala. The children of these and other bankrupt households now find themselves forced out of Karnataka's educational sweatshops. They can no longer pay the fees and must leave, their deposits forfeit, studies unfinished. Many cannot even retrieve their school certificates. The colleges hold on to those to extort more money from already shattered families.

There's nowhere to go. They cannot afford the new private colleges at home either. The nation's finest pool of nursing graduates shrinks this way.

Bangalore, once the `Garden City,' `developed' rapidly. It drained many of its vital lakes and ponds to exploit the real estate beneath. And did that with breathtaking speed. Call it accelerated development. Now you have areas that suffer water shortages much of the year because you've drained the lakes. And flooding during the rains because you've built houses on those lakes. It is as simple as it is stupid. But we crave for more of the same development.

In the media, development is about engineering and technology. Not about improvement of the human condition. Nor about trying to be non-destructive. It is not important that the engineering and technology work. We don't even scrutinize that. But without them, it's not development. So if you have localized water systems that meet people's needs, that's not development. But if you plan to spend a quarter of your GDP on a brainless interlinking of rivers, that's development. Never mind that no one knows what its fallout will be.

The giant corporate hospitals are development. Networks of small dispensaries that are far more vital to public health are not. Why treat a scratch with a band-aid when you can do an organ transplant? We have the know-how, after all. We're at the point where medical tourism is going to earn someone a lot of money. And why fight malaria through preventive measures, good sanitation, better public health or anything as dumb as that? Better to distribute - as the touts advize - bed nets "impregnated with anti-mosquito repellent." That way, there's technology, contracts, and rewards for corporates, consultants, and corrupt bureaucrats.

Never mind that you will distribute millions of nets to people who have no beds. Nor does it matter that malaria parasites are remarkably uncooperative. They refuse to sign the roster when you're asleep and insist on being more active when you're not. That is, at dawn and dusk. When millions of people make their way to or from the fields in this country. Of course, you could make a bold new fashion statement by wearing your mosquito net to work, but it might cramp your style if you're a cane cutter.

Central to the regressive debate is the faith that there is only one way of doing anything. The big-budget, super-scaled, privatized way. Also, with major names. Dabhol in the Enron era was a fine example of this. So now we go back to it. Had Maharashtra spent a small amount each year strengthening its once profit-making State Electricity Board, we would not have such enormous sums of money. Losses that showed up in welfare budget cuts. But why be deterred by some of the highest power rates on the planet? Look Mama, we're world class.

The `debate' sparked off by the Narmada-linked fasts in Delhi took the same route. The dams are the only way. All that matters is we show some concern over `rehabilitation.' (Even if we do little about it in practice.) That this scheme will never work is irrelevant. People are incidental, the project is the thing. That even the pathetic share of water for Kutch and Saurashtra is being diverted to better-off destinations barely merits mention. That the power produced will be precious little - well, what does that have to do with development, anyway?

As for consent and humane conduct, how can these stand in the path of progress? The Orissa police shot dead 13 Adivasis in Kalinga Nagar. A crime dismissed with token tongue-clicking. A big daily put it simply in an editorial the next day. Let's face it. People will be displaced by projects. The question is how to re-settle them.

Yet, Orissa is a State where thousands of acres of land were taken by force from people for projects that never came up. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited is just one instance from the 1960s. Some of its giant units for which the land was then grabbed finally sprang up in Bangalore and elsewhere. But the surplus acres never went back to the shattered owners. This is also the State where the same village has been displaced three times for different projects. And where the dams of the 1960s still bear plaques boasting of how many villages they submerged. That, after all, proved how massive they were. Events of a kind that will never affect the rich residents of Malabar Hill in Mumbai. Though this city razed 84,000 homes of poor people in the same week the tsunami wiped out 30,300 in Nagapattinam. Mumbai, though, did it in the cause of development.

The regression shows in other ways, too. For instance, in the way some of the most vapid concepts are now romanced. It's at the point where malls are seen as the finest `public spaces.' An English daily ran a piece this week titled: "Hanging out at the friendly, neighborhood mall." Ultimately, says the piece, "a mall is seen as a place that is non-corrupt, safe and accessible. A public utility that functions and does not favour any class of user." What's more "all the amenities are free." No charge for the bathrooms, folks. Never mind the claim that shops, some of which sell exotic jewelled pens, do not `favor any class of user.' And never mind too, what the lesser shops and chains do to small retailers and the jobs of countless thousands. This notion of progress sits well with the one-way-only view of development.

Of course engineering and technology can play a vital role in development. They should. They must. The questions that have in every case to be answered are: For whose benefit? At whose cost? Do you do something because it is a good thing to do? Or simply because you can? Are there different ways of doing it? Which is the best of them? Do people have a right to say no even if they're poor? Have they a right to resist?

It's odd the more primitive debate on this now comes out of Kerala. Accept that framework, and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are way ahead of it. Countless big-budget `development' projects have been on forever. With little improvement in the living standards of the people in those States. Meanwhile, it might make sense to test one more indicator. Check how the bottom 30 per cent in each of our States is doing or has done over a period of time. It might give you a very different view of development.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. This piece initially ran in the Indian weekly Frontline. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.

From Counterpunch, May 20-21, 2006

What might have been

From Republic to Imperium

Three independent incidents:

1. USA Today revealed today that the NSA had been tracking the phone calls of millions of American customers of AT&T, Verizon and one other provider.
2. Several websites published the letter from President Ahmedinijad of Iran written to President George W. Bush of the US. Contrary to the dismissals, the letter, as Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com pointed out in his article, made several important points.
3. Featured on Tech Horizons, a public access channel from the George Mason University, was a review of Face Recognition techniques. Appearing as a panelist, a former general indicated without any disquiet that in the future, technology would ensure that all our movements anywhere would be tracked because we would be recognized.

Reading an article in the American Conservative by Michael Vlahos the same evening, I realized that he had brought these three, and so many other disjoint and disparate items of news and confusion together. His article, "The Weakness of Empire", identifies how 9-11 transformed America from a Republic to an Empire. He points a key fact that an empire consists of the people trading their voice for their putative security. He also points out that an empire needs constant military engagement. Hence, no talking to Iran. A vital article. A must read.

Illegal Immigration and the Commons

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The Eiffel Tower has been sold a couple of times. So too have Platform #1 of the Patna Railway Station, and the Taj Mahal. We are struck by the audacity of a seller parlaying a public landmark into a private transaction. We laugh at the suckers who were so gullible to buy them. As usual, we laugh loudest at those who resemble us most.

A couple of days ago, there appeared an article about the privatization of water in India. Privatization of the commons is always cause for alarm, because its social consequences are always disastrous. Some time ago, I wrote that the single major differentiator between the First and Third Worlds was the faith in the Commons. The First world had huge investments in the public sphere. No less a luminary than John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to Nehru, wrote in his memoirs how he would find himself chuckling at the Indian government's boasts of socialism, gently reminding them that there was much more social investment in America than they could ever imagine in India (I paraphrase).

What does this all mean in terms of consciousness? When I was growing up in India, a family celebrating a wedding would think nothing of erecting a wedding tent in the middle of a public street. Blocking a major road meant that you had real clout. A religious bhajan would be blared out on loudspeakers, with no concern for those in the neighborhood. Ditto for the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. People would complain when it was someone else doing it, but they would do the same in their turn. Now things have changed, as people are more conscious of the boundary between private and public.

Put differently, first world thinking means we do not presume upon public resources for private ends. When we begin to misuse public resources, the inevitable result is (a) greater layers of bureaucracy and (b) the deterioration all such public resources and (c) increased social tension and strife. Even the person who perpetrates this, if he continues to live in the same society, will eventually feel the ill-effects of this process.

One enduring contribution of the Reagan era has been the legitimization of the grab of the commons for private profit. Twenty five years after it commenced, we are still in Reagan's thrall, so much so that this mindset is no longer even questioned, although some stirrings may have commenced -- the latest evidence being a complaint by Field and Stream magazine that Bush and Cheney are terrible stewards of the wild.

Societies break down in strange ways when the commons is used for personal profit, or even perverse private fulfilment. Graffiti is shocking when it first appears on the stop sign near your home. A week later it shocks a lot less. A month later you're practically used to it. Respect for the law, too, is part of the commons. It works because everyone does it. Weird as it might seem, the simple expedient of standing in line is by no means universal. It is a tribute to American society that people do so. That so many people drive, and have a fair understanding of traffic rules, is nothing short of an American social engineering miracle.

What about illegal immigration? When I read impassioned speeches and writings about the rights of illegal immigrants, I wish I could ask these opponents of punishment for illegal immigration a simple question -- would you allow any illegal immigrant to stay in your home and support them 100%? Remember, 100% -- which means you have to pay for private schooling for their children, their health care, etc. -- forever (You cannot, after all, seek to benefit from a breaking of the law). I doubt there would be many takers. And this, it seems to me, is the basic infirmity of their position. They want to be charitable, and claim to be settling ancient scores, but all on the back of the Commons.

Call their attention to this, and there are angry responses about how America had done this or that atrocity, or how immigrants have built this country. That last is particularly unctious. Let us suppose I helped build a public park. Let us even ignore the fact that I was paid for it (as did any immigrant). Does that mean that I can, without permission, usurp it to throw a party? As with the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower, I cannot dispose of something I do not own outright. If there are others involved, they must sign on too. In the case of the commons, those involved are the American people, most immediately those living along the Mexican border. Who has obtained their assent to allow foreigners to arbitrary cross into their towns, because some wise folk in Wall Street or Washington have concluded that immigration is a 'net plus'? And when their governments fail to protect them despite repeated pleas, why should anyone be surprised at the rise of bodies like the Minutemen?

One does not have to lose sight of America's numerous acts of omission and commission in and outside the USA. But that is no excuse for anyone to defend sneaking around the law, soaking up public resources in a manner never intended. After all, even if the official figures of 12 million illegal immigrants (which should, realistically, be revised upwards, being official statistics -- that's third world thinking) are true, that is a 4% population of illegal immigrants, encroaching upon the commons. A large figure in any circumstances, in an era when investment in the Commons is considered akin to heresy, it is a straw more than capable of felling the camel.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com/.

The Approaching Water Crisis

From Counterpunch (Apr 12, 2006)

Water as Commodity and Weapon

The Corporate Hijack of India's Water

By P. SAINATH

2001: The old man shuffled his feet, acutely embarrassed. No matter which part of India you're in, the first thing you do is offer your guests a glass of water. And this was one part of Nallamada in Andhra Pradesh blessed with that element. Things had changed, though. "Please don't drink it," he said, finally. "See how it is?" he asked, showing us a tumbler. Tiny blobs of thingummy floated atop a liquid more brown than transparent. But then he brightened up. "Will you have Coca-Cola instead? That, this village has." And so it did. As in the Aamir Khan ad. The smaller bottle for Rs. 5.

It's also there in countless other villages where a glass of clean water is now hard to find. And Coca Cola's impact on both drinking and irrigation water sparks revolts across the country. From Plachimada in Kerala to Kaladera in Rajasthan. From Gangaikondan in Tamil Nadu to Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh. From Thane in Maharashtra to Khammam in Andhra Pradesh.

2002: M.P. Veerendrakumar, chairman of the Mathrubhumi group of publications, is startled to discover that the Malapuzha river and dam in his native Kerala are "for lease or sale to private parties. "I did not know you could sell and buy dams and rivers." He learns this from a tender he sees in an American daily while on a trip overseas. "This had not appeared in any of our local newspapers."

It had already begun in Andhra Pradesh There, two years earlier, farmers chased away the World Bank's James Wolfensohn. He had come to unveil the confederation of "Water Users Associations" in the state. "Water Users." Oh, what a lovely word! It denotes that special group of folks who use water. The rest of us are non-users, a type of dryland bacteria.

But non-users, being a touchy, irritable lot, showed up in large numbers at the Koelsagar dam in Mahbubnagar. Pitched battles were fought and hundreds arrested. The government shifted the plaque of the dam to a safe haven miles away so the Bank Boss could cut his ribbon in peace.

2003: Private theme and water parks in and around Mumbai are found to be using 50 billion litres of water daily. This, while countless women in the slums and chawls of the city wait hours in queues for 20 litres. Meanwhile, anti-Coke battles are hotting up again. Kerala's pollution control board confirms the toxic nature of the sludge spewed out by Coke's plant in Plachimada. The panchayat revokes the plant's licence.

2004: The polls to parliament -- and in some states -- see the rout of the biggest 'water reformers.' Of course, there are many reasons for their defeat. But water is on that list. Sadly for the World Bank, its puff job is already done. So its report "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future" appears as it is -- a year later. It sings the praises of Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra. And it claims they gained politically from the reforms. It says the water users associations were particularly good for Naidu. Because "farmers perceived this to be a reform which moved in the right direction." That is in 2005, a year after farmers in both states hand out some of the worst electoral defeats ever seen to the Bank's heroes.

2005: Bazargaon is a scarcity-hit Vidharbha village that has one sarkari well and gets tanker water once in ten days. It is also host to the giant 'Fun & Food Village.' An elite park which offers 18 kinds of water slides and uses millions of litres as a matter of course. All Bazargaon's water flows towards this 'village.' It's a story repeated in different ways in many places, across many states. Water as a commodity, flows from poor to rich areas.

In Yavatmal, a Maharashtra minister asks farmers at a meeting to "diversify into dairying." The crowd jeers. (Vidharbha has seen over 425 farm suicides in ten months.) The problems of water and irrigation loom large here. "You want us to take up milk production?" scoffs a farmer, rising to his feet. 'When you pay us a price of Rs. 6 for a litre of milk, but pay Rs. 12 for a litre of your bottled water?" The meeting ends early.

People pay more for water than corporates do. The bottled water brigade got treated and cleaned water in Hyderabad for 25 paise a litre for years. This goes into that bottle costing Rs. 12. In many parts of the country soft-drink giants get it almost free. Whole communities lose out as heavyweights like Coke step in. That company used 283 billion litres of water worldwide in 2004. Enough, points out the India Resource Centre, to "meet the drinking needs of the entire world's population for ten days." And the billions of litres it guzzles in India could meet the needs of whole districts. in Orissa or Rajasthan for a year.

Yet Coca Cola was the leading sponsor of the "World Water Forum" in Mexico this year. But Coke is not alone in the devastation it inflicts in India. Meet the Real Thing. Central and state governments in this country are privatising water. Coke is just one of the beneficiaries. Oddly, those selling out India's water almost never use the word 'privatisation.' They know how discredited that is. So the buzzword is 'efficiency.' Or 'public-private partnerships.' The real questions are never raised. Should anyone own water? How must it be shared? Who gets to decide? Is water a commodity to profiteer in or is it a human right? Is it more than a 'human' right? Countless other species also need it to survive.

The bazaar is large. And top water corporations figure in the Fortune 500 Global list. As Maude Barlow, one of the world's leading water activists, points out, the business "is already considered to be worth U.S. $400 billion annually". And there is lots more to be made. In her stunning book, Blue Gold, Barlow cites the Bank's own estimate of the market size. "In 1998, the World Bank predicted that the global trade in water would soon be a U.S. $800 billion industry, and by 2001, this projection had been jacked up to one trillion dollars." And these revenues are "based on the fact that only five per cent of the world's population are now receiving their water supply from corporations". So as the corporate grip on water tightens, "water could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the future. What if city after city privatises its water services?"

Now you know why our planners, Ministers and bureaucrats are eager to privatise. There's big bucks in it. Major `studies' and contracts are being awarded to private groups. As this deepens, people and governments will suffer huge losses. But government officials and private corporations will make giant gains.

The corporate hijack of water is on worldwide and one of the most important processes of our time. The World Bank and the IMF help ram it through. Water privatisation has often been shoved into their loan conditionalities in the past decade.

In few nations will the damage be as terrible and complex as in India. Here water use is already very unequal. Most irrigation and drinking water in India, for instance, has a clear caste geography. Even the layout of our villages reflects that. The dalit basti is always on the outskirts, where there is least access to water. Barring dalits from the main water sources of the village are not just about the 'social' horror of untouchability. It is also about curbing their access to this vital resource.

It is also closely tied to the framework of class. About 118 million households -- 62 per cent of the total -- do not have drinking water at home. As census household survey data analysed by Dr. S. L. Rao show, 300 million Indians draw water from community taps or handpumps. (Many World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects, by the way, will end up doing away with those community taps.)

About five million Indian families (roughly the population of Canada) still draw water from ponds, tanks, rivers and springs. This is a stratified society. The big dams that have displaced millions of Indians in the past decades have also narrowed control and access to water. Atop this structured inequity, we now install hyper-inequality.

A huge share of India's public health problems are linked to water-borne or water-related diseases. Diarrhoea alone claims lakhs of lives each year. Further reducing the access of poor people to clean water will sharply worsen matters. In State after State, the laws are being rewritten. A prelude to handing over control of both drinking and irrigation water to corporations. The Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act simply prices farmers out of agriculture. If the rates implied in the act are actually imposed, irrigation costs could be in thousands of rupees per acre. It would in fact be more than what most farmers earn per acre.

At the same time as more and more fields run dry, golf courses dripping pesticides and guzzling over a million litres of water a day come up in regions of high stress. Even in Rajasthan. (In the Philippines, there have been shootouts between farmers affected by golf courses and the hired goons of the course owners.)

India is a nation of subsistence farmers. When you privatise the rivers and the streams, the canals and the dams, you privatise rainfall. And you ask for a social tsunami. This is also the swiftest route to corporatisation of agriculture. In that sector, we are already forcing out millions of small private owners called farmers. The task is to hand it all over to large corporations. This policy-engineered agrarian crisis wracking rural India is also about the greatest planned displacement ever in our history. Water will be a major weapon used against farmers in this process.

Noble terms serve to whitewash the theft of water from the poor. In Angul in Orissa, the World Bank sought to hand over water to the rich. And called the process 'pani panchayats.' There, the 'rotation' of canal water use saw to it that poor farmers could have a rabi crop only once in two years. With people rebelling, this 'model' collapsed. But not before causing much misery. In Andhra Pradesh, too, the Water Users Associations were mostly headed by the biggest landlords and contractors of the region.

Just think of the trouble we're begging for. Almost every giant political headache in this country is linked to water. The single most explosive issue in South India is the Cauvery waters dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Then there is the Almatti problem vexing Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka relations. There is the fight over the Kabini waters between Karnataka and Kerala. Even the 'Khalistan problem' had a distinct link to the struggle over the Ravi-Beas waters. Water conflicts in India also affect regions of the same state. The Krishna-Godavari water disputes drive conflict within Andhra Pradesh. The list is endless. Further, across the country, water conflicts of many kinds seep right down to intra-village battles and bloodshed .

Some of our worst troubles with neighbours have also been about water. The Kosi barrage with Nepal. The Farakka Barrage with Bangladesh. Indus waters with Pakistan. Over decades, we've made things a lot worse. The unregulated spread of borewells was an early form of privatisation. The richer you are, the more wells you can sink, the deeper you can go. It has proved quite disastrous. Many poorer farmers have seen their dug wells sucked dry as neighbours collar all the groundwater. In the end, it can destroy the entire village. Mushampally village in Nalgonda in AP has more borewells than human beings. The damage done to the aquifer has been terrible. Even the richest farmers also went bankrupt as water stress peaked.

In his bid to privatise water when chief minister, Chandrababu. Naidu wound up the irrigation development corporation of Andhra Pradesh. Which meant it was now each farm for itself. That led to lakhs of new borewells being sunk across the state. With disastrous results. Water shortages in many states have also led to the emergence of 'water lords' who make a fortune by selling the liquid. In Anantapur, some of these are former farmers who find this more lucrative than agriculture ever was.

In the cities, millions dwell in slums where they might pay the same rates others do for water. But they get far less and spend far more time in getting it. Against this deadly backdrop comes water privatisation. If even the upper middle classes of Delhi loathe it, imagine the plight of poor people in Chandrapur.

And get this. India could be the first nation in the world to nationalise its rivers and privatise their waters. That is if we go ahead with the great river interlining project. Nationalise? And privatise? The linking scheme would demand the former. The latter we are already deep into. Of course you can, like in Chhattisgarh, sell or lease the river itself`Sheonath's sorrow'.

Those bringing it to you include some of the top corporations in the world. Some of the companies now making a beeline for India have been turfed out of Latin America. Suez, one of the Big Three of water, told the Guardian that "it was almost impossible for it to work in Latin America or Africa. And so, instead, it would "be concentrating on China, India and Eastern Europe." The company did not mention that it had been tossed out of Grenoble in its native France as well. As Maude Barlow points out, that city also jailed its own mayor and a senior Suez executive for bribery.

As she also shows, it's not just any racket. It's scale is stunning. "Bottled water costs up to 10,000 times more than tap water in local communities. For the same price as one bottle, 1,000 gallons of water could be delivered to a person's home."

In Bolivia, when the MNC Bechtel took control of the water supply in the city of Cochabamba, it raised prices by 200 per cent. In cities in Peru, Chile and other nations too, water was priced out of the reach of the poor. All of them saw widespread unrest and political turmoil. Tiny Uruguay has set an example for the rest of the world. It amended its constitution in 2004 to bar private control of water and to declare water "a fundamental human right." This followed a referendum where close to two-thirds of the voters rejected privatisation.

The U.S. Ambassador calls for 'Public-private partnerships' (read privatisation) in India. Yet, as a report cited by Public Citizen points out: "About 85 per cent of all the water that comes out of a tap in the U.S. is delivered by a publicly owned and publicly operated system." That was and is the norm. Though the drive for profit will change things there, too.

Meanwhile, in India, the battles have begun. Protests across the country show that people will not take it lying down. Still, with so much money to be made, the privatisers will not just go away. The waters have just begun to get choppy. And we're in at the deep end.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. This piece initially ran in the Indian weekly Frontline. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.