Suicide rate in Greece rises by 26 percent, hits 50-yr. high

Press TV

Official data show the suicide rate in Greece has soared 26 percent in 2011 compared to a year before, making it the highest rate in past fifty years.

Greek national statistics agency, Elstat, said on Tuesday that 477 suicides have been recorded in 2011 compared to 377 a year before.

The district of Athens accounted for the highest number of suicides with 35 percent of the total number of recorded cases.

According to Klimaka, a non-governmental organization (NGO), the number of people taking their own lives in the country is actually much higher than the number recorded.

In addition, Klimaka said there is no available statistics on the number of failed attempts, which is estimated to be 15 to 20 times higher than the registered suicide rate.

Greece has been at the epicenter of the eurozone debt crisis and is experiencing its sixth year of recession, while harsh austerity measures have left tens of thousands of people without jobs.

Systemic malfunctioning of the labor and financial markets

Rethinking Industrial Agriculture

by Dr.Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, source

According to Michael Ableman, author of Fields of Plenty, 25% of Americans make the conscious choice to eat organic food. Those who make the switch from corporate, industrially produced food do so for a variety of reasons. The main ones are cost, health and ethical concerns. Cost is a big consideration for low income families. In an economic depression accompanied by spiking food prices, growing your own fruits and vegetables or purchasing them from a grower at a farmers’ market can save families literally thousands of dollars a year.

Ironically the economic crisis has one silver lining in inner cities, as neighborhoods organize to create urban orchards and gardens on vacant, foreclosed land. An example is Chicago Lights Urban Farm, which supplies fresh produce for the once notorious Cabrini Green subsidized housing complex. This is the first access to fresh produce in decades for many inner city residents – thanks to the mass exodus of supermarket chains in the eighties and nineties.

Health issues linked to industrial agriculture are the second biggest reason people choose locally grown organic food over the standard corporate options. The growing list includes a number of debilitating and fatal illnesses linked with endocrine disruptors (estrogen-like molecules) in chemical herbicides and pesticides; contamination with infectious organisms; severe allergies, immune problems and cancers associated with GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and nanoparticles; type II diabetes related to growth hormones fed to US cattle and the proliferation of superbugs like MRSA (methcillin resistant staphylococcus aureus) linked to antibiotics routinely fed to factory farmed animals.

Endocrine Disruptors and Food Borne Pathogens

At the moment the biggest concern for health advocates is the epidemic of breast cancer and infertility linked to the growing presence of endocrine disruptors in our water supply and food chain. Breast cancer currently affects one out of eight women, and sperm counts in American men are among the lowest in the industrialized world. However the infectious organisms arising from factory farming methods and lax regulation of slaughter facilities are also responsible for a growing number of health problems. Infectious organisms linked with severe illness and death include the prion carried by cattle that causes Creuzfield Jakob disorder (aka Mad Cow Disease); campylobacter, salmonella and pathogenic E coli from the fecal contamination associated with overcrowded livestock pens and inadequate regulation of slaughterhouse hygiene; and Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis (MAP), an increasingly common organism linked to a big spike in Crohn’s disease. Lax US food regulation and inspection regimes are worrying enough. Adding to all these concerns is the vast amount of supermarket food imported from third world countries where food production is totally unregulated.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

GMO-related health issues are another reason more and more consumers are going organic. Unlike New Zealand and most of Europe, which ban GMOs, in the US 88% of corn, 93% of soy, 90% of canola (used in cooking oil), 90% of sugar beets (the source of half of US sugar) are genetically modified. Moreover thanks to the millions Monsanto spends lobbying to block product labeling laws, the majority of US shoppers have no way of knowing whether supermarket foods contain GMOs. Knowledgeable consumers are especially angry about the so-called “Monsanto Protection Bill”. This was a clause inserted in a recent continuing budget resolution that virtually guarantees Monsanto immunity against lawsuits for GMO-related health problems and environmental damage.

Nanoparticles

The latest food controversy involves the presence of untested nanoparticles in processed foods. Nanoparticles are submicroscopic particles the food industry adds to foods and packaging to lengthen shelf life, to act as thickening agents and to seal in flavor. As You Sow, NRDC and Friends of the Earth, first raised the alarm about five years ago regarding the nanoparticles used in cosmetics. They were mainly concerned about studies which showed that inhaled nanoparticles cause the same kind of lung damage as asbestos and can lead to cancer. More recently the American Society of Safety Engineers has issued a warning about research showing that nanoparticles in food pass into the blood stream, accumulate in organs and interfere with metabolic process and immune function.

Environmental and Psychological Benefits

Aside from cost and health concerns, an increasing number of consumers eat locally produced organic food for ethical and environmental reasons. In doing so, they are consciously opting out of an insane corporate agriculture system in which food is transported halfway around the world to satisfy an artificially created demand for strawberries in the winter. They are joining food localization initiatives springing up in thousands of neighborhoods and communities to increase options for locally produced organic food. As they reconnect with local growers to start farmers’ markets (the number in the US is 3,200 and growing) and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives*, they find they are simultaneously rebuilding fundamental community ties their grandparents enjoyed.

Applying Design Technology to Farming

These food localization initiatives have been accompanied by radical technological advances that apply design principles to the way food is grown. The design technology employed in the rapidly growing fields of permaculture and biointensive farming is based on a radically different approach to water and soil management, modeled on nature’s ecosystem design principles. Anyone who studies natural ecosystems can’t help but notice there are no neat rows or bare soil in natural forests and prairies. Nature crams as many living organisms as possible, all with complex symbiotic relationships, into every square inch.

Ironically this “revolutionary” technology happens to be 4,000 years old. Chinese farmers discovered around 2,000 B.C. that designing their fields to replicate natural ecosystems produced the highest yields. This approach is well-described in F.H. King’s 1911 book Farmers of Forty Centuries. The US Department of Agriculture sent King to China in the early 1900s to investigate why Chinese farms were so amazingly productive. What he discovered was a highly sophisticated system of water and soil management that emphasized species diversity and rational utilization of ecological relationships among plants and between plants and animals.

The Watershed Model of Water Management

Despite King’s innovative work, it has taken English-speaking countries a full century for the lessons to sink in. Applying capitalist slash and burn mentality to farming clearly hasn’t worked. Agricultural yields in Britain and its former colonies, which all employ similar “modern” methods of water management, have destroyed tons of topsoil and essentially reduced agricultural yields by a third. In a desperate attempt to ramp up yields, chemical insecticides and herbicides were introduced after World War II. These, in turn, systematically killed off microscopic soil organisms essential to plant health.

Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other former British colonies all adopted the “drainage” system of water management. In this approach, trees are systematically cleared (usually by burning) and wetlands and springs are drained. Typically land managed in this way is subject to alternating flooding and drought, creating an unending cycle of economic hardship for farmers and farming communities. Besides destroying existing crops, repeated flooding also washes away topsoil and essential plant nutrients.

In contrast traditional farmers in non-English speaking countries are more likely to use the centuries’ old “water catchment model” of water management, sometimes referred to as terraquaculture. Because they deliberately design their farms to catch and hold water, they aren’t subject to flooding, soil erosion and draught. Chinese farmers wouldn’t dream of draining their wetlands, which are always the most productive areas for high energy food crops, such as rice and other grains.

Plowing “Kills” Soil

Soil technology has also greatly advanced in the last five decades, with the discovery of complex micro-ecosystems that support optimal plant growth. These eocosystems include a myriad of soil yeasts, bacteria and other organisms that live in symbiosis with host plants. Not only do they provide nutrients to the root systems of larger plants, but they also produce a myriad of natural insecticides and herbicides to protect them against pests. Mechanically disrupting the soil through plowing kills these organisms. They can potentially recover if the soil is left undisturbed – unless the grower totally wipes them out with pesticides, herbicides or bacteriocidal GMOs.

Studies show that plant diversity is also essential to a healthy plant ecosystem. Planting a single crop in neat rows surrounded by bare soil is also perfect invitation for weeds and insects to come and attack them.

Permaculture, in contrast, discourages noxious weeds and insect pests by creating “food forests” made up of compatible food-producing trees, shrubs and ground cover crops. Unlike veggie gardens limited to annuals that have to be replanted every year, the food forest is self-sustaining with minimal input. For people worried about the economy collapsing and their gardens being invaded by barbarians from the big city, it’s also virtually indestructible.

*In a CSA (community supported agriculture) scheme, local consumers help farmers with upfront costs by pre-purchasing a share of their crops. In return, members receive a regular delivery of fresh fruits and veggies as various crops are harvested.

Scared Americans and “The US Terror State”

by Daniel Patrick Welch, source

Syria, Libya and other US crimes invisible to financially scared Americans.

Watch Out, World! Even America’s Wealthy Are Losing Ground.

Cognitive dissonance among the US sub-elite means more war and death for everyone else.

Occasionally the tip of the iceberg pokes through, and the reported facts corroborate the experience of most of the people. The recent Pew Center report that has now reached broad circulation shows that a full 93% of US households *lost* ground in the much vaunted recovery of 2009-2011.

This just validates what we are all living through, glossed over by averages, smoke and mirrors. There is no “recovery.” Sectors *within* the top quintile are holding on, barely.

This is the starkest portrayal I’ve seen in black and white; I had previously been telling anyone who would listen that, while there seems to be a pickup for those in the $250,000 and up range, it is clearly not the case for the bottom 4 quintiles [i.e. $100,000 combined household income 2010]. It should be shocking enough to most middle class types that the real picture is so different from what they believe to be living–that is, that they are actually in the top 8-10%… BUT the data shows even worse. Even families up to $500,000 (!) are losing ground.

This bespeaks the desperation in the political outlook of what Zinn called The Guards and what Chomsky called The Priesthood: people who are doing just fine in the current system but think it needs a few tweaks. As this sector shrinks, the internal contradictions will become more apparent and the response of the state becomes harsher and less elastic. So households with “two good jobs” say $100,000 plus each, are prone to seeing some hope, the famous ‘green shoots’ mantra that fell on deaf ears for most of us a few years ago. Come on, guys–it *can* work! We all need to just be a bit more patient! Etc.

The political ramifications are quite alarming. This sector is crucial to the viability and perceived legitimacy of the system, and their panic has far reaching consequences. It may just beginning to dawn on them that they, too, will ultimately be left behind in the wealth shift, and that it was never really about them. Slowly but surely, and to varying degrees, they are recapitulating Judas’ epiphany [the Andrew Lloyd Weber version, at least]: “My god I’m sick. I’ve been used–and you knew all the time!” They are just beginning to see that they are facing an uphill battle in a rigged game against the House with a stacked deck–and any other cheesy analogies you want to cram in there–but there is nowhere for them to go.

Paradoxically, the initial wave of reaction to this newfound betrayal by their patrons in the ruling class is not to turn on their masters. It is to express this anger at those below, in the age-old game of shooting the messenger. Consequently, they become even better “shushers,” the Seinfeld term for viewers who keep order in a theater. Border collies, gatekeepers… they have always been there, but they were more consciously part of the professional ‘left,’ an icon of the political class. In the current period, their anger is more desperate and more diffuse: They have always been more inclined, for example, to trust the police, to believe the official version of events, to avoid sources of information considered by their class position and experience to be beyond the Pale. Having rarely, if ever, been on the wrong side of Officialdom, or had to bail relatives out of jail, or had any race-tinged experiences themselves, they are primed and pampered to be the intellectual shock troops of Acceptable Discourse. In the face of increased perfidy on the part of their class betters, they can’t (yet) bring themselves to bite what they still perceive as the hand that feeds them. Consequently, they will lash out at the incongruously labeled ‘parasites’ who they feel are ruining their banquet, even as the din of cognitive dissonance grows inside their heads.

The brutal fallout from this game is apparent all around us, as the body counts rise and the single minded state terrorism of the state apparatus grows ever more horrific in its attempt to maintain their bloated lifestyles through hegemony over the world’s resources. This transaction is completely lost on the Shushers–rather, they become its ghoulish cheerleaders, with or without acknowledgement. They are capable, somehow, of rationalizing the complete destruction of country after country–even as they are shown they are being lied into doing so. It is inconsequential to them that their government is funding, arming and training the very – terrorists in Syria and Libya that they are primed to fear elsewhere. The simple mathematical rule of balance and scale demands that they acknowledge and reject the 1000 : 1 ratio of violence ravaging the world in their name, with their money, with their silence at best and enthusiastic endorsement at worst. They just don’t give a sh…t, and their macabre privileging of the relatively few victims among their own–as awful as these surely are–is lost outside the bubble, where the rest of the world grieves for their victims.

The economic consequences of their loss of station “scares the sh..t” out of them: while logic and basic morality dictate that they should wake up every morning with the bloody carnage of their own drone army foremost in their minds, they are instead preoccupied with how they can no longer afford an annual pilgrimage to Disney, or that they may have to postpone the kitchen/bath/boat/car upgrade they have been contemplating. If this makes them sound like monsters, it should. There is something epic about the horror of simultaneously having no power over a political system that wreaks such destruction and yet defending that very system as acceptable and benign, without at the very least having been the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the littlest Who shouting ‘We are here!’ from the tallest available tower. It is more than a sham and a shame. It is a moral crime, a breach of ethical duty that will yield unimaginable consequences when the balance is eventually righted. And yes, for international readers, I do realize the self-absorption of focusing on the internal American experience, and hear your cries of “Who gives a shit!’ inside my head.” If you have stuck with me this long, much respect. Sometimes I feel it necessary to speak to and about my American countrymen from the perspective of one who shares, albeit sometimes tangentially, their experience.

I believe we are living in the time of tremendous turmoil. It may take a year or two or ten, but in historical terms we are living in that instant, that one day where, looking back, it will become apparent that everything changed. It is the pivotal moment so brilliantly enacted by the montage at the end of Les Miserables where all social actors, no matter their role or position, sense that something momentous is on the horizon: “Tomorrow we’ll discover what our God in heaven has in store. One more dawn. One more day. One day more!”

The pain of Bangladesh: T-shirts made with blood and tears

“Family members display portraits of missing relatives at a a makeshift morgue in Savar near Dhaka. The death toll in the garment factory building collapse rose to 931 with the recovery of 97 decomposed bodies on Thursday.” (AP)

by Ramzy Baroud, source

As they spoke to a BBC correspondent in their run-down room which they call home in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a man sobbed as his 12-year-old daughter sat close to him.

His face, wrinkled before its time, was a picture of utter anguish. It could only be understood by a parent whose child was dying under giant slabs of concrete where nothing could be done.

“If she is dead,” he said, “I just want to bury her with my own hands, so at least in my mind I know that I have finally found my daughter.”

Then the despairing man succumbed to his uncontrollable tears.

His daughter Hamida had been working right along his other young daughter who had miraculously escaped the collapse of several factories in the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka on April 24.

Hundreds of dead bodies were retrieved, most of whom were women and young girls who made a living working under the harshest of conditions in the country’s many sweatshops.

Hundreds more were still trapped and presumed dead. Many of those who were freed had to sacrifice a limb as it was the only way to freedom.

Images of the devastation dominated the news for days after the eight-storey building collapsed on top of nearly 3,000 cheap laborers who were already trapped in another sense – in the endless poverty and exploitation of factory owners.

Over 3.5 million people work in the country’s estimated 4,000 factories, generating about 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s total exports.

Some estimates put the monthly salary of a garment worker in Bangladesh at $70 (£45) to $100 (£64).

Other estimates are lower, considering that the country’s monthly minimum wage hovers above $38 (£24).

Quoted by the BBC last August, Rosa Dada of Four Seasons Fashion Limited found the business logic simple and convincing.

“In Bangladesh the average monthly salary for garments workers is only around $70 to $100. If I produce here, [the] price is much more competitive.”

Competitiveness is key, even if it is at the expense of impoverished people who have no other option but to accept miserable pay and highly dangerous work conditions.

Of course a Four Seasons executive would not accept work for a $70 a month.

Dada must be aware that most of the garment industry laborers in Bangladesh are women.

When one calculates the long-term loss brought on by the death of a mother working under inhumane conditions, no numbers, no statistics, no charts and certainly not Dada’s quest to stay above the competition, could possibly do this tragedy any justice.

The story of Bangladesh’s pain is dotted with tragedy, government corruption and unmitigated greed.

It also involves many companies and garment distributors in Western countries, China, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Moreover, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in some way, our constant hankering for cheap prices, untamable desire for “good deals” and lust after brand names is happening at the expense of the sweat, blood, tears and in some cases, the crushed bones of cheap laborers like 13-year-old Hamida.

Walmart, Gap, JCP, Abercrombie, Kohl’s and many more are very much part and parcel of this story. Some of these companies still refuse to take any real action to avoid future tragedies.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza building was not the first of such disasters and is unlikely to be last, especially since government action has been so lacking, to say the least.

As for most Western companies, they merely resort to public relations tactics to circumvent their direct and indirect responsibility, as opposed to rethinking their negligent approach altogether.

True, there has been much media coverage of the tragedy, which even by the country’s poor work conditions standard is unprecedented.

But there has been ample evidence for many years that Bangladeshi laborers are being abused, humiliated and sacrificed in the name of profit.

Abusive business owners often lock and bolt exit doors to ensure that workers can’t go out.

They build without permits and authorities turn a blind eye to their many illegal practices.

According to Human Rights Watch, the government has a workforce of 18 inspectors who are supposed to oversee and prevent illegal practices in thousands of factories in the Shaka district, which is the heart of the garment industry.

Workers’ rights activists contend that officials are paid handsomely for their silence.

Human Rights Watch said that “factory owners – a powerful force in Bangladesh, with ties to government officials – are usually given advanced notice before an inspection.”

Just five months ago, 112 workers died in a Tazreen Fashions garment factory near Dhaka.

Some workers jumped to their death from high windows to escape the fire because the doors were bolted.

The complicity of international companies was also found in the traces of the burnt building.

The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) said recently that “Walmart-labeled product was found in Tazreen and now one of the factories in the Rana complex, Ether-Tex, had listed Walmart-Canada as a buyer on their website.”

Predictably, “Walmart has yet to contribute to the worker compensation fund for Tazreen victims.”

But there is more that Walmart and others haven’t done. It is yet to sign the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement which, according to ILRF, is a legally “binding agreement that has (only) been endorsed by two global brands, (and if implemented) would create rigorous inspections, transparency and oversight and ensure that workers and their organizations are an integral part of the solution.”

To avoid the “hassle” of accountability, some companies have decided to carry out their own inspections and of course made sure that the international media knows of their supposedly grand effort.

The two companies that signed the agreement are German retailer Tchibo and PVH Corp, which owns the brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger.

But two more need to sign for the agreement to take effect. Walmart, along with other large companies, is yet to sign.

Considering the rampant corruption and Bangladeshi’s dire need for foreign funds which are partly secured through the $20 billion (£13bn) per year industry, expectations are low that the government will do much to right this ongoing injustice.

Attempts at unionizing garment factory workers have not been successful. Respected workers’ rights activist Aminul Islam was reportedly harassed by the police, had his phone tapped and “domestic intelligence agents once abducted and beat him,” reported the New York Times last September.

When he disappeared for few days on April 4 last year there was a general understanding of who might have been the culprit.

Days later his body was discovered. He had been tortured to death. His small office once stood amid towering buildings – some surely constructed without permit.

With his murder, Dhaka’s workers have lost a great friend, an ally. Now they have lost hundreds of their equally poor colleagues whose entire monthly salary is barely enough to purchase one Tommy Hilfiger item.

Writing in Spiegel International online, German journalist Hasnain Kazim and others wrote that “the disaster … created sights and sounds that many will find hard to forget. Rezaul, for example, vividly remembers a woman with disheveled hair and a blood-encrusted face whose right leg was pinned down by a concrete pillar. ‘She begged me to saw off her leg and free her,’ he says. ‘I just happened to be there’.”

The main photo of the article was that of a head barely rising above a heap of concrete, while the entire body, apart from an arm was submerged.

It was of a handsome young man’s face, with eyes so peacefully closed, and his barely free left arm, resting gently over the debris.

The most painful part of this tragedy is that it was completely preventable, but perhaps neither the government, nor Walmart and many others find the issue urgent enough for decisive action to spare poor people a horrible death.

Recession and Austerity good for the rich

The Weapons Oligarchy

(Hiroshima-nuclear bomb aftermath)

Federal Taxes Reward 8-Figure Pentagon Fraud Spree

by JOHN LaFORGE, source

With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time to consider the mountains of money being wasted on useless weapons or just plain stolen.

Without a public uproar, U.S. could spend more than $600 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years, according to Alicia Godsberg of Peace Action and others.^[1]

President Obama has famously mouthed support for “a world without nuclear weapons,” and “a world where these weapons will never again threaten our children,”^[2] but his nuclear weapons budget says bombs, bombs and more bombs.

For 2014, the President plans a nuclear weapons spending increase over the current level of $7.227 billion. Where’s the money to come from? Taking a page from the Reagan/Thatcher play book, Obama plans to get it from the nuclear non-proliferation budget. According to a report by Jeffery Smith and Douglas Birch in Foreign Policy April 9, the president has proposed a $460 million cut from the nuclear non-proliferation program — so it can boost nuclear weapons building programs by exactly $500 million.^[3]

Since 2011, Obama has been pushing a plan to spend $85 billion over 10 years to rebuild thousands of H-bombs — bombs that should be retired and abolished. The president has also proposed pouring $125 billion over 10 years into a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, new nuclear bombers and new land-based ICBMs.^[4]

One plan is to return 200 B61 gravity H-bombs from five U.S. bases in Europe, where they are unwanted, and to replace their warheads and tail fins. Today, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Turkey and Belgium are debating whether they want the U.S. bombs ousted permanently, yet the Pentagon plans to return them to European fighter bases with new “life extension.” Europeans by the millions are demanding that the B61s be withdrawn forever.

The H-bomb program, known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), estimated last year that the B61 make-work plan would cost $7 billion and produce its first replacement bomb in 2019. The Pentagon countered that it would cost $10.4 billion and take until 2022. Daryl Kimball and Tom Collina reported April 11 in Arms Control Now that 400 new B61-12s are planned, at roughly $25 million-per bomb.^[5] Boeing Corp. hopes to make hundreds of millions working on the 50-kiloton devices,^[6] each one capable of a Hiroshima massacre times four.

Joe Cirincione, of the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Ploughshares Fund, charged April 21 that “lavishing” billions on the B61 “is criminal.”^[7]

According to Edward Aguilar of Project for Nuclear Awareness, cancelling construction of the new submarines, reducing the current number of such subs, and retiring rather than replacing nuclear warheads and a couple hundred ICBMs would save $270 billion.

Billions for unneeded, unusable weapons

As every combat or terror casualty since 1950 proves, our nuclear weapons cannot protect us. So what is this spending for?

One answer was revealed on March 14, 1992, when the Associated Press reported on a study — by Admiral Bruce DeMars — that made clear that the purpose of new submarines was “to protect the vast industrial facilities and skilled workers needed to build them, not because the submarines themselves were needed.”^[8] Today’s plans are precisely the same. With its 5,000 ready and reserve nuclear weapons, the US can pulverize every major city on earth with over 200 each.

The NNSA calls Obama’s new warhead production “modernization” or “refurbishment” or “life extension.” This is just euphemism, deception, deceit and disinformation used to help rob the taxpayers, and it has no purpose but to pamper billionaire industrialists and string out some cancer-causing careers.

Because fear moves taxpayers to send half their federal taxes to the Pentagon and to a militarized space program and Energy Department, the deceptions extend to the manufacture of threats too. Thus, North Korea’s nuclear nothing somehow endangers the Pentagon colossus. On April 3, the New York Times said North Korea might have “6 to 8” nuclear weapons. Four days earlier it noted two salient facts on its page one: North Korea’s missiles cannot reach the U.S.; and there is no evidence that its bombs can be made small enough to fit on a missile. Even the Wall St. Journal admitted that Pyongyang “isn’t thought to be capable of following through.”[9]

With $1 billion being spent on new “missile interceptors” in Alaska “to foil North Korea,” cynical fear mongering has reached absurd heights. Experts have reported for decades that money spent on missile defense is wasted. Even the cold-blooded Margaret Thatcher said, “I am a chemist. I know it won’t work.”^[10]

Mr. Cirincione said Pentagon contracts for useless weapons are “clearly aimed at buying senators’ votes.”[11] Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found a staggering $70 billion in Pentagon spending that was nothing but waste.^[12] In the realm high crimes, it takes a lot of bribery, larceny, robbery, kickbacks and embezzlement to steal that much money and then to protect so much theft from the law.

The weapons oligarchy appears to be a racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization. Luckily, the RICO Act provides for heavy criminal penalties for such death-dealing corruption.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its Quarterly.

Notes.

[1] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 11, 2011; & Alicia Godsberg, letter, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2011

[2] Joe Cirincione, interviewed on Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, April 21, 2013, <http://ploughshares.org/>

[3] R. Jeffrey Smith & Douglas Birch, “Obama Proposes Shifting Funds from Nuclear Nonproliferation to Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Policy.com, April 9, 2013,

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/09/obama_proposes_shifting_funds_from_nuclear_nonproliferation_to_new_nuclear_weapo

[4] “The Bloated Nuclear Weapons Budget,” New York Times, editorial, Oct. 30, 2011

[5] Daryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina, Arms Control Now, April 11, 2013, http://armscontrolnow.org/ 2013/04/11/nnsa-nuclear-weapons-budget-ignores-fiscal-realities-congress-should-re-examine-b61-project/

[6] Hans M. Kristensen, “B61-12: Contract Signed for Improving Precision of Nuclear Bomb,” Federation of American Scientists, Nov. 28, 2012; http://blogs.fas.org/security/2012/11/b61-12contract/

[7] Julian Borger, “Obama accused of U-turn as guided weapons plan emerges,” The Guardian, April 21, 2013http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/21/obama-accused-nuclear-guided-weapons-plan

[8] Associated Press, “Navy seeks to preserve submarine shipyards: In doing so it would buy some vessels it may not need,” Milwaukee Journal, March 14, 1992

[9] Wall St. Journal, March 29, 2013, p. A12

[10] “Margaret Thatcher, ‘Iron Lady’ Who Set Britain on New Course, Dies at 87,” New York Times, April 9, 2013, p. A11

[11] Ibid, n. 7

[12] Christopher Drew, “Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste,” New York Times, March 30, 2011

Four signs neoliberalism is (almost) dead

The Icelandic Canary

by SAMEER DOSSANI, source

Though Margaret Thatcher is no longer among the living, her ideology lives on. That ideology – known today as neoliberalism, “free market fundamentalism” in a phrase coined by George Soros – is strikingly unique. Apart from religious beliefs, is there any example of an ideology that has been so thoroughly disproven yet maintains an aura of respectability?

The basic premise of neoliberalism – that “free markets” lead to better growth, higher prosperity and even more equality – was always fiction. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has repeatedly pointed out, there is no such thing as a free market. Nor is there any example of a country that has developed by following the neoliberal tenets of privatization, liberalization and budget cuts. Instead countries have traditionally used some mix of subsidies, tariffs, and debt-financed investment to prop up industries and shift comparative advantage to higher-end goods.

Despite the history, neoliberals argue that markets alone should determine things like wages, and that corporations and their owners should be able to operate however they like. Developed countries that adopted neoliberal tenets post-1980 saw wages stagnate almost as quickly as corporate profits skyrocketed.

In the developing world it was much worse. Africa suffered two decades of economic stagnation as a direct result of being forced to follow these policies, with Latin Americans and Asians doing not much better. The past decade has seen some improvement, but the global community is still well behind where it should be in terms of eradicating things like hunger and preventable disease.

But the neoliberal era may finally be nearing its long-awaited end. Here’s why.

1) The IMF has admitted that budget cuts are not always the answer.

The IMF has for over three decades forced countries to restructure their economies to be in line with neoliberal tenets. In particular, they have forced indebted countries to cut budgets before they can borrow from capital markets to pay off creditors. The phrases bureaucrats and politicians invented to sell this ideology are by now clichés. “Governments can’t spend more than they earn,” “We all need to tighten our belts,” etc. etc. By cutting government spending, the story goes, countries make room for increased private sector spending, and the economy grows.

Though earlier IMF studies had come to similar conclusions, it wasn’t until January 2013 that the IMF’s chief economist published what amounts to a “mea culpa”. Turns out that decreasing public investment is actually a pretty good way to hurt prospects for economic growth rather than increase them. Oops.

And there’s another twist in the story. For the last few years, decision makers have been citing a paper by Harvard economists that ostensibly highlights the dangers of countries borrowing too much in order to finance public expenditures. The paper specifically suggested a cutoff – when the debt hits 90% of GDP – beyond which economies would suffer for their overspending ways. The paper has been cited by public officials around the globe to justify budget cuts. But it turns out that the paper’s conclusions were a result of a series of errors, one of which was forgetting to update a calculation on an Excel spreadsheet. When the correct data is put in place, the conclusions more or less disappear.

Double oops.

2) The Doha development round is dead

In November, 2001 the World Trade Organization launched its “Doha development round”. Despite its name, the Doha round was about anything but development. High on the agenda were things like removing social and environmental protections, eliminating subsidies for poor farmers, and ensuring that big pharmaceutical companies could maintain patents on (and greatly increase the cost of) life-saving medicines.

With the help of progressive activists from Seattle to Hong Kong, and due to the huge uprising of developing countries in the WTO’s Cancun ministerial, Doha is more-or-less dead and the WTO is at a standstill. That’s great news for those who want to see fair trade as opposed to “free trade” and trade deals that put development and human rights first. The challenge now is to come up with a framework (and maybe even a mechanism) for multilateral regulation of global trade that prioritizes human rights over corporate profits.

3) Countries are increasingly trading in local currencies

Apart from the IMF, one way for the U.S. to maintain its control over the global economic system is the supremacy of the U.S. dollar. Certain transactions must be done in U.S. dollars – buying petroleum for example – and the U.S. dollar is still seen as the safest global currency. The result is that the dollar’s value remains artificially high, increasing the purchasing power of U.S. consumers and the desire of everyone else to sell to the U.S.

This deal benefits almost no one (not even U.S. consumers) and some governments have begun to look for alternatives. Agreements to begin to trade in local currencies have been negotiated between Brazil and China, Turkey and Iran, China and Japan, and the BRICS countries. Though some of these agreements are just taking off, if implemented they represent a significant challenge to the status quo.

4) 2007-08 proved beyond a doubt that markets don’t regulate themselves. And Iceland proved that there is another way.

The financial crisis of 2007-08 is far from the first financial crisis of the neoliberal era; in fact it would also be accurate to call the neoliberal era the “era of financial crisis”. From Mexico in 1982, to other countries in Latin America soon after that, to the U.S. stock market collapse in 1987, to Japan in 1990, to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, to Russia and Brazil in 1998-99, to Turkey and Argentina in 2000-2002, to the collapse of the dot com bubble, there has hardly been a moment since 1980 when there is not a financial crisis happening somewhere. What usually happens in such times is that governments take measures to protect the elites (usually the bankers who actually caused the crisis) and shift the burden of paying for the costs to the general public. The current crisis is a good case in point.

But unlike previous crises there are indications that this time we might be looking at a system change. The first of these is just the scale of the crisis. The collapsed U.S. housing bubble represented about $8 trillion USD in artificial wealth. That’s more than 11% of global GDP, and that’s not counting the housing bubbles that collapsed in Europe and elsewhere. This is market failure on a massive scale.

This time there’s also an example of a country that protected its citizens, jailed its bankers and is doing much better as a result. The country, Iceland, joins Argentina as one of the only countries to default on debts as a result of financial crisis. The disasters that “everyone” was expecting (no access to currency markets, investors blacklisting Iceland, etc) never materialized, showing that even small countries can stand up to the international creditor cartel and live to tell the tale.

Iceland demonstrates that there’s nothing natural about neoliberalism. The decision to protect elites from the effects of markets while using those same markets to punish everyone else is a political injustice, not a natural law.

And it is this injustice which ensures that neoliberalism will go the way of the dodo. Ultimately markets are just a social contract, like marriage. And just as the move towards marriage equality now seems inevitable, drastic reform of the way we relate to markets is on the way.

Money for militarism not for people

by Carlos Latuff

Obama’s Betrayal of Social Security

by DAVE LINDORFF, source

What’s wrong with the Obama administration’s proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a “chained” CPI?

Let’s start with the fundamental problem: Social Security is not a cause of the federal budget deficit, and will not be for years, even if nothing is done to raise more revenue for the program.

Sure the US will eventually have to come up with more money to pay the benefits earned by retirees in the Baby Boom generation, but that problem of an eventual shortfall in Social Security tax revenues can be easily solved by simply eliminating the cap — currently $113,000 in annual income — that is subject to the FICA tax. If the cap were completely eliminated, so that all income was subject to the tax, as is the case with the Medicare tax, the shortfall would be nearly eliminated. Any remaining shortfall could be erased too, by extending some kind of FICA tax to unearned income from investments. My favorite is one that is common in Europe: a small — say 0.25% — tax on short-term stock and bond trades.

But there is a bigger problem with this Obama proposal to cut both Social Security benefits and Medicare funding: Adopting a long-time Republican proposal, it only looks at those programs in isolation, and concludes that they need to be cut. Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president does not look at the biggest and most wasteful spending in the entire federal budget, which is the military. That bloated white elephant, which this year is sucking up close to $800 billion, not counting the interest on money borrowed to pay for past wars and armaments, could be cut in half or even by three-quarters, and it would still leave the US military budget larger than any other nation’s in the world. The US would be no less safe in that case. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot safer because we would no longer have US troops stationed expensively and provocatively in 1000 foreign locations.

Nobody in Congress is talking about slashing military spending and spending the savings on medical care, Social Security, education and other pressing needs. The public needs to demand this.

But let’s leave those two points aside for a moment, important as they are.

What the Obama administration is calling for — a switch from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI to a new chained-CPI to determine inflation adjustments in Social Security checks each year — is a brazen attempt to cut benefits for the elderly without admitting it. This is unconscionable, and as poorly reported as the story has been, the American people, regardless of age, are smart enough to be solidly opposed to the idea. People old enough to be drawing Social Security benefits, or who are close to filing for Social Security, know it’s stealing from them. But younger people, who almost all have parents or grandparents who are depending on Social Security, also know intuitively that this is a bad idea, and are opposed to it.

Chained-CPI has long been a favorite scam among by Republicans and conservative Democrats, who are in thrall to business interests that want to reduce the payroll taxes they have to pay into the Social Security system. But their claim that it is a “more accurate” way to measure inflation’s impact on the cost of living is clearly a fraud and a lie.

The rationale behind a chained-CPI calculation of inflation is a theory that when the price of some good or service rises too much, people supposedly switch to a cheaper alternative, so that alternative should be substituted in the “market-basked” used to calculate the cost of living.

Now sometimes that may be true. When gasoline prices soared during the Bush invasion of Iraq, many people downsized their cars to cut their gasoline bills. That move to smaller cars also cut families’ overall transportation expenses because small cars are generally cheaper than big ones. A chained-CPI would account for this by substituting small cars in the market basket, and might also lower the allocation for gasoline, since people would be buying less.

But the theory falls down, especially when it comes to older people, who drive a lot fewer miles than those who are commuting every day to work, and who also tend not to buy new cars. The old gas-guzzler they have, which doesn’t get many miles put on it in a year, is kept on the road and repaired as needed. They continue to buy whatever gasoline it takes to drive the thing. (I had a great aunt who died in the mid-1970s. We discovered that the 1950s Rambler she drove, which was in mint condition because it was kept in a garage, only had 10,000 miles on it because she just used it to go to the store once a week. When my cousin, who inherited it, tried to drive it home to New York, she discovered, out on the highway, that she couldn’t get it to go over 30 mph. Taking it back to the garage she learned from the mechanic that there was so much wear on the metal throttle arm that rode over a rod to move the carburator fuel control, that it would hang up on a ridge formed where it rested at 30 mph — the fastest my aunt ever drove. She would never have traded that car in for a new smaller one to save on gas.)

Old people and the disabled also spend vastly more on health care than most other people, and the cost of that health care is rising much faster than most other things.That’s a point the CPI, chained or not, doesn’t factor in. And the elderly and disabled have little choice about making substitutions on health care. They don’t — and shouldn’t — change doctors. And if you need an operation, you go where your doctor practices. If you need heart medication or cholesterol-lowering medication, you buy what is prescribed, whatever it costs. If you need Medi-gap insurance to cover your health needs, you buy it, whatever the inflated premium. Even Medicare itself has become more expensive at a pace well above the inflation rate!

Housing is another problem area. Young people, if their rent goes up, can move to cheaper digs. Old people can’t do that so easily. If they are in some kind of senior housing, it’s probably the only one in their neighborhood, and they’re not going to move to some place cheaper where they don’t know anyone, or where they are too far from their family, or to the son or daughter who lives nearest and who has been helping them out as needed. Nor should we expect them to move just to save money. If they are in their family home, it is where they are comfortable. It would take a lot to make them move, so they probably won’t. (Add to that the fact that with housing prices still way down thanks to the housing collapse, it would be a terrible thing for them to have to sell at a time like this — akin to selling out of the stock market right after a crash.)

Food is another area where the elderly have a harder time making substitutions. As people get older, they tend to get much more set in their ways. A young person can decide that buying salmon is too expensive, so they’re going to switch to mackerel or sardines, but an older person can get very fussy. They may not know how to cook a new fish, and won’t even try to switch. They may not even be doing that much cooking, and are relying on prepared foods that can be put in a microwave. There’s not much room for switching there.

All in all, this chained-CPI proposal from the White House is a disgusting betrayal by a president who swore as a candidate that he would stand firm against any cuts in Social Security or Medicare. As economics professor Michael Hudson so succinctly explains in an interview in Counterpunch, chained-CPI isn’t really a consumer price index, it’s a “cost of lower living standards index.” He says, “If living standards are ground down and down (through substitutions of cheaper goods and services) because people are poor, then the government can say, ‘Because you’re getting poorer and poorer, your living standards have declined, so we don’t have to pay you so much to live.’ … Poverty will cascade downward, and so will the chained CPI. This gives new means to the working class being put in chains.”

There are only two proper responses to this betrayal. One: we must demand that there be no cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits, or increases in the taxes paid by those already paying taxes into the program or receiving benefits, until the military budget is first cut by at least 50 percent. Two: We must demand that no change be made in the index used to adjust Social Security benefits for inflation unless or until the government conducts an honest, unbiased and transparent academic study to develop a valid market basket for the elderly and disabled, to determine what their actual costs of living are, and how they are impacted by inflation. And no index should be based on simply adjusting as the elderly and disabled adjust to becoming increasingly destitute.

Obama’s “cat food” Social Security reform

The grand betrayal has arrived

France: From Gloire to Desespoir

L’Affaire Cahuzac

by BARRY LANDO, source

Paris.

President Francois Hollande’s government is reeling from the latest scandal to jolt this country-the admission by Budget Minister, Jerome Cahuzac, after months of denying the charge, that he had secret offshore accounts. This newest affaire only adds to the strange brew of outrage and despair that has enveloped the citizens of what was once Europe’s greatest power.

Nothing brings home more starkly France’s awful decline than a visit to the Basilica of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris. It is still considered one of the architectural marvels of Europe. Its vaulted domes, 13^th century nave, slender towering walls and luminous stained glass windows were models for the high Gothic style that that inspired the architects of Notre Dame in Paris and other great abbeys and temples to the Christian God throughout Europe. Inside are the tombs—though not always the remains–of most of the kings and queens of France over the past 1500 years. It’s a memorable sight. But there were precious few tourists there when I visited yesterday; and non apparent on the streets outside.

Once you exit the cavernous, hushed Basilica you’re suddenly walking the main shopping streets of one of Paris’s most notorious urban slums, filled mainly with immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from the sprawling lands that France once ruled in Africa, not that many years ago.

Today, however, Saint Denis is more notorious for its crime and drug rate than its basilica. Probably 25% or more of the young people on these streets are unemployed. Saint Denis is also associated with gang violence, car burnings, housing complexes that even the police fear to enter, and a predominately Islamic population that feels increasingly estranged from the rest of France.

And Saint Denis is far from being an exception in France.

Despite President Hollande’s vow when he entered office to reduce unemployment, the number of jobless is still high—more than 10% and growing higher–throughout the country.

As is the crime rate, from petty street and auto thefts to apartment break-ins, assaults, and all-out gang warfare on the streets of Marseilles. The Interior Minister talks darkly of new violent mafia-like organizations in France, run by legal and illegal immigrants who have swarmed into the country from Eastern Europe in the past few years.

Despite President Hollande’s promise to revitalize French industry and block factory closures, factories continue to shut down. Others continue to lay off thousands of workers. The 35-hour workweek still reigns supreme.

Meanwhile, Hollande’s politically-driven drive to raise taxes on the wealthy, particularly a charge of 75% on those making more than one million Euros a year, has probably cost France far more than any such tax could ever bring in. The latest demented development is that the companies that pay those salaries will also have to pay the taxes. That includes France’s major football teams and millionaire stars.

Hundreds of thousands of French—many of the best and the brightest–have fled abroad over the past few years, more than 400,000 to London alone. But a survey taken found most of them left not to so much to avoid French taxes, but to escape stifling French bureaucracy and regulations, and do something about the huge waste.

Every French government in recent history has promised to do something about that bureaucracy. None have succeeded in tackling the entrenched labor unions and special interests.

In fact, most French long ago gave up their claim to be a major power. They would happily settle for a good, secure government job, with decent schools, housing, a comfortable retirement and continued access to one of the world’s best medical systems.  They would settle in short for security, in their own land..

But that’s exactly what’s being threatened in an atmosphere of moral decay and crisis—of underlying rot.

Francois Hollande was elected eleven months ago to deal with all this-to bring an end to the frenetic bling-bling reign of Nicolas Sarkozy, to restore order, to return to a feeling of probity; to be, as he promised, “a normal president.”

And now comes the affaire Cahuzac

Jerome Cahuzac, Francois Hollande’s Minister of the Budget, who had vowed to clean up France’s huge deficit, its finances, and go after tax dodgers. This past December a new investigative on-line journal Mediapart, reported that Cahuzac had an illegal bank account in Switzerland. Cahuzac solemnly swore to his colleagues in the National Assembly, swore to all who would listen, that the charge was false.

This week, however, he finally admitted that, yes, he had secret account in Switzerland, which he then moved to Singapore. The account totaled about 600,000 Euros.

The French media immediately compared Cahuzac with Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky affair, Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Cahuzac’s humiliating admission is like blood in the water to the France’s political and media sharks. Before this scandal broke, the level of public approval for Hollande had plummeted to less than 30%. Today, it could only be lower. Now all sides are demanding to know how, if a small muck-raking journal could discover Cahuzac’s misdeeds, how is it that President Hollande—with all the investigative tools at his disposal–couldn’t have found out earlier.

Then today came further embarrassing news for Hollande. The revelation that the treasury of his last election campaign—the one that was waged to bring honesty etc. into government—the treasurer also had a couple of off-shore companies in the Cayman Islands.

There are increasing calls—even from within his own party–for him to completely reform his government, to strike out in some heroic new direction, to revive France’s faith in its future.

There’s no indication that Francois Hollande has either the stomach or the backbone for such a challenge. Nor that the French would willingly make the sacrifices necessary to retool and rebuild their nation.

They’re reluctant to even seriously discuss what’s needed.

Perhaps that’s because the problems they confront—like unemployment, economic growth, crime, racial strife, the survival of the Euro —-perhaps because those problems are so complex, the French—like other nations—find it much easier to obsess about other simpler issues—issues someone can have a real opinion about. Like..well, should a Muslim woman working in a government office be able to wear a veil?  Or, should France’s social security system pay for a homosexual couple to have a child using artificial insemination and a surrogate mother?

Yet all the while, France’s real problems keep growing.

This week for instance, the Canard Enchaine, reports that, according to a recent government study, the time-off taken for such things as “sickness” and “accidents at work” by the 57,000 people employed by the City of Paris, came to an average of 20 days—that is about one month—per employee. That’s in addition to the five weeks of holiday they get each year.

That represents a total of more than 1.15 million days of work—a cost of 160 million Euros per year.

Meanwhile, as part of a project to refurbish the Basilica of Saint Denis, its marvelous stained glass windows, which looked over the tombs of France’s greatest monarchs, were removed from the church, replaced by artificially colored panes, and sent off to be repaired by skilled French artisans. Ten years later, those windows, according to a guide I spoke with, are still locked away in their protective cases.

The authorities can’t find the money to restore them.

Corporate India versus Indigenous People

Indian farmer (file photo)

Violent in the Name of Development

by GRAHAM PEEBLES, source

Consistent with the unjust, decaying economic model of our deficit times, the commodification of everything and everyone proceeds apace in India. The commercialisation of the land is shattering the lives of millions of India’s poorest, hungriest most malnourished people, who are being murdered and raped, violently displaced and falsely arrested as huge multi-nationals, financially favoured and militarily armed by the Indian government, ravage the land.

The state has more or less abandoned rural people (70% of the population) and turned the countryside over to corporate India. Mineral extraction, dam building, infrastructure projects, water appropriation and industrial farming make up their burgeoning business portfolios. The acclaimed author and political activist, Arundhati Roy [discussing ‘The changing face of democracy in India’ (CFDI)] makes clear that the land and everything inside it, is now owned “by the corporations, every mountain, every river, every forest, every dam, every water supply system”. Add to this the telephone networks and the media, and some say the judiciary, and the world’s largest democracy looks rather less democratically sparkling clean. Indeed, to the persecuted people in the forests and the urban poor crying out for justice, democracy is a city fable of little significance and no reality.

Land sympathetically and sustainably nurtured by Adivasi families for generations (the original or native people), is being violently taken from them in what Arundhati Roy describes as “the biggest land grab since Christopher Columbus”. In varying degrees of intensity, conflict and resistance is taking place throughout the areas affected by the land appropriation, although Roy suggests the violence is even more widespread, “all across India there is insurrection, there is a bandwidth of resistance” – made up of various marginalized groups. Massive numbers are being displaced, villages destroyed, women raped, hundreds, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) state, “have been arbitrarily arrested, [and imprisoned] tortured, and charged with politically motivated offenses that include murder, conspiracy, and sedition”. Charges manufactured and enforced under one or other of the draconian laws passed by the world’s largest democracy, to stifle dissent and confine the troublesome poor to the shadows. Mira Kamdar, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute says, the nations oldest and most marginalised people are “completely cut off from the economically vibrant, rapidly growing India of the country’s major cities”, and, due to the industrialisation of the environment are facing a major threat to their livelihood. They are sidelined, intimidated and, labeled “Maoist (or Naxalite) terrorists” by the government, a call reinforced by the screaming ubiquitous 24-hour news media. They are relentlessly victimized, targeted, Roy states, “in the name of development”: A perverse idea of development that whilst feeding corporate coffers, is destroying the lives of millions of indigenous people and causing devastation to the natural environment.

Clear off we want our Bauxite

Within some of the poorest states of India, from West Bengal and Chattisgarh in the Northeast, to Karnataka in the Southwest, (taking in Orissa, Andra Pedash, Jharkhand, Utter Predash, and Manipur) sits a treasure trove of minerals worth trillions of dollars. A huge area incorporating large tracks of ancestral Land, where Adivasi who number around 150 million (half the population of the USA) and Dalit groups have lived for millennia. Rich in bauxite, iron ore and uranium, this area is an Aladdin’s cave of minerals, which India’s corporations, and the one percent beneficiaries of a decade of economic growth, see as theirs by right. A right assumed by wealth and power, as Arundhati Roy, speaking on BBC Newsnight 3/06/2011 puts it, “the middle and upper classes in India have ascended into outer space from where they look down on the (rural) poor and ask, what’s our bauxite doing in your mountains, what’s our water doing in your rivers?”

To facilitate easy access to “their bauxite”, corporations need the land to be cleared of obstacles – indigenous people and their homes. According to Ashish Kothari, author of Churning The Earth, “In recent years the country has seen a massive transfer of land and natural resources from the rural poor to the wealthy. Around 60 million people have been displaced (although some put the figure much higher) in India by large-scale industrial developments”. The millions of mainly Dalits and Adivasi, made homeless and destitute, forced to ‘re-locate’ to the slums and shanty colonies of small towns and mega cities, where they are also unwelcome, are patronisingly promised their plight serves a greater good, that of employment-generation. But as Roy makes clear in Capitalism A Ghost Story (CGS), “by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of ‘growth’, 60% of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90% of India’s labour force works in the unorganized {unprotected, unregulated} sector”.

IDP’s in India fall into a bureaucratic chasm, with neither local nor national government taking responsibility for them. There is, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) state, “no central government agency responsible for monitoring the situations and numbers of people internally displaced by armed conflict or generalised violence in India”, and although the government occasionally publishes figures of IDP’s in camps, there is no “monitoring of the number of people in displacement outside camps, including in urban areas.” Official figures they conclude are “therefore likely to underestimate the scale of the actual situation”.

In the resource-rich areas of central and eastern India, where large scale mining and infrastructure projects are taking place, fast economic growth, HRW, report, “has been accompanied by rapidly growing inequality”, and “widespread displacement of forest-dwelling tribal communities”. And, despite the fact that India is bound by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which places IDP’s under the protection of the state, entitling them to the same rights as everyone else, “the government has yet to enact comprehensive laws to protect, compensate, and resettle displaced people”, caused by ‘development’, who number in the millions.

TINA and The Corporate Lovers

A violent undemocratic river of greed and indifference is attempting to drown the indigenous people of Eastern and Central India. The Adivasi and Dalit people, living in the vast Dandakaranya forest are, Arundhati Roy (CFDI), states, “being surrounded [by government forces], they are cut of from their resources, they can’t come out of the forest they are dying of malnutrition [so intense it has been described as ‘nutritional aides’]“, all of which constitutes genocide by attrition. To their great credit, and indomitable will these ancient peoples are fighting back, waging a tribal uprising against the range of security forces deployed against them; the military and paramilitary the Salwa Judum militia and Special Police Officers (SPO). Security personnel that operate it would seem under a cloak of impunity, particularly, HRW relate, “for abuses committed … in Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast, and areas in central and eastern India”, where “members of security forces implicated in serious rights abuses continued to enjoy impunity, in large measure, due to India’s laws and policies”.

As well as trampling on a range of international treatise the Indian government is vandalizing the constitution, in support of Indian businesses, as they attempt to clear tribal land of millions of people, and extract the treasures sewn into the fabric of the Earth. Taking something for nothing and with armed government support, it’s a dream come true for the multi million rupee corporations that, as Arundhati Roy (CGS), puts it, “have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth”. Like the Bauxite, which runs through the mountains of Orissa, which to the corporations and futures traders, is estimated to be worth $4 trillion (extracted). To the Adivasi the bauxite is an ecological keystone, its value rests in it being in the mountain, because as Arundhati Roy (NN) tells us, it “makes the mountain a porous reservoir, which holds water, that irrigates the plains”, sustaining hundreds of thousands of people. To the people who live on the land, in harmony with the environment, the bauxite outside the mountain is worthless – they will not benefit in any way from the minerals being extracted, nor indeed will the people of India generally. Corporations, who are exempted from all manner of taxes and offered a range of government “incentives” to rape the land, pay only a nominal “royalty” to the government of India.

Out of step with the time

Such government negligence and indifference fits hand in glove with an obsessive desire for economic development and accelerated growth divorced from social justice. Destructive (government) policies pursued for the last two decades are at the root of the intense suffering being caused to millions of Adivasi and Dalit people, not just in the Dandakaranya forest but also in towns and cities across India. They are seen as a refuge of the past, to be swept aside, eradicated, lest India’s image as a financial destination of choice and the great shopping center of Asia be tainted in western centres of corporate/power. Government policies that are condemning hundred of millions to extreme poverty, fueling growing levels of cataclysmic inequality, and feeding a system of injustice and division, that traps the poor into greater and greater poverty and destitution, whilst concentrating more wealth and power with the wealthy and powerful.

Employed to justify a range of social violations, legal and illegal, from austerity measures, to the violent destruction of ancient ways of life, abuse and population displacement, development along with its partner in crime – ‘growth’ have become the golden chalices of the age. Fused together, they determine the policies of corporate/governments throughout the developed world and dictate the approach of developing nations – whose economic plans are fashioned by international agencies offering conditional support, dressed up as aid, who are themselves little more than agents of corporate power.

Growth and development, pseudonyms for profit and more profit, are the lead players of market fundamentalism, a system like all totalitarian ideologies, which is destructive, divisive and (often) violent in its methods and impact. It is a model of civilization that promotes separation and inequality, which seeks to reduce mankind to think in limited and limiting material terms, and sees everything and everybody as a commodity to be exploited until utterly spent. Every corner of every city, town and village viewed as a market, everyone a banded consumer. Crude by any standards, such subtleties of ‘development’ fuel the corporate political machinery that is violating the lives of millions of India’s most vulnerable people in the forests of central and eastern India.

Growth and development, pseudonyms for profit and more profit, are the lead players of market fundamentalism, a system like all totalitarian ideologies, which is destructive, divisive and (often) violent in its methods and impact. It is a model of civilization that promotes separation and inequality, which seeks to reduce mankind to think in limited and limiting material terms, and sees everything and everybody as a commodity to be exploited until utterly spent. Every corner of every city, town and village viewed as a market, everyone a banded consumer. Crude by any standards, such subtleties of ‘development’ fuel the corporate political machinery that is violating the lives of millions of India’s most vulnerable people in the forests of central and eastern India.

Out of step with the new time that speaks of cooperation, unity and social justice, the ‘Neo Classical’ model has served its purpose and had its day. It does not meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of the people of India or the world. It has hold of the minds of men, restricting the possibilities for change to its own limited paradigm. It is a model, which has quashed the imagination of the unimaginative who deny even the possibility of a fair and just alternative. As British Prime Minister David Cameron, in his myopic manner, recently proclaimed – “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) the Financial Times 7/03/13 report. No alternative to what Prime Minister? To inequality and injustice, competition and division, to conflict and suffering? The poisonous river of consequences flowing from “TINA” – neatly packaged in shiny corporate/political propaganda and sold to us as the only show in town, it must be confined to the past and allowed to die. As Arundhati Roy speaking on Democracy Now, makes clear, “People [we] have to begin to formulate some kind of vision and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth and power, both political and corporate. That has to be dismantled” and “a new imagination” beyond restricting ideologies, neither communist nor capitalist” explored.

Such crippling ideological rhetoric (as Cameron’s) closes down the intellectual space in which open-minded investigation can flourish as Gillian Tett, Assistant editor of the Financial Times, puts it, “the way the elite stay in power is not merely by controlling the means of production – the money, but by controlling the cognitive map – the way we think”. A system that grows out of and perpetuates injustice and suffering, as market totalitarianism does, is one for which an alternative is not only required, it is essential for the health of the planet, the wellbeing and survival of humanity, indeed ‘there is no alternative’. A pragmatic alternative rooted in principles of goodness, sharing, justice and freedom – the birthrights of every man, woman and child, which if imaginatively modeled and simplistically applied, offer a just and fair alternative. One that, if mankind is to flourish and not simply persist, is, I suggest, our only choice.

Cyprus bailout deal tantamount to theft: Medvedev

Press TV

Russia has strongly condemned a new bailout deal brokered between Cyprus and its international lenders, saying the agreement is tantamount to theft.

“The stealing of what has already been stolen continues,” Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday, referring to the bailout deal between Nicosia and the troika of lenders namely the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU).

Medvedev said the agreement will save Cyprus from bankruptcy at the cost of forcing heavy losses for uninsured depositors on many bank deposits.

The deal will include a tax of up to 40 percent on deposits of over 100,000 euros in Cyprus’ two biggest banks.

Russian citizens hold as much as 20 billion euros (USD 26 billion) in Cypriot banks.

Moscow announced plans to study the consequences of the bailout deal including restructuring a 2.5-billion-euro Russian loan previously issued to Nicosia.

The bailout deal also drew heavy criticism from Speaker of the Cypriot Parliament Yiannakis Omirou who said “…this decision is painful for Cypriot people – this decision is a defeat.”

People in Cyprus have taken to the streets to protest the bailout deal. The protesters gathered outside the parliament in the capital Nicosia.

Cypriot protesters denounced their government, the EU and the IMF for their austerity policies.

The bailout agreement was reached early on Monday in Brussels. The deal paves the way for the country to receive a 10-billion-euro (USD 13 billion) bailout.

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