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Addendum to the paper published in our January 2010 Newsletter and titled:

The worst kind of planarchists are NATO nations
by Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
President
Global Parliament
December 20, 2009

The above image titled "Obama’s world tepee (tea p.) and The Little Red Riding Hood" is part of the addendum to the paper published in January 2010. The paper itself gives a more detailed description of the imagery work. Let us define further the different components of the imagery.

The Obama figure standing up

Obama is truly a representation of America today and NATO friends wanting to defend an old way of doing things, 20th century thinking, but knowing this will not get them anywhere. The people of those nations have the stomach of a 'black hole' where everything on Earth is absorbed anb consumed without rules but those of the gun and fear. Obama is pointing out his own public face, a truly friendly face, a person able to make believe 'change' is possible that would make everything right in the world. But that was shown to be a lie during the Copenhagen Summit on Climat Change. Humanity itself was part of the lie. Humanity has lost track of what is the most practical thing to do to save life on our planet. Several decades ago, similar self-destructive activities on the part of humanity gave rise to the Global Community, the Earth revolutionaries.

Obama wearing a NATO uniform

NATO wants to be the gun for the corporate wealthy but eventually will absorbe itself and died out in its own 'wasteland'.

The Little Red Riding Hood

People of most nations no longer trust America for anything. America is doomed to nothingness and will be absorbed by its own 'black hole', its 'wasteland'.

United Nations diplomatic suite

The United Nations (UN) is the global suite with no justice where everyone can go unpunished and get a Nobel Peace Prize. The more destruction you do the bigger the prize. America and its NATO friends got the biggest prize of all. The UN should never be promoting war as a solution to world problems. That alone is against global sustainability. Sustainability means no war. War is the greatest act of destruction. There is no worst action than war. The UN is promoting a culture of violence and war, and certainly that goes against global sustainability and Global Peace. That is the worst thing the UN could ever do to humanity. It is totally opposite to the Vision that the Global Community is promoting. And it is totally insane! The leadership of the UN has failed to enforce disarmement. All weapons of mass destruction should have been phased out a long time ago. Why are the USA still holding the world hostage with its 40,000 nuclear war heads, and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction? What has the UN ever done to help the phasing out of WMDs? Now several nations, including North Korea and Iran feel threatened just like everyone else and will refuse to be invaded. They would rather take on the US. Russia and China will also refuse to be invaded.

The Global Community is very concerned about the state of the world today and the causes that brought up so much frictions and wars between nations. Ever since WWII, the world has seen the rise of an invading world power, the USA. The United Nations has never done anything to stop the invasion. The UN leadership has been one of a 'watcher', an observer. The UN watch the world go by, on the brink of self-destruction and of being invaded, environmentally and militarily, and do nothing. The United Nations, US Administration, World Bank and IMF are corrupted organizations and never to be trusted of anything. The Global Community will never go along with these organizations.

The entire planet is in a state of low intensity civil war. The ruling elite profit off the exploitation of the rest of the world. Over several decades now, and in several press releases, the Global Community has made everyone aware of this critical situation, and how dangerous the US military and NATO allies were actually bringing the social fabric of the world to a complete breakdown. The October Press Release made that very clear and has caused a domino effect that started with NATO not wanting to take the blame for the global financial crisis and forced the collapse of the financial bubbles in the stock market, the Wall Street financial crisis. Americans are too proud of their military to throw away the blame of their bankrupted economy, in large part onto their astronomically high military expenditures, which truly bankrupted America long before the financial crisis. The financial crisis reflected fundamentally bad financial principles.

Germain Dufour
Spiritual Leader of the Global Community
President
Global Parliament
Federation of Global Governments

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Sanhati.com

The devil’s advocate?

It was a bizarre spectacle, Karan Thapar interviewing Dr. Binayak Sen on CNN-IBN on Maoist violence in India. The subject of Maoist violence, more than any other at present, agitates the powers that be, including the media. The choreography of the debate follows a similar pattern. Invite a respectable person(s) for a “debate” on the issue of violence, lure them into believing they are invited because the media wants to present a contrary point of view; once there, corner the person, prevent them from making their point of view, heckle them if necessary, and somehow wring a statement, even if by slip of tongue, that can be bandied about as endorsement for the military offensive against the Maoists, as a moral justification for the so called “war on terror”. This desperation for moral endorsement from respected citizens like Dr. Sen, is itself evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the powers that be.

Dr. Sen tried, heroically, to make the point that one third of the people of India suffer from chronic malnutrition, that over 50% of the Adivasis and 60% of Dalits are bordering on starvation (dear readers, put these numbers in perspective by bearing in mind that India is one-sixth of humanity), that over 50% of India (1/12th of world population) is undernourished, and that state policies that create and sustain the conditions for this mass starvation fall within the definition of “genocide” in international law. One would have thought that the enormity of what Dr. Sen was saying, and its implications for what we have become as a nation, made his point of view, at least, worth listening to. But no, Thapar had lured Dr. Sen into the platform to wring a public condemnation from him against Maoists, and he was determined to do that come what may. Half the nation may have turned into semi-starved ghosts, but we need to condemn Maoist violence, first and foremost, to feel morally good about ourselves; and it was Thapar’s job to make the nation feel they stood on high moral ground. Any competing ethics, or higher moral principle, would deflate the performance choreographed for the nation.

“I am not talking on behalf of the Maoists. I am talking from the point of view of a human rights worker”

Dr Sen said as he tried desperately to stand his ground. Again and again he tried to make the point about state violence.

“I will come to the state. I promise you and I will handle the state later but first I want to hear you clearly say that annihilation which is an acceptable and justified policy of the Maoists is one that you completely, totally condemn”

Karan Thapar persisted, literally putting words into Dr. Sen’s mouth. Note too his words “I”, Thapar, “want you to clearly say…” etc. Of course Thapar never came to the state as he promised, we knew he wouldn’t, there is only that much time allocated for a show, and that time was up. The show was never about hearing Dr. Sen’s point of view; it was a choreographed performance to corner a respected citizen into endorsing the moral justifications touted out for the state’s military offensive. Ironically the show was called the “Devil’s Advocate” –Karan Thapar, the Devil’s Advocate?

No, this is no time for humorous asides. Let’s turn to the moral outrage. Ethics is important, and moral awareness is the essence of being human. It is important we do not walk away from ethics, especially when there is a widespread perception among ordinary Indians that the nation has lost its moral compass. Thapar too is bound by ethics. Basic principles of media ethics require that an interviewee is given an opportunity to make his/her point of view clearly, that their views are not misrepresented, that there is no ulterior motive or collateral purpose, and to ensure that views of the interviewee are fairly represented. Thapar clearly breached rules of fairness and representation in media ethics. Paradoxically, there appears to be a correlation between the length of the code on media ethics in India and falling ethical standards in the media. When there were no codes we had a vibrant independent press. Over the years as scepticism about the media has grown so has the length of the code from one page in 1992 to 112 pages today (see Norms of Journalistic Conduct, Press Council of India, 1992, 1996, 2005, 2010). Let’s not judge this only through narrow legalistic lenses.

We are proud of the spiritual foundations of our society a tad bit more than others. In the Indian tradition, when we invite a guest we are required to show him/her due respect, and treat them with some indulgence. Amartaya Sen wrote about how we are an “argumentative society” and about how the ethos of public debate goes back a long time in our history. In a moving scene at the end of the Kurkshetra war (in the Mahabharata), the philosopher Charvaka publicly accused Krishna of bringing ruin upon the entire society by his actions. Everyone heard him out, including a subdued Krishna. Clearly Dr. Sen was Thapar’s athithi (guest). But Thapar was not going to let any Western legal principles of media ethics, any Indian codes of athithi dharma (codes of right conduct towards guests) or the glorious Indian cultural traditions of public debate to get in his way. Freedom of the press it appears is freedom from all constraints: legal, cultural, ethical. Are we surprised that so many ordinary Indians feel the nation has lost its moral anchor?

I have used this interview to exemplify how ethics gets confounded in the media and in public debate, but the point can be extended to all sorts of public debates in the Indian media today. If the job of the media is to inform and educate, that purpose is defeated either because viewers and readers are left bewildered as a result, or condemned to vitriolic mindlessness. The first is the basis for cynicism and the second, for fascism. This production of mindlessness requires closer scrutiny.

Institutional and individual violence

At the heart of the controversy over Maoist violence is an issue that is foundational to modern societies, an issue that Thapar went out of his way to ensure did not register in public minds: the difference between institutional and individual violence. Only human beings can make ethical judgments because only human beings have a psyche capable of moral differentiation. For that reason in criminal trials, for example, intention is decisive. Institutions are not human beings, they are literally “mindless”. Institutions are complexes of laws that structure society and allocate people their places within it. When an institutional system is founded on violence, violence becomes the necessary condition for the continued existence of those institutions, in other words, the institution cannot survive without violence, it becomes like the proverbial vampire that will die if it cannot suck blood. This type of violence is fundamentally different from individual and group violence. However brutal, or obnoxious, or vicious it may be, individual violence is still human violence, it involves the mind, rightly or wrongly, and it invariably invites contestation over ethics in society. Institutions founded on violence, on the other hand, will collapse if violence is taken away. Individuals in charge of institutions must, therefore, continue to engage in violence if they are to save the institution from collapse. Let me exemplify this.

In a controversial TV interview to 60 Minutes (5/12/96) Lesley Stahl the TV host, when questioning the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on U.S. sanctions against Iraq, asked her:

“We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Her reply was:

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

This statement scandalised a large cross section of people in the United States and elsewhere. Imagine by some miracle if a total pacifist were to occupy the White House. It is estimated that sixty percent of the American economy is directly or indirectly dependent on defense. Corporate America: the Lockheeds, the Boeings, the Northrops, will collapse like a pack of cards, taking with them the thousands they employ. Most technological innovations of the West that invest their institutions with so much power and capabilities are the result of militarism. Even banal things like food packaging, gyms and exercise regimes, dietetics, aging research, are driven by militarism. The internet and the communication technologies were military innovations. The incorporation of civilian and military uses of technologies through dual-use policies makes the intermeshing of militarism and economy virtually inseparable. The entire society is organized in a “warlike way” to use Marx’s phrase. In such a military-industrial-finance-media complex waging war becomes a necessity for survival of those institutions. If Iraqi children die in their millions in the process, it is sad, but necessary. Albright was not wrong. She was speaking as Secretary of State for the US state and economy. Her only ethics, if there was one, was to save those institutions from collapse.

Our messiah of peace in the White House will have to reorganize life in America, bottoms-up, get people to plant potatoes and cabbages, run their own local communal power plants, dismantle the supermarkets and get them to preserve and cook their own food, and turn them into a community of people affiliated to land, instead of a community of interest groups affiliated to different types of market institutions. The messiah of peace will, without doubt, be branded a trouble maker, a revolutionary, a terrorist, even a Maoist perhaps, who knows. He will without doubt be liquidated before long. Only the people of America can undertake such a task, and that too only when they feel so committed to building a non-violent society that they are prepared for the sacrifices, and violence and bloodshed the task will necessarily invite.

The Indian armed forces are the fourth largest in the world. Unlike the United State, the Indian military has been used primarily against the Indian people: against Kashmiris, Nagas, Assamese, North-eastern peoples, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, or… Maoists. This is a fundamental difference between capitalist nations like the US, and India. The Indian state must colonise its own people to remain affiliated to the military-industrial-finance-media complex that rules. Is the price worth it? The NDTVs and the CNN-IBN journalists are too terrified to pose this question to the ministers of the Indian state as Lesley Stahl did with Madlinene Albright. Understandably so. Colonising one’s own people is far more terrifying than colonising all those “out there” somewhere.

We in India are more fortunate, however, because our task of building a non-violent society is much less daunting. It is less daunting precisely because fifty percent of our people, at least, are already outside the formal, institutionalised, globalised, militarist political economy. Many more, such as the urban poor for example, are only marginally or loosely tied to it. Of course, that is also the reason why they are being slowly starved to death, or driven to commit suicide, as with the two hundred thousand farmers. Only a numerically small, but economically powerful section is tied to the political economy of violence, and they must defend it come what may.

The violence of individuals and political groups pales into insignificance in comparison. The nation faces its worst crisis ever as swathes of land is auctioned off to powers that be and people turned into cannon fodder for the military-industrial-finance-media complexes of vampire states. The Maoists are desperate to get the message across to a nation besotted with the vampire, and they do it using desperate means. Are we going to shoot the messenger because we do not like the message, or, ostrich-like, bury our heads in the sand because we do not want to know about the message?

The message will not go away because we do not like how the message is delivered. If anything it will feed the vampire institutions with more blood. This has nothing to do with our revulsions for the methods of the messengers. Remember, institutions do not feel? They have no psyche? The message and the desperate messengers are part of the same problem, the problem of the political economy of violence. Paradoxically, the institutions founded on violence, the military-industrial-finance-media complexes, are the ones that preach the ideology of non-violence in unequivocal terms; and those who advocate peace with justice end up advocating violence. How are we to understand this paradox? We cannot say it is because the institutions are hypocrites because, if institutions are mindless, they cannot be hypocrites.

Merchants, people of the land, and political violence

In his book The Great Transformation, written during the World Wars, a time when states and economic institutions were collapsing, as now, Karl Polanyi points out that during the hundred years between 1815-1914, for the first time in their histories, European powers did not go to war with one another (except minor forays) and he inquires into the reasons for this extraordinary century of non-violence. The reasons he argues was “haute finance” the emergence of financial institutions that

“functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world”.

Let us not rush to the conclusion that there was global peace during that time. Polanyi adds:

“They were anything but pacifists; they made their fortune in the financing of wars; they were impervious to moral consideration; they had no objection to any number of minor, short, or localized wars. But their business would be impaired if a general war between the Great Powers should interfere with the monetary foundations of the system.”

For the merchants, just the right level of war is good because it allows for sale of weapons and provides access to markets; but too much war destroys trading systems. In the merchant’s world view non-violence is a way of limiting and containing wars. Modern capitalism projects the merchant’s world view as the human world view: violence in economy through usury, expropriation, whatever; and containment of violence in politics through ideology of non-violence. See how the UN writes PEACE in large bold letters in its Charter, but retains veto powers with the victorious Allies in the Security Council? When the Cold War ended the Euro-American states hailed it as new era of peace for the world. The Pentagon, however, spent many anxious hours trying to work out what a defence policy in the era of peace should look like. After much deliberation, it adopted the “two-wars” policy. If somehow wars to be limited to two at a time, America would just about manage to survive peace. We witnessed great euphoria about peace simultaneously with new forms of militarism. The Pentagon’s logic makes perfect sense, but only to those who subscribe to the merchants’ world view or “haute finance” as Polanyi calls it. The recipients of violence are not merchants however, they are “people-of-the-land”; and their ideas of violence and non-violence differ fundamentally from those of the merchants’.

The Maori word “whenua” means land/earth and umbilical cord, and whanau, derived from whenua, means biradri or extended family from common ancestry. For people of the land, land is the umbilical cord that ties them to this world. Cut it, and it is like a new born child thrown away from its mother; it means certain death. People-of-the-land have always defended their land, non-violently if possible, violently if necessary, because land is life itself. This is the case with indigenous peoples anywhere in the world, and our own Adivasis and Dalits are no exception. It is not surprising therefore that with the new round of aggressive “haute finance”, with liberalisation and globalisation, indigenous peoples everywhere have been at the forefront of defending the land. People-of-the-land throw the peace plans of merchants, the “two-war” strategies of “haute finance”, the “rights based approach to development” and such, into disarray. The Adivasis and Dalits tar the shine on “shining India”. See the fifth Afghan war? The mandated territories of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and many more that the League of Nations distributed to the Great Powers to keep the peace? Did the people-of-the-land quietly fade away with the years?

And what of our own people-of-the –land? First we said, don’t fight, after Independence you will be okay, then we said don’t fight we will give you special place in the Constitution, don’t fight we will give you land reforms, don’t fight we will give you jobs in the factories that we build on your land, and now we are saying, don’t fight, we will kill you non-violently, by slowly starving you to death. Are we prepared to be party to an economy founded on cheap labour and confiscated land? Are we going to allow our land and people to be auctioned in the global bazaars? Are we people-of-the land? Or, are we not?

Dear readers, I can see many of you pouncing on me at this point, wagging your fingers and saying to me: but the Maoists are not Adivasis and Dalits. I will concede the point to the sceptical reader; I will agree that we cannot conflate Maoists with Adivasis and Dalits. But I must insist that you answer my question: are you people-of-the-land? Are you a bystander who watches your people and land auctioned in global bazaars? Or, are you going to defend it by whatever means you are capable of? If India is auctioned off, all of us, without exception, lose the ground on which we stand rightfully. Are you going to leave the your fate to the Vedantas and Stanley Morgans, up today, down tomorrow; or the military-industrial-finance-media complexes always on the prowl hunting for “rogue states”, today Iraq, tomorrow Iran, the day after India?

Do you want to be counted as the people-of-the-land, or, are you happy to remain a citizen who wants to be allocated a place in the institutions of the political economy of violence? The urgency of this question drives many to take desperate steps. When we fail to answer this question unequivocally we create the political spaces for Maoism.

Is there a difference between citizens and people-of-the-land?

Civilisation, Nation-State, and Comprador State

The Indian subcontinent is home to an ancient civilisation, a fact that people of the subcontinent are conscious of. The problem with such an inheritance is that we have to live up to it. A civilisation defines its place in the world, provides the people with their conceptual resources, their languages, forms their relationship to their natural environments, and helps people to locate themselves in society and to make sense of the world they live in. Citizenship, in contrast, is a relationship of individuals to the state which is an institution, a constitutional order that oversees a range of economic and political institutions. Clearly, we have forfeited our claims to be a civilisation if we cannot create the conditions that sustain life for our people. Actually we are not even a nation-state properly speaking, because a nation state integrates all its citizens, even the poorest, and most discriminated, in its military-industrial-finance-media complexes, in its institutions, from dole queues to defence. Nation-states bludgeon other states to keep their “civil society” integrated into the state machine. Can you see Germany or Sweden launching Operation Green Hunt against their poor? The Indian state in contrast leaves out half if population from its institutions, it leaves them to fend for themselves, and it is on the prowl, always, to confiscate anything they may have: their land, resources, labour, and starves them to death. The other half, it leaves to the vagaries of global markets, pledges them to the military-industrial-financial-media complexes, the real nation states. Juridical recognition alone is not enough to be a state. We are a comprador state, a dalal state, which will collapse if we start getting fancy ideas about our place in the world.

This is the reason why we are unable to respond to the present crisis. The Maoist say: constitutionalism has failed our people, and we say, true it has failed, but what can we do, let us try once more. The Maoists say: India has become a violent society, forty percent of our parliamentarians have a track record of violence, our democratic political parties have their militias, we kill freely in the name of Ram, our army with its vast arsenal has waged war against our people for sixty-three years, and therefore, they say violence is the order of the day. We say: all this is true, but you Maoists should not be violent.

The Adivasis and the Dalits (see, I am not conflating them with Maoists) raise a more fundamental question about human life, one that touches a raw nerve in modern societies. They say land and labour can never become commodities. That human life can only be lived out on land in relation with nature; that land, labour and nature are necessary conditions for human life; that it is not possible to gouge out “The Economy” from society and cast it into different sets of institutions, insulate “The Economy” from people. Doing this is violence par excellence. Civil society displaces people from land, and promises them a place in market institutions: labour markets, consumer markets, property markets, whatever. That capitalism is made possible, and underpinned by colonisation of land and labour, nature and culture. What do we say to them? We say: all this is true but let us turn to the very colonial inheritances for our conceptual resources, for knowing our place in the world, for nurturing our land and people. We are unable to think beyond ideas of liberal democracy, economic and political rights, individualism and constitutionalism, and all the conceptual, philosophical, ethical, legal inheritances we have from our colonisers. Macaulay must be laughing in his grave.

India stands at historical crossroads at present. The challenge it faces is the task of real and actual decolonisation: of the mind, of the institutions, of the political economy for the first time since Columbus set sail on that unfortunate voyage five hundred years ago; a daunting task by any measure. India cannot meet this challenge by turning the clock back, for the cycle of time rotates without beginning or end.

The Cycle of Violence

Violence, no doubt, begets violence. We can all agree that the vicious cycle must be broken. But who should break the cycle? The case can be argued both ways: the state is violent therefore the Maoists are violent, or, the Maoists are violent therefore the state is violent.

To the best of my knowledge (and I am open to correction here) the Buddha was the first thinker to address this question directly. It is useful to recall the context in which he spoke about the cycle of violence and the onus of breaking it. He too lived in difficult times.

King Prasanjit, a follower of the Buddha, was attacked by Ajatasatru, a powerful king with expansionist ambitions. Ajatasatru mobilised a large army, defeated Prasanjit, confiscated his kingdom and took his people as slaves. Prasanjit fled and lived as a demoralised refugee, incognito. A merchant named Ananthapindika offered to finance Prasanjit and help him raise an army to regain his kingdom. Prasanjit took the merchant’s support, raised an army and defeated Ajatasatru. The defeated Ajatasatru pleaded with Prasanjit to end his life. Prasanjit took Ajatasatru, instead, to the Buddha instead and said: he attacked me, therefore I attacked him, but really I want nothing from him, I want to let him go. The Buddha agreed that Prasanjit was right in defeating Ajatasatru first, but equally, in wanting to free him, because the onus of breaking the cycle of violence is on the victor, the strong, and the more powerful. Note too, that Prasanjit does not see himself beholden to the merchant forever.

If we are to extend the analogy to our times, we must insist that the state, clearly the more powerful party, must cease its violence first, must stop displacement of people, stop forcible acquisition of land, stop unending suffering. Sadly, we live in a mindless modern state. If we could get the state to end violence we could stand on high moral ground and say to the Maoists what the Buddha said to Prasanjit and Ajatasatru: “Victory begets hatred; defeat begets suffering. They that are wise will forgo both victory and defeat. Insult is born of insult, anger of anger. They that are wise will forgo both victory and defeat. (The Life of Buddha, by A. Ferdinand Herold, tr. by Paul C Blum [1922])

It is a hallmark of civilisation that the strong, the more powerful, the better armed are called upon to renounce it first. We are not a civilisation any longer, we cannot think for ourselves about the destiny of our people and society. We take our moral cues from heads of nation-states: “war on terror”, “axis of evil” and such. The Buddha said:

The Killer begets a killer;

One who conquers, a conqueror.

The abuser begets abuse,

The reviler, one who reviles.

Thus by the unfolding of karma,

The plunderer is plundered.

We witness before our eyes the “killer begetting a killer”, and the “unfolding” of the karma of the conquerors and abusers and revilers and plunderers. But we live in strange times of equality, liberal rights, and individual freedoms, and somehow these lenses do not help us to see the difference between abuser and abused, between plunderer and plundered, between cause and effect, the begetter and the begotten.

Postscript

In 1873, when India faced famines, starvation deaths, disease, and political unrest, another medical professional someone we would call a human rights campaigner today was invited to speak on the situation in India. She told the gathering:

It is not, however, more enquiry that is most needed. Enquiry and investigation are the curse of India, as of any country where we do not act up to the light we have : where evils are investigated and re -investigated fifty times over, simply as an excuse for doing nothing. […]Under the permanent settlement the share of the produce of the soil left to the cultivator is often too little for health. A process of slow starvation may thus go on, which so enfeebles the great mass of the people, that when any epidemic sets in they are swept off wholesale. Land is let and sublet to a degree unknown anywhere else. […]Such is the relation between the State and the ‘ creatures of its own creation,’ the Zemindars.

What is the answer given by modern ‘financial policy ‘ or impolicy ? […] Is it not as though we said : It is ‘ unsound financial policy ‘ to live unless you have money in your stocking […]?Is it cheaper to let a man ‘ get dead ‘ than to feed him or house him, on borrowed capital ? […].But one must live in order to be a subject for sanitary considerations at all; and one must eat to live. If one is killed off by famine, one certainly need not fear fever or cholera. [ “Life Or Death In India” Paper read at the Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Norwich, 1873 LONDON :Harrisons and Sons (1874)]

That health professional and campaigner was Florence Nightingale. Fortunately for Nightingale, there were no NDTVs and CNN-IBNs at that time and she was allowed to complete what she had come to say.

Uruknet.info

Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S.-led World Bank tightened its grip on Haitian economic policy. Essentially, it decided that the dysfunctional Haitian elite should encourage international investment in export-oriented assembly sweatshops. This was called a "structural adjustment program." Haiti’s trade tariffs on foreign goods were to be removed, public utilities privatized, and all state subsidies removed—including on essential items like gasoline, subject to sharp price fluctuations that can greatly increase transportation costs for workers and street vendors.

Assembling the goods, of course, would be the super-exploited Haitian worker, considered by World Bank experts to be Haiti’s greatest asset. The ideal was to make Haiti "the Taiwan of the Caribbean." Today, textile assembly plants produce 90% of exports.

There are about 20,000 assembly workers in Haiti. They make about 20 cents an hour, about 70 Haitian gourdes a day (40 gourdes equals around $1). A study by the Haitian government showed that a subsistence salary would be closer to 300-400g a day.

Despite heavy quake damage to assembly-plant buildings, Haitian workers in some plants have been ordered back to work. Said Laurance Merzy, 32, a worker at DKDR Haiti in Port au Prince, "The walls are still standing, but they are cracked. It is not safe in there." The New York Times reports that the Palm Apparel T-shirt factory in Carrefour, a few miles outside of the capital and at the epicenter of the quake, collapsed, killing at least 500 people.

An essential player in maintaining the plantation system in Haiti is Obama asset Bill Clinton, who, in addition to promoting tourism and sweatshops in Haiti, successfully campaigned for passage of the Hope I and Hope II trade bills. Hope I and II require yearly certification that Caribbean countries are complying with guidelines that mirror World Bank policies—that is, super-low wages that attract foreign investors.

Last summer, a struggle erupted for passage of a minimum-wage increase from 70g to 400g a day. Tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in August, but a massive deployment of UN troops blocked their entry to the assembly sector. In the end, Preval bowed to pressure from Bill Clinton to increase the minimum daily wage to 125g ($3) in 2009, which would rise to 200g ($5) in 2012. Assembly workers are exempt from the new wage levels and will only receive the 200 gourdes in 2012.

In reality, the initial 125 gourdes is worth less than half of the minimum wage that existed in 1980 under the U.S.-backed dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Annual inflation in Haiti over the last decade was about 12-14%, although accurate figures are hard to come by.

Another key goal of the World Bank plan was to redirect food production away from satisfying the nutritional needs of Haitians to producing food for the export market. A 1982 document of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a federal "aid" agency often linked to the CIA, proposed the "gradual but systematic removal" of domestic crops from 30% of all tilled land, whose products can then be exported.

The result was the massive migration of Haitian rural farmers and workers from the countryside, where most Haitians live, to already over-crowded urban centers like Port-au-Prince, where unemployment stood at 70-80% before the earthquake.

Rice, a staple of the Haitian diet, used to be produced in quantities that would satisfy domestic needs. However, World Bank economic policy meant dropping tariffs on imported goods. Within a few years, cheaper "Miami rice" flooded the Haitian market, resulting in the destruction of domestic rice farming.

In 2008, after a 45% jump in the price of Miami rice in two years, there were "food riots," as thousands poured into the streets in the capital shouting, "We’re hungry. Feed us!" Some described their hunger pains as "swallowing Clorox." UN troops killed about a dozen protesters throughout Haiti. The practice of eating mud laced with sugar is not uncommon in Haiti.

Keeping Haiti politically dependent on the World Bank and Western capital are loans from the World Bank and imperialist governments that come with political strings attached, as do the "structural adjustment" programs. Today, over 50% of the almost $1 billion Haitian budget originates from so-called foreign aid.

Foreign debt had multiplied 17.5 times between 1957 and 1986, the years of the Duvalier family dictatorship. In 2001, the yearly debt servicing alone was $321 million.

However, last June the WB, IMF, and Paris Club reduced the current debt by $1.2 billion out of $1.4 billion to make payments "bearable" as part of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), after years of delay. New loans will increase the debt again unless a genuine debt cancellation is enacted. In order to qualify for HIPC, however, Haiti had to be certified by imperialist institutions as being in compliance with World Bank/IMF policies of "structural adjustment," the privatization of public utilities, the elimination of tariffs on foreign goods, and the elimination of all price subsidies, etc.

A government study of the public phone company found that its annual revenues amounted to approximately $600 million, but as a result of privatization, this amount was lost to the Haitian people for schools, roads, and medical care—as well as debt repayment.

Although in the wake of the crisis there has been an international call to cancel Haiti’s debt, much of it having originated with dictatorships, Haiti is still on the hook for about $764 million to U.S.-dominated lending institutions, which constitute about 80% of all Haitian debt.

Activists in the Jubilee USA network and author Naomi Klein launched a campaign that pressured the World Bank’s International Monetary Fund into restructuring a recent $100 million loan into a no-interest loan, with the possibility that the IMF might decide that it does not have to be repaid at all.

What is needed is a powerful workers’ movement in Haiti that will challenge the entire system of vulture capitalism and imperialism and reconstruct Haiti under the democratic control of Haiti’s working masses. It would enforce the cancellation of all foreign debts. That would require building a revolutionary party and working for a socialist revolution in Haiti, and building a powerful solidarity movement in the U.S.

As the early 20th-century revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice faced by humanity is a choice between "socialism and barbarism."

(The author is a long-time Haiti solidarity activist and a member of the TWU in New York.)

Guardian.co.uk

The living fabric of this planet - its ecosystems and biodiversity - are in rapid decline worldwide. This is visible and palpable and is variously due to commercial over-exploitation, or population pressures, or a raft of unhelpful policies, or some combination. At a very fundamental human level, however, it is due to the lack of awareness that there is a problem with human society being disconnected from nature.

Economics is blamed for much of our woes these days and credited with little so two questions need to be asked: is economics part of the problem of ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss? And is it part of the solution?

The answer to the first question is a fairly obvious "yes". The economic invisibility of nature in our dominant economic model is both a symptom and a root cause of this problem. We value what we price, but nature's services - providing clean air, fresh water, soil fertility, flood prevention, drought control, climate stability, etc - are, mostly, not traded in any markets and not priced. These so-called "ecosystem services" are all "public goods" provided free. Our tendency to value private wealth creation over improving public wealth - creating a healthier natural world, for example - doesn't help.

We cannot manage what we do not measure and we are not measuring either the value of nature's benefits or the costs of their loss. We seem to be navigating the new and unfamiliar waters of ecological scarcities and climate risks with faulty instruments. Replacing our obsolete economic compass could help economics become part of the solution to reverse our declining ecosystems and biodiversity loss.

We need a new compass to set different policy directions, change incentive structures, reduce or phase out perverse subsidies, and engage business leaders in a vision for a new economy. Holistic economics – or economics that recognise the value of nature's services and the costs of their loss – is needed to set the stage for a new "green economy".

The crisis of biodiversity loss can only begin to be addressed in earnest if the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services are fully recognised and represented in decision-making. This may reveal the true nature of the trade-offs being made: between different ecosystem services (food provision or carbon storage), between different beneficiaries (private gain by some, public loss to many), at different scales (local costs, global benefits) and across different time horizons. When the value of ecosystem services are understood and included, what may have looked like an "acceptable" trade-off may appear quite unacceptable.

Conversely, benefits that were unrecognised become visible, and worth preserving. In Costa Rica, payments to farmers who conserve forests on their land rather than destroy them for low-earning pasture have become almost a national environment programme. Soil and water benefits flow to farmlands all around them. And this was funded by a small 3% tax on transport.

In India, ecological restoration and water harvesting is paid for by a national rural employment guarantee scheme, employing millions. In San Francisco and New York, ecological infrastructure is the reality: reservoirs and lake watersheds surrounded by well-managed forests provide cities with a freshwater supply. Meanwhile, biomimicry - using nature's methods to solve human problems, such as Velcro which was inspired by dog hair and burrs - is offering opportunities for innovative businesses across both developing and developed nations.

These are all examples of new economic models for government and business in which both private opportunity and "public goods" are being created and rewarded by a new partnership between business, citizens, and their government.

Teeb (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) has assembled a library of suggestions for policy-makers on how to use good economics to conserve wild nature (TEEB for Policy-Makers, November 2009). In June, TEEB will publish a parallel document on what role business can play in changing the rules of the game and herald a society that profits and progresses yet lives in harmony with nature.

• Pavan Sukhdev is a special adviser to the United Nations environment programme's green economy initiative and study leader for Teeb. He is speaking at the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture tonight, co-hosted by environmental charity Earthwatch and strategy consultancy and thinktank SustainAbility

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

TruthDig.com

As any student of foreign and national security policy well knows, the devil is in the details. Back in April 2009, in a speech delivered in Prague, the Czech Republic, President Barack Obama articulated his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Since that time, however, the Obama administration has offered very little of substance to push this vision forward. When one looks past the grand statements of the president for policy implementation that supports the rhetoric, one is left empty-handed. No movement on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). No extension of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia (START). No freeze on the development of a new generation of American nuclear weapons. Without progress in these areas, any prospects of a new approach to global nuclear nonproliferation emerging from the May 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference are virtually zero.

Perhaps the most telling indicator of failed nonproliferation policy on the part of the Obama administration is the fact that there has been no progress on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, and in particular the ongoing controversy surrounding a proposed uranium exchange. The deal would have Iran swap a significant portion of its existing stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium (the level needed to fuel Iran’s planned nuclear power reactors, as opposed to uranium enriched to 90 percent, which is needed for nuclear weapons) in exchange for nuclear fuel rods containing uranium enriched to 19.5 percent (the level needed to operate a U.S.-built research reactor in Tehran that produced nuclear isotopes for medical purposes). Iran is running out of fuel for this reactor, and needs a new source of fuel or else it will be forced to shut it down. As a signatory member of the NPT, Iran should have the right to acquire this fuel on the open market, subject of course to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, but the United States and Europe have held any such sale hostage to Iran’s agreeing to suspend its indigenous uranium enrichment program, which is the source of the 3.5 percent enriched uranium currently in Iran.

The crux of the U.S. and European concerns rests not with Iran’s possession of 3.5 percent enriched uranium, but rather that the enrichment technique employed by Iran to produce this low-enriched uranium could be used, with some significant modifications, to manufacture high-enriched uranium (90 percent) usable in a nuclear weapon. This reality, and the fears of a nuclear-armed Iran it produces, trumps the fact that the IAEA today is in a position to certify that it can account for the totality of Iran’s inventory of nuclear material, and that any diversion of nuclear material would be detected by the IAEA almost immediately. Furthermore, beyond its capacity to enrich uranium, there is no real evidence that Iran has engaged in a nuclear weapons program.

But the fear and hype that emanate from American and European policymakers, strongly influenced by the zero-tolerance policy of Israel when it comes to Iran and anything nuclear, peaceful or otherwise, have created an environment where common sense goes out the window and anything becomes possible. Take, for instance, Iran’s current stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium. The IAEA certifies that Iran is in possession of approximately 1,800 kilograms of this material. Policy wonks and those in the intelligence community given to hypotheticals have postulated scenarios that have Iran using this stock of 3.5 percent enriched uranium as the feedstock for a breakout enrichment effort that, if left to its own devices, could produce enough high-enriched uranium (90 percent) for a single nuclear bomb. This breakout capability would require Iran to reconfigure thousands of the centrifuges it uses for low-level enrichment for use in the stepped-up process of follow-on enrichment. Ironically, one of the next steps required in such a scenario would be for Iran to reconfigure its centrifuges to enrich uranium up to 20 percent—roughly the level Iran needs for the nuclear fuel required to operate the Tehran research reactor.

Fears about a potential covert Iranian enrichment breakout capability reached feverish proportions when, in September 2009, Iran revealed the existence of (and U.S. intelligence proclaimed the discovery of) a prospective small underground centrifuge enrichment facility near the city of Qom. The fact that this facility was under construction, and consisted as of September 2009 of little more than a reinforced hole in the ground without any equipment installed, did nothing to allay the fears of those who saw an Iranian nuclear bomb behind every bush, or under every rock. Suddenly Iran was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, and something had to be done to prevent this from happening.

The focus of attention shifted away from Iran’s ongoing enrichment capability, which the U.S. and Europe demanded be permanently suspended, to Iran’s 1,800 kilograms of 3.5 percent enriched uranium. This material represented Iran’s theoretical atomic bomb. If the material could be placed under international control, then Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, at least for the immediate future, could be thwarted. Iran was not going to freely hand over this material. However, a deal was negotiated between the U.S. and Iran that would have Iran ship 1,600 kilograms of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium to Russia, which would then further enrich it to 19.5 percent before sending it to France, which would process the uranium into fuel rods unusable for nuclear weapons. This fuel swap appeared to provide an elegant solution to a vexing problem. Indeed, President Obama embraced it as his own initiative when it was announced in October 2009.

For Iran, the swap was always about acquiring the needed nuclear fuel rods, manufactured from 19.5 percent enriched uranium, in order to continue operation of its research reactor in Tehran, which produces much-needed nuclear isotopes for medical purposes. The main attraction for the Iranians for such a deal, beyond acquiring the fuel rods, was that they would not need to produce any 19.5 percent enriched uranium itself, and thus not have to reconfigure their current centrifuge-based enrichment infrastructure to operate beyond its 3.5 percent enrichment threshold. Iran has consistently maintained that it neither requires, nor desires, any capability to enrich uranium beyond the 3.5 percent level needed to manufacture nuclear fuel rods for its own nuclear power reactors. Having its uranium enrichment infrastructure locked in at 3.5 percent simplified not only Iran’s own operations, but also the safeguard monitoring and inspection requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency, charged with verifying Iran’s compliance with the terms of the NPT. Iran viewed the fuel swap as a means of facilitating international acceptance of its uranium enrichment program, a point of view that was in fundamental opposition to that of the United States and Europe.

No amount of finessing the specifics of a fuel swap, whether it be done in stages, managed by a neutral third party, or carried out over the course of several months or several years, could reconcile the Iranian position with that of the U.S. and Europe. At the center of this problem is the Iranian uranium enrichment program itself. Any fuel swap deal is little more than window dressing to the larger issue of whether or not Iran will be permitted by the international community to enrich uranium. To the U.S. and Europe, finer points such as whether such enrichment would be capped at 3.5 percent, or diversified to include 19.5 percent, remain irrelevant, since their unified policy approach is to suspend all uranium enrichment activities inside Iran.

The fatal flaw in the Obama fuel swap proposal, when it was broached in October 2009, was that it failed to explicitly state that any fuel swap had to be linked to Iran’s suspension of its uranium enrichment program. While policy wonks in and out of the Obama administration can argue that such a position was more than implied, given the existence of U.N. Security Council resolutions that explicitly call for suspension, any deal that introduces Iran’s stocks of low-enriched uranium as a legitimate commodity provides de facto legitimization of the processes that produced that commodity. Since Iran has consistently refused to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, it had every reason to treat the proposed fuel swap as a stand-alone deal that focused on a short-term problem, and not as part of the larger U.S.-driven demands for enrichment suspension.

The U.S. policy objective was never to provide Iran with 19.5 percent enriched uranium fuel rods, or to lock Iran in at a 3.5 percent enrichment threshold, but rather to get the majority of Iran’s existing stocks of 3.5 percent enriched uranium out of the country, thereby eliminating any scenario that had Iran using this low-enriched uranium as feedstock for any breakout nuclear weapons production capability, no matter how farfetched such a scenario might be. This is why the Obama administration never paid much attention to the details of such a swap, since these details simply didn’t matter. The U.S. approach was never about facilitating a swap so much as it was about facilitating a kidnapping. The policy objective was to get the majority of Iran’s enriched uranium stocks under international control. Once Iran no longer had access to 1,600 kilograms of its 1,800-kilogram stockpile of low-enriched uranium, the Obama administration could blunt the fear-driven concerns over the immediacy of any Iranian nuclear capability. It would take Iran several months to reconstitute its low-enriched uranium stocks to the level needed to produce its hypothetical nuclear bomb. During this period, the U.S. would redouble its demands for suspension of uranium enrichment and develop a comprehensive package of stringent economic sanctions that would be imposed on Iran should it fail to cooperate.

The fatal flaw in the U.S. approach was that it failed to recognize that such policy formulations may work on paper but in the real world things are far more complicated. The Obama administration had hoped for immediate Iranian agreement to the fuel swap. Once Iran’s enriched uranium was safely out of Iran, the U.S. would then redouble its diplomatic pressure to suspend enrichment activities while simultaneously pressing for international consensus on sanctions. U.S. policy formulators envisioned a seamless transition between these various stages of policy implementation. But Iran, by agreeing in principle to a fuel swap, but demanding closer scrutiny of the details inherent in any such deal, complicated implementation of the U.S. plan.

By December 2009, a point at which the U.S. had hoped to have the Iranian uranium under its control and a sanctions campaign under way, Iran had yet to agree to the specifics of any fuel swap but at the same time publically remained committed to the concept. That approach paralyzed the U.S.-led effort to rally support behind sanctions since most nations did not want to do anything that would threaten the fuel swap negotiations. As 2010 rolled around, the Iranian delay tactics forced the U.S. to shed all pretenses around the fuel swap. While Iranian negotiators spoke of a potential swap formula that could unfold over the course of several months, the U.S. spoke of a swap timetable stretching out several years, making such a swap useless for the purpose it was ostensibly being instituted for—the Iranian nuclear research reactor and the manufacture of medical isotopes.

With the true U.S. policy objective thus exposed, Iran last week announced that it would carry out its own indigenous enrichment of uranium to the 19.5 percent needed to fuel the research reactor. Whether Iran has the technical or practical capabilities necessary to bring such a plan to fruition is debatable. While reconfiguring its existing centrifuge cascades to produce 19.5 percent enriched uranium is not impossible, Iran has never before attempted to process enriched uranium into nuclear fuel rods. Likewise, there is a question about the viability of Iran’s feedstock of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), the gaseous material that is fed into the centrifuges for the purpose of enriching uranium.

Iran’s stores of foreign-procured UF6 are nearly exhausted. So is the stock of UF6 that Iran produced using foreign supplies of natural uranium. What is left for Iran is UF6 produced from indigenous sources of natural uranium. However, these stocks are believed to be contaminated with molybdenum, a metallic substance the presence of which creates destructive mass-distribution problems when Iran’s centrifuges are spun up to the more than 60,000 revolutions per minute needed to extract enriched uranium from the UF6 feedstock. If Iran cannot come up with the means to extract the molybdenum from its indigenous UF6, then short of finding an outside supplier of natural uranium or clean UF6 (activities that would have to be declared to the IAEA), the Iranian enrichment program will halt.

This would not prevent Iran from using its existing stocks of 3.5 percent enriched uranium as the feedstock for any effort to produce 19.5 percent uranium. Reconfiguration of its centrifuges to conduct this higher level of enrichment is likewise well within the technical capability of Iran. The ultimate testament to the failure of U.S. nonproliferation policy when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program is the reality that, in an effort to retard any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario that saw Iran rapidly converting its low-enriched stocks to high-enriched fissile material, the United States has actually facilitated such a scheme. Had the U.S. sought to lock Iran’s enrichment infrastructure in at a 3.5 percent capacity, any deviation from that level would have been viewed with suspicion. However, by creating the conditions that have Iran now seeking to build enrichment facilities capable of 20 percent enrichment, the Obama administration has significantly reduced the threshold of detection and prevention which was in place when all Iran produced was 3.5 percent enriched uranium.

The number of centrifuges required to step up enrichment of 20 percent uranium to higher levels is significantly smaller than the number needed to step up from 3.5 percent to 20 percent. Furthermore, any Iranian breakout scenario that starts at 20 percent enriched feedstock will reach its end objective of 90 percent enrichment far quicker than a similar program that starts at 3.5 percent. The Obama administration has not only made it easier for Iran to hide a covert nuclear weapons enrichment capability, but also made it far more efficient. That there is no evidence of any such program in existence does not matter in the minds of those who had given Iran such a capability to begin with. When dealing in a universe driven by the theoretical, the U.S. fumbling of the nuclear fuel swap with Iran has simply made the breakout theory more viable. And since U.S. nonproliferation policy toward Iran is more driven by faith-based analysis than it is by fact-based analysis, one can all but guarantee that the U.S. response to this new fiction will be real, and measurable, and have nothing but negative results for the Middle East and the World.

The unfolding crisis concerning Iran’s nuclear program represents but one of several nonproliferation failures perpetrated by the United States that, in combination, bode poorly for the upcoming NPT Review Conference scheduled for May. In May of 2009, at the conclusion of the preparatory committee for the NPT Review Conference, there were high hopes for the possibility of progress in reaching international consensus on nonproliferation issues, and reshaping the NPT to capture this consensus. Much of these hopes were derived from the statements and rhetoric of the Obama administration about nuclear disarmament and arms control. Unfortunately, rhetoric never caught up with reality.

Not only has U.S. policy toward Iran been exposed as operating in total disregard to the provisions of the NPT (Iran, after all, is permitted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under Article IV of that treaty), but the cornerstone commitments made by the Obama administration as a prerequisite for a successful NPT Review Conference in May 2010—movement toward ratification of the CTBT, agreement with the Russians to extend the verification mechanisms inherent in START while achieving even deeper cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals—have failed to materialize. There is almost no chance of the CTBT being submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification, let alone being actually ratified. The failure of the administration to extend START past its December 2009 expiration date has not only left the U.S. and Russia with no arms control verification vehicle, but has reignited dormant Cold War-era tendencies in both nations, with the Russians deploying a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missile and the U.S. talking about nuclear warhead modernization.

President Obama had hoped that the 2010 NPT Review Conference would pave the way to a global consensus on multilateral approaches toward nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Instead, its looming demise only accelerates the existing trend in the United States to reject international agreements and instead embrace a unilateralism sustained by the false premise that security can be achieved through nuclear supremacy. One only needs to examine the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ongoing fiasco that is America’s global war on terrorism to understand the fallacy of that argument.

The policy of the U.S. toward Iran’s nuclear program is to blame for much, if not all, of this failure. Had the administration used the fuel swap agreement as an opportunity to bring Iran back into the fold of the international community—not by excluding its uranium enrichment efforts, but rather legitimizing them through enhanced IAEA inspections and Iran’s agreement to participate in closely controlled regional fuel bank programs that kept its enriched uranium stocks under stringent international controls—there would not have been the policy floundering which occurred in the fall of 2009.

Fears about a phantom Iranian nuclear weapon would have dissipated, and with it the illogical U.S. insistence on ballistic missile defense initiatives that have fatally undermined the current round of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Had the Obama administration remained consistent with its September 2009 decision to terminate the controversial Bush-era missile defense plan involving the stationing of interceptor missiles and radar systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, there would be a START treaty today. But the sleight-of-hand approach, in which one program was terminated only to be replaced by another, triggered concerns among Russian military leaders about the real policy objectives of the Obama administration.

The administration has demonstrated that, for all the noble intent and objectives in the arena of arms control and nonproliferation exhibited at its inception, it too is susceptible to the addiction to nuclear weapons that has plagued America since 1945. This addiction, which feeds the notion of the United States’ self-appointed status of global savior and policeman, prevents any policy formulation that is perceived to weaken or undermine America’s nuclear supremacy. At a time when the world needed American leadership in the field of disarmament and nonproliferation, it instead got nothing but a replay of past policy, wrapped in the paranoid delusions of a nation that is unable or unwilling to come to grips with reality. Genuine international security is derived not from any nation, even the United States, seeking to impose deterrence-based policies through nuclear supremacy. True security comes from a world free of nuclear weapons.

To secure America, a president must have the courage to dismantle what, in the past, has been proclaimed as the foundation of our survival, but in reality presents us with the seeds of our destruction—nuclear weapons. President Obama had articulated such a vision in his groundbreaking speech in Prague back in April 2009. Since that time the United States has embarked on arms control and nonproliferation policies that have not only failed to move America and the world further down the path of peace and security, but actually made matters worse.

Policies must be judged not by their intent but their results. In this, the Obama administration’s policies represent an abysmal failure. The administration seeks to place the blame for these failures elsewhere, on Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. But the root cause of such failure lies with the utter lack of courage and conviction on the part of Barack Obama. He claimed to possess a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, only to succumb to the same hubris and avarice that afflicted past U.S. presidents when tempted by the world supremacy that nuclear weapons promise.

Scott Ritter was U.S. weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-1990) and chief inspector for the United Nations in Iraq (1991-1998) and is author of “Iraq Confidential” (2006), “Target Iran” (2007) and “Dangerous Ground: The Failure of U.S. Arms Control Policy From FDR to Obama,” to be published by Nation Books this year.

TomDispatch.com

On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks of “the global arms trade.”

Let’s consider that label for a moment, word by word:

*It is global, since there are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry.

*Arms sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we’re talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim.

*And trade suggests a give and take among many parties when, if we’re looking at the figures for that “trade” in a clear-eyed way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers.

How about updating it this way: “the global weapons monopoly.”

In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total “trade.” Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn’t take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term “global arms trade” doesn’t quite cut it.

Consider the “competition” and reality comes into focus. Take a guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the planet: China? Russia? No, Italy, with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold War superpower in the “trade,” was close behind Italy, with only $3.5 billion in arms agreements.

U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those Cold War days when the United States really did have a major competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service’s data for 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, shows global weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for most of the rest.

Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where the Pentagon could hang out a sign: “We arm the world.” No kidding, it’s true.

Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million), Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion), the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru ($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen.

From the Pentagon’s own data (which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon, and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008:

Saudi Arabia $6.06 billion

Iraq $2.50 billion

Morocco $2.41 billion

Egypt $2.31 billion

Israel $1.32 billion

Australia $1.13 billion

South Korea $1.12 billion

Great Britain $1.10 billion

India $1 billion

Japan $840 million

That’s more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco, for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those “buy 10, get the 11th free” punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop.

To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything you like, just not the “global arms trade.”

Getting Even More Competitive?

It used to be that the United States exported goods, products, and machinery of all sorts in prodigious quantities: cars and trucks, steel and computers, and high-tech gizmos. But those days are largely over.

The Obama administration now wants to launch a green manufacturing revolution in the U.S., and in February, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a new “National Export Initiative” with the aim of doubling American exports, a move he said would support the creation of two million new jobs. The U.S. could, of course, lose the renewable-energy race to China and that new exports program may never get off the ground. In one area, however, the U.S. is manufacturing products that are distinctly wanted -- things that go boom in the night -- and there the Pentagon is working hard to increase market share.

Don’t for a second think that the American global monopoly on weapons sales is accidental or unintentional. The constant and lucrative growth of this market for U.S. weapons makers has been ensured by shrewd strategic planning. Washington is constantly thinking of new and inventive ways to flog its deadly wares throughout the world.

How do you improve on near perfection? In the interest of enhancing that “competitive” edge in weapons sales, the Obama administration is investigating the possibility of revising export laws to make it even easier to sell military technology abroad. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see “wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports” in the name of “competitiveness.”

When he says “government technology exports,” Morell of course means weapons and other military technologies. “Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security,” he continued, “[Gates] strongly supports the administration’s efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper.”

The laws that regulate U.S. weapons exports are a jumbled mess, but in essence they delineate what the United States can sell to whom and through what bureaucratic mechanisms. According to U.S. law, for example, there are actually a few countries that cannot receive U.S. weapons. Myanmar under the military junta and Venezuela while led by Hugo Chavez are two examples. There are also some weapons systems that are not intended for export. Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor jet fighter was -- until the Pentagon recently stopped buying the plane -- deemed too sophisticated or sensitive to sell abroad. And there are reporting requirements that give members of Congress a window of opportunity within which they can question or oppose proposed weapons exports.

Given what’s being sold, these export controls are remarkably minimal in nature and are constantly under assault by the weapons industry. Bans on weapons sales to particular countries are regularly lifted through aggressive lobbying. (Indonesia, for example, was offered $50 million in weapons from 2006 to 2008 after an almost decade long congressional arms embargo.) The industry also works to relax controls on new technology exports to allies. Japan and Australia have mounted campaigns to win the ability to buy F-22 Raptors, potential sales that Lockheed Martin is now especially happy to entertain. The reporting window to Congress remains an important export control, but the time frame is shrinking as more countries are being “fast tracked,” making it harder for distracted representatives to react when a controversial sale comes up.

In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of “dual-use” technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments.

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon’s research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles. But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk. So the weapons industry and the Pentagon are arguing for “updating” the rules. If you translate updating as “loosening” the rules, then the United States would indeed be more “competitive,” but who exactly are we trying to beat?

Weapons Sales are Red Hot

“What’s Hot?” is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga’s blog entry for January 4, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable -- at least when it’s about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: “Afghanistan is really HOT!” Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.

As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration’s new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers’ expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that “means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do.”

It’s not just Afghanistan that’s now in the torrid zone. Weapons sales all over the world will be smoking in 2010 and beyond.

The year began with a bang when Wieranga’s Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan. Even as the United States leans heavily on China for debt servicing, Washington is giving the Mainland a big raspberry by offering the island of 22 million off its coast (which Washington does not formally recognize as an independent nation), a lethal cocktail of weaponry that includes $3 billion in Black Hawk helicopters. This deal comes on top of more than $11 billion in U.S. weapons exports to Taiwan over the last decade, and is certain to set Chinese-U.S. relations back a step or two.

Other bonanzas on the horizon? Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a whopping $7 billion. India, once a major arms buyer from the Soviet Union, is now another big buy-American customer, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion.

Such deals are staggering. They contribute more bang and blast to a world already bristling with particularly lethal weaponry. They are a striking American success story in a time filled with failures. Put in the lurid but everyday terms of a nation weaned on reality television, the Pentagon is pimping for the U.S. weapons industry. The weapons industry, for its part, is a pusher for every kind of lethal technology. The two of them together are working to ensure that more of the same will flow out of the U.S. in ever easier and more lucrative ways.

Global arms trade? Send that one back to the Department of Euphemisms. Pimps and pushers with a lucrative global monopoly on a killing drug -- maybe that’s the language we need. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to launch a “war on weapons.”

Frida Berrigan is a Senior Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative. “Weapons at War 2008,” a report she co-authored with William D. Hartung, goes into much more detail about the politics and pratfalls of weapons exports.

For decades, international activists have been pushing the idea of a tax on financial transactions. Such a tax would give us a twofer: a drop in short-term speculation that serves no productive purpose and leads to dangerous bubbles, and 2) loads of money that could be used for good things, like health, climate, and jobs programs.

Today, we’re closer to achieving this two-for-one deal than we’ll probably ever be in our lifetimes. Reeling from the worst financial crisis in 80 years, policymakers are not only desperate for new sources of revenue, they’re more open to rethinking the role of Wall Street and making sure it serves real economic needs.

To take advantage of these new opportunities, a wide range of activists, including trade unionists, international health advocates, and climate justice groups, have come together to move this decades-old proposition into practice. Their efforts are gaining traction—and even some celebrity support.

The specific proposal is to tax trades of all types of financial assets, including stock, derivatives, and currencies. The tax rate would be so low that ordinary investors wouldn’t even notice it. Some U.S. legislative proposals would even exempt retirement funds and mutual funds, the primary middle class investment vehicles. The real target would be the hedge fund investors and other high fliers in the global casino, who make most of their money through high-frequency betting on short-term market movements that often have nothing to do with what’s going on in the real economy. Since the tax would apply to each of these transactions, it would make this type of speculative gambling much less profitable and encourage more long-term, patient investment.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has analyzed the likely impact of a set of taxes, ranging from 0.01 percent on currency transactions to 0.25 percent on stock trades. Assuming that trading volumes dropped by 50 percent, these taxes could raise more than $175 billion per year in the United States alone.

The call for such taxes has been particularly loud in Europe, where activists have managed to win promises of support from leaders of the three largest economies—the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. But more pressure is needed to make speculation taxes a reality.

In the UK, activists have teamed up with filmmaker Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary) to put some star power behind the cause. Through a creative media campaign being launched today, they aim to secure commitments from candidates vying for votes in the upcoming general election.

One of the campaign tools Curtis has produced is this video, starring British actor Bill Nighy (who you'll recognize from his roles as Davy Jones in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or as the ribald aging pop singer in Love Actually) as a haughty banking executive whose arguments against the tax completely unravel in the course of three minutes. The UK groups kicked off their campaign by projecting a giant image of ordinary people wearing Robin Hood masks and the slogan “Be Part of the World’s Greatest Bank Job” on the side of the Bank of England.

In the United States, we may not yet have Hollywood spokespeople, but we do have prominent business leaders on our side, including John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund. We also have bills to create financial speculation taxes in both the House and the Senate, introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA).

President Obama is not yet on board. Recently, he did call for a new fee on the top 50 banks. This is a positive, but far more modest, approach—it wouldn’t directly affect speculation, would leave hedge funds off the hook, and would generate far less revenue.

U.S. activists are hoping to see a shift in the administration’s position by the time Obama travels to Toronto in June for a summit with the leaders of the other G20 big economies. Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of more than 200 labor unions, consumer groups, and other activist organizations, has been working to raise the profile of the issue in the media and on Capitol Hill and recently sent this letter to the president, urging his support. AFR is also working with other U.S. and international activists to coordinate pressure on key governments and the International Monetary Fund, which is carrying out a feasibility study of the issue at the G20’s request.

Taxing financial speculation won’t single-handedly prevent another crisis or solve the world’s climate and jobs crises. But for those of us who want the financial industry to serve people and the planet rather than dominate them, this is the most exciting reform under serious consideration on the world stage. And it is an idea whose time has come.

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide "security and stability" to bring in aid, according to nearly all independent observers in the field, violence was never an issue. in
 
Instead, there appears to be cruder motives for the military response. With Haiti’s government "all but invisible" and its repressive security forces collapsed, popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in envision sweatshops and tourism as the foundation of a rebuilt Haiti. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw their strength from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed on a devastated Haiti it will be done at gunpoint.
 
The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S troops was not for humanitarian reasons; in fact it crowded out much of the arriving aid into the Port-au-Prince airport, forcing lengthy delays. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies were turned away during the first week while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. One WFP official said of the 200 flights going in and out of Haiti daily “most … are for the U.S. military.” Nineteen days into the crisis, only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running "dangerously low" on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground, with another 15,000 troops offshore at one point, dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, the New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word."
 
In the first week, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said the presence of the Haitian police was “limited” because they had been “devastated" by the earthquake. The real powers in Haiti right now are Keen, U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke, Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it" while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”
 
While much of the corporate media fixated on "looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as "relatively calm." One aid worker in Haiti, Leisa Faulkner, said, “There is no security threat from the Haitian people. Aid workers do not need to fear them. I would really like for the guys with the rifles to put them down and pick up shovels to help find people still buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings and homes. It just makes me furious to see multiple truckloads of fellows with automatic rifles."
 
Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives concurred, explaining to “Democracy Now!”: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.”