America's shame

America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.

Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom.

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The American political system is in deep trouble for another reason—it is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy, supported by the ascendancy of market fundamentalism and a strident antiregulation, antigovernment, antitax ideology. The hard truth is that our political system today is simply incapable of meeting the great challenges described here. What we have is third-rate governance at a time when the challenges we face require first-rate governance.

America thus confronts a daunting array of challenges in the maintenance of our people’s well-being, in the conduct of our international affairs, in the management of our planet’s natural assets, and in the workings of our politics. Taken together, these challenges place in grave peril much that we hold dear.

The America we must seek for our children and grandchildren is not the America we have today. If we are going to change things for the better, we must first understand the forces that led us to this sea of troubles. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. We have encompassing problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. By understanding these flaws, we can end them and move forward in a very different direction.

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Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest human needs.

Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing the things that would make us, and the country, better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially. We have entered the realm of what ecological economist Herman Daly calls “uneconomic growth.” Environmentally, we see a world in which growth has brought us to a situation where more of the same will quite literally ruin the planet. Politically, the growth imperative is a big part of how we the people are controlled: the necessity for growth gives the real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver it. 

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The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow.

• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.
• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.
• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.
• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.
• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.
• Indicators: from GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.
• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.
• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.
• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.

 James Gustave Speth in Orion. Here

The fall of America

Consider that the last time the United States won a major war was 1945 - Korea was a stalemate, Vietnam a defeat; the first Gulf War failed to topple Saddam Hussein; Afghanistan and Iraq have become prolonged quagmires. Total victory has become alien to us.

A small example of how far we have fallen, how pampered and coddled we have become, was the decision by the NFL this week to postpone the game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings in Philadelphia. Football players are supposed to be the closest thing Americans have to modern Roman gladiators. The game exemplifies the rugged individualism and grit at the heart of the American character. The reason for the delay: Philadelphia was expecting 11 inches of snow. By comparison with historical Northeast winters, this was a minor storm - something previous generations simply shoveled and plowed through as they got on with their daily lives.

If 11 inches of snow brings America’s gladiators to a halt, it is clear we have lost our resilience.
This is evident, too, in the kinds of leaders we elect. Conventional wisdom holds that Mr. Obama is the antithesis of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Mr. Obama is a liberal Democrat. Mr. Bush was a conservative Republican. Mr. Obama is a cosmopolitan internationalist, while Mr. Bush was a unilateralist cowboy. In fact, they have much more in common than either the left or the right would like to admit. Mr. Obama is simply continuing -and intensifying - many of the disastrous Bush policies.

The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed “God is dead.” Nietzsche’s point was that the loss of faith would constitute our civilization’s seminal cultural reality. The passing of the Christian West signifies the end not only of a worldview, but of a character type - one based on honor, family, self-help, blood-and-soil patriotism, personal responsibility and a God-centered moral order. Self-indulgence and self-expression have filled the vacuum. Life is no longer about sacrifice and duty; it’s about maximizing pleasure and self-fulfillment.

Most Americans can no longer endure pain. This is why unemployment benefits keep being extended. This is why nearly every industry is “too big to fail.” It is the inevitable consequence of statism: the transformation of freeborn and productive citizens into de facto serfs who look to Uncle Sam for handouts. Decades of liberalism have led to the servile state.

In the 2000s, as we became soft, self-indulgent and mired in foreign interventions, a new great power emerged: an ultranationalist China. During the past decade, Beijing became the world’s No. 1 manufacturer and automaker, premier exporting nation and No. 2 economy. China is engaged in a massive military buildup and menaces its neighbors. It owns much of our public debt. It is to America what we once were to Great Britain: the rising force in the world.

All civilizations rise and fall. Ancient Greece, Persia, Rome, medieval Europe, the great Italian city-states, the Ottoman Empire, the vast European empires - the past is littered with the corpses of once unparalleled and dominant powers that are now a distant memory. So too has America passed its zenith.

Jeffrey T Kuhner in The WashingtonTimes. More Here. 

"Obama's war": Tariq Ali

Afghanistan was captured without a struggle, in reality. Worth remembering that. There was no real struggle by any segment of Afghan society to resist the U.S./NATO occupation. Why? Because the key player in this war was Pakistan, which had armed the Taliban, which had sent the Taliban to take power and end a period of civil war. And there were large numbers of Pakistani soldiers, Pakistani Air Force, Pakistani military, Pakistani intelligence people, people in Afghanistan who essentially told the Taliban leaders, “Now is not the time to fight. Shave your beards and come back to Pakistan, or go. But do not resist, because you will all be killed.” From their point of view, it was very sane advice. And, more astonishingly, the Taliban leadership, which was divided, actually accepted that advice. So Kabul fell without a struggle. And for the first two years the resistance to the United States and its NATO allies was limited, episodic, and localized.

What made it national? What made it national was the decision by the United States to impose a regime on Afghanistan. One of its CIA assets, Hamid Karzai, was propelled into power. More on him later since he has become a controversial figure as of late, supposedly fighting with the United States. But let’s just go through the chronology.

They imposed this regime and gave it a U.S. bodyguard. I think DynCorp supplied the bodyguard because Karzai said at that point that he didn’t trust any Afghans to protect him, give him personal protection. And of course, that was astute, because they probably would have bumped him off. He then established together with his brother a government of cronies and a very tiny, narrow circle of supporters, largely within Kabul and a tiny part of Kabul, and their aim in Afghanistan was that the only way forward was to enrich ourselves. And in a country with the most appalling levels of poverty in the entire world, these people used the money that was being sent to them for reconstruction, money that was being sent to them both via NGOs and via states, after the Bonn conference, spent this money and they did enrich themselves. It’s no secret.

That is why General Eikenberry, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, warned very seriously against against “the surge” of 30,000 extra troops.

So the entire socio-economic structure, backed by NATO armies, was a structure that made a tiny group of people very rich. And this in front of the eyes of the poor, who were swelling the slums outside Kabul, which grew by half a million within the first two years of the occupation.

And that’s the reason that Peter Galbraith got kicked out of Kabul, not because he was engaged in corrupting the Kurds in relation to oil, but because he’d screwed up by antagonizing Karzai without having any alternative. And that is why General Eikenberry, the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, warned very seriously against two things. He warned against “the surge” of 30,000 extra troops. And he warned very sharply against removing Karzai in private. Or so we are told. Because he said, “There is nothing else here, removing him is like handing the place over to the Taliban.”

If you want a particularly contorted defense of this position written, I hate to say this, but really written for idiots who know nothing about Afghanistan, I would recommend the article of the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband in the New York Review of Books. It is truly appalling, without understanding what’s going on in the country, bland, one cliché dripping onto the pages after another, but at least saying one thing which is of interest: that we can’t stay there.

The U.S. Marines went back in and with knives took the bullets out of everyone there, especially the women and children, so no one would know American bullets had been used to kill them.

You see, since the surge began, the big publicity machines going into operation—another victory, yes, we’ve captured this, we are now going to attack Kandahar… In fact, disaster stories. Total and complete disaster stories. And you read side-by-side with these big propaganda stories smaller, quite shocking stories, of which many more happen, if you read the vernacular press in Pakistan (because that reports them). But occasionally they find a way into the mainstream press in the United States and Britain and other parts of Europe.
Let’s just see one story. The U.S. Special Black Ops Squad targets a house because they think insurgents are in the house. They don’t explain why they think that, but they say they’re pretty sure. They attack the house and kill everyone in it. In that house is a family, a large joined family. Everyone is killed. Women, children, a pregnant woman—this happened in February—are killed. Realizing what they’ve done… but the story is already going out: “We had a targeted attack on an insurgent house and it was successful.” Then, a London Times journalist who’s there, embedded with the troops, finds out what really happens. That it was a completely innocent family that was killed, that they went back in, the marines on these special operations, and with knives took the bullets out of everyone there, especially the women and children, so that no one would know American bullets had been used to kill them and to cover up the whole story. Now this is a tiny cover up. But there have been big cover ups since.

A week after this event happened, a passenger bus on its way to Kandahar was bombed and hit by helicopter gunships. Why? Because the troops on the ground had said that the bus was traveling in a funny way, and may have insurgents in it. So they fired at the bus and killed a few dozen people, wounded several dozen others, and even Karzai once again had to say, “This is atrocious, how the hell can we do anything if this is going on?” This is the concrete result of the surge, essentially.

In other words, if the draft constitution had gone through, women in Afghanistan would have had the right to vote before they did in the United States and Britain and most parts of the West.

The other ally which gave the U.S. the green light to occupy both Iraq and Afghanistan are the Iranian clerics. I mean, it’s no secret now.

Now, what is the way out? The only way out is the way the Russians took and the British before them. And by the way, the British were driven out of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. They fought two wars, and they were driven out; they were defeated at a time when weapons were very straightforward and simple. Of course, the British had the Maxim gun, or something closely resembling it, which later became the Maxim gun. They had quite advanced technology for the time. But they were defeated essentially, you know, by tribal guerrillas who had nothing but very old-fashioned rifles which often took just one gunshot, and they fired it normally for killing animals. And the British, realizing they had lost, left the country.

And they claimed they left it alone. But they never did because they were then occupying and ruling over India. It was British India at the time. And when, for the first time, you had in Afghanistan an attempt by native Afghans to create a popular democratic constitution in 1918, 1919—inspired partially by the Kemalists in Turkey, and partially by the Bolsheviks—the new king, Amanullah, said, “We will have a democratic constitution and permit elections,” and his wife Soraya, said, “And we will give women the right to vote.” This was in the Afghan draft constitution.

In other words, if that had gone through, women in Afghanistan would have had the right to vote before they did in the United States and Britain and most parts of the West. But this plan was defeated by a British plot which conspired with very deeply conservative and reactionary tribes and toppled this regime and put a semi-puppet regime in its place which was always unstable.

So it’s all been tried before. The Russians likewise invaded Afghanistan in 1979 after two unanimous politburo decisions not to do it. Zbigniew Brzezinski boasts that they drew them into a bear trap. Was false information put on the desk of the politburo saying that Hafizullah Amin, the president of Afghanistan, was a CIA agent? Probably.

In any case, they changed their minds; they went in and were stuck in an unwinnable bloody war for ten years, until finally, Gorbachev came and decided, “We have to withdraw unilaterally,” and General Boris Gromov crossed the River Oxus, the Amu Darya, marched out. Quite a courageous thing to do given the enormous causalities they had had.


One thing I will say about the Russians, opposed though I was to that invasion and occupation, simply for the reason that I said, “If this happens the Americans will come in and it will become a Cold War battlefield and the whole area will be a mess for thirty years.” And it is more than that now. Afghanistan has now been at war, bloody, brutal war since 1979, longer than the Vietnam War, longer than the First World War, longer than the Second World War, and imagine what that does to the people… But I was saying that, opposed though I was, the Russians at least did one thing. They did build an education infrastructure, they did build hospitals, and for the time they were there, they did attempt—and succeeded—to educate Afghan women, lots of people were trained as technicians, lots of people were taught sciences, lots of people were given free room, board and lodging, and education at higher institutions in Moscow. That they did.

Their successors in the invasion occupation business, the U.S. and NATO, have not done that. They claim they have but the statistics are a joke. And any serious person who goes to Afghanistan reports back on how much of a joke it is: statistics are cooked, statistics are manufactured, handed to them, and they believe them. But of course the real intelligence forces in that country know that this is far removed from the truth.
So, this is a war which is unwinnable, this is a war which is going to end, no one can win it. Neither the United States nor the insurgents.

The insurgents do not have the power to inflict a Vietnamese-style defeat, and that defeat too which the Vietnamese inflicted in 1975—you know, we tend to sort of exaggerate the indigenous impact; it was very strong, but we mustn’t forget the Vietnamese armies had state-of-the-art weaponry from the Soviet Union and from the early days from China. So they were incredibly well armed to take on the United States; even though their causalities were huge, they inflicted very heavy damage. And the second help the Vietnamese had, which is hardly a secret, is from the huge anti-war movement that erupted in the United States because you had a conscript army and every single family was affected by that war.

These two factors are missing in the case of Afghanistan. So there’s not going to be any quick victory for the insurgents. But they now have the support of large swathes of the population who were indifferent to them, because of their experience of the regime they had imposed on Afghanistan, and are now not so indifferent. And what has made them supportive of the insurgents and [enabled] large numbers of kids joining the insurgency is how the NATO armies have operated. Look, it’s not just the killings, it’s not just the massacre of innocents, which happens regularly; it is the whole tone and tenor of this occupation. That the way Western soldiers, Western journalists, Western administrators, Western NGOs live is in such sharp contrast with the ordinary people of the country, that it excites anger and makes people feel this is not the way we are ever going to get anything.

The argument being used today by Obama and his British camp followers is: “We can create a stable Afghan army. Look: we have an Afghan army of 100,000 people.” Hang on a minute. You may have that on paper. How do you know how many of these 100,000 soldiers are on your side, how do you know that all the people you’re training to be policemen are on your side? We know what the insurgency has instructed people to do. It’s not a secret. They’ve said in the villages and in the towns, “If the Americans offer you military training, if they say, ‘We’ll teach you how to use weapons,’ join it; we need people in there.”

Classic resistance tactics, utilized in virtually every resistance struggle over the last century. The Vietnamese did it, by the way. Lots of the opponents were asked to join the South Vietnamese army. Which is why sections of them collapsed in ’74,’75. And the Afghans are doing it because it’s an obvious thing to do, and in this case even more so—no one is backing you, no one is training you, a tiny chunk of your forces are getting irregular, informal help from the Pakistanis. But by and large you’re dependent on the weapons you capture and the training you get. And we’ve had episodes lately of supposedly loyal Afghan policeman turning and killing British officers. We’ve had a famous case of an Afghan agent working for the Intelligence agencies for United States who went into a very heavily guarded secure facility and shot people dead. And that is not surprising given the anger that exists at the moment.

So what to do? What then is to be done? Out. Got to get out of Afghanistan and got to get out quick.

From Tariq Ali's lecture in Guernica a magazine of art and politics. More Here and Here and Here

Is America a Muslim nation?

Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be YES. Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus–not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive “Abrahamic” view.

Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus–not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive “Abrahamic” view.

Islam is democratic in spirit. Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur’an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.

Islam is egalitarian. From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, “under God”) and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all people are “created equal”) express themes that are also basic to Islam.

From Michael Wolfe's article in The Muslim Observer

To read the full article click here

Globalisation is bad!

The following is an article on Globalisation. It is enlightening and interesting. I am very thankful for the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind people for sharing this valuable piece of intellectually stimulating article on Globalisation.
Nowadays everybody talks about Globalisation. It is the most discussed subject today in this country. But seldom I came across persons who are well versed in the subject. Those who take stands in the issue do so without any deep study and analysis. There are some who take an extreme stand and reject Globalisation wholly and fully. They brand globalisation as the tool of modern imperialists. They equate it with evil and reject it with vengeance.
There are some who have splashed in the illusions created by the Globlalisation. They are over awed by the glittering world created by the globalisation. They consciously chose to close their eyes and they refuse to see the side effects of globalisation.

Now with the UPA government once again in the centre and with Dr Singh as PM one could expect a rise in the globalisation process in India. They may behave responsibly and sensibly. Or they may not. And the leftists have already left the scene. They are no longer interested in the interests of the Aam Aadmi. Nandhigram and Singur are the worst examples.

Amidst this challenging scenario with nobody there to challenge the evils of Globalisation it is for the common man to do the job. Hence I commence a series of articles on Globalisation with this post. Excerpts from the article (author unknown):

There are two strands to the argument that globalization is undermining nation states. First, it is that it is empowering corporations at the expense of the nation state, and secondly, that the international institutions such as the WTO and World Bank are not democratic.

There is an issue of sheer size. It is noted that many corporations are larger than nation states – more than half the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations. The sales of Ford and General Motors combined are greater than the combined GDP of sub-Saharan Africa while those of the six largest Japanese trading companies are almost as big as all the nations of Latin America combined.

Critics of capitalism say the problem starts with laws of the early 19th century, which meant individual managers, and directors could not be held liable for the actions of the corporation. It is argued that globalisation was not a democrat choice but was pursued by corporations to suit their own ends of maximising profit by playing one nation off against another.

The international organisations, such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF are make it their mission to open the world to the influence of transnational corporations. The IMF rules make it hard for nations to legislate to stop currency speculators from attacking their economy. The World Bank insists that nations to which it makes structural adjustment loans privatise government enterprises, often handing them to transnationals. The World Trade Organisation’s effort to break down trade barriers is designed to open markets to transnational corporations.

None of these supranational organisations are democratically constituted, and they make their decisions behind closed doors.

Globalization as an Attack on Democracy

THE GLOBALIZATION OF RECENT DECADES WAS NEVER A DEMOCRATIC CHOICE by the peoples of the world--the process has been business driven, by business strategies and tactics, for business ends. Governments have helped, by incremental policy actions, and by larger actions that were often taken in secret, without national debate and discussion of where the entire process was taking the community. In the case of some major actions advancing the globalization process, like passing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or joining the European Monetary Union (EMU), publics have been subjected to massive propaganda campaigns by the interested business-media elites. In the United States, public opinion polls showed the general public against NAFTA even after incessant propaganda, but the mass media supported it, and it was passed. In Europe as well, polls have shown persistent majorities opposed to the introduction of the Euro, but a powerful elite supports it, so that it moves forward.

This undemocratic process, carried out within a democratic facade, is consistent with the distribution of benefits and costs of globalization, and the fact that globalization has been a tool serving elite interests. Globalization has also steadily weakened democracy, partly as a result of unplanned effects, but also because the containment of labor costs and scaling down of the welfare state has required the business minority to establish firm control of the state and remove its capacity to respond to the demands of the majority. The mix of deliberate and unplanned elements in globalization's antidemocratic thrust can be seen in each aspect of the attack process.

ONE OF THE MAIN OBJECTIVES OF TNC MOVEMENT ABROAD HAS BEEN to tap cheaper labor sources. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states that curb unions and enter into virtual joint venture arrangements with foreign capital, as in Suharto's Indonesia and PRI's Mexico. Capital moves to such friendly investment climes in an arbitrage process, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale, in a process that penalizes and thereby weakens democracy.

The actual shift of capital abroad, and the use of the external option to drive hard bargains at home, has weakened labor. Labor has also been weakened by deliberate government policies of tight money and restrictive budget policies to contain inflation, at the expense of high unemployment. These policies, and the incessant focus on labor market "flexibility" as the solution to the unemployment problem, reflect a corporate and antilabor policy agenda, fully institutionalized. There have even been more open and direct attacks on organized labor--both Reagan and Thatcher engaged in union busting, and the latter was quite explicit in her aim to weaken labor as a political force. Democracy, according to pluralistic theory, is said to rest on the existence of intermediate groups, like labor organizations, that can bargain and work on behalf of an otherwise atomized population. The deliberate weakening of such groups is thus an attack on democracy.

IN THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN, CANADA, AND OTHER COUNTRIES the business community has also mounted a sustained ideological campaign to make their preferred policies part of common understanding. These campaigns have proceeded in parallel with globalization and have been remarkably similar, reflecting the global flow of ideology and overlapping sources of funding. The favored neoliberal ideology pushes the idea that the market can do it all, that government is a burden and threat, and that deregulation and privatization are inherently good and inevitable. It presses an extreme individualism and the value of "personal responsibility," which is highly advantageous to corporate power, leaving bargaining between large firms and isolated individuals. Collective and community values, the threat of externalities and ecological damage from unconstrained business growth, free market instability--all are shunted aside in this ideological system. This ideological campaign has been highly successful, because vast sums of business money fed to intellectuals and think tanks, and business domination of the mass media, have allowed their views to prevail. Heritage Foundation leader Edwin Feulner has described the strategy of his corporate-funded and globally linked think tank as analogous to Procter & Gamble's in selling soap--saturate the market with messages that overwhelm any that are less well funded.¹⁰ But this is a corruption of democracy; it is a bought market of ideas, not a free market of ideas.

The business community has also mounted a powerful effort to dominate governments--either by capture or by limiting their ability to serve ordinary citizens. Globalization has contributed to this effort, partly by the arbitraging process mentioned earlier, which favors authoritarian rule. Apart from this, by enlarging business profits and weakening labor it has shifted the balance of power further toward business, so that political parties have been even more decisively influenced by business money in elections. In the United States, it is notorious that Mr. Clinton has sought and received enormous sums from business and serves their interests almost exclusively, with only token efforts on behalf of the major nonbusiness constituencies of the Democratic Party. The globalizing corporate media have added their growing strength to the advance of neoliberal ideology and opposition to any vestiges of social democracy, making social democratic policies difficult to implement. The Murdoch effect on British elections, and the current Murdoch-Blair connection illustrates the point.

Another well-known and important antidemocratic force is the power of global financial markets to limit political options. Social democratic policies make for an unfavorable investment climate. Businesses will therefore respond to politicians and acts serving ordinary citizens with threatened or actual exit. Financial market effects on exchange and interest rates can be extremely rapid and damaging to the economy. Spokespersons for the new global economy actually brag about the ability of capital to penalize "unsound" policies, and the fact that money capital now rules.

These business efforts, aided and validated by the IMF and by media support, regularly cause social democrats to retreat to policies acceptable to the rulers. Thus, in country after country social democratic parties have accepted neoliberalism, despite the contrary preferences of great majorities of their voting constituencies. But this means that nominal democracy is no longer able to serve ordinary citizens, making elections meaningless and democracy empty of substance. This helps explain why half or more of eligible U.S. voters no longer participate in national elections.

Not satisfied with this level of political control, the business community has pushed for international agreements, and policy actions by the IMF and World Bank, that further encroach on the ability of democratic polities to act on behalf of their constituencies. These agreements and the demands of the international financial institutions invariably call for precisely the policies desired by the TNC community. The EMU conditions give primacy to budget constraints and inflation control, in accord with the neoliberal and corporate agenda. GATT, the WTO, and the NAFTA agreement also give top priority to corporate investor and intellectual property rights, to which all other considerations must give way. In the early 1980s, the IMF and World Bank took advantage of the Third World debt crisis and used their leverage with numerous distressed Third World borrowers to force their acceptance of Structural Adjustment Programs. These forced the borrowing countries to agree to give first priority to external debt repayment, private as well as government; it compelled them to adapt austerity programs of tight money and budget cutbacks focusing heavily on social expenditures affecting the poor and ordinary citizens; it forced a stress on exports, which help generate foreign exchange to allow debt repayment and that more closely integrate the borrower's economy into the global system; and it stressed privatization, allegedly in the interest of efficiency, but serving both to help balance the budget without tax increases and to provide openings for TNC investment in the troubled economy. The IMF is doing the same in Asia today.

A second characteristic of the new agreements and IMF-World Bank actions is their denial of democratic rights to non-corporate citizens and elected governments. These are subordinated to the rights of corporate investors, the superior class of global citizens with priority over all others and beneficiaries of the New TNC Protectionism. In the NAFTA agreement, governments are denied in advance the right to take on new functions; any not asserted now are left to the private sector and to the superior class of citizens. In these agreements, also, and even more aggressively in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment now under consideration, the global TNCs have no responsibilities and none can be imposed on them. They can fire people, abandon communities, fatally damage the environment, push local companies out of business, and purvey cultural trash at their full discretion. They can or will be able to sue governments, and disagreements are to be settled by unelected panels outside the control of democratic governments.

A third characteristic of the new agreements and IMF-World Bank actions is that they rest not only on neoliberal theory but on a false reading of recent experience and economic history. As noted earlier, globalization so far has been a productivity failure, a social disaster, and a threat to stability. The claim of its proponents that free trade is the route to economic growth is also confuted by longer historic experience: no country, past or present, has taken off into sustained economic growth and moved from economic backwardness to modernity without large-scale government protection and subsidization of infant industries and other modes of insulation from domination by powerful outsiders. This includes Great Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan, all highly protectionist in the earlier takeoff phases of their growth process. The governments and institutions bargaining on behalf of the TNCs today, through the IMF, World Bank, WTO and NAFTA, have been able to remove these modes of protection from less developed countries. This threatens them with extensive takeovers from abroad, thoroughgoing integration into foreign economic systems as "branch plant economies," preservation in a state of dependence and underdevelopment, and most particularly, an inability to protect their majorities from the ravages of neoliberal top-down development priorities.

Conclusion

IN SUM, WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF AN ANTI-DEMOCRATIC COUNTERREVOLUTION in which globalization and its imperatives are being used to weaken popular and elected authority in favor of a system of domination by super-citizens, the TNCs. This process sows the seeds of its own destruction, as it serves a small global minority, damages the majority, breeds financial instability, and exacerbates the environmental crisis. Its destructive tendencies are likely to produce an explosion if the process is not contained and democracy is not rehabilitated.

Halting this anti-democratic juggernaut will be difficult, not only because of the power of its beneficiaries, but also because it operates within the framework of nominally democratic structures and musters plausible arguments. But these arguments are self-serving and wrong, and should be vigorously contested. An agenda should be advanced that serves ordinary citizens rather than the TNCs and financial institutions. Negatively, this agenda will include strenuous opposition to all supranational arrangements that take power out of the hands of democratic governments to serve some alleged economic need. Positively, the agenda requires support for the imposition of serious limits and responsibilities on TNCs, including capital controls and other deterrents to financial speculation. Pursuit of this agenda is going to require a combination of understanding and effective organization of the large majority who are the victims of globalization.

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Obama's tryst with Islam

I have always been skeptical about Obama's Muslim background.
He does not look like a Muslim. I could not see any shade of it.
But, my friends are enthusiastic about this more than everything else. After all his father is a Muslim, mind you, they tease! This line of thinking makes me uncomfortable and I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Now I stumbled upon an excellent article by U. Mahesh Prabhu. His piece is interesting and it shed lights on Obama's "Muslim background".

Excerpts:

If you think Obama's full name is 'Barack Obama' then you are half right. His middle name, which is hardly flashed in the media, is 'Hussein'. Thus his complete name is 'Barack Hussein Obama.'

Now the question that would certainly follow is: 'Does he, or not, have a Muslim background?' When the very same question was asked to him sometimes back his answer was 'If I was a Muslim, I would let you know.' and I believed in him. Obama is today a practicing Christian and also a member of the Trinity Church of Christ.

Obama in his campaign website on November 12, 2007 posted a statement with the headline 'Barack Obama is not and has never been a Muslim', followed by 'Obama never prayed in Mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim and is a committed Christian.'

Speaking personally about his Muslim lineage, on Dec 22, 2007, Obama spoke thus: 'My father was from Kenya, and lots of people in his village were Muslim. He didn't practice Islam. Truth is he wasn't very religious. He met my mother. My mother was a Christian from Kansas, and they married and then divorced. I was raised by my mother so I have always been a Christian. The only connection I have had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country. But I have never practiced Islam… For a while I lived in Indonesia because my mother was teaching there. And that's a Muslim country. And I went to school. But I didn't practice Islam…'

However, in complete contrast to Obama's aforesaid statement, in the article 'Obama Debunks Claim about Islamic School' Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press wrote, on January 24, 2007, that: 'Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to country from 1967-71. At first Obama attended the Catholic School Fransiskus Assisis where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his step-father. The document required that each student choose one of the five sanctioned religions while registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.'

In response to the above claim Obama's communication director, Robert Gibbs, responded that 'He wasn't sure why the document had Obama registered as a Muslim.'

What more? Two months later, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times reported that the Obama campaign had retreated from that absolute statement and instead issued a more nuanced one: 'Obama has never been a [practicing] Muslim.'

The Times looked into the matter further and learned more about his Indonesian interlude: 'His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers along with two people who were identified by Obama's grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.' The article further continued stating that 'his childhood friends say Obama sometimes went for Friday prayers at local mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and we went to mosque together and prayed." Said Zulfin Adi'

To read the complete story, click here.
And also read : Coke, Pepsi and Obama!
And read : The Indian Obama and American Mayawati.
And read : Deve Gowda is greater than Obama!
And read : Obama, racism and America!!
And read : Karti Chidambaram and Obama!