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Friday, July 30th, 2009
Volume 8, No. 14
4 Articles, 24 Pages
1. Mourn On The 4th of July
2. Russia's Sickness: 'Anti-Americanism'
3. Health Care Hypocrisy
4. The Real Unemployment Rate Hits A 68-Year High
1. MOURN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
BY
JOHN PILGER
(Liberals say that the United States is once again a "nation of moral ideals", but behind the façade little has changed. With his government of warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, Barack Obama is merely upholding the myths of a divine America.)
The monsoon had woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. "We are here not to kill," said the sergeant, "we are here to impart the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86."
Page 86 was headed WHAM. The sergeant's unit was called a combined action company, which meant, he explained, "we attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays". He was joking, though not quite. Standing in a jeep on the edge of a paddy, he had announced through a loudhailer: "Come on out, everybody. We got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you."
Silence. Not a shadow moved.
"Now listen, either you gooks come on out from wherever you are, or we're going to come right in there and get you!"
The people of Tuylon finally came out and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben's Long Grain Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were kept for the colonel's arrival. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled.
"Mr District Chief and all you folks out there," said the colonel, "what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there's no place on earth like America. It's a guiding light for me, and for you. You see, back home, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you good folks to share in our good fortune."
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Davy Crockett got a mention. "Beacon" was a favourite, and as he evoked John Winthrop's "city upon a hill", the marines clapped, and the children clapped, understanding not a word.
It was a lesson in what historians call "exceptionalism", the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world", was unspeakable. As the great people's historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop's much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city upon a hill", a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a "triumphant joy". The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by "the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained".
Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War". It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa's grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation's "great mission" were dispensed. These included tributes to the "exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives" in Vietnam, where they were "determined to stop communist expansion". In Iraq, other true hearts "employed air strikes of unprecedented precision". What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.
"History without memory," declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, "confines Americans to a sort of eternal present. They are especially weak in remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did for them." Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941 divined the "American century" as an American social, political and cultural "victory" over humanity and the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit".
None of this is to suggest that vainglory is exclusive to the United States. The British presented their often violent domination of much of the world as the natural progress of Christian gentlemen selflessly civilising the natives, and present-day TV historians perpetuate the myths. The French still celebrate their bloody "civilising mission". Prior to the Second World War, "imperialist" was an honoured political badge in Europe, while in the US an "age of innocence" was preferred. America was different from the Old World, said its mythologists. America was the Land of Liberty, uninterested in conquest. But what of George Washington's call for a "rising empire" and James Madison's "laying the foundation of a great empire"? What of slavery, the theft of Texas from Mexico, the bloody subjugation of central America, Cuba and the Philippines?
An ordained national memory consigned these to the historical margins and "imperialism" was all but discredited in the United States, especially after Adolf Hitler and the fascists, with their ideas of racial and cultural superiority, had left a legacy of guilt by association. The Nazis, after all, had been proud imperialists, too, and Germany was also "exceptional". The idea of imperialism, the word itself, was all but expunged from the American lexicon, "on the grounds that it falsely attributed immoral motives to western foreign policy", argued one historian. Those who persisted in using it were "disreputable purveyors of agitprop" and were "inspired by the communist doctrine", or they were "Negro intellectuals who had grievances of their own against white capitalism".
Meanwhile, the "city on the hill" remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about realising Luce's dream and recolonising the European empires in the postwar years. This was "the march of free enterprise". In truth, it was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state capitalism, which left half the world's wealth in American hands. The cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Described as "negotiations about economic stability", the conference marked America's conquest of most of the world.
What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, "was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets." The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these "international" institutions, and an "invisible government" of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.
Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. "Propaganda," he wrote, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations." Bernays used Freud's theories about control of the subconscious to promote a "mass culture" designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes "torches of freedom"; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala's democracy in 1954.
Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. "Free enterprise" became a divinity. "By the early 1950s," wrote Noam Chomsky, "20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony' of the ‘American way of life' . . . Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks."
The new "ism" was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war (which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of food, known as "agripower" (which receives $157bn a year in government subsidies).
Barack Obama is the embodiment of the "ism". From his early political days, Obama's unerring theme has been not "change", the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America's right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, "we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people." And: "At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders."
Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum's histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama's wars.
In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that "everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but "US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all". It is as if "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening . . . You have to hand it to America . . . masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a "nation of moral ideals", as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British "influence", albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land "where miracles happen". Justin Webb, until recently the BBC's man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the "city on the hill".
Behind this façade of "intensification of feeling and degradation of significance" (Walter Lippmann), ordinary Americans are stirring perhaps as never before, as if abandoning the deity of the "American Dream" that prosperity is a guarantee with hard work and thrift. Millions of angry emails from ordinary people have flooded Washington, expressing an outrage that the novelty of Obama has not calmed. On the contrary, those whose jobs have vanished and whose homes are repossessed see the new president rewarding crooked banks and an obese military, essentially protecting George W Bush's turf.
My guess is that a populism will emerge in the next few years, igniting a powerful force that lies beneath America's surface and which has a proud past. It cannot be predicted which way it will go. However, from such an authentic grass-roots Americanism came women's suffrage, the eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership. In the late 19th century, the populists were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. In the Obama era, the familiarity of this resonates.
What is most extraordinary about the United States today is the rejection and defiance, in so many attitudes, of the all-pervasive historical and contemporary propaganda of the "invisible government". Credible polls have long confirmed that more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves. They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even "anti-American".
I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term to me. "I'll tell you what ‘anti-American' is," she said. "It's what governments and their vested interests call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity.
"There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America's citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional."
2. RUSSIA'S SICKNESS: 'ANTI-AMERICANISM'
BY
CHRISTOPHER DOWD
No one in Russia is buying tickets to the traveling Obama road show.
This is the road show whereupon Obama flies into a foreign country and makes a pretty speech that all two of our allowed political viewpoints will pretend to bicker over and then he flies home and US policy continues on the same as before… as this news story from the other day makes clear. So much for that "reset button."
Americans, especially liberals, line up for tickets to the Obama road show. The lines are around the block.
Outside of cocoon America, however, sales are dead.
But the backers of the Obama road show, the Beltway (or what our press would call "oligarchs" when talking about Russia’s government) don’t care about foreign ticket sales. They just want to mollify Americans with the appearance of "change" while everything pretty much stays exactly the same. From troop "pullouts" that haven’t really happened to detention policies that haven’t really changed to defense spending that isn’t decreasing Americans are subjected to an Obama regime that must pretend to be different while actually being so only in the most cosmetic and substance-less of ways.
While our government takes pains to make sure our viewpoints are narrowly managed it really could care less how the broader world views the US. Except in active war zones or in areas of "national interest" where the US wages intense, focused, and sophisticated propaganda campaigns, what foreigners generally think of the US is of little concern to the Beltway. And why should the views of foreigners be of any concern to our Beltway elite? It is not like they really have to worry about another country being a threat (I mean a real threat and not the made-up-for-the-rubes "threats"). Short of doing something to ignite a nuclear exchange with another nuclear power the United States has nothing to fear militarily from any nation on the planet. The only attack the US can suffer is from the pin prick of terrorism. And a terrorist attack certainly does not threaten the Beltway’s rule or power — on the contrary — they only strengthen and enhance them. Heck — some US politicians and statists of the rightist variety have even hoped openly for more terrorists attacks in this country for precisely that reason — so the hand of government would be strengthened!
This isn’t to say that DC doesn’t make an effort. Periodically we will get a spasm out of Washington in which they express interest in US "image management" abroad and it becomes the rage for a month or so among our media talking heads. As if America’s image was just a problem of mixing up the right PR stew and not the direct consequence of its actions and deeds. But then Washington makes clear just how much they care about their foreign image when they do things like put an unqualified boob and parochial political hack in charge of the outreach effort to cultures and a religion she knows less than nothing about.
Now our elite understand that the US image is a direct result of what they do. They just don’t care. But they do take pains to make sure the average American is kept from this reality. And they have done this by infantilizing us with such broad notions as "Anti-Americanism."
You see, it isn’t what we do that so upsets foreigners. No. See — what makes them mad at us, what makes them crazy is that they have this disease — this disorder — this condition, if you will, called "Anti-Americanism."
"Anti-Americanism" is something that foreigners just seem to catch out of the blue for no reason. Well — some say "Anti-Americanism" is spread to foreigners when jealousy for how awesome we are overwhelms them and they realize just how inferior to us they are in all ways. Hatred for America has nothing to do with what our government does, which always does things out of pureness of heart and for noble motive. Rather, hatred for America comes from, well… . "Anti-Americanism."
See, we are the victim. America. Us against the world that hates us because they are all infected with irrational "Anti-Americanism" and are blinded to our inherent goodness.
And other than "Islam" (which in idiot reich winger land is one mass Muslim mind out to set up the One World Caliphate) no one has the disease of "Anti-Americanism" worse than the Russians.
And this was starkly evident on Obama’s visit when Russians, a people who have no cause for "white guilt" when it comes to those with ancestry in the Southern Hemisphere, refused to embarrass themselves by spazzing out like teen age school girls as any West European country would upon a visit from "the first black President."
Oddly, unlike Americans — the Russians have this "Anti-American" propensity to dismiss words over actions and deeds. They also have the troubling habit of not seeing American actions in the best possible light as we do and they likewise don’t believe automatically in the noble intentions of all US policy and actions — as we do reflexively.
And those are indeed chief symptoms of "Anti-Americanism." Not seeing American actions as we see them — as motivated by pure goodness — is to "hate America" actually. It is also a sign of "paranoia."
This LA Times article from July 4th, even before Obama’s visit, entitled "Anti-Americanism plays in Russia" lays out all the reasons that the ugly soul-destroying disease of "Anti-Americanism" has gripped the small shrunken hearts of Russians everywhere (except those in the employ of MIC-financed American think tanks however). And the reasons for their Anti-Americanism? Well they are myriad. First — it is just a habit of Russian rulers to drum up anti-American sentiment to bolster rule at home. Also Russian insecurities about not being a superpower are to blame. Other reasons are that "Anti-Americanism" is a good career path for Russian politicians, Cold War nostalgia, and the idea that if there is no hostility with the US then Russia isn’t important anymore and Russian rulers can’t stomach that reality.
Oh — and the article mentions in passing that Russia may feel threatened by the expansion of NATO up to her borders when it was assured to them that this would not happen. And some unnamed meddling on the part of the US in Georgia and Ukraine might, maybe, also be a factor. But not really.
No one has a legitimate reason to be mad at America. To feel threatened by America. To suspect America of less than pure intention. All that motivates their hostility is… just… well…"Anti-Americanism" for the sake of being anti-American. Most, if not all "Anti-Americanism" in Russia isn’t motivated for any legitimate reason. No, as the LA Times article makes clear — it is motivated out of grubby cynical political reasons on the part of their corrupt grubby cynical "oligarchs."
And in the few instances that they can point to as being the cause of their alarm at American actions, they are really just failing to believe the US rationales for these actions at face value — which is itself — another sign of "Anti-Americanism." Failure to believe US explanations, no matter how imbecilic or insulting, is paranoid "Anti-Americanism." Not buying into the often absurd self-serving Beltway "conventional wisdom" on an issue of foreign policy is likewise "Anti-Americanism." Straying too far afield from the tiny parameter of debate allowed on foreign policy issues (which in most cases among our two party fraud is literally no more than who can do more for the sainted holy "troops") is perilous for a foreign leader to do — as it is for an American politician.
When Russia doesn’t believe the false and clearly preposterous US rationale that a missile shield they are building in Poland is to defend from attack by Iran — that is clearly an example of Russian paranoid "Anti-Americanism" run amok.
Likewise — to view the expansion of NATO up to her borders as a threat is yet more rampant "Anti-Americanism." Since US politicians say that this expansion isn’t motivated by anything Anti-Russian — then it is "Anti-American" for the Russians to think or suspect otherwise! See how that works?
Not buying into the New York Times fantasy version of events in Kosovo that ended in the 72-day-long murder-bombing of civilians in Serbia? You got it. "Anti-Americanism."
Take a dim view of the US funneling money through NGO’s into your domestic politics and in the border states not yet officially in NATO? Just another sad example of not seeing that NGO money for what it is — pure democracy goodness! And it is "Anti-American" to suspect such US sponsored NGO operations in their countries as anything other than that.
See, Russians don’t have any cause to be alarmed by American actions at all. If they would just listen to Obama, and believe in the unique special sweet goodness of America as much as we do — then the Russians would be cured of this terrible sickness!
This sound bite — this phrase — "Anti-Americanism" is not questioned by Americans at all. We don’t even think about it. We accept this nonsense phrase as an excuse for why foreigners hate us without even thinking about it. It works like a charm on a dumbed down American population that has long lost the ability to formulate or solve the most basic of logical syllogisms.
For decades now it has been used to dismiss much criticism of the United States. Its use in the last decade however has gone into turbo crazy overdrive. Our leaders even seem to forget that "Anti-Americanism" isn’t real, sometimes, and they can come off sounding… well… nuts.
They are so accustomed to no one of any consequence at home challenging the notion that maybe foreigners might have reasons to dislike American policy other than simply "hating America" for no specified reason that they actually have no idea how they seem to the world. Nothing better demonstrated this deranged disconnect from any semblance of reality than the reaction among our elite to the Russian response to an attack on them from the DC client state of Georgia.
Here we had an American elite — which is waging two wars on more than dubious grounds thousands of miles away from her borders charging Russia with illegal aggression against a rump statelet on her borders that had all but attacked Russia! And that they themselves more than likely approved of if not had orchestrated beforehand! Without batting an eye, a deranged American elite felt entirely comfortable charging Russia with illegal aggression against an all-but-installed American puppet government in a "country" on her borders that had attacked a Russian minority group enclave while American armies swarm over the Middle East on justifications that only Americans and morons would buy. But for Russia to charge or even hint at malign American motives in oil-rich Iraq is intolerable "Anti-Americanism," ridiculous paranoia.
The reaction of the American Beltway to that event was quite simply, scary mental.
Our media’s and foreign policy establishment’s abuse of this term is so obscene and shameless at this point, it makes Al Sharpton and Abe Foxman blush.
3. HEALTH CARE HYPOCRISY
BY
RALPH NADER
About the only lesson Barack Obama has learned from the Hillary and Bill health insurance debacle of 1993-1994 is to leave Michelle Obama out of his current drive to get something-anything-through the Congress labeled "reform".
Otherwise, he is making the same mistakes of blurring his proposal, catering to right-wing Democrats and corporatist Republicans, who want an even mushier "reform" scam, and cutting deals with the drug, hospital, and health insurance industries.
His political opponents become bolder with each day as they see his party base in Congress weakening, his polls dropping, and a confused public being saturated with unrebutted propaganda by the insatiable profiteering, subsidized health care giants.
Their campaign-money-greased minions on Capitol Hill and the corporatist Think Tanks and columnists are seizing on President Obama's aversion to conflict and repeated willingness to water down what he will fight for.
The loud and cruel baying pack comes in the form of William Kristol ("This is not time to pull punches. Go for the kill."), Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) ("If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."), and Charles Krauthammer yammering wildly about medical malpractice and tort law. Krauthammer does not substantiate his claims or mention the many victims of malpractice as he gleefully predicts "Obamacare sinking."
All these critics have gold-plated health insurance, of course.
Hillary tried to appease the drug and hospital companies. Obama invites them to the White House, where they presumably pledged to give up nearly $300 billion dollars over ten years without any specifics about how this complex assurance can be policed.
No matter, in return Obama and his aides agreed not to press Congress to authorize the federal government to negotiate drug prices with the drug industry. Don't worry: the taxpayers will pay the bill.
At a meeting on July 7 at the White House between drug company executives, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), the industry, according to The New York Times, was promised that the final legislative package would not allow the reimportation of cheaper medicines from Canada or other countries even if they meet our drug safety standards.
Since these industry meetings at the White House are private, no one knows how many other concessions were made. What is known is that Barack Obama knows better. A former supporter of single payer health insurance (often described as full Medicare for all with free choice of physician and hospital and the elimination of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate administrative costs and billing fraud), then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama predicted, in 2003, that it would be enacted once Congress and the White House were controlled by Democrats. Well, that is now the situation, but, as President, he believes single payer is not "practical".
Single payer health insurance is supported by a majority of the American people, majority of physicians and nurses, and nearly ninety members of the House of Representatives. (See H.R. 676 and singlepayeraction.org.)
A clear replacement of the private health insurance companies with federal insurance, as Medicare for the elderly did in 1965, allows for clear language. Twenty thousand people die in America each year because they cannot afford health insurance, according to the Institute of Medicine. Hundreds of thousands more suffer because they have no insurance to treat their diseases or injuries.
Single payer means everyone is covered from birth, as is the case now in every western nation. Imagine no lives lost or suffering due to no health insurance.
Fuzzy proposals, regularly altered and over-complicated due to the hordes of avaricious corporate lobbyists, make politicians like Obama very susceptible to lurid descriptions and lies by his vocal, well-insured opponents. Finally, the Obama people are using "health insurance reform", rather than the misnomer "health care reform" which opened them up to charges that government would take over health care. All proposals, including single payer, are based on private delivery of health care.
Now enters the well-insured libertarian Cato Institute with full-page ads in the Washington Post and The New York Times charging Obama with pursuing government-run health care. A picture of Uncle Sam pointing under the headline "Your New Doctor." Nonsense. The well-insured people at Cato should know better than to declare that this "government takeover" would "reduce health care quality."
About 100,000 lives are lost from medical-hospital negligence per year, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. This vast tragedy is hardly going to get worse under universal government health insurance that assembles data patterns to reduce waste, enhances quality, and transparency. By contrast, the secretive big health insurers who make more money the more they deny claims, ignore their loss prevention duties.
In 1950, when President Truman sent a universal health insurance bill to Congress, the American Medical Association (AMA) launched what was then a massive counterattack. The AMA claimed that government health insurance would lead to rationing of health care, higher prices, diminished choices and more bureaucracy. The AMA beat both Truman and the unions that were backing the legislation, using the phrase "socialized medicine" to scare the people.
Fifty-nine years later, "corporatized medicine" has produced all these consequences, along with stripping away the medical profession's independence. Today, the irony is that the corporate supremacists are accusing reformers in Washington of what they themselves have produced throughout the country. Rationing, higher prices, less choice, and mounds of paperwork and corporate red tape. Plus, fifty million people without any health insurance at all.
On Thursday, July 30, 2009, there will be a mass rally for a single payer system in Washington, DC. It is time to put what most Americans want on the table.
THE REAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE HITS A 68-YEAR HIGH
(Comparing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “U-3” and “U-6” rates.)
BY
JOHN MILLER
Although you have to dig into the statistics to know it, unemployment in the United States is now worse than at any time since the end of the Great Depression.
From December 2007, when the recession began, to May of this year, 6.0 million U.S. workers lost their jobs. The big three U.S. automakers are closing plants and letting white-collar workers go too. Chrysler, the worst off of the three, will lay off one-quarter of its workforce even if it survives. Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and giant banking conglomerate Citigroup have both laid off thousands of workers. Alcoa, the aluminum maker, has let workers go. Computer maker Dell and express shipper DHL have both canned many of their workers. Circuit City, the leading electronics retailer, went out of business, costing its 40,000 workers their jobs. Lawyers in large national firms are getting the ax. Even on Sesame Street, workers are losing their jobs.
The official unemployment rate hit 9.4% in May—already as high as the peak unemployment rates in all but the 1982 recession, the worst since World War II. And topping the 1982 recession’s peak rate of 10.8% is now distinctly possible. The current downturn has pushed up unemployment rates by more than any previous postwar recession
Source: Table A-1, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Labor Department, www.bls.gov.
The comprehensive U-6 unemployment rate adjusts the official rate by adding marginally attached workers and workers forced to work part time for economic reasons to the officially unemployed. To find the U-6 rate the BLS takes that higher unemployment count and divides it by the official civilian labor force plus the number of marginally attached workers. (No adjustment is necessary for forced part-time workers since they are already counted in the official labor force as employed workers.)
Calculating the Real Unemployment Rate
The BLS calculates the official unemployment rate, U-3, as the number of unemployed as a percentage of the civilian labor force. The civilian labor force consists of employed workers plus the officially unemployed, those without jobs who are available to work and have looked for a job in the last 4 weeks. Applying the data found yields an official unemployment rate of 9.1%, or a seasonally adjusted rate 9.4% for April 2009.
Accounting for the large number of marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons raises the count of unemployed to 24.0 million workers for May 2009. Those numbers push up the U-6 unemployment rate to 15.9% or a seasonally adjusted rate of 16.4%.
Some groups of workers are already facing official unemployment rates in the double digits. As of May, unemployment rates for black, Hispanic, and teenage workers were already 14.9%, 12.7% and 22.7%, respectively. Workers without a high-school diploma confronted a 15.5% unemployment rate, while the unemployment rate for workers with just a high-school degree was 10.0%. Nearly one in five (19.2%) construction workers were unemployed. In Michigan, the hardest hit state, unemployment was at 12.9% in April. Unemployment rates in seven other states were at double-digit levels as well.
As bad as they are, these figures dramatically understate the true extent of unemployment. First, they exclude anyone without a job who is ready to work but has not actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies such workers as “marginally attached to the labor force” so long as they have looked for work within the last year. Marginally attached workers include so-called discouraged workers who have given up looking for job-related reasons, plus others who have given up for reasons such as school and family responsibilities, ill health, or transportation problems.
Second, the official unemployment rate leaves out part-time workers looking for full-time work: part-time workers are “employed” even if they work as little as one hour a week. The vast majority of people working part time involuntarily have had their hours cut due to slack or unfavorable business conditions. The rest are working part time because they could only find part-time work.
To its credit, the BLS has developed alternative unemployment measures that go a long way toward correcting the shortcomings of the official rate. The broadest alternative measure, called “U-6,” counts as unemployed “marginally attached workers” as well as those employed “part time for economic reasons.”
When those adjustments are taken into account for May 2009, the unemployment rate soars to 16.4%. That is the highest rate since the BLS began calculating the U-6 rate in 1994. While not exactly comparable, it is also higher than the BLS’s earlier and yet broader adjusted unemployment rate called the U-7. The BLS began calculating the U-7 rate in 1976 but discontinued it in 1994 in favor of the U-6 rate. In the 1982 recession the U-7 reached 15.3%, its highest level. In fact, no bout of unemployment since the last year of the Great Depression in 1941 would have produced an adjusted unemployment rate as high as today’s.
Why is the real unemployment rate so much higher than the official, or U-3, rate? First, forced part-time work has reached its highest level ever, going all the way back to 1956 and including the 1982 recession. In May 2009, 8.8 million workers were forced to work part time for economic reasons. Forced part-timers are concentrated in retail, food services, and construction; about a quarter of them are young workers between 16 and 24. The number of discouraged workers is high today as well. In May, the BLS counted 2.2 million “marginally attached” workers. That matches the highest number since 1994, when the agency introduced this measure.
With the economy in the throes of a catastrophic downturn, unemployment, no matter how it’s measured, will rise dramatically and impose yet more devastating costs on society and on those without a job or unable to find full-time work.
4. INTO THE INFERNO
(Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies
What can we do, now that democracy and the free market are one?)
BY
ARUNDHATI ROY
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy? Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?”
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment.
The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?
What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly – our nearsightedness? Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do) combined with our inability to see very far into the future makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.
It would be conceit to pretend that my new book of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers, provides answers to these questions. It only demonstrates, in some detail, the fact that it looks as though the beacon could be failing and that democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would. All the essays were written as urgent, public interventions at critical moments in India – during the state-backed genocide of Muslims in Gujarat; just before the date set for the hanging of Mohammad Afzal, the accused in the 13 December 2001 parliament attack; during US President George Bush’s visit to India; during the mass uprising in Kashmir in the summer of 2008; and after the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Often they were not just responses to events, they were responses to the responses.
Though many of them were written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something, the essays do have a common thread. They’re not about unfortunate anomalies or aberrations in the democratic process. They’re about the consequences of and the corollaries to democracy and the ways in which it is practised in the world’s largest democracy. (Or the world’s largest “demon-crazy”, as a Kashmiri protester on the streets of Srinagar once put it. His placard said: “Democracy without Justice = Demon Crazy.”)
In January 2008, on the first anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, I gave a lecture in Istanbul. Dink was shot down on the street outside his office for daring to raise a subject that is forbidden in Turkey – the 1915 genocide of Armenians, in which more than one million people were killed. My lecture was about the history of genocide and genocide denial, and the old, almost organic relationship between “progress” and genocide.
I have always been struck by the fact that the political party in Turkey that carried out the Armenian genocide was called the Committee for Union and Progress. Most of the essays in Listening to Grasshoppers are, in fact, about the contemporary correlation between union and progress, or, in today’s idiom, between nationalism and development – those unimpeachable twin towers of modern, free-market democracy. Both of these in their extreme form are, as we now know, encrypted with the potential of bringing about ultimate, apocalyptic destruction (nuclear war, climate change).
Though the essays were written between 2002 and 2008, the invisible marker, the starting gun, is the year 1989, when in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan capitalism won its long jihad against Soviet communism. (Of course, the wheel’s in spin again. Could it be that those same mountains are now in the process of burying capitalism? It’s too early to tell.) Within months of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian government, once a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, performed a high-speed somersault and aligned itself with the United States, monarch of the new unipolar world.
The rules of the game changed suddenly and completely. Millions of people who lived in remote villages and deep in the heart of untouched forests, some of whom had never heard of Berlin or the Soviet Union, could not have imagined how events that occurred in those faraway places would affect their lives. The process of their dispossession and displacement had already begun in the early 1950s, when India opted for the Soviet-style development model in which huge steel plants and thousands of large dams would occupy the “commanding heights” of the economy. The era of privatisation and structural adjustment accelerated that process at a mind-numbing speed.
Today, words like “progress” and “development” have become interchangeable with economic “reforms”, deregulation and privatisation. “Freedom” has come to mean “choice”. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. “Market” no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The “market” is a de-territorialised space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling “futures”. “Justice” has come to mean “human rights” (and of those, as they say, “a few will do”).
This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalise their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress”, “anti-development”, “anti-reform” and of course “anti-national” – negativists of the worst sort. Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, “Don’t you believe in progress?” To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs and whose homes are being bulldozed they say, “Do you have an alternative development model?” To those who believe that a government is duty-bound to provide people with basic education, health care and social security, they say, “You’re against the market.” And who except a cretin could be against a market?
This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing. Two decades of this kind of “progress” in India have created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it – and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering – the massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines and Special Economic Zones. All of them promoted in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.
The battle for land lies at the heart of the “development” debate. Before he became India’s finance minister, P Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his world-view. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In an interview a year ago, he said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities. Realising this “vision” would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about 500 million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister. The portfolios are separated only by an osmotic membrane. Underlying this nightmare masquerading as “vision” is the plan to free up vast tracts of land and all of India’s natural resources, leaving them ripe for corporate plunder.
Already forests, mountains and water systems are being ravaged by marauding multinational corporations, backed by a state that has lost its moorings and is committing what can only be called “ecocide”. In eastern India, bauxite and iron ore mining is destroying whole ecosystems, turning fertile land into desert. In the Himalayas, hundreds of high dams are being planned, the consequences of which can only be catastrophic. In the plains, embankments built along rivers, ostensibly to control floods, have led to rising riverbeds, causing even more flooding, more waterlogging, more salinisation of agricultural land and the destruction of livelihoods of millions of people. Most of India’s holy rivers, including the Ganga and the Yamuna, have been turned into unholy drains that carry more sewage and industrial effluent than water. Hardly a single river runs its course and meets the ocean.
Sustainable food crops, suitable to local soil conditions and microclimates, have been replaced by water-guzzling hybrid and genetically modified “cash” crops which, apart from being wholly dependent on the market, are also heavily dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, canal irrigation and the indiscriminate mining of groundwater.
As abused farmland, saturated with chemicals, gradually becomes exhausted and infertile, agricultural input costs rise, ensnaring small farmers in a debt trap. Over the past few years, more than 180,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. While state granaries are bursting with food that eventually rots, starvation and malnutrition approaching the same levels as in sub-Saharan Africa stalk the land.
It’s as though an ancient society, decaying under the weight of feudalism and caste, was churned in a great machine. The churning has ripped through the mesh of old inequalities, recalibrating some of them but reinforcing most. Now the old society has curdled and separated into a thin layer of thick cream – and a lot of water. The cream is India’s “market” of many million consumers (of cars, cellphones, computers, Valentine’s Day greeting cards), the envy of international business. The water is of little consequence. It can be sloshed around, stored in holding ponds, and eventually drained away.
Or so they think, the men in suits. They didn’t bargain for the violent civil war that has broken out in India’s heartland: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal.
As if to illustrate the connection between “union” and “progress”, in 1989, at exactly the same time that the Congress government was opening up India’s markets to international finance, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in the opposition, began its virulent campaign of Hindu nationalism (popularly known as “Hindutva”). In 1990, its leader, L K Advani, travelled across the country whipping up hatred against Muslims and demanding that the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque that stood on a disputed site in Ayodhya, be demolished and a Ram temple built in its place. In 1992 a mob, egged on by Advani, demolished the mosque. In early 1993, a mob rampaged through Mumbai attacking Muslims, killing almost 1,000 people. As revenge, a series of bomb blasts ripped through the city, killing about 250 people. Feeding off the communal frenzy it had generated, the BJP defeated the Congress in 1998 and came to power at the Centre.
It’s not a coincidence that the rise of Hindutva corresponded with the historical moment when America substituted communism with Islam as its great enemy. The radical Islamist mujahedin – whom President Reagan once entertained in the White House and compared to America’s Founding Fathers – suddenly began to be called terrorists. The Indian government, once a staunch friend of the Palestinians, turned into
Israel’s “natural ally”. Now India and Israel do joint military exercises, share intelligence and probably exchange notes on how best to administer occupied territories.
By 1998, when the BJP took office, the “progress” project of privatisation and liberalisation was about eight years old. Though it had campaigned vigorously against the economic reforms, saying they were a process of “looting through liberalisation”, once it came to power the BJP embraced the free market enthusiastically and threw its weight behind huge corporations like Enron. (In representative democracies, once they are elected, the people’s representatives are free to break their promises and change their minds.)
Within weeks of taking office, the BJP conducted a series of thermonuclear tests. Though India had thrown its hat into the nuclear ring in 1975, politically, the 1998 nuclear tests were of a different order altogether. The orgy of triumphant nationalism with which the tests were greeted introduced a chilling new language of aggression and hatred into mainstream public discourse. None of what was being said was new, only that what was once considered unacceptable was suddenly being celebrated. Since then, Hindu communalism and nuclear nationalism, like corporate globalisation, have vaulted over the stated ideologies of political parties. The venom has been injected straight into our bloodstream.
In February 2002, following the armed raid on a train coach in which 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were burned alive, the BJP government in Gujarat, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, presided over a carefully planned genocide of Muslims in the state. The Islamophobia generated all over the world by the 11 September 2001 attacks put the wind in their sails.
The machinery of the state of Gujarat stood by and watched while more than 2,000 people were massacred. Gujarat has always been a state rife with tension between Hindus and Muslims. There had been riots before. But this was not a riot. It was a genocidal massacre, and though the number of victims was insignificant compared to the horror of, say, Rwanda, Sudan or the Congo, the Gujarat carnage was designed as a public spectacle whose aims were unmistakable. It was a public warning to Muslim citizens from the government of the world’s favourite democracy.
After the carnage, Narendra Modi pressed for early elections. He was returned to power with a decisive mandate from the people of Gujarat. Five years later he even repeated this success: he is now serving a third term as chief minister, widely appreciated by business houses for his faith in the free market, illustrating the organic relationship between “union” and “progress”. Or, if you like, between fascism and the free market. In January 2009, that relationship was sealed with a kiss at a public function. The CEOs of two of India’s biggest corporations, Ratan Tata (of the Tata Group) and Mukesh Ambani (of Reliance Industries), celebrated the development policies of Narendra Modi and warmly endorsed him as a future candidate for prime minister.
Only two months ago, the nearly $2bn 2009 general election was concluded. That’s a lot more than the budget of the US elections. According to some media reports, the actual amount that was spent is closer to $10bn. Where, might one ask, does that kind of money come from?
The Congress and its allies, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have won a comfortable majority. Interestingly, more than 90 per cent of the independent candidates who stood for elections lost. Clearly, without sponsorship, it’s hard to win an election. And independent candidates cannot promise subsidised rice, free TVs and cash-for-votes, those demeaning acts of vulgar charity that elections have been reduced to.
When you take a closer look at the calculus that underlies election results, words like “comfortable” and “majority” turn out to be deceptive, if not outright inaccurate. For instance, the actual share of votes polled by the UPA in these elections works out at only 10.3 per cent of the country’s population. It’s interesting how the cleverly layered mathematics of electoral democracy can turn a tiny minority into a thumping mandate.
In the run-up to the polls, there was absolute consensus across party lines about the economic “reforms”. Several people have sarcastically suggested that the Congress and BJP form a coalition. In some states they already have. In Chhattisgarh, for example, the BJP runs the government and Congress politicians run the Salwa Judum, a vicious, government-backed “people’s” militia. The Judum and the government have formed a joint front against the Maoists in the forests, who are engaged in a brutal and often deadly armed struggle. Among other things, this has become a fight to the finish, against displacement and against land acquisition by corporations waiting to begin mining iron ore, tin and all the other wealth stashed below the forest floor. So, in Chhattisgarh, we have the remarkable spectacle of the two biggest political parties of India in an alliance against the Adivasis of Dantewara, India’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Already 644 villages have been emptied. Fifty thousand people have moved into Salwa Judum camps. Three hundred thousand are on the run, and are being called Maoist terrorists or sympathisers. The battle is raging, and the corporations are waiting.
It is significant that India is one of the countries that blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes that may have been committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Governments in this part of the world have taken note of Israel’s Gaza blueprint as a good way of dealing with “terrorism”: keep the media out and close in for the kill. That way they don’t have to worry too much about who’s a “terrorist” and who isn’t. There may be a little flurry of international outrage, but it goes away pretty quickly.
Things do not augur well for the forest-dwelling people of India. Reassured by this “constructive” collaboration, this consensus between political parties, few were more enthusiastic about the recent general elections than major corporate houses. They seem to have realised that a democratic mandate can legitimise their pillaging in a way that nothing else can. Several corporations ran extravagant advertising campaigns on TV – some featuring Bollywood film stars – urging people, young and old, rich and poor, to go out and vote. Shops and restaurants in Khan Market, Delhi’s most tony market, offered discounts to those whose index (voting) fingers were marked with indelible ink. Democracy suddenly became the cool new way to be. You know how it is: the Chinese do sport, so they had the Olympics; India does democracy, so we had an election. Both are heavily sponsored, TV-friendly spectator sports.
Even the BBC commissioned the India Election Special – a coach on a train – that took journalists from all over the world on a sightseeing tour to witness the miracle of Indian elections. The train coach had a slogan painted on it: “Will India’s voters revive the World’s Fortunes?” BBC (Hindi) had a poster up in a café near my home. It featured a $100 bill (with Ben Franklin) morphing into a 500 rupee note (with Gandhi). It said: Kya India ka vote bachayega duniya ka note? (Will India’s votes rescue the world’s currency notes?)
In these flagrant and unabashed ways, an electorate has been turned into a market, voters are seen as consumers, and democracy is being welded to the free market. Ergo: those who cannot consume do not matter.
For better or for worse, the 2009 elections seem to have ensured that the “progress” project is up and running. However, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the “union” project has fallen by the wayside.
As the 2009 election campaign unrolled, two things got saturation coverage in the media. One was the 100,000-rupee ($2,000) “people’s car”, the Tata Nano – the wagon for the volks – rolling out of Modi’s Gujarat. (The sops and subsidies Modi gave the Tatas had a lot to do with Ratan Tata’s warm endorsement of him.) The other is the hate speech of the BJP’s monstrous new debutant, Varun Gandhi (another descendant of the Nehru dynasty), who makes even Narendra Modi sound moderate and retiring. In a public speech Varun Gandhi called for Muslims to be forcibly sterilised. “This will be known as a Hindu bastion, no ***** Muslim dare raise his head here,” he said, using a derogatory word for someone who has been circumcised. “I don’t want a single Muslim vote.”
Varun Gandhi won his election by a colossal margin. It makes you wonder – are “the people” always right? The BJP still remains by far the second largest political party, with a powerful national presence, the only real challenge to the Congress. It will certainly live to fight another day.
The hoary institutions of Indian democracy – the judiciary, the police, the “free” press and, of course, elections – far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of union and progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colourful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.
Speaking of consensus, there’s the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir, the consensus in India is hardcore. It cuts across every section of the Establishment – including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and even Bollywood.
The war in the Kashmir Valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have “disappeared”, women have been raped and many thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir Valley, making it the most militarised zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that’s true. But does military domination mean victory?
Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India’s 150 million Muslims who have been brutalised, humiliated and marginalised. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
India’s temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun) have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40° Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the cold – from frostbite and sunburn. The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war, thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice-axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.
While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military stand-off than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They’re good people who believe in peace, free speech and human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the UN Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . it’s a long list.) The glacial melt will cause severe floods in the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We’ll need more weapons. Who knows, that sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life – and the glaciers will melt even faster.
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