Journalism in the Age of Snowden

Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, was on CNN deploring Edward Snowden’s decision to flee abroad with his revelations of the NSA’s massive spying program; she said he should have come to the US Congress with the information.

I wonder if she thinks anyone other than junior high-school kids will agree, and perhaps not even them, for most have probably seen the Will Smith Gene Hackman starrer Enemy of the State, in which the NSA bad guy not only lies to Congress but murders one of its members. There are also the Bourne series of movies in which lying to Congress is standard procedure for the CIA bad guys.   

The current Head of the NSA has been caught lying to Congress and there have been no repercussions as yet. That is par for the course. The history of the post-WW II era -- especially the Iran-Contra affair -- has made it clear that the constitutional structures of the United States have been powerless to control those pursuing the interests of the military-industrial complex.(Video of President Eisenhower's famous speech.)

As far as I can see, Snowden took the only honorable option he had as someone sworn to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States.

Feinstein at 80 is the oldest member of Congress, and a Liberal Democrat from California; she would have risked nothing by calling for public hearings and getting the NSA to clean house.   

Instead, she has framed a bill to “reform” the NSA that the Electronic Frontier Foundation says will merely codify the worst abuses and extend the mass surveillance of Americans. Typically, Feinstein’s Committee negotiated the bill behind closed doors and has not responded to critics.

All this indicates the strength of the body of lies that has come to be accepted as reality over the past 60 years; but as I have been reporting, its underpinnings are now disintegrating..

How the current situation develops will depend on where the American media Establishment locates its loyalties. If it acknowledges that the unconstitutional power nexus created in Washington by the Ismay-Churchill coup is coming apart at the seams, we could be looking at a transatlantic version of Soviet de-Stalinization.

If United States media begin telling the truth about the British role in subverting American democracy, the effect across the Atlantic will be profound. The British elite will be forced to abandon its elaborate self-aggrandizing fictions and admit that its criminal policies have driven the country into an unprecedented crisis.

As strong pressure from German and American bank regulators has made the international movement of illicit money increasingly difficult, the elite British custodians of the global black market have been obliged to guarantee the trillions under their management by offering up concrete national assets. Unbeknownst to the British people, large chunks of their country have passed into the hands of foreign owners, many of them drug lords and mafiosi masquerading as nebulous corporations.

That process is set to become much more obtrusive under recently announced initiatives ostensibly aimed at facilitating Chinese and Arab investment in Britain. As The Guardian reported on 17 October, Britain faces the prospect that under a recently announced agreement with Beijing, “Chinese entities will hold important stakes in water in the UK, airports, IT infrastructure and now nuclear power generation, all without a serious national debate on any potential risks such involvement might bring.”

Ironically, the paper did not note the reason why this is happening, for silence about Britain’s criminal involvement in the international economy continues to be the cost of survival in the British journalistic Establishment.

Truth telling will also revolutionize American politics.

If American journalists examine how Britain undermined constitutional rule in the world's most powerful country they will bring into the light the treachery of many who chose to promote their own interests over those of their country. The "religious Right," a long-standing pawn of and supporter of the military-industrial nexus, will lose much energy. The Bush wing of the Republican Party could be decimated.

The logistics of such change remain to be worked out, but the atmospherics indicate that it is only a matter of time. Consider what Adam Gopnik had to say in The New Yorker last week about the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination.

The murder marked the beginning of “the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know;” it highlighted an overlay of two truths. “The first truth is that the evidence that the American security services gathered, within the first hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-witness evidence, fingerprint evidence, firearms evidence, circumstantial evidence, fibre evidence. The second truth of the assassination, just as inarguable, is that the security services collecting that evidence were themselves up to their armpits in sinister behavior, even conspiring with some of the worst people in the world to kill the Presidents of other countries. The accepted division of American life into two orders—an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime—collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir.”

Bitcoin Augurs Global Rule of Organized Crime

 The Internet currency Bitcoin was supposedly invented by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009.

It is not issued by any central bank or authority but is based on an algorithm and has come into increasing use to make electronic payments for all kinds of goods and services; it is also traded against the US$ on the Gox exchange based in California.

What makes Bitcoin more than a curiosity is that it seems to be seeding a new incarnation of the global money laundering system that Britain built as its Empire dwindled in the second half of the 20th Century.

That system, centered on London and run through some 70 “tax havens” strung around the world, has been under increasing pressure from regulators in the United States and Germany. The leak last week of an enormous trove of data on some 250,000 secret accounts held in tax havens is the latest sign that it cannot survive.

However, with an estimated $30 trillion in assets belonging to elite and criminal groups in countries around the world, the global black market is unlikely to disappear. Any vanishing act will be into the vaporous realm of the Bitcoin, and the effects will be dire indeed.

Just for starters, there is the prospect that the Bitcoin as the currency of the global underground will unseat the US$ as the repository of national reserves. That process would accelerate to light-speed if an opportune "leak" were to reveal that "Satoshi Nakamoto" is a high placed British Darth Vader masterminding an Empire Strikes Back scenario. Pointing in that direction is the debut of Bitcoin just as the United States Federal Reserve led Western central bankers into the massive "monetary easing" that staved off immediate disaster in 2009 but undermined the long term viability of the $ as the world's reserve currency.

Governments can try fighting such a disastrous progression of events with new rules and regulations or by subverting the Gox exchange, but given the range of elite groups invested in the underground economy nothing less than closing down the Internet is likely to work.

The only other alternative will be for the 99% to organize at the community level to insulate their families and homes from the Criminals Without Borders regime augured by the onset of what will, at some point, probably be dubbed the Britcoin.

To Change the World

The piece below is the Introduction to the book I have just finished writing. It is long and complex, as is the book. Anyone interested in knowing more or commenting on what I have to say should contact me at  bhaskarpmenonATgmail.com or papamenon04ATyahoo.com. DO NOT use the Blogger interface; it seems to convert most messages to gibberish  (The 15 August piece on Sri Aurobindo elicited, in addition to the few published comments, over 50 identical pieces of spam!)  If you send me a message and do not get a polite and considered response it means I have not got it. Please feel free to circulate or post this note and the piece below wherever you want.

1001 Things You Should Know

The world is now trapped in deep interlocked crises that could precipitate an extended economic depression, global environmental disasters and war; but we have the capacity to deal with them by effecting a global spiritual transformation. This book is a guide to what ordinary people can do to direct the course of events. Its recommendations emerge from a tradition and history that are uniquely of India, a legacy that Mahatma Gandhi brought into politics and Martin Luther King made global.
 
As our national legacy is not well understood even in India -- perhaps especially in India because of deliberate colonial era distortions that have endured into the 21st Century -- much of the book is history, with a particular focus on the confrontation of India and Britain as that of two fundamentally different approaches to reality, the spiritual and the material. In addressing that issue the book examines several venerable clichés about India -- its spirituality, its "unity in diversity" and the unparalleled tolerance of its society -- that no one has felt the need to explain. Why is India so famously spiritual, united in its diversity and tolerant?

The answers, necessarily hypothetical, point to the time when efforts began to to tone down the endemic hostilities of the fiercely territorial hunter gatherers inhabiting India. Probably taken in hand by the legendary Saptarishis, the seven sages at the beginnings of Indian tradition, the effort most likely began with the collection of the sacred lore of all the tribes into a compendium -- the Vedas -- that everyone could venerate. (The colonial era theory that blond White protoEuropean "Aryans" composed them while herding cattle and riding their chariots up and down the high Himalayan passes is laughably absurd.)

The word Veda is from the same root as video; it is what is seen or known. To seek the significance of that body of collected tribal knowledge India's best and brightest gathered in forest retreats and produced the Upanishads (a composite word that means to talk sitting together). Those ancient conference reports conceptualized familiar realities: a universe governed by law extending from the starry sky to the endless cycling of nature's seasonal transformations in which death was but a step to rebirth and human actions propelled fate.

The Upanishads postulated an eternal and immanent power governing by immutable Dharma (Law), the endless flux of the universe. In human affairs that law operated as Karma, the unbreakable chain of cause and effect binding an individual’s actions to personal destiny. As death is but a door to rebirth, the karmic chain was seen as extending over many lives, determining the soul's evolution or regression in awareness and understanding. In the happiest of circumstances the individual soul could achieve enlightenment, escape from the cycle of life, and merge with the Paramatma, the Universal Soul. The guiding lights on that positive track were defined as Sat Chit Ananda — Truth Knowledge Bliss — three separate elements that can be read as a statement: the bliss of knowing the truth.

The Indian world view shaped by the Upanishads is profoundly hopeful; individuals face no Judgment Day but have endless opportunities for trial and error in their progress towards God. Existence is a constant teacher of the need for spiritual understanding and evolution. Although human society suffers a long decline in virtue through great cycles of time, the immanent power of the Universe never allows the defeat of the Good. The darkest age, the Kali Yuga (now current), ends with the return of virtue in full flood.

The philosophy of the Upanishads flowed into the life of ordinary people through two masterly epics written some seven millennia apart and marking key points in the evolution of Indian society. Endlessly retold as sacred legend, folk tale and life’s eternal drama, celebrated in music, song and dance, the Ramayana and Mahabharata carried the philosophy of the Upanishads down to the lowliest village. By popularizing the view that all Creation is Vasudev kutumbakham, God's family, they made it impossible to define a tribal "Other" and enforce a group identity on the basis of fear. Thus defanged, tribes became castes, autonomous in certain customs and traditions but parts of a larger society; the law-giving Manu of the current Yuga compared them to the functionally different but interdependent parts of a human body.

 The Ramayana marked the evolution of caste federations into unitary kingdoms; it set the ideal of Ramrajya, the rule of a virtuous monarch dedicated to the welfare of his people and beloved by all castes. When that ideal lay trampled in the struggle for imperial power the Mahabharata carried instructions for corrupt and confusing times: people were not of high or low caste by birth but by personal merit and action; the individual must maintain his moral equilibrium and do his duty regardless of immediate success or failure.

The attributes of personal freedom and tolerance, combined with the acceptance of law and specialization of labor, made India a cultural and economic powerhouse that influenced all of Eurasia. The Universal Soul of the Upanishads migrated West to ancient Greece, and its Platonic version entered the Semitic world when, some 300 years before Jesus, a learned council convened by Ptolemy II in Alexandria produced the first Greek translation of the Torah. The council rendered the tribal war god Yahweh into the almighty God of the Pentateuch, beginning the monotheistic tradition that flowed into the Bible and the Koran. Meanwhile, the Buddha's spare non-deistic retelling of universal reality centered on the creative core of Sunnyata (emptiness) fathered the Zero and revolutionized mathematics globally; his philosophy found a receptive home in East Asia and endured there as India itself returned to the richly personified deism of the old religion.

As trade with all parts of Eurasia and parts of Africa added to India's great wealth the country became a magnet for migrants, many filtering in peacefully and others invading to conquer and rule. With one exception, all of them settled into the unifying amalgam of Indian society.

The British were the exception. Arriving initially as traders, they rose to power at a time of great disorder in the country by using to advantage an acute capacity for political manipulation and treachery. Their rise coincided with two significant changes in the world view of the British elite. One reflected the demolition of the Biblical God-centered universe by Newton's mechanistic concept of it. The other was the fond fantasy that Europeans were the descendants of a superior "Aryan race." Atheism, racial arrogance and consistent perfidy put the British fundamentally at odds with Indian society and precluded their settling into it. Their nonviolent expulsion after two massively murderous world wars fought in the ruthless pursuit of imperial interests highlighted the stark contrasts between Britain and India.

The "Soul Force" that Mahatma Gandhi mobilized to end British rule has been missing in most of what has been reported as happening in India since independence. In addition, the massive corruptions afflicting the country now seem to signal the death of our traditional values. However, such conclusions are premature, for our history lies largely unexamined and misunderstood, as indeed, does the force that Gandhi mobilized. It is urgent to remedy those deficits now because the world is in deepening peril from the industrial “progress” that Gandhi correctly described as malignant and unsustainable in his seminal 1910 book, Hind Swaraj.

Corrective action will not come from governments: for some four decades they have done little in the face of disastrous environmental trends that are driving species to extinction at a rate not seen since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. They have taken only the most desultory action in the face of the threat that global warming could force radical changes in the cropping patterns of major food crops, precipitating possibly genocidal wars. The elite groups in control of the world's governments are loath to change economic arrangements that bring them vast wealth. If their suicidal inertia is to be overcome without ruinous disruption of the world economy ordinary people must mobilize the transformational power of Gandhian "Soul Force." 

Gandhi himself refused to explain how other people could use that force, saying to one interlocutor, “I have it all in my head. When the occasion comes I take out what is applicable to the situation.” When pressed to write a “treatise” on the matter he replied “I cannot do what you want me to do. It is beyond my power. ... I am not the man who can write a treatise. I speak under inspiration. I cannot decide as to how I shall tackle a particular situation until I am faced with it.” But even in the absence of written instructions, we can make out that he acted on the fundamental tenets of Hindu faith. If all Creation is part of the divine, all must share in and resonate to the force of the Soul, the spiritual truth. Satyagraha sought to mobilize the spiritual force of those he led and engage adversaries at the level of their highest common denominator. The essence of the Gandhian approach is the belief that once spiritually engaged, people can resolve any problem.

Gandhi based himself in the mainstream of a spiritual tradition Indians have sustained for some 15 millennia in an effort to comprehend the nature of reality. As noted earlier, that effort began in the Vedas, intensified in the Upanishads, and entered the lives of ordinary people with the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It has coursed unbroken down the centuries into the contemporary world, albeit with major blockages and periods of great difficulty. When the Vedic tradition became crusted over with ritual and superstition the Buddha emerged to cleanse and reform it. When Buddhism lost energy, Adi Sankara revived the old religion and set off the Bhakti tradition that strengthened resistance to invading Islam and eventually softened the foreign faith into the indigenous Sufi movement.

 Emerging from that milieu, Kabir and Guru Nanak, healers of caste and religious division, set off the streams of poetry and faith that became modern Indian nationalism. It is that extended background that explains why, when Raja Rammohun Roy took up the British challenge in Bengal in the 18th Century, the response came not just from there but from the whole country, reaching fruition in Gandhi. Britain’s empty boast that it created Indian unity flies in the face of the world’s most ancient nationalism, emerging not from conquest and oppression as in Europe but by consensus and culture shaped by sages, poets and philosophers.

The spiritual has always been a structural element of Indian history. With Satyagraha in South Africa Gandhi rendered it overtly political, opening the door to its globalization by Martin Luther King. The trajectory of Gandhian ideas from Africa and India to America is what allows their use to change the world in the 21st Century. That does not mean that we do not need to innovate. Gandhi's experience in leading a spiritually attuned people to confront oppressive authority is not directly relevant to a situation in which activists must deal with a hugely diffuse system with its decision-making centres dispersed among corporate elites obedient to no single institutional centre.

Satyagraha remains useful in situations like Koodankulam, where elite groups promote poisonous patterns of “development;” and it can be used to protest an entire range of policies as Spain’s Indignado and American “Occupy” movements have done. But it cannot transform the existing world situation without bringing local efforts into global synergy. The Information and Communications Revolutions have made that possible. The next decade will see most of the world's seven billion people connected by mobile telephone networks; the number of those on the Internet will be nearly five billion by 2020. The number of online machines that process and store most of human knowledge ─ the "Internet of things" as Yuri Milner the Russian IT strategist calls it ─ will grow much faster in the same period, increasing from five billion to 20 billion. Meanwhile, vastly improved Internet search functions and geospatial presentations integrating complex data streams will change the content and quality of the Web. Widespread use of smart phones will enable billions of people to access that information and contribute to online data banks. In sum, we will have the beginnings of what Milner calls a "global brain."

The impact of such a new planetary consciousness will depend on how it is used. If it is committed to help the poor and weak, to deal with social and environmental problems and promote peace and nonviolence, it could develop into a composite Mahatma, a collective "Great Soul" to guide the world out of its current state of generalized crisis and along a path beneficial to all. Its immoral use to control and manipulate people, to generate corporate profits without regard to social and environmental impact would produce a violent dementia. Much of the book is devoted to examining the negative factors that must be neutralized to prevent such a perversion. It also suggests how activists working at the level of their own communities can engage in a global matrix to build the synergies necessary to transform the world.

The first step towards mobilizing global action must be to spread a balanced understanding of what happened during the era of Europe's global dominance. At present such an understanding is not possible because imperial Europe has buried its record in fabricated histories. The motivation has not been national pride but elite profit; the truth cannot be told because it would reveal that exploitative violence and bloody treachery have continued unabated long past the supposed end of the colonial era. This is especially true of Britain, where a cohesive elite has engaged in a campaign of active and widespread propaganda. This is not because of the long afterlife of imperial arrogance; the propaganda hides the fact that the British Empire has been resurrected as a global underground economy that fosters every form of organized crime and corruption.

"Islamic terrorists," drug lords and criminal mafias in every country are the foot soldiers of that new imperium, as are wealthy tax cheats around the world. Their alliance is rooted in the use of "tax havens," of which there are now about 70, most of them established as the British Empire declined in the second half of the 20th Century. Tax havens help major multinational banks launder the proceeds of crime; they constitute a system with its hub in The City (financial district) of London. There is hard evidence of the system at work. Just in the last year Britain's largest bank, HSBC, incurred a fine of about a billion dollars in New York for laundering drug money. (The bank was only being true to its roots: HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corporation, which rose to international prominence by financing the opium trade in the 19th Century.)

 In effect, the tax haven system has created within the world's existing financial architecture a shadow criminal enterprise hidden in plain sight: mass media regularly report the obscenely large "bonuses" major banks pay to their staff but they never explain why. Journalists avoided explanations even when such payments continued in the aftermath of the 2009 financial meltdown, as banks wallowed in public funds to stave off bankruptcy. If the thought has ever crossed their minds that bank bonuses are payoffs to people managing trillion dollar flows of black money, reporters and editors have kept it a very close secret.

The New British Empire is far more powerful than the old one ever was. It manipulates a wide range of proxies around the world to generate a massive flow of illicit earnings. Revenues come from the theft of natural resources, drug trafficking and the arms trade. Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have been the primary victims. Since the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China, Britain has also tied into the lucrative corruptions of that largest of tyrannies. The lurid downfall in 2012 of Bo Xi-lai, the rising political "Princeling" whose wife murdered a British money launderer, brought that fetid reality to world attention; or rather, it would have done so if the mainstream Press had not presented the murder victim as a respectable "British businessman."

The media have given scant attention to expert estimates valuing the global black market at over $30 trillion and annual money laundering at $2 trillion. To put those figures in perspective: the entire American economy is valued at about $15 trillion. The cooperation of Western mass media in disguising Britain's multifaceted post-colonial criminality points to the corrupting power of real-life Mordor. Unfortunately, there is no single magic ring that can be tossed into hellfire to destroy its dark empire; that will require a concerted global effort to promote understanding of its violent nature and corrupting role. Whoever accepts the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the European Union will have a golden opportunity to kick-start that process.

Will the people of Middle Earth mobilize against the great evil threatening them? I believe they will for two reasons. One is that the old order is spent. Corporations, the central institution of the colonial and industrial eras, are no longer the most efficient means to organize economic activity; increasingly, the giant transnational entities that dominate the world economy are like lumbering dinosaurs in a networked world. Although they have accumulated enormous political, economic and social power, the corporate elite have come up against a new reality they cannot master, the lightning fast connectivity of the Information Age.

To understand how that has changed economic fundamentals we have to look at the historical context, specifically, the evolution of the European concept of “capital.” It appeared first when elite groups enclosed common lands, claimed property rights, and imposed rent on weaker sections of society, thus monetizing their labour. Those without property could not get land without laying their lives on the line with a mortgage – a word that in the original French means “engaged to the death.”

Land ceased being the primary form of capital when the development of ocean-going ships and new navigation capabilities made long distance trade hugely profitable. The “capital” of the mercantile era was the money necessary to fund risky and expensive ventures. It was raised and spent by a new institution, the joint-stock corporation: the East India Company founded in 1600 was the first one. With industrialization the concept of “capital” changed again: it became the capacity to bundle money, technology, raw materials, labour and marketing skills.

At every step in its radical evolution "capital" remained under the control of elite groups; but the Information Age has changed that. The social connectivity now necessary to generate the most lucrative profits is a form of "capital" that cannot be easily controlled from the top. In fact, corporate advertisers using the Internet and Worldwide Web are the tenant farmers of the Information Age, monetizing the social connective. Without fascist measures similar to those in China they cannot control the vast potential of that connectivity or block its potential to mobilize transformational change.

As an illustration of that altogether new power, consider that the current "housing crisis" in the United States could be resolved in a week by organizing a Web-based state-regulated lottery of overpriced real estate. The overpriced properties now stalling the market could be transferred to new owners who would need no mortgage. Properly institutionalized, the entire housing market could be driven by lottery, generating a steady flow of funds for builders and erasing banks from the picture. The power of connected collectives can be similarly exerted in every area of economic and social activity. It can clean up politics, initiate and sustain action to protect the environment, eradicate poverty and illiteracy, and dramatically bring down the incidence of preventable and communicable diseases.  

The second reason for my optimism is that the world seems primed for a spiritual revolution. To see why that is so, we have to bring into focus the net result of four grim centuries of Europe's global hegemony. All things negative in that era have had unexpected positive outcomes:

• The racist genocides, slave trades and exploitation of indentured and migrant labour have mixed the human gene-pool into an unprecedented unity.
• War has ploughed under many national parochialisms and cross fertilized traditions.
• Opposition to Europe's racist and colonial oppressions brought to life the moral revolution that for the first time in history demanded the equality of men and women of all races.
• Mass-market consumerism with its color blind pursuit of profit undermined racism everywhere.
• The ecological ravages of the industrial era underlined humanity’s close and custodial relationship with Nature; the deepening environmental crises they triggered have made urgent and fundamental change imperative.
• The current world economic crisis has made clear to many millions of people that the existing economic and political systems are deeply corrupt and must be changed.

To read an epochal transformation into this negative-to-positive progression is admittedly an intuitive leap but it can be defended scientifically by considering the nature of thought. Scientists have demonstrated that thoughts are patterns of electrons that can not only be mapped and projected visually in the laboratory, but used to control equipment, most innocuously to help grievously disabled people. They have done this without venturing an opinion on the provenance of more complex thoughts. Is "thinking" individually generated? Or does the "thinker" merely perceive existing patterns? If thought is individually generated, it would support the view of our universe as an accidental evolutionary development with no set direction or purpose. If it is the perception of existing structures of electrons -- as in the intuitive leap above -- it would imply that a purposeful universe is transmitting a message.

The mainstream of Indian spiritual tradition has affirmed that human beings are part of a purposeful Universe. That belief is the basis for yogic meditation which seeks to tune the individual to the Universal essence. This is not to say that the Universe is deterministic in human terms: it can be perceived in many different ways, and that can change its course: “You attain what you worship” says the Bhagavad Gita. The world we now have is the result of Europe’s worship of wealth and unscrupulous power; to transform it we must perceive and want a different reality.

There is little doubt that since Gandhi’s advent turned the tide against the colonial era there has been a continuous improvement in the moral quality of human actions. We have seen a widening altruism, a growing sensitivity to the need to protect all life on the planet, and a strengthening effort to promote human rights and democracy. Even neo-colonial Europe amidst its continuing depredations has bowed to the trend and instead of glorying in domination and rapacity, provides “official development aid” to its victims. It is within our power to push that positive trend into an evolutionary quantum jump. Out of the titanic gloom of the current global crisis we can bring another world into being; this book is a basic guide to how we can do so.

Bo Xilai, China and Media Hypocrisy

The story of Chinese "princeling" Bo Xilai, his "Jackie Kennedy wife" Gu Kailai, and murdered "British businessman" Neil Heywood is a textbook case of mass media hypocrisy in covering international affairs.

Consider for example the Letter from China headlined "Corruption Nation: Why Bo Xilai Matters" in the latest New Yorker, and last week's investigative piece by Bloomberg on Gu's four sisters who "controlled a web of businesses from Beijing to Hong Kong to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million.”

In both articles, as in the general flow of news agency reporting of the matter, the focus is firmly on Chinese corruption. The cesspool  represented by Neil Heywood, who Reuters reported was "poisoned after he threatened to expose a plan by a Chinese leader’s wife to move money abroad,” remains firmly in the shadows.

Heywood was no ordinary "British businessman." He was a fixer for the global black market centered on and run from The City, London's financial center. His main job seems to have been helping corrupt Chinese officials move hot money into safe havens abroad. On the side he reported to MI6, Britain's nefarious spy agency (a link he advertised in a pathetically juvenile manner by incorporating 007 on his car license plate).

Why is China "corruption nation" and not Britain?

The New Yorker piece sins by omission; the Bloomberg article engages in active distortion. Noting the use of offshore tax havens by Gua's sisters, it says that is "not unusual: P.O. boxes in jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands can serve as the address for thousands of companies. While the majority of tax haven-based companies are set up for legitimate reasons, offshore jurisdictions have been linked to multiple frauds and corruption cases...".

The Bloomberg authors do not say what "legitimate reasons" are served by accounts and shell companies with untraceable owners in off-shore tax havens (of which there are now over 70, most of them in tiny former British colonies). I can see none; those who use tax havens want to avoid taxes, evade legal responsibility, and stash the proceeds of crime.

Illicit outflows from China are the largest of any country in the world. Sarah Freitas notes in her blog at Washington-based Global Financial Integrity that the country lost $2.74 trillion over the past decade. Partial estimates from a number of sources including the IMF and the World Bank indicate that global black market assets amount to over $30 trillion.

Assets in the trillions of dollars cannot be managed by hoods carrying around suitcases filled with high denomination currency notes. Major financial institutions are involved, and they operate in a coherent system that drains an estimated $1 trillion from developing countries every year. 

Mainstream media have been incurious about such numbers, and especially in the mechanisms used to move and manage the money. The growth of a global black market that Britain developed as its Empire dwindled in the 1960s is perhaps the most uncovered international story of our time.  

The corruption represented by that enterprise is not just victimless "white collar" crime. The global black market sustains terrorist organizations, drug traffickers, civil wars, coups against elected governments, trafficking of women and children for the sex trade, and a host of other organized criminal activities. It feeds the huge speculative "hedge funds" that have driven oil prices beyond $100 a barrel during a global recession. It kills democracies.  

To bring the current situation into political focus it is necessary to see it as a second British Empire, one that employs drug mafias and "Islamic terrorists" instead of conquering armies and rewards its primary agents -- bankers -- not with titles and tiaras but with munificent "bonuses" even as their above-ground organizations wallow in public funds to avoid bankruptcy.

Public outrage about those bonuses is often reported in the mass media, but strangely, there has never been an investigation into the rationale for them. The halfhearted excuse that the bonuses are necessary to ensure the integrity of those who deal with billion dollar flows is not valid; there are thickets of safeguard procedures and special oversight and audit arrangements to impose honesty.

As we move into a period of individual connectivity rich with democratic promise it is critically important for people everywhere to recognize that corruption at the national level is sustained by a global system run by a violent and unprincipled elite. Unless we dismantle that system the world will continue to be in a state of perennial violent disorder.

General V.K. Singh as Mir Qasim

The leaking of Chief of Army Staff V.K. Singh's top secret letter to the Prime Minister is more than the action of "a frustrated individual" as UPA minister Vayalar Ravi told reporters.

It is not a case of the General going "berserk" as former National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra put it on a television panel. 

It is also more than a liar hoping to escape entrapment in his own inconsistencies by creating a diversionary alarm.

If it is proved that General Singh is the source of the leak -- and none of the four or five men involved has any reason to release it -- he should be charged with high treason. The publication of the letter can have potentially disastrous consequences for the country.

Opposition parties in Parliament have demanded that General Singh be sacked, but that does not deal with the situation he has precipitated. His bizarre trajectory over the last year signals deeper systemic problems and we must understand what they are to deal with an unquestionably serious national crisis.

 To understand the situation it is essential to see General Singh's actions in the proper context.

First, the matter of his age. He told the media the revision of his age was a "matter of honor," but the fact that he made himself a laughing stock in pursuing it to the Supreme Court suggests that honor was probably not a high priority.

If the revision had been accepted, he would have led the Indian Army for another year, and that must be seen as the objective of his graceless ambition.

Considering that heavyweight interests abroad are invested in manipulating our military decision-making, it is safe to assume that his bid to stay longer in a key post was not driven purely by ego.    

Several facts suggest who might have encouraged his unseemly pursuit of an extra year in office. Perhaps the clearest indicator is that immediately after the Supreme Court declined to support his bid to grow younger, he rushed off to Britain. (A subsequent visit to Israel was vetoed by the Ministry of Defence.)

Britain is home to the world's largest arms corporation, BAE Systems, and is a major beneficiary of Indian military procurement. It does not take kindly to losing major deals in India.

In 1987, when it lost the Indian contract for field mortars to the Swedish company Bofors, the repercussions were heavy.

Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who had lobbied Rajiv Gandhi on the deal was assassinated.

The Indian Prime Minister was hit with charges of corruption originating from a  Geneva-based NRI stringer for The Hindu. She suddenly developed an anonymous source who provided a steady stream of entirely unsubstantiated innuendos and suggestions that led the Indian media a merry chase for over a decade.

That campaign of disinformation led to Rajiv Gandhi's defeat in the General Election of 1989 and his assassination weeks before he would have returned to power in a mid-term poll.

India finally got the Swedish mortar but by then Bofors had gone bankrupt and become a holding of BAE Systems.

A quarter century after The Hindu launched the "Bofors scandal" General Singh's peculiar antics have as background another major Indian arms deal gone sour for Britain: the Indian Air Force decision to buy the French-built Rafaele fighter jet instead of the Eurofighter Typhoon in which BAE Systems has a major stake.

The General's allegations of being offered a bribe and the letter to the Prime Minister about Indian military unpreparedness are calculated to cast doubt on the probity of the Indian procurement process, which the British, if we go by a statement Prime Minister David Cameron made in parliament, are now set on overturning. (A particularly interesting sentence in the General's letter notes that 97% of Indian Air defence is obsolete; I wonder how he arrived at that precise figure!)

Meanwhile, the slavishly pro-British elements of Indian "elite" media have been shouting from the rooftops about the need for mid-term polls: quite clearly, the Bofors game book is in use again.

But history is being replayed as farce.

General Singh has become a pathetic figure, almost clownish with cravat and swagger stick in looped television footage.

Instead of the rest of the media leaping on The Hindu's corruption bandwagon as in 1987, there is considerable scepticism about the General's allegations.

Cameron's assertion in parliament that the Eurofighter case continues to be pressed in New Delhi takes on a decidedly comic aspect when it turns out that his primary agent is Telegu Desam Rajya Sabha member M.V. Mysura Reddy, who was talking of retirement in January and has never before shown the slightest interest in military or foreign affairs. In February Reddy wrote a semi-literate letter to Defence Minister Anthony pushing for the Typhoon and explicitly raising the ghost of Bofors. It was publicized by the Gunga Dins at India Today/Headlines Today.

 This is not to say that General Singh's mischief is innocuous.

There is talk of his political ambitions, most probably in Rajasthan, where the Cairns/Vedanta "Creating Happiness" death's head is the new face of British rapacity in India.

On a recent visit to Jaipur I was told that the state had become home to mafiosi from all over the world, that Dawood Ibrahim came and went as he pleased, and that the local government seemed quite powerless.

General Singh is behaving "as if he were in Pakistan" (to quote Brajesh Mishra again), because powerful forces want India to be the next South Asian banana republic.

In a period of global economic slow-down, with China on the skids, the managers of the multi trillion dollar global black market need India to be "friendly" to their poisonous investments.

General Singh is their Mir Qasim in waiting.

Occupy the Global Black Market!

The Times of India on 10 December had a front-page story explaining why Britain had refused to join a European Union deal to move towards closer economic cooperation. It said that Prime Minister David Cameron had been unable to “secure a halt in ongoing EU efforts to curb the City of London’s huge financial services sector.”

It quoted Cameron saying he had failed to get “safeguards” from EU colleagues. French premier Nicolas Sarkozy noted that the British had asked for “something we all judged unacceptable – for a protocol to be inserted into the treaty granting the United Kingdom a certain number of exonerations on financial services regulations.”

None of them – Cameron, Sarkozy or TOI – explained what exactly the British were trying to protect. A keyword Internet search yielded not a single story, Indian or foreign, that spelled out the matter.

This is not because the issue is too difficult to explain.

The City (financial center) of London is the Wild West of international finance, where drug runners, organized crime groups, dictators, mega-corporations and garden-variety tax cheats can all invest with the greatest of ease. What Cameron wanted to protect was Britain's role as the manager and epicenter of the global black market. Without exemption from EU regulations, that cannot continue.  

Among the many interesting questions that float around this situation is how, given the much touted “freedom of the Press” in democratic countries, this total media blackout has been achieved.

There are several factors. One is that the rich won’t talk about it, and the poor can't. Another is British propaganda presenting London as the center of virtuous “free enterprise.” A third is that most media bigwigs probably have a secret stash in some tax haven.

There is no one to bell the cat.

In this situation, the London Olympics offers civil society activists an unprecedented opportunity to draw attention to the black hole of criminality in The City. It would be a perfect time to launch "Occupy the Global Black Market!"