Charles Plans Slumdog Housing

Prince Charles has been belatedly inspired by the 2007 movie Slumdog Millionaire to build a "green utopia" for "low caste" Indians. It is to look like a pile of rubbish from the outside and to extend over 25 acres.

He hopes to build it in Bangalore.

Indian newspapers which carry this item report it as a straight story, but it seems to me the man has had his rather large snout put out of joint by something about India. Wonder what.

I don't think Charles will be able to build his low caste housing. Call it a hunch.

But I have an idea that might make up for that. How about a project in Paris?

It could be housing for the children of murder victims.

Something in the shape of a tunnel, with individual houses made of cars wrecked in high speed chases?

The furniture could be made of used tampons.

Saving the World at Earth Summit 2012 (Part 2)

If the “Earth Summit” convened by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 is to save the world from sliding into certain environmental disaster, it must address the rapacious ecological impact of giant corporations.

How to do that when corporations control the world economy and have enormous influence on the policies of governments?

To know what must be done we have to understand how corporations got so big and powerful – and why they are so vulnerable now to citizen action.

The joint stock corporations which now control world markets have only been around since the 17th century. The first of them was the East India Company, which was formed by a number of rich merchants in London and given a monopoly of the India trade by Queen Elizabeth. Soon other countries in Europe followed suit, and that first generation of corporations laid the foundations of a global economy.

They established colonies in Asia and the Americas, and the transatlantic slave trade out of Africa. They brought indentured workers from Asia to the Americas and Africa. They created a global trade in sugar, opium, tea, calico and silk. In the 18th century they also became the main vehicles for the industrial and technological revolutions in Europe.

In doing all this, corporations with the most resources had a natural advantage, and as smaller competitors fell by the wayside, the survivors became ever bigger. To manage their giant budgets and processes they needed huge bureaucracies with top-down systems of command and control. Such systems could not cope with volatility, so corporations sought to create stable economic and social conditions.

They did that in several ways. One was by getting involved in politics and ensuring business-friendly legislation. Another was through advertising (an industry pioneered by corporations to shape the social atitudes underlying mass demand). Perhaps the most important avenue of influence was the mass media, control of which came to be concentrated in a very few mega-corporations.

As long as the Cold War was in progress, many developing countries were suspicious of corporate power and did not allow them free entry into their economies. Such resistance ended in the 1990s, and as developing countries clamoured for corporate investments, it accelerated economic globalization. The trade patterns that emerged were insane. Investments flowed mainly to a handful of countries in East and South-East Asia where corporations could make the most profit. China became the “workshop of the world,” producing all matter of goods, including cheap plastic toys, and shipping them around the world.

This was of course, hugely wasteful of energy, for many commodities, including petroleum, had to be shipped in bulk to China to enable the reverse flow of manufactures. There was a dramtic growth of environmental pollution. Scientists noticed a "brown cloud" over all of Asia, a poisonous mix of chemicals, eroded top-soil and sand blown from rapidly expanding deserts. In the middle of the Pacific there grew a floating island of garbage, mainly discarded plastic items, as large as the continental United States.

How can the Earth Summit in 2012 change this awful reality?

It must base its action on three realities.


The first is the nature of the problem. Corporations are the principal cause of environmental degradation.

The second is that corporations create most of the wealth in the world; thus, any effort at change must be evolutionary and result in a reorientation rather than a destruction of corporate capacities.

The third reality is the irrelevance of factors that made mega corporations necessary and efficient in the heyday of heavy industrialization. The information and communications revolutions have made networks much more efficient than hierarchical bureaucracies.

What is the strategy for action that the Earth Summit must construct on these realities? That will be in the next post. Stay tuned.

Can 2012 Earth Summit Save The World? (Part 1)

[News: The UN General Assembly has called for a new "Earth Summit" in 2012.]

Five decades after biologist Rachel Carson’s best-selling book “Silent Spring” rang the alarm about environmental pollution, world leaders will gather for the fourth time to deal with the rapidly worsening problem.

Their previous meetings achieved limited but important goals; in 2012 they have an opportunity – if they think big – to reverse the trend and save the world form certain environmental disaster.

What exactly does thinking big mean?

It is best explained by looking at the previous three meetings.

The first UN Environment Conference in 1972 (Stockholm), put the issue on the world’s political agenda. It led to the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro agreed on a voluminous action programme. Dubbed Agenda 21, it acknowledged the magnitude of problems affecting the planet’s eco-system and identified “major groups” that should be activated to take remedial action.

The 2002 “Rio+10” conference at Johannesburg elaborated on the implementation of Agenda 21.

At all three meetings, the focus was heavily on symptoms. The conferences identified specific problems – climate change, loss of bio-diversity, deforestation etc. – and initiated separate courses of action to deal with them. The core issue of why so much bad stuff was happening was dealt with only tangentially, with blame apportioned mainly to "unsustainable" patterns of production and consumption. That approach was like that of a physician prescribing symptomatic treatment for a patient suffering from cancer.

As a result, the implementation of Agenda 21 quickly lost focus and energy. Problems have been worsening rapidly as billions of people seek to “develop” by joining industrialized countries in an ever more global economy.

To remedy the situation the 2012 meeting must consider root causes. If governments will not do it, civil society must undertake the task. In either case, implementation will depend heavily on citizen action.

Even a cursory review of historical trends will show that all the most serious problems are rooted in the nature of industrial civilization. Two factors about it are especially problematic.

The first is enormity of scale (yes, size has a moral dimension). The environmental impact of a local population using wood from a forest is quite different from a corporation selling it to a global market. One harvests to meet a need, the other devastates for profit. 

The second factor is that the central institution of industrial civilization, the commercial corporation, is blind to moral, aesthetic and natural claims unrelated to its profit. The wilful nature of that blindness is indicated by the monumental flop of the Global Compact, a UN initiative to have corporations pledge to uphold certain minimum human rights and environmental standards. Only some five thousand corporations have joined the Compact, many of them small and medium enterprises. The mega corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenues, of which there now over 60,000, have stayed away in droves.

How do we address these two problems? I’ll deal with that in my next post. Those impatient to know what I suggest can get part of the answer by reading the article on Gandhi at my web site (scroll down to Essay 1 under the title Hind Swaraj II).

Is Britain Now America’s Worst Enemy?

Most people think of Britain as America’s closest ally, but it’s time to jettison that idea. The two primary factors that shaped their “special relationship” in the aftermath of World War II -- the Cold War and the need to arrange a stable transatlantic transfer of power -- are now irrelevant. As one of Britain’s cold blooded politicians put it two centuries ago, the country has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Those interests might now have positioned Britain as America’s worst enemy.

Consider what’s been happening in Afghanistan. Is it credible that the Taliban, which was at best a smoke and mirrors creation of Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), should be competent on its own to give the United States a run for its money?

The Taliban consists of a few thousand fighters, most of them illiterate and poor, drawn to fight not by religious fanaticism but for money. The group’s leadership of record consists of a rag-tag band of tribal leaders and mullahs, none with any demonstrated capabilities for anything but simple battlefield strategies. Yet we are asked to believe that this group managed to infiltrate a Jordanian agent into the Central Intelligence Agency – getting Jordan’s spymasters to vouch for his credibility – and then turned him into a suicide bomber who took out most of the members of a CIA field post in Afghanistan.

That is not a credible story. Even Pakistan’s ISI couldn’t have done it on its own. Only Britain’s MI-6 has the breadth of contacts and insider information about the CIA necessary for the operation.

Why would the British do it? Because the CIA post in question was focused, according to a recent article circulated by Tomgram, on taking out “the Haqqani network in North Waziristan just across the Pakistani border.” It was “collecting information about militant networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and plotting missions to kill the networks’ top leaders.” The post has been effective, as the on-going drone assassinations prove, and was probably beginning to disrupt Britain’s primary interests in the region, the illicit drug trade out of Afghanistan-Pakistan, and strategic control of both countries through small and violent groups (the ISI in the case of Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan).

More broadly, the CIA "surge" in Pakistan and Afghanistan threatened Britain's long-standing role as Washington's eyes and ears in the region, which gave it enormous capacity to influence regional affairs. The growing strategic relationship between India and the United States, and the determination of the CIA to build up its own capacities in Afghanistan would have sapped much of that power. The precise hit on the CIA post thus directly served British interests.

Another reason for animosity between the two partners is that Washington has been muscling in on control of Pakistan, which has been pretty much Britain's exclusive domain since it created the country as its regional proxy at the end of its colonial rule of India. A British Army officer established the ISI to fight the first "Indo-Pak war" and it has been used to fuel and foment jihadist, insurrectionist and subversive events in every country in South Asia.

The London Conference on Afghanistan last week, at which Britain orchestrated a European call to hustle the NATO involvement into a transitional mode by the end of 2010, rachets up the pressure on the Obama administration to quit too. This move coincides with talk about including in the Kabul government the so-called "good Taliban." At British initiative, the United Nations Security Council removed four Taliban terrorists from its sanctions list. One of the four was actively involved in hijacking an Indian airliner out of Nepal and the subsequent exchange of its passengers for four terrorists held in Indian prisons. One of the four released at that time went on to become a key figure in the Lashkar e-Toiba, the group suspected of a string of major terrorist attacks. India's strong objections to the Security Council move were ignored.

Talk of the "good Taliban" is nonsense. Unless the nexus of drug-runners, terrorists and money launderers is broken, we can expect no peace in Afghanistan, Pakistan or India. That nexus is kept in place by that part of the British political elite that used the Cold War to take its former imperial control underground. It now controls most of the estimated $17 trillion underground economy that is fed by drug trafficking and other forms of international crime. That economy, operating through an intricate system of over 90 "off-shore tax havens" outside all national jurisdictions, has become the tail wagging the dog during the current global economic crisis; growing American pressure to bring it under control is another strong reason for the British elite's enmity towards Washington.

By the way, the secretive banking system and the underground global economy are fairly recent phenomena: they have been in existence only since the 1960s. The timing is significant, for the 1960s saw most of Africa decolonized. The new secretive systems that replaced overt imperial control are estimated to launder about a trillion dollars annually out of the economies of developing countries, including China.

London is a dangerous enemy, for it can not only marshall opposition to the United States diplomatically, its links to the drugs-terrorist nexus allows it to mount remote-controlled terrorist attacks from countries ranging from Pakistan to Jordan to Nigeria. The attacker of the CIA post was Jordanian; the "underwear bomber" who failed to blow up a United airlines flight over Detroit last Christmas was Nigerian. Britain also maintains an extremely effective public relations capability, which has been used to present all American initiatives affecting British interests as imperialistic. That drumbeat of criticism has lowered Obama's credibility and poll ratings globally.

[P.S. Apropos that last sentence, in 2013 I did a piece on How Britain Controls the Global Narrative.]

The Collapse of China in 2010?

My predictions for 2009 didn’t pan out, but only because massive intervention in the financial markets by central banks staved off a cataclysmic collapse. Whether 2010 will see that respite turn into a stronger recovery or send the world into another heart-stopping descent into crisis will depend on what happens in China.

At first flush, the news out of China looks good. As widely reported last week, it has replaced Germany as the world’s top exporter. Beijing claims that overall economic growth has been continuing at a rate of over 8 per cent. World commodity prices have not collapsed because of demand from China. The Times of India was among those impressed by all this. Its lead editorial on 14 January contrasted the slow growth of the United States with that of “China racing up the world economic ladder” to replace Japan as the world’s second-largest economy soon, and perhaps even claiming the top spot from the US by 2030-2040.

Sorry to rain on this parade, but none of it is real. The picture of China as a dynamic economy is an illusion. The country’s economy is actually a gigantic Ponzi scheme run by one of the most corrupt and criminal regimes in the world. When I say the fate of the world hangs on what happens in China, it is not economic projections I refer to but the prospect of violent political upheaval and chaos affecting one-sixth the human race. Consider the following points.

1. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been in power for over six decades. During that period it has killed between 40 to 50 million Chinese, mainly by creating massive famines in the pursuit of “Marxist-Leninist principles,” but also through violent programmes to “eliminate class enemies.”

2. More than three decades after the death of the monster who led that madness his porky face continues to adorn every currency note in the country and to look down from giant posters and statues on public places throughout the land. Instead of being held accountable for crimes against humanity the Party has remained in power, and its members are attached like leeches to the entire economy, from the biggest foreign deals to the workings of smallest village cooperative.

3. The economic “reforms” that began in the 1980s and ostensibly moved the country into a free-market system did nothing of the sort. The introduction of stock markets in the 1990s merely opened up an entirely new river of illicit funds for the “Communist” mafia. An expert report published by UNESCO in 2001 noted the “strong intervention of large sums of illegal hot money from state units” in the new stock markets, accounting for as much as “half of the free-float, or some US$35 billion, according to local brokers in Shanghai and Shenzhen.” The amount of "twilight capital" drawn “from state enterprises, pension funds, insurance premiums and state bank loans to securities firms” has grown so large that any attempt to curb it will crash the markets, which no longer serve as a mechanism for economic valuations.

4. Western corporations profited hugely from this system and did not object. But that might be about to change as a result of the latest criminal enterprise of the Chinese State, a wide effort to hack into the computers of Western corporations and acquire proprietary information. In the case of Internet giant Google, the hackers also tried to get information on human rights activists. As a first response, Google has stopped cooperating with State authorities in censoring the Internet for its Chinese users, and has threatened to pull out of the country entirely.

5. If Western corporations stop cooperating with the Chinese State its Ponzi scheme will swiftly come to an end. Investors will begin to see that much of China’s economic growth in 2009 was illusory. It achieved the “world’s top exporter” ranking only because its exports fell less steeply than those of Germany; and the continued demand for commodities came largely from the infrastructure projects financed by Beijing’s massive stimulus spending.

6. If Chinese markets crash it will quickly burst the real estate bubble that has kept house and apartment prices soaring in China while the rest of the world struggled through the swamp of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It will also reduce millions of small State enterprises to bankruptcy, for their resources have been used by Communist Party functionaries for stock market gambles.

In sum, China faces an earth-shaking economic and political upheaval in 2010. If the Communist Party tries to hold on by using the army against the Chinese people, we could be looking at a period more violent and disastrous than either the "Great Leap" or the "Cultural Revolution." The collapse of China will also have major economic and political repercussions abroad. To survive them without enduring the worst recession the world has ever known we must begin planning coordinated and extraordinary action now.

Why Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

George McGovern had a piece in the Sunday Washington Post recalling how, during his run for the presidency in 1972, he told audiences across the country “that the only upside of the tragedy in Vietnam was that its enormous cost in lives and dollars would keep any future administration from going down that road again.”

He was wrong, he declares: Obama is going down the same path that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon did.

McGovern should know better.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Here are the reasons why:

1. Vietnam was in the midst of an entirely legitimate nationalist, anti-colonial struggle that had the massive support of the Vietnamese people.

The fighting in Afghanistan is against the Taliban, a terrorist group that sustains itself by trafficking drugs. Based on their experience of Taliban rule, Afghans are massively opposed to the group.

2. The United States slipped into the Vietnam war by slow degrees, first supporting the French, then the corrupt regimes in South Vietnam, and finally subjecting the country to massive military intervention. Its motivation was fear that if the Viet Cong won, then the balance of power in Southeast Asia would tip towards the Chinese communists. That fear, as it turned out, was entirely misplaced; the Vietnamese have a historical hatred of Chinese domination.

The United States is in Afghanistan because it was attacked on 9/11 by terrorists who were based there and enjoyed the support of the Taliban regime. The need to fight them is not abstract or ideological; democracies around the world have suffered gratuitous attack because terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been driven by a medieval Islamic vision of world conquest.

3. The Viet Cong fighters American troops faced in Vietnam were financed and supplied by North Vietnam, a State recognized by the overwhelming majority of the international community.

In Afghanistan American troops confront combatants who are financed with drug money and are universally considered to be criminal and illegitimate.

4. The withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam led to the end of the war there, and eventually, the emergence of a stable and unified Vietnam. The country is now a member of the strongly free-market Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

If American troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan the result will be the renewed spread of terrorism throughout the region and the world. Afghanistan itself will sink into civil war, and that will destabilize Central and South Asia. This is not a new “Domino Theory;” the forecast is actually a look back at what happened when the Taliban were in power.

Quite obviously, McGovern’s attempt to draw an analogy between American interventions in Vietnam and Afghanistan is not credible. He seems to acknowledge that in a final argument for withdrawal: ”Even if we had a good case for a war in Afghanistan, we simply cannot afford to wage it. With a $12 trillion debt and a serious economic recession, this is not a time for unnecessary wars abroad.”

That too is not a credible argument. The post-Cold War spread of democracy is not a settled and irreversible fact. To withdraw from Afghanistan prematurely would endanger vulnerable democracies not only in its immediate region but throughout the Islamic world. Authoritarian States like China and Iran would feel much less pressure to democratize. India, already seriously affected by terrorism exported from Pakistan, would be in much greater danger. Not to confront the sworn enemies of democracy in Afghanistan is to ensure that the fight, when it becomes unavoidable later, will be much more difficult.

Picking the Next UN Secretary-General

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has two years left of his first term, and the jockeying has begun to get him a second term -- or find a successor.

At the moment it seems likely Ban will not get a second term, for his sleep-walking performance in office has been unredeemed by any initiative that can claim to be even marginally successful or imaginative. Assessments of his performance in mainstream Western media have been consistently dismal.

Governments have not been too thrilled with him either. Earlier this year, a leaked memorandum to her capital from the Norwegian Ambassador at the UN portrayed him as virtually useless. In Afghanistan Ban has been caught between British ambitions to play a larger role and determined opposition to that from Prime Minister Karzai (read Washington), a no-win situation the Secretary-General has handled with his usual ham-fisted skill.

The latest indication of how little he is valued has come in the leaked “Danish Document” at the Copenhagen talks on climate change; it contains a plan by the industrialized countries to sideline the United Nations in dealing with an issue Ban has trumpeted as his highest concern.

None of this is definitive. A good performance record and the support of world media have never been necessary to get and hold the UN’s top job. Ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim almost got a third term despite his well known corruption and incompetence. To be appointed Secretary-General only one thing has been essential, the support of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, Britain, France, Russian Federation, United States).

In the past the Five have not been hard to please; but unfortunately for Ban, that might no longer be the case, now that Washington has signalled its intention to make serious use of the UN. The growing expectation at the UN is that he and his little mafia of operatives from the South Korean Foreign Office will have to take their congee in 1911.

Ban’s most visible competitor for the post of Secretary-General is Helen Clark, the new Administrator of the UN Development Programme. A former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Clark has a bluff political persona and would probably make a good “first woman Secretary-General.” But who exactly is backing her is murky. It is unlikely to be Washington, for Clark was decidedly anti-American as Prime Minister, opposing the entry into New Zealand waters of American ships carrying nuclear weapons, and pulling out of ANZUS, the defence agreement with Australia and the United States. It is probably Britain, and if so Ban might as well give up the game, for it was a deal with London that put him on the 38th floor.

The guessing game got more complex last week with the announcement that Ban had picked Rebeca Grynspan, former Vice-President of Costa Rica (1994-1998), to be Associate Administrator of UNDP. In doing that he ignored representations from the African Group that it had a claim on the post, having been promised it when Clark was appointed Administrator.

Why would Ban offend a group of 51 member States to give a high-level post to a Costa Rican? It is certainly not merit, for the Secretary-General has made it very clear during his three years in office that he is not swayed by that consideration. Representations from the Latin American Group could not have been the reason, for most of its members are middle-income States with tiny UNDP aid allotments; none is an influential donor.

It is fair to speculate that the push for Grynspan came from Washington, and that she is now positioned to join Helen Clark as a viable woman candidate to replace Ban Ki-moon.