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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Now!
The television reports were perhaps
just about as bad as the grumbles of my bourgeois friends. They
complained about the inconvenience of the strike, the long waits
experienced by passengers, the garbage strewn in and around the
toilets, the barricades of the angry workers, and what not. For
them, the issue was simple: the Indian airports are undercapitalized
and rife with all manner of corruption, and the only way to "modernize"
them is to privatize them. Few dispute the lack of capital in
the basic infrastructure of the Indian State, except that there
might be a question about where to spend the surplus--toward
the well-being of the many millions in the rural areas, or for
the few million who ride aircrafts. Few would also dispute the
issue of corruption, for the Airport Authority of India is not
an unblemished State entity that wins admirers from Right or
Left. To reduce the idea of modernization to privatization is
not anomalous to India; indeed it is the root premise of neo-liberal
thought. The Left (that is, the Communists) and the trade unions
took a strong position against the privatization of the two fiscally
sound airports (Mumbai and Delhi) on several grounds--to wit,
that the private firms would not be accountable to many of the
State's laws, that the private firms would not honor the long
years of service of more than half of the employees (who are
over 35), that the private firms will leverage these national
assets to their own ends rather than toward those of the employees
or of the people at large. It was the basic showdown between
the neo-liberals and the socialists, with the former arguing
that any curtailment of their agenda was anti-modern and the
latter arguing that any fire-sale of national assets makes of
mockery of the broad goals of modernity (which should, in theory,
include the idea of popular, rather, than corporate sovereignty).
All this is commonplace in political discourse. These battle-lines
have been drawn deeply since the dawn of the age of neo-liberalism:
which I date, in non-materialist fashion (unfortunately), to
the 1974 joint award of the Bank of Sweden prize in Economics
to Gunnar Myrdal and Fredrich von Hayek. The former earned the
prize as a nod to the waned authority of Keynesianism, and the
latter to the emergent hegemony of neo-liberalism. It was a poetical
gesture. The joke was on us, as the Swedish Royal Academy of
Sciences informed the public that these two men had the prize
for their "penetrating analysis of the interdependence of
economic, social and institutional phenomenon." Yes, except
that while one of them found the entry of the State salutary
to economic affairs, the other found it abhorrent. Hayek argued,
since at least 1944, that any State intervention would lead to
economic chaos, or at worst to the growth of the big-bad State.
By the 1970s, Hayek's dyspeptic view of State power had come
from the margins to the center, as the global corporations went
into the world unfettered by State regulation and by inter-state
controls (the United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations
began in 1974 to try to study the role of these new transnational
behemoths; its role was hampered; in 1993 it was effectively
shut down). The prejudice of the bourgeoisie toward the Market
(as ideology if not as practice) is well known. This is what
drives its ideas about the "modernization" of Indian
airports.
Equally routine is the manner in which the bourgeoisie conducts
privatization. Professor Marshall Goldman studied the fire sale
of Russian State assets in the 1990s and concluded that its privatization
was actually a form of "piratization." He quotes Anatoly
Chubais, head of the State Privatization Committee, who complained
that the Russian oligarchs "steal and steal and steal. They
are stealing absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop
them." The deflation of Russian civil society made any resistance
impossible, whereas in India, as we shall see, civil society
is as yet engaged.
To "steal" is to
strip assets. The best assets in the public's arsenal are to
be sold off to raise revenues, while the public sector is to
continue to own and run less fiscally profitable concerns. The
removal of the fiscally productive divisions further cripples
the public sector, and validates anew the view that anything
owned and run by the State is inefficient. This is an immense
political advantage for the bourgeoisie. Delhi and Mumbai
airports, both profitable ventures (they earn 65% of the revenues
of the Airport Authority of India), are to be given over to the
South African firm, GVK-ACSA, and the German firm,
Fraport AG (which has been in some hot-water over its Manila
airport work, but which has its claws from Lima to Belgrade airports
and elsewhere). There is no incentive to auction off fiscally
less sound assets. And besides, a Parliamentary commission found
that the "modernization program" promised by these
firms would become redundant by 2012: hardly a long-term approach
to development.
The media reports on the destruction of property at the airport
and of the trash that has piled up as a result of the strike.
The indignation is contagious. The outrage, however, is restricted
to all that which is inconvenient for the bourgeoisie itself,
not that which is unbearable to the workers. Those who do not
fashion anything with their hands cannot appreciate that those
who do don't destroy their handiwork happily. They built and
maintain the airports, and they will be the ones to clean it
up as the demonstrations die down: industrial actions of this
kind are not the carnival that one imagines. The workers come
to them out of anger for their conditions, not out of a kind
of jouissance towards destruction (recall: the adjectives most
often placed before "destruction" in this context are
"willful" and "wanton"). The larger context
of the workers' anger is muted, as the press and the politicians
of the middle-class flog the view of worker indiscipline.
The dress rehearsal for privatization is in the sphere of "sub-contracting."
It tells us what privatization portends. Fifteen years ago, when
"liberalization" (or, reforms of the IMF variety) came
to India, an early victim was the workforce at the Delhi airport.
Liberalization had been hard to workers across all sectors. In
1992-93, six million workers lost their jobs in India, while
the next year another eight million joined them. Industrial disputes,
in this period, fell to about 50% of their 1970 level. The chill
among workers was clear, and their hardship increased (inflation
in the basket of goods for workers rose by 14%).
The most vulnerable sectors
of the workforce entered the twilight world of contract labor.
I first met Ram Pyari in late 1991. She was a sanitation worker
at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. Ram Pyari,
like the other sanitation workers and loaders, had only recently
come under the sway of a sub-contractor who ran their fief-firm
under the radar of the unimpeachable laws of the Indian Republic.
Long hours, no overtime, minimal equipment to clean the toilets
and vicious supervisors--this was the condition at work.
Then, because the contractor
bore no responsibility for it, the workers had to walk a long
distance to their homes (airports are frequently far from habitations,
and because of the clientele who fly there is only sporadic bus
service). The State used to provide transport for the workers,
but that was before liberalization. What was most shocking, according
to Ranjit Singh, a courageous trade unionist and Communist, is
that the sub-contractors had begun to force their employees to
help operate their smuggling rings. He recounted how the smuggler-contractors
would use the trash removal vans to carry out contraband of one
kind or another. One afternoon he took me on a reconnaissance
mission to see how the contractor's vans would leave the Cargo
area without even a perfunctory search. The contractor, Ram Pyari
said sadly, lives in a big house, and we live in hovels. We make
the world, she says, and yet it is not made for us. If this is
the condition of the worker under the regime of the sub-contractor,
what will it be like when the State has utterly withdrawn? What
will be the condition of the unions under these new conditions?
Will they survive?
In India, unlike Russia in the 1990s, the trade unions and the
Left are strong. Over the last few years, there have been several
nation wide general strikes against the economic "reforms."
On September 29, 2005, about fifty million workers went on strike
against liberalization (this was the tenth national strike since
1991). Organized and unorganized workers, peasants and bank employees,
State employees and private sector workers--all went out in a
combative mood. Importantly, the workers of the Airport Authority
of India joined the action against the privatization of the Mumbai
and Delhi airports. All the talk of "civil society"
by NGO intellectuals means little; their bromide is worthless
because their vision of civil society is absent the workers'
organizations. It is the organized working-class that makes Indian
society bearable. Otherwise the hierarchies of money and power
would be much more brutal than they are. The workers have representation,
but they are not represented in the media.
In Krishan Chandar's short story (Kalu Bhangi), the narrator
despairingly asks, "I have often wanted to write about Kalu
Bhangi, but what can one write about him?" Kalu Bhangi,
the representative sanitation worker, who lingers in the shadows
of Chandar's story, is unable to shine in a story named for him.
His life is seen as so ordinary that it does not merit a narrative.
The reality of worker's lives is boring; neither does it make
good copy, nor does it do more than make the bourgeoisie uncomfortable.
Discomfort does not sell newspapers, and nor does it appeal to
advertisers who would like the pages to transform the reader
into a buyer. Reality has to be occluded in the world of commodities,
so it is the inconvenience that needs to be highlighted over
the everyday struggle of the working class.
A four-day strike in February 2006 paralyzed air transport. The
22,000 striking workers concluded a deal with the government.
A commission was to be set up, and the government had pledge
to protect the workers' jobs. These parts of the deal have been
discarded. In early April 2006, the government went ahead with
privatization. It violated the Common Minimum Program (the principles
by which it won election in 2004 and by which it is supposed
to govern); the CMP says, "Generally profit making companies
will not be privatized." The airport workers are outraged,
as are their representatives, the Communists. The Indian government,
led by the Congress, trots to the Right, further and further
from the dreams and hopes of the Indian people. This innings
of the struggle is over, but the match is unfinished. Punters
have put their money on Money. Others are hopeful.
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