struggle

New Delhi: What can Rs 20 possibly fetch? For 836 million Indians, Rs 20 per day, or Rs 600 a month, buys them their daily sustenance.

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Technically, a large chunk of these 836 million Indians — 77 per cent of the country’s population — are above the poverty line at Rs 12 per day.

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But the reality is that they remain dismally poor, comprising largely of STs, SCs, OBCs and Muslims, according to the report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihood in the Unorganised Sector.

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This is the the first authoritative study on the state of informal or unorganised employment in India, compiled by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), a government-affiliated body.

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"If people do not earn, how will they spend or save," says Dr Arjun Sengupta.

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The report is based on government data for the period between 1993-94 and 2004-05.

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A staggering 394.9 million workers, or 86 per cent of India’s working population, toil in the unorganised sector, which means they work without a social security cover.

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Nearly 80 per cent of these workers are among those who live on less than Rs 20 per day.

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NCEUS Chairman Dr Arjun Sengupta said: “These are the discriminated, disadvantaged and downtrodden. People who live on Rs 20 or less per day are the real poor and vulnerable.

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”Sengupta told HT that Rs 20, which signifies consumption pattern, is an indicator of the person’s income and saving. “If people do not earn, how will they spend or save?” he added.

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Agriculture, the report found, was a fertile ground for poverty, especially for small and marginal farmers, 84 per cent of whom spent more than they earned and were often caught in debt traps.

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to someone on the inside who decided to speak out, and he is John Perkins, has written the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He came into our studios to talk about his former work, going into various countries to try to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations, what he called the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he was an economic hit man. I began by asking him to explain this term.

JOHN PERKINS: We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what's going on at the World Trade Organization, and also, in fact, with the transit strike here in New York, is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire.

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AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we move further, your experience with it? Explain the vantage point you come from. What does it mean to be an economic hit man?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we've done -- we use many techniques, but probably the most common is that we'll go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, and we'll arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks, things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they're huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won't get education, health, and other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can't repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq.” And in that way, we've managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we've done this.

AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?

JOHN PERKINS: I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the one that's in the news so much today because of spying on people, and I was tested by them, recruited by them --

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean you were recruited by them?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, while I was a senior in business school at Boston University, they came to me and suggested that I take their test. I had connections through my wife with people in the agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit man, and they also discovered a number of weaknesses in my character, which they could use then to hook me into the business, and then I ended up working for a private corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn't you work for the N.S.A.?

JOHN PERKINS: Because these days it's not done that way. Nobody wants to be able to connect the dots. So the N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types of organizations often recruit economic hit men and the jackals, the assassins, the 007 types, but they will recruit us, maybe train us, and then turn us over to a private corporation, so that you really can't make the connection, so that if I were caught at what I was doing in one of these countries, it would not reflect on our government; it would only reflect on the corporation that I worked for.

AMY GOODMAN: And who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: I worked for a company called Charles T. Main, a big consulting firm out of Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: And your job?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I started off as economist, became chief economist, and my job really – I had a staff of several dozen people. My job was to get them, and for me to convince these countries to accept these very large loans, to get the banks to make the loans, to set up the deal so that the money went to big U.S. corporations. The country was left holding a huge debt, and then I would go in or one of my people would go in and say, “Look, you know, you owe us all this money. You can't pay your debts. Give us that pound of flesh.”

The other thing we do, Amy, and what's going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you're president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I've got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain actually how that plays out, because it's not really in this pocket and that.
JOHN PERKINS: No, it’s – what I'm saying is that, you know, I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means, and I can also – if he doesn't accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying – that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don't overthrow him, we'll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to Torrijos, for example, in Panama, and what did you have to do with it?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, this was back in the ‘70s, and Torrijos was making a lot of world headlines, because he was demanding that the Panama Canal be turned back over to Panamanians. I was sent down to Panama to bring him around, to convince him that he needed to play the game our way. And he invited me to a little bungalow outside of Panama City, and he said, “Look, you know, I know the game, and if I play it your way, I'll become very rich, but that's not important to me. What is important is that I help my poor people.” Now, Torrijos wasn't an angel, but he was very committed to his poor people. So he said, “You can either play the game my way, or you can leave this country.”

And I talked to my bosses, and we all decided I should stay. Maybe I could bring him around. In the meantime, we could make some money, and so I stayed. But I knew the whole world was watching Torrijos because of this Panama Canal issue and that if he didn't come around, the jackals would be likely to come in. [inaudible] A man like Torrijos [inaudible] not only would we lose Panama, but he would set an example that others might follow. So I was very concerned. I liked Torrijos, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring him around was not just because it was my job, but because I wanted to see him survive, and because he didn't come around, sure enough, he was assassinated.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

JOHN PERKINS: Fiery airplane crash, and afterwards, there was no question that – he had been handed a tape recorder as he got on the plane that had a bomb in it.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I know the people that did the investigation afterwards, and this is pretty well-documented in many places also, but I, personally, was aware of what went on, and, of course, you know, our official line here was that, of course, that wasn't what happened. The plane simply blew up and hit a mountain. But there was no question, and in fact we were expecting this to happen.

Three months before this, another president, Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, who I also was involved in trying to bring around, he very strongly opposed our oil companies. Not “oppose,” isn't the right word. What he said is, “Oil from Ecuador has to serve the interest of the Ecuadorian people. Therefore, the oil companies are going to have to pay a lot greater share to the Ecuadorian people or we're going to nationalize them.” And he’d run on a very, very strong anti-American campaign, and we knew that if he didn't change his ways, that something would happen to him. We were in his office making the same promises. You know, here we’ve got a couple of million dollars for you. Here we’ve got a bullet for you, basically. It’s done a lot more subtly than that, but that's the short version. And three months before Torrijos, his airplane also exploded.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the investigation reveal in that case?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, if you're talking about F.B.I. investigations, it revealed that there was an airplane that exploded in both cases. If you’re talking about local investigations and investigations that were done by many international journalists, there were explosives on those planes, both of them. And, you know, it's relatively easy to get to assassinate one of these presidents who has a security force that's well armed, that surrounds him all the time, and in the case of both Roldos and Torrijos, those security forces had been trained primarily at the School of the Americas, a U.S. training camp for South American armies. It’s well known that when --

AMY GOODMAN: Which used to be in Panama, actually?

JOHN PERKINS: Used to be in Panama, right, and it's well known that people that are trained this way stay pretty loyal to their trainers. And they didn't make a lot of money, and so if one of their trainers went back and said, “Hey, would you mind handing this tape recorder to Jaime Roldos?” And the security guy may very well know that there's a bomb in it, and I'm going to pay you several hundred thousand dollars or maybe in this case it's only $100,000, because these guys were not very well paid, or, “simply look the other way while we plant something on the plane.”

That's an easy thing to do, and incidentally, we also tried to do that to Saddam Hussein. When he didn't come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don't want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it's the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family's isn't worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in.

AMY GOODMAN: Although Saddam Hussein was in the pocket of the U.S. for many, many years.

JOHN PERKINS: He was and – but we wanted that final deal, similar to the one we’d struck with Saudi Arabia. We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that's what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: As a consultant, you did work in Saudi Arabia, John Perkins?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, in fact I put -- I was one of the ones responsible for putting together the main deal there in the early ‘70s. As you may recall, Amy, OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn't like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn't happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.

So again, the short version is we put together a deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send almost all of the money it made from selling oil all over the world back to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities, the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants, in fact, entire cities from the desert, and in the process, to westernize Saudi Arabia, to make it more like us. And the other part of the deal was the House of Saud agreed to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us, and we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, and that deal still holds. It's been holding for a long time. There's a lot of blowback right now that's occurring around it, but from our standpoint as economic hit men, it was an extremely successful deal, and it’s the one we tried to replicate with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. We’ll continue with our conversation in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. I asked him if he was the first person to coin the term “economic hit man.”

JOHN PERKINS: I think I may have been the first to use it in print, but we used it back in the ‘70s. We called ourselves -- and it was sort of a tongue-in-cheek term. Officially, I was chief economist, but we used that sort of tongue-in-cheek, because it described was we did. Since the book came out on hardback – yes, and there’s a new epilogue in the paperback, which covers a lot of the new material -- a lot of people have stepped out of the shadows and approached me and talked to me, high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals and wanted to share their story. A lot of them want to do it anonymously, which is a little tricky for a writer these days, as you know, but it's been fascinating to me how many have stepped out.

I also have seen, Amy, I think, a tremendous change in attitude around the world. We're seeing people really rebelling and saying, you know, we understand what's going on. And to be honest with you, I attribute a great deal of that to your show and other shows like it. You're reaching people. The internet, for example, is working wonders. And there’s a lot of books, there’s a lot of movies like Syriana and Hotel Rwanda and Good Night, and Good Luck and so on and so forth. So, the information is getting out. And I think once Americans understand what we're doing in the world and how much hatred this is generating, we will demand change. And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually -- it takes a little time -- but we do get it. So I’m very hopeful.

AMY GOODMAN: And these people who have come forward, are they active today?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, very much so. One of them – you know, there was a president elected, the President of Ecuador, Gutierrez, a few years ago and he ran on a very, very strong anti-U.S. ticket. And he said that if he was elected, he would make sure that the people of Ecuador get the fair proceeds from Ecuadorian oil. As soon as he was elected, he was visited by an economic hit man, whom I know personally, and read the Riot Act, told the things we mentioned earlier, you know, “I’ve got money for you or a bullet.”

Within a month, he came to Washington. There was a famous picture shown all over Ecuador of him sitting, holding hands with George Bush. And very soon after that, he went against everything in his campaign promises. He cut sweet deals with the oil companies. He went back on the indigenous peoples, whose lands in the Amazon area he had promised to protect. And the Ecuadorian people went wild. They took to the streets. They protested and demonstrated and eventually threw him out of power.

So this particular one backfired. But what -- the economic hit man did his job right. Gutierrez came around, and then the Ecuadorian people understood what was going on. I have good friends in Ecuador who called me shortly after that and said, “You know, when we elect someone democratically to do something and he doesn't do it, democracy requires that we throw him out. Why don't you the same thing in your country?”

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, what about Evo Morales? You talk about Gutierrez.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Bolivia. In fact, at one time, I was offered the job as president of Bolivian Power Company, which is the second most important job in Bolivia, actually, behind the President. And Bolivia has this – and it was an American-owned company, incidentally. Bolivia has this long record of giving into the I.M.F. and the World Bank, privatizing their resources, like their power company and their water company. And the people of Bolivia were fed up with this. They had been exploited and exploited and exploited. And so Evo Morales ran on this ticket that said, “I’m not going to put up with this anymore.” And, of course, he's getting a bad name in the U.S., because we want to portray him as a cocaine-raising farmer who's all in favor of Castro and socialism and communism and cocaine. The fact is he did raise coca. He was a coca farmer. Coca's a very legitimate product in Bolivia that is not just used for cocaine. It's used for many other things.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, for example, high altitude sickness. Coca tea is perfectly legal in this country, too, and it's very effective against high altitude sickness, and derivatives of coca are used for many medicines. They're very effective. But the reason he was elected had nothing to do with any of that. It simply has to do with the extreme frustration and anger of the Bolivian people, of how they've been exploited and how the I.M.F. and the World Bank have insisted that they turn their resources over to foreign corporations. And also, you know, part of the World Trade Organization policies is that we insist that countries like Bolivia not subsidize their local industries and products, but that they accept our subsidies of them, and that they not erect any barriers against our goods coming in there, but they accept the barriers that we erect against their goods. And people around the world, Amy, are getting fed up with this. 300 million Latin Americans -- South Americans out of 360 million, over 80% have voted for these types of candidates.

AMY GOODMAN: Not to be ethnocentric about it, but America is a tremendous power, especially military power. It has been diverted now to dealing with Iraq. President Bush declaring war on Iraq, not exactly officially declaring it, but engaging in it. Do you think that that has something to do with what is happening in Latin America, not to take power away from the people and what they are doing there?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, certainly, I think that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might not have survived his presidency. His presidency might not have survived had we not been in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were so diverted. We -- the economic hit men tried to overthrow him, you know, a few years ago and were successful for about 48 hours. But then he had control over the oil company, and he was very, very popular. So he got back into office. At that point, had we not been involved in Iraq, I strongly suspect that we would have done something much more aggressive, as we've done so many other times. When the economic hit men fail, we take more drastic steps. Because we were so involved in Iraq, we didn't do that.

This gave great support to all of the other movements in Latin America. And these other candidates, people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact that the administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry.

The other side of the coin is that Brazil is a world power. It's one of the largest economies in the world, and it produces a tremendous number of military weapons that are used worldwide. And Lula, of Brazil, he’s backed off a bit. And there’s an interesting story that I know behind that.

AMY GOODMAN: What?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I'll get into that. But he's backed off a bit. But he still – he’s made alliances with Chavez, with Kirchner of Argentina, with Morales of Bolivia. They’ve all agreed that if the United States does anything drastic, they'll stand together and oppose us. So there is this coalition that's happening. It's quite loose. But nonetheless, there's a tremendous amount of support there.

AMY GOODMAN: Lula, what do you know?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February, and a man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said, “You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just -- that's just the tip of the iceberg.” He said, “You know, from the time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that I’m in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking pictures of all those things, that there's a record of this.”

And he says, “You don't realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It's recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government, they basically –” And I said, “They blackmail you?” And he said, “Well, you could use the word ‘blackmail,’ but I think I would prefer that’s ‘modern U.S. diplomacy.’”

And I asked him, I said, “Well, is Lula a part of this?” And he obviously didn't really want to answer this question. He hesitated, and he said, “Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and your government.” He said, “I think Lula’s a very, very good man, but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he's been watched all of his life, and I’m sure he's had the same temptations I did.”

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s also engulfed in a major corruption scandal, which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outside, are raising a lot of questions.

JOHN PERKINS: And I think the fact that the scandal has come out and has been blown into such proportions is an indication that someone is sending Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal – I’ll call him – that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, “You know, this isn’t limited to other countries. This happens in your country, too. Don't you think that the assassination of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and others like that, and the many senators that have died in airplane crashes and other things, has sent a strong message to your politicians? And don't you think that –”

AMY GOODMAN: Who said this to you?

JOHN PERKINS: The same economic hit man/jackal who visited Gutierrez and read him the Riot Act.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you care to share his name?

JOHN PERKINS: No. I'll let him do that at some point, if he feels it's appropriate. Right now, he doesn’t feel it’s appropriate. He's still in the business. And so, many of these people are still very -- even the ones that have retired are getting pensions, and they’ve got loyalties, some of them. So, they’ll talk to me on the side and say, “I want you to put this in your book, but I’m not ready to talk.” A couple of them I am working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. So hopefully some of them will come clean. But it's a slow process in making that happen.

JOHN PERKINS: And these people you know, who you call economic hit men, who are the first to move in to these men who gain power, where does -- what do you know about Evo Morales now? He's just been elected President?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I have no doubt that he has been visited by at least one of these men, who's known him beforehand. These are not strangers that walk in. They’ve been hanging around Bolivia for a while, as I did. And so, once the President is elected, they walk into his office and shake his hands and say, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You won. We launched a strong campaign against you, but now you've won. And now, I want to tell you the facts of life and make you --”

AMY GOODMAN: And you know someone who has talked to him in this way?

JOHN PERKINS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was -- according to you, what was President Morales's response?

JOHN PERKINS: Morales was very diplomatic about the whole thing, but absolutely stood firm and said, “You know, my people have elected me for a reason, and I intend to honor that.” This is what his initial response was. But what I will say is we can't imagine the pressure now that’s being exerted on a man like Morales, as is true with all these other presidents. They know what's happened before their time. And they – you know, the pressure will be put on them tighter and tighter and tighter.

And imagine being in that position. Imagine being an integritous person and really wanting to help your country, being elected with a majority – Morales got 54% of the vote, which is unheard of in Bolivia; he was up against many opponents -- and then, wanting to implement the policy, and somebody walks into your office and reminds you of what happened to all these other presidents.

And perhaps the most scary one was Noriega, who did not get assassinated. He wasn't a martyr. Instead, he had to stand by and watch several thousand innocent Panamanian civilians bombed, slaughtered, burned to death. And then he was dragged off to a U.S. prison, where he has been pretty much in solitary confinement every since. Imagine thinking that might happen to you.

And so, Evo Morales, the story has just begun for him. I sympathize with him very deeply. And I think from our standpoint, Amy, as American citizens -- and I look at myself as an extremely loyal American citizen. I believe in the principles of this country, which I think that in the past few decades, increasingly, we've put them way in the back burner. But as good Americans, we need to insist that our government and our corporations honor democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

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REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF

BUSH EXPECTS EVERYTHING TO BE SOLVED WITH A BANG

A word popped up in my mind. I looked it up in the dictionary and there it was; it’s an onomatopoeic word and its connotation is tragic: bang. I’ve probably never used it in my life.

Bush is an apocalyptic person. I observe his eyes, his face and his obsessive preoccupation with pretending that everything he sees on the “invisible screens” are spontaneous thoughts. I heard his voice quaver when he answered criticism from his own father about his Iraq policy. He only expresses emotions and constantly feigns rationality. Of course he is aware of the impact of every phrase and every word on the public he addresses.

What’s dramatic is that what he expects to happen may cost the American people many lives.
One can never agree, in any kind of war, with events that take the lives of innocent civilians. Nobody could justify the attacks of the German Air Force on British cities during World War II, nor the thousands of bombers that systematically destroyed German cities in the decisive moments of the war, nor the two atomic bombs which the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an act of pure terrorism against old people, women and children.

Bush expressed his hatred of the poor world when he spoke on June 1, 2002 at West Point, of the pre-emptive attacks on “60 or more dark corners of the world”.

Whom are they going to convince now that the thousands of nuclear weapons in their possession, the missiles and the precise and exact delivery systems they have developed are just to combat terrorism? Could it be perhaps that the sophisticated submarines being constructed by their British allies, capable of circumnavigating the globe without surfacing and reprogramming their nuclear missiles in mid-flight, will be used for that as well? I would never have imagined that one day such justifications would be used.

Imperialism intends to institutionalize world tyranny with these weapons. It aims them at other great nations which arise not as military adversaries capable of surpassing their technology with weapons of mass destruction, but as economic powers that would rival the United States whose chaotic and wasteful consumerist economic and social system is absolutely vulnerable.

What’s worse about the bang upon which Bush is hanging his hopes is the antecedent of his actions during the September 11th events, when, knowing full well that bloody attack on the American people was imminent, and having the capacity to foresee it and even to prevent it, he took off on a vacation with his entire administrative apparatus.

From the day of his appointment as President –thanks to the fraud orchestrated by his friends from the Miami mafia, in the manner of a "banana republic" –and prior to his inauguration, W. Bush was informed in detail of the same facts and in the same way as the president of the United States, who directed that he be informed. At that moment, the tragic events symbolized by the fall of the Twin Towers were still more than 9 months away.

If something similar were to happen with any kind of explosives or nuclear material, given that enriched uranium flows like water throughout the world since the days of the Cold War, what would be the probable fate of humanity? I try to remember and analyze many moments of humanity’s march through the millennia, and I wonder: could my views be subjective?

Just yesterday Bush was bragging about having won the battle over his adversaries in Congress. He has a hundred billion dollars, all the money he needs to double, as he wishes, the number of American troops sent to Iraq, and to carry on with the slaughter. The problems in the region are increasingly aggravated.

Any opinion about the president of the United State's latest feats grows old in a matter of hours. Is it perhaps that the American people can’t take this little moral fighting bull by the horns?

Fidel Castro Ruz
May 25, 2007.
7:15 p.m.

A stunning, must-read Interview of Arundhati Roy. Though i have got differences in her opinions on Mao, Stalin and the other socialist states of the last century, i find this interview thoroughly portrays the truely agonised mind bursting out in anger on what is happening today in India. Thanks to TEHELKA.

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You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines — supertoys for the new supercitizens of the new superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. The government and the corporations reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down people’s throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only barometers the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit has hit the fan, folks.

I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! I doubt I used the word ‘immoral’ — morality is an elusive business, as changeable as the weather. What I feel is this: non-violent movements have knocked at the door of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The nba had a lot going for it — high-profile leadership, media coverage, more resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound to want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins to promote satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it’s time for us to sit up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within the structure of a democratic nation state? Is it possible in the age of disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger strikes umbilically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger strike? Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a lesson to many of us. I’ve always felt that it’s ironic that hunger strikes are used as a political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway. We are in a different time and place now. Up against a different, more complex adversary. We’ve entered the era of NGOs — or should I say the era of paltu shers — in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and social forums which make militant postures but never follow up on what they preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance. Meetings against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism and community action given by corporations responsible for devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the forests of Orissa, wants to start a university. The Tatas have two charitable trusts that directly and indirectly fund activists and mass movements across the country. Could that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than Nandigram? Of course the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too — maybe he was our first NGO. But now we have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of reports, but whom the sarkar is more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of all this? The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action. ‘Virtual’ resistance has become something of a liability.

There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a series of judgements that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgement, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the requisite clearances, said in so many words that the questions of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the ERA of corporate globalisation, corporate land-grab, in the ERA of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most powerful institution in this country. The judiciary, along with the corporate press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this, when people feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus non-violence. There are political parties that believe in armed struggle but only as one part of their overall political strategy. Political workers in these struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the violence of the Indian State. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colours fade to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

Huge question — what can I say? The military occupation of Kashmir, neo-fascism in Gujarat, civil war in Chhattisgarh, mncs raping Orissa, the submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada Valley, people living on the edge of absolute starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal victims living to see the West Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide — now calling itself Dow Chemicals — in Nandigram. I haven’t been recently to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know about the almost hundred thousand farmers who have killed themselves. We know about the fake encounters and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of these places has its own particular history, economy, ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis. And yet there is connecting tissue, there are huge international cultural and economic pressures being brought to bear on them. How can I not mention the Hindutva project, spreading its poison sub-cutaneously, waiting to erupt once again? I’d say the biggest indictment of all is that we are still a country, a culture, a society which continues to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some f***ing superpower this.

How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?

No different from police and State violence anywhere else — including the issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all political parties including the mainstream Left. Are Communist bullets different from capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The Chinese government tabled a bill sanctioning the right to private property. I don’t know if all of this has to do with climate change. The Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect our own parliamentary Left to be any different? Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes you wonder — is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism? Think about it — the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the anti-apartheid struggle, the supposedly Gandhian freedom struggle in India… what’s the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end of imagination?

How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything. However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become spos (special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun. This kind of thing happened in countries like Colombia — one of the most devastated countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are fixed on the spiralling violence between government-backed militias and guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh.

Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they’re as much the victims of government policy as anybody else. For the government and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder — there’s plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for a while and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial killings, false encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if such a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination.

I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That’s a logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not diminshing. That says something. People have no choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse.

But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous situations it creates.

‘Naxals’, ‘Maoists’, ‘outsiders’: these are terms being very loosely used these days.

‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the early stages of repression by governments who have begun to believe their own publicity and can’t imagine that their own people have risen up against them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now in Bengal, though some would say repression in Bengal is not new, it has only moved into higher gear. In any case, what’s an outsider? Who decides the borders? Are they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block? District? State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new Communist mantra? About Naxals and Maoists — well… India is about to become a police state in which everybody who disagrees with what’s going on risks being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, and shut down by people who don’t really know or care who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages, of course, that has begun — thousands of people are being held in jails across the country, loosely charged with being terrorists trying to overthrow the state. Who are the real Naxalites and Maoists? I’m not an authority on the subject, but here’s a very rudimentary potted history.

The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed in 1925. The CPI (M), or what we now call the CPM — the Communist Party Marxist — split from the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both, of course, were parliamentary political parties. In 1967, the CPM, along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to power in West Bengal. At the time there was massive unrest among the peasantry starving in the countryside. Local CPM leaders — Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar — led a peasant uprising in the district of Naxalbari which is where the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the government fell and the Congress came back to power under Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The Naxalite uprising was mercilessly crushed — Mahasweta Devi has written powerfully about this time. In 1969, the CPI (ML) — Marxist Leninist — split from the CPM. A few years later, around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the CPM-ML (Liberation), largely centred in Bihar; the CPM-ML (New Democracy), functioning for the most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the CPM-ML (Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have been generically baptised ‘Naxalites’. They see themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly speaking Maoist. They believe in elections, mass action and — when absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked — armed struggle. The MCC — the Maoist Communist Centre, at the time mostly operating in Bihar — was formed in 1968. The PW, People’s War, operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh, was formed in 1980. Recently, in 2004, the MCC and the pw merged to form the CPI (Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle and the overthrowing of the State. They don’t participate in elections. This is the party that is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way.

I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that both Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed under their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the Chinese Communist Party (while the West looked discreetly away), wiped out two million people in Cambodia and brought millions of people to the brink of extinction from disease and starvation. Can we pretend that China’s cultural revolution didn’t happen? Or that millions of people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not victims of labour camps, torture chambers, the network of spies and informers, the secret police. The history of these regimes is just as dark as the history of Western imperialism, except for the fact that they had a shorter life-span. We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and Chechnya. I would imagine that for the Maoists, the Naxalites, as well as the mainstream Left, being honest about the past is important to strengthen people’s faith in the future. One hopes the past will not be repeated, but denying that it ever happened doesn’t help inspire confidence… Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I admire that. It may well be that when they come to power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, or even worse than the present government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too. And most likely someone like myself will be the first person they’ll string up from the nearest tree — but right now, it is important to acknowledge that they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us are in a position where we are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those who we know have no place for us in their religious or ideological imagination. It’s true that everybody changes radically when they come to power — look at Mandela’s anc. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the imf, driving the poor out of their homes — honouring Suharto, the killer of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists, with South Africa’s highest civilian award. Who would have thought it could happen? But does this mean South Africans should have backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or that they should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria should have remained a French colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military occupation? That people whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?

Is there a communication breakdown in our society?
Yes.

Mar 31 , 2007