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Archive: POLITICS

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Net Neutrality

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Verizon and Google have made a deal on network neutrality policy they'd like to see in America. That deal (surprise!) is Google can get special privileges on Verizon's network. The Huffington Post splash page mocks Google's slogan: "Don't Be Evil" with an asterisk. Asterisk: "unless it's profitable." Josh Silver called it the end of the Internet as we know it.

I want to explain why I think this deal matters, and why it doesn't. And it might not be for the reasons you think.

The Deal

Net neutrality is simply a proposed rule forbidding Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and other ISPs from engaging in special deals to block or favor certain content on the Internet; it's to keep the Internet an open general purpose network equally accessed by all innovators, speakers, and businesses. Like it is today. The carriers want to turn it into a controlled medium.

Among other things, according to the New York Times, the deal essentially says that Verizon will be able to cut special deals with any company--like, um, one called Google--to prioritize that company's traffic, giving that company an advantage online over any other content online. Google decided it could make more money getting special--or even exclusive--treatment on the Verizon network because few of their competitors could afford to get the same treatment.

(Note: Google is denying the Times report through a Tweet. I'll spell out the implications assuming the Times is right.)

Business Examples

So, as a business matter, let's say you use a Verizon mobile wireless card (an EVDO card) for your laptop (in addition to having a a Verizon mobile computer).

Google's products can get priority on your laptop based on commercial deals.

Google's Youtube may get Verizon-special treatment denied any competing video site, from Blip.tv to Netflix. (This is the example given by the New York Times today.)

Google's Orkut, a social network once known only for being big in Brazil, gets better treatment than Facebook. ?

Google's Blogger--a blogging technology--gets the Verizon-special preference denied WordPress.

Google's Chrome browser happens to work a lot better than Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Google's GChat video gets special treatment compared to video phone services like Video Skype.

Google's Gmail, an email service, gets better treatment than Hotmail or Yahoo!

Google Books gets special treatment denied any competitors.

Google's domain name service gets preferred treatment denied competitors like OpenDNS, which could even be blocked under the deal.

Google's advertising network can get Verizon network priorities.

Google's Froogle site gets special treatment denied everything from Groupon to Ebay to all those random "deal of the day" sites.

Google Voice could get special treatment compared with those other online phone services.

Google's Picasa could get special treatment over Flikr, for photo albums.

Google's Buzz could somehow get special treatment over Twitter.

Even Google Wave could get priority... Really.

So, as a business matter, the deal is important. And, yes, it may be the end of the Internet as we know it, if the FCC blessed such deals. The deal yesterday announces that Verizon and Google open the door to all of this.

more from Marvin Ammori at Balkanization

Wikileaks

In her essay discussed in the second part of this series, Hannah Arendt argues that what we commonly call obedience cannot, in the political context, properly be regarded as obedience at all. In fact, it is support -- for a country's constitution, its laws, and its panoply of requirements concerning how we act.

By creating Wikileaks and utilizing it in the manner he does, Julian Assange has withdrawn that support, and he has chosen to act in the manner condemned by those who insist on obedience to authority: he acts "irresponsibly" (the term used by critics of those who disobey, as Arendt notes). When obedience means that one supports a system of brutality, oppression, cruelty and death, to act "irresponsibly" is the only way to express one's loyalty to the values of freedom, truth and the sanctity of life.

The power of Wikileaks does not lie in the fact that it challenges a particular authority or only one system of obedience; its power arises from its rejection of authority and systems of obedience as such.

The startling effectiveness of the challenge represented by Wikileaks can be witnessed repeatedly in the reactions of those who condemn Assange and his work with such heated vehemence. I discussed a typical reaction from the conservative side of the political spectrum in the last section of this article. As I noted there, the tone and specific terms of Tunku Varadarajan's violent condemnation reveal someone who is profoundly unnerved by Wikileaks' actions, and by the fact that Wikileaks exists at all. I also pointed out -- and this bears emphasis for purposes of the present analysis -- that what finally undoes Varadarajan utterly is that he sees no way to stop Assange and Wikileaks.

This is further testament to Assange's brilliance -- and it is also testament to what I call "the power of 'No'": finally, the only weapon held by those who insist on obedience to authority is your own willingness to comply. If you refuse to comply, if you say "No," if you act "irresponsibly" and withdraw your support, there is nothing they can do. Those who represent and uphold authority understand this. Many other people do not. Wikileaks may help many people to see finally the enormous power they have, if only they will use it.

more from the L.A. Times

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men,
they create for themselves,
in the course of time,
a legal system that authorizes it,
and a moral code that glorifies it.

– Political economist Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850)

Tom Toles of the Washington Post

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

— James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

read about the disastrous trends in world military spending at Global Issues

Another Damning Summary

The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery. The cause, at the deepest level, was a breakdown in the rule of law. And it follows that the first step toward prosperity is to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.

First, there was a stand-down of the financial police. The legal framework for this was laid with the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Meanwhile the Basel II process relaxed international bank supervision, especially permitting the use of proprietary models to value complex assets—an open invitation to biased valuations and accounting frauds.

Key acts of de-supervision came under Bush. After 9/11 500 FBI agents assigned to financial fraud were reassigned to counter–terrorism and (what is not understandable) they were never replaced. The Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision appeared at a press conference with a stack of copies of the Code of Federal Regulations and a chainsaw—the message was not subtle. The SEC relaxed limits on leverage for investment banks and abolished the uptick rule limiting short sales to moments following a rise in price. The new order was clear: anything goes.

Second, the response to desupervision was a criminal takeover of the home mortgage industry. Millions of subprime mortgages were made to borrowers with undocumented incomes and bad or non-existent credit records. Appraisers were selected who were willing to inflate the value of the home being sold. This last element was not incidental: surveys showed that practically all appraisers came under pressure to inflate valuations in order to make deals happen. There is no honest reason why a lender would deliberately seek to make an inflated loan.

Mortgages were made with a two-or three-year grace period, with a low, fixed interest rate called a "teaser." These were not real mortgages; they were counterfeits, whose value would collapse when exposed. As with any counterfeit, the profits came early, when the bad paper was first sold. After the grace period, rates would reset, and the lenders knew that the borrowers, who were already stretched by their initial payments, would either refinance or default. If they refinanced, that would mean another mortgage origination fee. And if they defaulted, well ... on to step three.

Third, the counterfeit mortgages were laundered so they would look to investors like the real thing. This was the role of the ratings agencies. The core competence of the raters lay in corporate debt, where they evaluate the record and prospects of large business firms. The value of mortgage bonds depended on the behavior of tens of thousands of individual borrowers, whose individual quality the ratings agencies could never check. So the agencies substituted statistical models for actual inquiry, and turned a blind eye to the fact that the loans were destined to go bad.

Fourth, the laundered goods were taken to market. The investment and commercial banks transformed the bad mortgages into bonds, obtained the AAA ratings, and sold the stinking mess to American pension funds, European banks and anyone else who took the phrase "investment grade" at face value. (Later chumps would include the Federal Reserve.) The European crisis now underway is a direct result, as their banks and investors, stung by losses on American mortgage bonds, are dumping their risky Greek public debt and seeking the safety of U.S. Treasury bills.

read the rest of James K. Galbraith's piece in The New Republic

The Con of the Decade (Part I)

The con of the decade (Part I) involves the transfer of private debt to the public (the marks), who then pays interest forever to the con artists.

I've laid out the Con of the Decade (Part I) in outline form:

1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.

2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.

3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.

4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.

5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).

6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.

7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.

8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.

9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.

10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.

11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.

12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments being paid by taxpayers on Treasuries that were purchased with their money but which are safely in private hands.

Since the Federal government could potentially inflate away these trillions in Treasuries, buy enough elected officials to force austerity so inflation remains tame. In essence, these private banks and corporations now own the revenue stream of the Federal government and its taxpayers. Neat con, and the marks will never understand how "saving our financial system" led to their servitude to the very interests they bailed out.

The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk.

In effect, it's a Third World/colonial scam on a gigantic scale: plunder the public treasury, then buy the debt which was borrowed and transferred to your pockets. You are buying the country with money you borrowed from its taxpayers. No despot could do better.

more from Charles Hugh Smith, including Part II

The U.S. Government Assassinating Its Own Citizens

Having exposed the deep flaws in the Administration's rationalization of targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens (here), Glenn Greenwald gets to the essence of the problem:

...we also find here the central justification for most of what was done under the Bush administration: anything and everything is justified if it can be cast as helping to "protect the American people," as though Security is the overarching presidential duty. In fact, the actual oath taken by the President as compelled by the Constitution -- that irritating, purist, Far Leftist document which he incessantly told us he studied and taught -- is this: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." To fulfill that duty, he might want to begin by looking here: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

via Naked Capitalism

David Harvey's full lecture can be viewed here

Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan…

President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working. So said a parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s firing. But what does that phrase, so often in the media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really isn’t working, just how can you tell?

The answers to these questions raise even more important ones, including: Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn’t working, what about the enemy’s? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way? Let’s take these one at a time.

1. What do you mean by “it’s not working”?

“It” is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of “protecting the population” above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.

I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily “sig acts” -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every “lethal” American soldier is matched by a “nonlethal” counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for “protection.”

General McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, “an amazing number of people” who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s palace to say, “Sorry.” Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.

The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the “sorry” part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local “key leaders.” Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan’s vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn’t explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever.

read the rest of Ann Jones' piece at Tom Dispatch

Orange Beach, Alabama (click here to view a larger image)

via American Samizdat

Monsanto, Big Brother of the New World Agricultural Order

As a companion piece to the article below, here is an interesting interview...

Award-winning French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin is the author of "The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption and the Control of Our Food Supply" (The New Press) and the creator of the film by the same name.

In a review of these two projects, Leslie Thatcher writes: "What Marie-Monique Robin most effectively documents are the perverse effects - the moral, social, technological, economic and market failures - of Western society's economic organization, most specifically with respect to science and the products of science and, ultimately, with respect to the preservation of the public commons and human life on the planet."

My conversation with Marie-Monique Robin follows:

Mickey Z.: Was there an initial spark that led you to this project that took three years and investigations on four continents to complete?

Marie-Monique Robin: My "story" with Monsanto began in 2003, when I made three documentaries for the Franco-German channel ARTE (to which I pay a tribute for the quality of its programs) about the reduction of biodiversity.

MZ: Please take us through those documentaries and their connection to Monsanto.

MMR: The first, "Biopirates," told how corporations like Monsanto were holding abusive patents on living organisms which are contributing to a new drastic reduction of biodiversity. At that I time, I heard about a company called Monsanto which already held more than 600 patents on living organisms. The second documentary, called "Wheat: Chronicle of a Death Foretold," told the story of cultivation of that golden cereal, from the very beginning 10,000 years ago until today and explained how the practices of industrial agriculture that brought the "green revolution," made thousands of local landraces and varieties disappear, a dramatic evolution which will be accelerated by GMOs [genetically modified organisms]. At the same time the so-called green revolution provoked a huge contamination of the environment through the massive use of chemical pesticides, "biocides," which "entered into living organisms, passing one to another in a chain of poisoning and death," as Rachel Carson wrote in "Silent Spring." Finally, I made a documentary, called "Argentina: The Soybeans of Hunger," about the cultivation of Roundup Ready soybeans in Argentina, where I depicted the environmental, social and health disasters which the introduction of Monsanto's GMOs represent. Today, they cover 60% of the area under cultivation in the country.

MZ: What was the process like, creating these three films?

MMR: I traveled around the world for a year: Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Israel and India. The ghost of Monsanto lurked everywhere, almost like the Big Brother of the new world agricultural order - the source of much anxiety. Therefore, I proposed a new investigation to ARTE about this powerful multinational, created in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, the world leader of GM foods (90% of genetically modified crops) which presents itself on its website home page as "an agricultural company" the purpose of which is to "help the world's farmers to produce healthier food ... while reducing the impact of agriculture on the environment." But what it doesn't say is that, before getting involved in agriculture, it was first of the largest chemical companies of the twentieth century and one of the biggest polluters in industrial history. My book, "The World According to Monsanto," tells how the firm became one of the major industrial empires on the planet and one of the most controversial companies in the industrial history.

MZ: With so much background and research, how did you ever reach the conclusion that you had gathered enough material to write this important book?

MMR: Once more, I traveled a lot - to the US, Canada, Mexico, Paraguay, India, Vietnam, Europe - and met a lot of scientists, experts, whistleblowers (from the FDA, EPA, Berkeley University), lawyers, farmers and Monsanto victims. I consulted thousands of declassified documents from the EPA (on dioxin), FDA (GMOs), judiciary affairs (PCBs), scientific studies, reports from independent organizations and then decided it was enough!

MZ: Monsanto has given the planet "gifts" like Agent Orange and Roundup Ready crops, PCBs and GMOs, yet, for most humans, it has pretty much flown under the radar. To what would you attribute the fact that the vast majority of us rail mostly at governments, instead of the far more dangerous and powerful multinational corporations?

MMR: The problem is that the corporations act behind the scene, manipulating information, studies, press and the experts of the regulatory agencies. To speak quite frankly, I had never imagined before that a company could resort to such procedures, to sell its harmful products, in complete impunity, during decades: concealing scientific data, lying, manipulating regulations, corruption, pressuring scientists and journalists, threats. The problem is also that governments do not take any legal action against companies which are repeatedly affecting the environment and the health of consumers. If Monsanto were a private person, it would be convicted as a great criminal, but current law protects the criminal companies, which are never held accountable for the damage they cause.

read Mickey Z's full interview at Truthout

Seeds of Suicide

Our products provide consistent and significant benefits to both large- and small-holder growers. In many cases farmers are able to grow higher-quality and better-yielding crops.

— Monsanto, Pledge Report, 2006

It was December 2006, and we had barely arrived when a funeral procession came around the corner of an alley running between whitewashed walls, shattering the torpor of the little Indian village under the burning sun. Wearing the traditional costume—white cotton tunic and trousers—the drummers led the group toward the nearby river, where the funeral pyre had already been set up. In the middle of the procession, weeping women desperately held on to robust young men with somber faces carrying a stretcher covered with brilliantly colored flowers. Gripped by emotion, I glimpsed the face of the dead man: eyes closed, aquiline nose, brown mustache. I will never forget this fleeting vision, which stains Monsanto’s great promises with infamy.

Three Suicides a Day

“Can we film?” I asked, seized by sudden doubt, as my cameraman questioned me with a motion of his head. “Of course,” answered Tarak Kate, an agronomist who heads an NGO specializing in organic farming who was traveling with me through the cotton-growing region of Vidarbha, in the southwestern Indian state of Maharashtra. “That’s why Kishor Tiwari brought us to this village. He knew there would be a funeral of a peasant who had committed suicide.”

Kishor Tiwari is the leader of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS), a peasant movement whose members have been harassed by the police because they have insistently denounced the “genocide” caused by genetically modified Bt cotton in this agricultural region, formerly celebrated for the quality of its “white gold.” Tiwari nodded when he heard Kate’s answer. “I didn’t say anything to you for security reasons. The villagers inform us whenever a farmer has committed suicide, and we come to all the funerals. Right now, there are three suicides a day in the region. This young man drank a liter of pesticide. That’s how peasants kill themselves: they use the chemical products the transgenic cotton was supposed to enable them to avoid.”

As the procession headed off toward the river, where the body of the young victim would soon be cremated, a group of men approached my film crew. They looked suspicious, but Tiwari’s presence reassured them: “Tell the world that Bt cotton is a disaster,” an old man said angrily. “This is the second suicide in our village since the beginning of the harvest. It can only get worse, because the transgenic seeds have produced nothing.”

“They lied to us,” the head of the village added. “They had said that these magic seeds would allow us to make money, but we’re all in debt and the harvest is nonexistent. What will become of us?”

more from Marie-Monique Robin in Guernica

A big corner has been turned in Gaza

The Israeli decision to ease the three-year-old siege of Gaza is being greeted with mild welcome in many quarters, and deep skepticism in others. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has pleaded with the world via the Quartet to pressure Israel to fully lift its siege, while Lebanese and Iranian groups plan to send more humanitarian aid ships to Gaza to challenge and break the Israeli blockade.

These two approaches reflect differing positions on the larger question of how one reacts to Israeli power, and what one does to change conditions when power is applied unfairly, brutally or illegally. Does one negotiate with Israel and ask Western powers to pressure it into obeying international law and stopping its criminal behavior? Or does one confront and challenge Israel, at the risk of being arrested, injured or killed?

The experience of the Free Gaza Movement over the past few years, which sent half a dozen boat expeditions to deliver humanitarian aid to Gazans, suggests to many that in-your-face confrontation is the most effective way to challenge Israel and force it to change its policies. Israel’s reduced siege of Gaza is the fourth example of its changing a policy under pressure. The three other cases were the withdrawals from south Lebanon and Gaza’s heartland in the face of Hizbullah- and Hamas-led resistance, and the partial suspension of some settlements for 10 months last year in response to American government pressure.

So the question now is: How will people and states in the Arab world and nearby lands, like Iran and Turkey, react to the latest lesson in challenging Israel with forceful action, over making only meek pleas?

Israel is already initiating two new aggressive acts that will quickly test the mettle of both its friends and foes. It will destroy several dozen Palestinian Arab homes in occupied East Jerusalem to build an Israeli tourism facility, and it will initiate work on the ground to build another 600 homes for settler-colonial Zionists in the Jerusalem area.

The fascinating issue today is not whether Israel is making any major changes in its policies: it is not. It’s changes are only cosmetic, to ward off foreign pressures. The really important new development is the growing Arab and international realization that the criminal and inhuman excesses of Zionism – colonialism, discrimination, collective punishment, racism, siege and starvation, murder on the high seas, mass incarcerations, and more – can best be confronted using the same tactics that finally brought down the two major examples of racism and inequity in modern times: the civil rights movement that broke the back of official racism in the United States, and the anti-Apartheid movement that forced the white minority government in South Africa to accept a fully democratic system.

read the rest of Rami Khouri's piece in The Daily Star

Why the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government. The Taliban have now advanced out of their borderland safe havens to the very gates of Kabul and are surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahedin once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late 1980s. Like a rerun of an old movie, all journeys by non-Afghans out of the capital are once again confined largely to tanks, military convoys and helicopters. The Taliban already control more than 70 per cent of the country, where they collect taxes, enforce the sharia and dispense their usual rough justice. Every month, their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai's government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.

Just recently, on 17 May, there was a suicide attack on a US convoy in the Dar-ul Aman quarter of Kabul, killing 12 civilians and six American soldiers; the following day, there was a daring five-hour-long grenade and machine-gun assault on the US military headquarters at Bagram Airbase, killing an American contractor and wounding nine soldiers, so bringing the death toll for US armed forces in the country to more than 1,000. Then, over the weekend of 22-23 May, there was a series of rocket, mortar and ground assaults on Kandahar Airbase just as the British ministerial delegation was about to visit it, forcing William Hague and Liam Fox to alter their schedule. Since then, a dozen top Afghan officials have been assassinated in Kandahar, including the city of Kandahar's deputy mayor. On 7 June, the deadliest day for Nato forces in months, ten soldiers were killed. Finally, it appears that the Taliban have regained control of the opium-growing centre of Marjah in Helmand Province, only three months after being driven out by McChrystal's forces amid much gung-ho cheerleading in the US media. Afghanistan is going down.

Already, despite the presence of huge numbers of foreign troops, it is now impossible - or at least extremely foolhardy - for any westerner to walk around the capital, Kabul, without armed guards; it is even more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley, along with the towns of Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat, are the only safe havens left for westerners in the entire country. In all other directions, travel is possible only in an armed convoy.

more from William Dalrymple in The New Statesman

What Bhopal Started

Over 20,000 killed. Over half a million victims maimed, disabled or otherwise affected. Compensation of around Rs. 12,414 per victim on average on the 1989 value of the rupee. $ 470 million total. And that divided between 574,367 victims.) Over a quarter of a century’s wait. To see seven former officials of Union Carbide Corporation’s Indian subsidiary sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2100. Not a single person from the far more responsible parent US company punished.

Yet, the notion that the main injustice to Bhopal is a failure to extradite then UCC chief Warren Anderson from America is mildly ridiculous. Trying to evade the lessons the 1984 Bhopal Gas disaster threw up on the tyranny of giant corporations is completely so. Well over two decades after its MIC gas slaughtered 20,000 (mostly very poor) human beings, Bhopal still pays the price of Carbide's criminality. (Evident from the long-term impact on the health of the gas-affected. And from the poisoned soil and water around the former Carbide plant.) While the Indian government's appalling Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, if adopted, would give legal cover to such conduct across the country.

Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power. The ongoing BP spill in the Mexican Gulf -- with estimates ranging from 30,000 to 80,000 barrels per day -- tops off a quarter of a century where corporations could (and have) done anything in the pursuit of profit, at any human cost. Barack Obama's 'hard words' on BP are mostly pre-November poll-rants. BP can take a lot of comfort from two US Supreme Court judgements in the past two years.

The first of these came in 2008. That was in the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 -- till then the biggest recorded (or admitted to) oil spill in history. Simply put, BP's blowout is recreating an Exxon Valdez every eight days or so. And has been doing that since late April. In the Exxon case, a jury in 1994 imposed penalties of $ 5 billion on the company. In 2006, points out Sharon Smith in an incisive piece in counterpunch.org, "an appeals court halved the punitive claim to $2.5 billion." And in June 2008, "the Supreme Court reduced that amount by 80 percent, to roughly $500 million—an average of $15,000 per plaintiff." Exxon CEO Lee Raymond who fiercely fought the damages, retired with a $400 million package all for himself. While Exxon Valdez's victims, points out Smith, ended up with roughly the same amount -- only, it was shared amongst 33,000 of them. That is about 10 per cent of the original award and roughly $15,000 per victim

In September the same year, Wall Street's kleptocrats famously tanked the world economy. Their actions cost millions in America and elsewhere their jobs and livelihoods. Yet, US CEOs took home billions in bonuses that very year. Even the New York Times felt the need to say in a lead editorial at the time: “Just weeks after the Treasury Department gave nine of the nation’s top banks $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to save them from unprecedented calamity, bank executives are salting money away in billionaire bonus pools to reward themselves for their performance.” (In that election year, Big Oil also drummed up support for offshore drilling with this cheery slogan: 'Drill, Baby, Drill.' What’ll it be now? 'Spill, Baby, Spill?')

This year, barely three months before BP turned the Gulf of Mexico into a sludge pond, the US Supreme Court further strengthened corporate power with its ruling in the Citizens United Vs. Federal Election Commission case. As Ralph Nader put it: " With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of corporate money... into the electoral swamp already flooded with ...(corporate) dollars ...corporations can (now) reward or intimidate people running for office at the local, state, and national levels."

Mason Gaffney makes the point in the CounterPunch newsletter that “The ideas behind this are that a corporation is a ‘legal person,’ with all the rights (if not all the duties) of a human being; that, as such, it has a right of free speech; and that donating money is a form of speech.” So chin up, BP, there's still hope. Remember how many who make it to Congress and Senate get there on Big Oil's big bucks.

While on the BP spill, spare a thought for the victims of such disasters who are not American or white-skinned. As Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Conn Hallinan points out: “Nigerian government figures show there have been more than 9000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are currently 2,000 official spill sites.” But then, what are African lives worth?

Seven years after Bhopal, Larry Summers, then chief economist at the world bank, wrote his infamous memo. This said, among other things: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” Summers suggested that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Summers was to later say that he was joking, being sarcastic, and so on. Few buy that pathetic plea. Still, he went on to become President of Harvard and is now President Obama’s chief economic adviser, And his memo’s logic holds in the real world. It is exactly what has happened since Bhopal.