The U.S. Foreign Policy Elite Still Wants the Middle East for Its Oil and Its Strategic Location

Edward Hunt

In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, four former U.S. diplomats provided remarkably candid commentary on recent U.S. involvement in the Middle East, revealing a number of the most closely guarded secrets of U.S. diplomacy.

The four former diplomats emphasized the importance of the region’s oil, spoke critically about the weaknesses of U.S. strategy, made a number of crude comments about U.S. partners, displayed little concern about ongoing violence, and called for more “discipline” throughout the region.

One of the former diplomats, James Jeffrey, criticized the Obama administration for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 rather than going through with a secret deal to maintain a secret network of military bases in the country. Even today, Jeffrey said, officials in Washington must not “melt down” and retrench when U.S. forces get killed. Officials must accept that there could always be “new Benghazis and new Nigers,” he said, referring to incidents in which U.S. agents have been killed.

The four former diplomats also lambasted U.S. partners in the region. They criticized many of their closest allies for poor governance, a lack of democracy, and an inability to coordinate on shared strategic objectives.

Jeffrey made some of the strongest criticisms, charging Kurdish leaders in Iraqi Kurdistan with making their region into “another basket case” in the Middle East. He also complained that U.S. officials had to deal “with a lot of bitching” from the Turkish government over U.S. support for the Kurdish fighters confronting the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) in Syria.

In addition to Jeffrey, who once held high-level positions in the George W. Bush administration, the group of former diplomats included Ryan Crocker, Eric Edelman, and Stuart Jones. Crocker has been the U.S. ambassador to six different countries in the Middle East. Edelman and Jones, who have both been diplomats in the Middle East, have held senior positions in numerous administrations.

Over the past few decades, all four men have played significant roles in crafting and implementing U.S. policies in the region. They were “giants” who had “walked the earth,” according to Edelman.

Together, these four former diplomats called on the Trump administration to play a more assertive role in the Middle East. Although they largely agreed that IS has been significantly weakened over the last two and a half years, removing a significant challenge to U.S. power, they saw ongoing challenges from Iran and Russia and growing problems between the U.S. and its allies. They wanted to ensure that the United States remained well positioned to call the shots in the region and maintain a U.S.-led system of regional order.

“Clarity on U.S. plans and goals and particularly success against Iran will help mobilize allies, but the U.S. must discipline the system and overwatch partners constantly,” Jeffrey said.

The Strategic Concerns

Some of the more astounding revelations concern the basic reason why U.S. officials remain so focused on the Middle East. Although U.S. officials typically emphasize the problems of terrorism and security, a number of the former diplomats indicated that the major concerns have always been the region’s oil, location, and function in the global economy.

Former diplomat Eric Edelman made the clearest statement on the matter, explaining in his prepared statement that geostrategic calculations have been central factors in U.S. policy since the end of World War II. “U.S. policymakers have considered access to the region’s energy resources vital for U.S. allies in Europe, and ultimately for the United States itself,” he wrote. “Moreover, the region’s strategic location—linking Europe and Asia—made it particularly important from a geopolitical point of view.”

Edelman went on to suggest that U.S. actions in the region have been consistently based on these geostrategic factors. He cited the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which identified the Persian Gulf as a region so vital to U.S. interests that the U.S. would militarily intervene in the region to expel outside forces. He also cited the first Gulf War against Iraq, in which the U.S. militarily intervened to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

“The geostrategic and economic factors that made the Middle East so important to our national security in the past are just as potent today,” Edelman said. Even with recent increases in U.S. energy production as a result of the fracking revolution, “real or even potential disruptions to the flow of oil anywhere would have serious negative effects on our economy.”

With his remarks, Edelman made it clear that U.S. officials continue to value the Middle East for its oil. The region “contains half of global proven oil reserves, accounts for one-third of oil production and exports, and is home to three of the world’s four biggest oil transit chokepoints,” he explained.

When Edelman raised these points during the hearing, nobody disagreed with him. Neither his colleagues nor the committee members challenged his observations about why the region was so important. His remarks were considered so uncontroversial that they never came up for debate.

Instead, the current and former officials focused their discussion on what they thought were the main challenges to U.S. access to the area. Their primary concern was that Russia and Iran were working together to challenge the U.S.-led system of regional order with the hopes of creating some alternative system.

“In reality, both Russia and Iran want to roll back U.S. influence even further in the region, and each depends on the other to help it do so,” Edelman warned in his prepared statement.

During the hearing, Jeffrey made a similar point, saying that “Russia and Iran and, to some degree, Syria want to change the mix of the Middle East.” The U.S. and its allies, he continued, must maintain the current system and “at the end of the day we just have to push back.”

In these ways, the former diplomats provided some remarkable insights into the most basic reasons behind U.S. actions in the Middle East. They revealed that basic U.S. policy was to maintain a U.S.-led system of regional order so that the U.S. government could influence how all parts of the world gained access to the region’s oil.

Frictions

Throughout the hearing, the four former diplomats also made a number of unusually blunt criticisms of U.S. strategy. They felt that their superiors in Washington and their many partners throughout the region kept taking steps that were creating more problems in the area.

Jeffrey was especially critical of the Obama administration, which he blamed for failures in the second Gulf War against Iraq. Jeffrey, who was the Obama administration’s ambassador to Iraq during the period when U.S. forces withdrew from the country in 2011, said that the administration should have accepted a secret plan to keep U.S. forces in the country. Jeffrey explained that administration officials had arranged a secret plan with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “to cheat, with Maliki’s acknowledgement,” on the final agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from the country. “We had Black SOF, White SOF,” he said, seemingly referring to different kinds of Special Operations Forces. “We had drones, we had all kinds of things,” he added.

Jeffrey was reluctant to provide more details, but he insisted that the secret plan could have worked if his superiors in the Obama administration had tried it. He did not express any concern about the fact that an estimated 100,000 people had already died in the war.

“It was a very big package, including a $14 billion FMS program,” Jeffrey said, referring to a program of military sales. “We had bases all over the country that were disguised bases that the U.S. military was running.”

Although the other former diplomats on the panel largely agreed that the Obama administration should not have withdrawn U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011, they were convinced that U.S. partners shared much of the blame for ongoing violence in the area. The former diplomats accused many of their closest partners and allies of acting in ways that were creating problems.

Sometimes, “they will do things in a way that we think makes things worse rather than better,” Edelman said.

Jeffrey agreed with his colleagues, saying it was simply the price of operating in the Middle East. To maintain access to the region, he explained, “we have to rely on five countries—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt.” Each of them, he said, came with significant problems, all of which made it difficult to operate in the area. “We wouldn’t pick these allies if we were coming up with a different Middle East, but we have to deal with the Middle East we have,” he said.

Jeffrey was especially critical of Turkey, a NATO ally. He said that “the things they do are toxic.”

Since a putsch attempt against the Turkish government in July 2016, Turkish leaders have accused the U.S. government of involvement. As part of the government’s subsequent crackdown on its domestic opponents, an estimated 150,000 Turks have been fired from their jobs, 60,000 have been arrested, 1,500 civil society organizations have been disbanded, and more than 100 media outlets have been closed.

The crackdown came amid a period of growing tensions between the U.S. and Turkish governments. Differences over how to deal with the war in Syria and relations with Russia have added to the tensions in the relationship.

“It’s unpleasant, it’s transactional, it’s ugly,” Jeffrey said.

Edelman, who believed that the U.S. bore “a little bit of the blame here for this deterioration in relations,” still called for a tougher approach. “I don’t think we can tolerate some of the behavior that our Turkish allies are showing,” he said.

Ryan Crocker reminded the committee members that the United States still relied on Turkey to maintain access to the region. He said that it would be necessary to continue working with the country’s repressive leadership, despite its troubling behavior.

“They are a NATO partner in a region where we don’t have a choice between democracy and autocracy,” Crocker said. “That’s not on the table.”

Jeffrey provided one of the most telling comments on the situation when he acknowledged that the Turkish government continued to tolerate U.S. support for the Kurdish fighters who were fighting IS in Syria. The Kurdish fighters, he explained, were an offshoot of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a group that both the U.S. and Turkish governments consider to be a terrorist organization.

“The Turks are allowing us to support the PKK offshoot Kurds in Syria every day—reluctantly, with a lot of bitching, but they do it,” Jeffrey said.

The U.S. decision to support the Kurdish fighters created additional controversy because of Kurdish aspirations to create their own state. The governments of countries with significant Kurdish populations, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, all opposed the idea.

When Iraqi Kurds living in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan voted last September to explore the possibility of independence, they faced a significant backlash. Weeks after the vote, the Iraqi government sent its military forces into the region, reclaiming the oil-rich area of Kirkuk while weakening the independence movement.

The former diplomats signaled their support for the Iraqi government’s military operations, despite the fact that the Iraqi Kurds were playing a significant role in the war against IS.

Jeffrey argued that Iraq must hold together because of its potential to produce so much oil. He said that Iraq could eventually enter “into the Saudi Arabia category,” meaning that it could become a major player in the global oil market. “That’s a very important trump card, so to speak, in the Middle East, and we don’t want to just break it up,” he said.

Jeffrey was especially critical of the Iraqi Kurds for pursuing independence, saying that “they have gone in three months from one of the best good-news stories in the region to another basket case.”

If they keep crossing “red lines,” Ryan Crocker said, “we’re probably not going to be around to back them up when the going gets rough.”

“It’s the same as, sadly, with the Christian communities,” Crocker added, referring to Iraqi Christians who were facing their own challenges.

In these ways, the former diplomats made it clear that they were willing to ignore the plight of their partners and other marginalized groups if they could not find any strategic reasons to support them. The challenges facing the Kurds and Christians, they indicated, were minor factors compared to the strategic factors at play.

Taken together, their comments indicated that geostrategic calculations remained paramount. The four former diplomats may not have liked all of their partners, but they all believed that they had to accept these trade-offs if they were going to achieve their plans for the region.

“We can’t be going at each other, scratching each other because of these secondary sins when the real sinning in the region is done by Islamic terrorists and Iran,” Jeffrey said. “So we have to get a better hold of our allies.”

The Final Outlook

In spite of the rather complex strategic landscape, the four former diplomats still acknowledged that the United States maintained tremendous influence throughout the Middle East. They largely agreed that the United States remained the dominant power in the region with no comparable rival.

In his prepared statement, Edelman acknowledged that U.S. naval and air power in the Persian Gulf “outmatches Iran’s.”

Jeffrey agreed, explaining that the U.S. maintained “significant assets” throughout the Middle East. “Most of the states in the region are our security partners, with a huge conventional superiority, along with CENTCOM, over Iran, even with Russian support,” Jeffrey explained.

CENTCOM, short for U.S. Central Command, hosts about 80,000 U.S. military forces at numerous bases and offshore sites throughout the region. Over the past two-and-a-half years, CENTCOM has put its power on display in the war against IS. Since August 2014, coalition forces have conducted nearly 25,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. As of April 2017, they had killed as many as 70,000 ISIS fighters, according to their own estimates.

As part of the campaign, U.S. forces have gained a major new foothold in Syria. “We have a lot of assets in Syria even though it doesn’t look that way,” Jeffrey said. “We and the Turks between us hold about a third of the country and have a lot of local allies.”

U.S. forces have also reestablished a powerful military presence in Iraq, now basing more than 5,000 U.S. forces in the country.

Currently, all signs indicate the United States is increasing its hold over the Middle East.

The only problem, according to the former diplomats, is that the United States continues to face significant resistance. Although the U.S. has constructed a kind of informal American empire, they believe that U.S. actions and polices are creating blowback that is bringing more conflict and violence to the region.

“Anything we do to contain Iran, to push back, will bring with it great risks to us and to people in the region,” Jeffrey said. These were the lessons of history, he explained, citing “the chaos we deliberately created” to confront past challengers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

Moving forward, Jeffrey believed it would be better to conduct what he called “economy-of-force, light-footprint operations with our allies.” He suggested that these types of operations would be more effective, even if they resulted in additional violence.

“That will produce new Benghazis and new Nigers,” Jeffrey said. But “we have to be able to move on and not melt down when these things happen because this is the right way to approach it.”

Indeed, Jeffrey insisted that it would be necessary to accept more death and violence if the United States was going to achieve its strategic objectives. This kind of trade-off, he believed, was simply how things worked in the area. Citing recent retaliatory actions by the Israeli and Saudi government against missile attacks, Jeffrey said that the high civilians death tolls that resulted from such operations had simply become one of the costs of military engagement in the region.

“Ten thousand more dead civilians in the Middle East, in a region that’s seen 1 million in the last 30 years, by my count… are not going to deter the Saudis and the Israelis from acting against this threat,” he said.

US Capitalism Lets Children and Mothers Die

W.T. Whitney Jr.

One of the authors of a recent study of U.S. children’s deaths told an interviewer that, “The U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy, democratic countries in the world for children … Across all ages and in both sexes, children have been dying more often in the U.S. than in similar countries since the 1980s.” The report was published online January 8 in Health Affairs. Ninety percent of the deaths analyzed there were of infants and older adolescents.

According to the authors, “we examined mortality trends for [20] nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for children ages 0–19 from 1961 to 2010 using publicly available data.” They discovered that, “Over the fifty-year study period, the lagging US performance amounted to over 600,000 excess deaths.”

“While child mortality progressively declined across all countries, mortality in the US has been higher than in peer nations since the 1980s,” they indicate. “From 2001 to 2010 the risk of death in the US was 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1–19. During this decade, children ages 15–19 were eighty-two times more likely to die from gun homicide in the US.”

In 2013, the United Nations Children’s Fund ranked the United States in 25th place among 29 developed countries for success in assuring child health and safety. African-descended infants in the United States are most at risk for preventable deaths.  The overall U.S. infant mortality rate (IMR) for all babies in 2015 was 5.9. (The IMR is the number of babies dying during their first year of life for every group of 1000 babies born alive.) The IMR for white babies was 4.8; that for black and Hispanic babies was 11.4 and 5.2, respectively.

U.S. mothers are experiencing similarly dreadful health outcomes. In the United States the maternal mortality rate (MMR) for 1990, 2000, and 2015 was 16.9, 17.5, and 26.4, respectively. (The MMR is the number of women per 100,000 births who die from causes related to childbirth during pregnancy, the birth process, and for 42 days thereafter.)The comparable Canadian figures were 6.0, 7.7, and 7.3, respectively.

Over those 25 years, the MMR decreased globally by an average of 1.5 percent per nation per year.  Over the same period in the United States, the MMR increased at an average rate of 1.8 percent per year.  The MMR for the United States in 2010 ranked 48 places higher  than that of Estonia whose MMR was the world’s lowest. In Save the Children’s 2015 rankings for overall performance in delivering health care to mothers, the United States ended up in 61^st place. The MMR for black mothers in the United States 2012 was almost four times that of white women.

Blame falls upon capitalism. In their recent Monthly Review article, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark explain that capitalists arrived at a method for accumulating wealth at the expense of women. We think children are losers too.

They’ve relied on a process that Marx, Engels, and their followers have labeled “social reproduction, which refers to capitalists’ need for renewing their workforce.  Children are the fodder for social reproduction, and women are the agents. Citing the investigations of others, the Monthly Review authors explain how women – and children – become sources of accumulation, a task for which capital would seem, superficially, to be ill-suited.  After all, social reproduction differs from the production of commercially valuable commodities through which workers are exploited.

But capitalists are resourceful, and “those areas outside commodity production, including both the reproduction of labor power and what could be expropriated from nature, were considered ‘free gift[s] … to capital’” (Marx’s words). According to the authors, capital demonstrates a “necessary and continuing attempt to transcend or readjust its boundaries with respect to its external conditions of production.” Doing so, it “constantly seeks to expropriate what it can from its natural and social environment.”  In both situations it’s a matter of “actual robbery – usurpation, expropriation, dependence, enslavement.”

Marilyn Waring, whom they cite, thinks that, “the treatment of Mother Earth and the treatment of women and children in the system of national accounts have many fundamental parallels.”

The vulnerability of U.S. children was on display recently. Congress in 1997 enacted legislation creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Children who benefited were those whose families earned too much to receive Medicaid benefits for them, but not enough to buy private health insurance. By 2015 the rate of uninsured children in the United States had fallen from 13.9 percent to 4.5 percent. CIP should have been reauthorized in September, 2017, but that didn’t happen.

Between then and January 22, 2108, it seemed that health insurance for millions of children might disappear. That day, however, an agreement emerged to renew CHIP, but only as part of a deal for temporarily funding the federal government.  The idea that protection of children’s health depends on negotiations on unrelated issues suggests the precariousness of guarantees for children’s survival in the United States.

Clearly, prospects for the well-being of U.S. children, taken as a whole, fall short of expectations for a wealthy nation. Those in charge, it seems, are able to commandeer financial resources that in a just society would be readily available for saving children and mothers from preventable deaths. But how, one asks, did children and mothers living in other OECD nations, all capitalist, escape dangers weighing upon children and mothers in the United States?

Vicente Navarro, a veteran public health investigator and economist, suggests that working-class forces in the United States are weak, too weak to resist plunder. He points out that, “The United States, the only major capitalist country without government-guaranteed universal health care coverage, is also the only nation without a social democratic of labor party that serves as the political instrument of the working class and other popular classes. These two facts are related.” Navarro notes the juxtaposition of strong labor movements in Europe and relatively small, timid unions in the United States.

In general, he observes, “If you establish a spectrum of capitalist countries, listing them from very “corporate friendly” (like the United States) to very “worker friendly” (like Sweden), you will find, where the capitalist class is very strong, very poor health benefits coverage (in the public as well as in the private sectors), highly unequal coverage, and very poor health indicators. This is, indeed, the U.S. case.”

How the Mass Media Misread the Iranian Protests

Rahman Bouzari

One of the largest social and political uprisings since the 1979 revolution in Iran has died down for now. However, due to the very lasting structures which ignited the first round of the protests, in more than 75 cites all around Iran, it does not seem to wane. One can argue that it is only the beginning of an end – the prolonged end of what we know as the Islamic Republic, either by an uprising or by an implosion. Some noted the structural causes and political-economic effects of the recent protest perfectly, among them these two are well-articulated: ‘The Moral Economy of the Iranian Protests,’ ‘Causes behind Iran’s protests: A preliminary account.’ It is now worth noting their reception in the mass media and the concerted efforts to manipulate its true origin.

What we are witnessing now is a gridlocked systemic and systematiccrisis. Systemic, for the whole system, in contrast to a particular part of it, suffers from a widespread endemic corruption that functions as a kernel in which the four-decades of socio-economic and political grievances are visible. Systematic, for the structural defects and problems cannot be solved or even fixed by minor modifications that serve only to defer any real transformation. It also means the whole system, including the so-called reformists and the conservatives, are responsible for the present predicament. To name but a few symptoms of the current crisis one could mention the stagflation, unfettered privatization, structural adjustment, deregulation, unemployment, ‘airpocalypse’, and all those policies having been imposed after the long Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the policies which could be articulated as the Iranian ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – a Master-Signifier to diverse signified.

It is indubitable that the economic grievances are the first and foremost drive for the recent protests. Indeed, the country’s economy seemed to be spinning out of control. Yet the economic, unlike the highly capitalist societies, has been inexorably tied to the political in the global south, as it was the case with the Greek crisis in 2015. The ‘elective affinity’ of capitalism in the so-called periphery societies provided the left with an opportunity to reject both the authoritarian governance and capitalism as a normative dispositif, and Iran is no exception in this regard, if not the exemplar of it par excellence. Almost all the problematics of the Islamic Republic is a distorted form of what we have seen on the global scene with simultaneous eccentric peculiarities that are coupled with a theocratic rule now in power. Ironically it seems, the government born out of 79 revolution started to constitute itself exactly at the beginning of Thatcherism and Reaganism. The long-life of the IR, thus, corresponds to the four-decades of neoliberal agenda. The enigma of Islamic Republic surviving four decades stems from the fact that, though isolated it has succeeded in finding itself amongst the global free-market as an exporter of raw materials and importer of goods and services. While being included in the system of globalized capital, owing to its oil reserves, it has been excluded from its presumed benefits. This exclusive inclusion, the ambivalent international status of the IR in relation to the forces of capital, led the commentators to hasty observations of how to understand its nature. It is from this perspective that one can see the kind of establishment which people are protesting against.

Theatricality of Elections

The Islamic Republic is by no means a democracy even in the formal sense, rather a hybrid form of theocracy and plutocratic oligarchy with heavily-controlled elections. At the level of democratic procedures, it follows, frantically, the rules of the alleged democracy in the 21st century, with nearly one election biennially. Though rigged and opaque with strict filtration of the candidates, it observes the electoral game to its logical end, to the extent in which it has turned to a ritual in Iran with all its pre-post implications. This ritual involves a limited spurious choice ‘between the lesser of two evils’ – the reformists vis-à-vis the hardliners, in this case – giving the voter some sense of agency while preventing them from fulfilling their very agency. The point is how a theocratic Constitution along with an oligarchic ruling class dominated this formal democracy. Though radical democracy means going beyond parliamentarianism, not to mention the leftist criticism of democracy, both the term and its practice in the modern world, there is no democratic order proper in the conventional sense in the IR. It is a peculiar form of demo-theo-pluto-cracy which cannot be considered by its voter turnout – a rampant misunderstanding in the western media persuaded by pro-regime pundits in the US and Europe.

Mainstream and alternative media: forgetting Trump

In the aftermath of the wave of protests in Iran, the mass media in the Anglophone world has failed, intentionally or unwittingly, to depict it rightly. The mechanism in which the for-profit media tried to manipulate what happened in the streets of tens of cities all around the country, during ten days for the time being, consisted of two mega-categories. The first, to call into question the originality of the protests in Iran, the modus operandi operated by the mainstream media such as BBC, Aljazeera English, and others. The second, to repudiate their independent act of uprising by invoking to Trump’s unconditional support of Iran protests, in unfortunately alternative and liberal media such as Democracy Now and the Guardian.

To begin with, there is a semantic zero level of misreading any uprising in the mass media by calling it ‘unrest’, something which renders the order, constituted and preserved by the police, disorder. The sacred space of sovereignty predicated upon an order, an authoritative command, to keep the order, the arrangement of bodies and actions, in an appropriate way. Any political movement or uprising would consider in their eyes as a threat to order, in both senses of the term, thereby label it as ‘unrest’ which would cause disorder rather than reordering the very order of the things.

Politically speaking, the mainstream media in the Anglophone world, replete with the IR spin-doctors, engaged in three levels of misrepresentation. Initially, they tried to ignore it as the hardliner underplot to topple the reformist administration down, as if there were any different attitudes towards the underprivileged between the two factions of the IR. The next step, following the unsuccessful ascription to the conservative camp, was to underestimate the number of protesters thereby humiliate the participants as a few poor, uneducated lumpen-proletariat, with no aim at their disposal, sabotaging the public property, banks, garbage bins, etc., who have no notion of non-violent struggles. Their ode to the maturity of middle-class in being an observer during the wave of protests is to be understood in this respect. When it spread to tens of cites across the country, however, another distinction was made visible in their rhetoric between those who have the right to protest moderately, and those who have embarked on taking down the police stations and clerical offices – Again as if the violence began by people who have nothing in their hands rather than the armored anti-riot police.

To take but a few examples of different levels of misrepresentation, one of the earliest Tweets by the Iranian contributor to Al-Manitor on the third day of the uprisings indicated that just a handful of people protested in the streets while there were 40 million voters participated in the last election. Another Iranian-American journalist and a frequent commentator on Iran at BBC, New York Times, Aljazeera, Huffington Post and others, tweeted on the fourth day of the uprisings that the protesters are much smaller than 2009 so that she “can’t find anyone personally who has joined the protests.” She later modified her Tweet, by justifying her stance that the demography of the protests seems different.

Surprisingly enough, the alternative news outlets do not fare much better. Their hysteric obsession not to be identified with Trump or the neocons in the United States makes them revolve around every tiny word he would say in order to riposte immediately. The result of this over-reaction is nothing but ignoring those people struggling against the same politics that put Trump and alt-rights into power, not only in the US and Europe but also in the global south. One of the most amazing examples in this regards is Democracy Now anchored by Amy Goodman and Juan González that is supposed to give voice to the heterodox journalists and analysts in contrast to mainstream media. In a broadcast released on the sixth day of demonstrations, Democracy Now invited a CNN correspondent in Iran who was just back to Los Angeles for holiday to declare the government restraint toward protesters and the president reception of the people’s right to protest, as well as the founder and president of the notorious National Iranian American Council (NIAK) to declare that “Trump messages carries no credibility.” The over-weight of Trump criticism in the alternative media is central to misrepresenting any social and political movements in the years to come. Moreover, to avoid Trump taking the power is to fight with him domestically as well as internationally, strengthening the grassroots movements that are fighting the manufacturing of ProducTrump.

Ecological Over-determination

Among the four horsemen of the coming terminal crisis of the global capitalism Slavoj Žižek has identified, the worldwide ecological crisis sets the pace. It is capable of an unexpected short-circuit between the material condition Iranians living through and the kind of alternative they aspire for, thus releasing political potentialities to challenge the IR as a whole. Apart from destabilizing political-economic factors, it is necessary to find out that almost every four corners of the country subjected to drought, air pollution, dust pollution, lake-drying, and infrastructural defects that are on the verge of devastating collapse. Four-decades of mismanagement by all factions of the ruling elite in the IR have left the country with an ecological crisis which could now propel to an environmental disaster. This is not an apocalyptic vision but a real one, based on facts and figures. To take but one last example, Plasco, an iconic high-rise building – a shopping center and clothing workshops, engulfed by fire – collapsed in Tehran almost one year ago. It could not be adjudged just an accident happening once a while in every country around the world but a symptom of what would resemble the forthcoming Iran. Plasco is the condensation of four-decade socio-politico-ecological ignorance in the IR, so that one is tempted to call the current situation ‘Plascoesque’. It is approaching an ecological catastrophe, if not impeded urgently, there exist no land known as Iran in a decade to come. This would lead to an implosion, activating the antagonistic forces embedded in the petrified current social relations, or a revolution, extending the waves of protests to an irrepressible bulk of uprising. Neither reformists nor conservative could address any transformative change which paves the way for a new order, nor even would they play any progressive role towards it. If the Islamic Republic survives the ongoing uprisings, by any chance, there would not remain any right to live and breathe, let alone the right to protest. To be straightforward, any transformative change in our context would amount to no less than a ‘regime change’ – an overloaded term in need of re-appropriation by radical dissidents, for good. Despite the fact that it has been popularized by George W. Bush, the term, in its origin, does not necessarily mean advocating foreign intervention to bring fictitious democracy through military forces. It can also occur through inside change caused by a popular uprising or revolution as a precondition for even a reformist change, at least in Iran

The discursive struggle seems an indispensable part of any political movement to endure the cultural and material repression. The international leftists have a work to do in solidarity with the less-heard isolated forces in the media. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, ‘the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.’ It is the task of producing counter-narrative by alternative media not to let the far-right politicians appropriate the genuine uprisings against neoliberal authoritarianism merged with theocratic plutocracy.

Another Iran is not possible but necessary.

Why is the Israeli Army Finally Worried About Gaza?

Jonathan Cook

Last week Israeli military officials for the first time echoed what human rights groups and the United Nations have been saying for some time: that Gaza’s economy and infrastructure stand on the brink of collapse.

They should know.

More than 10 years ago the Israeli army tightened its grip on Gaza, enforcing a blockade on goods coming in and out of the tiny coastal enclave that left much of the 2 million-strong population there unemployed, impoverished and hopeless.

Since then, Israel has launched three separate major military assaults that have destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, killed many thousands and left tens of thousands more homeless and traumatised.

Gaza is effectively an open-air prison, an extremely overcrowded one, with only a few hours of electricity a day and its ground water polluted by seawater and sewage.

After a decade of this horrifying experiment in human endurance, the Israeli army finally appears to be concerned about whether Gaza can cope much longer.

In recent days it has begun handing out forms, with more than a dozen questions, to the small number of Palestinians allowed briefly out of Gaza – mainly business people trading with Israel, those needing emergency medical treatment and family members accompanying them.

One question asks bluntly whether they are happy, another whom they blame for their economic troubles. A statistician might wonder whether the answers can be trusted, given that the sample group is so heavily dependent on Israel’s good will for their physical and financial survival.

But the survey does at least suggest that Israel’s top brass may be open to new thinking, after decades of treating Palestinians only as target practice, lab rats or sheep to be herded into cities, freeing up land for Jewish settlers. Has the army finally understood that Palestinians are human beings too, with limits to the suffering they can soak up?

According to the local media, the army is in part responding to practical concerns. It is reportedly worried that, if epidemics break out, the diseases will quickly spread into Israel.

And if Gaza’s economy collapses too, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could be banging on Israel’s door – or rather storming its hi-tech incarceration fence – to be allowed in. The army has no realistic contingency plans for either scenario.

It may be considering too its image – and defence case – if its commanders ever find themselves in the dock at the International Criminal Court in the Hague accused of war crimes.

Nonetheless, neither Israeli politicians nor Washington appear to be taking the army’s warnings to heart. In fact, things look set to get worse.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week there could be no improvements, no reconstruction in Gaza until Hamas agrees to give up its weapons – the only thing, in Hamas’s view, that serves as a deterrent against future Israeli attack.

Figures show Israel’s policy towards Gaza has been actually growing harsher. In 2017 exit permits issued by Israel dwindled to a third of the number two years earlier – and a hundredfold fewer than in early 2000. A few hundred Palestinian businesspeople receive visas, stifling any chance of economic revival.

The number of trucks bringing goods into Gaza has been cut in half – not because Israel is putting the inmates on a “diet”, as it once did, but because the enclave’s Palestinians lack “purchasing power”. That is, they are too poor to buy Israeli goods.

Netanyahu has resolutely ignored a plan by his transport minister to build an artificial island off Gaza to accommodate a sea port under Israeli or international supervision. And no one is considering allowing the Palestinians to exploit Gaza’s natural gas fields, just off the coast.

In fact, the only thing holding Gaza together is the international aid it receives. And that is now in jeopardy too.

The Trump administration announced last week it is to slash by half the aid it sends to Palestinian refugees via the UN agency UNRWA. Trump has proposed further cuts to punish Mahmoud Abbas, the increasingly exasperated Palestinian leader, for refusing to pretend any longer that the US is an honest broker capable of overseeing peace talks.

The White House’s difficuties are only being underscored as Mike Pence, the US vice-president, visits Israel as part of Trump’s supposed push for peace. He is being boycotted by Palestinian officials.

Palestinians in Gaza will feel the loss of aid severely. A majority live in miserable refugee camps set up after their families were expelled in 1948 from homes in what is now Israel. They depend on the UN for food handouts, health and education.

Backed by the PLO’s legislative body, the central council, Abbas has begun retaliating – at least rhetorically. He desperately needs to shore up the credibility of his diplomatic strategy in pursuit of a two-state solution after Trump recently hived off Palestine’s future capital, Jerusalem, to Israel.

Abbas threatened, if not very credibly, to end a security coordination with Israel he once termed “sacred” and declared as finished the Oslo accords that created the Palestinian Authority he now heads.

The lack of visible concern in Israel and Washington suggests neither believes he will make good on those threats.

But it is not Abbas’s posturing that Netanyahu and Trump need to worry about. They should be listening to Israel’s generals, who understand that there will be no defence against the fallout from the catastrophe looming in Gaza.

Global Capitalism And Livelihoods Denied: Whipping India’s Farmers Into Submission

Colin Todhunter

In India, there is a push to drive people from the countryside into cities. The mainstream narrative implies that urbanisation is natural in the evolution of societies and constitutes progress. The World Bank wants India to relocate 400 million people to urban centres. Former Chief Finance Minister P. Chidambaram once stated that 85% of the population would eventually live in cities, which would mean displacing many more than 400 million people given that the country’s population is heading towards 1.3 billion and that over 60% reside in rural India.

It is easy for some to conflate urbanisation and progress and to believe this is how to ‘develop’. But societies do not ‘evolve’ in a unilinear way. Policy makers merely look to prosperous countries and see the bulk of their populations living in cities with a small percentage working in (heavily subsidised and an unsustainable system of) agriculture. This is what ‘we’ must do, Indian politicians then say, spurred on by World Bank directives.

The route to capitalism and urbanisation was not ‘natural’ in Europe and involved the unforeseen outcomes of conflicts and struggles between peasants, landowners, the emerging class of industrialists and the state. The outcomes of these struggles resulted in different routes to modernity and levels of urbanisation.

In the book ‘The Invention of Capitalism’, economic historian Michael Perelmen lays bare the iron fist behind the invisible hand which  whipped the English peasantry in a workforce willing to accept factory wage labour. In this article by Yasha Lavene, it is noted that English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of industrial capitalists.

A series of laws and measures were designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support. Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land, not least the destruction of the access to common land by fencing off the commons.

Early capitalists and their cheerleaders complained how peasants were too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited. Indeed, many prominent figures advocated for their impoverishment, so they would leave their land and work for low pay in factories.

In effect, peasants were booted off their land by depriving a largely self-reliant population of its productive means. Although self-reliance persisted among the working class (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc), this too was eventually eradicated via advertising and an education system that ensured conformity and dependence on the goods manufactured by capitalism.

‘Development’: facilitating capital

“We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost of the welfare of the downtrodden and the environment. We don’t think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran CV 

Today’s affluent sections of urbanised Indians are often far removed from the daily struggles of the farmers for whom they depend on for their food. While inequalities spiral, many city dwellers echo similar sentiments of the cheerleaders of early capitalism described by Perleman when they say loan waivers for farmers are a drain on the economy and any subsidies given to them or the poor in general just encourages unproductivity or fecklessness.

Neoliberal dogmatists are quite content to sign a death warrant for Indian farmers.

Despite nice-sounding, seemingly benign terms like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’- behind the World Bank/corporate-inspired rhetoric, policies and directives is the hard-nosed approach of neoliberal capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was in England for its peasantry.

Like the English peasantry, India’s farmers are also being booted off the land.

Let us take a look at what has happened to India’s farmers. Trade policy and agriculture specialist Devinder Sharma  has written much on their plight (access his writing here). GDP growth has been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population, including public sector workers, has widened enormously. Rural India consumes less calories than it did 40 years ago. And corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans because it supposedly spurs job creation (which it has not), while any proposed financial injections (or loan waivers) for agriculture (which would pale into insignificance compared to corporate subsidies/written off loans) are depicted as a drain on the economy.

In short, although farmers continue to produce bumper harvests, the impact of underinvestment, lack of a secure income and effective minimum support prices; the undermining of the public distribution system; exposure to cheap imports courtesy of rigged international trade; the hardship caused by deregulation and profiteering companies which supply seeds and proprietary inputs; the loss of state agricultural support services; and the impacts of the corporate-backed/written Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, have made farming financially non-viable for many.

It is a deliberate strategy: part of the plan to displace the existing system of production with one dominated from seed to food processing to retail to plate by Western corporations. Independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land will be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and those that remain will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

Between 300,000 and 400,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and millions more are experiencing economic distress. Over 6,000 are leaving the sector each day. And yet the corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water and water shortages and poor health.

In addition to displacing people to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, unconstitutional land grabs for special economic zones, nuclear plants and other corporate money-making projects have forced many others from the land.

Various reports have concluded that we need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable agroecological methods of farming and develop locally-based food economies. Indeed, small farms are more productive than giant industrial (export-oriented) farms and produce most of the world’s food on much less land.

Instead, in India, the trend continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture for the benefit of Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer and other transnational players. Is this the future India needs, with a fraction of farmers left on the land, trapped on an environmentally unsustainable chemical-GMO treadmill?

While whipping farmers, tribals and the unorganised sector into submission by depriving them of their livelihoods by one way or another, India’s political elite blindly adhere to the mantra that urbanisation equals progress and look to the West, whose path to ‘development’ was based on colonialism, eradicating self-reliance and beating the peasantry into submission. There was nothing ‘natural’ or ‘progressive’ about any of it. It involved the planned eradication of peasants and rural life by capitalist interests and the sucking of wealth from places like India.

In India, the bidding of capital is these days done through its compliant politicians, the World Bank, the WTO and lop-sided, egregious back-room deals written by corporations.

Cyber Security: Going Beyond Data Protection

S.G. Vombatkere

Threats to databases

In an age of exploding data, information and knowledge, both human and machine, cyber security is as much a necessity for personal privacy as it is for internal and external national security, or for day-to-day economic activities and operation of social and economic infrastructure systems. Cyber security also constitutes the defensive part of modern warfare which is intimately connected with the blood-and-guts, on-the-ground military operations.

Thus, the threats to privacy and to national security from loss, leakage or corruption of data whether due to ignorance, inadvertence or cyber attack, need to be understood clearly.

Vulnerability to cyber attack is a function of the inter-connectedness of personal and institutional computer systems, and the integrity and quality of cyber defences at every level. Data has no geographical or political borders. The border for data is essentially the physical border formed by the physical infrastructure of installed hardware and the electronic boundary of the IT system or database within which the system manager has control.

Cyber attack has come into public spaces precisely because of increasing interconnectedness between systems or autonomous data silos, as internet users proliferate at the staggering rate of eight new internet users every second. This is even while there are allegedly 250,000 new computer viruses being created every day, which have the potential to infect private and institutional systems from around 300,000 infected websites, which can and do change every day. That gives an idea of the threat lurking behind every single keystroke of every computer which is connected to the internet.

Cyber criminals are not only professional in their capabilities, but are well organised, and even advertise their profession. There are ads for hacking services, which can be purchased by, say, a business person, to knock out business competitors by obtaining information or disabling systems for a critical period or effectively making the system inoperable by deliberately overloading it with inputs – called DDOS, standing for deliberate denial of services. DDOS can cost the purchaser of the hacking service $5 to $100 per hour or more depending upon the built-in security of the system, the risk of discovery, the benefit that the customer would get out of the DDOS to his business rival, etc.

While hacking into a system to extract (copy), corrupt or delete data is fraught with the risk of being traced, arranging DDOS is perhaps relatively safer. Alternatively, the hacker can be employed to infect a target system with malware. Such advertised services are themselves difficult to trace to a physical address, since the operators are skilled geeks who could be a next door neighbour or living on another continent.

Reportedly, malware sales and distribution to potential and in-practice cyber criminals is a thriving business. For example, a package named Black Hole Exploit Pack complete with full technical support and documentation, enables a newcomer to set up his own malicious hacking server.

Further, computer systems can be invaded by planting or embedding hardware at some stage of the manufacturing process or inserting malware during system installation. This provides a so-called “backdoor” to the system, unknown to the user, permitting individual criminals, corporate competitors, intelligence outfits or deep state actors unauthorised – and often undetected – entry to the system, for their respective nefarious purposes.

Software firewalls can prevent unauthorised entry into systems, but it must be understood that an engineer working in even a reputed firewall vendor company could have illicit and secret association with a hacking facility at the individual level.

Even otherwise, hacking is a part-time or full-time occupation which is open to even the very young, like 8-years of age. Some hackers do it for kicks – supposedly harmless – or to deliberately harm some particular person or organization, while others do it for making money.

All it requires for hacking a system is some self-acquired skill on computers (not very difficult for today’s youngsters born to the keyboard), motivation to hack (monetary incentives or personal satisfaction aims), and time (part-time after school or work is adequate) to succeed. The world over, cyber experts admit that a system is safe only until it is hacked, and the truth of this admission is that very high security systems like NASA, CIA, FBI etc. have been hacked or had malware injected into them.

Hard truth

Thus, cyber attack can be on an individual computer, a system, a network, or a server. But the threat is not only through the internet. There are many software devices and tools for physically gaining access to a system or database.

Most cyber criminals skilfully cover their tracks to escape detection and arrest. It helps them that most cyber security laws are national in scope whereas the internet is not limited to national political or geographical boundaries, being borderless and international. Furthermore, countries do not agree with each other on cyber security and privacy.

Backdoors and built-in threats

The IT infrastructure, meaning critical high-end hardware and software (“equipment”, hereinafter), in most, perhaps all, central and state government ministries, departments and organizations is purchased from international vendors. These vendors are not the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), since OEMs have limited global marketing capability. The purchaser enters into a contract with the vendor who procures the infrastructure from the OEM and installs it. In most cases, the vendor is also contracted for life-cycle technical support since the design and details of the equipment are protected by the OEM under IPR.

Further, the OEM, operating under an export control regime, insists on the purchaser providing end-use certification. The nexus between the IT OEMs and the intelligence community needs no highlighting. It is this nexus which permits the OEM to secretly embed targeted hardware and/or software in the equipment, including detecting and suiting the geographical location of the end-user.

Regarding the life-cycle technical support of the equipment, the vendor is often contracted for on-line support. This means that the purchaser actually hands over the entire live system to the vendor’s systems engineer – who may be physically located anywhere in the world – for updation, upgradation, rectifications, etc. At this stage, one or more of the following could happen: (1) If a backdoor was not installed at time of supply and installation, this can be done, (2) If a backdoor was installed at time of supply and installation, data can be downloaded, (3) A new or updated backdoor can be installed.

On-line technical support by the vendor may be preferred because it is cheaper than having a vendor’s engineer visit the site, and also because security clearances for physical visits could be problematic especially in high-security installations.

The point here is that critical IT hardware and software infrastructure is purchased from the international market, for end-use in defence, home, finance and banking operations, energy including oil, education, health, social welfare, electric power, nuclear power, railway operations, air traffic control, rail and air passenger reservations, public or private sector industry, etc., including UIDAI’s Central ID Repository (CIDR).

Thus vulnerability to cyber attack is substantial when every single item of critical hardware and software is purchased from international vendors, especially those who also provide technical support as part of the contract.

Sub-critical equipment

Cyber vulnerability is not only from critical hardware. Sub-critical hardware is also vulnerable when purchased from international vendors.

Sub-critical hardware is essential for operation of IT systems, and routers are one such item used for communication, data handling and transfer. Routers are sub-critical hardware which route data within and between IT systems. Routers are much like postmen who collect snail-mail from post boxes and post offices and deliver it to the addressee, hopefully without reading the communications or extracting anything from the mail. However, for digital data security, data is coded and voice communication is scrambled. The software for some routers is regularly updated by security patches, and this, as in critical equipment, is a source of substantial cyber threat.

Open market purchase

IT equipment purchased from the open market overcomes the disadvantage of revealing the end-use and prevents installation of targeted backdoors. Cyber threat is minimised but not eliminated because, for example, a mother board or a hard disk or the microprocessor could have secretly embedded devices which can be activated remotely. Notwithstanding, this is a “safer” route.

However, this route of open market purchase calls for increased levels of hands-on IT competence for system design, integration and implementation. Such talent is not difficult to find in our country, but sadly this is not encouraged because of reliance on foreign vendors who exercise influence at the highest levels of state and central governments.

Security evaluation

Criteria for IT-product security evaluation is done under a framework of evaluation assurance levels from 1 to 7. EALs 1 to 4 are relatively easily dealt with, but levels 5 to 7 involve checks ranging from investigation into the source of the hardware and software, to the checks for embedded hardware and/or software, to silicon-chip-level testing to check whether the device performs only the task for which it is purchased and none other. As EALs increase, the level of expertise, infrastructure required, and time-and-cost required for conducting evaluation grow exponentially. These need to be assessed according to the assessed risk of cyber attack, the extent of non-acceptable consequences, and the capability and time-frame for restoration after attack. Infrastructure planning and provision should be done accordingly.

Effects of cyber attack on national databases

Cyber attack by a foreign power or a criminal group on a national database by one of the means mentioned above can be disguised to appear as internal system failure. Simultaneous attack on multiple databases can bring the economy to a grinding halt. The ability to enter multiple data silos or systems almost simultaneously is provided by an “entry-point” which is common to them.

Such an entry-point could be through a database which provides a digital entity that is linked to multiple databases. Several experts consider UIDAI’s Aadhaar number, which is linked to multiple databases, as providing a hacker with entry into multiple databases. That is, if CIDR is hacked, it can be a clandestine route for entry into linked databases. In fact UIDAI naively created and implemented the CIDR by contract with an international vendor which had intimate links with the intelligence community of the vendor’s country. Hence, the danger of backdoors having already been installed cannot be ruled out. It is a moot point whether Aadhaar is UIDAI’s self-goal by unwittingly planting a cyber-crime bomb, notwithstanding their unconvincing protestations.

A law to protect data would not hinder a determined aggressor from hacking into the CIDR. It would appear that cyber security with national security consequences was apparently not a priority with the architects of UIDAI’s Aadhaar, and hence justification for alleging naivety.

In international politics, cyber attack is an act of war, justifying reactive military response. However, when cyber attack disables multiple databases which affect military logistics and operations, it can restrict or limit the scale or speed of military response.

Capability for cyber security

As mentioned earlier, India has virtually zero production of critical hardware and software even in core sectors like defence, home, finance, energy (especially oil) and transportation, all of which impinge immediately and directly on the daily economic life of individuals and the State. Total dependence on international vendors for critical IT hardware and software is the bitter truth.

The attitude of successive governments to this truth has been denial, finger-pointing, or targeting whistleblowers by trolling or legal action – Tribune journalist Rachna Khaira being the most recent instance – or “shooting” the messenger, or adopting an ostrich-head-in-sand policy. It is not surprising that the problem has not gone away. Rather, the risk has increased from military, political and economic perspectives.

Focussing on data protection at database levels is inadequate, since data is simply digital alpha-numeric strings divorced from real-time situations and real-life people. Privacy, cyber security and national security which are at the core of individual sovereignty and national sovereignty, need to be covered both by actionable policy and law.

A degree of assurance for cyber security can only be had by using national human and material resources drawn from India’s public and private sectors. This is obviously a process which will take years, and planning for this can only be effective after the risks and consequences of cyber attack are accepted and realistically assessed at state and centre government levels, and policy and law on data and cyber security are formulated. All this needs to be with policy and time-bound action plans cleared at the level of the National Security Council.

National Security Council

Government’s e-governance initiatives will inevitably shift every aspect of national functioning into the cyber domain. As it gains momentum, the concommitant risk will be increased attractiveness as a cyber target.

Since cyber security compromised in one sector gives an aggressor access to associated sectors that use linked data, cyber-security cannot be effective unless it encompasses the entire linked databases of knowledge-information-data across administrative and procedural demarcations. Only holistically architectured security can reduce vulnerability to cyber attack, limit or contain damage to databases and speed up recovery in case of successful attack.

A national database like UIDAI’s Aadhaar CIDR was created without laws to safeguard it or the data that it contains. Even after a law was passed in 2016, reports of leaked data are eliciting defensive responses from UIDAI, indicating successive governments’ casual approach to cyber security. A law to protect data can fix responsibility for invasion of databases and prescribe legal action. It would be ineffective when the attacker is outside India’s political boundaries, and cannot take cognisance of the larger aspect of cyber security at the national level. That would call for holistic policy at the National Security Council level, with action plans for time-bound, phase-wise implementation.

An effective cyber strike on the day-to-day governance of a nation could be catastrophic, impinging on national security and also compromising national sovereignty. Being in a state of denial with respect to cyber security, as in the UIDAI’s case, will only take our country closer to the edge of a precipice beyond the point of no return. We need to think beyond feel-good, band-aid solutions like formulating a law on data protection. Political tie-ups with countries which promise assistance in security can only further compromise security, since critical IT hardware and software in use are all imported, and may actually facilitate the foreign intelligence agency’s access. The National Security Council has its task cut out, but is it listening?

Demonetization And Its After Effects

Harasankar Adhikari

  The Government of India celebrated the 1st year of demonetization. Opposition of the Government observed “Kala Dibas”.  Demonetization was a foul programme. However, initially,  people in Bottom of Pyramid were very happy, and they thought that it was good step. They believed that rich people would become poor and they would get monetary rewards from the Government in their ‘Jana Dhana Accounts’. But gradually they have understood how they were hypnotized with this illusion. The effects of demonetization were adverse so far as their survival was concerned. Now they claimed and opined that Government had pushed them into a bad situation and they are in trouble to manage their minimal self.

A result of the small survey on effects of demonetization has been discussed explaining the agony of demonetization among poor working class. In Kolkata, there are many giant urban housing colonies consisting many residual units (flats) and a huge number of middle and higher classes people is the owner of these units. A number of people(just literate or primary standard of education, backward, unskilled or semiskilled)  works as maintenance workers (sweepers, cleaners, electrician and plumbers, etc.) of these units. They are contractual labour. Beside their monthly wages, they generally perform extra duty when the owners of these units assign internal work in their residual area for extra payment. It is usually at large before the festivals (Durga Puja). This extra income is potentially helpful for their family.  But after demonetization, they did not get such assignment and their extra earning was obviously cut off. Even, when they got extra-assignment their payment was lower than earlier times. Moreover, before the festival they enjoy some monetary rewards from the owners of these units which were almost nothing in this year.  The second scenario is that these units usually tender for internal maintenance (interior work) frequently to the local contractors. This year there was too limited such tender. Consequently, working people was jobless and their families were in crisis.

Now this poor labour class people use to blame government for horrifying decision of demonetization. They are gradually entering into the situation of job losers and necessarily they are afraid of hunger and others. They use to utter that the rich people are very much conscious and they are strict to incur unnecessary expenses for their lives style management.

Thus,  it reveals that life style and life choices of middle classes and higher classes has been created jobs of informal sector and they use to maintain it through their extra-earning. The fate of informal sectors depends on them. It is a cause of uncertain future of labour of informal sectors. Demonetization alerts them (middle and higher classes) to be restricted in their lives style. It might be said that flow of money determines the future of informal sectors. Governments fail to create new job markets. But it destroys the labour markets for poor. Gradually these informal poor labours would lose their work, and they would surely choose another path of earning. Therefore, social conflict, anti-social work, and crime would increase. Is government prepared to handle this situation? Is government ensuring more progress and development or it leads to put the poor people in a stage of poverty and backwardness? Only the development of corporate sectors supporting the government would not be the path of country’s progress development. Government fails to keep its promise for development of poor.