Power Systems (2 page)

 

The UN Human Development Index ranks India as 134th, slightly above Cambodia and Laos. And China ranks 101st.
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India is about where it was twenty years ago, before the famous reforms began. So yes, there has been growth. You go to Delhi, there is plenty of wealth. But it's an extension of the traditional Third World system. Even in the worst days, if you went to the poorest country in the world, say, Haiti, you would find a sector—white, European, mulatto maybe—that lives in tremendous wealth and luxury. You find the same structure in India, just on a vastly different scale. So in India a couple hundred million people now have cars, television sets, and nice homes. You have multi-billionaires in India who are building palaces for themselves.
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Meanwhile, the consumption of food, on average, has actually declined during this period of growth.
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Incidentally, the richest man in the world is now from Mexico, Carlos Slim. He beat Bill Gates this year.
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As one of the consequences of privatization in Mexico, mainly over the last twenty to thirty years, he was given a telecommunications monopoly.

I think you have to take the ranking of China with a grain of salt. India is a much more open society, so we know a lot more about what is happening there. China is pretty closed. We don't know much about what's going on in China's rural areas. One person doing important research on this is Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at UCLA. She's done extensive study of Chinese labor conditions, and she distinguishes what she calls the rustbelt from the sunbelt.
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The rustbelt is up in the northeast, the big production center where the state-run industrial sector was based. That's being wiped out. And she compares it to the rustbelt in the United States. Workers have essentially nothing. They had a compact, they thought. People have done studies of workers in Ohio and Indiana. They feel cheated, rightly. They thought they had a deal with the corporations and the government: they would work hard all their lives and in return they would get pensions, they would get security, their children would get jobs. They served in the army, they did all the right things. Now they're being thrown into the trash can. No pensions, no security, no jobs. The jobs are being shipped somewhere else. She finds the same in the Chinese rustbelt, except there the compact was the Maoist version: we have solidarity, we build the country, we sacrifice, and then we get security.

The sunbelt is southeast China, the big production center now, where the factories are bringing younger workers in from the rural areas. These workers don't have this Maoist tradition of solidarity and working to build the country. They're peasants. In fact, their lives are still based in the villages. That's where their families are, where they raise children, where they can go if they lose their job. They're a migrant workforce.

There is huge labor unrest all over China. In the southeast, the sunbelt, it's because the government is failing its legal obligations. There are laws that say you should have certain wages and working conditions, but workers don't have anything. So they're protesting that. There are a huge number of protests, even by official statistics.
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The labor force is atomized but very militant. But we really don't know what's going on in the inner rural areas. On top of which, there are enormous ecological problems developing in China.

So if you measured growth rationally—counting not just the number of products you make but the costs and benefits of making them—China's growth rate would be much lower. And its ranking in the Human Development Index would probably also be lower, though 101st is bad enough.

 

On your office door at MIT you have a bumper sticker featuring a quote from the two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedley Butler, who was a veteran of many U.S. interventions, from China to Nicaragua. The sticker says, “War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.”

 

In fact, he very eloquently described the way war is a racket. He says, “I was a racketeer for capitalism,” and he describes his role in many interventions.
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Actually, a very timely example is Haiti. When Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti in 1915, Smedley Butler was one of the commanders, though not the top one. He was the person who President Woodrow Wilson sent to disband the parliament. The parliament of Haiti had refused to accept a U.S.-written constitution, which permitted American corporations to buy up Haitian land. This measure was considered very progressive. If you go back to the time, the big thinkers were saying that Haiti needs foreign investment in order to develop. You can't expect American investors to put money in Haiti unless they can own the place, so we have to have this progressive legislation. And these backward people don't understand it, so we have to disband the parliament. Butler says we disbanded them by typical Marine Corps measures, at gunpoint. After that, the marines, under Butler, ran a referendum in which they got 99.9 percent approval of the U.S.-imposed constitution, with 5 percent of the population participating—namely, the rich elite.
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That was considered a great democratic achievement. It was another step in the process of driving the population off the land, turning them into assembly plant workers or something considered to be to their “comparative advantage” by progressive thinkers. And finally you get the hideous catastrophe we've just seen with the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

In his later years, Butler was pretty bitter. He also stopped a business coup that planned to overthrow the administration of and kill President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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He intervened and somehow put an end to it. He was vilified for speaking out, but he was a real hero.

 

Let's talk more about Afghanistan and the U.S. war there. In March 2010, Obama visited Bagram air base.
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It is a site of major war crimes, which went virtually unmentioned in news reports. Obama told the troops that their mission was “absolutely essential,” declaring, “We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else's business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11.” And finally he told the assembled troops, “If I thought for a minute that America's vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away.”
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What are those vital interests from Obama's point of view?

 

There are a few strategic interests but, by this point, I suspect it's mostly domestic politics. Daniel Ellsberg observed this about the war against Vietnam. If you pull out without victory, which is called losing, you're literally dead. Obama inherited the war. And I suspect the dominant interest is self-preservation.

The United States didn't invade Afghanistan because we were viciously attacked. It's true that there was an attack on 9/11, but the government didn't know who did it. In fact, eight months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn't know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States.
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After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn't give them any evidence because they didn't have any. But, secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we're going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we're going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government.
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This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it's much worse. It's aggression.

How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don't know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They're undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that's what will happen.
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Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing.
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That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It's very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn't want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule.

The same was true in Iraq. If it hadn't been for the sanctions, it's very likely that Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown from within in much the same way as a whole rogues' gallery of other gangsters the United States and Britain have supported, like, say, Nicolae Ceau
escu, the worst of the Eastern European dictators. Nobody wants to talk about him anymore, but the United States supported him until the very end. Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire—they were all overthrown from within. But the United States didn't want that in Iraq. It wanted to impose its own regime. And the same in Afghanistan.

There are geostrategic reasons. They're not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don't know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI) from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved.

The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That's the new “great game”: Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It's a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan.
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The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

In fact, that's probably one of the main reasons why the United States entered into a deal with India in 2008 to permit India to openly violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to import nuclear technology—which, of course, can be transferred to weapons production.
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That's another way to try to draw India more into the U.S. orbit and separate it from Iran.

So all of these things are going on. There are a lot of broad considerations involved. But I still suspect that domestic politics is uppermost. We can't get out of Afghanistan without victory or we'll be slaughtered.

 

Is that related to the greatly expanding drone attacks on Pakistan?

 

Yes. They're horrible, but they're also interesting. They tell us a lot about American ideology. The drone attacks are not a secret. There's much we don't know about them, but mostly they're not a secret. The Pakistani population is overwhelmingly opposed to them, but they're justified here on the grounds that the Pakistani leadership covertly agrees.
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Fortunately for us, Pakistan is so dictatorial that they don't have to pay much attention to their population.
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So if the country is a brutal dictatorship, it's great, because the leaders can secretly agree to what we're doing and disregard their population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to it. Pakistan's lack of democracy is considered a good thing. And then in an adjacent newspaper article you read, “We're promoting democracy.” It's what George Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to have two contradictory ideas in mind and believe both of them.
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That's almost a definition of our intellectual culture. And this is a perfect example of it. Yes, the bombing is fine, because secretly the leadership agrees, even though they have to tell the population they're against it because the population is overwhelmingly opposed.