Naomi Klein | ukwatch.net

The Greatest Stick-Up In History

Ellie Keen — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly rightwing media hosts had to prove their populist credibility by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well — until it doesn’t.

For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650bn to liberate a nation of 25 million people, shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush-hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government … Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in 10 days, not 10 years.”

There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stick-up in world history. The second that he was too late. “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the brink of doing so.

It started with no-bid service contracts announced for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual in itself. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies — not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. The contracts only make sense in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq’s oilfields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of backroom arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oilfields, accounting for half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under the control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign corporations will keep 75% of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25% for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anti-colonial struggles. According to Greg Muttitt, a London-based oil expert, the assumption up until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop new fields in Iraq — not to take over those which are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. “The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company,” he told me. “This is a total reversal of that policy, giving the Iraq National Oil Company a mere 25% instead of the planned 100%.”

So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Paradoxically, it is Iraq’s suffering — its never-ending crisis — that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain Iraq’s treasury of its main revenue source. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology, while the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq needs to start producing more oil urgently. Why? Also because of the war. The country is shattered and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to western firms have failed to rebuild it.

And that’s where the new contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Several of the architects of the Iraq war no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator for the invasion. On US National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as “a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future”. Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil undersecretary of state and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as “a primary objective”.

Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva conventions. That means the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure — including its oil infrastructure — is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations, just as Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9bn to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion. Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, and of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She wrote and co-produced “The Take,” a documentary about Argentina’s occupied factory movement.

Class War in Court

Tim Holmes — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:38:57 +0000

During the jury selection process at the Conrad Black fraud trial in Chicago, the judge polled potential jurors on their impressions of Black’s Canadian homeland. “Socialist country,” one replied. According to press accounts, Black, once the third-most-powerful press baron in the world, turned to his wife, Barbara Amiel, and they shared a smile. At last, a juror after their own hearts – the couple had been redbaiting Canadians for years.

The Black trial is an odd beast: a Canadian who gave up his citizenship in order to accept a peerage in Britain is on trial in the US for allegedly pocketing tens of millions that belonged to the shareholders of Chicago-based Hollinger International. Every twist is front-page international news, but most Americans have no idea who Black is. In his opening remarks, Black’s lawyer, Edward Genson, assured the jury: “In his native Canada and England, he’s a household name.”

It makes sense that Lord Black is a nobody in Chicago. He never needed to bother with politics in the US – as far as he was concerned, the country was close to perfect. It was the rest of the English-speaking world that required his bombastic ideological lectures. Delivering those was his life’s mission.

Black is the world’s leading advocate of the “Anglosphere”, a movement calling for the creation of a bloc of English-speaking countries. Adherents claim that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand must join together against the Muslim world and anyone else who poses a threat. For Black, the US is not just the obvious leader of the Anglosphere but the economic and military model that all Anglo countries should emulate, as opposed to the soft European Union.

Although the consolidation of the Anglosphere as a political bloc receives far less scrutiny than US military interventions, it has been a crucial plank of Washington’s imperial projects. The movement recently gained some notoriety when it emerged that on February 28 the White House had hosted a “literary luncheon” for George Bush and Dick Cheney’s new favourite writer, ultra-right British historian Andrew Roberts, author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, an Anglosphere manifesto. But it is Black who has been the linchpin of Anglosphere campaigns for two decades, using his British and Canadian newspapers to reach out and collectively hug his beloved US. In Britain, this took the form of using the Daily Telegraph as a beachhead against “Euro-integrationism” and insisting that Britain’s future lies not with the EU but with Washington. This vision reached its zenith, of course, with the Bush-Blair team-up in Iraq.

In Canada, where Black controlled roughly half the daily newspapers, the push to Americanise was even more strident. When he founded the daily National Post in 1998, it was with the explicit goal of weaning Canadians from our social safety net (a “hammock”) and forming a new party of the “united right” to unseat the governing Liberals.

So if Black was going to get a sympathetic jury anywhere, it should have been in the US, where regular people worship the wealthy because they are convinced they could be the next to strike it rich (unlike those envious, over-taxed and over-regulated Europeans and Canadians). Perhaps in 2000, at the height of the stock-market bubble, Black would have faced a jury made up of such supportive folks, ones who would have looked at his uncanny ability to divert Hollinger profits into his own accounts and said: “More power to you.”

But in 2007, Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom’s collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively globalised. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in order to whittle the group down to 12, plus eight alternates, she found men and women who had “lost every dime” in the WorldCom collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks to outsourcing, and who’d had their finances ravaged by identity theft.

Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of dollars, jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. “Who could possibly do that much work or be that much capable?” one asked. A mechanic’s apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works, “I’m barely getting by as it is, living at home”. No one said: “More power to you.”

Many appeared to regard North America’s ultra-rich the way Russians see their oligarchs – even if the way they amassed their fortunes was legal, it shouldn’t have been. “I just don’t think anyone should get that amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom,” one juror wrote. Others said: “I feel that there is corruption everywhere”; anyone paid as much as Black “probably stole it”; “I am sure this goes on all the time and I hope they get caught”. John Tien, a 40-year-old accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate lecture about the accounting scams endemic in corporate America that Black’s lawyers asked the judge to question him in private, to prevent his views from influencing the other potential jurors.

Regardless of what else happens in the Black saga, the jury-selection process has already provided an extraordinary window into the way regular Americans, randomly selected, view their elites – not as heroes but as thieves. As far as Black is concerned, this is all terribly unfair – he is being “thrown to the mobs” because of rage at the system and, unlike American billionaires, he doesn’t “dress in corduroy trousers” or donate his fortune to Aids charities. Black’s lawyers even argued (unsuccessfully) that their client could not get a fair trial because the average Chicagoan “does not reside in more than one residence, employ servants or a chauffeur, enjoy lavish furniture, or host expensive parties”.

There is no doubt that what is going on in that courtroom looks less like a fraud trial than class war, one at the heart of the Anglosphere. Even if Black wins, it will be harder to sell the world an ideological model that is so deeply reviled at home.

www.nologo.org

Racism is the Terrorists' Greatest Recruitment Tool

eddie — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:01:03 +0000

Hussein Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London’s failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching “films on the war in Iraq”, La Repubblica reported. “Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers … of widows, mothers and daughters that cry.”

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror because of its politically correct anti-racism. Yet the comments attributed to Osman suggest another possible motive for acts of terror against the UK: rage at perceived extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief – so prevalent that we barely notice it – that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?

It’s not the first time that this kind of raw inequality has bred extremism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian writer generally viewed as the intellectual architect of radical political Islam, had his ideological epiphany while studying in the United States. The puritanical scholar was shocked by Colorado’s licentious women, it’s true, but more significant was Qutb’s encounter with what he later described as America’s “evil and fanatic racial discrimination”.

By coincidence, Qutb arrived in the United States in 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel. He witnessed an America blind to the thousands of Palestinians being made permanent refugees by the Zionist project. For Qutb, it wasn’t politics, it was an assault on his core identity: clearly Americans believed that Arab lives were worth far less than those of European Jews.

According to Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history at Georgetown University, this experience “left Qutb with a bitterness he was never able to shake”. When Qutb returned to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, leading to his next life-changing event: he was arrested, severely tortured and convicted of anti-government conspiracy in a show trial.

Qutb’s political theory was profoundly shaped by torture. Not only did he conclude that his torturers were subhuman infidels, he stretched that categorisation to include the entire state that ordered this brutality, including the Muslim civilians who passively lent their support to Nasser’s regime.

Qutb’s vast category of subhumans allowed his disciples to justify the killing of “infidels” – now practically everyone – as long as it was done in the name of Islam. A political movement for an Islamic state was transformed into a violent ideology that would lay the intellectual groundwork for al-Qaida. In other words, so-called Islamist terrorism was “home-grown” in the west long before the July 7 attacks – from its inception it was the quintessentially modern progeny of Colorado’s casual racism and Cairo’s concentration camps.

Why is it worth digging up this history now? Because the twin sparks that ignited Qutb’s world-changing rage are currently being doused with gasoline: Arab and Muslim bodies are being debased in torture chambers around the world and their deaths are being discounted in simultaneous colonial wars, at the same time that graphic digital evidence of these losses and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer. And once again, this lethal cocktail of racism and torture is burning through the veins of angry young men. Qutb’s history carries an urgent message for today: it’s not tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it’s tolerance for barbarism committed in our name.

Into this explosive environment has stepped Tony Blair, determined to pass off two of the main causes of terror as its cure. He intends to deport more people to countries where they will likely face torture. And he will keep fighting wars in which soldiers don’t know the names of the towns they are levelling. (To cite just one recent example, an August 5 Knight Ridder report quotes a marine sergeant pumping up his squad by telling them, “these will be the good old days, when you brought … death and destruction to – what the fuck is this place called?” Someone piped in helpfully, “Haqlaniyah.”)

Meanwhile, in Britain, there is no shortage of the “evil and fanatic racial discrimination” that Qutb denounced. “Of course, too, there have been isolated and unacceptable acts of a racial or religious hatred,” Blair said before unveiling his 12-point terror-fighting plan. “But they have been isolated.” Isolated?

The Islamic Human Rights Commission received 320 complaints of racist attacks in the wake of the bombings; The Monitoring Group, a charity that provides assistance to victims of racial harassment, has received 83 emergency calls; Scotland Yard says hate crimes are up 600% from this time last year. And last year was nothing to brag about: “One in five of Britain’s ethnic-minority voters say that they considered leaving Britain because of racial intolerance,” according to a Guardian poll in March.

This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practised in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada … ) has little to do with genuine equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettoes while the centres of public life remain largely unaffected by seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the shallowness of this alleged tolerance more than the speed with which Muslims deemed insufficiently “British” are being told to “get out” (to quote the Conservative MP Gerald Howarth).

The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the diversity now ghettoised on the margins of western societies – geographically and psychologically – were truly allowed to migrate to the centres, it might infuse public life in the west with a powerful new humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign deportation orders sending Algerian asylum seekers to torture, or to wage wars in which only the invaders’ dead are counted. A society that truly lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, would have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.

Africa's Noose

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:19:13 +0000

Gordon Brown has a new idea about how to “make poverty history” in time for the G8 summit. With Washington so far refusing to double its aid to Africa by 2015, the chancellor is appealing to the “richer oil-producing states” of the Middle East to fill the funding gap. “Oil wealth urged to save Africa,” reads the headline in the Observer.
Here is a better idea: instead of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth being used to “save Africa”, how about if Africa’s oil wealth was used to save Africa – along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy and coal wealth?

With all this noblesse oblige focused on saving Africa from its misery, it seems like a good time to remember someone else who tried to make poverty history: Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed 10 years ago this November by the Nigerian government – along with eight other Ogoni activists, he was sentenced to death by hanging. Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that political decisions made in the interests of western multinational corporations kept its people in desperate poverty. Saro-Wiwa gave his life to the idea that the vast oil wealth of the Niger delta must leave behind more than polluted rivers, charred farmland, rancid air and crumbling schools. He asked not for charity, pity or “relief”, but for justice.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded that Shell compensate the people from whose land it had pumped roughly $30bn worth of oil since the 1950s. The company turned to the government for help, and the Nigerian military turned its guns on demonstrators. Before his state-ordered hanging, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal: “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial … The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come.”

Ten years later, 70% of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, “got to keep a mere 12% of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract”, according to a report on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes – a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage.

This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination. It offers, according to the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report, “the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world”. Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.

The idea for which Saro-Wiwa died fighting – that the resources of the land should be used to benefit the people of that land – lies at the heart of every anti-colonial struggle in history, from the Boston Tea Party to Iran’s turfing out of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan. This idea has been declared dead by the EU’s constitution, by the national security strategy of the US (which describes “free trade” not only as an economic policy but a “moral principle”) and by countless trade agreements. And yet it simply refuses to die.

You can see it most clearly in the relentless protests that drove Bolivia’s president, Carlos Mesa, to offer his resignation. A decade ago, Bolivia was forced by the IMF to privatise its oil and gas industries on the promise that it would increase growth and spread prosperity. When that didn’t work, the lenders demanded that Bolivia make up its budget shortfall by increasing taxes on the working poor.

Bolivians had a better idea – take back the gas and use it for the benefit of the country. The debate now is over how much to take back. Evo Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism favours taxing foreign profits by 50%. More radical indigenous groups, which have already seen their land stripped of its mineral wealth, want full nationalisation and more participation – what they call “nationalising the government”.

You can see it too in Iraq. On June 2 Laith Kubba, spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister, told journalists that the IMF had forced Iraq to increase the price of electricity and fuel in exchange for writing off past debts: “Iraq has $10bn of debts, and I think we cannot avoid this.” But days before, in Basra, a historic gathering of independent trade unionists, most of them with the General Union of Oil Employees, insisted that the government could avoid it. At Iraq’s first anti-privatisation conference, delegates demanded that the government simply refuse to pay Saddam’s “odious” debts and opposed any attempts to privatise state assets, including oil.

Neoliberalism, an ideology so powerful it tries to pass itself off as “modernity” while its maniacal true believers masquerade as disinterested technocrats, can no longer claim to be a consensus. It was decisively rejected by French voters when they said no to the EU constitution, and you can see how hated it has become in Russia, where large majorities despise the profiteers of the disastrous 1990s privatisations and few mourned the recent sentencing of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

All of this makes for interesting timing for the G8 summit. Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for a million people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city centre on July 2 – a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets.

But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose – a noose around the lethal economic policies that have already taken so many lives, for lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice.

A noose like the one that killed Ken.