Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiHillary Peddles Worst Sort of Wares in India
To assist the corporate bottom line, the Obama Administration is peddling the worst sort of wares abroad.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just concluded a visit to India in which she acted as a shill for U.S. arms and nuclear companies. The United States and India signed an agreement that will pave the way for the possible sale of more than 100 fighter planes to India, the largest pending weapons deal globally (Lockheed Martin and Boeing are in the running for the contract). And India announced that two civilian nuclear reactors—most likely to be constructed by General Electric and Westinghouse—will be set up in the country as part of the U.S.-India nuclear deal signed a couple of years ago.
The Indian elite was nervous about the new Administration in Washington, uncertain whether India would receive the same warm embrace it had from Dubya’s people. It needn’t have worried (though differences did crop up during the Clinton trip on issues like climate change).
In a recent interview with me (available in the July issue), Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, expressed apprehension about how the Indian political leadership has veered away from the ideals of his grandfather. He bemoaned its enthusiasm for nuclear weapons, its desire to cultivate a strategic relationship with the United States, and its muted tone as a moral authority on the global stage. The Bush Administration encouraged these tendencies, and the Obama folks seem to be heading down the same path.
The fighter jet deal has been in the works for years now, but that doesn’t make it any less repugnant. Presumably, it is meant as a counterbalance to the billions in military aid that the Bush Administration showered Pakistan with over the years, and to the Obama Administration’s announcement a few months ago of a $3 billion, five-year military aid package to Pakistan (much of which will be transferred back to the coffers of U.S. arms companies).
As a result, both nations are spending their scarce resources on shiny new military hardware. And if they still feel insecure, there's plenty more where that came from.
Like the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration is using Pakistan in the "war on terrorism," and flattering India as a junior global partner, a role India is willing to be employed in as long as the United States assuages its ego (as Clinton did by referring to it as “a global leader for the 21st century”). The United States fulfills its geostrategic aims, while U.S. arms manufacturers rake in the moolah. The losers in this scenario are the Indian and Pakistani people.
The nuclear deal is also very problematic. By agreeing to supply fuel, reactors and other technology to India’s civilian nuclear sector, the Bush Administration legitimized a nuclear weapons project that India conceived in dishonesty. India, in return, gave up any pretense of pressing for global nuclear disarmament, and signaled that it would open up its vast civilian nuclear sector to U.S. corporations. The pact “will present a major opportunity for U.S. and Indian companies,” Ron Somers, president of the U.S-India Business Council, said in 2007. He was so right.
But the really interesting thing here is what the United States is demanding: that the Indian Parliament pass a law releasing the U.S. companies from legal responsibility if there’s an accident. Since the worst industrial disaster in history, with a toll of tens of thousands of lives, was caused by a U.S. corporation in India, some Indians are not too happy and are promising a tough fight against any such measure.
“With what happened in Bhopal in view, we will oppose any move to bring in legislation to shield U.S. suppliers from liability in the event of a nuclear accident,” says S.P. Udayakumar, convenor of the National Alliance of Anti-nuclear Movements.
This is not the first time that a U.S. company has sought immunity from the consequences of a disaster in India. DuPont asked to be released from all such responsibility when it was negotiating with the Indian government in the 1990s to set up a nylon plant, but the people of the state of Goa, where the plant was slated to be located, mobilized to nix the venture.
The deals that the Obama Administration is pushing will be worth $20 billion to U.S. corporations if they go through. The damage that they cause could be incalculable, however.
13 Comments so far
Show Alland so it goes, on and on ad infinitum... the virus consuming itself
Arms dealers are below drug dealers and child pornographers and rapists in my estimation. US citizens are inured to seeing guns everywhere from birth. They lose the comprehension that a gun is an obscenity, a thing to be instantly dismantled and buried in pieces before someone is hurt, before the gun wielder loses his humanity by killing someone. That a respected head of state can serve as a shill for weapons sales is completely wrong. She should also sell meth and poisonous spiders and lamps made of human skin. She should wear a necklace of finger bones and strap a captive dwarf to her crotch for constant stimulation. Barbaric old cow.
India is out of control very much as the US is. The government is militaristic and arrogant. Hindu nationalist parties are crazed as Christian and Muslim and Jewish fanatics. Bhramanism is cruel, greedy, delusional just as the other religions are. The so-called peacefulness and spirituality of India is a fraud just as it is everywhere. The upper class in India is exploitive, mean, self-centered, self-righteous and brutal. I love India and may be there soon but people in the West should know how it is instead of these fantasies that abound. I can explain more if anyone is interested.
So much for turning swords into plow-shares. Not only are we not re-tooling America into a Country that has an economy dependent upon jobs that are constructive and that will improve America, the enviornment and the world but we continue to be the world's leaders in arms sales to foreign countries. We worry about the U.S. building new nuclear weapons or energy plants and we worry about India and any other nation building nuclear plants. Remember the problems that America had with environmental contamation, mismanagement and equipment failures which resulted in increased cancer rates among workers at nuclear weapons plants during the Reagan Administration(local paper 11-6-88). They had to close some of the plants.No wonder corporations do not want to be liable.Where will they send their radioactive toxic waste,to America? This will keep America a leader in global destruction rather than builders of a better world for our children.
genie: swords into plow shares (Joe's suggestion) and Where do we start? (my question). Although I'm not Muslim (nor Jewish) I proudly wear a "Tear Down These Walls" t-shirt of a Jewish peace group called Against the Wall that takes direct actions against the apartheid walls in the West Bank. I'm the proud friend and supporter of Cynthia McKinney, who has done her personal "plow share" operation in Gaza. These are small "starts" indeed, but starts they are and they can give us a wee spark of actual HOPE that more swords will be converted to peaceful purposes. An analogy from the issue of ghetto housing is the effort undertaken a few years ago to rehabilitate slums not by massive slum clear projects, typically replaced by gentrified middle class condos, but the construction of individual "decent" housing units in the midst of slums, with the idea that, as "blight" is supposed to spread from the spot of its origin, revitalized homes for low income people will spread in a benign form of contagion. Living now outside any city with prominent "ghettoes," I don't even know how that is going; but it's an idea for starting small and expanding to big that is the only way we may arrive at the "ultimate" sustainable economy which, I think, is an absolute essential to stabilizing world conflict.
It seems to me that the organizing principle of our foreign policy has become supporting weapons producers, war contractors and foreign bases all over the world. It seems to me that oil is no longer a sufficient justification for having bases and operations in over 150 countries.
In order to justify our issuing of military contracts, we fabricate enemies and issues. We sabotage efforts for peace. We exaggerate threats. How can North Korea’s feeble military efforts justify building a missile shield (of doubtful efficacy) in Hawaii? It cannot, but it is an opportunity for a contract. How else can we justify spending close to 700 billion a year when we have so many without effective, stable schools, healthcare and homes and our economy is increasingly built on puffery and banking fraud rather than productive job-rich industry? How else can we justify that India, with so much poverty, spend its resources on war planes?
The result is the enrichment of a very small but powerful and pitiless group of profiteers who care nothing for the environment, the future, our soldiers, our people's needs or citizens of other countries. They buy off our so-called representatives. Many local economies in various states have become structurally dependent on this cancerous growth.
It is time to start excising it bit by bit and replacing it with healthy economic enterprise. How about some project that helps Indian and US farmers to survive while they grow organic products, for instance? Wouldn't that be a better use for our money?
Swords into plowshares!
Joe
jclientelle: Hey Joe, you should have read my 3:53 p.m. post before you posted your 3:48 one. We're in perfect agreement on the defense-profit driven motives of U.S. foreign policy. And, as I said, it's ultimately the dependence of the U.S. economy on defense expenditures that drives this insanity, and any ultimate solution to our foreign woes will come only with the "bit by bit" construction of a sustainable U.S. and world economic system. Where do we start?
Hi,
There was a temporary problem posting, thus the time disconnect. I do think we are in agreement. The motivations for war have tilted more towards purely immediate mercenary ones focused on war contractors. Even the longer term imperialist project has faded somewhat compared with an urgent sort of piggish predatory thuggery and thievery.
Joe
What's the problem? It's not like any us companies have ever killed hundreds of Indians in any industrial accidents (Bhopal).
These aircraft are needed to counter the aircraft the us sold/gave to Pakistan. Selling arms to both sides of a potential war is the best kind of business there is, right Major Barbara?
"It's not like any us companies have ever killed hundreds of Indians in any industrial accidents (Bhopal)."
The first official immediate death toll was 2,259. A more generally accepted figure is that 8,000- 10,000 died within 72 hours, and it is estimated that 25,000 have since died from gas-related diseases. Also a minimum of 574,304 people were exposed (after the courts rejected 455,213 out of 1,029,517 registered cases in 2007).
Yes - we keep the pot stirring to increase weapons sales and to keep regions destabilized and weak so they can be more easily fleeced. Cynical and ruthless to the extreme.
Joe
Aye, Saturnalia, together with Clinton's pledge to "upgrade the defences" of our "partners" (Arab and Israeli) in the Middle East, we're assured that the U.S. will go on its merry way of "selling arms to both sides of a potential war." Defense production strengthens the U.S, economy you know, and in U.S. politics "it's the economy, stupid!" and please don't forget it. (And of course we have to protect our "investments" by protecting our investers from nasty lawsuits in the countries where they operate. (That's the "best kind of business.")
Let's hope that the people of India show more courage and integrity than many in the US do.
q