Gobind Thukral

EVERY passing day terrorists leave a bloody message through bombs blasts across India. It was Jaipur, the pink city on May 13 where 68 innocent persons were lost. Next was Bangalore, the industrial hub of India where three persons were killed and in Ahmedabad another 50 persons lost their lives and then came Delhi where 24 innocents died in a series of bomb blasts and 100 were injured. Later it was Malegaon and now on October 1 in Agartala, further comer of India, two persons were killed and 100 injured. This killing and maiming has gone for many years.

Terror is tearing South Asia apart and hurting where it hurts most. Whether it is Pakistan or India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, it is social fabric and economy is under brutal strain. In many other parts of the world this scourge is eating away innocent lives, disrupting economies, destroying social structure and creating unprecedented security problem. India is spending more on internal security than perhaps alleviating the poor. If we look at the Stare laws and harsh measure, resulting at times into State terrorism, India looks least civilised. There are loud protests from all sides.

State was essentially created to secure life and regulate economic, social activities and advance human development. If it can not fulfill the basic tenets despite the citizens making all sacrifices, what good is this basic idea of the State? If people are losing faith in the capability of the State, it is just natural. If they seek sterner actions to meet the menace, they are not wrong.

Yet in the whole debate essentials are being lost. Intelligence gathering networks, policing and violence and actionable laws would always help. But these measures shall never solve the real problem; why young people who should love good life and look towards future should become suicide bombers and take innocent lives.

Suicide bombing, mapped out by the non-state actor, a renegade faction, secessionists or even nation-states, is sometimes written off as futile and incomprehensible. As one serious study after study pointed out there is condition of grave injustice or perceived injustice that often to alienation, forcing communities and individuals or even insecure nation states to terrorism. It is not an irrational exercise or mindless action. The question really is political; hence seeking solutions outside the realm of politics is a pointless exercise.

University of Chicago’s political scientist Robert Pape argues that suicide bombing contains a strategic logic wherein the perpetrators inflict sustained, brutal costs upon the State so as to compel it to re-consider its policy. In his insightful work, Dying to Win, Pape — based on a universal database of attacks from 1980-2003 — shows suicide bombings are motivated more by limited geo-strategic objectives than exclusively religious ones. Religious doctrine is mangled to sanctify the purely political objectives of the planners and to promise salvation for their pawn.

One classic example could be the response America has provided to 9/11 bombing in New York and Washington by invading Iraq[ more for oil] and Afghanistan and letting its economy bleed. The Americans only prove Osama bin Laden right who had in his 2005 tapes projected that with a little effort they could hurt the Americans and let them bleed.

The bailout package to reset the financial markets sought by President Bush is $700 billion and it is hard not to notice that this sum closely resembles the amount that the United States has spent thus far in Iraq. This is Osama bin Laden's very strategy: entangling the United States abroad and plunging the country into economic turmoil. In 2004, he remarked that his "bleed-until-bankruptcy" plan was seeing "evidence of the success." Real losers are the American people and their economy.
The present pattern of suicide bombings in India and Pakistan suggests a coordinated effort at galvanising the shifting forces to achieve a certain objective. The overarching one in Pakistan is to enable the periodic regrouping of Taliban remnants against the NATO forces in Afghanistan. An accommodating western border and imprudent neo- conservative policies having hurt tribal pride and sub-nationalism have forced the locals to rally behind their renegade Pashtun kin and their foreign financiers. If they succeed, they would turn Pakistan and Afghanistan into badland of Islamic fundamentalism of the medieval period.

In India, Gujarat riots, and the total lack of understanding at the policy level and at the level of the police besides discrimination in social and economic activity has caused immense agony to the Muslims and the present pattern of suicide bombings in India and Pakistan suggests a coordinated effort at galvanising the shifting forces to achieve a certain objective. The overarching one in Pakistan is to enable the periodic regrouping of Taliban remnants against the NATO forces in Afghanistan. If they succeed, they would turn Pakistan and Afghanistan into badland of Islamic fundamentalism of the medieval period. The State actors by their faulty policies and faulty ideas of meeting this challenge by mere force are only helping these elements.

Amidst all this, however, something has been lost. There is now a growing chasm between the majority and minority communities in India, best evidenced by lack of credibility of the official line on blast investigations in the minority community. The minority view is that there is more to the blasts than meets the eye. These may have been engineered by those who would like to entrench an enmity between majority and minority India. There is a pan Indian perception of a minority under threat. Investigations by security agencies are taking a toll on community life in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in the south; Gujarat and Rajasthan in the west; Indore in central India; and Azamgarh in UP.

In India, Gujarat riots, and the total lack of understanding at the policy level and at the level of the police besides discrimination in social and economic activity has caused immense agony to the Muslims and the prolonged Kashmir imbroglio has added to the perceived injustice. India besides what it gets from Pakistan; Taliban and ISI operatives has now home grown terrorists or militants. Naxalites are also born of out the same root cause, largely economic inequalities and perceived injustice.

The pride and joy of militant’s arsenal is a weapon of mass terror that has no known defense: the human missile. But one might wonder why the bombers in India or Pakistan and other parts are destroying their own country? The standard answer to this is often ‘it is outside elements that are doing this’ and ‘it is the helplessness of the masses that pushes them to throw away their life like this’ or ‘extremist religious views are behind this’. But when the psychology of the bomber is studied, it brings to light a far devious mentality. These bombers are less ‘outside elements’ and more of a militia raised at home.

If the governments are serious to weed out this scourge, they shall have to change policies ands take political initiatives while dealing at the level of the security forces.

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America's system is to blame for the problem of its banks

Harjap Singh Aujla

THE normal duties of banks are to safely manage the savings of their depositors and to forward loans to the needy. In order to cover their overhead charges, the banks charge a higher rate of interest from their borrowers than what they offer to their depositors. But in order to lure more and more investors into the highly speculative stock market, the American financial system lowered the bank interest rates for the depositors in the banks to such ridiculous levels that going into the stock markets looked a lot rosier than depositing the money in the banks. For example throughout the Presidency of Roland Reagan, the banks all over American were offering interests of 1 to 2 percent on savings accounts. Such rates don’t match even 3% rate of inflation. Such practices by the American financial institutions forced even the most reluctant investors into the fold of the stock market related businesses like the money market funds, hedge funds, junk bonds and actual purchase of stocks.

If the bank deposit interest rates would have been somewhat higher, the common folks would have deposited money in the savings and fixed deposit accounts and not in the gamble of stock market.. The American Government made the situation worse by taxing the interest earned from bank interests. What a ridiculous idea, the people who were earning 1% interest were paying 0.3% tax to the U.S. Government in tax. This resulted in the actual interest income dropping to 0.7%. During the Reagan Presidency, I had suggested that up to an annual income of $10000 from bank interest, there should be no federal income tax, but even such suggestions were not acceptable to the powerful financial managers operating out of the Wall Street. And they had influence in the corridors of power in Washington D.C. The health of our banks, even with a huge burden of bad loans would have been a lot better, if the depositors’ interest rates would have been higher. These are the basic mistakes, which America has been committing and is still unprepared to learn from the past blunders.

When I came to the U.S., Jimmy Carter was the president. During his time the ordinary home buyer was made to deposit a down payment equal to 25% of the value of the property. In addition, the monthly income of the purchaser was required to be twice the amount of the monthly installment for low income people and proportionately less for those earning sizable incomes. Job security was also one of the conditions. But when Ronald Reagan became the president, he gave a free hand to the financial institutions to govern themselves. The long rope given by President Ronald Reagan was relaxed further under the Presidency of George W. Bush. What happened during the Bush Presidency was that the condition of down payment was relaxed to such an extent that in several cases, no down payment was required. This exposed the banks to even greater risks. The 25% down payment required during Carter Presidency was enough of a guarantee against up to 25% drop in the re-possessed value of the fore-closed property. Normally in the first two years of the downturn in property values, the properties don’t lose more than 25% in price. After two years the prices do stabilize and then start rising at least at the rates of inflation.

For permanent remedial regime, the basic old fashioned banking system must be encouraged once again. That means, the bank interest rates on savings deposits should be increased to not less than 3% annually and fixed deposit rates should also be increased to keep pace with prevailing rates of inflation.

I think at least 20% down payment must be mandatory for all the housing sector purchases. In the mortgage business, the system of fixed mortgage rates should also be made mandatory. The fixed interest rates should never be less than 6% or at least 2% above the Federal Reserve Prime lending rate.

This is the time for encouraging savings and not for obtaining back-breaking loans. The U.S. Federal Deficit this year is likely to exceed 1.25 trillion dollars. That will be an all time highest federal deficit. Let us make sure that we do not fall into such a trap once again.

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U.S.: Oil companies make money as people suffer

Stephen Leahy

WHY do U.S. oil companies some of the most profitable corporations on the planet receive 20 to 40 billion dollars a year in subsidies from the U.S. government?

And, in a time of skyrocketing oil prices and profits, why did the George W. Bush administration in 2005 authorise an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies over a five-year period?

"Those are very good questions," said Doug Koplow of Earth Track, Inc., an independent energy information research organisation in Boston, Massachusetts.

"I don't have a good answer other than to say we've been subsidising American oil companies since 1918," Koplow told IPS.

Koplow's 2007 report to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development puts the annual U.S. subsidy at an average of 39 billion dollars a year, when the costs of guarding oil lanes in the Persian/Arab Gulf, and the Alaska Pipeline are included. This does not include any costs from the Iraq war.

Official U.S. government statistics from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) offer a different picture, stating that the oil and gas industry only received 2.15 billion dollars in 2007.

"The EIA has a very narrow definition of what constitutes a subsidy," said Koplow.

Like many industrialised countries, the U.S. subsidises oil production, not oil consumption. Consumption subsidies reduce the cost of buying fuel to the public while production subsidies reduce the cost of finding and producing oil for oil companies.

Experts agree that both forms of subsidies encourage consumption and thus increase the price of oil.

Estimating U.S. oil and gas subsidies is very challenging. Subsidies rarely involve cash payments. Instead scores of U.S. government agencies and departments create hundreds of programmes to support the U.S. energy sector. And there is no requirement for the federal government to keep track of all this.

Among the most common subsidies are construction bonds and research-and-development programmes at low interest rates or tax-free, assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company's stead and income tax breaks. Despite record high prices at the pump, the federal sales tax on petroleum products is lower than average sales tax rates for other goods. And on it goes.

Originally these production subsidies were intended to help the nascent industry meet a growing nation's energy needs. Despite record-high prices, that rationale remains firmly in place. In 2007, U.S. oil giant Exxon corporation made history with 40.7 billion dollars in profits, the most any U.S. company has ever achieved in a single year.

And subsidy programmes from 1918 are still in place.

"I'm not aware of any oil and gas subsidy that has ever been phased out," said Koplow, the leading expert on U.S. energy subsidies.

Energy subsidies are often simply hidden from public scrutiny. It's only recently been revealed that 40 companies granted leases between 1996 and 2000 for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico do not have to pay royalties for the publicly-owned resource. This is worth nearly a billion dollars a year in lost revenue to the federal government, according to a 2008 study by Friends of the Earth (FOE), a U.S. environmental NGO, and may ultimately total 50 billion dollars.

That study also revealed that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 would generate an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies in the form of tax breaks, reduced royalty payments, and accounting gimmicks over a five-year period.

"The report only includes the explicit subsidies we could find," said Erich Pica, an energy analyst at FOE.

"There are a whole lot of others out there that are less explicit," Pica told IPS.

U.S. businesses, for example, can deduct far more from their taxes on the purchase of a large SUV than they can for a fuel-efficient vehicle. "Every dollar spent subsidising oil companies is a dollar not spent on reducing oil use," he said.

These production subsidies do nothing to lower the price of petrol at the pump for U.S. consumers. It simply boosts companies' bottom line, Pica said.

Skyrocketing oil company profits and prices did put some pressure on the U.S. government to cut some subsidies and shift them to renewable energy sources which currently receive very little support. However, the much-touted 14-billion-dollar plan announced in January 2007 has stalled and is unlikely to pass this year, if ever, said Pica.

"It's outrageous that the big five oil companies who made 123 billion dollars in profit last year [ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron Texaco]continue to be subsidised by the U.S. taxpayer," he said.

The United States is a great place to be in the oil business. Energy analysts report that the U.S. government charges some of the lowest royalties and receives the least amount of taxes from oil and gas companies to extract a limited resource from public lands.

"U.S. taxes on a gallon of gasoline are 45 cents compared to four dollars in most of Europe," said Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, a U.S. NGO based in Washington.

"It's very easy to be in the oil business in the U.S. companies can drill wherever they want and make enormous profits, a lot of which is at the expense of taxpayers," Larsen said in an interview.

And the public is largely none the wiser, she said.

This massive government intervention distorts energy markets, making it very difficult for alternative energy sources to compete without similarly massive subsidies. "And it promotes America's addiction to oil," Larsen added.

While reducing consumption subsidies results in people taking to the streets in India, merely talking about reducing U.S. production subsidies brings floods of silk-suited corporate lobbyists into the White House. And they are welcomed since the oil and gas industry is now a part of the current government, she said.

The energy sector's control of the government is the strongest and clearest evidence of the corruption of the U.S. political process, said award-winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan.

"The private sector is manipulating the government for its own ends," Gelbspan, author of books on the energy sector's influence over government, told IPS.

Meanwhile the U.S. government said it cannot afford to invest 200 billion dollars in clean energy over the next few years. That investment would be enough to "jumpstart" the clean energy revolution that would see the U.S. able to dramatically reduce its emissions of carbon from fossil fuels, Gelbspan said.

The pace of global warming is already moving into overdrive and will become catastrophic without urgent action to reduce emissions. But action will not come from the White House, no matter who is charge, he lamented.

"We have taken the typical developing country corruption scandal to new heights in this country," he concluded. [Courtesy IPS]

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Crisis of Capitalism Deepens

Sawraj Singh writes from Seattle, USA

IT’S becoming quite clear that the Western capitalism is facing the most serious crisis. America, the undeclared leader of the consumerist capitalism at its highest stage, “Globalization”, is going through the most difficult period in its entire history. The challenge is much more severe than the great depression of the thirties. At that time, it was only the economic crisis but now America is facing political, social and moral crisis. Many people are reminded about the last days of the Roman Empire. The consumerist capitalist model of development has failed and we need an alternate model of development.

Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs, can provide us with the alternate model of development. The Sikh religion is the zenith of the eastern cultivational spirituality. Overall, the east has contributed more towards human development compared to the West.

The main reason for this phenomenon was the milder climate of the east. Even Plato could see the effect of climate on the development of culture. We can look at Europe and see the difference between the Mediterranean coast (Greece and Rome) and the Nordic (north) countries of Germany and Scandinavia. There is almost one thousand years difference in the level of civilization.

There are six major religions of the World, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism. All the six major religions of the World originated in the East. The origin of a major religion is a very significant milestone in the history of human development. The three major religions developed in the Indian subcontinent, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism while the other three Judaism, Christianity and Islam, developed in the Middle East.

The Sikh religion is chronologically the last major religion to develop in the Indian subcontinent as well as in the World. Another unique aspect of the Sikh religion is that it has absorbed good concepts of both the Indian as well as Middle Eastern religions. Therefore, it can be called the zenith of the eastern cultivational spirituality. Historically, the Sikh religion played a very important role in bringing the two great religions, Hinduism and Islamic together.

Today Islam has emerged as a counter culture to the consumerist capitalist culture of the west. The conflict between the west and Islam actually represents a clash of the eastern and the western civilizations. The modern western consumerist capitalist culture has nothing to do with the Christian values. Therefore, the present clash is not between Islam and Christianity. Both of these great religions have a common origin as well share fundamental values.

The Sikh ideology is based upon the principles of universal concern and universal well being and it advocates a global community based upon love, tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The capitalist globalization is based upon selfishness, greed and lack of ethical as well as a global perspective.

Marxism is the only modern western philosophy that has a global perspective. However, Marxism became ossified and was mostly reduced to economism. It lost its revolutionary zeal as well its humanitarian aspect. To make Marxism relevant in the present context it has to be easternized. Since India was the main seat of the eastern philosophy, Marxism has to be Indianized.

Confluence of Marxism and Sikhism can bring the best elements of the western and the eastern philosophies together for the benefit of the whole mankind. Liberation theology brought Christianity and Marxism together in South America. Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs, can provide us with an alternate model of development based upon the concept of harmony with nature and natural evolution as opposed to capitalist concept of conquering of nature and imposed development. Marxism, which has the experience of the functioning of the modern class society, can help us to implement the universal philosophy of Sikhism in the modern World.

[The writer is M.D. FICS Chairman Washington State Network for Human Rights.]

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American dream gets sour for Indian immigrants

KARTHIK Rajaram, 45, an unemployed man with an MBA in finance, killed his wife, Subasari, 39; sons Krishna, 19; Ganesh, 12; Arjuna, 7; mother-in-law, Indra, 69, before killing himself in San Fernando Valley, 20 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

A man distraught because he could not find work shot and killed his mother-in-law, his wife and three sons and then killed himself inside a home in an upscale San Fernando Valley neighborhood, police said.

Authorities said the man had an MBA in finance but appeared to have been unemployed for several months and had worked for major accounting firms, such as Price Waterhouse. The two-story rented home is in a gated community in Porter Ranch, about 20 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

Rajaram had fallen hard. He once made more than $1.2 million in a London-based venture fund had lost his job. His luck playing the stock market ran out.

On september 16, he bought a gun. He wrote two suicide notes and a last will and testament. And then, sometime between Saturday night and Monday morning, he killed his wife, mother-in-law and three sons, and took his own life.

"This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole, if you will, of absolute despair, somehow working his way into believing this to be an acceptable exit," said LAPD Deputy Chief Michel Moore. "It is critical to step up and recognize we are in some pretty troubled times."

In a letter addressed to police, Rajaram blamed his actions on economic hardships. A second letter, labeled "personal and confidential," was addressed to family friends; the third contained a last will and testament, Moore said.

The letter to police voiced two options: taking his own life, or killing himself and his entire family. "He talked himself into the second strategy," Moore said. "That that would be the honorable thing to do."

Authorities believe Rajaram killed his family and himself after seeing his finances wiped out by the stock market collapse, according to a source familiar with the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Concern about the family's welfare began Monday morning when Rajaram's wife, 39-year-old Subasri, did not show up for her carpool. Friends went to the house in the 20600 block of Como Lane, only to find it strangely quiet. The morning newspaper lay in the frontyard. The family's two cars, a Suburban and a Lexus SUV, were parked in the driveway.

When police entered the home in the gated, Spanish-style community, they first found the gunman's mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, dead in a downstairs bedroom. His wife and three sons -- Krishna, 19, a sophomore at UCLA majoring in business economics; Ganesha, 12; and Arjuna, 7, all named after Indian gods and warriors -- were discovered in various upstairs bedrooms, all shot in the head, some with multiple gunshot wounds.

Their father was found dead in a bedroom with Ganesha and Arjuna, the gun still in his hand.The Rajarams had lived in the upscale Sorrento neighborhood of Porter Ranch for a couple years in a 2,800-square-foot rented house. The landlords, another Indian couple, said that the family paid their rent on time and that there were no indications of trouble.

Neighbors in the Northridge neighborhood where the family previously lived said they were well-liked and enjoyed entertaining guests. Except for one night when residents heard a man screaming for hours, the family seemed content for the nine years they lived there.

"He loved those kids more than any man I've seen love his sons," said next-door neighbor Sue Karns. But Karthik Rajaram, who held an MBA from UCLA, was a hard-driving businessman. He was involved in several financial ventures. Between his home sale and another lucrative investment, he should have had a pile of cash.

A 2001 article in The Daily Telegraph of London, under the headline "Bust, but big bucks for the big boys," called Rajaram a "winner" in a deal for NanoUniverse, a Los Angeles- and London-based venture fund taken public on the London Stock Exchange.

For a 12,500-pound investment, Rajaram, one of the company's founders, received 875,000 pounds -- or about $1.2 million in 2001 dollars -- after a voluntary liquidation, the newspaper reported.

He also sold his house in 2006, a calculated decision even though his wife, a bookkeeper at a pharmacy, did not want to move, their former neighbors said.

He sold the house for $750,000, making a sizable profit on a home the couple purchased in 1997 for $274,000. "The market was going down and he wanted to get out before the bottom dropped out," Karns said. "I talked to him last December and he said, 'I feel I did a good thing by selling when I did.' "

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