Gobind Thukral

IF people believe that large sections of political leaders across the parties are corrupt, insensitive and even lewd, they can not be faulted. Anyone who has seen on the television screens on November 10 how in BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh, Tourism Minister Tukoji Rao Pawar threatened and intimidated a lady SDM Sanjana Jain, Returning Officer for Sonkatch, would find such politicians obnoxious.

Pawar met her in Dewas and demanded that she reject a candidate's nomination papers since he had submitted them late. There was an argument that turned into a show of strength and the minister got personal. "She is nothing to look at. There is nothing to see," said minister and everyone around burst into laughter. How do we treat officers and women? For them she was a plaything indeed.

But the Election Commission appreciated the bold and firm officer and was prompt in action. Along with Pawar, who is the BJP candidate from Dewas and the erstwhile royal scion of Dewas, another ruling party nominee from Sonkatch Phool Chand Verma was also jailed. The arrests came a day after Sanjana Jain lodged a complaint against them for obstructing official work and threatening her. The also ordered the transfer of Dewas deputy commissioner following laxity on his part in sending a report on the incident.

What face the ruling BJP had? No regrets and BJP president Rajnath Singh refused to comment. BJP national spokesperson Rudra Prasad Singh only said,” I am not aware of the facts." The entire country has witnessed it on the television. If there was congress minister, the BJP would have shouted hoarse in demanding resignation and apology. This is called party politics in India.

Within couple of weeks, six Indian states; Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Mizoram and Jammu and Kashmir would elect new assemblies. Out of these three are ruled by the main Hindu party, the Bhartiya Janata Party and the Congress, ruling party at the Center controls the national capital Delhi. Mizoram is ruled by Mizoram National Front and Jammu and Kashmir is currently under central rule.

These elections are a test run for the general elections that could come up in March or a little later. BJP has to defend itself in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and snatch Delhi from the Congress if it wants to comeback to power at the center. These are large states and the stakes for each party are very high. This time there is a new powerful player, the Bahajun Samaj Party under Ms Mayawati along with the leftists to challenge the two main parties that have dominated the political scene at the national level for some years now.

It would not have been difficult for the Congress to seize power from the BJP a few months back. There is always an anti incumbency factor and dissatisfied voters hunt for an alternative grouping or a party. Now this may prove only partly right. There are two clear reasons for that; increased terrorist violence across India and the rising prices, falling jobs. There had been 63 blasts in seven states during the past seven months, killing scores of people and injuring hundreds. BJP with its divisive agenda of communalizing the polity is in an aggressive mood despite its affiliate organisations like Bajrang Dal, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and even RSS being as accused of funding and promoting Hindutva terrorism in Malegaon. It should have been on the back foot.

BJP has earlier won a crucial election in Karnataka. Clearly it is spreading its fangs and on the issue of terrorism where it can afford to ‘annoy’ Muslims and seek majority Hindu votes. It has pushed the Congress on the back foot. Now no amount of chest beating and claims like indo US Nuclear Deal can spring the Congress back into action. The Communists parted ways on the nuclear issue, leaving it lurching at the shoulders of Samajwadi Party. Its secular credentials too are under doubt. Its poor performance on the economic front that has worsened with deepening economic crisis in the West has added to its woes. It is only hoping without any real agenda that prices would come down and these could with falling energy prices and less demand for commodities. But how shall the Congress party bail out itself from the general discontent and sense of insecurity gripping the nation.

The Congress over the past couple of years has become sluggish with no clear leader and clear decision making process. The experiment of having a weak but honest prime minister and a strong party president, the real power center has not worked well. No one owns responsibility. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi keeps sending missives to the prime minister about the plight of farmers and workers who pays scant attention without being disloyal as he heads an inefficient coalition.

Yet it is possible that the elections may not provide very clear answer as to who would emerge the winner later at the national level.

In Jammu and Kashmir with a daily mark of violence on its face, there are no clear signs for a stable political setup emerging. Kashmir valley is totally alienated from the center. In the minds of Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmir and India are two different countries. Voting percentage could be dismally low. Same would be Chhattisgarh where Naxalites has called for a poll boycott.

All in all we have a big jamboree called democracy and people ought to enjoy it as much as they can afford to.

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US: Massive Iraqi death toll ignored by tabloid culture

Marie-Helene Rousseau

THE year is 1994. Pictures of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley cover the pages of prominent U.S. newspapers and magazines. Yet hidden from national view is the attempted elimination of the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda.

When news of pop stars and their marriages and divorces takes precedence over stories about the Iraq War or privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures, U.S. citizens are faced, as described by the director of Project Censored, "with a truth emergency".

To address this emergency, Project Censored, a non-profit media project within the Sonoma State University Foundation, each year compiles 25 stories which they say have been neglected by the mainstream media. Since 1976, when Carl Jensen founded the research facility, these stories have comprised a yearbook of controversial stories that have gone largely unread and underreported.

The organisation, now headed by Peter Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, works with students and faculty of SSU to review and select which of the 700-1,000 annually submitted stories make the final cut. A panel of judges that includes noted writers Noam Chomsky and Susan Faludi then ranks the 25 stories in order of importance.

How do they determine what constitutes "censorship"? An explanation on ProjectCensored.org states, "We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets."

The organisation outlines a set of criteria by which individuals can determine if a story is suitable for the "censored" list. The first of these criteria reads, "A Censored news story is one which contains information that the general United States population has a right and need to know, but to which it has had limited access."

Indeed, none of the selected stories have appeared in the mainstream press, a category encompassing widely read publications such as The New York Times and the network news channels. Rather, the stories have been covered by a select number of independent media that are free from the constraints of corporate ownership.

The number one story this year gave a staggering answer to a question that has been glossed over in the mainstream press -- just how many Iraqi lives have been lost because of the U.S. occupation? The answer is one million, and it exceeds the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, points out the Censored entry.

But that figure, calculated by British the polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB), was reported in just three independent media outlets -- AlterNet, Inter Press Service (IPS), and After Downing Street.

Michael Schwartz, of the nonpartisan coalition After Downing Street, also refuted in Censored the idea that most violence occurs only between Iraqis, placing the percentage of U.S.-inflicted Iraqi deaths at about 80 percent.

Censored also points to what may be the most ominous consequence of media censorship -- a public lack of awareness.

Schwartz, in Censored, refers to a February 2007 Associated Press poll in which U.S. citizens were asked how many Iraqis died because of the U.S. occupation. The most common answers placed casualties at below 10,000.

"This remarkable mass ignorance, like so many other elements of the Iraq War story, received no coverage in the mass media, not even by the Associated Press, which commissioned the study," he writes.

Many of the stories included in this year's compilation dealt with the aftermath of the Iraq War as well as privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures.

At number three on the list, "InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business" reveals that members of the business community may be part of an anti-terrorism line of defence, but are also the first ones reaping the benefits of it. This programme is called InfraGard, and goes as far back as 1996, when it started in Cleveland with 350 members from the Fortune 500.

By transmitting information about private individuals to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, 23,000 members of private industry guarantee that they will receive warnings of a terrorist attack before private individuals -- even before certain elected officials, reported The Progressive in an article by Matt Rothschild.

Rothschild's article also asserts that an InfraGard member can even shoot to kill in the case of martial law "without fear of prosecution".

Although in February, the FBI released a statement denouncing the piece, Rothschild is sticking by his story.

The Winter Soldier hearings, which took place in Silver Springs, Maryland in March of 2008 organised by Veterans against War, also found a place on the list at number nine. The testimonies of more than 300 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans revealed atrocities they not only saw, but also participated in, such as desecrating corpses and targeting civilians.

These revelatory hearings were covered in just three print media outlets -- The Nation, One World, and Inter Press Service -- as well as one radio station, Pacifica Radio.

If the U.S. government deems that a person, directly or indirectly, poses the risk of threatening U.S. operations in the Middle East, the U.S. treasury department can seize their property and freeze their assets -- a story on this is number five on the list.

Two executive orders were established giving the treasury department this power, one in July of 2007 and more recently in August of 2007. The first executive order is limited to Iraq, and threatens seizure of property in the event someone committing, or posing a risk of committing violent acts in opposition to U.S. operations there.

The second order, targeted to operations in Lebanon, goes a little further, broadening the scope to actions, non-violent or otherwise, that undermine U.S. involvement in Lebanon. Under this order, dependents of the individuals (spouse, children) would also have their assets frozen, and would not be allowed to receive humanitarian aid, Censored states.

The two executive orders were covered in The Progressive, and Global Research.

While mass media closely followed such stories as Angelina Jolie's pregnancy and Alec Baldwin's marital problems, reports regarding the aftermath of the Iraq War and privacy concerns were hidden.

News of abuse and death in juvenile detention centres, unprecedented rates of arrests for marijuana possession in the U.S., corporate profiteering from No Child Left Behind, and the American Psychological Association's sanctioning and aiding in torture methods lay buried underneath images of Paris Hilton's new escapades. And those are just the top 25. [Courtesy IPS]

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Who Owns Nature?
Corporate concentration and commodification of nature

Umendra Dutt

NEW report warns of corporate concentration, commodification of nature; highlights global resistance grounded in "Food Sovereignty" ETC Group today releases a 48-page report, "Who Owns Nature?" on corporate concentration in commercial food, farming, health and the strategic push to commodify the planet's remaining natural resources.

In a world where market research is becoming increasingly proprietary and pricey, ETC Group's report discloses market share and provides top 10 industry rankings up and down the corporate food
chain. Not all the corporations identified in ETC Group's new report are household names, but collectively they control a staggering share of the commercial products found on industrial farms, in our refrigerators and medicine cabinets.

An international advocacy organization based in Canada, ETC Group has been monitoring corporate power in the industrial life sciences for the past 30 years. The report reveals that:

From thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions three decades ago, 10 companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales From dozens of pesticide companies three decades ago, 10 now control almost 90% of agrochemical sales worldwide From almost 1,000 biotech start-ups 15 years ago, 10 companies now account for three-quarters of industry revenues The top 10 pharmaceutical companies control 55% of the global drug
market.

With collapsing systems - eco, climate, food and financial - as the backdrop, Who Owns Nature? warns that, with engineering of living organisms at the nano-scale (a.k.a. synthetic biology), industry is setting the stage for a corporate grab that extends to all of nature.

"About one-quarter of the world's biomass has already been commodified," explains ETC Group's Pat Mooney. "With extreme genetic engineering, we're seeing new corporate strategies to capture and
commodify the three-quarters of the world's biomass that has, until now, remained beyond the market economy."

Advocates of synthetic biology - the creation of designer organisms built from synthetic DNA - are promising a post-petroleum future where fuels, chemicals, drugs and other high-value products depend on biological manufacturing platforms fuelled by plant sugars. In the 21st century "sugar economy," industrial production will be based on biological feedstocks (agricultural crops, grasses, forest residues, plant oils, algae, etc.) whose sugars are extracted, fermented and converted into high-value products. Synthetic microbes will become "living chemical factories" that require massive quantities of plant biomass. ETC Group warns that corporations are poised to appropriate and further commodify biological products and processes in every part of the globe - as well as destroy iodiversity, deplete soil and water and displace marginalized farmers.

ETC Group's report highlights similarities between the current financial and food crises. "Corporate-controlled food systems, suffering from decades of deregulation, have resulted in a cornucopia
of calamities making us sicker, fatter and more vulnerable," says ETC's Research Director Hope Shand. Ongoing food contamination scandals, the global obesity burden and ocean "dead zones" caused by fertilizer pollution are among the food chain disasters cited in Who Owns Nature? "Unhealthy and hazardous food products are constant reminders of a corporate food chain broken to bits," adds Shand.

Governments are working hand-in-hand with corporations to deny the root causes of the crises and sidestep structural reforms. "Despite the implications for democracy and human rights, no international body exists to monitor global corporate activity and no UN body has the capacity to monitor and evaluate emerging technologies," says ETC Group's Kathy Jo Wetter. "The ongoing food emergency and imploding global economy testify to the need for monitoring and oversight of
corporations, as well as social control of powerful new technologies."

Who Owns Nature? reports on daunting trends in corporate concentration and technology convergence, but it also points to a very different reality and a powerful contrast to the corporate-controlled life sciences. Although a single company - Monsanto - accounts for almost one-quarter of proprietary seed sales, about three-quarters of the world's farmers routinely save seed from their harvest and grow locally-bred varieties. Wal-Mart may be the world's largest buyer and seller of retail food, but 85% of global food is consumed close to where it is grown - much of it outside the formal market system.

"There is vast and growing resistance to the dislocation and devastation caused by the agro-industrial food system," points out Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group. "In the global struggle for Food
Sovereignty, the playing field isn't level, but the scope of resistance is massive - peasant farmers, fisher people, pastoralists and allied civil society and social movements are fighting for locally
controlled and socially just food and health systems."

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