What is swine flu?
Swine influenza, or ‘swine flu’, is a highly contagious acute respiratory disease of pigs, caused by one of several swine influenza A viruses that cause regular outbreaks in pigs. Morbidity tends to be high and mortality low (1-4%). The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs. Outbreaks in pigs occur year round, with an increased incidence in autumn and winter in temperate zones. Many countries routinely vaccinate swine populations against swine influenza. Swine influenza viruses are most commonly of the H1N1 subtype, but other subtypes are also circulating in pigs (e.g., H1N2, H3N1, H3N2). Pigs can also be infected with avian influenza viruses and human seasonal influenza viruses as well as swine influenza viruses.The H3N2 swine virus was thought to have been originally introduced into pigs by humans. Sometimes pigs can be infected with more than one type of virus at a time, which can allow the genes from these viruses to mix. Pigs are therefore also called as “mixing vessels”, resulting in an influenza virus containing genes from a number of sources, called a ‘reassortant’ virus. Although swine influenza viruses are normally species specific and only infect pigs, they do sometimes cross the species barrier to cause disease in humans.So far, the recent outbreak due to the new strain of influenza virus A (H1N1) has had cases reported from North America, Mexico, Spain and UK. Suspect cases have been reported from New Zealand and France and these are being investigated,
How does it spread?
It spreads in the same way as seasonal influenza – through direct contact (being within one metre of an infected person) or indirect contact (touching a contaminated surface). People usually get swine influenza from infected pigs, however, some human cases lack contact history with pigs or environments where pigs have been located. Human-to-human transmission has occurred in some instances but was limited to close contacts and closed groups of people.
What are the clinical symptoms?
Generally clinical symptoms are similar to seasonal influenza but reported clinical presentation ranges broadly from asymptomatic infection to severe pneumonia resulting in death. Patients experience high fever, cough, and sore throat, symptoms similar to typical influenza, with some patients experiencing diarrhoea and vomiting. The cases can rapidly progress to severe and unusual pneumonia.
What are the implications for human health?
People do not normally get swine flu, but outbreaks and sporadic human infections have been reported. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.Since typical clinical presentation of swine influenza infection in humans resembles seasonal influenza and other acute upper respiratory tract infections, most of the cases have been detected by chance through seasonal influenza surveillance. Mild or asymptomatic cases may have escaped from recognition; therefore the true extent of this disease among humans is unknown.
Is it safe to eat pork meat and pork products?
Yes. Swine influenza has not been shown to be transmitted to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork (pig meat) or other products derived from pigs. The swine influenza virus is killed by cooking at 160°F/70°C, corresponding to the general guidance for the preparation of pork and other meat.
What is the prevention and treatment?
There are antiviral medicines one can take to prevent or treat swine flu. There is no vaccine available right now to protect against swine flu. The spread of the viruses that cause respiratory illnesses like influenza can be prevented by:Covering your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.Washing your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. You can also use alcohol-based hand cleaners.Avoiding touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread this way.Trying to avoid close contact with sick people.Staying home from work or school if you are sick.Antiviral drugs for seasonal influenza are available in some countries and effectively prevent and treat the illness. Most of the previously reported swine influenza cases recovered fully from the disease without requiring medical attention and without antiviral medicines. Some influenza viruses develop resistance to the antiviral medicines, limiting the effectiveness of chemoprophylaxis and treatment. The viruses obtained from the recent human cases with swine influenza in the United States were sensitive to oselatmivir and zanamivir but resistant to amantadine and remantadine.
What is the risk of pandemic risk?
It is likely that most of the people, especially those who do not have regular contact with pigs, do not have immunity to swine influenza viruses that can prevent the virus infection. If a swine virus establishes efficient human-to human transmission, it can cause an influenza pandemic. The impact of a pandemic caused by such a virus is difficult to predict: it depends on virulence of the virus, existing immunity among people, cross protection by antibodies acquired from seasonal influenza infection and host factors.
Is there a vaccine for protecting humans?
There are no vaccines that contain the current swine influenza virus causing illness in humans. It is not known whether current human seasonal influenza vaccines can provide any protection. Influenza viruses change very quickly. It is important to develop a vaccine against the currently circulating virus strain for it to provide maximum protection to the vaccinated people.
Swine Flu prevention and treatment
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Al-Qaeda is a U.S.-sponsored Intelligence Asset used to Justify War in the Middle East: Interview with Michel Chossudovsky
|Michel Chossudovsky, author of the international bestseller America’s War on Terrorism, personally graced the jam-packed local launch of the Philippine edition of his latest book held at the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City last June 24. During the launch, he gave a lecture about the imminent danger of a U.S.-made nuclear catastrophe amid the Bush administration’s preparations for war with Iran.
BY JOEL GARDUCEContributed to Bulatlat
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international bestseller America’s War on Terrorism, made locally available by IBON Books. An economics professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, he personally graced the jam-packed local launch of his latest book held at the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City last June 24. During the launch, he gave a lecture about the imminent danger of a U.S.-made nuclear catastrophe amid the Bush administration’s preparations for war with Iran.
Joel Garduce of Center for Anti-Imperialist Studies (CAIS) caught up with the director of the Centre for Research in Globalization (CRG) during his short weekend stay in the Philippines and conducted the following interview.
Chossudovsky
JPG: How would you characterize your book’s contribution in giving a better understanding of the events surrounding 9/11?
MC: Well, there have been many books on 9/11. In fact, I would say that we have a lot of coverage of 9/11 from many angles. Many of these studies are carefully researched. They are, however, invariably ignored by the mainstream media.
In my own research, i have not centered on what happened on that particular day from the point of view of the WTC and Pentagon buildings. That aspect has been the object of several investigations.
What I have focused on is the role which the 9/11 events have played in justifying the invasion of Afghanistan almost a few weeks later after 9/11, and of course the invasion of Iraq, not to mention the police State legislation adopted in a number of Western countries.
I’ve focussed on 9/11 from a broad geopolitical perspective, because essentially 9/11 is still the core event which justifies the so-called "war on terrorism". Without 9/11, there is no war pretext. An that is why 9/11 is a very important landmark. It is used extensively by the Bush administration to attempt to demonstrate that America is under attack, that the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are acts of self-defense. And consequently, the US must carry out a humanitarian mandate which consists in waging a global war against the terrorists, as well as against the so-called state sponsors of terrorism, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so I think that has been my focus, I've looked more at the geopolitics of 9/11, the role of intelligence agencies. And I’ve also centered on the fact that these terrorist cells, namely al-Qaeda, are invariably linked to the CIA. They have been consistently supported by U.S. intelligence. What we are dealing with is a process, which consists in fabricating an enemy. The creation of Al-Qaeda is an intelligence operation used as a pretext to justify a war of conquest.
So it begs the question: if al-Qaeda were, according to the Bush administration, to have played a role in 9/11, then we would have to investigate the relationship between al-Qaeda and the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The evidence confirms that al-Qaeda did not play a role in 9/11. But in fact, that in itself is a red herring, because al-Qaeda is a U.S.-sponsored intelligence asset.
JPG: Is it accurate to say that your research points to 9/11 looking more like an inside job?
MC: Well, I haven’t made that statement. I never made a statement that it’s "an inside job".
What I’ve done in my writings is to show that the official narrative or explanation regarding 9/11 can be refuted, namely that the official narrative is a lie.
What the 9/11 Commission Report has submitted is an extensive narrative of what happened on that day and what happened on the planes. And the evidence suggests that the 9/11 report is a lie. It’s fabricated.
But I can’t say unequivocally that this was an inside job. What I can say with certainty, backed by evidence, is that the U.S. administration is involved in a cover-up pertaining to the investigation of who’s behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And what they have presented in the 911 Report, as well as in numerous national security statements is to my mind totally fabricated.
JPG: Your research goes against the thesis of some thinkers like Noam Chomsky that 9/11 is principally a blowback operation. How would you look at these views?
MC: Those views are totally incorrect. The blowback thesis assumes that the relationship between al-Qaeda and the U.S. government (including its intelligence apparatus) ceased in the wake of the Cold War. Because that’s what they say and acknowledge.
They say "yes we created al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war. We trained the mujahideen, we helped them in fighting the Soviet Union. And in the wake of the Cold War, al-Qaeda has gone against us." And that’s what’s called the blowback. Blowback is when an intelligence asset goes against its sponsors.
That viewpoint s incorrect because in the course of the 1990s there’s ample evidence of links between al-Qaeda and the U.S. administration, during the Clinton administration as well as the Bush administration, leading up in fact to 2001. There’s evidence of active collaboration between al-Qaeda paramilitary groups in the Balkans and senior U.S. military advisers.
I think that the blowback thesis, whether it emanates from supporters of the Bush adminstration or from the Left is mistaken and misleading. Why? Because it really provides legitimacy to the war on terrorism. It essentially says "yes, the war on terrorism is a legitimate objective of U.S. foreign policy." I would say that people who support the blowback are either mistaken and unaware of the facts, or alternatively they are tacitly involved in media disinformation.
9/11 and U.S. client states
JPG: You’ve cited the role of countries like Pakistan through its Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI. How would you reckon the role of other countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and even Israel in the perpetration of 9/11?
MC: Well, we’re talking about intelligence agencies. Pakistan has played a very key role historically in supporting al-Qaeda right from the onslaqught of the Soviet Afghan war under the helm of Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the military commander who was president of Pakistan in the early ‘80s. And it was under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) that the training camps, the madrassahs were established.
In turn, Saudi Arabia played a role because they provided funding through Islamic charities. So there is a connection between Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda. And according to several reports, Saudi intelligence also played a role.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan have certainly played a role but I think that Pakistan’s role was far more central in the institutional support provided to al-Qaeda, always on behalf, of Pakistan's ISI’s counterpart, the CIA.
My research has centered much more on the role of Pakistan’s ISI. Because Pakistan’s ISI also appeared to be involved in the conspiracy in the wake of 9/11, to wage the war on Afghanistan using 9/11 as the pretext.
Israel influence
JPG: There was a recent furor over the article by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” that saw print in the London Review of Books last March. It’s ruffled some U.S. circles about how the Israeli government exercises much influence over the U.S. government, specifically the Bush administration where many personalities identified with the Bush ruling clique are considered neoconservatives. How would you account the influence of the right-wing circles in Israel over the Bush administration and the conduct of the U.S. war on terrorism?
MC: I think that this relationship is far more complex than that. I don’t believe that Israel overshadows U.S. foreign policy. I think that there’s in fact a coincidence between Tel Aviv and Washington.
And this is something that is not recent. It goes way back in fact to the creation of Israel.
But on the other hand, to say that Israel overshadows U.S. foreign policy is incorrect. Because I think that Israel is an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. And it is being used in this particular context in the pursuit of U.S. hegemony. Now, Israel has an agenda. So I would identify (the U.S. and Israel) as involved in a longstanding military alliance. The U.S. has extensive military aid to Israel for a long time.
But I don’t share the viewpoint that somehow Israel is now hijacking U.S. foreign policy and manipulating it. That position is simply incorrect.
However, we also have to understand another dimension of this question. The "Jewish Lobby" in the U.S. may in fact play a role (through) their U.S.-based organizations. These are not Israeli-based organizations. And they certainly play a role in shaping U.S. foreign policy and in sustaining a pro-Israeli position. That is probably true.
But that is an entirely different mechanism to that of a foreign country actually hijacking America’s foreign policy. To the extent that American foreign policy would be different had it not been for Israel, I don’t share that statement. Because U.S. foreign policy in fact is quite consistent in its stance from the Truman Doctrine --which was formulated by George Kennan in the mid- to late ‘40s and early ‘50s-- to the present neoconservative agenda.
The other aspect, and it’s very popular both among leftist as well as libertarian right-wing analysts is to say somehow the neoconservatives are really different from their predecessors. And they are putting forth the Democrats as a possible alternative to the neoconservatives when in fact, if you really look at what’s happening in the last ten to fifteen years, you see a continuum.
I mean, you had the First Gulf war, you had the war on Yugoslavia, you had the invasion of Afghanistan, then you had Gulf War II. And if you go back further in history, the wars in Afghanistan during the Cold War era to the present, there’s been a very consistent thread and it has been pursued both by the Republicans and the Democrats.
On the 9/11 truth movement
JPG: You have emerged as a leading resource speaker of what has been called the international 9/11 truth movement. Unfortunately, Filipinos are not yet familiar with that; there isn’t much of an active 9/11 truth movement locally. Could you familiarize us with this movement?
MC: I’m not an active member of the 9/11 truth movement. I have participated in some of their activities and I support their endeavors.
I have, however, some reservations regarding the group because it has very contradictory elements within it. And there are various internal disputes also within the group.
Moreover, I do not believe that the analysis of 9/11 should be strictly limited to looking at what happened to the WTC and the Pentagon buildings. A much broader focus is required. It’s the use of what General Tommy Franks calls "mass casualty-producing events" --implying civilian deaths-- with a view to justifying war. Moreover, when addressing the issue of mass casualty producing events, we should not limit our understanding solely to 9/11. We should be looking at 9/11, but we should also examine the 7/7 London bombings, the Madrid as well as the 2002 Bali bombings, and so on.
We should also address the various suicide attacks which have taken place in the Iraqi war theater. And we know, as in the case of the Basra terrorists (British Special Forces disguised in traditional Arab clothing arrested by the Iraqi police) that many of those suicide attacks were instigated by the occupation forces.
So I think it’s also important at least from my perspective to broaden this understanding of 9/11. And the 9/11 truth movement has done lots of good work, focussing on Building 7 and the World Trade Center, and what happened to the planes going into the Pentagon, whether it was a plane or a missile. And all those things I think are very important. While I’ve been following that literature very carefully, I have not been involved in research into that particular aspect of 9/11. I have, however, undertaken one piece of analysis which is in line with that literature. It’s the issue of what happened on the planes. And I have a chapter in my book which focuses on what happened on the planes as outlined in the 9/11 Commission Report, because it struck me that there was a very important relationship which had not been well-analyzed. The 9/11 Commission's narrative is based on cell phone conversations. The telecom industry is unequivocal. Those cellphone conversations could not have taken place from cellphones at altitudes above 8,000 feet. And so I wanted to review the narrative in the 9/11 Commission Report, and demonstrate concretely that it is simply fabricated. It is impossible to make a telephone call from high altitude onboard a plane. And most of their descriptions rest on that. Not all of it, but most of it rests on telephone conversations between alleged passengers on the one hand and family members on the other. And the telecom industry is absolutely unequivocal. They say that you could not (in 2001) make a telephone conversation at 31,000 feet. You might be able to do it at 8,000 feet but the planes were flying at high altitude during a good part of the time when they were in the air.
The U.S. and fascism
JPG: How do you view claims that the U.S. government especially under the Bush administration has become a full-fledged fascist empire a la Nazi Germany?
MC: There’s certainly evidence to suggest that the Bush administration is moving towards a police state. There’s repeal of the rule of law because people can be arrested arbitrarily.
There’s a military agenda to conquer foreign lands, and the pretext to wage war is fabricated. So, yes, there are certain features reminiscent of Nazi Germany. But on the other hand one has to be very careful in making those comparisons.
Because one of the features of Nazi Germany was that Nazism was also a means for creating employment in the military-industrial complex, so that they were building up their military and they had expanded defense expenditures, infrastructure, and so on, which created a lot of jobs in the course of the 1930s. And what characterizes the present regime in America is yes, movement towards martial law and the police state, militarization of civilian institutions, and also big contracts for the military and lots of military spending. However, the type of weapons systems which currently prevails is such that military spending actually creates very few jobs.
And so we’re today in a neoliberal context. Nazi Germany was not characterized by neoliberal reforms. And that was one of the reasons why there was more support for the Nazi programme in the middle to late ‘30s. Because there was a promise of jobs which ultimately was reached in the late ‘30s when the German military machine was in full swing.
Rifts in the U.S. establishment
JPG: There had been revelations in the U.S. media that point to the Pentagon under Rumsfeld getting more control over the covert operations than the CIA. and the U.S. State Department. How do you regard these revelations? Do they indicate anything of value in terms of the changes being undergone by the U.S. state?
MC: There’s always sort of a rivalry between competing agencies of the U.S. government. I think that the Pentagon has been vying for some time to implement its own intelligence operations. In this particular case, they have implemented disinformation campaigns which consist in planting news stories in the media. So yes, they are involved in intelligence.
But on the other hand, I don’t view this necessarily as a crucial issue. It’s a rivalry between bodies of the state apparatus, between the military and intelligence agencies. There can be very significant discrepancies, but they also work together..
Look at the person now who’s in charge of intelligence. It’s John Negroponte, who was involved in the dirty war in Central America, particularly in promoting the para-military death squads in Honduras and Nicaragua.
I think in effect that these organizations are rivals but they also involved in active collaboration. . They always have joint committees, the Pentagon, the CIA., the NSA., and so on. I really don’t think that any change in direction would occur as a result of these discrepancies. They’re normal within the US military-intelligence community.
JPG: There have been a string of prominent Americans coming out against the Bush administration and its handling of the war in Iraq, of the U.S. war on terror. They include active and retired generals, some previous Cabinet secretaries and even some current members of the U.S. Congress. There seems to be emerging rifts within the U.S. ruling class. What do you think are the prospects of the anti-imperialist movement being able to make use of these rifts within the U.S. ruling class?
MC: I think there are people in the U.S., both Republicans and Democrats, who recognize that the Bush administration, particularly in Iraq, but also in relation to Iran, spells disaster.
And it’s not necessarily that they are against U.S. foreign policy as decided by the Bush administration. They believe that it should be conducted differently, perhaps with a less militarist perspective.
So you have people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who firmly support the extension of America's sphere of influence in the Middle East and Central Asia, to gain control over the Eurasian corridor, and the oil and gas reserves of that region. These people would, however, favor a somewhat more negotiated foreign policy, rather than all-out military conquest and war.
So people like that are now more or less presenting themselves as voices of moderation. But it doesn’t mean necessarily that they are in disagreement with the broader objectives of U.S. imperialism, which is really to colonize regions.
I see dissent from within the establishment but I don’t see necessarily articulate dissent against the project of global domination and militarization which the Bush administration has been putting forth.
JPG: So these emerging rifts within the U.S. ruling elite do not really indicate a departure from the imperial project that the U.S. has been conducting?
MC: I think that these differences in the current context could still play a very important role. It’s not to say that things don’t change.
What I’m saying is that these differences of viewpoint do not constitute some kind of big revolution in U.S. politics. It’s simply the fact that within the ruling elite, people think the Bush administration has taken on a course which is untenable and which ultimately will lead to disaster. Moroever, this course is not furthering the U.S. corporate agenda in the most effective way.
So these moderating views do not mean that the U.S. all of a sudden has become a peaceful nation. It simply means that they want to give a slightly more humane face to imperialism. That’s really the whole issue.
There’s a global military agenda, there’s a plan to conquer, there is a plan to dominate and impoverish. And some people in America within the establishment think that there are better ways of doing it. That’s the way I see this critique. Because the people who were undertaking that critique are themselves the architects of this military agenda, including Brzezinski.
And the Democrats don’t really have an alternative viewpoint to that of the Republicans. They probably would be a little bit less radical in pushing certain policies but I don’t think that fundamentally they would do things that differently if they were to form the next adminstration.
You must remember that there are certain institutions which will be there all the time—the CIA, the Pentagon, and so on – irrespective of the team of people who are in power. And ultimately, to what extent do these people call the shots. The people who ultiamtely decide are Lockheed Martin, the defense contractors, and the oil companies.
JPG: But what if it’s possible that the war crimes committed by the Bush administration and those in the U.S. ruling elite are held to account? Don’t you think the people’s movement in the U.S. and the antiwar movement worldwide can benefit from holding to account the Bush administration and even the Democrats who approved of this war on terrorism?
MC: I think that at one level, there’s certainly an opportunity to push forward in terms of the antiwar movement, focussing on the criminal nature of the Bush administration, let’s say with regard to Iraq, with regard to torture, the police state, etc.
But we must not fall into the trap of thinking that if Bush is impeached or if there’s change in direction leading let’s say to a new president who is a Democrat, that there will be fundamental change in America.
You see, the U.S. is also involved in what we call regime change or regime rotation. Regime rotation in America doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s going to be real and meaningful changes in the way in which the country is moving nationally and internationally.
And that’s where the confusion emerges, because there’s a movement in the U.S. that says "anything else but Bush". And they say yes, we must get rid of Bush.
Now that assumes first of all that Bush is actually making the decisions. The evidence suggests that he’s not making the decisions. He himself is a puppet. He has a limited understanding of U.S. foreign policy and essentially he is acting on behalf of powerful corporate interests. This is a war driven by profit.
Clearly yes, the advisory team is important but I would say we have to look at the role of U.S. intelligence, the military, the links between the military intelligence establishment and the oil companies and the defense contractors, and so on. And of course Wall Street which ultimately is really the basic pinnacle of financial power in America.
If Bush were to be impeached, which at this juncture seems unlikely, or if there’s a change in regime, this does not mean that there’s going to be fundamental change in America.
Impeachment could contribute to demobilizing people who would otherwise be more aware of the fact that you don’t change a New World Order by simply changing a president. You need much more carefully thought out ways of waging the struggle against the New World Order. You have to target the defense contractors, the oil companies, their insidious role in pushing a military agenda, not to mention the use of 9/11 as a pretext for waging war.
That’s the way I see it. I do not think that once you get rid of Bush you solve the problem. But I should say that an impeachment of Bush would be a very important achievement if it can be used as a stepping stone towards a broader struggle.
It’s ironic to say the least that there was an impeachment move against Clinton for his involvement with Monica Lewinsky but when extensive war crimes are revealed and when the U.S. president blatantly violates all the domestic and international norms of justice, and engages the US in a criminal war with no justification whatsoever, his legitimacy as Head of State remains unscathed. His adminstration continues in a routine fashion.
So yes the impeachment of President Bush is something that I would support. But I don’t believe necessarily that it will resolve matters in the longer run.
JPG: Given the unprecedented belligerence of the U.S. under the aegis of the war on terror, what are the prospects of a schism developing within the imperialist camp similar to what developed during World War II where there were Allied Powers vis-à-vis the Axis Powers?
MC: You mean, between the U.S. and UK on one hand, and France, Germany on the other?
JPG: Or say, Russia and China?
MC: China and Russia are part of that imperialist design. They’re not countries which have an imperial agenda as such. I’m not saying necessarily that they couldn’t in the future. But historically the Soviet Union didn’t really have an imperial agenda. And China has never had an imperial agenda. Throughout its history, it has remained within its borders.
I think what we’re looking at is the relationship which exists within the Western military alliance. That is really the crucial thing. And the fact that you have very significant divisions between the U.S. and Britain, on one hand, and France and Germany on the other. I think that’s very important.
And you have splits in the military-industrial complex. Britain's military industrial complex is integrated into that of the United States. British Aerospace Systems Corporation (BAE) is actually producing for the U.S. Department of Defense. It has exactly the same privileges as the U.S. defense contractors, under an agreement signed in 1999 under the clintion administration entitled the Transatlantic Bridge.
And then you have the European defense industry (i.e continental Europe) which is based on an alliance between France and Germany. The dominant company of the european military indsutrial complex is EADES, which is a joint venture between Aerospatiale Matra and Deutsche Aerospace. And so you have a split or division between what I would call the Anglo-American axis, which now includes Australia , Canada as full fledged partners and, perhaps Israel, and maybe a few other countries, who are part of this agenda. And then you have the Franco-German alliance.
But I should also mention that NATO is still an organization which is firmly under U.S. control. And that’s why in the buildup of a possible war with Iran, NATO is firmly behind the US and Israel. In this context, both President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Angela Merkel are firmly behind the US military agenda in relation to Iran. And so you don’t have a situation in any way comparable to that prior to the war on Iraq, where France and Germany were opposed to the Anglo-American axis.
Ravi Naik
Is Nuclear Deal With U.S -BACK DOOR ENTRY TO NPT??
|Indian Nuclear Society News
Vol. 3, No. 3, July – September 2006
The relevant Committees of the two Houses of the US
Congress adopted the Waiver Bills (full text of the bills is
available in Library of congress web site) to enable the US
to conclude a bilateral agreement with India to give effect to
the nuclear deal, many have gone into an overdrive to
convince the people of India that this is the best thing that
ever happened in India’s history, and there is nothing more
for us to do except to stand up and cheer. They have
dismissed the concerns expressed by eminent scientists,
defence analysts and some politicians, as foolish, misguided,
mischievous or at best, born out of complete ignorance The
spokesmen of the government of India, have repeatedly
informed us that the Indo-US nuclear deal is all about nuclear
energy and not at all about non-proliferation. Yet, Section 2
of the Bill adopted by the International Relations Committee
of the House of Representatives begins by stating that,
“Preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, other
weapons of mass destruction, the means to produce them,
and the means to deliver them are critical objectives for US
foreign policy.” After further singing the praises of NPT, the
Committee states, “It is in the interest of the US to the fullest
extent possible to ensure that these countries, that are not
NPT members, are responsible with any nuclear technology
they develop.” The Senate Committee has voiced similar
sentiments. This provision and the other provisions of the
Bills make it amply clear that for the US Congress, the entire
objective of the Indo-US nuclear deal is non-proliferation and
not development of nuclear energy in India. This is a myth
number one.
The Prime Minister had assured Parliament and the
people repeatedly that the separation of our facilities into
civilian and military would be done by us voluntarily, and in
exercise of our sovereign authority. The Prime Minister had
told Parliament on August 4, 2005 that, “It will be an
autonomous Indian decision as to what is civilian and what
is military. Nobody outside will tell us what is civilian and
what is military.” The Prime Minister went back on this
himself when he told Parliament in a suo-motu statement on
February 27, 2006, “At the official level we have constituted
two groups… These two groups were respectively mandated
to draw up an acceptable separation plan and to negotiate
on that basis. The negotiations by our officials have been
extensive and prolonged.” The US undersecretary of state
Nicholas Burns shed more light on this when he said on
March 2, 2006 in New Delhi, “What the Indians did after Prime
THE BILLS – BACK DOOR ENTRY TO NPT
Minister Singh’s visit to the White House in July was to
develop a plan, a very complex plan that would, in effect,
separate its military nuclear facilities and its civilian nuclear
facilities. And we helped the Indians to try to think through
the separation plan, because it has to be presented to the
United States Congress and then it will have to be presented
to the Nuclear Suppliers Group.” The Prime Minister had
assured Parliament on July 29, 2005 that such identification
and separation would be “a phased action” and would be
“based solely on our own duly calibrated national decisions.”
All along it was known that the plan would have to be
“acceptable” to the US and would have to be submitted to
them for approval. Since the Americans were not satisfied
with this plan, a fresh separation plan was prepared and
submitted to the US authorities in February 2006. Thus, far
from being “an autonomous Indian decision,” the separation
plan has been submitted to the Americans time and again
and finalised only after their approval.
Now, this autonomous Indian decision taken “voluntarily”
and “in exercise of our sovereign authority” will have to be
submitted to the US Congress for their scrutiny and approval.
Section 4(c)(2)(A) of the House of Representatives Bill clearly
states that, “A summary of the plan provided to the US and
the IAEA to separate India’s civil and military nuclear facilities,
materials, and programmes, and the declaration made by
India to the IAEA identifying India’s civil facilities to be placed
under IAEA safeguards, including an analysis of the
credibility of such plan and declaration, together with copies
of the plan and declaration” will have to be submitted by the
US President to the two Committees dealing with foreign
policy of the House and the Senate. Obviously, the two
Committees are not asking for this separation plan to adorn
their library; they are asking for it in order to examine it in
detail before approving it. So much for our sovereign authority
and the voluntary nature of the separation plan! The third
myth that was propagated was that, India would get fuel for
Tarapur immediately, and when the Russians supplied low
enriched uranium (LEU) for Tarapur recently, it was believed
that this was the outcome of the Indo-US nuclear deal. The
fact is that the Russians had agreed to supply LEU for
Tarapur well before July 18, 2005. But what is even more
disconcerting is the fact that despite the commitment in the
July 18, 2005 agreement, that the “United States will work
with friends and allies to adjust international regime to enable
full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India,
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Vol. 3, No. 3 July – September 2006
Indian Nuclear Society News
including but not limited to expeditious consideration of fuel
supplies for safeguarded nuclear reactors at Tarapur. In the
meantime, United States will encourage its partners to also
consider this request expeditiously,” the US actually opposed
the supply of fuel for Tarapur by Russia, and the Russians
supplied it in the face of American opposition.
The fourth myth is about the sequencing of the various
steps to give effect to the deal. In his statement to Parliament
on March 7, 2006, the Prime Minister said, “The United
States government has accepted this separation plan. It now
intends to approach the US Congress for amending its laws
and the Nuclear Suppliers Group for adapting its guidelines
to enable full civilian cooperation between India and the
international community. At the appropriate stage, India will
approach the IAEA to discuss and fashion an India specific
safeguards agreement.” He was even more emphatic about
the sequencing of the various steps when at the press
conference with President Bush in New Delhi on March 2,
2006, the Prime Minister said, “An important step forward is
the preparation of a separation plan, which separates the
civilian nuclear programme from the military programme. That
phase has been successfully completed. Now it is for the
US to go to the Congress for necessary amendments in the
US laws, also the US will approach the members of the
Nuclear Suppliers Group and thereafter we will also have to
go to IAEA for India specific safeguards.” This sequencing
now stands on its head. The House Bill clearly lays down in
Section 4(b)(1) the following pre-conditions, namely that,
“India has provided the US and the IAEA with a credible plan
to separate civil and military nuclear facilities, materials, and
programmes, and has filed a declaration regarding the civil
facilities with IAEA” and “(2) India and the IAEA have
concluded an agreement requiring the application of IAEA
safeguards in perpetuity in accordance with IAEA standards,
principles, and practices…” before the US Congress approves
the agreement with India. Section 4(b)(3) of the Bill goes a
step further and lays down that India and the IAEA should
make “substantial progress towards concluding an additional
protocol consistent with IAEA principles, practices, and
policies that would apply to India’s civil nuclear programme”
as a reporting requirement by the US President. This is not
rhetoric; these are determinations by the US President who,
in his report to the Congress, would have to state that “the
following actions have occurred.” Thus, India will have to
complete its part of the deal, including entering into
irrevocable commitments with an international organisation
like the IAEA, before the US Congress will agree to consider
the bilateral “123 agreement” with India.
The next myth which has been propagated is that this
deal is a de facto recognition of India as a nuclear weapon
state and is based on complete parity with such states. In
his July 29, 2005 statement to Parliament, the Prime Minister
had said, “Predicated on our obtaining the same benefits
and advantages as other nuclear powers is the understanding
that we shall undertake the same responsibilities and
obligations as such countries, including the United States.
Concomitantly, we expect the same rights and benefits.”
The PMO in a “backgrounder” issued on July 29, 2005, went
a step further. On the question of flexibility it said, “Nuclear
weapon states, including the US have the right to shift
facilities from civilian category to military and there is no
reason why this should not apply to India. This also
addresses possible concerns on capping.” And again, “India
has accepted responsibilities in a strictly non-discriminatory
manner (i.e. the same as other nuclear weapon states).” And
yet again, “India, in turn, has committed to taking reciprocally
exactly the same steps that other nuclear weapon states
have taken.” The “backgrounder” has repeatedly emphasised
that India will have the same benefits and advantages as
other nuclear weapon states. So, military facilities can
continue to do civilian work.
Subsequent developments have proved beyond doubt
that India is not being recognised as a nuclear weapons state,
it will have the status of only a non-nuclear weapons state.
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony
on April 5, 2006 before the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, had clearly said, “India is not and is not going to
become a member of the NPT (as) a nuclear weapon state.”
In fact, the Prime Minister has acknowledged that India
is accepting international inspections of a type that are
applicable not to nuclear-weapons states, but to non-nuclear
states. The PM told Parliament on March 7, 2006: “India will
place its civilian nuclear facilities under India-specific
safeguards in perpetuity and negotiate an appropriate
safeguards agreement to this end with the IAEA.” Nuclearweapons
states only accept voluntary, revocable safeguards
while perpetual inspections apply solely to non-nuclear
weapon states. This decision is contrary to the Prime
Minister’s assurance in Parliament on July 29, 2005 that
India would “place voluntarily its civilian nuclear facilities
under IAEA safeguards. India will never accept discrimination.
”The two Bills go further. They paint India clearly in a
South Asian corner. In Section 3(b), where the Congress
lays down the policies of the US with respect to South Asia,
the House Bill says that the US will work to “achieve a
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Indian Nuclear Society News
Vol. 3, No. 3, July – September 2006
moratorium on the production of fissile material for nuclear
explosive purposes by India, Pakistan, and the People’s
Republic of China at the earliest possible date.” The Senate
Bill mentions only Pakistan and India and not China in this
context. Section 3(b)(5) clearly states that the US policy
with respect to South Asia will be to “seek to halt the increase
of nuclear weapon arsenals in South Asia and to promote
their reduction and eventual elimination.” In Section 4(c)(D)
the Bill further says that the President shall submit to the
two Committees of the US Congress information on a number
of issues including “a description of the steps that US has
taken and will take to encourage India to identify and declare
a date by which India will be willing to stop production of
fissile material for nuclear weapons unilaterally or pursuant
to a multilateral moratorium or treaty.” It will not be an ordinary
report because it will have to include the reasons which form
the basis of the determination by the US President. So much
for India being recognised as a nuclear weapons state; so
much for not accepting discrimination and so much for the
assertion that the deal will have no consequences for our
strategic or weapons programme!
Some of the other features of the two Bills are: The
government of India would, in future, be more accountable
to the US Congress than to the Indian Parliament. On the
various determinations to be submitted by the US President
to the US Congress every year by January 31, India’s nuclear
programme will have to be laid bare including “(i) an estimate
for the previous year of the amount of uranium mined in
India; (ii) the amount of such uranium that has likely been
used or allocated for the production of nuclear explosive
devices; (iii) the rate of production of – (I) fissile material for
nuclear explosive devices; and (II) nuclear explosive devices;
and (iv) an analysis as to whether imported uranium has
affected such rate of production of nuclear explosive devices.”
In other words, the US Congress will acquire the right to
know how many nuclear weapons India is producing every
year, something which only the Prime Minister of India knows
so far; something which is not even shared with members of
the Cabinet Committee on Security.
Through the various reports which will have to be
submitted to the US Congress by the US President, the US
Congress will not only be privy to detailed information on the
entire range of India’s nuclear programme including its
weapons programme, it will acquire a large number of
pressure points to impose its will on the government of India
through the US President. Thus, while Parliament of India
may not have such a role, the US Congress will acquire the
authority to monitor India’s nuclear programme closely and
at least every year. If this is not obtrusive or invasive, one
wonders what else is. India’s foreign policy henceforth will
have to be in line with US foreign policy objectives. The
Congress has called upon the President to “secure India’s
full and active participation in the US efforts to dissuade,
isolate, and, if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its
efforts to acquire weapons for mass destruction…”
India will have to “actively” work with the US for the
early conclusion of an international Fissile Material Cut-off
Treaty. There is no reciprocal obligation on the US to work
with India, otherwise, the US would not have submitted the
draft of a new FMCT to the Committee on Disarmament in
Geneva without including the verification requirement which
has been a consistent Indian position regarding FMCT. In
other words, it means that India will have to support, rightly
or wrongly, all US foreign policy initiatives in future. So much
for the pursuit of an independent foreign policy by this
government!
All the commitments made by India will be in perpetuity
without any exit clause. This is what prompted Homi Sethna
to remark that perhaps we would have been better off signing
the NPT itself. The proponents of the deal counter it by saying
that the reciprocal obligation of the US and members of the
Nuclear Suppliers Group to supply fuel for India’s reactors is
also in perpetuity. It is like comparing apples with oranges.
These countries are not going to make any investments to
supply nuclear fuel to India. On the other hand, India would
have invested billions of dollars in new nuclear reactors which
will be left high and dry if fuel supplies are stopped. And fuel
supplies will be stopped and the deal will be off if India were
to test a nuclear explosive device or violate any of the
provisions of the Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. As
far as further nuclear tests are concerned, our voluntary
moratorium not to do so, is now being written in stone in a
bilateral agreement with the US.
Eminent scientists have spoken against this deal. Noted
defence analysts have opposed the deal. In a free vote, I
have no doubt that a majority of the members of Parliament
will vote against the deal. And yet, the government is going
ahead with the deal and is justifying every surrender it is
making to the US as an act of great courage and
statesmanship. Nothing could be more laughable. Nothing
could be more dangerous.
(Information gathered by the Editor)
● ● ●
The Birth of Google
|The Birth of Google
It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."
"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.
When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.
Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.
Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.
Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.
Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.
Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.
Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.
He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."
At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."
The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.
Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.
Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?
Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.
This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.
As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."
Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.
Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.
Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.
The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.
"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."
A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.
One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.
Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)
On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.
Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"
Is Globalisation a Myth or a Fact?
|The term globalisation describes the process of becoming worldwide in scope or application, and the increasing interdependency of nation-sates. At least - that gives us one loose definition for globalisation, but as Scholte (2000) realises, globalisation is a thoroughly contested subject, with arguments extend across the issue of definition as well as measurement, chronology, explanation and normative judgement. In fact, Scholte identifies five contrasting definitions for the word 'globalisation' as used by a number of the subject's commentators and critics - internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, western/modernisation and deterrioralisation are (2000: 13).
In choosing a definition of globalisation, one is also selecting how they wish to interpret it, and what points they wish to convey. For example, the choice of western/modernisation leads to a view that globlisation sees the economically and politically powerful west globalising the rest of the world, whilst universalisation leads to a more neutral stance, taking it's root from the dictionary definition of the word 'gloalise', meaning to universalise.
To judge whether or not globalisation is a myth or fact therefore requires the full understanding of what the term means to it's critics and advocates, and in which ways they belive it to be myth of fact. Giddens simplifies the debate into two main schools - the sceptics and the radicals. A radical himself, he writes that "According to the sceptics, all the talk about globalisation is only that - just talk" whilst "The radicals argue that not only is globalisation very real, but that its consequences can be seen everywhere" . Sceptics are seen by Giddens to hold a politicially left view, with their argument that globlaisation is "put about by free-marketeers who wish to dismantle welfare systems and cut back on state expenditure" (1999: 7-8). Key to his own argument, Giddens realises that globlisation is not just economic, but also political, technological and cultural.
It appears that some sceptics of globalisation take their definition of the word not as a verb but as the resulting noun, 'globalised'. The argument is that globalisation does not exist because we're not living in a fully globalised world. For example, economists may argue that we are not living in a total global economy and use this as proof that globalisation is a myth. All these ambiguities surrounding the context and use of the word leads to great confusion, highlighted by Rosenberg's (2000) muddled critical analysis of Giddens' works from which little conclusion can be drawn.
Through the development of new technologies, transport and communications have brought about the feeling of a smaller world as it becomes quicker and cheaper for people, data and goods to get from one point in the world to another. There is a changing concept of space and time (Cohen & Kennedy, 2000) - because distance and time are often used interchangeably, the fact that time taken for journeys has decreased means that our concepts of distance have also changed. Today it's possible to travel half way around the globe in a day, whilst before the invention of the steam ship or airplane, such a journey would have been unheard of. Similarly, email enables messages and data to be sent across the globe in milliseconds, whilst before it's advent postal services would have taken several days.
The use of the word globalisation has only been with us, we are told, since about 1960 (Waters, 1995: 2), yet the development of transport and communications is not a new phenomenom. Perhaps it is that in contemporary times there has been an accelearation in the advances made which has brought the conecept of globalisation to our attention, and hence given us reason to add it to our vocabularies. However globalisation is not whether or not the world is globalised, but whether it is globalising - so clearly the movement towards the compression of space and time is proof in itself that globalisation is indeed a fact.
Too add yet further dimensions to the globalisation debate we have at least three competing chronologies as to when globalisation has come about - but all of these see globalisation as a fact. Giddens views globaliation as contemporary, occuring only in post-war years - highlighting old; that is the growth of capitalism, and new; that is new methods of communications. The alternative extreme is an idea put forward by Andre Frank, suggeting that globalisation is a constant process occuring over several millennia. This would suggest that perhaps the recent changes that have been occuring aren't just globalisation at all, but some new process such as westernisation. A third suggestion by Immanuel Wallerston focuses on the triumph of capitalism and how globalisation is merely a result of our capitalist society and it's values.
A fully globalised culture should be taken as a single or multiple cultures for the whole world - either culminating cultures from around the world, or the world-wide domination of one culture set above others. Ideally this would be the former, however America and The West have significantly more power than the rest of the world leading to their contemporary cultural domination. Greater awareness of non-western cultures is learnt through education, interactions and the media - although rarely are any of these cultural traits adopted. Conversely, western cultures are often forced upon peoples through the media (predominately controlled by the technologically advanced West), company branding and the ability of westerners to travel across cultural boundries (whilst their non-western counterparts may not be economically or politically able). It is therefore hard for these non-western cultures to compete, and so cultural globalisation sees the emergence of America and the West.
It is suggested that only a select group countries that are becoming globalised, whilst other countries are unaffected by the process. WW1 and WW2 are said to be 'world wars' and yet only a small selection of countries were involved. The football world cup is greatly overrepresented by Europe, whilst almost all 'global' pop stars come form England, America, Australia and other English speaking countries. Particularly in economic terms, globalisation is confined to a minority of the most wealthy countries.
A globalised economy would be one in which there is a single universally acepted currency and where there are no differences in economic policies between nations, no trade restrictions and barriers, and where nations no longer have control over their own economy, as their own economy as such does not exist, but is part of the wider global economy. Clearly today we don't have this single economy, however in recent years there have been movements towards it, evidence of economic globalisation. Europe now has the Euro, and it's important to realise that this isn't just a unit of currency, but sees the amalgamation of many different economies into one, as by signing up to a joint currency a nation is also signing away total control over fiscal and monetary policies. This again is evidence that it is only a select few wealthy countries that are perhaps undergoing some processes of globalisation, however poorer countries have also been Americanised through the often black-market use of the US dollar. For example, in Vietnam and many other poor countries, US dollars are prefered as payments over predominately weaker and more vulnerable local currencies.
Sceptics often argue that economic globalisation is a myth, whilst what they actually mean is that we're not living in a global economy - they fail to realise that globalisation is a process rather than an end result. Financial markets only exist on a large scale in wealthy countries; multinational enterprises and transnational companies aren't totally global; employment isn't always globally mobile; foreign direct investment is concentrated in the wealthy countries. All are evidence that our economy isn't truly global, but none tell us that globalisation doesn't exist. In fact, they do quite the opposite - they illustrate various ways in which the economy has become more global over the years.
Through the literal meaning of globalisation (an act or process), suggesting that globalisation is a myth is ludicrous. Globalisation is the process of becoming worldwide in scope or applicaing and the increasing interdependency of nation-states. It is a commonly accepted definition of globalisation that is required to put an end to some rather pointless debate. With such a definition in place it is then possible to start truly analysing globlisation - looking at why it's happening, what it's leading to and in which ways its acting. A current fully globalised world is a myth, globalisation is not.
Electronic Voting Machine - better know how it works
|Dear All
Most of us know how Electronic Voting Machine works and how we vote - Still it will be better if we could just recollect how it works so that this knowledge may be disseminated to others also:
EVM has two units -
-Control unit and a Ballotting unit - cable wires connected
-Control unit will be with the election official and Ballotting unit will be inside the Voting Compartment
- After your identification is proved, the official will press a button of his control unit and directs you to go to a voting compartment and press ONE blue button on the Ballotting unit
- A small red bulb glows after you have exercised your franchise on the blue button and to indicate your successful voting, a long beep sound is heard
- these simple methods of audio and visual indications assures foolproof voting system by voters
- There will be no facility for invalid votes and one EVM can record 3840 votes / maximum 64 candidates
-by using EVM, all of us become Green Voters because we have taken one step towards preservation and protection of greenery by using paper that is prepared from pulp of wood.
- VOTE YOU MUST - VOTE TO THE LEAST CRIMINAL
Ravi Naik
Dr Manmohan Singh
|
Brief Introduction
One of the more non-political faces of Indian politics, Dr Manmohan Singh is best known as the "liberator" of Indian economy. As the Union Finance Minister in the Narasimha Rao government (1991-96), he liberalised the economy to put India on the path of globalisation.
He worked as the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission from 1985 to 1987 and as the Governor of the Reserve Bank for three years before that. He has also been the Central government's Advisor on Economic Affairs, besides taking international assignments at the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank.
He was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1991, and has represented the Congress there since. In 1999, he contested the Lok Sabha elections from South Delhi, but lost. He was the Leader of the Opposition in the Upper House until becoming the Prime Minister of India.|
He has won several awards for his work and contribution to society, including the Padma Vibhushan in 1987, the Euromoney Finance Minister of the year award in 1993 and the Asiamoney Finance Minister of the year award in 1993 and 1994.
Singh was born in Gah in West Punjab (now in Pakistan) in September 1932, and studied economics in Chandigarh and later went to Cambridge & Oxford UK for higher studies. He later taught the subject at the Punjab University. He has authored a book on Indian export trends.
FACTFILE
Place of birth
Gah in West Punjab (now in Pakistan)
Date of birth
September 26, 1932
Education
MA, DPhil (Oxford), DLitt (Honoris Causa)
Academic Career
Senior Lecturer in Economics (1957-59), Reader in Economics (1959-63), Professor in Economics (1963-65) at Punjab University, Chandigarh
Professor of International Trade, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi (1969-71)
Honorary Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1976, and at Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, 1996
National Fellow, National Institute of Education, NCERT, 1986
Honorary Fellow, (i) St John's College, Cambridge UK, 1982, (ii) Indian Institute of Bankers, 1982 (iii) All India Management Association, 1993 and (iv) Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, 1994
Wrenbury Scholar, University of Cambridge, 1957
Non-Academic Career
Economic Affairs Officer, 1966 and Chief, Financing for Trade Section, UNCTAD, United Nations Secretariat, New York, 1966-69
President, Indian Economic Association, 1985
Chairman, (i) UGC, March 15, 1991 to June 20, 1991, (ii) India Committee of the Indo-Japan Joint Study Committee, 1980-83 and (iii) Committee on Commerce, August 1, 1996-December 4, 1997
Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, January 15, 1985 to July 31, 1987
Governor, Reserve Bank of India, September 16, 1982 to January 14, 1985
Director, (i) Reserve Bank of India, 1976-80 and (ii) Industrial Development Bank of India, 1976-80; Economic Advisor, Ministry of Foreign Trade, India, 1971-72
Chief Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, India, 1972-76
Advisor to Prime Minister of India on Economic Affairs, December 10, 1990 to March 14, 1991
Secretary-General and Commissioner, South Commission August 1, 1987 to November 10, 1990
Secretary, Ministry of Finance (Department of Economic Affairs), Government of India, November, 1976 to April, 1980
Member-Secretary, Planning Commission, April, 1980 to September 15, 1982
Member, (i) Finance, Atomic Energy Commission, Government of India, (ii) Finance, Space Commission, Government of India,(iii) Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, 1983-84
Member,(i) Committee on Finance,(ii) Committee on Rules, (iii) Committee of Privileges and (iv) Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Finance
Leader, Indian Delegation to (i) Indo-Soviet Monitoring Group Meeting, 1982, (ii) Indo-Soviet Joint Planning Group Meeting, 1980-82 (iii) Aid-India Consortium Meetings, 1977-79, (iv) Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Cyprus, 1993 and (v) Human Rights World Conference, Vienna, 1993
Attended as member of Indian Delegations (a) South-South Consultations, New Delhi, 1982, (b) Cancun Summit on North-South Issues, 1981, (c) Aid-India Consortium Meetings, Paris, 1973-79, (d) Annual Meetings of IMF, IBRD and Commonwealth Finance Ministers, 1972-79 (e) Third Session of UNCTAD, Santiago, April-May, 1972, (f) Meeting of UNCTAD Trade and Development Board, Geneva, May 1971-July 1972 and (g) Ministerial Meeting of Group of 77, Lima, October, 1971
Deputy for India in IMF Committee of Twenty on International Monetary Reform, 1972-74
Associate, Meetings of IMF Interim Committee and Joint Fund-Bank Development Committee, 1976-80 and 1982-85; Alternate Governor for India, (i) Board of Governors,IBRD, 1976-80, (ii) Board of Governors IMF, 1982-85 and (iii) Board of Governors Asian Development Bank, Manila, 1976-80
Governor for India on the Board of Governors of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1991-95
Participated in Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Meeting, Kingston, 1975; represented Secretary-General UNCTAD at several Inter-Governmental meetings, including Second Session of UNCTAD, 1968 and Committee on Invisibles and Financing related to Trade Consultant to UNCTAD, ESCAP and Commonwealth Secretariat
Political Career
Union Finance Minister, June 21, 1991 to May 15, 1996
Leader of Opposition, Rajya Sabha; elected to the Rajya Sabha in October, 1991 and re-elected in June 1995
Awards
Recipient of honorary degrees of DLitt from Panjab University, Chandigarh, Guru Nanak University, Amritsar, Delhi University, Delhi, Sri Venkateshwara University, Tirupathi, Panjabi University, Patiala, University of Mysore, Mysore, University of Bolonga, Italy, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, Osmania University, Hyderabad, Nagarjuna University, Nagarjunanagar and Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Agra
Recipient of honorary degree of (i) Doctor of Laws from University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, (ii) Doctor of Social Sciences from University of Roorkee, Roorkee and (iii) DSc from Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hissar and (iv) Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala
Conferred,(i) University Medal for standing first in BA(Hons), Economics, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 1952, (ii) Uttar Chand Kapur Medal, Panjab University, Chandigarh, for standing first in M.A.(Economics) 1954, (iii) Wright's Prize for distinguished performance at St John's College, Cambridge, 1956 and 1957, (iv) Adam Smith Prize, University of Cambridge, UK, 1956, (v) Padma Vibhushan, 1987, (vi) Euromoney Award, Finance Minister of the year, 1993 (vii) Asiamoney Award, Finance Minister of the year for Asia, 1993 and 1994, (viii) Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress Association, 1994-95, (ix) Justice KS Hegde Foundation Award, 1996 ,(x) Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. (NIKKEI), publisher of Japan's leading business daily,1997 and (xi) Lokmanya Tilak Award by the Tilak Smarak Trust, Pune, 1997.
Publications
India's Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth, Clarendon Press, Oxford University, 1964
Resume of Dr. Manmohan Singh - Prime Minister of India
Resume of Dr. Manmohan Singh - Prime Minister of India |
Indian Money in Swiss Bank
|Indian Money in Swiss Bank Indians' money - 70,00,000 Crores Rupees in Swiss Bank * Yes, 70 lakhs crores rupees of India are lying in Switzerland banks. This is the huge black amount parked in foreign Bank, as India is the
champion of Black Money among all 180 countries of the world. * German Government officially wrote a letter to Indian Government that they (German Government) are willing to inform the details of holders of 70 lakh crore rupees in foreign Banks, if Indian Government officially asks them. * On 22nd May, 2008, this news already published in The Times of India and other Newspapers based on German Government's official letter to Indian Government. * But the Indian Government did not send any official enquiry to Germany for details of said money which are sent outside India between 1947 to 2008. The opposition party is also equally not interested in doing so because most of the amount is owned by these dirty, sinful and traitor politicians. * This money belongs to our country. From these funds we can repay 13 times of our country's foreign debt. The interest alone can take care of the Center's yearly budget. People need not pay any taxes and we can pay Rs. 1 lakh to each of 45 crore poor families. * Let us imagine, if Swiss Bank is holding Rs. 70 lakh crores, then how much money is deposited in other this kind of 69 Banks in foreign? How much they have deprived the Indian people after freedom? More over if the account holder dies the Bank become the owner of the funds in his account. * Are these people totally ignorant about the philosophy of Karma? What will this ill-gotten wealth do to them and their families when they own/use such corrupted and sinful money ? It will ruin their family and their future generation. * On 20th February, 2009 the American President Mr. Barack Obama has exerted immense pressure on USB Bank to disclose the details of deposits by tax evading/corrupt Americans in this Bank. He has taken this step even at the risk to his life. On the other hand, our political leaders have not taken any action despite lapse of 8 long months. The Opposition Parties also are not interested. Why?
Is hindi our National Langauage myths and truth
|The Answer is Yes. But, it is not "THE" national language, but one of the 22 national languages - my mother toungue Kannada is there in the list, and so is Marathi, the language of the state I am currently in. Here is the official website which has the list of "National Languages" as the left frame rightly describe. So what is this crap all about Hindi being THE national language of India. For me, its a myth being propogated by -dont know who- but believed by almost everyone, and taught in our schools. Hindi is an official language of India (even though the link above uses the word 'The', I would still stick to the word 'an' since English is also an official language of India, approved by the constitution of India.) Ok. Enough of proving my point. The point I am trying to make it - I get pissed off when any Indian points at any fellow Indian who doesnt know Hindi that you "should" have known Hindi being an Indian - because hindi is "the" national language of our country. One incident is etched in my memory - it was in the Railway reservation center of Pune when the person standing in the queue was insulted by the booking officer for not knowing Hindi, that poor Tamilian was asked - what an Indian he is if he does not know Hindi? In a nutshell, In a vast country like ours, there cannot be one language which everyone should know, just like there cannot be one type of food or one type of dress. Learnt to co-exist, learn as many languages as possible, but never force anyone to learn a language of the majority's choice. PS: I learnt Hindi from the age of 8 and have completed 8 examinations in Hindi, even though Hindi is not a subject in the schools I learnt. I am only against forcing Hindi on non-Hindi speaking Indians. PS2: A very interesting read on this topic is a set of 4 articles written long back by Rajeev Srinivasan in rediff.com. Here they go Article 1 Article 2 Article 3 Article 4