Friday, October 02, 2009
Pittsburgh's State of Siege
Suppressiing Dissent With High-Priced Cop Toys
James S. Henry
Pittsburgh's State of Siege
You didn't hear much about it from any major US news organizations, but there was a very disturbing case of gratuitous police-led violence and intimidation at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 23rd-25th, 2009. Perhaps the only consolation is that it allowed those of us who were there to get a close look at some of the disturbing "brave new world: technologies for anti-democratic crowd control. These were initially developed by the US military to fight terrorists on the high seas and abroad, in places like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq, but are now coming home to roost. Indeed, ironically enough, this is one of the few remaining global growth industries where the US is still the undisputed world leader, as we'll see below.
One local newspaper account described the events at the Pittsburgh G20 as a "clash" between the police, protesters, and college students.
Indeed, a handful of storefronts were reportedly broken on Thursday September 24 by a few unknown vandals.
However, based on our own visit to the summit, interviews with several students and other eye witnesses, and a careful review of the significant amount of video footage that is available online, the only real "clash" that occurred in Pittsburgh on September 23-25, 2009, was between lawless policing and the Bill of Rights.
The most aggressive large-scale policing abuses occurred from 9 pm to 11:30 pm on Friday September 25th near Schenley Park, in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus. This was miles away from the downtown area where the G20 had met, and, in any case, it was hours after the G20 had ended.
This particular case of aggressive policing -- "Hammer and Anvil," as the operation was described on police scanners -- was clearly not just a matter of a few "bad apples."
Rather, it appears to have been part of a willful, highly-organized, one-sided, rather high-tech experiment or training exercise in very aggressive crowd control by nothing less than a really scary uniformed mob.
New York police sometimes describe their firemen counterparts, tongue in cheek, as "robbers with boots." In this case we have no hesitation at all in describing this uniformed mob in Pittsburgh as "assailants with badges."
Their actions resulted in the unlawful suppression of the civil rights of hundreds of otherwise-peaceful students who were just "hanging out with their friends on a Friday night in Oakland," or attending a free jazz/blues concert in Schenley Park.
Essentially they got trapped in a cyclone of conflicting and inconsistent police directives to "leave the area." The result was nearly 200 arrests, gassings, beatings, and the deployment of dogs and rubber bullets against dozens of innocent people.
In addition to the students, this aggressive policing also assaulted the civil rights of a small number of relatively-peaceful protesters and quite a few ordinary Pittsburgh residents, most of whom were as innocent as bystanders can possibly be these days.
Why did this occur? In addition to whatever top-down "experiment" or training action was being conducted there appears to have been an extraordinary amojnt of pent-up police frustration and anger. For example, one student overheard a policeman piling out of a rented Budget van near Schenley Park around 9:50 PM Friday.
The officer was heard to exclaim, "Time to kick some ass!"
This is disturbing, but perhaps not all that surprising. After all, thousands of police had basically stood around for days in riot gear, sweltering in the "Indian Summer" heat, dealing with the tensions associated with potential terrorist attacks as well as all the hassles of managing large-scale protest marches, even if peaceful.There was also the inevitable tensions of social class and culture among police, Guardsman, and college students.
On the other hand, precisely because such tensions are so predictable, those in direct command or higher political office, and, indeed University officials, should have acted forcefully to corral them.
JOIN THE CLUB
All this means that Pittsburgh has unfortunately now joined the growing list of cities around the world that have experienced such serious conflicts -- mainly in connection with economic summits or national political conventions.
The list of summit frays includes this summer's G-8 in Italy, last Spring's G20 in London, the September '08 RNC in Minneapolis, the '04 RNC in New York City, Miami's Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit (11/03),
Quebec (4/01), Naples (3/01), Montreal (10/00),
Prague 9/00), Washington D.C. (4/00), the November '99 WTO
"Battle in Seattle," the J18 in London (6/99), Madrid (10/1994), and Berlin (9/88).
President Obama had originally selected Pittsburgh for the G20 because he hoped to showcase its recovery since the 1980s, especially in the last few years, under a Democratic Mayor, in a Democratic state that he barely carried in the 2008 Presidential contest.
In seeking to explain such events, therefore, it alway helps to keep a firm eye on the question -- whose interests did really this serve?
In retrospect, the failure of these leaders to control the police at the G20 has created a serious blemish on the city's reputation for good government. It may have also to some extent undermined Obama’s relations with college students and other activists who worked so hard for his election in this key state. And it certainly did not help the reputation of the Democratic Party in Pittsburgh or Pensylvania at large.
TIANANMEN FLASHBACKS
To journalists like me who happened to have been in Beijing in May 1989, during the buildup to the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square, Pittsburgh also bears an interesting resemblance. The analogy may sound a little strained, but bear with me.
(1) As in Beijing, there was a very large deputized police force from all over the country. These included over 1000 police "volunteers" (out of 4000 total police and 2500 National Guardsmen) who were ported in just for the G20.
According to the conventional wisdom, not being from the same community is likely to reduce your inhibitions when it comes to macing and kicking the crap out of unarmed, defenseless young people.
The guest policeman also included several hundred police who were under the command of Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney, pioneer of the infamous "Miami model"
for suppressing protest that was first deployed at the Miami Free Trade Area of the Americas Conference in November 2003. (Here’s the Miami model checklist, most of which was repeated in Pittsburgh.)
As one writer has observed, Timoney, who also served as Police Chief in Philadelphia, "(L)iterally transformed the city into a police state war zone with tanks,
blockades and “non-lethal” (but severely damaging) artillery."
It is unclear to what extent he played a similar role behind-the-scenes in Pittsburgh this year, but there certainly is a strong sulfurous odor.
(2) As in Beijing, In Pittsburgh there were no identifying badges on officers' uniforms, and they also refused to provide any identifying personal information in response to questions. Several photographers also complained about receiving threats and actual damage to their cameras.
(3) As in Beijing, there was simply no direct contest between the power of the security forces once they mobilized, and those of the unarmed students. The only kind of victory that the students could possibly have one in both cases was a moral one -- by essentially sacrificing their bodies and their rights to a tidal wave of repression.
Indeed, the "clash" theory of these events looks even odder once we take into account the fact that on Friday night in Pittsburgh, for example, unarmed students and protesters faced hundreds of police in full riot gear, armed for bear with equipped muzzled attack dogs, gas, smoke canisters, rubber bullets, bean-bag shotguns, pepper pellets, long-range pepper spray, at least four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters (courtesty of New York Governor Patterson and his National Guard's 3-142nd Assault Helicopter Battalion unit), plus several brand new "acoustic cannons" (see below). There were also probably dozens of undercover agents provocateurs -- at least three of whom were actually "outed" by the students.
The police were also actively monitoring student communications on web sites like Twitter.
From this angle, a key difference with Bejing in 1989 was that the Chinese authorities felt genuinely threatened by the growth of student power and the democracy movement, and feared being ousted,from power. and were therefore able to justify their brutality as part of a zero-sum game. In the case of Pittsburgh, whatever police violence occurred was entirely gratuitous.
"I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. I order all those assembled to immediately disburse. You must leave the immediate vicinity. If you remain in this immediate vicinity, you will be in violation of the Pennsylvania crimes code, no matter what your purpose is. You must leave. If you do not disburse, you may be arrested and/or subject to other police action. Other police action may include actual physical removal, the use of riot control agents, and/or less lethal munitions, which could risk of injury to those who remain."
The fact is that this warning was itself completely unlawful. Putting on the NYCLU lawyer's hat for a moment, absent a "clear and present danger" to the public peace, these threats violated the First Amendment's explicit recognition of right to "peacefully assemble.”
In effect, the fact is that the police and National Guard in Pittsburgh temporarily seized control over public streets, parks, and other public spaces, and exercised it arbitrarily. By the time the victims of these outrageous civil rights infringements have their day in court, the damage will have been long since done.
(5) As in Beijing, the police and military decided to launch their biggest raid late at night, after the summit had ended, most major media had gone home, and the courts had closed for the weekend.
GLOBAL COP TOYS Police behavior at all these global summits has evolved over time into a rather high-tech affair that would make Iranian crowd control experts turn bright green with envy. These sophisticated "phase array" device s emit a targeted 30-degree beam of 100+decibel sound that is effective up to several hundred yards, and is potentially very harmful to the human ear. The Pittsburgh units were apparently purchased by local sheriffs' departments across the country with the help of recent grants from the US Department of Homeland Security. Officially the grants have been justtified in the name of improving communications with the public, by permitting clearer voice channels (!), but that's a cover story -- the true purpose is crowd control. ( Roll tape: LRAD-500X_SDCo_Sheriff1). Other recent ATCO customers include the US Army (for "force protection" in Iraq and Afghanistan), and the US Navy and the navies of Japan and Singapore, for communicating with potentially-hostile vessels at sea. In 2008 ATCO flogged its wares at the biannual China Police Forum, Asia's largest mart for police security equipment. Obviously China would make a terrific reference customer, since it is one of the global front-runners in the brutal suppression of mass dissent. ATCO also has a 2007 contract with the US Marine Corps' "Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program" to develop new, even more powerful weapons, euphemistically branded "acoustic hailing devices." Just two weeks before the Pittsburgh G20, they turned up in San Diego, where the Sheriff's Department provoked controversy by stationing them near a Congressional town hall forum -- just in case. This growing use of LRADs for domestic crowd control in the For all the homeland security technology buffs in the audience, you may rest assured that LRADs are hardly the only In the last decade the non-lethal weapons arena has exploded, and the US appears to be far ahead, assisted by ample R&D grants and purchase contracts from organizations like the Department of Justice's "National Institute of Justice," DHS's multi-billion dollar Homeland Security Grant Program, the U.S Coast Guard, and the Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, and DOD's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) Program. The industry has also been aided by key contractors like ATCO, spearheaded by legendary engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur "Woody" Norris; and Penn State's Advanced Research Lab -- home of the Institute for Emerging Defense Technologies. NIJ also works closely with police organizations like PERF, and international organizations like the UK's Home Office Scientific Development Branch. In the first instance, the development of such non-lethal technologies is usually justified by their potential for providing an alternative to heavier weaponry, thereby reducing civilian casualties in combat situations. The fact that the US military now has at least 750 military bases around the world, and has also recently been playing an important "military policing" role in countries like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, underscored DOD's rationale for these technologies. The problem is that just as in the case of the LRAD, once developed, it is very difficult to wall such technologies out of the US, or restrict them to "pro-civilian/pro-democratic" uses, like providing clearer amplification for outdoor announcements. Even aside from their technical merits, the competitive nature of the global law enforcement equipment industry virtually insures that every tin-horn US sheriff, as well as every Chinese party boss in Urumqi, will soon have access to these very latest tools in the arsenal for suppressing dissent. The ultimate irony, of course, is that the first generation of all these powerful new free speech suppressors have all been developed, not by authoritarian China, Iran, Burma or North Korea, but by US, ostensibly still the leader of the "Free World." TOYS IN THE PIPELINE So what's in store for those who are on the front lines of popular dissent?
We assume that some of the juiciest details are classified. But even a cursory review of public sources reveals that the following new crowd-control technologies may soon be
coming to an economic summit near you.
(See this recent UK review for more details.). ▣
"Area Denial Systems." This is a powerful new "directed-energy" device that generates a precise, targeted beam of "millimeter waves," producing an "intolerable heating sensation on an adversary's skin."
Under development by the US military since at least the late 1980s, this class of "non-lethal" weapons is now close to field deployment. Its key advantage over LRADs is that it has about ten times the range. Raytheon is already supplying its "Silent Guardian" version of the system to the US Army.
The next step required to bring this product to the police market will be to make it smaller and more mobile. According to this week's
New Scientist,
a new highly-portable, battery-powered version of the system, called the
"Thermal Laser,"
will soon become available -- though it has yet to show that demonstrate conclusively that it is within the bounds of the
UN Binding Protocol on Laser Weapons.
▣ New Riot-Control Chemicals and Delivery Systems. Subject to the dicey question of whether these new "calmative," drug-like agents are outside the boundaries of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (to which the US and 187 other countries are signatories), these would not irritate their targets, unlike pepper spray or tear gas, but calm them down.
▣ Glue Guns. If all else fails, UK's Home Office reports that another approach to "less- lethal" crowd control weaponry is also making progress -- a gigantic glue gun that sprays at least some 30 feet, bemingling its target audience in one huge adhesive dissident-ball. Apparently still unsolved is the question of precisely what becomes of all those who are stuck together, or how the police avoid becoming entangled with them. But undoubtedly millions of pounds are being devoted to solving these issues even as we speak. SUMMARY I went to Pittsburgh last week on behalf of Tax Justice Network, a global NGO that is concerned about the harmful impacts that tax havens and dodgy behavior by First World banks, MNCs, lawyers, and accountants are having, especially on developing countries. I was under no illusion that the reforms we were rather politely advocating would quickly be adopted, but at least we'd say our piece, if anyone cared to listen. I came away with the depressing sense that the G20 summit, like its many predecessors, was never intended to be a listening post for independent, outside opinions. But even worse, it had actually become, in practice, an excuse for the criminalization of dissent in capital cities all over the globe, even in those that are nominally the most free, by way of the vast new security measures that it requires and subsidizes,and the repressive tactics that it legitimized. In this day and age, of course, we are told that almost any amount of security is too little. And this heightened sense of insecurity is certainly not aided by having the world's top 20 leaders regularly shuffling from pitstop to pitstop, trying to conduct the world’s business from a traveling roadshow. But I was struck by just how unnecessary, senseless, and counterproductive almost all of the repressive policing tactics deployed in Pittsburgh really were -- how they ran roughshod over many of our most precious freedoms, freedoms that we are supposedly trying to protect. And to what a degree whatever “terrorists” there are out there have already won, by succeeding in creating a society that is really is often ruled by fear instead of justice, by force instead of discourse. ***
For example, last week's G20 featured one of the largest US deployments ever against civilian demonstrators of "LRADS," or acoustic cannons.
Manufactured by San Diego's tiny American Technology Corporation (NASDQ: ATCO), the $37,500 so-call "500X" version of the sound cannon that was used in Pittsburg was developed at the behest of the US military, reportedly in response to the USS Cole incident in 2000, to help the Navy repel hostile forces at sea.
Until recently the most widely-publicized use of LRADS had been against Somali pirates. The devices have also been deployed against "insurgents" by the US military in Fallujah, by the increasingly-unpopular, anything-but-democratic regime of Mikhail Saakashvili in the Republic of Georgia, and by New York City at the RNC in 2005.
US is worrisome, not only because it is a potent anti-civil liberties weapon, because -- just like tasers, rubber bullets, OC gas, and other so-called "non-lethal but actually just "less lethal" weapons" -- they can cause serious injuries to ears, and perhaps even provoke strokes.
potential "less-lethal" free speech-and-assembly killers in the pipeline.
ated 135 miles east of Pittsburgh, has been especially active in advocating the advantages of such new chemical weapons.
Rather than, say, simply allowing the overwhelmingly non-violent demonstrators and students at that peaceful Friday night blues concert to have their say, instead some 200 people were arrested and scores were gassed, clubbed, rubber-bulleted, and imprinted with galling memories that will last a lifetime. The City of Pittsburgh and its residents will certainly be fighting criminal cases and civil rights law suits for years to come. I supposed we are meant to be consoled by the fact that, as the New York Times chose to emphasize this week, things are much more repressive in Guinea.
So perhaps it is time to establish a permanent location for all these global summits. Perhaps one of the Caribbean tax havens, like Antigua or St. Kitts, would do -- journalists always like the sun, and after TJN gets done with them, these havens are going to need to find a new calling anyway!
October 2, 2009 at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Thursday, June 03, 2004
We Remember - Tiananmen Square, Beijing June 4, 1989
Those who take
the most from the table
teach contentment.
Those for whom
the taxes are destined
demand sacrifices.
Those who eat their fill
speak to the hungry
of the wonderful times to come.
the country into the abyss
call ruling too difficult
for ordinary men.
June 3, 2004 at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Monday, November 17, 2003
First World Criminals, Third World Crimes - Part 2: France's Heart of Darkness: The ELF Story.
Loik Le Floch-Prigent
On November 13-14, 2003, the former CEO Loik Le Floch-Prigent and 22 other former executives of France’s Elf Aquitaine, plus seven other accessories, were sentenced by a French court to a few €millions in fines and no more than 5 years apiece in jail –- 14 of the accused got suspended sentences -- on charges that they had embezzled €300 million ($346.8 million) from the company from 1989 to 1993. These sentences, the culmination of an investigation that started in August 1994, determined that most of these thefts had been skimmed from secret slush funds managed out of Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein.
From our standpoint, the key fact is that these secret funds had originally been created in order to pay up to $130 million of bribes a year to senior officials in African countries like Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea, and the Congo, as well as in Venezuela, Russia, Taiwan, Central Asia, China, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
Significantly, this extraordinary global corruption eventually “blew back” to France itself, where, according to Le Floch-Prigent, Elf paid at least €5 -€20 million in bribes per year to France’s leading politicians, ministers, and political parties -- not only Gaullist parties like Chirac’s RPR/UMP party, and former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua’s RPF, but also the Socialists and other parties.
Even after this extraordinary 9-year trial, we still lack much of the detail on precisely where all this payola went. However, as usual, some things can be said.
de Gaulle and Chiraq
To begin with, it appears that most of Elf's transgressions were committed with the knowledge and tacit or active approval of every French President from Charles de Gaulle on down to Chirac, after de Gaulle created Elf and the original “black box” system in the 1960s.
In addition to these domestic political subsidies, Elf also paid out an extraordinary amount of personal payola to France’s political elite – including free airfare, sweetheart deals and payoffs for ex-wives and girlfriends, and fancy apartments. For example, when President Mitterrand's weekly golfing partner was threatened with losing his house near their favorite golf course, Elf bought the house and let him continue living there, all expenses paid.
Francois Mitterand
Many of the key figures involved with these funds turned out to have top-level connections in the French government. After his stint at Elf ended in 1993, its former CEO, Le Floch-Prigent, was appointed by Mitterand and Jacques Chirac to serve as head of the state-owned utility Gaz de France and SCNF, the French National Railroad. Roland Dumas, President Francois Mitterand’s close friend and Foreign Minister in the 1980s, was convicted in 2001 of receiving Elf bribes in connection with an arms sales to Taiwan – though the conviction was overturned on a technicality in 2003.
Andre Tarallo was a close friend and former classmate of French President Jacques Chirac (Ecole Nationale d'Administration, class of ’59), and an Elf employee since 1967.
From our standpoint, Tarallo is an especially important figure. During the course of his long career, he became known as Elf’s “Monsieur Afrique,” the “real boss of Elf-Afrique,” in charge of the company’s relationships with corrupt regimes all over Africa. Meanwhile, he also helped himself to $27 million worth of property, including a mansion in Corsica and one of the largest apartments in Paris. For all these efforts, 74-year old Tarallo received a four-year sentence and a €2 million fine.
This huge case has been nine years in the making. As it slowly wended its way to a conclusion, many cynics predicted that because the case is one of France’s most sensational corruption scandal ever,few convictions would ever be seen. However, mainly because of the perseverance of a handful of courageous judges and magistrates in France and Switzerland, the embezzlement charges ultimately stuck. But for evidentiary reasons as well as “pour raison d’Etat,” the French court limited the investigation to personal enrichment by Elf’s own officials. When it came to exposing the details of the many bribes paid in the Third World and the First, they drew a complete blank.
Alfred Sirven
As noted, because of the sensitive nature of Elf’s payoffs, we are unlikely to ever learn the full story. Nevertheless, it is already clear from many other sources that Elf – France’s largest multinational company at the time, with owned refineries and gas stations throughout Europe, Africa and the West Indies -- became a cornucopia of global corruption. As Alfred Sirven, Elf’s second-in-command in the early 1990s, and the former head of Elf’s Geneva office, said at the trial this year, “I know enough to eliminate the whole French political class.” Or as the former CEO, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, said, “If the money sometimes ended up in an orphanage then I am very happy - but let's say it didn't always end up in an orphanage.”
Gabon's Bongo
Among Elf’s many unsavory activities around the globe: (1) Elf developed incestuous, mutually profitable relationships with key African autocrats like Omar Bongo, Gabon’s ruler, the Congo-Brazzaville’s Sassou Nguesso, the Cameroon’s Paul Biya,
>Cameroon's Biya
Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader; Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Angola’s “Marxist” President; and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha.
Congo's Nguesso
Angola's dos Santos
For example, according to an investigating magistrate, $30-$50 million a year was placed in a secret bank account belonging jointly to Bongo and Tarallo, his close friend, and Bongo’s Presidential Guard was partly paid for by Elf. In Congo-Brazzaville, where Elf has lucrative refineries and other concessions, it supplied helicopters and financed arms supplies for rival leaders. In Nigeria, it reportedly paid bribes to secure a lucrative oil concession in 1995. All told, according to the French magistrate, Elf ran "a vast and opaque system aimed at paying commissions, via intermediaries, to certain African personalities.”
Kofi and Sani
Carlos Andres Perez
(2) Elf allegedly paid $2.5 million in bribes to Venezuela’s President Carlos Andres Perez and other Venezuelan politicians in 1991-92, part of some $20 million in commissions that Elf was alleged to have spent in Venezuela.
(3) Elf allegedly made still more payoffs in China and Taiwan in connection with a 1991 arms deal – including millions of dollars that were allegedly paid to Zhu Rongii, the former Mayor of Shanghai who served as China’s Premier from 1998 to 2003, and to Foreign Minister Dumas, to secure their tacit approval for the deal. 
Zhu Rongii and Clinton
These payments were reportedly made by Elf’s network in connection with the sale of six frigates to Taiwan by Thompson-CSF, another French company, in 1991. On this deal alone, the commissions reportedly totaled more than 30 percent of the $2.5 billion purchase price.
(4) Elf also allegedly made huge payoffs to Nadhmi Auchi, an obscure Iraqi-British billionaire who is reputedly Britain’s seventh wealthiest man, the largest shareholder in BNP Paribas, and – according to some – one of Saddam Hussein’s oldest cronies and private bankers. (They both took part in the attempted assassination of Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Qasim in October 1959.).
Nadhmi Auchi
The Elf payoffs to Auchi, which he reportedly passed on to Spanish politicians and partly kicked back to Elf officials, were made in connection with its 1991 purchase of Ertoil, a Kuwaiti-owned oil refinery in Spain. Auchi, one of the 37 people charged by the French court, was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million, after having been found guilty of accepting illegal commissions from Elf worth $84 million.
(5) Meanwhile, back in the First World, Elf also allegedly paid at least €47 million ($54.8 million) in commissions to senior German ministers and a slush fund for former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic (CDU) Party.
"Kohl and Liechtenstein Money Man"
These payments were made in connection with a corrupt privatization deal, Elf’s purchase of a chain of gas stations and the Leuna oil refinery in eastern Germany in the early 1990s. Elf received more than €1 billion in German subsidies to help it finance €2.4 billion cost of modernization costs for the refinery. Former Chancellor Kohl denied any involvement in the scandal, and German prosecutors were unable to make a case against him – especially after Kohl’s government destroyed millions of documents and two-thirds of its computer files during the three weeks after the CDU lost the 1998 German elections. However, one of those recently convicted in the November 2003 case in France was Dieter Holzer, a German lobbyist who had handled the refinery. He got 15 months in prison and was ordered to pay a €1.5 million fine and return at least €24 million in commissions.
- A TOTAL REFORM?
However, it turns out that this “neoliberal” view of reform is extraordinarily naive. First, it usually take a long time to change corporate culture and interests. Second, as this recent 9-year Elf prosecution showed, even if senior executives are caught and convicted, the initial “loot” is so large, the investigations are so lengthy and complex, and the ultimate jail sentences and fines for such white collar crimes are so modest under present laws, on a “net present value” basis, crime really does pay quite handsomely.
So it should not be surprising that misbehavior by Elf and its new parent Total S.A. appears to have continued long after privatization. For example:
Nazarbaev and Clinton<
(6) Total S.A. has recently been implicated by the US with participaitng with five other leading oil companies – including ExxonMobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell – in a consortium that allegedly paid millions in illegal bribes to Kazahkstan’s President Nazarbaev and former Prime Minister Balgimbaev in the late 1990s, to secure oil concessions.
(7) Elf and Total S.A. have also compiled an unsavory record of dealing with Burma’s SLORC/SPDC, one of the world’s most repressive military regimes. Together with Unocal and Thailand’s National Oil Company, in July 1992 Total struck a deal with the regime to exploit the Yadana offshore gas field, and to build a $1.4 billion gas pipeline across rebel territory to Thailand – with the help of forced labor. Throughout the 1990s, Total S.A. and Unocal were Burma’s largest foreign investors, with the pipeline and a related railroad accounting for more than a third of all foreign investment in Burma, and will provide the military its largest source of foreign exchange other than heroin. The “clean currency” provided by Total and Unocal to the regime helped Burma source mortars in Portugal and helicopters in Poland.
All told, then, what we have here is a clear demonstration of just how contagious corporate corruption can be -- and how it interacts with the power of the state to generate a long-term venal alliance that is extremely hard to unravel, once it is in place. From one standpoint, French justice worked -- after all, all these former Elf senior managers have at least been jailed and fined. But it took almost a decade to catch up with them, and apart from social disgrace, the actual fines and sentences they will suffer are relatively minor, compared with all the hundreds of millions still missing. Moreover, out of all the senior French officials who knew about Elf's behavior and tolerated or encouraged it, only one saw any jail time -- and his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Finally, perhaps the worst damage from this scandal has been suffered by the scores of developing countries where Elf/ Total has long used bribery to wield undue influence. While the names of those Elf bribed are still in many cases secret, we can be sure that this not only tilted public policy unfairly in Elf's favor; it also helped to spread corruption from the First World to the Third, and helped undermine the rule of law in these fragile environments.
So those who blithely criticize developing countries for having "corrupt governments" -- which many of them no doubt do -- might do well to remember the case of Elf. As this tale indicates, the fact is that for more than forty years -- and quite possibly still to this day -- the Government of France joined together with leading French corporations and banks, plus quite a few friendly bankers in Europe's top havens, and made it national policy to foster corruption throughout the developing world, in order to serve its own perceived national interests, and pocket a few bucks for influential insiders on the side. If this does not constitute "crime against humanity," the term has little meaning.
November 17, 2003 at 02:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Friday, November 07, 2003
South Asia - The Mystery of the "Missing Women," High Population Growth Rates, and The Limits of Choice
In the 1990s, India and its non-Communist neighbors on the Asian subcontinent -- Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal -- followed the advice of UN experts and "pro-maternal choice" advocates, and bet heavily on a laissez faire approach to population control. This approach, which emphasizes education, family planning, maternal control, and the voluntary use of contraceptive devices, was supposed to be more humanitarian than the coercive approach that had been adopted by China, and briefly by India itself, in the 1970s. That approach had relied heavily on forced sterilzations, IUDs, and abortions, and heavy-handed ceilings on the number of children per family.
A decade later, as recent research on this region's demographics makes clear, both these approaches turn out to have serious limitations. For different reasons, they have both facilitated very high levels of infanticide against infant girls. And the laissez-faire approach has also utterly failed to restrain South Asia's population growth rate, which remains among the highest in the developing world. To transcend these problems will require the state to intervene, but in a much more intelligent way, by providing positive incentives to parents to "do the right thing."
Private Choice, Collective Insanity. To begin with, the voluntary approach to population control has not succeeded in reducing the overall populaton growth rate fast enough. As this The New York Times report indicates, population growth in India, and for that matter, in the whole South Asia region, continues at a very strong pace -- 1.7 percent a year. While this is below the 2 percent average recorded by South Asia in the early 1980s, it is 40 percent higher than the average for the rest of the developing world, and more than 2.3 times the population growth rate in China.
There are many factors responsible for these persistent growth rates, but among the most important are the relatively limited voluntary prevalence of contraceptives -- just 28 % of women in Pakistan and 49 percent in South Asia as a whole, compared with 82% in China, where the use of contraception was heavily subsidized and, indeed, mandated.
All told, South Asia now contains more than 1.35 billion people, a fifth of the world's population, compared with China's 1.28 billion. India alone is well on its way to displacing China as the world's largest country by the year 2020, absent a nuclear war or some unforeseen famine or epidemic. All these people are living on a land area just two-fifths the the size of the US or China, so this means intense pressures on living conditions, labor markets, and the environment.
Sexual Infanticide In both South Asia and China, another pathological byproduct of current family planning approaches, on top of cultural traditions, has been to reinforce one of the most abhorrent ancient forms of sexual discrimination. This is the age-old practice of eliminating what the Chinese called "the maggots in the rice" -- terminating pregnancies or new-borns, once it is determined that a child is a girl.
In the aggregate, the magnitude of this sexual infanticide activity is astonishing. To arrive at a very rough estimate, we've examined the World Bank's latest (2002) figures for the average "population sex ratio" -- the percentage of a country's total population that is female. For the developing world as a whole, excluding China, India, and the rest of South Asia, the average is 50.4 percent. But for China and South Asia it is 48.5 percent. The World Bank reports that India and China both have have almost identical rates, at 48.4 percent, but both rates appear to be dropping. A Chinese census in 2002 reported, for example, that the sex ratio for live births is now just 46.7%. As shown in Table 1 below (scroll to the end) , this implies that for these countries to record the same average sex ratio as other developing countries, South Asia and China would need to have almost 100 million more females in their populations than they currently do. So where are they?
The odds of conceiving a female child are 50-50 in the population at large, and certainly do not vary by country. Furthermore, life expectancy for women in all these countries actually exceeds that for men by at least 2-3 years -- so long as the women are allowed to be born in the first place, and are not snuffed out in their cribs.
So the only plausible explanation for these sex ratio differentials in South Asia and China is that something is killling off unborn and just-born girls at an extraordinary rate. Since there do not appear to be diseases or other health factors that discriminate against female children in this way, the only conceivable explanation appears to be willlful infanticide by the parents themselves, under the influence of cultural institutions like the dowry, unprincipled medical counselors and abortionists, and the state.
This is hardly an entirely new observation; other observers, like the World Health Organization, have also (rather quietly) observed that, for example, in China's case there appears to be at least 50 million women who are "missing" from the population statistics, compared with the sex ratios that one observes in other countries. But there is new evidence (see below) that the magnitude of this pathological activity may be on the increase.
The "sexual infanticide" explanation is supported by recent UN field studies that show that it is indeed a widespread practice. For example, an October 2003 study by the UN Population Fund reported a growing problem of sex-selective abortion and infanticide in India. The study found that the sex ratio for the country as a whole had declnied from 48.59% in 1991 to 48.11% in 2001, and that in some states, like Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the ratio had fallen “drastically" to 44 percent -- less than 800 girls for every 1,000 boys. Interestingly, the study also found declining sex ratos even in the country's most affluent districts of Delhi, where prospective parents use all the latest medical technology, including pre-conception gender selection practices, amniocentesis and late-term abortions, to support their curious, culture-bound preferences for male babies.
There have also been numerous press reports that corroborate similar findings with respect to China. In China's case, the impact of traditional preferences for male children was undoubtedly further aggravated by the notorious "1 child per family" that was introduced by the CP in 1979. In addition to increased infanticide and sexual discrimination, this system also produced a huge underground market in "unregistered" children, and has been widely criticized for its punitive nature.
So there are real dilemmas here, both for advocates of "choice" and "regulation" alike. Fans of "free choice" have to explain how we can square unfettered individual choice in these matters with the important goals of reduced violence and discrimination against women, as well as with the goal of securing aggregate rates of population growth that are sustainable in the long run. Fans of "regulation" have to explain how they can provide
| Category | Population | %Women | Female Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| High Income Countries | 964,738,600 | 50.71% | 489,218,944 |
| China | 1,280,975,000 | 48.42% | 620,248,095 |
| India | 1,048,279,000 | 48.41% | 507,471,864 |
| Other South Asia | 304,708,410 | 48.94% | 149,118,930 |
| China/ South Asia Total | 2,633,962,410 | 48.48% | 1,276,838,889 |
| All Other Developing Countries | 2,602,674,990 | 50.35% | 1,310,446,857 |
| World | 6,201,376,000 | 49.61% | 3,076,502,634 |
| "Missing Women:" China/ South Asia*** | - | 1.87% | 99,418,297 |
***Assuming that the China/ South Asia sex rato would otherwise equal the average in other developing countries
© Submerging Markets (2003)
(c) James S. Henry, 2003. Not for reproduction or other use without express consent of the author.
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