Transparency

If developing countries must have "transparency", so should developed nations. Most corrupt deals in the energy, raw-materials and commodities sectors are controlled by corporate interests and their servants in high decision-making positions. The kickbacks taken by former senior US officials from energy deals in the new Central Asian republics or by others in Angola or Congo and money given to the dictators runs into billions of dollars, which has further impoverished these poor nations

Most African dictators are creatures of multinational organizations and diamond dealers and the cause of ethnic fighting, mayhem, genocide and unashamed exploitation. The whole system is designed to exploit the poorest of the poor.

The leaders and people of the United States delude themselves that other people are envious. Yes, they admire US dynamism and the rule of law and democracy, but these apply only inside the US. But the rage is against injustice perpetrated by naked US financial clout backed by coercive military power all over the world.

The US: A law unto itself

Bush's threat of war against Iraq for defying international law is absurd. Since coming into office, he has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world in past 20 years.

The list is familiar, including but not limited to the withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the pursuit of National Missile Defense. It appears ready to violate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It opposed the ban on land mines and has sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture so that it could keep foreign observers out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay and hide its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners. It has sabotaged the small-arms treaty and is opposed to new provisions of the biological-warfare convention. It experiments with biological weapons of its own and has refused chemical-weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories. It is opposed to the International Criminal Court and is coercing other countries to sign separate agreements not to charge US citizens. It has permitted CIA hit squads to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. Even its threat to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN Security Council is a defiance of international law.

The Bush administration's foreign policy has undermined the fragile structure of international law and conventions built up during the past three centuries, to which the United States made important contributions. Former president Billy Carter, a respected elder statesman frequently invited as an observer to elections, wrote in the Washington Post on September 6 that, "formerly admired almost universally as the pre-eminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life". He added that statements on Israel by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld indicate "a radical departure from policies of every administration since 1967, always based on the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories and a genuine peace between Israelis and their neighbors". 

 [ With over 100 nuclear bombs in its arsenal ,Israel is grabbing Palestinian land illegally by building a concrete Wall against international law . Do Israelis envisage a Green Zone in the Middle East  Red Zone ! ]

Look how the energy interests are trying to rule the United States and the rest of the world. Zalmay Khalilzad, whom the Bush administration appointed as its envoy to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, was a Unocal consultant, as was, according to some reports, Karzai himself -It is well known that the Bush family acquired its wealth through oil; former president George Bush Sr still works with the Carlyle Group that specializes in huge oil investments abroad. His son's commerce secretary, Dale Evans, was chairman and chief executive officer of an oil company. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was on the board of Chevron before going to Washington. (The oil company even named a giant tanker after her, although the ship has reportedly been quietly renamed the Altair Voyager.) Dick Cheney, before becoming vice president, worked for the giant oil conglomerate Halliburton.  

[ US Energy corporate interests remain predominant  while the military –industry complex gets fatter every day , now with the so called 'never ending war against terrorism' .]

Dangers from within

The knee-jerk US reaction and quick-fix measures after the September 11 attacks have changed the very basics of US society, its function, transparency and freedoms. Thousands of its loyal citizens and students of Middle East origin and others are being scrutinized, harassed and imprisoned without charge, sometimes for no reason except for their origins. It has alienated loyal citizens of Middle East and South Asian descent, many in key positions.

The United States is an idea barely more than 200 years old that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants dominate. There are still questions about what happened to its first Catholic president John F Kennedy and some of his family members. The US is a fragile nation, never tested fully at home. Its internal security and unity are fragile. It has yet to recover from its Vietnam trauma.

The danger to the US "way of life and stability" could come from within, from black American Muslims who now number 3 million to 5 million. Black Americans are now joining the armed forces in large numbers after the compulsory military draft was abolished.

The black community and Muslims remember many historic wrongs done to them. Of the 2 million Americans in prisons, two-thirds are non-white. Many feel oppressed by the white power structure and sentencing disparities, which too often fall most harshly on minorities. Islam offers brotherhood, dignity, and a sense of pride and solidarity, especially for non-whites. But many, alienated and disfranchised, are prime targets for radical Islamists who preach a religion of violence, of overcoming oppression by jihad. Many black Americans have experienced maltreatment and dehumanization. Conversion to Islam increased after September 11, even among Hispanics.

The UK has a big Muslim population, which sends volunteers and huge sums of money to support terrorism in the South Asian subcontinent and elsewhere. Many are al-Qaeda members involved in the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and other terror-related and hijacking activities. Other European countries such as Germany and France have big Muslim populations of many millions from Turkey and North Africa, mostly on the margins of the society and fertile ground for recruitment. Besides Chechnya and other places in the Caucasus, Russia has a large Muslim population. There is a well-spread-out and long-term danger all over the Christian world. 

[ US could morph from a melting pot of nations into a melt down. France and Germany did not join US because of its Muslim population. Spain and UK have paid the price.]

Who needs a regime change?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, one misses Pravda and Izvestia, not that they propounded truth (Pravda in Russian) but they were a check on the so-called free Western media, which were careful and comparatively honest. Now, without any restraints, the brainwashing monopoly of Western propaganda is wreaking havoc around the world, specially in the United States, whether it was the 1990-91 Gulf War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, Jammu and Kashmir, and now Iraq.  

[US has little free media left, only corporate news networks , functioning as in house PR organizations .T he Big Five, the global media conglomeration of Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Bertelsmann AG, Viacom, and News Corporation, now control approximately 90% of the world's headlines Such control has undermined the foundations of democracy in USA. ]

If the American public were told that an attack on Iraq would not be like the 1990-91 computer game and might cause many thousands of casualties (given the low US threshold last tested in Mogadishu), that Arabs might destroy oilfields which bring prosperity to oil companies and cheap gas to their cars, and that US nationals might even be attacked in Muslim countries, Bush's popularity would plummet immediately.
 
The United States, with 2 percent of the world's population, controls 30 percent of world resources. And US corporate interests, forming perhaps 2 percent of this 2 percent population, control these massive resources. They want to control the world without accountability, not even to the American people.

Perhaps it is in the United States itself where its ill-informed and misinformed people need not just a regime change but a system change. Where energy and military-industry corporate interests have hijacked power from the people to pursue their narrow objectives. Where corporate chiefs enjoy coercive powers even the Communist Party chiefs in the former Soviet Union would have envied. Where blacks, Hispanics and the poor cannot freely choose a president (as in Florida, where only by not counting their votes did George Bush become the president).