The last year sucked. And, if the strange change in the weather is any indication, this year promises to suck sideways.

While more qualified people can ponder over the inevitability of that prospect, and send out New Year greetings like that placard-weilding smelly bloke in Soho proclaiming the end of the world (does he know something that I don’t?) I’ll stick to my ongoing charter of demands. So, in lieu of a postcard whose mum was a tree, here’s hoping that the year ahead brings:


1) A mass destruction of weapons, not weapons of mass destruction. An end to all wars, just or unjust. No laser-guided, GPS-positioned, radar-tracked, microwave-controlled thermobaric bombs. No bunker-busters, no daisy-cutters, no smart bombs, nothing. Stop. Put an end to the whole bloody circus. There’s nothing hip about war. There’s nothing hip about a landmine blowing up under your feet, a bullet hitting bone, shrapnel tearing through flesh.

There’s no such thing as a just war. Or a ministry of defence. What the hell is it that the world needs to defend itself from? And why would a nation make itself and its policies so damn hated that it would need to defend itself from other nations? It’s like our elected leaders zipping about on undisclosed routes in bombproof convoys with small armies of apes armed to the teeth. We the People vote for them, they win a popular election, and they become our representatives (theoretically, at least). So what makes them suddenly so unpopular that they must coat their arses in gleaming armour paid for by our taxes? It seems to me that America is a lot like the average Indian politician (not like there’s another kind), just at a much larger scale. American embassies across the world are ugly fortresses. High walls, razor-wire fences, coded doors, metal detectors, a hundred guards wearing guns like jewellery, thousands of electronic eyes. All watching. Scared and scary.

Ever been to a Canadian embassy? It took me two hours to find the one here, on the fifteenth floor of some cheap building, guarded by a relic you’d want to slip a tenner for valet-parking the getaway car right next to the fire escape.

When you consider that the US has a military presence in 88 of the world’s 191 nations (and Canada doesn’t), when you consider that the US is the only nation in history to have used atomic weapons on civilian targets – twice (and Canada hasn’t), when you consider that the US maintains over 7000 nuclear weapons directed at virtually every major city on the planet (and Canada doesn’t), when you consider that the US has far more nuclear weapons than all nations of the world, combined (and Canada doesn’t), it all begins to make sense.

The way to end all war is to not start war at all. Nuclear weaponisation isn’t that irreversible decision you took to get laid last Friday night. It’s possible to step back from the brink. All it takes is beginning with a freeze on development, moving on to de-escalation, and then just burying the lot. Along the way, it also takes some intelligence, some commitment towards a welfare state, and a resolute desire to be remembered in terms other than Fucking Idiot.

Since we’re on the subject, let’s see an end to biological weapons as well, starting with the country that first used biological weapons over two-and-a-half centuries ago.

20 million Indians inhabited North America when white man arrived, and less than 2 million survive today. There’s no truer illustration of the term “decimation.” During the French and Indian Wars between 1754 and 1767, British soldiers distributed blankets that had been used by smallpox patients with the hope of initiating outbreaks among the Indians. Epidemics occurred, killing more than 50% of many affected aboriginal tribes. By the 1880's smallpox had already killed off, on average, more than 90% of them. And in “Guns, Germs And Steel”, Jared Diamond has extended the culpability of the British army onto the entire white American population. I quote: "US whites bent on wiping out ‘belligerent’ Native Americans sent them gifts of blankets previously used by smallpox patients."

Let’s face it, nuclear or biological, big or small, weapons kill – whether or not they’re used. If you disagree, consider that somewhere on this planet, a child dies of hunger every four seconds. 15 children every minute. 900 children every hour. 21,600 children every day. 7,884,000 children every year. And that barely one-and-a-half-month of America’s military spending would allow the entire world to be fed.

This is not a typo.


2) A respect for the environment. The US accounts for less than 5% of the earth’s total population and contributes to 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Despite her disproportionate representation in the grand scheme of things, the US has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol, effectively disabling a critical mechanism aimed at reducing these emissions. So the next time a specie disappears, and its last straggling remnants slam into a New York skyscraper by way of retribution, maybe it would be pertinent to ask of nature “why do they hate us?”

And then there’s the small matter of tens of millions of people dying or losing their homes from rising sea levels thanks to melting polar ice-caps thanks to global warming thanks to increased emissions from cars the size of breakaway Soviet republics.

The idea’s not that far-fetched. At the same time that the Earth Summit was underway in Rio, Tom Kijiner, the foreign minister for the Marshall Islands agonised that floods caused by global warming were destroying his country “as effectively as a nuclear bomb.” And Robert van Lieerp, UN Ambassador for Vanuatu warned of similar devastation on his South Pacific island chain. Meanwhile, just off the west coast of India, islands in the Maldives were already being evacuated and abandoned because of rising sea levels. And if five years from now a single wave laps against the doorstep of my beach-house, you can safely expect some kind of reaction against a giant auto plant somewhere.

Though I must admit, a pre-emptive strike against the parasites is certainly more tempting.

Okay, while we’re going about respecting the environment, how about an “environment tax” on air travellers? Let’s spell this out.

During take-off, a Jumbo Jet can devour 2 million litres (528,344 gallons) of air per second. In the first five minutes of flight, a commercial airliner can burn as much oxygen as 49,000 acres of forest produce in a day. Assuming this airliner takes off from Washington, DC and – instead of detouring into a couple of tall buildings – heads straight to San Francisco, it’ll have burned 17,232 gallons of jet fuel by the time it touches down. It’ll also have averaged 32 minutes taxiing, taking-off and landing. During this time, it’ll have generated 190 pounds of NOx – equal to the amount produced by driving a car 53,500 miles.

According to NASA, three of Boeing Corporation’s top-of-the-line aircraft account for over 25% of the planet’s aviation-related pollution, and each of them burns close to 30,000 tons of jet fuel in a day, making them the dirtiest planes on, and off, the ground. The resultant hole in the Ozone layer is roughly the size of United Sates. This is not a coincidence.

If you consider that laws pertaining to aviation’s impact on the environment are invariably passed keeping the aviation lobby’s interests in mind, it’s also no coincidence that under international agreement, jet fuel is not taxed -- giving the airline industry a subsidy to pollute.

The Center for International Climate Change and Environmental Research had suggested funding climate protection efforts by taxing fuel and passengers. Had their recommendation for a per-passenger tax of $8.70 been taken up two years ago, by now we’d have $10 billion towards the environment kitty. But instead of being held accountable, the rich folk that can afford to zoom around the planet to visit other rich folk are rewarded frequent-flier benefits.

Maybe Deep Vein Thrombosis is God’s way of telling us something.


3) A move to non-conventional, renewable sources of energy. The technology exists, and if only the idiots we elected could see beyond their immediate sphincters, they’d know how to exploit that technology.

Bill Gates had once reportedly joked that “if GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twentyfive-dollar cars that gave a thousand miles to the gallon.” But GM never did and never will, and neither will any other auto major. And it’s not hard to see why.

How on earth do you convince John Redneck that a nifty little hydrogen-electric car which maxxes at 4.5 bhp is actually a more fitting tribute to his testosterone-saturated manliness than the one-mile-a-gallon luxury SUV he needs for hourly trips to the Guns & Ammo section down at Wal-Mart?

Or convince Big Oil that peace in the Middle East, democracy in Venezuela and East Timor, oceans free of oil slicks, and global cooling are more critical than lining their fat bastard pockets?

I think the voice of reason around these parts has as much of a chance as a snowflake has in hell. Meanwhile, auto majors continue a pretense of concern for the climate, dedicating more resources to PR that churns out eco-friendly noises than to R&D in alternative energy. And cute stickers in pastel green shades go up on fuel hatches of our cars, proclaiming “Towards a Green Delhi” and “Euro-2 Compliant.” And in the name of progress and development and deregulation and liberalisation and economic reform and structural readjustment, governments turn the countryside into one monstrous auto plant, turning, at the same time, their backs on building any meaningful infrastructure for clean, reliable public transport.

Why, within a year of Bush becoming Commander-In-Thief, the few auto majors that had embarked on highly-publicised exercises to develop eco-friendly vehicles have quietly placed them on the back-burner, if not outright discontinued their efforts. Allan J Yeomans states in “Green Pawns And Global Warming” that a majority of programmes dealing with non-conventional energy (wind, tidal, wave, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, ocean heat transfer and atmospheric heat transfer) has come under attack worldwide. These have been vilified by “experts” in the corporate media, discarded as “nonsensical” by Big Oil, and condemned as “unviable” by their financiers.

In 1983 there was one auto major in India. Twenty years later, there are twenty. In Bangkok, the average motorist sits in his car, idling in a traffic jam, going nowhere for the equivalent of 44 eight-hour workdays per year. Four hundred new cars are added to Bangkok’s streets every day. In London, cars move not much faster than a horse-drawn carriage. Globally, these “fuel-efficient” cars consume 20% of all fossil fuel energy that is produced. And in a classic case of the pot calling the kettle a nigger, the US refuses to do anything about arresting climate change, citing Third World emissions and the Asian Brown Cloud as the real threat. Turns out, there’s nothing wrong with the John Redneck’s truck-sized automobile itself. As Ilya Ehrenburg said, “the automobile can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: it is destined to wipe out the world.”

And if you just turn your attention to Iraq, you’ll see that we’re damn close too.

What does it cost to stop the world from being wiped out? I’ll break it down for you. $8 billion a year to prevent acid rain. $8 billion a year to prevent global warming. $5 billion a year to stop ozone depletion. $7 billion a year to stop deforestation. In short, protecting the environment costs $28 billion annually. If my calculator battery isn’t totally drained, that’s $437 billion less than what the US spends on weapons every year.

Were the amount the US spends daily on weapons ($1.2 billion) be spent daily on the environment, we’d clean up the planet in less than thirty days.


4) A respect for international law.

The Security Council Resolution condemning International Terrorism was defanged by the US veto in 1987. Perhaps Nicaragua’s case against the US had nothing to do with this action. Perhaps three separate rulings by the World Court at The Hague, the UN Security Council, and the UN General Assembly that found the US in violation of international law (and ordered her to pay massive reparations to Nicaragua) had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the only terrorism that must be condemned is that which involves commercial airliners and skyscrapers.

The Comprehensive Anti-landmine Treaty was signed by 135 nations, but opposed by the US. In addition, the US has the dubious distinction of unilaterally acting against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as well as the Biological Weapons and Toxic Weapons Convention.

The US has tried to sabotage the establishment of a binding International Criminal Court. Earlier this year, it entered into an agreement with India that effectively shrugs off any questioning by the ICC of what these two countries consider their “internal affairs” – which means American soldiers and officers can’t be tried alongside Milosevic for war crimes they commit across the world, and Indian soldiers and officers can’t be taken to task for the tortures, gang-rapes, murders and disappearances they commit in Kashmir.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was not ratified by two nations: Somalia, which had no functioning government in December 1987, and the US, which had no government that was functioning. As a logical corollary to this point, the call for Abolition of the Use of Child Soldiers has been opposed by the US until 2000.

The Abolition of Capital Punishment has been consistently opposed by the US. Not surprising, given that Bush has signed more death warrants (135) than any US president ever, and given that the US is the No.4 State Executioner in the World, just behind likely bedfellows China, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women was opposed in 1979 by (no prizes for guessing) the US and Israel. After losing the vote, they opted for the second-best solution, i.e. voting against the inclusion of Palestinian women at the conference.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was opposed by the US till 1994. While the international community was opposing apartheid in South Africa, the US was voting alone against UN efforts to sanction the South African government. Between 1978 and 1987 there were over 10 such instances. Most recently, the US just plain walked out of August 2001 UN Conference on Racism.

In November 1981, the US opposed 126 other states in rejecting the right of every society to choose its own economic and social system in accord with the will of its people. In 1985, the US had voted alone against 134 countries in opposing the declaration of the indivisibility and interdependence of economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights. The US has even taken exception to the right of nations to develop. In 1986, she voted against 146 other countries in opposing such a right. The fact that this declaration is a subset of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was deemed irrelevant. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has also been rendered useless by the US. The covenant was opposed by the US until 1992. When finally it was accepted, it was only within the limits of its own laws. And what a great idea that was.

In 1982 and 1983, the U.S. was alone in voting against a declaration that education, work, healthcare, proper nourishment and national development are human rights. In 1996, the US affirmed the same opposition at the World Food Summit. The reason? The recognition of food as a “right” and not merely a basic “need” would enable poor nations to sue the United States for special trade deals.

Can one really expect any better from a country that doggedly refuses to respect even its own constitution?


5) An equitable distribution of our planet’s wealth and resources.

Today, 1% of America’s population is in control of more wealth than the total wealth of 90% of the population. The US consumes over 40% of the earth’s resources, while more than 30,000 people – over two-thirds of them children – die of hunger every day. According to the respected hunger advocacy group Bread for the World, a yearly appropriation of $13 billion would meet their basic health and nutrition needs and save their lives. That’s about what America spends on pet food annually, or less than 1/36th of Bush’s $465 billion defense budget. We could also cover this amount seven times with the yearly cost of the recent tax cuts for the wealthiest one-in-a-hundred Americans.

Every day, nearly 55,000 hectares of forests are hacked down, more than 50 species disappear, more than 30 million animals are slaughtered for meat, and more than 300,000 automobiles are added to the planet. Only some 5% of global landspace remains as natural habitat – the remaining 95% is already invaded, occupied, polluted, contaminated, poisoned and turned into a gigantic global agri-factory to feed, house, clothe, employ, transport, defend, entertain and genetically engineer ever more humans. Power to the people!

Even the Swiss Bank UBS AG study admits that over a billion people subsist on less than a dollar a day, while 20% of humanity (for want of a better term) owns 80% of global assets and income, consumes 80% of Earth’s resources, causes 80% of bio-diversity destruction, and 80% of global pollution.

In large parts of South-East Asia, pesticide cocktails used on a surfeit of genetically-modified crops have raised the resistance of mosquitoes to such an extent that hundreds of people are dropping dead from virulent dengue fever daily – even in places like Singapore, a police state notorious for slapping a $2000 fine on anyone found breeding mosquitoes.

Fish is a major component of much of the world ‘s diet, as well as an important factor in local economies and employment. But thanks to $20 billion in fishing subsidies to big conglomerates, overfishing is the order of the day, and more than 70% of the world’s fish stocks are severely depleted. Some commercially viable species are close to extinction.

The saddest, most tragic and most infuriating part is that there’s enough to go around. Some 80% of the world’s hungry children live in countries with actual food surpluses, much of which is in the form of grain fed to animals which will be consumed only by the rich. In the developing world, the share of grain fed to livestock has tripled since 1950 and now exceeds 21% of the total grain produced. Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry all over the world because much of the arable land is being used to grow feed-grain for animals rather than food-grain for people (mind, an acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production). Thousands of tons of grain rots in silos across India, while thousands die of hunger. Meanwhile, genetically-modified sludge moonwalks across our plates cross-dressed as food.

In other words, it’s time to turn the world upside down and see what falls out of its pockets. Else, we can all get on that free-market bus and head off to our collective hell. And you know what hell is, of course. It’s sitting in an unventilated room for aeons sealing envelopes with Hallmark CEO Donald J Hall Jr.

Don’t forget to send a postcard.


6) An end to torture. And an end to warehousing people in prison as a solution to the accommodation problems of society’s poorest lot.

Until 1994, the US opposed the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (after which she ratified this only within the limits of her own laws). As a result, half-a-million people in the US suffered abusive police treatment in various forms, including physical assaults and threats with trained dogs in 1996 alone. Ashcroft’s own Department of Justice indicates that a total of 125 civilians died of maltreatment at the hands of police officers between 1980 and 1995, with only one police officer punished for related crimes.

It costs in the neighbourhood of $30,000 a year to keep someone behind bars in the Land of the Free. That’s $60 billion a year for America’s 2 million inmates. Going by that figure, the US has more people in prison than any nation in the history of the world. Over 60% are non-violent drug offenders. Since 1990, eight under-18 teenagers have been executed, and 60 other juveniles are on death row.

Over the past decade, the US executed 30 people suffering mental disorders, including a convicted murderer in Texas with the mental capacity of a seven-year-old child. That would be someone about five years smarter than Bush.

Today, blacks account for 12% of the total American population, yet comprise 54.2% of the prison population. Today, a black man in America faces a nine times greater chance of receiving a death sentence, than a white person convicted for the same crime. Today, 67% of prison inmates are coloured people, even though coloured people represent a mere 25.1% of US population. Today, if your name happens to be Ken Lay or Warren Anderson, you can enjoy the rest of your life playing golf with your buddies. But if it happens to be Abner Louima or Amadou Diallo, you get a broomstick rammed up your rectum or 41 bullets in your face.

This Land of the Free is issued in public interest by two corporations whose stocks are traded on Wall Street – Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut Corporation. Denny Eichhorn mentions in “Too Much Coffee Man” that these are big businesses, whose goal is to have the entire American inmate population housed in privately run prisons, working as virtual slaves, with no unions, minimum-wage guarantees, overtime wages, or retirement benefits other than the prospect of a lingering death in lockup. They want to operate as profitably as possible, and they exhibit a total disregard for the problems their practices cause for society as a whole.

But private enterprise alone isn’t raking in the spoils. The US administration, under growing opposition to the School Of Americas (in Fort Benning, Georgia) figured that this kindergarten for torturers, rapists and despots was too much of a PR liability. The solution? They renamed it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. From the WHISC website I learn that training in the fine arts still begins at as little as $3,765 per month.

What boggles the mind most is not these statistics, but that in the face of these statistics all of humanity (that’s you, and you, and you) can continue to pretend that everything’s just fine, and witness the worst kinds of injustice and the most degrading forms of atrocity without once flinching, and get on with a lifetime of suffering in silence. By our silence, we’re victim, accessory and perpetrator, all rolled into one.

The Chinese say this is the year of the goat. From here, it looks more like the year of the sheep.