COVER FEATURE

The 1% in India: Licensed to Loot
At a time when the world is up in arms against the impunity and political patronage enjoyed by corporate offenders, India’s Law Minister has gone on record to say that corporations should be above the law.
“If you lock up top businessmen, will investment come?...The judiciary has to understand the political economy,” said Salman Khushid, the UPA Government’s Minister for Law and Justice in an interview recently.
In the 2G scam probe being monitored by the Supreme Court, some of the businessmen who benefited from the scam are behind bars. They are mostly small fry – the big players like Anil Ambani, Tata etc are implicated in the scam, just as Mukesh Ambani is implicated in the KG basin oil-and-gas scam, but they are yet to be arrested or even interrogated. Janardan Reddy of the infamous Bellary mining mafia, is behind bars – but his brothers are still free. Yet, the political climate of people’s anger against corporate plunder – both globally and in India – is such that the Law Minister feels the need to remind the Supreme Court of its duty to the “political economy.”
So, according to the UPA Govt., corporate lawlessness and plunder = political economy. That’s why there’s never any action against companies (such as Maruti) who blatantly break labour laws. That’s why even when the Lavasa project or POSCO are proven to have violated a host of environmental laws, they continue to get clearance from the Government. In the noble cause of the ‘political economy’ of liberalization, police and Courts must overlook corporate crimes. It’s all in the ‘national interest.’ That’s why the Government is risking so much political embarrassment to block an effective Lokpal law – because an anti-corruption law that might pose some snags for the corrupt nexus of corporates and politicians would endanger the ‘political economy’ of liberalization-privatisation-globalisation (LPG).
But in the very temples of globalization – the US, Europe – people are on the streets against LPG! They have cracked open the truth of the LPG ‘political economy’ that serves the greed of the 1% at the cost of needs of the 99%.

In India, too, the people are beginning to recognize – and reject – the political economy of corporate greed, corruption and plunder, promoted by Governments. It’s true that even a modest Lokpal law is unpalatable for the managers of the political economy of plunder. But it’s not enough for the anti-corruption movement to stop at the demand for such a law. Along with the 99% across the world, let us build a movement that names and challenges the political economy that promotes and protects the greed, corruption and loot by 1% at the cost of the poverty, devastation and suffering of the 99%!

Message of International Longshore and Warehouse Union
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
On behalf of 40,000 members in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), I want to thank you for organizing your “Occupy Wall Street” protest in New York City which is inspiring millions of Americans.
Most of us are tired of seeing a handful of the richest corporations and executives behave as though they’re entitled to live like kings at everyone’s expense:
They aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, so schools are cutting back and colleges are
raising fees – leaving students with obscene debts.  It’s time for the millionaires – the richest 1% – to start paying their fair share so we can support education and other vital services.
They’re destroying our democracy and right to a voice in the workplace. By making it almost impossible for workers to form unions and negotiate fair agreements, corporate America is dragging down the living standards for all working families.
They’re threatening to destroy Social Security and Medicare for future generations.  We can’t allow corporations to privatize and profit from these programs.  Instead, we should close the loopholes so corporations and the rich start paying the same contributions as everyone else.
Your decision to bring these and other issues to corporate America’s doorstep is courageous – and involves some risks....
Like you, ILWU members in Longview have been arrested, beaten and pepper spayed.   We know that justice won’t be won by asking greedy employers for permission or waiting for politicians to pass laws.  That’s why we hope that you’ll stand your ground on Wall Street while we do the same in Longview – because An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

Robert McEllrath

International President

Oct. 15 Global Day of Action Sweeps the World
Political apathy has been swept away once again by a surge of political activism. In the course of nine months, a global movement premised on grassroots political activism has spread throughout the Middle East, Europe and now the United States.
People are in the streets. They are moving. They are both angry and hopeful.
Yesterday, more than 1,500 cities organized coordinated actions against a global economic system that rewards the rich and powerful (the 1%) while hundreds of millions are unemployed and the already poor, as well as the urban and rural working classes and middle class, have seen their living standards plummet.
The central and unifying reality that has spawned this movement is the financial meltdown of the largest capitalist-owned banks on Wall Street.
The U.S. government rushed to bail out the elites and allowed millions to become unemployed. The government was exposed as a servant of the 1%.
Other national governments followed suit—saving the elites who caused the crisis and shifting the burden of the economic fallout to the rest of society. Especially hard hit have been young people. From Cairo to Athens and Rome to New York City, a new generation of young people have initiated the global uprising.
The bankers, corporate tycoons and politicians are nervous. They hope the movement subsides or fractures, or that it can be co-opted. But the bottom line is that the 1% has no intention of giving up their economic and political power.
The ANSWER Coalition believes that there must be a new political system that provides every person certain inalienable rights that are certainly realizable in a $15 trillion annual economy: The right to a job, the right to free health care, the right to free education, the right to affordable child care, the right to affordable housing, the right to nutritious food, the right to live in peace. That would require liberating society’s wealth from its tyrannical control by the 1%.

From New York Times Editorial, October 8 2011
Protesters Against Wall Street
As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.
At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.
The jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.6 percent over the past year; for young high school graduates, the average is 21.6 percent. …
The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. …
The initial outrage has been compounded by bailouts and by elected officials’ hunger for campaign cash from Wall Street, a toxic combination that has reaffirmed the economic and political power of banks and bankers, while ordinary Americans suffer.
…When the protesters say they represent 99 percent of Americans, they are referring to the concentration of income in today’s deeply unequal society. Before the recession, the share of income held by those in the top 1 percent of households was 23.5 percent, the highest since 1928 and more than double the 10 percent level of the late 1970s.
That share declined slightly as financial markets tanked in 2008, and updated data is not yet available, but inequality has almost certainly resurged. In the last few years, for instance, corporate profits (which flow largely to the wealthy) have reached their highest level as a share of the economy since 1950, while worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the mid-1950s.
…Research shows that such extreme inequality correlates to a host of ills, including lower levels of educational attainment, poorer health and less public investment. It also skews political power, because policy almost invariably reflects the views of upper-income Americans versus those of lower-income Americans.

No wonder then that Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for discontent. …the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.