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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Indians should know that white man speaks with forked tongue

AWol is on his way to India. In addition to his usual bubble of armored limousines, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and dozens of secret service agents, he'll likely be carrying a million US jobs in his luggage. The WSWS describes the Bushies' agenda for the trip:
First, it wants to ensure that corporate America plays a major and ever-expanding role in India’s rapidly expanding economy—as exploiter of cheap labor in the offshore-oriented information technology and business-processing sectors, as participant in public-private partnerships (PPPs) aimed at furnishing India with the transport and energy infrastructure needed to more tightly bind it to the world capitalist economy, and as purveyor of weapons and weapon-systems to India’s burgeoning military.

The Bush administration is especially interested in prying open India’s retail trade sector—in which tens of millions are employed in small, unregulated businesses for want of proper, full-time jobs—to companies like Wal-Mart and in gaining greater access to India’s agriculture sector—which continues to provide over 60 percent of Indians with their livelihood—for agri-business giants like Monsanto.
Our economic model doesn't even work here--why do we keep exporting it? Oh right--it's the only way that our model even seems to work, by exploiting cheap labor and resources elsewhere. The WSWS continues:
The second and even more important objective of Bush’s trip is to harness India—through increased military, civilian nuclear, and geo-political collaboration—to Washington’s drive for global supremacy. In short, the US wants to transform a “rising India” into an economic, military and geo-political counter-weight to China.

Last March, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly announced that the US wants to help India become a “world power.” Subsequently, Washington and New Delhi initialed a series of agreements meant to pave the way for enhanced military cooperation, including sales of advanced US military equipment and joint foreign interventions without United Nations sanction.
Which means, of course, that some day our arms merchants will be selling us even more expensive weapons of mass destruction so that we can counter the Indian threat.