US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

Romney Thinks Global Climate Change Is a Great Big Joke

Good Lord, what a smug fucktard this guy is. Look at all those White Republican Brooks Brothers men laughing uproariously about climate change. Yeah! Hurricane Sandy is real hilarious, isn’t it?

I think this monster is going to lose in 6 days. It will be very nice to see his face when he is forced to admit that he’s going down to defeat. I’d like to see him lose than for no other reason than to wipe that permanent smirk off this rich punk’s face.

Mitt Romney is a punk! A smirking little punk rich boy…

Obama Versus Romney Energy Plans

Click to enlarge. Romney’s energy plan would mean the death of planet Earth itself!

We don’t have much time left before global warming goes completely out of control, possibly with no way to turn it back or stop it. Romney’s energy plan would lead to global warming going completely out of control with no chance of getting it back. In other words, Romney would singlehandedly kill planet Earth itself.

If I am not mistaken, Romney does not even believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Why Are Conservatives Anti-Science?

Here.

It is an interesting question. The answer either is that all conservatives down through time have always opposed science (Theory 1) or that conservative opposition to science is a recent phenomenon and has to do with the fact that science rejects most of the foundational beliefs of conservatism (Theory 2).

I would argue that both are true. Conservatism is based on elitism, and elitism is a philosophy that is hard to justify in any remotely empirical sense. It is very hard to argue that a society in which almost all of the rewards flow to a tiny elite at the top while the rest wallow in the worst misery is the best of all possible worlds. Yet this is the argument of conservatism, always has been and always will be.

Another notion is that conservatism believes in freezing time. Conservatives in general are opposed to change. This is because due to the what I would argue are the rules or laws of history, mankind will always move towards change in a more progressive direction.

Conservatives of course will oppose all such change. In societies that have already moved dramatically forwards, conservatives will try to roll back the hands of time towards their Burkean monarchical dream society or whatever looks like it.

Mankind progresses away from hierarchy and towards relative equality. Conservatism opposes anything remotely representing the slightest of equality and always supports the most backwards and primitive of hierarchical orders. So conservatism in our modern era will always be on the wrong side of the historical process.

What meager gains in makes in rolling back time to their wonder era where niggers knew their place, a man’s home was his castle and women were prim and proper ladies will always be rolled back rather quickly by the inevitable forces of history.

In societies that have moved forwards substantially beyond the primitive order, conservatives will always be reactionaries, trying to roll back the hands of time back to the era where everything was fine and dandy (italicized above).

Science does not believe in remaining in place as scientific knowledge always moves forward, always progresses. Science opposes stagnation and so opposes the very nature of conservatism itself. And of course science is not reactionary. Science does not believe in rolling back modern science and going back to the era of Copernicus and bloodletting and leeches in medicine.

Since science is open minded and ready to reject any theory that is not empirically proven, it’s automatically opposed to conservatism. Conservatism is based on dogmas that are deeply believed but imperfectly proven, if they are proven at all.

The general dogma of conservatism is that conservatism is good for the elite and bad for everyone else. Even in the social sciences, conservative dogma falls flat on its face.

Neoliberalism has a record almost as bad as real existing socialism, yet one is a failed ideology while the other continues to be championed around the globe.

In economic science, it’s long been proven that structural adjustment is bad for 3rd world countries, that the 3rd world debt is unpayable and that trickle down or supply side economics has been proven repeatedly to not work. Instead of learning their lessons, conservatives keep repeating the failed policies of the past.

The economic crash proved that neoliberalism and supply side economics always fails catastrophically, yet the conservative response to the crash was to double down and do the same neoliberalism – supply side theory twice, or five times a much!

It’s been proven that abstinence sex ed doesn’t work, but conservatives push it anyway. Denying women contraceptives will have many ill affects on society, but conservatives push it anyway. All research in pubic health completely rejects conservative theory in medicine (private medicine). Private or capitalist education always fails.

Bilingual education works well, and getting rid of it is harmful to L2 speakers. Cutting back on education makes for a worse society, not a better society. Cutting back on science spending harms society on many levels, including economically.

Global warming is supported by 98% of climate scientists, but conservatives uniformly reject it. In fact, conservatives reject almost all environmental science. Use of antibiotics in factory farms leads to antibiotic resistance, but conservatives don’t believe it. Colony collapse disorder is caused by Bayer’s insecticides, but conservatives so no it isn’t.

The more guns you have, the more crime and gun crime, but conservatives say no. If you don’t fix highways and bridges, they will all start to fall apart, costing the economy terribly and possibly killing motorists. Conservatives say that’s not true.

Much of conservative rejection of science is based on religion. Conservatives don’t believe in evolution, so they reject the entire foundational basis of modern biology and indeed a good part of modern medicine too. Conservatives believe male homosexuality is a lifestyle, while science suggests it is not. They say that therapy changes gay men straight, but science suggests otherwise.

In short, almost nothing that modern conservatives believe, almost none of the dogmas that they hold dear, hold up empirically in the scientific community. Of course scientists themselves increasingly reject the backwards and primitive ideology of conservatism. In 1965, 40% of scientists were Republicans. Now only 8% are.

In the academy, conservatives are quite rare, and ideology and research coming out of our institutions of higher learning increasingly rejects conservatism in most ways. The smarter someone is, the less likely they are to be conservative. Conservative PhD’s are rather rare.

Yet as Edmund Burke, admirer of the French monarchy, fierce critic of Jacobinism and father of modern conservatism himself noted, while not all conservatives are stupid, most stupid people are conservatives. This was true in 1866, and it is still true today. In fact, it is even more true.

What is interesting that the leading force of idiotism, anti-education, anti-science and Know Nothingism in the US is now White men. This group was once the leading edge of a movement called Progressivism in the US. This was the group that freed the slaves, emancipated women, instituted universal education, etc. Now it’s the largest and most fiercely idiotic and deliberately stupid group in the country.

 

 

“No Rainwater in Tokelau,” by Alpha Unit

There’s not enough water in Texas. There’s not enough in East Africa and some other places, too.

Climate change is being blamed for some of it. La Niña, specifically, is being blamed for what’s happening in Texas – and for what’s happening in the South Pacific. Several island nations in the region are having water shortages and trying to fend off a crisis.

Tuvalu and parts of Samoa have begun water rationing. And the tiny nation of Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand, has only a week’s worth of fresh drinking water left. The people who live there collect rainwater for drinking, but because of La Niña, there hasn’t been much rain.

New Zealand is now in a joint humanitarian effort with the US government. A US Coast Guard vessel stationed in Honolulu met up with a New Zealand Defence Force aircraft on American Samoa to get water to Tokelau.

The US Coast Guard cutter Walnut has used its onboard desalination plant to produce 136,000 liters of drinking water. International seagoing vessels typically have onboard desalination plants. Naval vessels, cruise ships, and privately owned vessels have them. Most US Navy ships use reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants.

In the RO process, pressurized seawater is filtered through a specialized semi-permeable membrane, which can remove about 99% of the impurities in water. After desalination, water is remineralized since desalination removes some of the important minerals normally found in drinking water. Then they check it for impurities, make sure there are no pathogens, and adjust the pH. Now it’s ready for delivery.

By the way, governments and private concerns have been examining the prospect of offshore desalination vessels for years. (Everything’s on the table. There’s a lot of people – and people use a lot of water.) There’s much to consider, cost (including energy costs) and what to do with that brine you get from desalination being major questions.

But there are people figuring it out.

Hilary Clinton, Tea Partier

This is what Hilary Clinton said recently. Discussing global warming, she said that global warming will be a great thing because the arctic ice will melt enough so that ships will be able to cruise through the Arctic very easily without having to worry about ice. I guess the Nome to Oslo route will be nice and quick.

Hilary Clinton was a good liberal President’s wife under Bill Clinton in the 1990′s. If you read her work, she’s always been a good liberal. But something happens to US liberals once they get into office. They morph into rightwingers.

It’s interesting to ponder why this might be so.

The truth is that the US government is owned completely by the US rich, the corporations, the bankers and Wall Street. With Citizens United, this is more true than ever. Even Democrats have to take the cash from the corporations and the rich if they want to get into office. Note the recent $45,000 a plate dinner for “liberal” Barack Obama. These are the people who put Obama into office. These are the people who own him. He’s beholden to them, not to us. When he gets into office, they give him his marching orders.

Once a President of either party gets into office, they realize that they are controlled by the rich and the corporations who really run the country. Republicans realize this anyway, and they only work for the moneyed classes and corporations anyway, so they don’t care. But no matter how liberal a Democrat is, this is the reality that hits them in the face the day they walk into office. Reading Barack Obama’s published work before 2008, he seems to be the typical liberal university professor type. But once he got into office, that all changed, and he’s spent most of his time trying to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan.

The truth is that the same thing probably happened to both Hilary and Obama. Once you get in office, you realize who really calls the shots in the US – the rich and the corporations. They run the country, the run both parties, the entire US media – TV, newsmagazine, newspapers, the Pentagon, the US military – in short, they run this entire country as their personal feudal fiefdom. You can’t go against them. On domestic policy, you must obey your rich and corporate feudal masters. On foreign policy, the agenda is US imperialism. You must obey the dictates of your lords and masters or you will be destroyed and run out of office.

This is probably as good an explanation as any of why there is no US Left, why there is no opposition press in the US, why we have two rightwing parties – the radical rightwing Republicans and the moderate rightwing Democrats, and why the future of America is the same as the future of all countries controlled by the Right – hopeless and progressive Third Worldization.

The Stupid Party

The Republican Party has been anti-science for a long time now, since Reagan in 1980 at least. Part of the problem is due to capitalism. Capitalists simply reject science when it gets in the way their profits. That’s why the state always has to run science research. Science is too important to let smarmy capitalist liars get their mitts all over it. Science run by capitalists, when it was done at all, would come up with exactly those findings that the capitalists running the science would want to come up with.

Note I said when it was done at all. Much basic science simply would not be run by the private sector. The private sector would only fund science that they thought they could make a buck off of, or else they would fund fraudulent science designed to protect their profits from regulators.

The Republican Party has been getting more anti-science since 1980. In fact, recent studies have shown that watching Fox News actually makes you stupid, in a dose response fashion. The more Fox News you watch, the stupider you get. That’s because Fox News lies to you about the truth all the time. There are many truths that Fox News will not admit because they are ideologically bad for the Right. And there are many lies that it continues to peddle because those lies are good for the Right.

Fortunately, the Left in the US, or what’s left of it, doesn’t have the same problem.

New information has just come out that proves that a majority of Republican voters, at least in Iowa, may well be retarded. Of Iowa Republicans:

79% do not believe in global warming.

65% do not believe in evolution.

Rick Perry has chimed in. He doesn’t believe in evolution either, but he believes in fucking beautiful young men, in quantities even. Rick Perry doesn’t believe in global warming either, but he believes in fucking scores of hot young hookers, stripper and call girls, often while doing lines of cocaine.

Perry has a particularly bizarre theory about global warming. He says that there is a gigantic conspiracy on the part of tens of thousands of climate scientists all over the world to cook the books and make up this fake scientific theory. Why are they all lying like this? For the money, he says. To keep the dollars rolling into their projects. Amazing, and not one scientist has blown the whistle about this.

Never mind that 97.5% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming. Never mind that even mainstream scientific groups are sounding ever shriller warnings lately about this looming crisis. Never mind that in the past few years the debate in climate circles has not been on whether global warming exists, but on whether or not we are underestimating it. The worried consensus is that we may well be.

Mitt Romney has chimed in idiotically, saying that he is not sure if the planet is warming or if humans are to blame. Way to have it both ways, Mittens.

India: Hell on Earth

Here is an excellent piece about India that I got from an internet site. The author is unknown, but he may be a Dalit or low caste Indian. It sums up why India is such a Hellhole – Indians created it that way.

We have a commenter on here called Dota, an Indian Muslim, who hates India way more than I do. He fled to Canada. He recently said that India is Hell and it’s people are the scum of humanity. That’s a hard-hitting thing to say, but is it true? He lived there for many years and I did not.

It does appear that Indian society and culture itself is at the core of India’s problems, and I can’t help but think that the religion of Hinduism is a big part of the country’s problems. As Dota says, of all religions, Hinduism cares about people the least. A shocking statement, but is it true?

In another comment, I talked about the hundreds of millions starving, diseased, shitting outdoors and living in the streets or fetid slums of India. According to Dota, Indian elites feel that the Indian poor living and dying in Hell deserve everything they get, up to and including death. That’s why there’s so little effort to fix up the mess – the poor deserve their fate. They even deserve to die. A shocking statement again, but what if it is true?

And once again, this belief seems to circle back around to Hinduism once again. The Hindu religion seems to be at the very heart and core of India’s Hell on Earth.

Why Do 1 Million Indians Flee India Every Year?

Any crackdowns on illegal immigrants abroad or restricting quotas to Indians are a major concern to India’s politicians. The latest statistics from the US Department of Homeland Security shows that the number of Indian illegal migrants jumped 125% since 2000! Ever wonder why Indians migrate to another countries but no one comes to India?

Here are some Indian facts:

Poverty Graph

According to the WFP, India accounts around 50% of the world’s hungry (more than in all of Africa) and its fiscal deficit is one of the highest in the world. India’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) score is 23.7, a rank of 66 out of 88 countries. India’s rating is slightly above Bangladesh but below all other South Asian nations, and India is listed under the “alarming” category. [IFPRI Country Report on India].

Around six out of 10 Indians live in the countryside, where abject poverty is widespread. 34.7% of the Indian population has an income below $1 a day, and 79.9% lives on less than $2 a day. According to the India’s Planning Commission report, 26.1% of the population lives below the poverty line. The World Bank’s poverty line is $1 a day, but the Indian poverty line is Rs 360 a month, or 30 cents a day.

The Current Account Balance of India

“A major area of vulnerability for us is the high consolidated public-debt to GDP ratio of over 70 percent…(and) consolidated fiscal deficit,” says the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Mr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the current account balance of India is -$37,510,000,000 (minus) while China is the wealthiest country in the world with $426,100,000,000 (plus). India listed as 182 and China as 1 [CIA: The World Factbook].

Human Development vs GDP growth

The Human Development Report for 2009 released by the UNDP ranked India 134 out of 182 countries, based on measures of life expectancy, education and income. India has an emigration rate of 0.8%. The major continent of destination for migrants from India is Asia with 72.0% of emigrants living there. The report found that India’s GDP per capita (purchasing power parity) is $2,753, far below Malaysia’s $13,518. China listed as 92 with PPP of $5,383.

Population

According to the Indian census of 2001, the total population was 1.028 billion. Hindus numbered 827 million or 80.5%. About 25 per cent (24 million) of those Hindus belong to Scheduled Castes and Tribes. About 40 per cent (400 million) are “Other Backward Castes”. The 15 per cent Hindu upper castes inherited the majority of India’s civil service, economy and active politics from their British colonial masters.

Thus the caste system virtually leaves lower caste Hindus as an oppressed majority in India’s power structure. Going by figures quoted by the Backward Classes Commission, Brahmins alone account for 37.17 per cent of the bureaucracy [Who is Really Ruling India?].

The 2004 World Development Report mentions that more than 25% of India’s primary school teachers and 43% of its primary health care workers are absent on any given day!

Living Conditions of Indians

89 percent of rural households do not own telephones; 52 percent do not have any domestic power connection. There are daily power cuts even in the nation’s capital. The average brownout in India is three hours per day during non-monsoon months and 17 hours daily during the monsoon. The average village is 2 kilometers away from an all-weather road, and 20 percent of rural habitations have partial or no access to a safe drinking water supply. [Tarun Khanna, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization].

According to National Family Health Survey data (2005-06), only 45 per cent of households in the country had access to improved sanitation.

Education

India has over 35 per cent of the world’s total illiterate population [UNESCO Education for All Report 2008]. Only 66 per cent of people are literate in India (76 per cent men and 54 per cent women).

About 40 million primary school-age children in India are not in school. More than 92% children do not go beyond secondary school. According to reports, 35 per cent schools don’t have infrastructure such as blackboards and furniture. And close to 90 per cent have no functional toilets. Half of India’s schools still have leaking roofs or no water supply.

While Japan has 4,000 universities for its 127 million people, and the US has 3,650 universities for its 301 million, India has only 348 universities for its 1.2 billion people. In the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities by Institute of Higher Education published by, Shanghai Jiao Tong, only two Indian Universities are included.

Even those two IIT’s in India found only a lower slot (203-304) in the 2007 report. Although Indian universities churn out three million graduates a year, only 15% of them are suitable employees for blue-chip companies. Only 1 million among them are IT professionals.

Health

India today allocates lower than one per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to health. According to United Nations calculations, India’s spending on public health as a share of GDP is the 18th lowest in the world. 150 million Indians are blind. 2.13 per cent of the total population (21.9 million) live with disabilities in India. Yet, only 34 per cent of the disabled are employed [Census 2001]. India has the single highest share of neonatal deaths in the world, 2.1 million.

107,000 leprosy patients live in India. 15.3% of the population do not live past age forty. Serpent attacks kill as many as 50,000 Indians while the cobra occupies a hallowed place in the Hindu religion. Heart disease, strokes and diabetes cost India an estimated $9 billion in lost productivity in 2005. The losses could grow to a staggering $200 billion over the next 10 years if corrective action is not taken quickly, says a study by the New Delhi-based Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

There are only 585 rural hospitals compared to 985 urban hospitals in the country. Out of the 6,39,729 doctors registered in India, only 67,576 are in the public sector and the rest are either in the private sector or abroad. According to a survey by NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization), 40 per cent of the people hospitalised have either had to borrow money or sell assets to cover their medical expenses. Over 85 per cent of the Indian population does not have any form of health coverage.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India. India accounts for one-fifth of the global TB incident cases. Each year about 1.8 million people in India develop TB, of which 0.8 million are infectious cases. It is estimated that annually around 330,000 Indians die from TB every year [WHO India].

Economy under Siege by Elite Hindus

In India, the wealth of 36 families amounts to $191 billion, which is one fourth of India’s GDP. In other words, 35 elite Hindu families own one quarter of India’s GDP by leaving 85% of ordinary Hindus poor!

The dominant group of Hindu nationalists come from the three upper castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas) that constitute only 10 per cent of the total Indian population. But, they claim perhaps 80% of the jobs in the new economy in sectors such as software, biotechnology, and hotel management.

India is also one of the most under-banked major markets in the world with only 6 bank branches per 1,000 sq kms, according to the World Bank, and less than 31% of the population has access to a bank account. According to India’s national agency (NABARD), around 60 per cent of people do not having access to financial institutions in India. The figure is less than 15 per cent in developed countries.

Corruption

According to TI, 25% of Indians have paid bribes to obtain a service. 68% believe that governmental efforts to stop corruption are ineffective. More than 90% consider the police and the political parties as the most corrupt institutions. 90% of Indians believe that corruption will increase within the next 3 years.

“Corruption is a large tax on Indian growth; it delays execution, raises costs and destroys the moral fiber,” says Prof. Rama Murthi. Transparency International estimates that Indian truckers pay something in the neighborhood of $5 billion annually in bribes to keep freight flowing. According to Rahul Gandhi, only 5 per cent of development funds reach their intended recipients due to hierarchical corruption in the country [Financial Times].

Discrimination Against Dalits

Crime against Dalits occur every 20 minutes in India. Every day 3 Dalit women are raped, 2 Dalits are murdered and 2 Dalit houses are burnt down! These figures represent only a fraction of the actual number of incidents since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper caste Hindu individuals. Official figures show that there are still 343,000 million manual scavengers in India from the Dalit community. More than 165 million Dalits in India are simply abused by their Hindu upper castes due to their birth [HRW Report 2007].

Human Rights

When it comes to human rights issues in India, it has not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and its citizens do not have the opportunity to find recourse in remedies that are available under international law. The victims are trapped in the local Hindu caste system, which in every aspect militates against their rights.

India has a very poor record of protecting the privacy of its citizens, according to the latest report from Privacy International (PI). India scored 1.9 points, which makes it an ‘extensive surveillance society’. A score between 4.1 and 5.0 (the highest score) would mean a country “consistently upholds human rights standards.” PI is a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations.

Fake encounter killings are rampant in India. These extrajudicial killings are inspired by the theological texts of the Brahmins such as Artha Shastra and Manusmriti which teach espionage and torture methods. Every such killing of an innocent person, branded a terrorist, has encouraged the killer cops to target socially excluded communities like dalits, tribals and minorities.

India’s intelligence agencies like IB, RAW, etc. seem to be thoroughly infiltrated by foreign secret services which support powerful weapon producing nations. Formed in 1947, IB is engaged in wiretapping, spying on political opponents and sometimes indicting people on false criminal charges. The IB also has files on numerous authors, bloggers and media persons.

According to the National Human Rights Commission, as of 30th June 2004, there were 3,32,112 prisoners in Indian jails out of which 2,39,146 were awaiting trial. That’s more than 70% who had not yet seen a judge. India’s jails hold a disproportionate number of the country’s minority Muslims, a sign of discrimination and alienation from the Hindu majority.

The bar association in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has refused to represent 13 Muslim suspects accused of bombing courthouses in 2005. A large percentage of Indian police officers, attorneys and judges appear regularly at events organized by notorious Hindu militant groups.

India is a parliamentary democracy, but nevertheless, it is not exactly a fully free society. The human rights group Freedom House ranks India as a 2 (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 the highest) for political rights and 3 for civil liberties. Elections are generally free, but, notes Freedom House, “Government effectiveness and accountability are also undermined by pervasive criminality in politics, decrepit state institutions, and widespread corruption.”

The State Department observes: “There were numerous reports that the government and its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals and insurgents, or staged encounter deaths.”

Minorities

About 20%, or 200 million Indians, are religious minorities. Muslims constitute 138 million or 13.4%, Christians, 24 million or 2.3%, Sikhs, 19 million or 2%, Buddhists, 8 million or 0.8% and Jains, 4 million or 0.4%. “Others” numbered 6.6 million or 0.6%. According to Mr. Tahir Mahmood, an Indian Muslim journalist, “The 2.3% Christians in the Indian population cater to 20% of all primary education in India, 10% of all the literacy and community health care, 25% of all existing care of destitute and orphans, 30% of all the handicapped, lepers and AIDS patients, etc.”

Discrimination Against Minority Muslims

Recently, Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee report admitted that 138 million Muslims across India are severely underrepresented in government employment, including Public Sector Units. Ironically, West Bengal, a communist ruled state, reported 0 (zero) percent Muslims in higher positions in its PSU’s! The share of Muslims in government jobs and in the lower judiciary in any state simply does not come anywhere close to their population share.

The only place where Muslims can claim a share in proportion to their population is in prison! Muslim convicts in India is 19.1%, while the number of under trials is 22.5%, which exceed their population ratio. A note sent on January 9 by the army to the Defence Ministry in 2004 said that there were only 29,093 Muslims among a total of 1.1 million military personnel — a ratio of 2.6%, which compares poorly with the Muslims’ 13.8% share in the Indian population. Officially, the Indian Army doesn’t allow head counts based on religion.

A Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared to the national average of four years. Less than two percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology come from the Muslim community. According to National Knowledge Commission member Jayathi Ghosh, “There is a need to re-orient official strategies for ensuring better access of Muslim children to schooling outside the madrasas which cater to only four per cent of children from the community.”

Discrimination in Media

Hindu upper caste men, who constitute just eight per cent of the total population of India, hold over 70% of the key posts in newsrooms in the country. Including the so-called twice-born Hindu castes, the number rises to 85% of key posts despite constituting just 16% of the total population, while the intermediary castes represent a meager 3%.

The Hindu Other Backward Class groups, who are 34% of the total population, have a share of just 4% in Indian newsrooms. Muslims, who constitute about 13% of the population, control just 4% of top media posts while Christians and Sikhs have a slightly better representation. But the worst scenario emerges in the case of Scheduled Castes (SC’s) and Scheduled Tribes /Aborgines (ST’s), whose representation is nearly nil. [CSDS Study, 2006, The Hindu, June 05, 2006]

Discrimination in the Judiciary

India’s subordinate courts have a backlog of over 22 million cases while the 21 high courts and the Supreme Court have 3.5 million and 32,000 pending cases (2006). In subordinate courts, over 15 million cases are filed and an equal number disposed of annually by about 14,000 judges! Every year a million or more cases are added to the arrears. At the current speed, the lower courts will need 124 years to clear the backlog. There were only 13 judges for every million people.

Recently a parliamentary committee blamed the judiciary for keeping out competent persons of downtrodden communities “through a shrewd process of manipulation.” Between 1950 to 2000, 47% of chief justices and 40% of judges were of Brahmin origin!

Dalits and Indian aborigines make up less than 20 out of 610 judges working in Supreme Court and state high courts. “This nexus and manipulative judicial appointments have to be broken”, the report urged. [Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on Constitutional Review, Sudarshan Nachiappan]. Among 12 states with high Muslim populations, Muslim representation in the judicial sector was limited to 7.8% [Justice Sachar Report].

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only 31 per cent of criminal trials are completed in less than a year. Some even take more than 10 years. According to its study, Crime in India 2002, nearly 220,000 cases took more than 3 years to reach court, and about 25,600 exhausted 10 years before they were completed. The term of the Liberhan Commission, formed 14 years ago to probe the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and originally given a mandate of three months, has been extended again!

Discrimination Against Children

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, India has the highest number of street children in the world. There are no exact numbers, but conservative estimates suggest that about 18 million children live and labor in the streets of India’s urban centers. Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta each have an estimated street children population of over 100,000. The total number of child laborers in India is estimated to be 60 million.

The level of child malnutrition in India is among the highest in the world, higher even than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, says the report Extent of Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition in India by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. While around 25 percent of children globally are underweight, in India the number is 43 percent.

A quarter of all neonatal deaths in the world (2.1 million) occurred in India, says the UNICEF Report 2007 . More than one in five children who die within four weeks of birth is an Indian. Nearly fifty percent of Indian children who die before the age of five do not survive beyond the first 28 days.

Discrimination Against Women

According to the 2001 census, female literacy in India is 54.16% versus male literacy of 75.85%. Most working women remain outside the organized sector. A mere 2.3% are administrators and managers, and only 20.5% of professional and technical workers are women.

There are an estimated 40 million Hindu widows in India, the least fortunate of them shunned and stripped of the life they lived when they were married. It’s believed that 15,000 widows live on the streets of Vrindavan, a Hindu holy city of about 55,000 population in northern India.

Many widows – at least 40 per cent are said to be under 50 – are dumped by their relatives in religious towns and left to live off charity or beg on the streets. Their plight was highlighted in Deepa Mehta’s award-winning film Water, which had to be shot mainly outside India because of Hindu extremist opposition to its production.

Nearly 9 out of 10 pregnant women between ages 15 and 49 years suffer from malnutrition, about half of all children (47%) under five are underweight, and 21% of the populations are undernourished. India alone has more undernourished people (204 million) than all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.

Nearly 20% of women dying in childbirth around the globe are Indians. Six out of every 10 births take place at home, and untrained people attend more than half of those births. 44% of Indian girls are married before age of 18. 16% of girls from age 15-19 are already mothers or expecting their first child, and pregnancy is the leading cause of mortality in this age group.

On average, one Indian woman commits suicide every four hours over a dowry dispute. In an Indian marriage, the woman should bring jewelery, cash and even consumer durables as part of dowry to the in-laws. If they fail bring enough valuables, the victims are burnt to death – doused in kerosene and set on fire. The in-laws routinely claim that the death happened simply due to an accident.

Rape is the fastest growing crime in India. Every hour Indian women suffer two rapes, two kidnappings, four molestations and seven incidents of cruelty from husbands and relatives [National Crime Records Bureau Report 2006].

Fetus Killing

The female to male birth ratio was feared to reach 20:80 by the year 2020 as female fetus killing is rampant. Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either just before they were born or immediately after, the Indian Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury related to Reuters.

According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys. The availability of ultrasound sex determination tests leads to mass abortions in India.

Around 11 million abortions are carried out in India every year, and nearly 80,000 women die during the process, says a report from the Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI).

Human Trafficking

Out of the 593 districts in India, 378 or 62.5% are affected by human trafficking. In 2006, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) sponsored a study conducted by Shakti Vahini, which found that domestic violence, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, unsafe migration and child marriage are the major reasons for the increasing rate of illegal human trafficking.

95% of the women in Madhya Pradesh involved in commercial sex are there due to family traditions. So are 51.79% in Bihar. While 43% of the total women trafficked are minors, 44 percent of the women involved in the flesh trade are there due to poverty.

Of the total women who are into sex work in the country, 60% are from the lower and backward classes, which indicates the pathetic living conditions of these communities. In Madhya Pradesh, a political bastion of Hindu right wing parties, 96.7% of women sex workers are from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

India has 4 million prostitutes nationwide, and 60% of the prostitutes are from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes or other backward castes. UNAIDS says over 38% of those living with HIV in India are women.

High Crime Rate and Communal Riots

India reported 32,481 murders, 19,348 rapes, 7,618 dowry deaths and 36,617 molestation cases in 2006. NCRB found that Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes (1,94,711), followed by Maharashtra (1,91,788), Andhra Pradesh (1,73,909), Tamil Nadu (1,48,972) and Rajasthan (1,41,992) during 2006. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 1,822,602 riots in 2005 alone [Incidence Of Cognizable Crimes (IPC) Under Different Crime Heads,  Page 2, NCRB website].

On average there are more than 2,000 cases of kidnappings per year in India. Under India’s notorious caste system, upper caste Hindus inherited key positions and control all the governmental branches. Violence against victims largely goes unpunished due to the support of upper caste crooks.

Economic Crimes

Economic crime continues to be pervasive threat for Indian companies, with 35% of them having experienced fraud in the past two years according to the PwC Global Economic Crime Survey 2007. Many incidents of fraud  go unreported. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers’ India findings:

* Corruption and bribery continue to be the most common type of fraud, reported by 20% of the respondents
* The average direct financial loss to companies was INR 60 Million (US $1.5 million) during the two year period. In addition, the average cost to deal with economic crime in India is INR 40 Million (US $1 Million), which is close to double that of the global and Asia Pacific average
* In 36% of cases, companies took no action against the perpetrators of fraud;
* In 50% of cases, fraud was detected by chance. [PWC Report 2007]

Armed Conflicts in India

Almost every state has separatist movements, many of them armed. A large number of Muslims were killed in the past few years across the country and the numbers are on a steady rise. On top of that, India has become a pariah for its neighbours. None of its neighbours appreciate their closeness to India, and they all blame it for meddling in their affairs.

63 per cent of India’s new budget will go to the military, police, administration and debt service (2008-09). The military might of centric Hindu elites in Delhi led to isolated feelings for the people of Jammu & Kashmir and the northeastern states. It is difficult for any community to feel part of a larger country when the armed forces of the country are deployed to silence them.

According to an Indian official report, 165 of India’s 602 districts — mostly in states like Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh — are “badly affected” by tribal and dalit violence, which the government termed “Maoist terror”. India’s military spending was recorded at US $21.7 billion in 2006, and it planned to spend $26.5 billion during 2008/09 financial year. 85 percent of the Army’s budget is spent on the enormous manpower of 1,316,000, which is the fourth largest in the world.

India experienced a rapid increase in demand for security in the period following the Mumbai attacks. Thanks to terrorism imports by world’s weapon industry! India is now one of the world’s most terror-prone countries, with a death toll second only to Iraq, says a report from the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington.

India’s crime rates, already some of the highest in the world, are also rising, as is the incidence of corporate espionage. Approximately 5.5 million private security guards are employed by about 15,000 security companies in India. As an industry, it is now the country’s largest corporate taxpayer [CAPSI report].

In 2005, Business Week reported that India became Israel’s largest importer of weapons, accounting for about half of the $3.6 billion worth of weapons exported by the Jewish state.

“Do remember that 34 years ago, NSG was created by Americans. Hence it has been their onus to convince the group to grant the waiver to India to carry out the multi-billion dollar business as India is a large market,” said former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Mr P K Iyengar.

The Booming Industry of Terrorism Experts and Security Research Institutes in India

With the emergence of Hindutva fascist forces and their alliance with neocons and Zionists, India witnessed a sharp increase in the number of research institutes, media houses and lobbying groups. According to a study by the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, India has 422 think tanks, second only to the US, which has over 2,000 such institutions.

Out of 422 recognized Indian think tanks, around 63 are engaged in security research and foreign policy matters, which are heavily funded by global weapons industry. India’s retired spies, police officers, military personnel, diplomats and journalists are hired by these national security and foreign policy research institutes which get enormous funds from global weapon industry.

These dreaded institutions in fact have a hidden agenda. Behind the veil, they work as the public relations arm of weapon industry. They create fake terror stories with the help of their media and intelligence wings and manipulate explosions through criminals in the areas of tribals, dalits or minorities in order to get public acceptance for weapon contracts.

By creating conflicts in this poor country, Brahmin spin masters get huge commissions from the sale of weapons to government forces. To these corrupt bureaucrats, India’s ‘national interest‘ simply means ‘their self interest’. Their lobbying power bring more wealth to their families as lucrative jobs, citizenship in rich countries and educational opportunities abroad.

India is one of the world’s largest weapons importers. Between 2000 and 2007, India ranked the world’s second largest arms importer, accounting for 7.5% of all major weapons transfers. It was fourth in military spending  in terms of purchasing power in 2007, followed by US, China and Russia.

Over 1,130 companies in 98 countries manufacture arms, ammunition and components. 90% of Conventional arms exports in the world are from the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, namely USA, UK, Russia, China & France. The regions of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East hold 51 per cent of the world’s heavy weapons.

The Defense Offset Facilitation Agency estimated the expenditure on the sector of  $100 billion for next five years. At least 38 court cases relating to arms agreements are still pending against bureaucrats and military officers. Hindu fascist forces currently enjoy the upper hand in the media, the civil service, the judiciary, defence and the educational sectors of Indian society.

Sooner or later, the 25,000 strong democratic institutions in India will  collapse, and the country will be transformed into a limited democracy under the rule of a security regime like Turkey or Israel. The Hindutvas’ security centric nationalism was never capable of bringing peace and protection to ordinary citizens.

According to Global Peace Index, India currently ranked on bottom, (122 with 2.422 score). Interestingly, our favourite arms supplier, Israel is among the worst performer when it comes to peace ranking (141). It reminds a simple fact that peace cannot be attained by a sophisticated security apparatus.

Furthermore, India topped Asian Risk Prospects 2009 with the highest political and social risk, scoring 6.87, mainly because of internal and external instability (PERC).

Suicides of Farmers and the Collapse of the Agricultural Sector

In the last two years, more than 218,000 people across India committed suicide, mainly due to poverty, family feuds, strained relationships with loved ones, dowry harassment and health problems. In research by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau, there were 118,112 and over 100,000 suicides in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Most of those who committed suicide were farmers, and the victims took their lives either by hanging or consuming poison. Aside from farmers, women also have a high suicide rate. Since 1998, about 25,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because they could not repay their debts. These debts, however, have largely accumulated because these farmers were severely overcharged by moneylenders, who demand up to 32% interest.

76 per cent of the nation’s land is owned by to 23 per cent of population. More than 15 million rural households in India are landless. Another 45 million rural families own only small plots of land, less than .1 acre each, which is hardly enough to make them self- sufficient, let alone generate a profit. 340 million people in India are largely dependent on agricultural wage labour and make $1 or less a day [Rural Development Institute (RDI), Washington].

70 per cent of the Indian population still depends directly on agriculture, but growth in this sector declined from a lackluster 3.8 per cent to an even more anemic 2.6 per cent last year.

Unemployment

Recently, a national report on the employment situation in India warned that nearly 30 percent of the country’s 716 million-strong workforce will be without jobs by 2020. The government of India doesn’t have the resources or political will to find jobs for such a large population.

Retail trade employs 8 percent of India’s population, the largest employer after agriculture. There are more than 12 million small retailers in India, 96 percent of whom are small mom-and-pop stores, each occupying less than 500 square feet, creating the highest retail outlet density per capita in the world. [Tarun Khanna, Yale, op cit.].

Call centers and other outsourced businesses — such as software coding, medical transcription and back-office tasks — employ more than 1.6 million people in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Heart disease is projected to account for 35% of deaths among India’s working-age population between 2000 and 2030, according to a World Health Organization study. The figure is about 12% for the United States, 22% for China and 25% for Russia.

Internal Migration and Influx to the Cities

Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, is projected to grow into a city of about 21.9 million by the year 2015 and is currently plagued by vast poverty due to mass influx from villages. “There are 5 million living on the street every night, covered only in newspaper, ” says Dr. Werner Fornos, president of the Global Population Education think tank and the former head of the Population Institute in Washington, D.C.

India is spending more than $400 million (£200m) to polish Delhi’s image as a first-rate capital, a difficult task for a city that seems to exist between the first and third worlds. A third of the capital’s 14 million-plus people live in teeming slums. According to crime statistics, in 2006, Delhi continued to be the undisputed ‘crime capital’ of the country, a position it held for the previous 5 years in a row. 35 mega cities in India collectively reported a total of 3,26,363 crimes in 2006, an increase of 3.7% over 2005.

Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore together accounted for more than one third of all crimes reported in Indian cities having a population of over a million people for the second year in a row.

India, a Closed Country

India’s share in world tourism map, has hovered between .38% to .39% for a number of years. Irrespective of its huge area and beauty, foreign exchange earned from tourism is merely $2.61 billion (2006). India, scored only 4.14 out of 7 in the WEF’s recently released Travel and Tourism Competitive Index (TTCI 2007). Among 124 countries listed, Switzerland ranked highest while India was 65th, which is far below even Malaysia (ranked 31). India was also listed at the bottom of ‘developing and threshold countries’, which put Tunisia at 34th place.

Indian immigration policies do not welcome tourists. On VISA requirements and T&T index, India ranked 106 while Malaysia ranked 15. VOA facilities are not available to anyone. The easiest entry to India is typically limited to countries with considerable Hindu populations like Mauritius or Nepal. The Hindu elite leaders of the country are always more concerned about India’s physical boundaries and its holy cows rather than the life of its poor, 85% of the population. To them, the national interest means their own economical or political interests.

Indian Embassies are rated as the worst on Earth. They are notorious for ‘red tape‘ and ‘ corruption friendly service,‘ a complaint repeatedly quoted even by Non Resident Indians themselves. 90% of Indian businessmen believe that India has yet to emerge as a “hospitable country” [ASSOCHAM].

Global Warming Effects on India

Water tables are dropping where farmers are lucky enough to have wells, and rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable. Economic losses due to global warming in India are projected at between 9-25%. GDP loss may be to the tune of .67% per year. Wheat losses will be serious. The rabi crop will be hit even worse, which will threaten food security. Drought and flood intensity will increase. A 100-cm sea level rise can lead to a  loss of $1.259 billion to India equivalent to 0.36% of GNP.

Frequencies and intensities of tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal will increase. Malaria will be worsened to the point where it is endemic in many more sates. There will be a 20% rise in summer monsoon rainfall. Extreme temperatures and precipitations are expected to increase [Sir Nicholas Stern Report].

India got the most foreign aid for natural disaster relief in two decades, obtaining 43 such loans totaling $8.257 billion from World Bank alone, beating even Bangladesh and now has the 2nd highest loan in the world.

Transportation

Despite the much touted economic boom, only .8 percent of Indians own a car; most are on foot, motorbikes, or carts. And of all the vehicles sold in India from April to November of last year, 77 percent were two-wheelers – motorcycles, mopeds, or scooters. India has less than 1% of the world’s vehicle population.

China has built over 34,000 km of expressways, compared to less than 8,000 km in India.

According to Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM), nearly 42o million man-hours are lost every month by the 7 million-odd working population of Delhi and NCR who take the public transport to travel to work because of traffic congestion during the peak morning and evening hours.

Road Safety

India accounts for about 10 percent of road accident fatalities worldwide,  and the totals are the highest in the world. Indian roads are poorly constructed, and traffic signals, sidewalks and proper signage are almost nonexistent. Other reasons for the high rates are encroachments, lack of parking facilities, ill-equipped and untrained traffic police, corruption and poor traffic culture.

An estimated 1,275,000 persons are badly hurt on the road every year. The social cost of annual accidents in India has been estimated at $11,000. The Government of India’s Planning Commission has estimated there are 15 hospitalised injuries and 70 minor injuries for every road death.

According to NATPAC, the number of accidents per 1,000 vehicles in India is as high as 35, while the figure ranges from 4 to 10 in developed countries. An estimated 270 people die each day from road accidents, and specialists predict that will increase by roughly 5 percent a year. Accidents also cause an estimated loss of Rs 8000 million to the country’s economy. About 80 per cent of the fatalities and severe injuries occurred due to driving error.

According to World Bank forecasts, India’s road death rate will continue to rise until 2042 if no remedial action being taken. In contrast, the number of road accidents in China dropped by an annual average 10.8 per cent for four consecutive years from 2003, despite continuous growth in the number of privately owned cars.

Doing Business in India

It takes 50 days to register a property in India, as compared to less than 30 days in China and less than 10 days in the United States and Thailand. Average cost of a business start-up is over 60 percent of per capita income, much higher than any of the comparable countries.

India has the highest cost of electricity among major industrialized and emerging economies ($.8 per kwh for industry as against $.1 kwh in China), or in other words a quarter of the gross electricity output, the result being the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world .

Transport costs are very high in India. It accounts for 25% of total import costs as against only 10% in comparative countries [World Bank Report on India].

Foreign Remittance from Non Resident Indians

In 2006, India received the highest amount of remittances globally from national overseas workers, $27 billion. Around $20 billion of this came from the Gulf expatriate workforce. Together, GCC countries are the largest trading partner of India, and home to 5 million members of India’s overseas workforce. The Indian government expects overseas Indians to pump in about US $500 billion into the FOREX reserves of the country in the next 10 years, making them the single largest source of foreign receipts.

Nearly three million people in Africa are of Indian ancestry. The top three countries with the largest population of Indians are South Africa, Mauritius and the Reunion Islands. Indians also have a sizable presence in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the east of Africa and Nigeria in the west.

Foreigners Living in India

Historically, about 72% of the current Indian population originated from the Aryan race. Prominent historians and Dravidians consider Aryans to be foreign invaders to India. The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was postulated by eminent Oxford scholar Max Muller in 1882 and later advanced by several western and Indian historians.

Under the current scenario, potential migrants or ‘invaders’ to India include a few ‘hired or weird’ Pakistani bombers, villagers from around India’s border with Bangladesh, Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka and prostitutes from Nepal.

The 92 year old Indian painter Maqbool Fida Hussain lives in Dubai after receiving death threats from Hindu militants.

According to Hindu extremists, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has passed all the tests for Indian citizenship. On the other hand, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the Christian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, is still considered to be a foreigner by Hindu elites, while Pakistan-born Hindu Lal Krishna Advani is ‘legally and morally fit’ to become India’s next Prime Minister.

Leave India!

Sixty years ago Indians asked the British to get out of India. Now they are doing it themselves. To live with dignity and enjoy relative freedom, one has to leave India! With this massive exodus, what will be left behind will be a violently charged and polarized society.

The Hindutvadis’ Fake National Pride in India

A 2006 opinion poll by Outlook-AC Nielsen indicated that 46% of India’s urban class wants to move to the US. Interestingly, in the Hindutva heartland of Gujarat, 54% of people want to move to US.

Even Parliament members of the Hindutva party are involved in human trafficking from India. Recently police arrested Babubhai Katara, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, who was part of such a racket. He received $20,000 per person to move his victims to the US.

When Indians are fleeing all over the world to just to find a job, how can these Hindutva idiots claim any “National Pride of India”?

India is the World Bank’s largest borrower. In June 2007, it provided $3.7bn in new loans to India. Due to the fake ‘India Shining’ propaganda launched by Hindutva idiots, foreign donors are reluctant to help the poor people in this country. According to figures provided by Britain’s aid agency, the total aid to India, from all sources, is only $1.50 a head, compared with an average of $17 per head for low-income countries [Financial Times].

Gridlocked in corruption, greed, inhumanity and absolute inequality – of class, caste, wealth, religion – this is the real India. Hindutva idiots, your false pride and antics embarrass us.

Romney Leading Obama in the Polls

This is extremely bad news, and it shows just how fanatically rightwing the reactionary American people are.

You wonder just how stupid Americans are. Romney is leading Obama, 49-46, in the latest ABC poll.

Romney is no moderate. This is what the joke is. Romney is seen as some kind of a moderate Republican. If this is what a moderate Republican is, we are in for some very deep trouble.

For instance, Romney has come out in full support of the Ryan Plan. The Ryan Plan would wipe Medicare off the face of the Earth, forcing the elderly to purchase their own medical insurance. It would also gut Medicaid by approximately 50% and would block grant it to the states. Some states have decided to try to end Medicaid entirely in recent days – for instance, Idaho. Surely Romney would allow rightwing governors to end the program entirely.

The rest of the Ryan Plan involves such deep cuts to the discretionary spending that it would end or seriously curtail most government programs outside of defense. The EPA, Food Stamps, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy would be wiped off the Earth.

Mitt Romney supports wiping out Medicare, Food Stamps, the EPA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He would cut Medicaid in half. He  would seriously curtail much of the rest of government.

Mitt Romney also supports the repeal of Obamacare, even though his own Romneycare plan as governor of Massachusetts was the same thing as Obamacare. He now says he doesn’t even support his own plan.

Mitt Romney supports jailing doctors give women abortions. Wow! Kook alert!

Mitt Romney actually believes in anthropogenic global warming, which must make him the only Republican who does so. He also says we need to cut our emissions. Good for him.

But it’s all nothing but lies because he supports the work of a discredited scholar who says that the best way to deal with global warming is to do absolutely nothing to try to stop it and just let it take its course. He says that the implications of it will be very mild and in many cases will even be positive. He says that we can muddle through global warming just fine with few to no problems. Further, he says he should not lower emissions one bit because AGW is no big deal. This is the real Mitt Romney: Complain about AGW, but do nothing whatsoever.

Mitt Romney made his money as a corporate shark, raiding and destroying perfectly good companies. He engaged in leveraged buyouts in which would buy good companies, fire all the workers, sell off everything that could be sold, and then turn a profit. He made many millions of dollars this way and he destroyed tens of thousands of jobs and maybe more. He also destroyed many fine US companies. Bizarrely, Romney claims that he created many jobs.

The truth is that Mitt Romney is an ultra-rightwing Republican fanatic loon. There’s nothing moderate about him. If you can find anything moderate about him, show me.

Romney is running against Obama’s handling of the economy. However, Romney’s own plan only involves massive cuts to government spending along with serious cuts to taxes on rich people and corporations. None of this is going to create one job. This is the same failed supply side economics that’s been ruining America for the last 30 years. It won’t even do much to touch the deficit, since the tax cuts should wipe out most of the savings.

The Republican Party has thwarted any stimulus spending that could hope to get this economy off the ground. Whether that’s due to calculation or ideology, the fact is that the Republican Party is deliberately running the economy into the ground in order to defeat Obama on the basis of a bad economy.

All sane people agree that the Ryan Plan would cause a new recession, if not a full depression. I’m not sure if Republicans realize this. The cuts that the Republicans are demanding are only going to sink the economy in the short term. The thinking is that the Republicans are willing to deliberately wreck the economy in order to defeat Barack Obama.

James Randi, Lunatic and Superwoo

I’ve always hated this idiot, and now I’m done with him.

Here, James Randi, the famous “scientific” skeptic, “debunks” anthropogenic global warming. Or here. Well, that does it. He couldn’t possibly be a scientist. AGW is real, it’s been proven for many years now. I’ve been studying this issue for ages, and I’m beyond convinced. AGW Denialism is on the order of Holocaust Revisionism. It’s not scientific. It’s politics.

I believe in a lot of stuff that Randi hates, and I don’t think much of “scientistic” types in general.

I’ve used chiropractic for many years, and found it very helpful for back and neck pains.

I’ve used a variety of herbs, and some of them were quite useful. One I use at the moment is Eyebright. Works like a wonder.

I had excellent results with Candex, an anti-Candida therapy. When I took it, I didn’t even believe in candida theory. I thought it was crap. I thought what do I have to lose and had a good result from it. Everyone I have talked to who took this product had some sort of a benefit.

When I was extremely tired, I gave myself B-12 injections for about one year. They worked very well until they finally wore off for some reason. I didn’t believe in B-12 shots either. I thought it was crap. But I had nothing to lose.

I believe in ghosts, but I’ve never seen one. I assume some places are haunted.

You already know how I feel about Bigfoot. About cryptids other than relict hominids, I am not certain. I have not studied them enough.

I’m a Christian. I’m sure Randi thinks that’s evil.

I believe that there is something called “the feeling that one is being watched.”

I believe high cholesterol and a high saturated fat diet clog your arteries, and that eventually gives you heart disease.

I believe in telepathy and clairvoyance, though I’ve had little experience with them. My Mom is a lot better at that. I’ve had only one incident of telepathy in 1979. I believe you can share hallucinations with another person, which is a form of telepathy. Experienced that too, with some chemical help.

I know people who tell when their loved ones are about to call them about 10 minutes before it happens.

I believe that our dying loved ones communicate with us when they are dying, if you are psychic enough to pick it up. My Mom is.

I believe pets can sometimes tell when their owners are coming home from vacation hours in advance. I also believe that pets can tell when certain people are calling on the phone before anyone answers it. Some psychic pets that is.

I believe that sick people smell bad and have funny colors about them, like blue or red, and people sometimes give off heat or cold. If you are psychic enough, you can pick up on that. I knew a near blind guy who could pick up on all that stuff. His eyes went, so he hyper-developed all his other senses.

I believe aliens crashed at Roswell, at the very least. Are they flying around now, watching us? No idea. Maybe. I think that the US Air Force thinks ET-piloted UFO’s exist and monitor their bases. Is the Air Force correct? Not sure, maybe.

I believe in MIB’s. Men In Black. They are military intelligence, top secret. They’re involved in coverups of this and that, and threaten people who know too much. They’re involved with UFO’s and Bigfoot. Anything else, I’m not sure.

I’ve seen a UFO once. I haven’t the faintest idea what it was.

I believe you can communicate your thoughts, or the character or your thoughts, at significant distances,  possibly up to 100 feet. I don’t mean I’m thinking of a word in the dictionary or a number and you can tell. I mean the emotional content of your thoughts. When I drive down the street wearing sunglasses, I believe that pedestrians can determine the emotional content of my thoughts, happy, sad, angry, mean, etc. These are called vibes, and they are readily transmissible to others.

I don’t believe you can hide your feelings from people. Or at least I can’t. Maybe a real sociopath could.

I believe in near death experiences, but I’ve never had one.

I believe Bush stole the 2000 election and then hacked the 2004 election with computer voting.

About the entire panoply of other woo/conspiracy, etc. stuff, I’m quite skeptical.

Randi thinks this is all a crock, and I’m a woo for believing it. Fine. But he’s the biggest woo of them all for being a AGW Denialist. What a turd.

The “scientistic” mindset is a drag. I don’t care if it’s the truth. It sucks all the joy, wonder, mystery and glory out of life and death and crunches it all down to a bunch of lousy atoms, molecules and particles.

It’s an utterly miserable mindset, and so is atheism. I don’t care if atheism is true. I lived that misery for decades. It’s a bleak and hopeless grey world. I’ll believe in my religion, even if it’s crap. Life just feels better that way, and there’s no harm in being mildly religious anyway. What’s going to happen to me for being slightly religious? Is my head going to fall off? And if there’s a 1/1000 chance it’s true, I’m in like Flynn. So there.