The Paydirt of Paranoia

Choudry, Ali, Hardt on prison-privatisation/imperialism/resistance 
 
ZNet Commentary: www.zmag.org

The Paydirt of Paranoia 
February 20, 2003

By Aziz Choudry

"They'll privatise your hopes and they'll privatise your fears. If they
catch your children crying, they'll privatise the tears" (Brian McNeill,
"Sell Your Labour, Not Your Soul")

Forbes magazine reported that the September 11 attacks had made private
security firms "the economic darlings of the world". Many of the major
players were already raking in profits. In the waves of political
opportunist "security" hysteria which continue to sweep the world, with even
more draconian immigration detention regimes, more fear, paranoia and
warmongering, many of these companies have been doing very well indeed.

"It's clear that since Sept. 11 there's a heightened focus on detention ...
more people are gonna get caught. So I would say that's positive ... with
the focus on people that are illegal and also from Middle Eastern descent in
the United States there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals from
Middle Eastern descent ... that is a population, for lots of reasons that is
being targeted... The Federal business is the best business for us and ...
Sept. 11 is increasing that business," said Steve Logan, CEO of Cornell
Corrections, a US private prison company in a Third Quarter 2001 conference
call with analysts.

The immigration detention business is booming. The global reach of the top
players in the security industry is astounding. They are truly transnational
corporations in every sense. And in our struggles against the neoliberal
agenda, just like other transnational corporations, they must be vigorously
exposed and opposed.

It is in their interests to encourage private "solutions" to governments
imposing racist, restrictive border controls, mandatory detention, domestic
security measures and aggressive foreign policy. Meanwhile they help to whip
up and sustain a climate of fear and hysteria in the name of the "war on
terror" and "security". Private security firms and government security,
intelligence and defense agencies have long been closely linked.

Since awarding the contract to run its notorious immigration detention
centres to Wackenhut Corrections Corporation subsidiary Australasian
Correctional Management (ACM) in 1997, Australia's Department of Immigration
and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) earnt the dubious distinction of becoming
Wackenhut's third largest customer, after the States of Texas and Florida.

By 2001 this contract was providing the corporation with eleven percent of
its total global revenues. In an SBS interview, reported in The Australian
on November 25, 2000, George Wackenhut, former FBI agent and head of
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, said: "Australian operations are very
important to us. They're really starting to punish people the way they
should have done all along. The do-gooders say no, punishment is not the
answer, but I can't think of a better one."

Wackenhut's directors and senior management have long resembled a Who's Who
of former CIA, FBI, US Secret Service and military high-ups. In the security
business, as with other corporate players, there is a revolving door of
personnel between industry and government, close political contacts,
enormous political lobbying power, secrecy, and unaccountability.

Many such companies offer a vast array of services. In the spirit of
deregulation, privatization, cost-cutting and contracting out, governments
are willing buyers. From airport security, to running private jails, from
surveillance of activists to private military operations, there is money to
be made in the security business.

The UK's largest security corporation, Securicor, was the first private
company to buy into the British immigration detention regime in August 1970,
when the then Conservative government awarded it the contract for the
Harmondsworth Immigration Detention Centre. It ran this until December 1988
when Group 4 took over. Securicor now boasts 125,000 staff in 28 countries.
It owns the embattled Argenbright Security, Inc., which was the largest U.S.
airport security company on September 11, forced out of most of its airport
operations after the Department of Transportation announced it would not do
business with the company after security lapses.

Chubb, another global security corporation, provides guards for Australia's
detention centres holding predominantly Iraqi and Afghani asylumseekers on
the tiny remote Pacific island of Nauru.

Like the rest of the corporate world, mergers and acquisitions are
commonplace. Swedish-headquartered global security giant Securitas entered
the North American market by acquiring Pinkerton in 1999 and Burns
International in 2000. Now the Securitas AB group has some 300 offices in
over 30 countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and
Africa with annual revenues of US$6 billion and over 210,000 employees.

Political activists will be interested to know that Pinkerton Global
Intelligence Services (PGIS) sells intelligence on a range of groups,
including political organisations Its website
(www.ci-pinkerton.com/global/groupProfiles.html) explains:

"The Group Profiles provide a detailed overview of high-profile fringe
organizations and terrorist groups. The Group Profiles highlight both global
and domestic organizations. PGIS covers the following groups:
politically-based, environmentalists, anti-globalists, anti-Western groups,
extremist religious factions, recognized terrorists, among many others."

In another major move, a US $570 million deal, Copenhagen-based Group 4
Falck bought out Wackenhut Corporation last May. In December, Australia's
Federal Government announced that Group 4 Falck Global Solutions Pty Ltd
(Group 4) would be taking over the operation of the immigration detention
centres.

Just as the continued spotlight on conditions at Woomera, breakouts, and
ongoing resistance of many detainees had doubtless led to its gradual
phasing out and replacement with the newly opened Baxter immigration
detention centre, so too the Howard government hoped that an apparent change
in management might defuse further embarrassment and outrage. I say apparent
because the move is little more than a name change. Group 4 already owned
ACM when it was awarded the 4-year, Aus $100 million-a-year contract to run
the centres. Spot the difference? I can't.

In Australia ACM/Wackenhut and the Immigration Department routinely avoided
scrutiny and hard questions by referring inquiries back and forth between
them and denying media access to the camps. No doubt the "new" contractor
will enjoy the same symbiotic relationship with government.

According to its website (www.wackenhut.com), "The Wackenhut Corporation is
an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We uphold all State and
Federal Civil Rights laws. We also believe that fostering diversity within
the workplace contributes to the success of the Company". Wackenhut claims
that it will not tolerate sexual harassment or workplace harassment, whether
it occurs between a supervisor and subordinate or between co-workers. Too
bad about the rights of the people it imprisons.

South Australia's Department of Human Services reported that between January
and June 2002 there had been 130 notifications of alleged abuse at Woomera,
92 requiring investigation. 10% of these involved sexual abuse. ACM has been
accused of covering up incidents of physical and sexual abuse within the
camps. Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission slammed the
conditions and ACM's management, calling it a "miasma of despair and
desperation". Many guards have used racist abuse against the detainees, and
beatings, tear gas and other forms of violent tactics have been commonplace
inside the cages and razor wire.

Meanwhile Group 4 Falck maintains (www.group4falck.com) that it "works both
nationally and internationally on the basis of principles regarding such
issues as human rights, racism and child labour."

As Group 4 officially takes over in Australia, its operations elsewhere give
a sense of things to come. It operated Europe's largest immigration
detention centre at Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire, England which was closed
after being virtually destroyed by fire in February 2002. Firefighters
complained that Group 4 had grossly inadequate safety measures and had
impeded them from reaching the scene of the blaze.

Fire Brigades Union General Secretary, Andy Gilchrist criticised Group 4 for
treating asylum seekers as "second class citizens" by putting "private
profit before the lives of asylum seekers. Group 4 flatly refused to put a
sprinkler system into these premises to cut their costs". With last year's
takeover it is now the largest detention contractor in the UK.

In her book "Open Borders: The case against immigration controls" (Pluto,
London, 2000), Teresa Hayter documents the poor conditions, inadequate
medical facilities, punitive and racist treatment and lack of accountability
that characterised the regime at Group 4's Campsfield House near Oxford. So
much for principles. More detentions and more cost-cutting mean bigger
profits for companies like Group 4.

Many of those detained under Australia's mandatory detention policy are from
the Middle East. So let us not forget how, late last year, British and
Danish journalists exposed the activities of Hashmira, a leading Israeli
security firm in which Group 4 had bought a 50 percent share.

In the Occupied Territories it provided back-up for the Israeli military in
settlements deemed illegal by the UN. In October, in the Israeli settlement
of Kedumim, The Guardian's Peter Lagerquist and Jonathan Steele observed:
"In the name of "security" the guards, many of whom are settlers, routinely
prevent Palestinian villagers from cultivating their own fields, travelling
to schools, hospitals and shops in nearby towns, and receiving emergency
medical assistance."

"Intimidation and harassment are common, causing many villagers to fear for
their lives". Uncomfortable with adverse media publicity and political
pressure from some Danish MPs, Group 4 withdrew its guards from the West
Bank. Following this the Brimbank Community Legal Centre in Melbourne wrote
to Group 4 that the UN High Commissioner Human Rights Special Envoy and
Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission had found the
mandatory detention policy violated human rights law as it applied to adults
and children in detention, and invited the company to withdraw from the
tender process.

Needless to say, it did not. This month, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock
admitted to Parliament that the average time spent in detention by children
is fifteen months. The Fortress Australia mentality and security paranoia of
governments like John Howard's mean more profits for companies like Group 4.

This Easter, Baxter, with its 9000 volt electric fence, and high tech
surveillance and alarm systems, will be the site of another major
mobilization against Australia's privatised immigration concentration camps
(see www.baxterwatch.net)

As we mobilise against the war, and plan to confront the next World Trade
Organisation ministerial meeting in Cancun this coming September, and as
people inside and outside the corporate-controlled Woomeras and Baxters of
the world struggle for a world where "no one is illegal" we must continue to
expose the connections between these issues.

John Howard's enthusiastic support of the US oiligarchy's war on Iraq is all
the more obscene, given the numbers of Iraqi people already incarcerated in
the privatised hellholes like Baxter, Woomera, and Port Hedland. Howard
stands ready (subject to Cabinet approval) to commit some 2000 Australian
special forces and other troops, a squadron of F/A-18 fighters and
Australian warships to the US's oil war. Somebody should tell him that war
creates refugees.

Neoliberal logic reduces all living things and all human activities to mere
commodities to be bought and sold in the market place. Group 4 Falck Global
Solutions' website boasts: "People, is our business...our business is our
people" Exactly. As Michael Welch, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
at Rutgers University wrote in a 2000 paper on the role of the US
Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Prison-Industrial Complex
"[U]ndocumented immigrants are commodified as raw materials for private
profit."

***

A second resolution is not enough

This war is immoral and unjust, with or without UN backing

Tariq Ali
Friday February 21, 2003
The Guardian

A massive majority in Britain is currently opposed to the war, but the
anti-war movement confronts a virtually uniform House of Commons. Both
major parties are united and Labour MPs incapable of mounting a
parliamentary revolt to ditch Blair, the only thing that could halt the
drive to war. The British peace movement, however, has a soft underbelly. A
war that is unjustifiable if waged by Bush and Blair alone becomes
acceptable to some if sanctioned by the "international community" - ie the
UN security council. The consciences of those opposed to the unilateralist
bombing of cities and civilian deaths are appeased if the weapons of
destruction are fired with UN support. This level of confusion raises
questions about the UN today. Do its resolutions carry any weight if
opposed by the US, as has repeatedly been the case with Palestine and
Kashmir?

The UN and its predecessor, the League of Nations, were created to
institutionalise a new status quo arrived at after the first and second
world wars. Both organisations were founded on the basis of defending the
right of nations to self-determination. In both cases their charters
outlawed pre-emptive strikes and big-power attempts to occupy countries or
change regimes. Both stressed that the nation state had replaced empires.

The League of Nations collapsed soon after the Italian fascists occupied
Ethiopia. Mussolini defended his invasion of Albania and Abyssinia by
arguing that he was removing the "corrupt, feudal and oppressive regime" of
King Zog/Haile Selassie and Italian newsreels showed grateful Albanians
applauding the entry of Italian troops.

The UN was created after the defeat of fascism. Its charter prohibits the
violation of national sovereignty except in the case of "self- defence".
However, the UN was unable to defend the newly independent Congo against
Belgian and US intrigue in the 1960s, or to save the life of the Congolese
leader Patrice Lumumba. And in 1950 the security council authorised a US
war in Korea.

Under the UN banner the western armies deliberately destroyed dams, power
stations and the infrastructure of social life in North Korea, plainly in
breach of international law. The UN was also unable to stop the war in
Vietnam. Its paralysis over the occupation of Palestine has been visible
for over three decades.

This inactivity was not restricted to western abuses. The UN was unable to
act against the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) or the Warsaw Pact's
entry into Czechoslovakia (1968). Both Big Powers were allowed to get on
with their business in clear breach of the UN charter.

With the US as the only military-imperial state, the security council today
has become a venue for trading, not insults, but a share of the loot. The
Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci predicted this turn of events with amazing
prescience. "The 'normal' exercise of hegemony," he wrote, "is
characterised by the combination of force and consent, in variable
equilibrium, without force predominating too much over consent." There
were, he added, occasions when it was more appropriate to resort to a third
variant of hegemony, because "between consent and force stands
corruption-fraud, that is the enervation and paralysing of the antagonist
or antagonists". This is an exact description of the process used to
negotiate Russian support at the UN as revealed in a front-page headline in
The Financial Times (October 4, 2002): "Putin drives hard bargain with US
over Iraq's oil: Moscow wants high commercial price for its support."

The world has changed so much over the last 20 years that the UN - the
current deadlock notwithstanding - has become an anachronism, a permanent
fig leaf for new imperial adventures. Former UN secretary general Boutros
Boutros-Ghali was sacked on Madeline Albright's insistence for challenging
the imperial will: he had insisted that it was the Rwandan genocide that
needed intervention. US interests required a presence in the Balkans. He
was replaced by Kofi Annan, a weak placeman, whose sanctimonious speeches
may sometimes deceive an innocent British public, but not himself. He knows
who calls the shots.

As Mark Twain described it in 1916: "Next the statesmen will invent cheap
lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently
study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will
by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the
better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

If the security council allows the invasion and occupation of Iraq either
by a second resolution or by accepting that the first was sufficient to
justify war as a last resort, then the UN, too, will die. It is necessary
to insist that UN-backed war would be as immoral and unjust as the one
being plotted in the Pentagon - because it will be the same war.

· Tariq Ali is the author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms (Verso)

tariq.ali3@btinternet.com


***

A trap set for protesters

Michael Hardt
Friday February 21, 2003
The Guardian

There is a new anti-Europeanism in Washington. The United States, of
course, has a long tradition of ideological conflict with Europe. The old
anti-Europeanism generally protested against the overwhelming power of
European states, their arrogance, and their imperialist endeavours. Today,
however, the relationship is reversed. The new anti-Europeanism is based on
the US position of power and it protests instead against European states
failing to yield to its power and support its projects.

The most immediate issue for Washington is the European lack of support for
the US plans for war on Iraq. And Washington's primary strategy in recent
weeks is to divide and conquer. On one hand, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld,
with his usual brazen condescension, calls those European nations who
question the US project, primarily France and Germany, "the old Europe",
dismissing them as unimportant. The recent Wall Street Journal letter of
support for the US war effort, on the other hand, signed by Blair,
Berlusconi and Aznar, poses the other side of the divide.

In a broader framework, the entire project of US unilateralism, which
extends well beyond this coming war with Iraq, is itself necessarily
anti-European. The unilateralists in Washington are threatened by the idea
that Europe, or any other cluster of states, could compete with its power
on equal terms. (The rising value of the euro with respect to the dollar
contributes, of course, to the perception of two potentially equal and
competing power blocs.) Bush, Rumsfeld and their ilk will not accept the
possibility of a bi-polar world. They left that behind with the cold war.
Any threats to the uni-polar order must be dismissed or destroyed.
Washington's new anti-Europeanism is really an expression of their
unilateralist project.

Corresponding in part to the new US anti-Europeanism, there is today in
Europe and across the world a growing anti-Americanism. In particular, the
coordinated protests last weekend against the war were animated by various
kinds of anti-Americanism - and that is inevitable. The US government has
left no doubt that it is the author of this war and so protest against the
war must, inevitably, be also protest against the United States.

This anti-Americanism, however, although certainly justifiable, is a trap.
The problem is, not only does it tend to create an overly unified and
homogeneous view of the United States, obscuring the wide margins of
dissent in the nation, but also that, mirroring the new US
anti-Europeanism, it tends to reinforce the notion that our political
alternatives rest on the major nations and power blocs. It contributes to
the impression, for instance, that the leaders of Europe represent our
primary political path - the moral, multilateralist alternative to the
bellicose, unilateralist Americans. This anti-Americanism of the anti-war
movements tends to close down the horizons of our political imagination and
limit us to a bi-polar (or worse, nationalist) view of the world.

The globalisation protest movements were far superior to the anti-war
movements in this regard. They not only recognised the complex and plural
nature of the forces that dominate capitalist globalisation today - the
dominant nation states, certainly, but also the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the major corporations, and so forth -
but they imagined an alternative, democratic globalisation consisting of
plural exchanges across national and regional borders based on equality and
freedom.

One of the great achievements of the globalisation protest movements, in
other words, has been to put an end to thinking of politics as a contest
among nations or blocs of nations. Internationalism has been reinvented as
a politics of global network connections with a global vision of possible
futures. In this context, anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism no longer
make sense.

It is unfortunate but inevitable that much of the energies that had been
active in the globalisation protests have now at least temporarily been
redirected against the war. We need to oppose this war, but we must also
look beyond it and avoid being drawn into the trap of its narrow political
logic. While opposing the war we must maintain the expansive political
vision and open horizons that the globalisation movements have achieved. We
can leave to Bush, Chirac, Blair, and Schröder the tired game of
anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism.

· Michael Hardt is professor of literature at Duke University, North
Carolina, and co-author with Antonio Negri of Empire

hardt@duke.edu