E-Com Mar 06

Freedom and Faith
by Fred Dallmayr

These are dark and dangerous times. Everywhere one turns one finds rancor, ill will, and animosities galore. The situation is starkly illustrated by the ongoing uproar over the cartoons published in Denmark. As a result of this uproar, people have been killed and property has been destroyed in numerous places; and there is no end in sight. This outcome is surely highly deplorable; my point in any case is not to condone or whitewash acts of violence committed against people or property. However, the outcome is hardly fortuitous; as in any confrontation, there are two sides to the story.

It is well to remember that the uproar in this instance was not instigated by Muslims or Muslim countries.It was a response to a prior incident or provocation. Reason dictates that, here as elsewhere, one consider the cause-effect nexus, the relation between action and reaction. In this matter, it is tempting to wax fundamentalist on both sides. In Western media, the uproar is usually portrayed as the conflict between “freedom” and dogmatism or fanaticism. “Freedom” in this context is often treated as something absolute and nearly sacred, while religious faith is presented as deplorable and obsolete.

For a Western person, it is important to ponder a bit this “absolutism”. Does freedom really mean that we can do as we please, that we can insult or malign other people at will? This assumption is at odds with both the religious and the ethical traditions of the West. Western civilization is often called “Judaeo-Christian”; but neither Judaism nor Christianity instructs believers to insult or injure other people. On the contrary, both Judaism and Christianity uphold the biblical injunction to love our fellow-beings (and this does not exclude Muslims). A prominent peak of the ethical tradition of the West is the moral philosophy of Kant. That philosophy stipulates as a “categorical imperative” the duty to treat other human beings as ends, not as means. And nowhere in Kant’s work is there a hint that this imperative does not extend to Muslims.

So Western religious and ethical traditions are united in condemning the use of “freedom” as a weapon of insult or injury. There are also legal considerations pointing in the same direction. In America, the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that individual freedom does not entitle a person to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Anyone who has traveled in the Near East, or simply has read the newspapers, knows that the Muslim world today is like a tinder box where a single match can cause a major conflagration. This is or should be common knowledge. There is a further legal consideration. As a deterrent to ethnic cleansings and other forms of collective violence, several countries, and also some states in America, have adopted statutes prohibiting “hate crimes” committed against groups of people. In addition, there is the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (in force since March 1976) which states in one article: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”

Again, I do not in any way condone the violence committed in response to the cartoons. But as I stated at the beginning: these are dark and dangerous times. Humankind seems be inching its way toward catastrophe, possibly a nuclear catastrophe. There are people in capitals of the world whose fingers are itching to press the nuclear button. In this situation it behooves all of us to exercise sober restraint, and to keep a guard on our words and deeds in order to prevent the worst from happening. Neither freedom nor religious faith entitle anyone to jeopardize the future of this earth.

Professor Dallmayr is a philosopher attached to the University of Notre Dame in the United States.He is also a member of JUST’s International Advisory Panel(IAP)

The cartoons controversy is not about freedom of expression. It is about how a segment of European society views religion in general and Islam in particular.

Western ‘liberals’ who have chosen to defend the vilification of the Prophet Muhammad in caricatures that first appeared in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in September 2005 and which were subsequently reproduced in various dailies in a number of other countries, argue that their media are free to publish anything and do not impose restrictions upon themselves. This is not true at all. Elite and corporate interests, the dominant worldview prevalent in society, certain notions of the well-being of the majority and specific circumstances have always conditioned the freedom of the media.

Isn’t it because of elite interests that in a democracy like Italy where the majority of the people were opposed to the invasion of Iraq very few anti-war intellectuals were interviewed in the mainstream print and electronic media? Isn’t it because of a worldview that is skeptical of Islam that almost every newspaper editorial in France — the nation that gave birth to the ‘Rights of Man’ — bemoaned the electoral victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria in 1992 and endorsed obliquely the usurpation of power by the military junta? Isn’t it because of a specific circumstance - a deep seated collective guilt arising from the holocaust — that the European media hounds and harasses anyone who dares to raise even the slightest doubt about that terrible tragedy?

What this shows is that there are issues that the Western media deliberately suppress — in spite of their professed commitment to freedom of expression — because they do not dovetail with the media’s worldview or their interests.

It so happens that religion is one of those subjects that is at odds with the worldview of a lot of Western media practitioners. Often vehemently secular in outlook,sometimes contemptuous of matters of faith, they have no qualms about deriding the Sacred and the Transcendent. It is not surprising therefore that Christianity has been lambasted at some time or other in almost every major European newspaper and, on numerous occasions, Jesus Christ has been lampooned in films, cartoons and articles. This has caused grievous hurt to practising Christians in the continent.

It is partly because of this attitude towards religion in general on the part of the media that Islam has also been targeted. But the vilification of Islam is also a consequence of other factors. With the dramatic growth of Muslim minorities in almost every European country in the last 20 years, the majority community has become more and more negative towards their presence, reflected in the rise of the phenomenon known as Islamophobia. While a degree of Muslim exclusivity has contributed towards this, it is the utter inability of the European to accord respect and equality to ‘the other’ in the socio-psychological sense which is the main problem. In an earlier period Jews had also been the victims of Europe’s discrimination and demonisation.

There is perhaps a more important reason for the demonisation of the religion. It is the baneful impact of 911 and the war on terror upon Muslims and their subtle stereotyping in the media as a people prone to violence. Though most Western political leaders are careful to distinguish the Muslim fringe that resorts to violence in pursuit of its political objectives from the rest of the community, television images and media commentaries have often reinforced the erroneous equation of the religion with terror. It explains why some of the offensive cartoons of the Prophet published in the Jyllands-Posten made that link.

Equating Islam and Muslims with violence and terror is not new. It has been going on for a thousand years. It began with distorted and perverted biographies of the Prophet in Latin in France and Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries and has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the writings of men like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes.

In the past, Islam was equated with violence partly because of the anger and antagonism generated by both the Muslim conquest of large parts of Europe and the defeat of Christendom at the hands of Muslim defenders of Jerusalem at the end of the crusades. The power and glory of Islamic civilization between the eighth and fourteenth centuries — especially its pioneering role as the founder of modern science — when much of Europe was shrouded in the darkness of the middle ages also caused a great deal of envy and resentment which European folk literature expressed through negative stereotyping of Islam and Muslims. This stereotyping with the emphasis upon ‘Islamic violence’ reached its zenith during the colonial epoch when Western powers ruled the roost.

It is not just the residue of this huge historical baggage that colors Western perceptions of the Muslim world today. It is significant that it was when certain Muslim states began to exercise control over their oil from the early seventies onwards, thus challenging the Western grip over this vital commodity, that pejorative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims became rife in the mainstream Western media. Similarly, as Zionist influence over the critical sectors of American society increased and the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation intensified in the sixties, the American media accelerated its imaging of ‘Muslim terror.’ It is undeniably true that the politics of Israel and oil has been at the root of much of the stereotyping of the religion and its adherents in recent times.

Since the politics of Israel and oil is entrenched within a global hegemonic structure of power, it is doubtful that the mainstream Western media will cease to equate Islam with violence in the near future. For the media themselves are part of this hegemony. This is why one has to depend upon the alternative media and dissident civil society actors to present a balanced perspective on how the religion views violence and what the historical record has been on this score. It is encouraging that there have always been non-Muslim writers in the past as in the present, from Wolfgang Goethe to Karen Armstrong, who have attempted to provide an honest picture of Islam to the public. It is bridge-builders of their kind who are crucial for inter-civilizational harmony between Islam and the West.

Unfortunately, most Muslims are not aware of the work of these bridge-builders. What they have been witnessing especially in the last few years are the stark consequences of global hegemony reflected in the slaughter of innocent Muslims in Palestine and Iraq; in the humiliation of occupation and subjugation; in the treachery of double standards; in the machinations of exclusion and marginalization. It explains to a great extent the explosion of violent fury in different parts of the Muslim world over the abusive caricaturing of the Prophet. It is anger that is driven by more than the Muslim’s boundless love for Muhammad.

However, what the cartoon protesters do not realize is that by resorting to violence they have unwittingly reinforced the worst prejudices of those detractors of Islam who are only too willing to link the religion to terror. Peaceful protest would have served the cause of Islam better. Such protest calls for a certain degree of restraint. It is true that in some of the protests Muslims have shown remarkable control over their emotions. But it should have been the norm.

After all, when the Prophet was hurled with abuse and taunted with insults — even when he was physically attacked — he displayed tremendous restraint. Surely, the least that those who are protesting in his name can do is to try to emulate his example.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,
President,
International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

Thus far much has been said and written about the global Muslim response to the controversy surrounding the caricatural cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper last year. Western observers in particular seem to be shocked by the extent of Muslim anger worldwide, and the level of organisation that has gone into the demonstrations that have erupted from Europe to Southeast Asia. Those who read this as an instance of the ‘revenge of God’ or a sudden display of emotional piety are missing the point: The demonstrations, global in scope and highly orchestrated in their execution, shows precisely how modern, developed and globalised the Muslim world has become. This was, in fact, a demonstration of a parallel form of globalisation at work: albeit one that is not capital-driven but rather based on a set of firmly shared values.

For decades, if not centuries, Occidental scholars have been asking the same questions: Are Muslims modern? Can Islam be reconciled with modernity? etc. It appeared as if these innane questions were being asked in some ahistorical vacumm, oblivious of the fact that Muslims have been among the first to embrace the tools of modernity from the beginning: the printing press, modern transport, modern notions of identity, citizenship, the nation-state; modern commerce and now internet and virtual communication technology and modes of representation. The images of the cartoons were transmitted world-wide via a network of interlinke Islamist websites and portals, they were discussed and criticised in Islamist chatrooms in cyberspace, and the protests against them were likewise organised and co-ordinated in cyberspace. How modern can Muslims get?

What we have seen therefore is clear evidence of a globalised Muslim world on the march. Islamist NGOs, parties, movements, civil society groups, media outlets and politicians have mobilised Muslims and got them on the streets to demonstrate the will of the Muslim masses, and more importantly, the power of the Muslim dollar. The boycott of Danish goods has shown that the Muslim dollar has clout - Muslims are rich, by the way - and that the Muslim dollar can make or break Western economies when it wants to.

But beyond the spectacular aspect of these demonstrations and their equally spectacular results (leading to Western leaders cringing and begging for forgiveness on Arab-Muslim TV channels) we have lost sight of the issue itself and the real underlying problems that perhaps could have done with a little more academic interrogation.

The cartoons themselves could be read not as caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (for indeed we do not know what the Prophet actually looked like) but were really caricatures of the everyday ‘Muhammad’ of the contemporary Arab-Muslim world. The cartoons were racist, offensive, abusive in more ways than one, but they really revealed the darker side of the Western liberal conscience and how some segments of Western society - including those who proudly claim to be Western liberals - really see Arabs and Muslims today. The stereotype image of the Arab as gun-carrying murderous fanatic was and is more an invention of the paranoid Western liberal mind, blind to its own racism, than anything else. This is perhaps one of the reasons that the cartoons caused so much pain to so many Arabs, who already have to labour with the painful realities of a Palestine under occupation and an Iraq brought to its knees by the American war machine.

The other aspect of the demonstrations that ought to be studied seriously is how well developed the global Islamist mediatic machine has grown. Over the decades, Islamist groups have learned the power of the media. Orchestrated media-directed protests such as we have seen show just how well integrated this parallel Muslim universe has grown, and the response time between the spark that ignites the crisis and the reaction to the crisis has grown ever shorter. Within 72 hours of the cartoon controversy re-emerging, a Muslim response was seen and heard from London to Indonesia. This demonstrates the extent to which this has become such a well-developed, smooth-running global machine.

But the phenomenon of media-orchestrated protests, mediated and reproduced via the media, also faces the real threat of becoming ritualistic, predictable and thus easy to manipulate. Indeed, one cannot help but feel that this entire crisis is being manipulated by conservative elements on both sides, who wish to see the Muslim and Western worlds grow further apart.

The danger then, is this: Without the help of circuit-breaking mechanisms in the form of level-headed commentators and dialogue agents who can prevent such crises from spinning totally out of control, we now face the real prospect of future incidents - both real and imagined - being spun by media-savvy demagogues who want to create controversies for the sake of publicity. Absent in this whole incident were the voices of reason who were capable of calming the nerves of everybody. Educated Muslim intellectuals ought to have stepped into the arena and cautioned the angry young men of the Muslim street from doing stupid things. One such case was the idiotic reaction of the British Muslim youth Umar Khayyam, who dressed as a suicide bomber during the demonstrations in London last week. The demonstration was also marred by the presence of placards bearing provocative slogans like ‘Kill those who insult Islam’ - a slogan designed not to defend the image of Islam and the Prophet, but which rather had the effect of helping to demonise Muslims further.

Now we are left with the final tricky question: If this culture of global mediated protest continues without any introspection, what may happen in the future? Will Muslims react to every such incident in such an unreflective way? What might happen, for instance, if some poor innocent driver were to accidentally back his car into a mosque in London? Would this be seen as an ‘attack on Islam’ and would there be another round of protests, demonstrations and boycotts against British goods?

Muslims have every right to protest against the injustices meted out against them. But let these injustices be real ones, not imagined. And as Muslims make their case and take their stand, they can and must be polite, rational and firm - never blindly reactionary. For that would merely confirm every negative stereotype of Muslims that they have been fighting against for all these years.

Dr. Farish Ahmad Noor is an Academic Reseacher in Berlin. He was once Secretary-General of JUST.

I would walk into the burning flames
Of the embassies
The street marches and the fights
Would separate one of your people from them
The men that are no longer men
Once they don the uniform
But neither can hear me
I walk past the signs that say
Bring your own petrol, to bring down the infidels
Though it is no longer clear to me who the infidels are
And who we are
I lift the jerrycans hoping to find your name beneath it
But you are not there.

And I would walk into the heart of the flames
Only to find your name
Written on a piece of charred paper
Burning, like everything else
As the world fights for and against you
In your wisdom, O Muhammad, you would have seen
The invisible lines of a battle being drawn
Not the cartoons, but underneath it
That thing which grows, slowly
With mechanized eyes that do not see
Your people are too busy trying to find you amidst the rubble
All eyes on a cartoon too small to ever be you
They do not see the shadow that has escaped all detection
Which holds hostage the land of Jerusalem
The heart of all faith.
But love says to fight for the honor of the beloved
This is why we stand here, burning
This is why I still search for you
Here, where all your people are gathered
In your name and for your honor
But you are nowhere to be seen.

The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) joins governments and civil society organizations around the world in calling for an immediate end to the sectarian violence in Iraq that has escalated since the bombing of the Samarra shrine on 22nd February 2006.

The transitional government and the Occupying Forces have a responsibility to ensure that law and order is restored without delay. Militia groups allied to both the Shias and the Sunnis should cooperate with the authorities to the fullest extent. Local vigilantes should also refrain from taking the law into their own hands.

If law and order prevails, rebuilding trust and confidence between Shias and Sunnis should not be an insurmountable task. Even when Saddam Hussein was in power, even when he and the rest of the Sunni elite suppressed and oppressed the Shias, ordinary Sunnis and Shias continued to interact. Many of them were not even aware of the dichotomy between the two sub-Muslim communities. Besides, there have always been Shia-Sunni inter-marriages. Atwar Bahjat, the brave Al-Arabbiya journalist who was killed as she was reporting on the aftermath of the Samarra bombing, was the product of such a union.
Dr Chandra Muzaffar

This is not to deny the doctrinal differences between Shias and Sunnis. But in recent times these differences have been exploited and manipulated by individuals and groups with nefarious political agendas. Saddam Hussein was one of the most cynical manipulators of the Shia Sunni dichotomy. Analysts would argue that in the short period that Paul Bremmer was the ‘Chief’ of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq he went all out to pit the majority Shia against the minority Sunni. Because the long suppressed Shias – their suppression in fact began when Iraq was under the Ottomans – had some genuine grievances against the Sunnis, it was not difficult for the Occupier to drive a wedge between the two.

Shias and Sunnis in Iraq should not allow either the foreign Occupier or domestic elites to manipulate and exploit their differences. They should not only desist from further sectarian violence; they should join hands, and together with the Kurds, Christians and others, demand an immediate end to the Occupation of Iraq. The struggle against Occupation should serve to strengthen unity among all the different communities and sub-communities, especially the Shias and Sunnis. It is only when Shia- Sunni unity is on a firm footing that Iraq will be able to safeguard its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,
President,
International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.
3 March 2006

At last the United Nations has asked the United States Government to shut down its detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. A 54 page report prepared by 5 UN experts released in Geneva on 16th February 2006 calls on Washington “to close down the Guantanamo detention centre and to refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Now that the UN has spoken up and the UN Secretary-General has publicly endorsed the Report, all member states of the UN should also demand that Guantanamo be shut down immediately. There should be a global chorus of governments and civil society groups pressurising the Bush Administration to heed the voice of the peoples of the world and act in the interest of human dignity and human decency. Most of all however, it is the good people of the United States of America itself who should urge their government to close down an infamous detention centre that has denigrated and disgraced the ideals of the American Constitution.

No human being with even an iota of honesty will be able to defend Guantanamo. It is not just prolonged detention without trial or systematic torture or incessant prisoner abuse that has angered the world. Prison guards and interrogators at Guantanamo are also guilty of indulging in crude and offensive acts aimed at humiliating the detainees and wounding their religious sensitivities.

The UN’s principled stand on Guantanamo should prompt the world body to make other demands upon the US government. It should be asked to cease forthwith its clandestine abduction-deportation-detention-cum-torture operations in foreign lands. It is now well established that a number of foreign governments in different parts of the world have been involved, directly or indirectly, in these operations. These nefarious activities bring shame to nations which claim to champion human rights.

Disclosures about clandestine abduction and deportation operations in the last few months and the publication of the Guantanamo Report a couple of days ago have acquired urgent significance in view of recent media revelations of hitherto unexposed prisoner abuse in the US run Abu Ghraib prison and of the brutal assault of youths inside a British military compound in al-Amarah in Iraq. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the previously unseen pictures aired over Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) seem to suggest that the torture and abuse were much worse than what was first revealed in 2004. What was particularly disturbing about the video showing the assault by British soldiers published in the British newspaper, News of the World was the callous indifference to the beatings displayed by other soldiers passing by at that time. Both the US and British governments have assured the world that they will conduct a thorough investigation into the incidents and punish the culprits.

In the ultimate analysis, acting against the guilty in specific instances of human rights violations is not enough. Justice will only be served when the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq ends and their attempt at global hegemony is thwarted once and for all.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,
President,
International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.
18 February 2006.

The True Cost of the Iraq war
by Joseph Stiglitz

The most important things in life, like life itself, are priceless. But that doesn’t mean that issues involving the preservation of life (or a way of life), like defence, should not be subjected to cool, hard economic analysis.

Shortly before the current Iraq war, when Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey suggested that the costs might range between US$100 billion and US$200 billion, other officials quickly demurred. But it now appears that these figures were a gross underestimate.

Concerned that the Bush administration might be misleading everyone about the Iraq war’s costs, just as it had about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection with al-Qaeda, I teamed up with Linda Bilmes, a budget expert at Harvard, to examine the issue.

Even we, as opponents of the war, were staggered by what we found, with conservative to moderate estimates ranging from slightly less than US$1 trillion to more than US$2 trillion.

Our analysis starts with the US$500 billion that the Congressional Budget Office openly talks about, which is still 10 times higher than what the administration said the war would cost. Its estimate falls so far short because the reported figures do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And these are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole.

For example, the Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of severely wounded returning veterans - 16,000 so far, including roughly 20 per cent with serious brain and head injuries. So, it is no surprise that its figure ignores the lifetime disability and health-care costs for them. Nor does the administration want to face up to the military’s recruiting and retention problems. The result is large re-enlistment bonuses, improved benefits and higher recruiting costs. Moreover, the war is extremely wearing on equipment, some of which will have to be replaced.

Of course, the brunt of the costs of injury and death is borne by soldiers and their families. But the military pays disability benefits that are markedly lower than the value of lost earnings. Similarly, payments for those killed amount to only US$500,000 - far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death (US$6.1 to US$6.5 million). But the costs don’t stop there. The Bush administration once claimed that the Iraq war would be good for the economy. Things have turned out differently: the oil companies are the big winners, while the American and global economies are losers. At the same time, money spent on the war could have been spent elsewhere. If a proportion of it had been allocated to domestic investment in roads, schools and research, the US economy would have been stimulated more, and its growth enhanced in the long run. In short, even our “moderate” estimate may significantly underestimate the cost of America’s involvement in Iraq. And it does not include any of the costs implied by the enormous loss of life and property in Iraq itself. The war was an immense “project”, yet it appears that the analysis of its benefits was greatly flawed and that of its costs virtually absent. One cannot help but wonder: were there alternative ways of spending a fraction of the war’s US$1 trillion to US$2 trillion in costs that would have better strengthened security, boosted prosperity and promoted democracy?

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor of economics at Columbia University.

Never underestimate the self-pity of the ruling classes. Since Labour took office in 1997 the Confederation of British Industry(CBI)has been engaged in one long whinge. It doesn’t matter that our taxes are among the lowest and our regulations among the weakest in the developed world. It doesn’t matter that the rich are richer than they have ever been. The CBI is the monster with a thousand stomachs that will never be satisfied.

In the submission it made to the chancellor’s pre-budget report, it demanded that the government spend less on everything except business. The state should cut its planned spending on health, social security and local authorities, and use some of the savings to protect and enhance its “support and advisory services for trade and businesses”. Our higher-education budget should be used to supply free research for corporations. The regional development agencies should “expand their activities to support more extensive business-to-business networking and collaboration”. Further road taxes should be abandoned, and the climate-change levy “should be frozen”, but the government should help businesses by building more roads and airports. This is what the CBI means by free enterprise.

I mention it to provide some context for the extraordinary revelations published by the Guardian last week. Felicity Lawrence used the Freedom of Information Act to discover who has been receiving the EU’s farm subsidies. The biggest beneficiaries, she found, were not farmers but food manufacturers. In 2003 and 2004, the sugar company Tate & Lyle was given £227m of taxpayers’ money. Nestlé was paid by you and me to export milk: I wouldn’t be surprised if this includes its ever-popular sales of powdered milk to the third world. Gate Gourmet, the airline-catering company, took half a million pounds from us for the little sachets of milk and sugar it puts on passengers’ food trays: because they leave British airspace, they qualify for export subsidies. KLM received a farm subsidy for “rural restructuring”: turning part of the Dutch countryside into a runway. GlaxoSmithKline, Boots, Eton College, Heineken, Grolsch, Shell and the tobacco company Philip Morris have been given millions of pounds of farm subsidies, and at least one of them (Eton) doesn’t even know why.

The British government can’t be blamed for this. Tony Blair has been trying for years to cut the money handed out under the common agricultural policy (CAP), and for years has been thwarted, principally by France and Germany. At the European summit this week, France and Germany will doubtless ensure that nothing changes until at least 2013, undermining everything they claim to be striving for at the simultaneous trade talks in Hong Kong. But what bothers our government is not that the poor are giving to the rich, but that the CAP represents an unnecessary drain on state resources. How do I know? Because when Britain provides its own agricultural aid, the same thing happens.

On Thursday the research organisation SpinWatch published a report on the outcome of the government’s Curry commission, which was supposed to help farmers recover from the foot and mouth epidemic. When the commission released its findings in January 2002, it claimed that the measures would help to reconnect farmers with their market, reconnect food production “with a healthy and attractive countryside” and reconnect consumers “with what they eat and where it has come from”. The government put aside £500m to make this happen, then used the money to make sure it didn’t.

It spent £2.3m on setting up the Food Chain Centre, which would “help build more effective and efficient supply chains”. The centre is run by the Institute of Grocery Distribution, a research group working for the food manufacturers and superstores. All but one of the IGD’s board of trustees come from companies that could be accused of helping to break the connections between farmers and the market, the market and the countryside, and consumers and the food they eat: Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, Compass, Nestlé, Heinz, Procter & Gamble, Bernard Matthews, Kraft and Unilever. The Food Chain Centre helps companies to reduce their costs and enhance their profits, and we pay for it.

A further £1.4m has gone to the Cereals Industry Forum, which is run by the food industry’s big lobby groups. The government has given £6.8m to the Red Meat Industry Forum, which, among other public services, has been helping Tesco to find cheaper ways of producing pork sausages. So it goes on. But when the National Association of Farmers’ Markets, which did exactly what the Curry commission recommended, applied for £150,000 from the government, it was told to get lost. It collapsed soon afterwards. Doubtless the money had already been spent on helping Tesco find new ways of destroying its competitors.

There is nothing unusual about these handouts for private companies. In his book Perverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Myers estimates that when you add the direct payments US corporations receive to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, you come up with a figure of $2.6 trillion, or roughly five times as much as the profits they make. As well as the $362bn the OECD countries were paying for farming when his book was published (or rather, as we have seen, for activities masquerading as farming) they were shelling out about $71bn on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25bn a year to destroy the Earth’s fisheries, and $14bn to wreck our forests.

The energy policy bill the Bush administration drove through Congress this summer handed a further $2.9bn to the coal industry, $4.3bn to nuclear power and $1.5bn to oil and gas firms. According to the Democratic congressman Henry Waxman, the oil subsidy “was mysteriously inserted in the final energy legislation after the legislation was closed to further amendment ... Obviously, it would be a serious abuse to secretly slip [in] such a costly and controversial provision.”

Most of the money, he discovered, would be administered by “a private consortium located in the district of majority leader Tom DeLay ... The leading contender for this contract appears to be the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America consortium”, whose board members include Marathon Oil and Halliburton. “There is no conceivable rationale for this extraordinary largesse. The oil and gas industry is reporting record income and profits ... the net income of the top oil companies will total $230bn in 2005.”

It would be tempting to hold Bush responsible for this, but the oil firms were scooping up taxpayers’ money long before they put their robot in the White House: Myers reports that between 1993 and mid-1996 “American oil and gas companies gave $10.3m to political campaigns and received tax breaks worth $4bn”.

This week the rich countries gathering for the World Trade Organisation meeting in Hong Kong will tell the poor ones to open their economies to the free market. But the free market does not exist. In every nation the corporations hold out their begging bowls and tax-payers line up to fill them. We are the ragged-trousered philanthropists of the 21st century, the comparatively poor obliged to sponsor the rich.