Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.
In a society that has very high concentration of capital in a narrow sector of the population, that's going to influence everything in different ways.
Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.
Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.
But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.
Long before the technology revolution there was declassification of documents and I've spent quite a lot of time studying declassified internal documents and written a lot about them. In fact, anybody who's worked through the declassified record can see very clearly that the reason for classification is very rarely to protect the state or the society from enemies. Most of the time it is to protect the state from its citizens, so they don't know what the government is doing.
Should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn't these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that.
Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.
What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.
Say the Pentagon Papers, - that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty - five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.
Wikileaks is providing information on what ambassadors are sending to Washington and things like that. Maybe some of that has a right to some kind of secrecy, but there is a heavy burden and I think its pretty hard to meet. I haven't read everything from Wikileaks by any means but the parts that I have read and seen I think are things the public should know.
The threat is that the public will know what the government is up to. Any system of power is going to want to keep free from public surveillance, that's natural. Its shouldn't be but, its very natural.
Pakistan is not a unified country. In large parts of the country, the state is regarded as a Punjabi state, not their (the people's) state.
Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society. It's also extremely dangerous with all the weapons development.
Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries [Pakistan and India]. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces.
A good American friend of mine who has lived in India for many years, working as a journalist, was recently denied entry to the country because he wrote on Kashmir. This is a reflection of fractures within society. Pakistan, too, has to focus on the Lashkar [Lashkar-i-Taiba] and other similar groups and work towards some sort of sensible compromise on Kashmir.
There is Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan which will also be a very tricky issue in the coming years. Then there is a large part of Pakistan which is being torn apart from American drone attacks. The country is being invaded constantly by a terrorist superpower. Again, this is not a small problem.
Historically, several policy domains, including that of foreign policy towards the US and India, budget allocations etc, have been controlled by the Pakistani military, and the civil-military divide can be said to be the most fundamental fracture in Pakistan's body politic.
Similar problems are arising in Egypt too. The question is whether the military will release its grip which has been extremely strong for the past 60 years. So this is happening all over the region and particularly strikingly in Pakistan.
Balochistan, and to some extent Sindh too, has a general feeling that they are not part of the decision-making process in Pakistan and are ruled by a Punjabi dictatorship. There is a lot of exploitation of the rich resources [in Balochistan] which the locals are not gaining from. As long as this goes on, it is going to keep providing grounds for serious uprisings and insurgencies.
The dynamics of the Taliban now appear to be very different and complex, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they attack governments and mainstream parties.
I've been interested in the reports on Rojava. It seems clear that there are positive developments.
We should certainly not be perpetuating further harm to others or to the environment. Suppose that workers at ExxonMobil are trying to unionize. We have two choices: to help them improve their lives, or to keep away so that their lives will be worse. Neither choice has any effect on use of fossil fuels. So radical organizers can both help them unionize and improve their lives, and convince them to find a different way to survive and work for ending the use of fossil fuels.
Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.
Because the 1979 strike against U.S. Steel in Youngstown, Ohio was an occupation - and actually, that's a model that really should be pursued now.They went on from striking to trying to have the workforce and the communities take over the abandoned factories that U.S. Steel was dismantling.
