Scoop of the day

China's Tianhe-2 retakes fastest supercomputer crown

2013-06-17T09:57:00.001-07:00

A China-based supercomputer has leapfrogged rivals to be named the world's most powerful system.

Tianhe-2, developed by the government-run National University of Defence Technology, topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, by a team of international researchers.

They said the news was a "surprise" since the system had not been expected to be ready until 2015.

China last held the top rank between November 2010 and June 2011.
According to the list, the US has the world's second and third fastest supercomputers, Titan and Sequoia, while Japan's K computer drops to fourth spot.

Fastest supercomputers

1. Tianhe-2 (China)
2. Titan (US)
3. Sequoia (US)
4. K computer (Japan)
5. Mira (US)
6. Stampede (US)
7. Juqueen (Germany)
8. Vulcan (US)
9. SuperMuc (Germany)
10. Tianhe-1A (China)

The latest version of the twice-yearly list - which is overseen by Hans Meuer, professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim - was published to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.

Unique features

According to the Linpack benchmark, Tianhe-2 - meaning Milky Way-2 - operates at 33.86 petaflop/sec, the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The benchmark measures real-world performance - but in theory the machine can boost that to a "peak performance" of 54.9 petaflop/sec.

The project was sponsored by the Chinese government's 863 High Technology Programme - an effort to make the country's hi-tech industries more competitive and less dependent on overseas rivals.

It has said it intends to install the equipment at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, based in the country's south-eastern Guandong province, where it will be offered as a "research and education" resource to southern China.

The machine uses a total of 3.12 million processor cores, using Intel's Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips to carry out its calculations.

However, the University of Tennessee's Jack Dongarra - a member of the Top 500 list team who visited the project in May - noted that many of its features were developed in China and are unique. These include:

A custom-built interconnection network, which routes data across the system
The inclusion of 4,096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs (central processing units) designed by the university - these have been installed to handle specific weather-forecasting and national-defence applications and are not included in the headline performance figures
The use of the Kylin operating system - this Linux-based OS is named after a mythical beast known as the "Chinese unicorn", and was designed by the university to be a high-security option for users in government, defence, energy, aerospace and other critical industries

On paper the Tianhe-2's performance is nearly double that of the next computer on the list.
Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, clocks 17.59 petaflop/sec of performance, according to the Linpack benchmark, and a theoretical peak of 27.11 petaflop/sec.

Mr Dongarra noted that the US government is not expected to acquire another supercomputer until 2015.

Japan's Fujitsu-built K computer - which displaced China's Tianhe-1 as the world's fastest supercomputer - now comes in fourth on the Top 500 list with a Linpack benchmark performance of 10.51 petaflop/sec.

According to the survey's editors, China now accounts for 66 of the list's fastest computers, which is actually a fall from six months ago when it had 72 in the list.
The US dominates the survey with 252 systems, Japan has 30, the UK has 29, France has 23 and Germany has 19.

Source: BBC News [accessed 17/6/2013]

Smashing the Spinning Plates

2012-07-19T05:28:00.001-07:00

Supporters of the Syriza party wave flags at a rally outside a university building following an expected second place in the general election on June 17, in Athens. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

June 29, 2012

How long can the Eurocrats in Brussels keep the dinnerware in motion?

BY Slavoj Žižek

The outcome of the June 17 Greek election—a narrow victory for the conservative New Democracy over the leftist Syriza party, and the prompt formation of a “pro-European” coalition government—predictably unleashed a gigantic sigh of relief all over Europe. The catastrophe was averted, European unity had prevailed, etc. But, in fact, a great opportunity was missed, a unique chance for Europe to finally confront the depth of its economic and political deadlock. The sigh of relief effectively meant: We avoided the awakening. We can continue to dream.

CNN’s Richard Quest recently offered a metaphor for this dream when he compared the European officials to:

[T]he proverbial “plate spinners” from the circus. Those talented artists who balance spinning plates on sticks, ever increasing the number of sticks, rushing from one to the other, giving them a tug and pull to keep them moving, always aware that if they are too slow or too fast, one of the plates will crash to the ground. That is exactly what we have in Europe today. Only the artists are European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso et al, while the plates are Greece, Spanish banks, Italian deficits, eurobonds and German chancellor Angela Merkel. … Daily it seems there are more plates spinning, and the antics of the spinners become more frantic as they rush from one to the other, ever proclaiming that the act is coming to a close. Unfortunately that is not the case. The plate spinning is likely to continue for some time to come.

Spinning plates is effectively what the Brussels Eurocrats are doing: endlessly postponing the critical reckoning by way of adding new plates and thus making the balance more and more fragile. Syriza was accused of promoting leftist fictions—but it is the austerity plan imposed by Brussels that is a fiction. In a strange gesture of collective make-believe, everyone knows that the Greek state cannot ever repay its debt, and everyone ignores the obvious nonsense of the financial projections on which the plans are based.

So why does Brussels impose these plans? What matters in contemporary capitalism is that agents act upon their putative beliefs about future prospects, regardless of whether they really believe in those prospects. And, as we also all know, the true aim of these rescue measures is not to save Greece, but to save the European banks.

There is a wonderfully dialectical joke in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic comedy Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this single coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk.

Greece is in the same predicament: The situation is difficult, and Greeks will get some kind of austerity—but will they get that austerity without cream or without milk? It is here that the European establishment is cheating. It is acting as if Greeks will get the coffee of austerity without cream (that the fruits of their hardship will not profit only European banks but also themselves), but they are effectively offering Greeks coffee without milk (only the banks, and not the Greeks, will profit from this hardship).

To illustrate the mistake of enacting austerity measures as the main strategy to combat the crisis, Paul Krugman often compares them to the medieval cure of blood-letting. That’s a nice metaphor that should be radicalized even further. The European financial doctors, who are themselves not sure about how the medicine works, are using the Greeks as test rabbits and letting their blood, not the blood of their own countries. There is no blood-letting for the great German and French banks—on the contrary, they are getting continuous and enormous transfusions.

Syriza is not a group of dangerous “extremists.” Rather, it is bringing pragmatic common sense to clear the mess created by others. It is those who impose austerity measures who are dangerous dreamers, who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. Syriza supporters are not dreamers—they are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, they are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

Syriza is a radical Left movement that stepped out of the comfortable position of marginal resistance and courageously signaled their readiness to take power. This is why, according to some, the Greeks should be penalized—or, as Bill Frezza recently wrote in Forbes, under the headline, “Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism”: “What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? … Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.” The old story of Haiti after 1804 repeats itself here: Greece should be exemplarily punished to block once and for all any temptation for a radical Left solution to the crisis.

Some have argued Syriza lacks the proper experience to govern, and this should be admitted: Yes, they lack the experience in how to bankrupt a country, in how to cheat and to steal. This brings us to the absurdity of the European establishment’s politics: They preach the dogma of paying taxes—and against Greece’s institutional corruption—and put all their hopes on the coalition of the two parties that institutionalized that corruption in the first place. The New Democracy victory was the result of a brutal campaign full of lies and scare-mongering—the politics of fear at its purest, drawing a picture of Greece with hunger, chaos and police state terror in the case of the Syriza victory.

The EU pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures fits perfectly with what psychoanalysis calls superego. Superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a sadistic agent that bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw clearly, the more we obey its demands, the guiltier we feel. Imagine a vicious teacher who imposes on his pupils impossible tasks, and then takes pleasure in jeering when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what is so terribly wrong with the EU demands: their austerity policies don’t even give Greece a chance—its failure is part of the game.

There is an (apocryphal, for sure) anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the middle of WWI: the Germans sent the message “Here, on our part of the front, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic,” to which the Austrians replied, “Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.” This is the true difference between Syriza and others. For the others, the situation is catastrophic but not serious; they want to continue with business as usual. For Syriza, the situation is serious but not catastrophic, since courage and hope should replace fear.

Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.

Source: <http://www.inthesetimes.com> [accessed 19/7/2012]

Iran, Russia, China, Syria to Stage Biggest Joint Wargames in Middle-East

2012-06-19T07:21:00.003-07:00

Iranian media outlets reported on Tuesday that Iran, Russia, China and Syria are to conduct joint military exercises in Syria next month.

The semi-official Fars News outlet, which has ties to the Iranian government, cited "certain unofficial sources" in its report but did not say what those sources were.

The report appears to have originated on Arabic language Syrian media outlet ShamLife, which said the war-games were scheduled in less than a month's time.

Also on Tuesday, the BBC reported that the UK had stopped a cargo vessel off the western coast of Scotland allegedly transporting Russian-made refurbished attack helicopters to Syria. British marine insurer the Standard Club canceled cover to the MV Alaed's owners after UK security services warned that the company would breach EU sanctions if it insured a ship carrying arms to Syria, according to the UK's Daily Telegraph.

The unconfirmed reports of joint wargames could just be part of the pyrotechnics of an escalating diplomatic row between the US and Russia over the Syrian violence.

A new form of European union

2012-06-13T06:37:00.001-07:00

By Martin Wolf

Here is the biggest question about the eurozone: can we envisage a set of reforms that are not only politically feasible and economically workable, but would let it prosper, as it is. If so, what might they be?

We already know that, as designed, the eurozone did not meet this test. Hence all the improvisation of today. The original design created huge imbalances. When the flow of finance dried up, these delivered a wave of financial and fiscal crises and a legacy of unaffordable debt. Furthermore, the forces driving those imbalances generated divergences in competitiveness. These also need to be redressed, as quickly as possible.

In response, the eurozone has developed a strategy based on fiscal austerity and structural reform. In addition, the European System of Central Banks, as lender of last resort, and the International Monetary Fund and eurozone governments, via the temporary European Financial Stability Fund and, soon, the permanent European Stability Mechanism provide indirect financing for fragile economies and sovereigns. The $100bn proposed rescue of Spanish banks is the latest example of this strategy at work. It is unlikely to be the last.

Will the strategy work? Probably not. As Mark Cliffe and his team at ING note, in a report entitled Roads to Survival, a good way to think about the challenge is in terms of the external and internal imbalances bequeathed by the incontinent cross-border lending prior to the crisis.

If external deficits are to be reduced, domestic demand must shrink. If done too swiftly, this would raise unemployment, possibly enormously (see chart). In the long run, high unemployment, aided by market-oriented reforms, should drive down nominal wages. But this could take many years. Meanwhile, persistently weak economies mean a growing mountain of bad private debt, high fiscal deficits, rising public debt, high interest rates and extremely fragile financial systems.

This strategy, then, looks neither politically feasible nor economically workable. Now consider alternatives. A federal union, with a federal government that finances spending throughout the union, is certainly economically workable. We have many examples: the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland. But we can safely say that, whatever the position may be a century from now, the eurozone is very far from able to share such a government.

A less ambitious – but still ambitious – alternative would be a transfer union, by which I mean a system of permanent transfers from richer to poorer member countries, as is normal within countries. This is surely politically infeasible. Above all, it is neither necessary nor desirable from the economic point of view. It is unnecessary for poorer countries to run sustained current account deficits, provided wages remain in line with productivity (as ceased to be the case for several members during the pre-crisis boom). It is undesirable for countries to receive large and sustained net transfers, because that tends to entrench backwardness.

If the current policies seem unlikely to work and either a federal or a transfer union is ruled out on grounds of political or economic infeasibility, what is left? I suggest the combination of two ideas: “insurance union” and “adjustment union”. By an insurance union, I mean one that provides temporary and targeted support for countries hit by big shocks. By an adjustment union, I mean one that ensures symmetrical adjustment to changes in circumstances, including, changes in financing. Both are necessary and, together, they should be sufficient to ensure a workable union in the long run. These notions would have been unnecessary if original members had been far more similar: the minimal union would then have worked. But that is not what now exists. If the eurozone is to sustain its current membership, it needs a combination of insurance and adjustment.

Before the birth of the euro, some economists thought that members might use fiscal policy to cushion country-specific shocks. We now know this does not work, even if (as was true for Ireland and Spain), the victim began with a healthy public finances. Really large capital inflows and asset price bubbles overwhelm fiscal policy. For this reason, members cannot self-insure against severe shocks. Insurance must be provided collectively, on the principle that everybody benefits from the survival of the union. The insurance must support the financial system and (if possible) fiscal solvency in a crisis. But if it is to be insurance, not an open-ended hand-out, conditions must be imposed. Designing insurance that stabilises financial systems and sovereign finances in a crisis is tricky, but not impossible. Clearly, support needs to be larger and more automatic than now, without being open-ended.

More important even than such insurance is adjustment. Members need a chance of returning to health within a reasonable time period provided they adopt sensible policies. If members – particularly large members – are to adjust, they will need complementary adjustments elsewhere. More precisely, the necessary return to external and internal balance in crisis-hit countries cannot be achieved without higher spending and inflation in the core. The European Central Bank is astonishingly complacent in failing to react to yet another recession.

Unless one imagines that the world economy could now cope with a big shift by the eurozone as a whole towards surplus, the rebalancing must occur largely inside the eurozone. If this adjustment is blocked by weak demand and very low inflation in core countries, the vulnerable countries will be locked into semi-permanent slumps. That way lies close to guaranteed failure.

Is it possible for the eurozone to make the needed reforms in the near future? I do not know. The time may now be too short and the irritation too great. But, conceptually, it seems clear what is needed: a swift and effective move towards an insurance and adjustment union. That is neither a federal union nor a transfer union. It is a way of making it possible for countries that remain largely sovereign to share a single currency. I do not know whether even this is economically and politically feasible. But if not that, what? And if not now, when?

Source: The Financial Times [accessed 13/6/2012]

The Accidental Empire

2012-06-09T08:36:00.003-07:00

08/06/2012 By George Soros

It is now clear that the main cause of the euro crisis is the member states’ surrender of their right to print money to the European Central Bank. They did not understand just what that surrender entailed – and neither did the European authorities.

When the euro was introduced, regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital, and the ECB discounted all eurozone government bonds on equal terms. Commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate weaker countries’ bonds to earn a few extra basis points, which caused interest rates to converge across the eurozone. Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, undertook structural reforms and became more competitive. Other countries enjoyed housing and consumption booms on the back of cheap credit, making them less competitive.

Then came the crash of 2008. Governments had to bail out their banks. Some of them found themselves in the position of a developing country that had become heavily indebted in a currency that it did not control. Reflecting the divergence in economic performance, Europe became divided into creditor and debtor countries.

When financial markets discovered that supposedly riskless government bonds might be forced into default, they raised risk premiums dramatically. This rendered potentially insolvent commercial banks, whose balance sheets were loaded with such bonds, giving rise to Europe’s twin sovereign-debt and banking crisis.

The eurozone is now replicating how the global financial system dealt with such crises in 1982 and again in 1997. In both cases, the international authorities inflicted hardship on the periphery in order to protect the center; now Germany is unknowingly playing the same role.

The details differ, but the idea is the same: creditors are shifting the entire burden of adjustment onto debtors, while the “center” avoids its own responsibility for the imbalances. Interestingly, the terms “center” and “periphery” have crept into usage almost unnoticed. Yet, in the euro crisis, the center’s responsibility is even greater than it was in 1982 or 1997: it designed a flawed currency system and failed to correct the defects. In the 1980’s, Latin America suffered a lost decade; a similar fate now awaits Europe.

At the onset of the crisis, a breakup of the euro was inconceivable: the assets and liabilities denominated in a common currency were so intermingled that a breakup would have led to an uncontrollable meltdown. But, as the crisis has progressed, the financial system has become increasingly reordered along national lines. This trend has gathered momentum in recent months. The ECB’s long-term refinancing operation enabled Spanish and Italian banks to buy their own countries’ bonds and earn a large spread. Simultaneously, banks gave preference to shedding assets outside their national borders, and risk managers try to match assets and liabilities at home, rather than within the eurozone as a whole.

If this continued for a few years, a euro breakup would become possible without a meltdown, but it would leave the creditor countries with large claims against debtor countries, which would be difficult to collect. In addition to intergovernmental transfers and guarantees, the Bundesbank’s claims against peripheral countries’ central banks within the Target2 clearing system totaled €644 billion ($804 billion) on April 30, and the amount is growing exponentially, owing to capital flight.

So the crisis keeps growing. Tensions in financial markets have hit new highs. Most telling is that Britain, which retained control of its currency, enjoys the lowest yields in its history, while the risk premium on Spanish bonds is at a new high.

The real economy of the eurozone is declining, while Germany is booming. This means that the divergence is widening. The political and social dynamics are also working toward disintegration. Public opinion, as expressed in recent election results, is increasingly opposed to austerity, and this trend is likely to continue until the policy is reversed. Something has to give.

In my judgment, the authorities have a three-month window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse current trends. That would require some extraordinary policy measures to return conditions closer to normal, and they must conform to existing treaties, which could then be revised in a calmer atmosphere to prevent recurrence of imbalances.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to identify some extraordinary measures that would meet these tough requirements. They would have to tackle the banking and the sovereign-debt problems simultaneously, without neglecting to reduce divergences in competitiveness.

The eurozone needs a banking union: a European deposit-insurance scheme in order to stem capital flight, a European source for financing bank recapitalization, and eurozone-wide supervision and regulation. The heavily indebted countries need relief on their financing costs. There are various ways to provide it, but they all require Germany’s active support.

That is where the blockage is. German authorities are working feverishly to come up with a set of proposals in time for the European Union summit at the end of June, but all signs suggest that they will offer only the minimum on which the various parties can agree – implying, once again, only temporary relief.

But we are at an inflection point. The Greek crisis is liable to come to a climax in the fall, even if the election produces a government that is willing to abide by Greece’s current agreement with its creditors. By that time, the German economy will also be weakening, so that Chancellor Angela Merkel will find it even more difficult than today to persuade the German public to accept additional European responsibilities.

Barring an accident like the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, Germany is likely to do enough to hold the euro together, but the EU will become something very different from the open society that once fired people’s imagination. The division between debtor and creditor countries will become permanent, with Germany dominating and the periphery becoming a depressed hinterland.

This will inevitably arouse suspicion about Germany’s role in Europe – but any comparison with Germany’s past is quite inappropriate. The current situation is due not to a deliberate plan, but to the lack of one. It is a tragedy of policy errors. Germany is a well-functioning democracy with an overwhelming majority for an open society. When the German people become aware of the consequences – one hopes not too late – they will want to correct the defects in the euro’s design.

It is clear what is needed: a European fiscal authority that is able and willing to reduce the debt burden of the periphery, as well as a banking union. Debt relief could take various forms other than Eurobonds, and would be conditional on debtors abiding by the fiscal compact. Withdrawing all or part of the relief in case of nonperformance would be a powerful protection against moral hazard. It is up to Germany to live up to the leadership responsibilities thrust upon it by its own success.

Source: Project Syndicate [accessed 9/6/2012]

Rundle: Greece is now the cutting edge of the world

2012-05-18T13:27:00.004-07:00

Wednesday, 16 May 2012 / by Guy Rundle

“Everything’s fine out the window … oh no, look, I can see society collapsing,” said Paul, a French-Greek journalist working in Athens. Out his window is Ermou, the wide shopping street that leads down to Syntagma Square. I’d phoned him to see what was going on, and to check the “Greece in turmoil” line that has become de rigeur in the official coverage of the crisis.

Paul didn’t need much of an invitation to take the piss out of that line. What has happened in the development of the Greek-European crisis — and the inter-connected coverage of it — has been extraordinary, but also indicative of the topsy-turvy world of capitalism, finance, and its relation to everyday life. It is a lesson worth following closely, because Greece is a harbinger of what will happen not merely in Europe, but across the world over the next decade as the vast global superbubble of neoliberalism slowly deflates.

Six months ago, Greece really was starting to fray — due to the determination of the two major parties, PASOK and New Democracy, to impose the austerity measures of the EU “memorandum” no matter how stupid or self-defeating — and the deep frustration of the public at the impasse between the political system and popular feeling.

But then, after six months of “technocratic” rule (really, EU satrapy), an election was held, and lo and behold, the hold of the major parties was broken, and new forces — Syriza, a leftist outfit, and Independent Greeks, a right-wing nationalist breakaway — managed to break through, gaining about 50 and 30 seats respectively. The vote may have scattered across several parties but the result was clear — 60% of votes went to parties that rejected the terms of the memorandum. At the same time, 80% of Greeks want to stay in the euro and the EU. They reject the old parties, but they also reject the notion that the only way to square away the debt is needless pain enacted for largely ceremonial purposes.

So, in other words, the people’s desires have entirely transformed the structure of Greek politics. Or, as it might otherwise be called, democracy. For surely, if democracy means anything, it means the capacity of a vote to up-end everything. In any real democracy, the party structure should collapse and recombine every 25-30 years or so. Large parties are, after all, coalitions of temporarily united values and interests. When the circumstances change, so should they.

That is what has happened in Greece. Rather than the shell-game of finance capitalism dictating the terms, people have made a fairly clear statement of what they want — the social-political has come to the centre of society, as it should. What the morons who constitute the ranks of financial journalism call “chaos” is really the exact opposite — it is politics, people expressing their will in a non-violent form, and then trying to negotiate an arrangement between differing manifestations of ideas and interests.

Chaos, by contrast, can be seen on the screen on every finance trader across the Western world, where stocks, shares, currencies move according to no rational basis, driven by the echo chamber of rumour. The idea that the business of everyday life should be governed by these processes rather than by the rational activity of production for use, indicates the nihilism at the heart of the market, its alliance with dead matter — numbers, money, power — rather than life.

The Greeks have rebelled against this. It looks like their rebellion will continue — with the failure of the latest attempts to form a coalition government the country is going back to the polls. Syriza, the left coalition that had taken 5% of the vote in the last election, and 17% in this, is now polling in the mid-twenties.

Such a result — if it occurred in the new elections, to take place in mid-June — would give Syriza the 50-seat bonus still in place. That would give them about 120 seats out of 300. Presuming that Democratic Left retained 10 seats or so — they would lose some seats back to Syriza — then there would be extreme pressure on Independent Greeks — the right-wing breakaway party — to support Syriza in their shared belief, a rejection of the austerity measures contained in the second memorandum.

That would deliver a government expressing the popular sentiment — in Europe but rejecting the memorandum. That is the scenario — a rational democratic one — that finance journalists call “the nightmare”. It is, but not in the manner they suggest. The truth is, that if Syriza forms government while rejecting the memorandum, but refuses to unilaterally leave the euro, then it is really Europe’s problem, not Greece’s. The usual groupthink that has everyone writing articles as to how Greece will leave the euro next week, etc, fails to take account of the fact that there is no easy way to expel a country from the eurozone. The onus is on the EU to do the expelling.

So everything from here on is uncharted. The technocratic Greek government — which remains in place — paid off an €5 billion-plus bond issue that came due today — but interest is due on hundreds of billions of euros of debt in the next month — much of it euro-debt — and the country has less than a billion euros in foreign reserves. So the EU would have to decisively refuse to underwrite the next series of payments — which would simply go from one euro account to another — in order to force the crisis.

The sensible solution would be the one proposed by new French President Francois Hollande — that bad Greek debt be swapped for eurobonds, and that the private debt take an 80-90% haircut, and that a rational 10-20 year paydown of what debt remains be negotiated without strangling the Greek economy — which would then shrink the economy further, and make it impossible for the country to repay its debts. It is utterly irrational, but so too is neoliberalism — it is the equivalent of the Incas believing that only human sacrifice would keep the sun rising, and that the advance of the conquistadors meant that they should redouble their efforts of tearing hearts out of chests on the top of ziggurats, rather than responding to the immediate threat in a rational and direct manner.

Every number quoted by the finance journalists — the hundreds of billions of euros owed, the terms coming due — are all bullshit. All that is due is the interest payments, and most of those are ludicrously inflated by the shell-game that got Greece into this mess in the first place — the sudden downrating of Greek debt by ratings agencies part-owned by the very banks that would profit from a hike in interest rates in the first place. Most finance journalists are simply unthinking propagandists of a system they have neither the intelligence nor the desire to examine.

Greece is now the cutting edge of the world. And Syriza is the most advanced political expression around. The party that the finance journalists call “strident” and lump in with the Nazi freak-show of Golden Dawn, is in reality an expression of the rationality within modernity — the idea that complex systems such as finance capital should be tools of humanity, rather than vice versa. People who think that the world can be covered by noting the movements of the FTSE, the Dow and the Kak better get used to what is happening in Greece, because it will soon be happening elsewhere.

Of course, with a month before the new elections, it is always possible that the voters in Greece will return to a mainstream pro-memorandum party, guided by fear. Should that occur, the relationship between the polity and the people will be sundered afresh, and everything up to civil war will have happened. Should Syriza triumph, then history will have happened, and Europe, the markets and their trailing sycophants in the financial press will have to adjust. Look away from the screen and out the window, and you might see the world.

Source: http://www.crikey.com.au/ [accessed 18/05/2012]

May Day

2012-05-01T03:02:00.001-07:00

Noam Chomsky, Reader Supported News

29 April 12

eople seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called "Law Day" -- a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement's organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

If you're a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They're not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves. People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that there are limits to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won't, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is necessary, steps to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to be a form of self-defense, they're not going to take part in them, at least they shouldn't.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and judicial punishment.

Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a "law day" as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

A note on the Greek Crisis

2012-02-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

After the latest negotiations for a further tranche of bailout money, which were followed by rioting in Athens and other Greek cities (12/2/2012), the question remains. What will happen to Greece? And why is this small country, which produces no more than 2% of the EU’s GDP grabbing the headlines?

Capitalism, which is back on the agenda since the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in the US, is supposed to be the best system we’ve known to date. But as Edward Heath (British PM of the 70s) was saying, capitalism with a human face, not rule of the markets with politicians as their pawns. And Heath was a Tory, not Labour politician. Of course, it was Thatcherism and Reaganomics that triumphed in the end and have shaped our modern world. The EU and German fixation with bringing down the deficit at all costs is very ideological in nature but has a veritable foundation. The argument is familiar to all: ‘we can’t live beyond our means’. Underlying that is the fact that an economy has to be productive, meaning people need to work and not abuse the social welfare system, all valid arguments.

The political elite in Greece (ex finance minister Papakonstantinou on BBC, Newsnight 14/2/2012 one bright example), as in most of Europe, belongs to the school of thought, known as neoliberalism. This way of doing politics is highly discredited now and it is extremely difficult to maintain otherwise in global forums. It is because of the shortsightedness and frankly, collusion, of the political class with creating the financial crisis in the banking sector of the economy that people are asked to stomach cuts on salaries, education, social services and benefits (in Greece as well as around the world UK/US). The crisis in Greece is not separate from the global recession. Although there are particular cultural and institutional problems in Greece (e.g. clientalism and corruption), that does not change the basis of the unfairness of the policies of austerity, which are a global problem.

In the US where this crisis started as a housing market bubble, the government had promised (Bush and then Obama) that they would bail out the banks and then bail out homeowners who were faced with foreclosure. Only the first measure of this plan was taken. In the UK, the banks (RBS, Northern Rock) also received bailouts and were effectively nationalized (money from the public purse) and nothing was done in order to reimburse the state funds apart from vague promises about returns in the future. In the meantime, the same bankers still have exorbitant bonuses. In Greece itself, a banker is now prime minister by decree (called a technocrat in Greek doublespeak). The least European elites could do, would be to impose a common tax regime on the mammoth banks and hedge funds, find a way of clamping down on tax havens and support industry, production and the REAL economy. That is the only constitutional way of avoiding more corruption and violence. Why are they unable to do those simple, constitutional (non-radical) things?

Although the recession is global, Greece has been especially hard-hit. According to Eurostat, the highest shares of the population living in households that had been in arrears with their mortgage were found in Greece. According to research by the Bank of Greece in 2007, 6 out of 10 Greek households had been in arrears with their mortgage, 7 out of 10 had been in arrears with consumer loans, 1 out of 2 had been in arrears with credit cards. Apart from credit, 7 out of 10 households had been in arrears with rent and 6 out of 10 had been in arrears with utility bills. The number of households on credit exceeded 51%; that means 2.15 million people were on some kind of credit. As far as wages and unemployment are concerned, 50% of the waged used to get less than 1030 euros gross pre-crisis. The basic wage in Greece had already been one of the lowest in Europe (50% of the EE15 wages) before the latest agreement to slash 22% off the minimum wage. Unemployment reached 20.9% in December with youth unemployment closer to 50%. The rest of the world is not far behind, with youth unemployment being just as bad in Spain and reaching 22% in the UK, 23% in the US and nearly 90% in some Arab countries (Davos 2012).

Bearing those numbers in mind, it is hard to deny that the risk of social upheaval is relevant to the depth of austerity. Following the same logic, it is questionable whether the fence around Greece will avert similar social unrest elsewhere just as it is uncertain whether it can contain contagion of the crisis. Of course, the bailout terms in Greece’s case are uniquely draconian but their effects are not unfamiliar. Greece is a very pro-European country and the people have held out as long as they have because of their faith in a European solution (some kind of Marshal plan from above). This has not materialized and the mood seems to be changing, with the latest polls suggesting that nearly half of the population thinks Greece should opt out of the euro. The policies of austerity have to be overturned at the European level but if nobody undertakes that, Greece will just keep borrowing and borrowing with extreme results-already there and recognized by all. On the other hand, support has to be given to local industry in order to get back to the path of growth. If Europe is to work at all it has to function as a single political entity that is the expression of the people of Europe and not some autocratic club of bankers. Unfortunately, my reading of history is that, this is an impossibility unless there is some kind of popular movement from below.

The case of Greece has to stand as one more, sad reminder that war can be waged by financial means. But whereas in the past it was usually the case of the IMF going to Africa and Latin America to extract their pound of flesh, this hits a little closer to home. It is easy to forget that enormous profits have been made on the short selling of Greek debt during this time. It should also be noted that the mass media in Greece has functioned as little more than state propaganda, in favor of cuts, sowing discord and confusion about the real issues. In my opinion, what is happening in Greece is an international protection racket that has domestically given rise to the extremes of the political spectrum. In the process, it is probable that laws and tenets of the constitution have been broken. It only remains to be seen whether this ‘formula’ could ever be ‘justified’ in a country that does not have some of the acute structural or cultural problems of Greece. In other words, can markets target the capitalist core or is there a 'home bias'; and in today's globalized world who is the capitalist core? In the end, the best bulwark for democracy against chaos is the welfare state and it seems otherworldly that it should be attacked at a time of crisis by governments and corporate media.

Is this the end of the world as we know it?

2012-02-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

Posted by Petros Fassoulas - 02 December 2011 10:32

It's certainly the end of the eurozone as we know it. If there was ever a time for apocalyptic titles, well, this is it. Politicians, journalists, market participants, commentators, academics and pretty much everybody under the sun have engaged in an unofficial competition for who is going to come up with the most depressing prediction of what the not-so-distant-future holds for the eurozone and Europe at large. If these doomsday predictions are anything to go by, our world will come crashing before our eyes very soon. Maybe, but it is not all that bad. This is indeed the end of the eurozone as we know but I believe we should all feel fine.

What is about to end is the perverse system of guarding a monetary union with peer pressure alone. The Stability and Growth Pack was an inadequate tool for governance, based on intergovernmentalism. Supranational institutions like the European Commission and Eurostat were left powerless to enforce discipline (or even question Member States' statistics).

Proposals are already on the table to strengthen the governance of the eurozone and empower the Commission to scrutinise national budgets, warn about the build-up of imbalances and challenge Member States that break the rules. But more needs to be done; not least the creation of a European treasury with the appropriate authority, know-how and firepower to make fiscal and economic policy common for the eurozone as a whole.

The intergovernmental model of governance has taken focus away from the collective good of the Union and put the emphasis on EU Member States' competing national interests. What we need is independent and supranational institutions, taking decisions beyond narrow national interests, with the good of the EU as a whole in mind. In a similar vein, the idea that monetary union can prosper without fiscal union has run its course.

The emergence of imbalances and the loss of competitiveness are features of all monetary unions, including the US or the UK. To reduce the chance that these imbalances occur, scrutiny of fiscal policies and national budgets must be accompanied by the integration of labour, social and tax policies in an effort to form not just common economic policies but also a truly common European economy.

But when imbalances do emerge a system of transfers must be put in place to afford the embattled part of the union time and space to implement the necessary policies that will allow it to regain competitiveness. Those transfers will be conditional to the applications of the appropriate policies and can only happen in the context of a comprehensive fiscal union, with the rights and responsibilities that implies.

Furthermore, the European Central Bank must be liberated from its purely price stability remit. A strong and stable eurozone requires an central bank that monitors the build-up of imbalances across the economy and the financial services sector and is able -- and willing -- to function as lender of last resort when solvent member states and financial institutions find themselves in liquidity problems due to a systemic shock in the markets.

The creation of a fiscal union and the strengthening of the central bank will allow for the issuance of common bonds without the risk of moral hazard. Member Sates won't need to rely purely on the discipline of markets when they have to abide to the discipline of eurozone institutions. At the same time, the eurozone will not run the risk of constantly falling pray to the un-picking of its weakest link by the markets.

Last, but certainly not least, this Huxleyian Brave New World should have at its core democratically legitimate and accountable institutions. If we are to move closer to fiscal and economic federalism, governed by the independent and supranational institutions mentioned above, EU citizens must be at the heart of the process. Those charged with making decision -- be it the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Council, a European Finance Minister or the Members of the European Parliament -- must be directly accountable to the people.

Direct election for the three former, and a more representative voting system for the latter, will ensure a direct link between the electorate and the elected, and legitimise the process of economic integration needed to safeguard the future of the eurozone. This is not pro-European fantasy: it is a necessary building block in the architecture of the new governance structure of the Eurozone. And for that we need a new, grand, pan-EU Social Contract between EU citizens and their elected representatives. The sooner we start drafting that contract the quicker we will be able to take EU citizens on board the process of closer European integration, bidding farewell to the world as we know it while greeting a new, brave one.

Petros Fassoulas is the Chairman of the European Movement UK

Tags: Eurozone debt crisis

From: New Statesman [accessed 18/2/2012]

Baltasar Garzón's second trial begins in Madrid

2012-01-24T09:10:00.001-08:00

Observers from the world's main human rights groups are in Madrid to monitor the second trial of the Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, who is accused of abusing his position by opening an investigation into the deaths of 114,000 people during the Franco dictatorship.

Garzón faces a 20-year ban if found guilty of knowingly twisting the law by investigating Francoist human rights abuses in a case that opened at the supreme court on Tuesday morning. Garzon appeared relaxed during the opening session of the trial, which his supporters say is politically motivated. It is the most polemical of three separate but almost simultaneous cases in which the judge is accused of wilful abuse of his powers as an investigating magistrate at Spain's national court.

Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Commission of Jurists (IJC) have all sent observers amid concerns that Garzón is being targeted because of his innovative use of international human rights laws. "On principle, Amnesty doesn't give an opinion on the charges faced by a single person – but the Garzón case is an exception and we cannot remain silent on it," Hugo Relva, the legal adviser to AI, said. "It is simply scandalous and unacceptable. The charges should be dropped and the case closed. "This case affects the independence of judicial power in Spain. Other judges see it as a warning about what might happen to them if they continue with their own investigations."

Reed Brody, of HRW, warned that judges in less developed countries were also watching nervously to see whether the developed world was happy to accept that limits be put on human rights investigations. "This is the first time that an established democracy has tried a judge for investigating human rights abuses and applying international law," he added.

Brody pointed to the importance of Garzón's investigations of human rights abuses committed by the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and by Argentina's military juntas in pushing forward the global reach of human rights laws. "He is being tried for applying the same principles that he successfully defended then," he said, referring to Garzón's arrest of Pinochet in London and the jailing of Argentine torturers in Madrid.

Garzón's investigations had helped persuade judges in Latin America to strike out amnesty laws and put dictators and their henchmen on trial, he added, saying: "Will Franco's victims now have fewer rights than Pinochet's victims?" Pedro Nikken, of the IJC, said Garzón had been right to ignore Spain's own 1977 amnesty law when investigating Francoist repression. "International human rights law comes into play when national laws do not provide enough protection," he said. "A judge is obliged to take that into account. "We hope the supreme court takes this opportunity to make that clear." This is Garzón's second trial in the space of a fortnight. Last week, the same court placed him in the dock to answer charges that he knowingly abused his powers by allowing police to listen in to conversations between remand prisoners and their lawyers.

Garzón is also due to be tried on similar charges involving a case in which a private prosecution alleges he should have ruled himself out of making decisions on a case involving the Santander Bank because it had financed a conference he was involved with in New York. "To face these sorts of charges once is rare enough," a senior court prosecutor, who asked not to be named, said. "To face them three times is simply unheard of."The case against Garzón for investigating Francoist crimes has been brought privately by a tiny trade union with far-right connections called Clean Hands. "In Spain we have an amnesty law, agreed by our parliament," Miguel Bernad, of Clean Hands, said. "Garzón has simply skipped over it." Bernad said Garzón had previously turned down a petition to investigate a massacre committed by leftwingers during Spain's civil war precisely because of the amnesty law. He had also declared himself competent when the case belonged to a lower court, and had named 34 dead people, including Franco, as suspects. The case will take several weeks to hear, with more than a dozen victims of Franco's repression, or relatives of those who were killed, giving evidence.

Source: The Guardian [accessed 24/1/2012]

London Riots: David Starkey on Newsnight

2011-08-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

Quite a bit of controversy has been caused by David Starkey's appearance on Newsnight commenting on the recent riots in London and other cities in the UK.

One could say that David Starkey is a historian who specializes in the Tudors or royals of other periods and not the best suited individual to have an informed opinion on the riots. Indeed during the 11 minute discussion on Newsnight he seems to make a fundamental error: he equates 'gangsta' culture with black culture. Actually both of these terms are non-precise and what they represent is debatable but I do think that for a moment during the discussion David Starkey uses them as a 60-year-old white male that is out of touch. On the other hand he remarkably catches on to current trends by noting that there is heavy cross-fertilization between different cultures and in particular youth cultures in Britain. His remarks show that he is aware of particular types of Jamaican music and 'language' or discourse that have significantly influenced and shaped an inner city, council estate subculture. Not bad for David Starkey! This is anything but new in Britain, however, as music, linguistic and cultural norms have often transcended racial and class boundaries to produce a rich milieu of youth cultures in the past. David Starkey is worried that the youths partaking in the riots exhibit various levels of conscious disengagement from mainstream society and are subject to alternative values, personal goals and lifestyles.

Of course David Starkey's point is fatefully underpinned by an assumption that white culture (as his use of black culture implies) was or is something fixed and homogenous. What he sees evidence of though, is a hybrid culture that has taken root in some parts of Britain and tends to be associated with the 'lower' classes. David Starkey's analysis would be better served if he included a conception of class dynamics and how successive immigrant groups have merged culturally with the white working class in some areas of this country. Since he is a historian he could well place this within the changing face of Europe overall.

Although David Starkey's point has been seen to condone a moral panic against a perceived 'clash of civilizations-cum-values' (the diluting of 'white culture') and borders on racism, the crisis lies in the continued disenfranchisement of new social classes from mainstream political processes and not in some imagined or real change in the culture of the white working class. The continued socio-economic disenfranchisement of the 'lower' classes can only lead to a deepening of their dissociation and the further development of alternative values systems and even power centers.

Criminality and Rewards: A different take on the current London riots

2011-08-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

Published: August 09, 2011 00:36 by max von sudo

What is the crime of looting a corporate chain store next to the crime of owning one?

-- Luther Brecht

Looters don't give many press conferences. This made all of the conversations on today's BBC morning show a little bit one-sided.

Having been out last night in Brixton, I feel as qualified as anybody to offer at least a bit of perspective as an anarchist living in the area for the past six years.

First things first. None of the people hauling ass out of Currys last night will ever pay £9000 annual tuition to David Cameron's shiny new neo-liberal university system, so beloved by the young people of London.

Although Britain has a bit more social mobility now than in the Victorian era which Cameron seems to idolize, the racist overtones in the Great British societal symphony are still pretty loud. Most of the black people who participated in last night's looting of the Currys over on Effra Road may never make it off their housing estates and into the Big Society. They don't have a hell of a lot to lose.

Despite this, the fairly mixed (for Brixton) crowd of several hundred was feeling festive last night, as cars lined up on both sides of the road, all the way to Brixton Water Lane. They're not people who are used to winning very often. The chance to haul away several hundred thousand pounds worth of electronics, right under the helpless noses of the police who routinely harass, beat, and kill them, made it a great night. The fourteen year old girls heading for that 60 inch plasma TV of their dreams were polite enough to say "excuse me", quite sincerely, as they bumped into me while springing into the Currys parking lot. Last night, everybody on Effra Road was in a great mood.

This morning, killjoys in the corporate media disagreed.

Many commentators decried the lack of a clear political motive in the riots, and seemed worried about how unrespectable the looting makes it all seem. According to this line of thought, poverty is not political.

On the radio, on the web, and in the papers, there's a lot of talk right now about the 'stupidity' of the rioters, burning down their own neighbourhoods. All of the commentators who follow this line of argument haven't considered some pretty basic facts.

Outraged Guardian readers, I say to you: you're only partially correct. It's true that the guy carrying that cash register past Brixton Academy last night probably didn't conceptualize his actions according to rational choice economic theories. However, when compared with four years of failed state capitalist attempts to catapult us out of the economic crisis, his maneuvers were in fact the height of rationality. Destroying evidence by turning on the gas cooker full-blast and burning down the Stockwell Road Nandos is pretty crazy. But it makes a lot more economic sense, for Brixton, than anything so far attempted by Labour, the Conservatives, or the wizard brains of the City of London.

Smashing windows in Brixton is probably a surer road to prosperity for most people than any of the more respectable paths already explored.

The guy who showed up today to fix the smashed windows on Brixton Road may live just down the street from the shattered glass lying on the pavement; it's unlikely that he's a currency speculator or a hedge fund manager on the side. Any money he makes from fixing the windows will be mostly spent back in the local community.

The merits of endlessly sucking money out of the pockets of working people into the reserve accounts of the supercharged risk-takers at Canary wharf are quite a bit less clear to me, at present. The crisis is entering year five. Throwing hundreds of billions into the endless rounds of bank bailouts, corporate tax breaks, and other props for a global economy which increasingly resembles that of the USSR circa 1987 is not clearly a winning strategy.

The eruption of economic chaos in the Eurozone, and the police bullets which ripped into Mark Duggan, ending his life, are now two events which are bound together in a massive sequence of riots in London, the European continent's largest financial centre.

These riots are remarkable chiefly for the role-reversals they bring about, and most of the outrage in the corporate media is a reflection of this. The outrage is really interesting if you stop to think about it.

For instance: retail profit is a kind of theft. It's economic value which is hoovered out of a local community via corporate cash registers. The decisions about where to re-invest the profits are the preserve of corporate managers and shareholders, not the decision of the people from whom the value was extracted. The whole process is fundamentally anti-democratic.

This daily denial of basic democratic political rights is "normal", and may last for years, decades or centuries. Corporations may steal from poor people - but any attempt on the part of poor people to steal back must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

Similarly, I had multiple conversations today about Saturday night's riots in Tottenham. They invariably referenced the case of Keith Blakelock, the police officer who was killed during the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Not one of the conversations I had included any reference to Cynthia Jarrett, the woman whose killing during a search of her apartment sparked those riots in the first place.

In the same way, I doubt whether any of the outraged middle-class commentators on the BBC 4 radio show this morning gave much thought to the dozens of people that the cops have killed in custody, or to the more or less daily humiliation of black youths who get stopped and searched outside my house. The message conveyed by all of this is pretty clear: police attacks on poor people who can't defend themselves (especially black ones) are normal. Conversely, popular attacks on police are an outrage, especially if they happen to succeed. And don't ask that guy who nicked the cash register to give his side of the story.

None of this is to say that the fire truck which just screamed past my window is a good thing. The political and economic problems of Brixton are complex. It's too easy to spout platitudes about how nothing will ever be the same again - but for a few hours last night, walking down Effra road with plasma screen TVs and Macintosh laptops, the losers were the winners. And that could have a powerful effect.

Source: Indymedia London [accessed 9.8.2011]

Crash club: when sputtering economies collide

2011-08-02T05:07:00.000-07:00

If current trends continue, China, the European Union, and the US are headed towards a synchronised global depression.

by Mike Davis

When my old gang and I were 14 or 15 years old, many centuries ago, we yearned for immortality in the fiery wreck of a bitchin' '40 Ford or '57 Chevy. Our J.K. Rowling was Henry Felsen, the ex-Marine who wrote the bestselling masterpieces Hot Rod (1950), Street Rod (1953), and Crash Club (1958).

Officially, his books - highly praised by the National Safety Council - were deterrents, meant to scare my generation straight with huge dollops of teenage gore. In fact, he was our asphalt Homer, exalting doomed teenage heroes and inviting us to emulate their legend.

One of his books ends with an apocalyptic collision at a crossroads that more or less wipes out the entire graduating class of a small Iowa town. We loved this passage so much that we used to read it aloud to each other.

It's hard not to think of the great Felsen, who died in 1995, while browsing the business pages these days. There, after all, are the Tea Party Republicans, accelerator punched to the floor, grinning like demons as they approach Deadman's Curve. (John Boehner and David Brooks, in the back seat, are of course screaming in fear.)

The Felsen analogy seems even stronger when you leave local turf for a global view. From the air, where those Iowa cornstalks don't conceal the pattern of blind convergence, the world economic situation looks distinctly like a crash waiting to happen. From three directions, the United States, the European Union, and China are blindly speeding toward the same intersection. The question is: Will anyone survive to attend the prom?

Shaking the three pillars of McWorld
Let me reprise the obvious, but seldom discussed. Even if debt-limit doomsday is averted, Obama has already hocked the farm and sold the kids. With breathtaking contempt for the liberal wing of his own party, he's offered to put the sacrosanct remnant of the New Deal safety net on the auction block to appease a hypothetical "centre" and win reelection at any price. (Dick Nixon, old socialist, where are you now that we need you?)

As a result, like the Phoenicians in the Bible, we'll sacrifice our children (and their schoolteachers) to Moloch, now called Deficit. The bloodbath in the public sector, together with an abrupt shutoff of unemployment benefits, will negatively multiply through the demand side of the economy until joblessness is in teenage digits and Lady Gaga is singing "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

Lest we forget, we also live in a globalised economy where Americans are consumers of the last resort and the dollar is still the safe haven for the planet's hoarded surplus value. The new recession that the Republicans are engineering with such impunity will instantly put into doubt all three pillars of McWorld, each already shakier than generally imagined: American consumption, European stability, and Chinese growth.

Across the Atlantic, the European Union is demonstrating that it is exclusively a union of big banks and mega-creditors, grimly determined to make the Greeks sell off the Parthenon and the Irish emigrate to Australia. One doesn't have to be a Keynesian to know that, should this happen, the winds will only blow colder thereafter. (If German jobs have so far been saved, it is only because China and the other BRICs - Brazil, Russia, and India - have been buying so many machine tools and Mercedes.)

Boardwalk Empire times 160
China, of course, now props up the world, but the question is: For how much longer? Officially, the People's Republic of China is in the midst of an epochal transition from an export-based to a consumer-based economy, the ultimate goal of which is not only to turn the average Chinese into a suburban motorist, but also to break the perverse dependency that ties that country's growth to an American trade deficit Beijing must, in turn, finance in order to keep the yuan from appreciating.

Unfortunately for the Chinese, and possibly the world, that country's planned consumer boom is quickly morphing into a dangerous real-estate bubble. China has caught the Dubai virus, and now every city there with more than one million inhabitants (at least 160 at last count) aspires to brand itself with a Rem Koolhaas skyscraper or a destination mega-mall. The result has been an orgy of over-construction.

Despite the reassuring image of omniscient Beijing mandarins in cool control of the financial system, China actually seems to be functioning more like 160 iterations of Boardwalk Empire, where big-city political bosses and allied private developers are able to forge their own backdoor deals with giant state banks.

In effect, a shadow banking system has arisen with big banks moving loans off their balance sheets into phony trust companies and thus evading official caps on total lending. Last week, Moody's Business Service reported that the Chinese banking system was concealing $500bn in problematic loans, mainly for municipal vanity projects. Another rating service warned that non-performing loans could constitute as much as 30 per cent of bank portfolios.

Real-estate speculation, meanwhile, is vacuuming up domestic savings as urban families, faced with soaring home values, rush to invest in property before they are priced out of the market. (Sound familiar?) According to Business Week, residential housing investment now accounts for 9 per cent of the gross domestic product, up from only 3.4 per cent in 2003.

So, will Chengdu become the next Orlando and China Construction Bank the next Lehman Brothers? Odd, the credulity of so many otherwise conservative pundits, who have bought into the idea that the Chinese Communist leadership has discovered the law of perpetual motion, creating a market economy immune to business cycles or speculative manias.

If China has a hard landing, it will also break the bones of leading suppliers like Brazil, Indonesia, and Australia. Japan, already mired in recession after triple mega-disasters, is acutely sensitive to further shocks from its principal markets. And the Arab Spring may turn to winter if new governments cannot grow employment or contain the inflation of food prices.

As the three great economic blocs accelerate toward synchronised depression, I find that I'm no longer as thrilled as I was at 14 by the prospect of a classic Felsen ending - all tangled metal and young bodies.

Mike Davis teaches in the Creative Writing Programme at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Planet of Slums, among many other works. He's currently writing a book about employment, global warming, and urban reconstruction for Metropolitan Books.
A version of this article first appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Source: Al Jazeera [accessed 2.8.2011]

How the so-called guardians of free speech are silencing the messenger

2011-08-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

10 March 2011 by John Pilger

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.

Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange’s “guilt”. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.

These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered “highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial”. A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the Republican right in the US. “Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,” he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange’s extraidition to the US from Sweden are dire.

The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen Spielberg’s Dream Works was to make “an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men” out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. “No idea,” was the puzzling reply of the Guardian’s “investigations editor”. The Guardian paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks -- not Leigh or Harding -- are responsible for what the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”.

The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian’s self-regarding book, Assange’s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an “unusual Australian” with a “frizzy-haired” mother, gratuitously abused as “callous” and a “damaged personality” that was “on the autistic spectrum”. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character assassination? e

On the BBC’s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a “Jewish conspiracy”, which follows a torrent of internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as “completely false, in spirit and word”.

It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for tearing aside the façade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. “We are taking all [the] cables to the administration,” said Bill Keller, the editor, “They’ve convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.” In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a “cacophony”. The gatekeeper has spoken.

The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will “end up being tortured in a high security American prison” are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?

Source: <www.johnpilger.com> [accessed 1.8.2011]

After Olso: Europe, Islam and the Mainstreaming of Racism

2011-07-30T06:26:00.000-07:00

Jul 27 2011 by Miriyam Aouragh and Richard Seymour

[Screen shot of Sky News feature of daily headlines showing that of The Sun.]

European media coverage of the Norwegian tragedy has led with dangerous and clichéd arguments about ‘Islamic extremism’ and multiculturalism, even after the identity of the killer was confirmed – thus contributing to the mainstreaming of racism that helped make Breivik what he is.

An hour before Anders Breivik embarked on his massacre of the innocents, he distributed his manifesto online. In 1500 pages, this urgent message identified “cultural Marxists”, “multiculturalists”, anti-Zionists and leftists as “traitors” who are allowing Christian Europe to be overtaken by Muslims. He subsequently murdered dozens of these ‘traitors’, the majority of them children, at a Labour Party youth camp. His inspiration, according to this manifesto, were those pathfinders of the Islamophobic right who have profited immensely from the framing and prosecution of the “war on terror,” including Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bat Ye’or.

Yet, almost before the attacks were concluded, a ‘line’ was developing in the mass media: it was perpetrated by jihadists, and certainly an ‘Al Qaeda style’ attack. Peter Beaumont of The Guardian was among the first to develop this narrative, but it was rapidly taken up across the media. Glenn Greenwald describes how on the day of the attack “the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.” Meanwhile, “the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible”. A hoax claim of ‘responsibility’ for the attack from a previously unknown group, disseminated by a dubious ‘expert’, was used to spin this line well beyond the point of credibility.

One might ascribe all of this to bad judgment and prejudice were it not for the fact that well after the identity of the terrorist had been established as a white, Christian Norwegian, the conversation continued to be about Islam and multiculturalism. The Wall Street Journal, for example, began its editorial on the subject with three paragraphs about Islam. The Sun, a flagship daily of the disgraced Murdoch empire, prepared a front page that initially described the attack as an ‘Al Qaeda Massacre’. The Guardian’s analysis piece on the day following the attack featured a series of experts – including Will McCant, who had circulated the bogus claim of responsibility – attributing the attacks to ‘jihadists.’ In fairness, The Guardian later removed the analysis piece and the Peter Beaumont article, while The Sun changed its front page

Even when the ‘jihadi’ angle was dropped, the effort to incriminate Islam and Muslims continued. The Belgian daily De Morgen, accepting the “white roots” of the perpetrator, nonetheless insisted that “the possibility that . . . the perpetrator is a sympathizer of Al Qaeda should not be ignored”.[1] In The Atlantic, it was asserted that the spirit of jihadism had ‘mutated’ and spread to the far right, as if fascism has no tradition of terrorism to speak of. The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall similarly argued that Breivik adopted the “language of Muslim jihadists”, though his idiom was classically fascist. There was a real fear that the grotesque nature of the attacks, by drawing attention to the dangers of racism, would undermine support for Islamophobic policies. For the Jerusalem Post, it was imperative that this should be avoided, and the attack should serve as an opportunity to “seriously re-evaluate policies for immigration integration in Norway and elsewhere.” Similarly, the widely esteemed ‘atheist’ writer Sam Harris is insistent that this attack should not blind us to the fact that “Islam remains the most retrograde and ill-behaved religion on earth.” This is the same author who has written that those “who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.” The logic is clear: Breivik is despicable, but his savagery expresses a truth about Islam and multiculturalism; an understanding of which should form the basis of European policy.

Perhaps the least convincing claim about Breivik has been the idea that he operated alone – a claim that would never have been made had the perpetrator been a Muslim. This was encouraged by Norwegian police and intelligence as they attempted to downplay his far right connections. Breivik may have planned and perpetrated this specific atrocity by himself, but it is also clear that, far from being a lone wolf, he comes straight out of a racial-nationalist activist milieu. He had been active in the anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway, and has been in contact with the English Defence League (EDL). Daryl Hobson, a member of the EDL whose links with EDL leader ‘Tommy Robinson’ have proven a source of embarrassment, acknowledged that Breivik had met him, while a ‘senior member’ told the Independent that Breivik had met several of the group’s leaders. Breivik himself claims to have advised the EDL on tactics, and to have been instrumental in co-founding the Norwegian Defence League. Far from being a lone madman, Breivik seems to have been embedded in the activist networks of the European far right.

Equally important, the racism that motivated Breivik comes straight from the ‘mainstream.’ His ideological inspirations are prominent European politicians such as Geert Wilders, as well as media reports, columns and books written by various Islamophobic intellectuals. This connection is not incidental. A 2010 report on Islamophobia in the UK, conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter, established an important correlation between both political rhetoric and media coverage concerning Islam and subsequent upsurges in racist violence toward Muslims. In fact, the ideas that Breivik articulates stand in a tradition of European reaction. In ‘Londonistan’ and ‘Eurabia,’ we hear echoes of ‘Jew York,’ just as in Breivik’s ‘Marxist-Islamist alliance,’ we hear Hitler’s evocation of the ‘Bolshevik-Jewish threat.’ That Islam has now taken the place of Judaism in the paranoid weltanschauung of some of the far right is a result of a transformed global situation.
The ‘war on terror’ licensed a period of intense imperial revivalism. It was suddenly the fashionable thing for intellectuals, former enragés among them, to eulogise about the benefits of empire, especially if led by the US. But the negative obverse of this supposedly humane dominion was Islam: the reputedly inhumane, irrational and barbaric nemesis of empire. While this dehumanisation of Muslims fuelled the bloodshed on the frontiers of Iraq and Afghanistan, it could not but flow back to the metropole, so that every European Muslim became a potentially menacing alien. The outward attributes of Islam, from dress to architecture, became the subjects of reactionary campaigns, street violence and state repression. The far right has learned and benefited from this. The organisations esteemed by Breivik – the English Defence League and the Dutch Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders – are among those that have translated the ascriptive hierarchy of the new imperialism into a new language for domestic reaction.

The complicity between the Islamophobic right and the far right is partly manifested in the latter’s growth translated into parliamentary seats. No longer marginal, they now occupy positions of state power. This has intensified both the quotidian racism of the streets and institutional racism at the level of the state, manifested in the ban on minarets, the niqab, hijab and halal meat in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, respectively. Further, they act as a gravitational force pulling mainstream parties further to the right. The sources of their support are challenged neither by the centre-right nor the centre-left, both of which instead seek to emulate the far right. This trend has contributed significantly to the mainstreaming of racist ideas that form the basis for such violent outrages.

That the media’s response to the attacks very often conformed to the same ‘clash of civilizations’ motif that undergirded Breivik’s own would-be chef d'oeuvre is an irony that has largely been lost in the deluge of opinion. What has also been lost, and what is as important, is the sheer idiotic irrelevance of such ideas in an era of Arab revolutions. The ‘clash of civilizations’ is more vacant than ever. Meanwhile, transnational jihadism has had its day. For as long as the vast majority of people in the Middle East suffered under the thumb of US-sponsored despots with little prospect of a reprieve, the solution of ‘terror’ had some limited purchase. But, while there may still be attacks, the base of support for such actions is being eroded every day. Astonishingly, none of the media’s queue of experts referred to this outstanding fact.

Many of the Muslims – including European Muslims – whom many Europeans have spent a decade vilifying, are now demonstrating that they have a more expansive and humane conception of democracy than most of their European oblocutors, and that their commitment to it is more enduring. Pundits might wish to reflect on that heroism and its meaning, as well as the diabolical horror in Norway and its meaning, before they reflexively verbalise the stale clichés of the ‘war on terror.’

Original: "De kans is klein maar het valt ook niet uit te sluiten dat de dader ondanks zijn blanke wortels een sympathisant is van Al Qaida.”

Source: <ww.jadaliyya.com> [accessed 30.7.2011]

Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World

2011-07-23T06:12:00.000-07:00

By MARK MAZOWER

Published: June 29, 2011

YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.

In the 1820s, as it waged a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape from the prison house of empire. For philhellenes, its resurrection represented the noblest of causes. “In the great morning of the world,” Shelley wrote in “Hellas,” his poem about the country’s struggle for independence, “Freedom’s splendor burst and shone!” Victory would mean liberty’s triumph not only over the Turks but also over all those dynasts who had kept so many Europeans enslaved. Germans, Italians, Poles and Americans flocked to fight under the Greek blue and white for the sake of democracy. And within a decade, the country won its freedom.

Over the next century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Greece again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.

It is ironic, then, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war while the rest of Europe cheered. And many cheered again a few months later when a young left-wing resistance fighter named Manolis Glezos climbed the Acropolis one night with a friend and pulled down a swastika flag that the Germans had recently unfurled. (Almost 70 years later, Mr. Glezos would be tear-gassed by the Greek police while protesting the austerity program.) Ultimately, however, Greece succumbed to German occupation. Nazi rule brought with it political disintegration, mass starvation and, after liberation, the descent of the country into outright civil war between Communist and anti-Communist forces.

Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman used the intensifying civil war there to galvanize Congress behind the Truman Doctrine and his sweeping peacetime commitment of American resources to fight Communism and rebuild Europe. Suddenly elevated into a trans-Atlantic cause, Greece now stood for a very different Europe — one that had crippled itself by tearing itself apart, whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in Athens telling Greek policy makers what to do and American napalm scorched the Greek mountains as the Communists were put to flight.

European political and economic integration was supposed to end the weakness and dependency of the divided continent, and here, too, Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s, first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe. And it gave the European Union the taste for enlargement and the ambition to turn itself from a small club of wealthy Western European states into a voice for the newly democratic continent as a whole, extending far to the south and east.

And now today, after the euphoria of the ’90s has faded and a new modesty sets in among the Europeans, it falls again to Greece to challenge the mandarins of the European Union and to ask what lies ahead for the continent. The European Union was supposed to shore up a fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new front line, throwing all these achievements into question. For we are all small powers now, and once again Greece is in the forefront of the fight for the future

Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia University.

Source: The New York Times [accessed 23/7/2011]

Closer political union: The best solution for Europe

2011-07-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

A clearly controversial opinion but perhaps the best option available to most middle-of-the-range Europeans as they see creeping spending cuts and budget austerity on an unprecedented scale.

Embattled citizens of the so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) would probably not need much convincing. The recent developments in Greece (over 34 consecutive days of, mostly, peaceful protest) show, if anything, that people want to stay in the Euro but are disputing the viability of the ECB, EU and IMF plan to end the crisis. Most people realize that they will never see a cent of the loan packages in healthcare, education and other necessities while at the same time they will have to make massive concessions on their income and pensions. The scale of the cuts to incomes is perhaps not so hard to imagine for someone in Germany or the UK who is also facing austerity and pension reform. Still the budget cuts are truly draconian and leave little doubt about what is really going on to anybody who has not already taken to the street. The looming privatizations of public companies, land and ports are the nail in the coffin of any notions of national sovereignty and more reminiscent of a Third-world gold rush/grab rather than any serious program of economic development.

But the option given to Greeks is not leave the Euro or take the pain. Why should Greek people or other Europeans in general accept loans and rescue packages, which are funneled into state coffers and then funneled out to the domestic and international banks that hold national debt? Do voters have any democratic control over how this money is spent? Last week/month has shown that Greeks believe that they don't and that they will nevertheless have to pay it back. Voters in Northern Europe should think twice before condoning such 'reforms'.

Just another Greek 'riot'

2011-06-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

After more than 20 consecutive days of peaceful protest in Greece's main public squares against cuts, the relative media silence was broken on the 15th of June. The spark for the sudden frenzy of reporting from that part of the world crisis was that the stage was finally set to play out the story to the usual tune.

Why is it that a popular, peaceful protest is ignored for over 20 days and 'extensively covered' when there is the slightest hint of trouble? That may explain the hostility of some protesters against mainstream media crews who only bother to show up when there is a riot. But it is not true that reporters were not present the previous days. Individual stories are subject to chief editor's approval and I guess a popular movement for democratic change is not as 'newsworthy' as a riot. Individual reporters in the corporate media make a half-decent effort at an accurate portrayal of the situation but unfortunately the norm is to stick to the familiar script. The familiar script will inadvertantly always designate some violent anarchists or other 'troublemakers' depending on the context. This time global media networks had to wait more than 20 days in order to report the story the way they wanted.

Anyway, the result was that protesters were tear-gassed indiscriminately by the police and Athens's Syntagma Square was cleared for a few hours while a few co-opted MPs inside parliament decided the future of 11million people, and that, of course, also went unreported. That is a very grim image of the future if you ask me.

Greek state starting to lose grip on functions of state

2011-06-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

Paul Mason Economics editor, Newsnight

The teargas hits us without warning, though I suppose being close to a bunch of people throwing bottles at riot police was warning enough. It explodes in mid-air, a thick cloud the colour of 1970s furniture. Those nearby run, everybody clutches their T-shirt to their face.

Then, like a football crowd leaving a game in the days when there were still terraces, we crush together, shoulder to shoulder, everyone in their little bubble: nobody panicking but everybody fighting that little bit of panic that starts inside when you cannot breathe, and everybody urgently pushing forward. At the edge of the disturbance people turn around. They throw water in their faces and a kind of milky substance they have brought with them which, as it dries, gives the whole crowd the air of a troupe of clowns that have been disrupted while putting on whiteface.

The trouble started simply because, if you put a crowd of hundreds of thousands next to a parliament that has lost its economic sovereignty, and let that crowd be fringed by anarchists in black balaclavas, it simply will.

'Eyes streaming'

After about two hours of sporadic fighting at various entrances to the parliament, the police started to go into side-streets and do flanking movements, much as the anarchists and "indignatos" (Facebook-organised youth who are not anarchists) were flanking them earlier in the day. Fires were started - some little ones on street corners - a couple of big ones, bringing a shudder to the crowd who remember the death of three bank workers in a fire last year.

The wider crowd - of trade union members, old ladies, mothers, teachers, girls in midriff-revealing tops and blonde dread locks, old sailors with white stubble - just stands there, its eyes streaming, wiping its nose. In the lulls there are mini confrontations between trade union groups and the black bloc. The former chant that they are provocateurs. While as a vignette this looks like merely a tense sub-plot, it should be of interest to the policymakers desperately trying to hold Greek society together as they impose the biggest austerity package a developed country has had to stomach since the war.

For in their own way the red-flag bearing, big-chested security groups of the Communist and non-Communist union groups are on the front line of holding things together. At no point did I see any union or left-wing party security group pick a fight with the police. The silent implication is, watch what happens if we ever do join in.

'Transvestite prostitutes'

What's going on here though is also startling when viewed from the fringes of the riot. You walk down Venizelos Avenue - the big business boulevard from Syntagma to Omonia Square - it is ghostly quiet. Two hooded anarchists, their shirts off, dance in front of a low burning barricade just, they hope, out of stun-grenade range of a platoon of riot cops.

On the next corner a group of chilled out youth protesters, and then the next the same. The street is under the control of the protesters - not that they are trying to exert control but nevertheless it is. Every shop is shuttered, some out of fear, others because the shopkeepers association declared a three-hour shutdown as part of today's general strike. There are no "bystanders".

A bit further on, it becomes like a Henry Miller novel. Still wiping my eyes, and looking for somewhere to write this, I have wandered into a street that is full of jerky emaciated drug-dependent people, transvestite prostitutes and migrant beggars. "I am hungry" says one cardboard sign. A woman stands on the corner hopping from one foot to the other, delirious with some substance, her hair matted. Of course you can see this in any city, but you have to look hard. Here in Athens you do not have to look hard.

There is a social crisis under way and I think it is different from the one our history books teach us to expect. It's not like the cracking of the state, or mass unrest, but simply that the Greek state - whose reach was never far into society - is beginning to lose its grip slightly on the actual functions a state should do. It cannot decide its economic policy; it can't convince its own people of any good intent; the rule of law is imposed hard here - with the impounding of yachts bought through tax evasion - only to break down somewhere else, as people begin to pledge non-payment of bills for the privatised utilities.

It is not anarchy here, but - to use another Hellenic word - neither is there catharsis. As the conservative daily Kathimerini put it in an editorial last night: "Prime Minister George Papandreou does not seem to be on top of things anymore."

'Political paralysis'

Actually the violence - though at a level several notches up from north-European rioting - remains like nearly all riots within a set formula: the rioters attack, the police fight back with stun grenades and gas, the rioters set fire to stuff, run away, the police control the streets, it goes dark…

But the violence is a sideshow: it is the political paralysis of the Greek government that is of world importance because - while the European Union bickers about how much bankers should lose versus how much the EU should lose as Greece defaults - you are seeing the lines of defence against financial and social chaos within this part of Europe getting very frayed.

A technical default for Greece looks close now - according to S&P even if Greece does everything it is asked to, its rating can never rise above CCC (which is junk). But in the policymaking circles the real worry is whether this will trigger a new round of credit failures. The Greek banks would collapse with any serious default on the debt; but the shock would also ripple through to north-European banks. And while most of them are in a shape to take the hit, not all of them are. And not all of the ones that look exposed are in states big enough to bail them out.

So with the recovery looking shaky across Asia, a credit event here in Greece could knock back sustained recovery even further. That's what my City contacts are worrying about in e-mails today.

Mounting hostility

This is my third blog post in 24 hours from here, and at the risk of repeating myself, I think the level of mismatch between perception and reality within the Eurozone is worrying. Because last year's protests were mainly leftist; and the strikes mainly token, a pattern of thinking has emerged that dismisses all Greek protest as essentially this.

But a new situation is emerging: Greek people I have spoken to are beginning to express things in terms of nation and sovereignty - and this makes the Greek situation different, for now, to Ireland and Portugal. While the centre right New Democracy would probably win any snap election, it is hard to find support for pro-austerity politics among ND's natural support base, the business class. Because austerity for them means getting hammered with a tax bill the like of which they have never dreamed, nor indeed paid.

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it's not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as "representatives of big capital", "Zionists", "scum and police informers" etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic - from balaclava kids to pensioners - should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The "mainstream" - whether it's the media, politicians or business people - is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

As one old bloke put it to me, when I said: "Don't you want us to report what's happening to you?" - "No." He was quite calm and rational as he waved his hand in my face: "It's too late for that."

Source: BBC [accessed 15/6/2011]

1million lay seige on Greek parliament now!

2011-06-15T06:08:00.000-07:00

No, it's not a music festival; it's the 22nd day of a peaceful protest outside the Greek parliament. MPs are voting today on further cuts, privatizations and austerity in order to secure more IMF and EU bail-out-money. After being mostly or totally ignored by mainstream/corporate/industrial/liberal/call-them-what-you-will media for the first 21 days, there have been reports of clashes today as the police are using tear-gas to try to prevent protesters from encircling parliament where the vote on the future of Greece is taking place. For REAL journalism, please follow the links below:

http://www.real-democracy.gr/

http://www.youtube.com/user/realdemocracygr

Leo Panitch on the protest and situation in Greece:

Ridiculous BBC propaganda

2011-06-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

While Greece is getting ready to vote on the latest round of cuts and austerity measures in order to receive an IMF and EU loan, the BBC is reporting on the following story. At the same time, it is provocatively ignoring the 21 day protests that are ongoing in all of the country's major public squares with thousands of people attending (I have a story on it and youtube clips below for anyone interested). I guess this peaceful revolt is a little too close to home; fear of contagion I would say. For anyone interested in REAL NEWS follow the link: http://www.real-democracy.gr/

For others who are interested in Balkan fairy tales of vampires and wild barbarians I've attached the BBC story in full below:

Macedonia assembles giant statue amid row with Greece

Work has begun in Macedonia to erect a giant bronze statue resembling Alexander the Great, as a bitter row over heritage simmers with Greece.

Pieces of "Warrior on a Horse" were laid out in the capital Skopje and are due to be assembled this week . The government says the 22m (72ft) monument is important to redevelopment but critics see it as a waste of money.

Greece, which has its own province of Macedonia, disputes Skopje's right to claim Alexander's heritage.Tensions between Macedonia and Greece have blocked the ex-Yugoslav republic's accession to Nato and its progress towards joining the EU. Macedonia accuses Greece of treating it unfairly and insists a 1995 agreement to change its constitution and flag should have ended any argument over potential claims on territory.

While the new monument is not being officially called after Alexander, the ancient leader's name has been given in recent years to Skopje's airport as well as the main motorway running towards Greece. Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has been accused of pandering to nationalist sentiment with the project. Cast in Italy, the monument cost an estimated 5.3m euros (£4.7m; $7.6m) and consists of a statue 12m (39ft) tall, to be placed on a 10m fountain pedestal.

Source: BBC [accessed 14/6/2011]

Greece: Same Tragedy, Different Scripts

2011-06-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

by Walden Bello

Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades. The global media has presented Greece, tiny Greece, as the epicenter of the second stage of the global financial crisis, much as it portrayed Wall Street as ground zero of the first stage. Yet there is an interesting difference in the narratives surrounding these two episodes.

Narratives in Conflict

The unregulated activities of financial institutions, which created ever more complex instruments to magically multiply money, created the Wall Street crash that morphed into the global financial crisis.

With Greece, however, the narrative goes this way: This country piled up an unsustainable debt load to build a welfare state it could not afford, and is now the spendthrift that must tighten its belt. Brussels, Berlin, and the banks are the dour Puritans now exacting penance from the Mediterranean hedonists for living beyond their means and committing the sin of pride by hosting the costly 2004 Olympics.

This penance comes in the form of a European Union-International Monetary Fund program that will increase the country's value-added tax to 23 percent, raise the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, make deep cuts in pensions and public sector wages, and eliminate practices promoting job security. The ostensible aim of the exercise is to radically slim down the welfare state and get the spoiled Greeks to live within their means.

Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.

In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe's banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece's $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.

The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt "disappear," thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as "credit default swaps," bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country's cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.

If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.

Hijacking the Narrative

There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors.

First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.

The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them. Promoted as rescuing Greece, the massive 110-billion-euro package, put together by the dominant Eurozone governments and the IMF, will largely go toward rescuing the banks from their irresponsible, unregulated lending frenzy.

The banks and international financial institutions played this same old confidence game on developing country debtors during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, and on Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. The same austerity measures - then known as structural adjustment - followed lending binges from northern banks and speculators. And the scenario played out the same way: Pin the blame on the victims by characterizing them as living beyond their means, get public agencies to rescue you with money upfront, and stick the people with the terrible task of paying off the loan by committing a massive chunk of their present and future income streams as payments to the lending agencies.

No doubt the authorities are preparing similarly massive multibillion-euro rescue packages for the banks that overextended themselves in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Shifting the Blame

The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one's means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too. They secured bailout funds from governments in the first phase of the crisis, but don't want to honor what governments told their citizens was an essential part of the deal: the strengthening of financial regulation.

Governments, from the United States to China and Greece, had resorted to massive stimulus programs to keep the real economy from collapsing during the first phase of the financial crisis. By promoting a narrative that moves the spotlight from lack of financial regulation to this massive government spending as the key problem of the global economy, the banks seek to forestall the imposition of a tough regulatory regime.

But this is playing with fire. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman and others have warned that if this narrative is successful, the lack of new stimulus programs and tough banking regulations will result in a double-dip recession, if not a full-blown depression. Unfortunately, as the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto suggests, governments in Europe and the United States are caving in to the short-sighted agenda of the banks, who have the backing of unreconstructed neoliberal ideologues that continue to see the activist, interventionist state as the fundamental problem. These ideologues believe that a deep recession and even a depression is the natural process by which an economy stabilizes itself, and that Keynesian spending to avert a collapse will only delay the inevitable.

Resistance: Will It Make a Difference?

The Greeks are not taking all this lying down. Massive protests greeted the ratification of the EU-IMF package by the Greek parliament on July 8. In an earlier and much larger protest on May 5, 400,000 people turned out in Athens in the biggest demonstration since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Yet, street protests seem to do little to avert the social catastrophe that will unfold with the EU-IMF program. The economy is set to contract by 4 percent in 2010. According to Alexis Tsipras, president of the left parliamentary coalition Synapsismos, the unemployment rate will likely rise from 15 to 20 percent in two years, with the rate among young people expected to hit 30 percent.

As for poverty, a recent joint survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found that, even before the current crisis, close to a third of Greece's 11 million people lived close to the poverty line. This process of creating a "third world" within Greece will only be accelerated by the Brussels-IMF adjustment program.

Ironically, this adjustment is being presided over by a Socialist government headed by George Papandreou voted into office last October to reverse the corruption of the previous conservative administration and the ill effects of its economic policies. There is resistance within Papandreou's party PASOK to the EU-IMF plan, admits the party's international secretary Paulina Lampsa. But the overwhelming sense among the party's parliamentary contingent is TINA, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: "there is no alternative."

The Consequences of Compliance

Faced with the program's savage consequences, an increasing number of Greeks are talking about adopting a strategy of threatening default or a radical unilateral reduction of debt. Such an approach could be coordinated, says Tsipras, with Europe's other debt-burdened countries, like Portugal and Spain. Here Argentina may provide a model: it gave its creditors a memorable haircut in 2003 by paying only 25 cents for every dollar it owed. Not only did Argentina get away with it, but the resources that would otherwise have left the country as debt service was channeled into the domestic economy, triggering an average annual economic growth rate of 10 percent between 2003 and 2008.

The "Argentine Solution" is certainly fraught with risk. But the consequences of surrender are painfully clear, if we examine the records of countries that submitted to IMF adjustment. Forking over 25 to 30 percent of the government budget yearly to foreign creditors, the Philippines in the mid-1980s entered a decade of stagnation from which it has never recovered and which condemned it to a permanent poverty rate of over 30 percent. Squeezed by draconian adjustment measures, Mexico was sucked into two decades of continuing economic crisis, with consequences such as the pervasive narcotics traffic that has brought it to the brink of being a failed state. The current state of virtual class war in Thailand can be traced partly to the political fallout of the economic sufferings of the IMF austerity program imposed on that country a decade ago.

The Brussels-IMF adjustment of Greece shows that finance capitalism in the throes of crisis no longer respects the North-South divide. The cynics would say, "Welcome to the Third World, Greece."

But this is no time for cynicism. Rather, it's a key moment for global solidarity. We're all in this together now.

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) Published on Thursday, July 15, 2010 [accessed 12/6/2011]

Walden Bello, a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist, is professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of, among other books, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).

Hedge funds 'grabbing land' in Africa

2011-06-09T05:47:00.000-07:00

Hedge funds are behind "land grabs" in Africa to boost their profits in the food and biofuel sectors, a US think-tank says.

In a report, the Oakland Institute said hedge funds and other foreign firms had acquired large swathes of African land, often without proper contracts. It said the acquisitions had displaced millions of small farmers.

Foreign firms farm the land to consolidate their hold over global food markets, the report said. They also use land to "make room" for export commodities such as biofuels and cut flowers. "This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat than terrorism," the report said.

The Oakland Institute said it released its findings after studying land deals in Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Mali and Mozambique. It said hedge funds and other speculators had, in 2009 alone, bought or leased nearly 60m hectares of land in Africa - an area the size of France.

In the field:

Umaru Fofana BBC African Service, Sierra Leone

When I visited Lungi-Lol in rural Sierra Leone I saw men hoeing thousands of hectares of farmland owned by Addax, a Swiss-based bio-energy company. They are growing sugarcane to produce biofuels. Campaigners say this contributes to food insecurity, but many people here welcome Addax's presence. Francis Koroma, who works on the farm, says: "We thank God for Addax. I am gainfully employed and I receive about $70 (£46) a month. Before, I spent a whole year without getting $50. "Villagers are unaware of the controversy surrounding biofuels. Abdulai Conteh, a local traditional leader, said: "Some people are doing business here but I have no idea what they are doing with our land. I see them growing sugarcane. That's all I know."

"The same financial firms that drove us into a global recession by inflating the real estate bubble through risky financial manoeuvres are now doing the same with the world's food supply," the report said. It added that some firms obtained land after deals with gullible traditional leaders or corrupt government officials. "The research exposed investors who said it is easy to make a deal - that they could usually get what they wanted in exchange for giving a poor tribal chief a bottle of Johnnie Walker [whisky]," said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute. "When these investors promise progress and jobs to local chiefs it sounds great, but they don't deliver." The report said the contracts also gave investors a range of incentives, from unlimited water rights to tax waivers. "No-one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans. "These deals only lead to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors," said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation in Addis Ababa.

However, not all companies named in the report accept that their motives are as suggested and they dismiss claims that their presence in Africa is harmful.

One company, EmVest Asset Management, strongly denied that it was involved in exploitative or illegal practices. "There are no shady deals. We acquire all land in terms of legal tender," EmVest's Africa director Anthony Poorter told the BBC. He said that in Mozambique the company's employees earned salaries 40% higher than the minimum wage. The company was also involved in development projects such as the supply of clean water to rural communities. "They are extremely happy with us," Mr Poorter said.

Source: BBC [accessed 9/6/2011]

Noam Chomsky on the Greek crisis

2011-06-08T04:00:00.000-07:00

The Greek economic crisis and the mobilization of Greek citizens was mentioned by the famous American thinker Noam Chomsky. According to him, Greece has only three options, none of which is attractive.

Chomsky was in Cologne, Germany for a series of lectures as a professor emeritus at the seat of Albertus Magnus. Speaking to reporters, according to Mary Rigoutsou for Deutshe Welle, Noam Chomsky estimated that in Greece " there are few options. One option is for rich countries like Germany to take over the debts and to pay. The other option is that Greece refuses to pay its debts. It is not impossible to do so. There are countries that have done it in the past with success. Ten years ago Argentina did it. It was the 'favorite' of the IMF. But eventually collapsed and refused to pay its debts. The IMF and several economists threatened imminent destruction but it actually worked very well. Later there was a surge in development. This is a way but it is not unique. Of course it is hard to swallow for banks and investors because they will lose their money but one has to choose. And the third option would be for Greece to leave the eurozone and have the opportunity to make its own economic policy to devalue the currency and get out of the crisis.

There are only three options and none of them are very attractive Referring to the protests of citizens in the country, the 83-year-old professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) noted: " Two weeks ago there was a great demonstration of people who were in the streets and on strike. But the media does not talk about it much. Their interest in the strikes is not great. The Guardian newspaper of London, considered a progressive newspaper, had a photograph in front of parliament in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier the next day. The photo was shot, however, so as not to see the crowd."

Source: tvxs.gr [accessed 8/6/2011] translated with google translation

Nine countries gather to create Latin American Union of News Agencies

2011-06-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

News agencies from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela decided to join efforts to create the Latin American Union of News Agencies (ULAN, Spanish abbreviation), aimed at facing negative campaigns undertaken by communication monopolies from the United States and Europe.

President of the Venezuelan News Agency (AVN), Freddy Fernandez, said the information this Wednesday, after a meeting held with Cuba"s Prensa Latina president, Luis Enrique Gonzalez. Next June 2-3, news agency representatives will meet with Venezuela"s Communication and Information Minister Andres Izarra, with the aim to endorse a main accord on ULAN"s work and information exchange system. “The main element for us is the possibility of building an information reference for the whole continent, capable of looking at the reality of the Latin American and Caribbean nations with our own eyes, not with the eyes of the North or Europe,” Fernandez said. AVN director added that Latin America is the single region in the world which still lacks of an agency of the kind. “We have a variety of opinions here about several communication issues. That will significantly enrich ULAN"s effort. Besides, we will face different political realities. It is a union of diverse news agencies.”

Meanwhile, Cuba"s Gonzalez expressed that the initiative, arisen during the World Council of News Agency -carried out in Argentina late in 2010-, represents integration and strengthening of the communicational work of these countries. “Governments of our region will set up the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in about a month and we have to accompany them on that effort of integration and rapprochement,” he said. Telam (Argentina), ABI (Bolivia), Agencia Brasil, Prensa Latina (Cuba) Andes (Ecuador), AGN (Guatemala), Notimex (Mexico), IP (Paraguay) and AVN (Venezuela) are the news agencies making up the project.

Source: AGN (Agencia Venezolana de Noticias) 1/6/2011 [accessed 7/1/2011]