HISTOLOGION

IMF: The gaping abyss of "reform"

2012-01-06T03:51:00.000+02:00

...Whenever the IMF tried to take care of countries’ debts, it created more problems than solutions

Former Brazilian President Lula Da Silva

About a month ago, on the 16th of December, IMF mission chief for Greece, Poul Thomsen, told reporters that the country's economy:

“...is continuing to trend downwards, reflecting that the hoped for improvement in market sentiment and in the investment climate is not materializing,”

Having finally recognized, after two years of producing an unmitigated societal and economic disaster, the failure of its plans, its estimates and its projections, one would expect the IMF to backtrack from its pro-depression policies, and start proposing something less catastrophic for Greece and the rest of the EU periphery (and eventually the whole of the EU and the rest of the world). Well one wouldn't really, if they knew the history of the IMF and the recent history of the EU debt debacle, but that would be the rational thing to do. Actually the IMF did the exact opposite: after a treatment that has driven the patient close to death, it is asking to increase the dosage of the same deleterious medicine in line with the Merkozy school of Hooverian economics:

"The numbers show that Greece's budget deficit continued to risein November, while the recession, spurred on by suffocatingausterity measures, has cancelled out a large part of the extraincome that the government hoped to gain from emergency taxes. Indeed, provisional figures from the Ministry of Finance showthat the state budget's "black hole" broadened by 5.1% in thefirst 11 months of this year, reaching 20.52 billion euros,compared to a total of 19.5 billion a year ago.

In order drastically to reduce public spending, therefore, theso-called "troika" has asked the Athens government to carry outfurther severe austerity measures, including the redundancy of afurther 150,000 public sector workers by 2015, in addition tothe 30,000 who will be released by the end of this month. Thedemands of the "troika"... were announced by the Minister for AdministrativeReform, Dimitris Reppas, following a meeting withrepresentatives of the international creditors: Matthias Mors,Mark Flanagan and Bob Traa. Reppas explained to the officialsthat the redundancy of surplus state employees has not had thedesired effect because the measure was applied hurriedly andwithout correct assessment..."

IMF eparch for Greece P.Thomsen

Along with all that, and a barrage of new taxes on the already buckling shoulders of employees and pensioners who cannot evade taxes, add the customarily sadistic and destructive extortions accompanying every installment of the "loan package" Greece has been receiving from the troika: demands for lowering or abolishing the minimum wage (it's ~8400 Euros/year net, theoretically, around 7000 Euros for youth entering the work force, and less than that for all the tens of thousands now forced into part-time jobs, usually with full-time schedules, and no overtime, and those who are months behind in salaries probably never to be received) and cancelling the 13th and 14th monthly salaries (misrepresented as bonuses when they are part of a workers' yearly compensation, cut into 14 installments for historical and practical reasons) - and that's for the private sector. Public sector workers having had their (mostly) meager salaries slashed by anything from 30 to 60% over the past two years, and having been fired at random for months now, are planned to be drastically reduced in number (they were no more than 14% of the workforce to begin with note, near the OECD average) while most teachers, and quite a few doctors etc will be among the working poor.
Note that there is still one area in which Greek public spending outperforms most of the healthier economies of the world: defence spending. This is apparently, actively encouraged by both Merkel and Sarkozy.

Is it a Greek thing?

The disaster that has befallen Greece, according to the various fiscal occupation authorities, is entirely of its own making, the reasons the IMF's predictions have failed is because of insufficient political support or not enough reforms. But is that true? How successful have the policies of uber-hooverism been in less rowdy patients?

Ireland: Troika warns of future welfare cuts

The Coalition will have difficulty in keeping to its promise not to adjust tax bands and credits in Government and will also need to rely on cuts in social protection to provide the “bulk of savings”, troika officials monitoring Ireland’s bailout programme have determined.
Two separate analyses by the EU Commission and the International Monetary Fund published before Christmas have disclosed details of proposed measures for the 2013 budget, which is unprecedented for Ireland. A total of €3.5 billion in savings are planned; €1.25 billion in new taxes and €2.25 billion in cuts.

The analysis has also criticised aspects of Government policy, including its decision to make larger than expected reductions in the capital budget as well as the lack of punitive sanctions for unemployed people who refuse to seek work.

...All of which lead to the obvious question: Ireland has done what the IMF wanted, but where is the reward?

Despite 'exceptional' efforts to meet IMF targets, Ireland has a rising deficit, sustained emigration and 15% unemployment... The fiscal adjustment, according to economist Karl Whelan, is the equivalent of "€4,600 per person… the largest budgetary adjustments seen in the advanced economic world in recent times". With annual "adjustments" of €3-4bn flagged until 2015, the euphemism of "purposeful austerity" cannot long camouflage the concerted assault on the – already minimalist – social contract...

...Costas Douzinas recently documented how the IMF blames the failure of its growth predictions, and austerity measures, on the impact of Greek public resistance. Yet in well-behaved not-Greece, the same bad medicine has resulted in a rising deficit, stagnant growth, sustained emigration, and unemployment at about 15%. In its latest quarterly report, the IMF praised Ireland's "exceptional" efforts to meet its targets, but this praise comes at a time when the fiction of a reward for good behaviour is falling apart.

Portugal: Income inequality EU15 champion, is heading towards even greater income disparity, as are apparently all the already highly unequal "restructured" peripheral countries - this being of course not a side effect but an aim of the IMF / ECB/ EU programmes. Meanwhile, this year's logistic trick that reined in the Portuguese deficit can't be repeated next year:

The government had set a goal to trim the deficit from9.8 percent of GDP in 2010 to 5.9 percent in 2011 and to 4.5percent next year. The 2012 budget includes a plan to eliminatethe summer and Christmas salary payments for state workersearning more than 1,100 euros ($1,443) a month. Tax deductions will be reduced and the government plans to increase the value-added tax rate on some goods.

Or as the IIF has put it:

Portugal, which has “experienced serious fiscal slippages,” is trying to meet a deficit target of 4.5% of GDP. Doing so would require a fiscal contraction valued at 6.1% of GDP, in a year in which growth is expected to drop by 3%. “This represents a very demanding objective and lack of progress could heighten market concern.”

Spain: The new conservative government has already reneged on its promises as a result of troika pressure and missed targets:

Spain's new government saidon Friday that this year's budget deficit would be much largerthan expected and announced a slew of surprise tax hikes andwage freezes that could drag the country back to the centre ofthe euro zone debt crisis. In its first decrees since sweeping to victory in November,the centre-right government said the public deficit for 2011would come in at 8 percent of gross domestic product, well abovean official target of 6 percent. It announced initial public spending cuts of 8.9 billioneuros ($11.5 billion) and tax hikes aimed at bringing in anadditional 6 billion euros a year to tackle the shortfall.

And things look bleak for the foreseeable future:

Rajoy's government is taking quick action so as to meet a promise to slash the annual public deficit to 4.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2012, come what may.
The government has acknowledged Spain will miss its goal of reducing the public deficit to 6.0 per cent of GDP in 2011 from 9.3 per cent the year before. The 2011 deficit may even top 8.0 per cent, ministers say.
The Popular Party government says the deficit slippage in 2011 could force it to implement another 20 billion euros in austerity measures for 2012, on top of the originally estimated savings target of 16.5 billion euros.
The government also announced that the social security fund's accounts are worse than had been feared, with a 2011 deficit of 668 million euros. The previous Socialist government had forecast a social security surplus

But it isn't just the unclean PIGS, who are in trouble, austerity (certainly the open-ended, turbo-austerity we're witnessing being implemented around the world) hasn't worked because it never worked in the interests of the societies subjected to it:

Indeed, austerity economics has not worked in one single case in Europe in the last two years. When David Cameron’s government imposed a first round of harsh spending cuts in 2010, it utterly failed to revive the British economy as promised. To the contrary, it probably cut a budding recovery short. Unemployment and the deficit as a percent of GDP remained high. Some pro-Conservative observers I met at the time assured me that the Cameron team, led by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was pragmatic and would reverse course on austerity if it wasn’t working. Yet when growth basically ground to a halt in late 2011, the Cameron team only doubled down, making further cuts. We need more of the same medicine, they told their citizens, a record number of whom are unemployed. Britian is a hair’s breadth away from outright recession only two years after its last one.

So, no Mr. Thomsen, the IMF / ECB failure was not due to some Greek particularity. It is systemic and ubiquitous. part and parcel of what austerity is supposed to do. Indebted countries in the EU periphery can get an idea about where they will be next year socially, if these policies are not resisted, by looking at Greece now . We're a year ahead as far as social despair is concerned (possibly a couple more years from richer countries). And by just sitting there and doing nothing, dear European reader, you're not helping avert it. Protest, organize, demand. Elect those who are explicitly and adamantly against the destruction of social Europe. Or, as our brothers from across the pond might put it, fight the 1%...

[An extended and slightly rearranged version of this post is cross-posted at the European Tribune]

Austerity: the Greek road to hell

2011-12-30T02:09:00.002+02:00

A beggar in Syntagma square, Athens, 27.12.2011

As the Euro crisis unfolds, and the European social model remains under attack by the mindless political armies of orthodox neoliberalism, spread across the continent in positions of power, and the bankers they represent, all is hardly well in Greece. The Greeks, having served as lab-rats for extreme-austerity, have come to realize one thing: Austerity is not a fiscal programme. It is a political project: a project of societal and financial sabotage, aiming at a radical upwards redistribution of wealth in an already very unequal country - indeed a whole continent. This is how the austeritarian disaster zone looks like from the ground:

Back to the Caves: "Dozens of homeless people in Athens will spend the Christmas holidays in the sheltering caves of Philopappou Hill, away from the rain and the cold weather.
According to two reports conducted by the Ministry of Health and the Municipality of Athens and published by Real News, there are many new age homeless, who once were businessmen and traders, and are now penniless, lying on the streets.
The shocking truth is that among those people there are families as well."
Homeless in Athens
Meet the new homeless: With an average age of 47, 11% of Greece’s homeless have a university degree (!) and 23.5% hold a high school diploma, while only 9.3% are illiterate. The new Greek homeless class members have laptops and iPhones, remnants of their “old” lives. “They come to us in suits with their laptops in hand. These citizens a couple of months ago had ordinary lives. They had a job, a home and car,” says Nikitas Kanakis, the head of Doctors Without Borders in Athens. Counselors from the Department of Homeless Services describe a similar situation. “We even have homeless from suburbs like Kifisia and Voula [upper class suburbs of Athens]! They come here with their laptops and expensive smart phones they once used for their work, shocked and depressed”.

Hunger: Athens Mayor George Kaminis told the daily that the city's homeless had increased by around 20 per cent while queues at soup kitchens organised by municipal and church organisations were up 15 per cent."Care workers no longer meet typical homeless people, they meet a person who likely had a perfectly organised life weeks previously," said Kaminis, who has asked for additional state funding for city welfare services."We have noticed a dramatic increase in our mess halls over the recent period," added Chrysostomos Symeonidis, head of the Athens archdiocese poverty fund. "We distribute over 10,000 meals on a daily basis and 250,000 meals are given out nationwide on a weekly basis," Symeonidis said... [oh and Starvation Recipes are all the rage]

...hunger in the schools: “Our pupils faint due to starvation. We see our pupils coming to school with holes in their shoes. They don’t even have money to buy food from the school canteen”

Which then leads to abandoned children: 'Propelled by poverty, 500 families had recently asked to place children in homes run by the charity SOS Children's Villages, according to the Greek daily Kathimerini. One toddler was left at the nursery she attended with a note that read: "I will not return to get Anna. I don't have any money, I can't bring her up. Sorry. Her mother."'

The disabled are also victims of the policies pursued: "In August, a five-year-old program providing deaf people with interpreters was suspended after the government abruptly cut its funding to less than half. Overnight, 15,000 deaf people around Greece were left without help to report a crime to the police, rent a house or go to a job interview. Funding cuts have opened up gaps across welfare services, with slashed services and longer waiting times for vulnerable groups including the blind, recovering organ-transplant patients, autistic children, and paraplegics in need of physiotherapy"

At the same time the already decrepit health system is further eroded according to The Lancet: "Overall, the picture of health in Greece is concerning. It reminds us that, in an effort to finance debts, ordinary people are paying the ultimate price: losing access to care and preventive services, facing higher risks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and in the worst cases losing their lives. Greater attention to health and health-care access is needed to ensure that the Greek crisis does not undermine the ultimate source of the country's wealth—its people". Giving birth is now a luxury activity. I suppose women are expected to give birth at home by themselves - a great way to bring infant and maternal mortality to truly third world levels...

And, desperate, people kill themselves at an unprecedented rate: "Greece's suicide rate has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country's economic crisis and painful austerity measures. Statistics from the Greek Ministry of Health show a 40 per cent rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared with the same period in 2010"

And the economy? Surely all those wizards of austerity must have improved the flailing Greek economy, raising its productivity etc. No? Well... No:

Greece: heavy industry, desperate measures to survive: Heavy industry in Greece, particularly the sectors that produce steel, concrete, aluminium, copper and paper, are desperately trying to find ways to stem some of the negative effects of the economic crisis the country is going though. Some companies even sell up to 70% of their production abroad at cost price, just to be able to keep producing... Energy-intensive industries in Greece fight a daily battle for their survival on a domestic market that has been in recession for four years, with low liquidity, limited financial resources, rising interest rates and a series of austerity measures that seem to ignore their impact on the real economy, like the high taxes on energy

Unemployment is rocketing, reaching fearsome heights:

The jobless rate rose to 17.7 per cent in the third quarter compared to 16.3 per cent in the previous quarter and 12.4 per cent in the corresponding quarter of 2010, the Hellenic statistical authority said... It added that there were over 878,000 people out of work during the three-month period, most of them women and young employees aged under 30

At the same time young (and not-so-young) Greeks are leaving the country or are planning to leave soon, the most highly educated and employable among them: "Lois Lambrianidis, an economist and geographer at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, told The Australian that 9% of young Greek graduates emigrated between May 2009 and February 2010. "And in recent months, the departures are accelerating," he said, noting that Greece's population of 11 million includes about one million immigrants while the diaspora has seven million – and counting"
While alternative local currencies have cropped-up in many towns, business is dismal, as more and more small and medium businesses go broke, and one in four shops have closed. This Christmas retail sales have dropped by 30%... So much for a festive season...
At the same time the wealthy are jumping ship. As enormous sums of money are already out of the country, invested in property as well as deposited in banks in tax-havens around the world...
The prospects are bleak, as the deep recession is continuing and will surely extend to 2012 (and probably beyond that if policy doesn't change) making it a five-year depression.
The tax system has been transformed into a shifting, irrational mechanism, whose sole aim is to extract the last drop of blood mostly from those that already paid their taxes, or indeed those that were too poor to tax. The government has imposed an extra, regressive property tax, to be paid through the electricity bill, threatening to cut-off electricity to any households that can't, or refuse, to pay it. However there are so many times a vampire can feed off his victim. Already they are facing diminishing returns and a tax revolt
Wages are slashed across the board. After cutting public sector wages anywhere from 30-60%, meaning that most doctors and teachers are paid subsistence wages, the IMF, true to its traditional "enemy of the people profile", is demanding a similar across the board cut in the private sector (what little they have left of it), in a job market where most workers are behind pay (some many months), no jobs are available and real wages are already below the official minimum wage

Things are, in other words, tough. Very tough. The kind of tough one associates with a war or a huge natural disaster. And do not think for a minute that all of this is irrelevant to you: if you live anywhere in Europe, periphery or center (but at this point probably anywhere in the Western world), this is in one form or another the future that has been prepared for you. Greece has been the canary in the coal-mine for social Europe in this crisis, a wretched and sorry bird, to begin with, admittedly, yet an indicator of the way things are going in Europe. Regardless of whether austerity is systemically viable in its own terms (it most probably isn't), the news is that the canary, is slowly yet steadily croaking. It is dying. Greek society is taking blows that will transform it for ever, in a path that no one knows where it takes and it is unraveling. So our suicides here, our untended ill, our abandoned children, our middle-class poor, our new homeless and hungry, they are an omen, a sign of things to come, across Europe. Or that seems to be the plan. The good news is that this society is taking it a lot better than some (I too) initially expected it would. Solidarity networks have cropped up all over Greece, while the support to the striking steel-workers (from Greece but not only), two months now in struggle for their livelihoods and lives, is going strong and their struggle is right now the rallying point of resistance to the destruction of all of our collective lives.


High school students, express solidarity with the steel-workers after having gathered a few Euros from pocket change to contribute to the strikers fund

An interesting thing is happening at the political level: the "unserious" Left is gaining. In a recent poll, the "electoral influence" of the three left of the mainstream parties adds up to 37% - 41 percent if one adds up the smaller parties and the Greens, a number that is unprecedented and apparently rising. Whether this will coalesce to a viable government is doubtful: The communists consider everybody else a capitalist stooge, not serious about systemic change, the Democratic Left, the right splinter group from SYRIZA, seems to be more comfortable discussing a collaboration with PASOK (assuming there will be a PASOK left by the time the elections arrive) than with everybody else. However, popular pressure can work wonders, and one still hopes that Greece will be the first to throw a political wrench in the working of the austeritarian banksters and their political employees in Europe. That is assuming that the ruling Socialist - Conservative - Far Right coalition under a former ECB vice president, actually deigns to hold elections sometime in the near future as originally promised.

The future remains at this point very opaque. The issue is whether the rest of the European peoples will need to arrive at the point of despair that Greeks have reached, before they react.

Greece on the Brink of Emergency: A Matter of Days

2011-10-19T02:58:00.001+03:00

As Greece prepares for a 48 hour general strike, promising to be the largest ever in a series of far from insignificant mobilizations over the past year and a half, there is a sense here that the coming week will be historical, fateful. The success of the strike over the following two days will be hard to measure, though it seems that there is an unutterable goal of toppling the government, which acts as a quasi colonial regime, pressured to surrender the last vestiges of sovereignty, imposing a catastrophic austerity in full knowledge that it is catastrophic.

The situation is reaching a critical point and I reproduce below, as a general intro, a brief analysis on the current situation that Aris Leonas has been kind enough to send me, with minor edits:

Greece on the Brink of Emergency: A Matter of Days

by Aris Leonas

[Note: This text is part of a longer article about the global crisis and resistance that is being written by Kolya Abramsky, and will explore questions of the emerging worldwide political struggle which is the latest stage of the crisis’ development; the limits of political reformism; control of key means of production and reproduction; and the question of force. It was hoped that this longer article could be finished already by now, but this has not been possible. However, due to the urgency of the situation in Greece, and the fact that the situation can change radically in the next few days, he has decided, together with Aris Leonas, who is the main author of this text on Greece, to send this part out separately].

In Greece a number of factors stand out, suggesting that Greece is on the verge of some major changes. The disruption of basic operations of the state in conjunction with the widespread certainty that the Greek debt cannot be controlled (constant rumours of default in the coming period) compose a picture of political instability and crisis which seems to be the precursor of a more generalized political crisis to be spread to the rest of the south European regimes first and possibly to the heart of the Eurozone given the accelerated tensions of the financial crisis and the disagreements among current leaderships in the Eurozone. The remaining days leading up to the summit of the EU leaders, on the 23rd October, and the G20 summit in the first week of November are considered crucial. Something has to give, and soon. And, it could go in many different directions, for better, or for worse. Rumours, which may or may not be true, are circulating regarding possible deployment of the EU EuroGendFor (Euro Gendamerie Force) military personell being called to Greece in the days ahead...

On the one hand, there has been an incredible level of political activity and mobilization from very broad layers of society. This has continued to intensify, bringing in ever greater numbers and becoming more and more continuous as the crisis has deepened much further since 2009. The sequence of movements follows this general scheme: broad student movement and riots during 2006-07 before the official announcement of the Greek debt crisis; weeks of urban rioting that took place in December 2008 as young people responded to the police killing of a teenager; mass demonstrations; 13 general strikes since the IMF deal; most political form of the movement of indignados (compared to the similar movement in Spain); the last step in this series of resistances is expressed through occupations of public spaces and buildings, and strikes in key industries such as transport or railways.

On the other hand, this high level of mobilization has not stopped or even slowed down the pace of austerity measures, nor the plans for mass privatizations, and repression has been growing. Protests have been met with extreme police violence, and increasingly strikes are being declared illegal.

Despite high levels of organizing, people report a profound sense of despair, and no clear sense of alternatives being built by people. There is widespread panic and a general sense of economic, political and mainly social collapse. Increasingly the reproduction of massive parts of the society is becoming more and more difficult, as society’s functioning grinds to a halt. Nothing is working, neither public services nor private deals.

Political organisations, such as parties on the left side of the spectrum to groups in the anti-authoritarian or autonomous spectrum, are under enormous pressure. The acceleration of the economic crisis has resulted in a serious political crisis and the complete lack of a concrete alternative is obvious. Voices on the left spectrum have begun whispering about the need to form a left government constituted by a broad coalition of the left parties and smaller groupings. However, they have been unable to articulate this idea in such a way as to inspire the broad movements and struggles which have appeared in a very sudden and decentralized way. This, despite the fact that these parties are actually potentially very strong, as they account for 26% in the polls, while the party in government accounts for only 15%, with almost 50% of the voters having declared that they will abstain from voting in any future elections. The range of left parties includes: Syriza, a left coalition born after the decade of Social Forums; the Communist Party – a traditional communist party with its own unions, that are widely criticized for being reluctant to join with the rest of the left in some type of coalition; Antarsia, a small coalition of anti-capitalist groups; and the Ecologists-Greens, a relatively new party linked to the European Greens).

People are under huge pressure. Increasing sections of the population are unable to pay taxes, pay back loans or even ensure the satisfaction of their basic subsistence needs, such as electricity, health services, housing etc.

Unemployment is increasing fast, and is expected to reach an average of 25% in the first semester of 2012. High taxes are being imposed through electricity bills, and the economy has contracted fast, and fear, or even panic, reigns among large parts of the active population. All of this has created a fluid mass of ex-workers, as well as over-exploited and insecure employees. These people are not connected to the traditional trade unions (these are the unions which have traditionally been, for the most part, attached to the two main political parties, i.e. the ruling PASOK party, and Nea Dimokratia, which was in power until it lost the elections in 2009). Unemployment and insecurity mainly affect the younger generations, which are forced to emigrate (mostly to North and Central Europe, and also Australia and Canada). This is especially so for high-skilled workers and those with with university degrees.

Current situation:

The level and intensity of struggles has grown rapidly since the summer and during the first weeks of October. The Greek version of the indignados movement (“Aganaktismenoi” in Greek), which ended with riots in June to mid July, seems to have completed its first cycle of existence, leaving behind a space for a broad basis for interaction among different movements and groups across the country. This has expressed itself in the form of many decentralized and spontaneous activities such as strikes and occupations in the public sector, as well as mass demonstrations and rioting. During this period, new forms of committees of struggle have emerged, increasing the number of participants and showing a willingness to unite behind the call for a 48-hour strike which was issued by the General Confederation of Workers (GSEE) and the Confederation of public servants (ADEDY) for the 19th-20th October. Although these committees are still very new, they have already shown themselves to be highly stable. They vary both in the form and place of struggle, ranging from low level unions in workplaces, to assemblies that organize occupations and neighbourhood assemblies that organize local struggles and unite during major calls, such as calls for demonstrations in the centre of Athens.

Several new forms of struggle have been born during this period. This includes occupations of (8) ministries and government offices, disruption of operations at different levels of the state, from local authorities all the way to state services such as tax offices and courts etc., the occupation of productive infrastructure (means of public transport, railways, occupations from the powerful union of workers in the Public Power Corporation). Every day smaller protests also disrupt the regular functioning of commercial, economic and social life. However, this high level of mobilization has, until now, as we mentioned, not managed to stop or slow down the pace of austerity measures, nor derail mass privatizations. Furthermore, the efforts at creating a concrete and broad organizing umbrella of all these movements has, so far, not given rise to any kind of new institutional form. Left parties, activists and workers meet during these struggles in a rather chaotic way. It is becoming increasingly important to try to ensure that these committees which have emerged become legitimate focal points for building and defending mass based popular power through struggle.

Until now the government has been trying to avoid any uncontrollable explosion from below (such as the ongoing occupations in the public power corporation, strike of workers in the cleaning sectors of the local authorities). Repression has been growing. Street protests are met with increasing levels of violence from the police. More and more strikes are declared illegal, and private companies are being hired by the government to take over tasks that are not being carried out due to occupations and strikes in the public sector etc. The army has even been called in to clean city streets, as cleaners are on strike.

Things are now coming to crisis point, and it is matter of days. In the run up to the summits mentioned above, the movement from below is intensifying its actions through strikes and demonstrations across the country. At the same time as mass activities are increasing, the government is also making moves from above, apparently in preparation for what will follow should the current government resign, and these plans are taking the antidemocratic measures to new levels, based around a state of emergency.

Certain moves from within the government show that this week is probably the most crucial of the crisis period in Greece. Especially important in this regard is a long article signed by three important ministers on Sunday the 16th October, and supported by the assistant PM and Minister of Finance E. Venizelos. This article asks people to loyally follow the policies agreed with the IMF, and to establish the consent of the silent majority against, the so-called vocal minorities who are disrupting the country’s political functioning. This is full of incredibly antidemocratic and authoritarian overtones, suggesting the urgency of the situation. Another important factor that adds to the image of a collapsing government is that increasing numbers of important trade unions and very large numbers of party members have been withdrawing from the ruling PASOK party, as well as one member of parliament. Rumours are rife about what scenarios might develop in the next-days, and it is virtually impossible to know which have their basis in fact and which do not. This includes the rumour that some kind of new antidemocratic social and political compromise will be established among the different centre-right parties, in the form of a national unity government, or the installation of a government of technocrats, or the installation of a state of emergency etc., in order to pre-empt the threat of an even worse scenario unfolding, a threat which remains unspoken from all sides. Presumably, this unspoken threat, which established political authorities understand all to well, is the threat of revolution from below. The question of political power in on the table, and the political crisis will be resolved in the struggles in the days and weeks ahead, in one way or the other.

This is a call for people in Europe, and other parts of the world, to watch closely the developments in Greece, and to be ready for the next stages in the development of this political crisis, which will soon spread, in all probability first to other parts of Southern Europe, and later to the European Union as a whole. The political crisis in Greece has taken approximately two years to reach its climax, and this time frame is likely to be greatly reduced in other countries as the European and global crisis accelerates. There is no time to lose.

Questions From a Worker Who Reads - from an iPad

2011-10-08T20:29:00.001+03:00

Questions From a Worker Who Reads, Bertold Brecht, 1935

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who
Else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.
So many questions.

[General idea first posted in Greek in Ιστολόγιον, more links added in this English version - cross-posted at the European Tribune]

This is what austerity looks like

2011-09-26T16:34:00.001+03:00

Police used massive and disproportionate violence to prevent a peaceful gathering of protesters against its indiscriminate and irrational tax policies in Syntagma square yesterday. It is obvious that the right to peaceful assembly is compromised in this country. The TV channels (private and public - all *state TV* though - downplayed the event and did not show images from the protest and its violent dispersal. The government intervened yesterday to prevent student protesters who stormed Greek public TV studios, from stating their grievances on public TV. The right to free speech is also being mediated to insignificance in this country... The way to the pauperisation of the population is the police state... The rest of the EU should heed the Greek guinea-pig's trials as a warning...This is the New European Democracy. Human rights are but a secondary concern to doctrinaire fiscal policy. Ms.Merkel, Mr.Trichet this is your police force. But beware, even they are enraged..

Roubini on the crisis and Marx - WSJ

2011-08-16T03:51:00.002+03:00

WSJ: (~4:00) So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future. That sounds awful. What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?

Roubini: Businesses are not doing anything. They're not actually helping. All this risk made them more nervous. There's a value in waiting. They claim they're doing cutbacks because there's excess capacity and not adding workers because there's not enough final demand, but there's a paradox, a Catch-22. If you're not hiring workers, there's not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we've actually had a worsening because we've had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process.

[1]

He then goes on to say many startling things (well for the WSJ readership I imagine) like:

Calling [the UK rioters] just criminals is ignoring the fact that these are poor & desperate people, and poor and desparate people whether in Egypt or the UK tend to riot, and eventually this inequality together with no jons and no income and no growth in the economy can lead to indstability in any country...

And generally the man sounds like a dangerous radical. The end of days. Surely.

[1] [transcript via MeFi]

Greek crisis, #imfgr @eurotrib

2011-07-13T04:48:00.001+03:00

If it seems that I'm not posting enough here lately, it's because I've been mostly doing that on the European Tribune, where some of the last remnants of various threads of the European Left blog together as neoliberal doom is already upon us. I'm posting the links here (diaries and major comments together with related stuff I have posted on this blog) for completeness sake, since I realized that they are forming a corpus of commentaries on the Greek Crisis and its reality, that might conceivably be considered useful, by someone, somewhere, somehow (posts/diaries in bold):

- 10.12.09(comment): Doom and gloom: The way it looks from the ground (in thread "Potential Greek default - how doomed is the euro?")
- 10.02.10 (comment): Pigs on parade + pig irony
- 27.04.10 (comment) Re: Resisting the Neoliberal Empire? (in thread: Resisting the Neoliberal Empire?)
- 06.05.10 (comment) Re: Getting ugly in Greece (1) and Re: Getting ugly in Greece (2 - the 5/5 demo) (in thread: Getting ugly in Greece)
- 14.05.10: Some sort of semi-coherent collage of notes on the Greek situation (1)
- 25.05.10 Some somewhat more coherent notes on the Greek crisis: debunking IMF propaganda (2)
- 29.06.10 (comment) Re: Is this it? (In thread: Is this it?)
- 02.11.10 (comment) Re: Europe
- 08.11.10 Greece: The unlocal elections
- 15.11.10 (comment) Re: Europe
- 19.11.10 (expanded comment): A comment on the alleged lack of productivity of Greek workers
- 25.11.10 (comment) Re: The Banksters (In thread: Relief)
- 26.11.10 Vampire policy makers of the IMF (and the ECB)
- 26.11.10 (comment) Re: The word from the Serious People (In thread: The word from the Serious People)
- 15.12.10 Greek general strike today: anger and violence
- 19.12.10 The Greek Economy on a Crucifix: IMF lies and misrepresents yet again
- 02.02.11 (comment): Re: Merkel's New (Old) Two-Speed Europe (In thread: Merkel's New (Old) Two-Speed Europe)
- 04.02.11 (comment): Re: Irish pushback strategy - we get mail (In thread: Irish pushback strategy - we get mail)
- 18.02.11 High Drama: Greece under the "troika"
- 04.04.11 Jake's Greek LTE, questions and discussion
- 14.04.11 (comment) Re: Why 2013 (In thread: Three months that will test the Eurozone)
- 19.04.11 (comment) On the Greek black economy (In thread: What's Happening in the Black Economy?)
- 06.05.11 The revelations of Strauss Kahn
- 11.05.11 (comment) Athens Strike / Demo
- 14.05.11 Kristallnacht in Athens
- 17.05.11 (comment) Re:Europe (about state sector participation etc)
- 18.05.11 Merkel's racist lies
- 20.05.11 (comments) Re: LQD: "Tahrir Virus" comes to Europe, Re: No One Expects the Spanish Revolution? (In thread: No One Expects the Spanish Revolution?
)
- 25.05.11 (comment) Re: Europe (on the indignants 1st day)
- 25.05.11 (comment) Re: Did Greeks wake up? Tina, Tara and other girls (In thread: Did Greeks wake up? Tina, Tara and other girls)
- 25.05.11 Here be dragons: Lies, horror populi and subversion amidst hope and chaos - reposted at Eurotrib and then reposted at Daily Kos as "Greece Shock Therapy update - WSJ lies debunked"
- 30.05.11 The Greek Colony
- 05.06.11 (comment) The Greek crisis explained on TV
- 15.06.11 Greece: if austerity doesn't work... Try more austerity!
- 29.06.11 Flash brief from the #greekrevolution
- 12.07.11 Greece: No other plan but plunder

Here be dragons: Lies, horror populi and subversion amidst hope and chaos

2011-05-25T03:39:00.002+03:00

Takis Michas' article in the WSJ, written a month ago, about Greece and what he describes as its Descent into Anarchy (full article reproduced here) is a stunning piece of disinformation on the situation in Greece, an outlandish view of the disaster unfolding in the country, tainted by class prejudices and ideolepsy. It is so utterly unrooted in reality, that, were it published in Greece anonymously, it would be unclear whether this was perhaps a parody. This is the pinnacle of a genre of alarmist anti-left writings that seem to pop-up regularly in the local MSM to lecture the restless natives on the vileness of resistance to Authority and its true Prophet, the IMF, and blame the Left as sole instigator of all sorts of violence: A"violence" however, which on closer inspection mostly consists of jeering a corrupt politician or two, staging a protest against the pauperization of this or that social group, peaceful civil disobedience and strikes. In a zoology of militantly conformist, fear-mongering tall tales on display in the government-friendly media (and that's 90% of all MSM media), Michas piece is Godzilla. That's why it was perhaps too tall for the Greek press and required a global newspaper to print it.

The WSJ readership of course, needs this potent injection of fear-mongering anyway, as the plebes in the US are rapidly becoming unruly themselves, faced with shouldering the costs of the banker bailout and this cautionary tale form the exotic Near East, complete with leftist dragons, is perfectly timed for domestic use.

As I said, if this was published in a Greek newspaper, in Greek, it would offer a hilarious peek at the paranoia that the crisis has bread among the country's upper classes, and would not merit a response significantly different from "you should go out more often". Since it is published in English, in a paper as broadly read among ruling elites as the WSJ, and might skew the perception of what is actually happening in Greece, it requires debunking, especially as I have seen the article being referred to on the www as some sort of authoritative picture of Greek "anarchy", since its publication. In the process it will provide an opportunity to relate the true story of the budding, if still incoherent, mass resistance to the ECB/IMF fiscal stormtroopers and their caretaker government in this peripheral ECB province I'm writing from, but also the truly darker side of collapsing neighbourhoods, mindless violence and general despair that is emerging from the deep cracks that the prolonged ECB/IMF induced depression has carved on the already decrepit social body. This panoramic view of civil discontent and societal unrest that answering Michas' article must include, and the true dangers lurking as the crisis deepens will be the major theme of this post, along with a discussion of things that have happened after the publication of this article: it has been a month thick with events.

Austerity? What austerity?

Michas begins by lamenting the demise of "the rule of law" in Greece and chiding the government for its inability to "to maintain order and implement its own legislation". While the debt crisis is briefly mentioned, Michas avoids pointing to a rather crucial piece of background info: the developments he "describes" (and misrepresents) are happening as Greece is plunged into the deepest recession in living memory, as unemployment is skyrocketing along with part-time and uninsured jobs, as even nominal wages are collapsing, as a quarter of small businesses have either gone bankrupt or are preparing to do so, as indirect taxes soar and inflation persists. But all this does not impress Michas:

"Many argue that Greece’s disintegration is the unavoidable consequence of the government’s attempt to enforce economic austerity. This seems doubtful".

Now why it seems doubtful to Takis Michas, he won't say. It certainly doesn't seem doubtful to the vast majority of people in the country, as the percentage of Greeks expecting social conflict in the next few months as a result of government policies reached 84% three months ago [poll links in Greek, I'm afraid], while when asked to describe their feelings towards these policies in another poll, 35,5% mentioned "anger", 33% "disappointment", and 21% "fear". Pollsters warn that the Greek political system has "passed the point of no return", and is facing a drastic overhaul...

I don't think there is a country in the world were the population can (or should) be expected to passively accept its own impoverishment and the annihilation of lives and prospects. Society is still paralyzed from the Shock Therapy the German Bankers and their local overseers have imposed and are still, to an extent, under the spell of the neoliberal mantra: There Is No Alternative. There are movements however on the ground, local and nation-wide that resist this destruction, stemming both from a sense of injustice and a practical inability to pay for much more than basic necessities. These movements are widely accepted and approved of by the Greek population. However, for Michas to admit to large scale societal desperation, rage and depression would be to accept that there are valid reasons for this anger. But that would by ideologically problematic for a large part of the neoliberal right that he represents and, anyway, it would stand in the way of red-baiting which is the object of this article. Thus Michas proceeds to a string of accusations against the left that are blatantly outrageous and viciously false. They are the kind of accusations an authoritarian government levels against dissident groups. It is highly unlikely that Michas is so secluded and deluded that he doesn't know this already, so this is IMHO inexcusable disinformation.

All protest is lawlessness?


SYRIZA members harass pro-market politician

Michas starts his description of the Evil Greek Left with an impressive piece of disinformation:

The country is at the mercy of militant activists, who are mostly inspired by various factions of Greece’s hard left. The heaviest hitters are Greece’s Communist Party and the anarcho-Stalinist Coalition of the Radical Left, which is comprised of the Ecosocialists of Greece, the “Roza” Radical Left Group and the Internationalist Workers’ Left, to name a few. Their followers, with total impunity, have taken to harassing citizens and destroying public property, even taking over whole villages.

First if all let's start with this fact: The "militant activists" of these parties are responsible for zero (0) acts of real physical violence against anyone. They have "harassed" no citizens that I'm aware of, unless "harass citizens" means "demonstrate against politicians" perhaps, they have not destroyed public property as far as I'm aware of, and they have certainly not taken over any villages, at least since the Greek Civil War in the 1940s.

Beware of Stalinists bearing flags

The Communist Party is an ossified relic of a sovietophilic old-school stalinist party, whose intransigence and militancy in workers' movements as well as its historic role in the Greek resistance have guaranteed it a permanent place in parliament - and which is growing stronger by the day as the protest party par excellence. Its actions include the usual old-school labor actions, i.e. ship-workers and sailors blocking ports. The party has no loose canons and has a horror of things getting out of control. No police officers worry about attending a KKE demonstration. Ever.

Rabid SYRIZA Members armed with deadly pickets

The description of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SY.RIZ.A in Greek) again is, well, somewhat idiosyncratic. It is indeed a coalition, a block of left and green parties from left social-democracy to post-maoist groups. The three parties Michas chooses to enumerate are however not quite representative of the alliance. It is like saying that "the Italian peninsula is comprised among others of the Vatican and San Marino". The missing elephant, the core political and parliamentary entity around which the alliance was built, is the Coalition of the Left and Ecology (even the similar name sort of gives the deal away) a member of the Party of the European Left (along with Die Linke, Bloco, Sinn Fein, PCF etc.). Interestingly, despite Michas' claims regarding their dastardly final objectives, this party participated in two Greek governments in the late 80s early 90s (along with the Communists - with the Conservatives first and then in a emergency government): there were no gulags built. Kim Il Sung does not seem to feature among the guiding lights of either party... About "Anarchostalinism" I can only say that it is a term that has no proper place outside satire, so I'll leave it at that.

Those evil commies then, have activists who apparently "direct physical attacks primarily at politicians and journalists who support open societies and market economies". Now, the three "attacks" Michas mentions have indeed happened (as have many more like them); in fact politicians and establishment figures are currently feeling rather unsafe walking around in public without heavy escort. But that isn't because they are "for open societies and market economies" but rather because they are part of a corrupt and/or incompetent political two-party system that has thrown Greece into an unsustainable debt maelstorm, through cronyism, clientilism and theft. This opinion about the two governing parties is shared by a vast majority of the population - 93% of Greeks feel that corrupt politicians should go to jail. According to last year's Transparency International survey, Greeks were the people who ranked their political parties with the highest marks for corruption in the world. A recent poll shows that 40% of the population are for (and 56% against) violent heckling of governing politicians. As the Greek economy collapses even the "official" narrative for the crisis makes people who are facing destitution rather angry.

Even so, the conservative politician mentioned was most certainly not attacked by organized leftist activists (of any kind). Kostis Hatzidakis, MP and former transport minister, not involved in any personal scandals, was attacked by a couple of elderly men during a huge union demonstration, one carrying an umbrella which he used against the former minister, as other protesters from the crowd protected the MP.

Hadzidakis attacked

No one credible has, to my knowledge, seriously suggested that the attackers were members of any party. Their photos and the relevant video has travelled around the Greek web and the media many times. Were the perpetrators members of any left party, the MS media, quick to indulge in all sort of wild accusations against those "irresponsible leftists" would no-doubt have unearthed it. They haven't.

Keratea burning

The same is true for both other cases (and there are many more instances of public, intense disapproval, voiced all over Greece and abroad wherever government members appear in public, on a daily basis by now, most of which have nothing to do with physical violence). In one case Michas mentions, we know for a fact that the person that threw yogurt (yogurt! how deadly can you get?) against the Vice-Premier was a voter of the far-right LAOS party, (and we know this because he gave an interview in a Greek newspaper). He was acting as a citizen of Keratea, a town whose inhabitants have immersed themselves in an insurgency against the creation of a landfill next to their homes. The town was a rather conservative - if anything - electoral municipality. This is the only instance of anything that might be legitimately called an insurrection in Greece, and it is very local in its scope. Theodoros Pangalos, the Vice Premier, elected from that particular electoral periphery, had spoken against the locals and for Law and Order, as is par for the course. Again, since local politicians of all colours and stripes have expressed their sympathies with the locals, and the whole town was behind the demonstrations, the claim that the locals were "supported by anarchist 'freedom fighters'” is ridiculous - not to mention in contradiction with the claim that the village was taken over by leftist activists. Keratea is a case study in state intimidation since from day one the government chose to use sticks - not carrots: the police have shown incredible ferocity against the inhabitants of Keratea, including Gaza-style home invasions and violence against the elderly, on orders to support tooth and claw a project that the citizens of Keratea insist is a contract awarded to politically connected construction companies. This is not the first time in Greece or in Europe, where locals have found being forced to live next to a toxic landfill violently unpalatable. Only previously, no one would have thought it necessary to invoke a conspiracy of anarchostalinists to explain it away. As for Pangalos, who has distinguished himself in heaping scorn against Greek citizens, a recent poll has shown that a full 79% of those questioned agreed with the deprecation and the jeers directed against him. By the way: it seems that these protests might yet have borne fruit... with all that this fact might have to teach us.

Raw terror at the toll booths

Similarly, the "Won't pay" movement, far from being some sort of bloodthirsty extremist group (in fact they are completely non-violent) is a citizens' initiative, mostly, but not solely, from areas where the government has set up toll booths that force the inhabitants of towns to pay in order to be able to leave their towns. At the same time, the toll fee prices had been hiked originally, exactly as general nominal income is steeply declining and inflation is charging on at 4-5%. Frequent commuters find it too much of a drain for their precarious finances to pay extra for driving to and from work, on incomplete roads constructed by the "national" contractors whose contracts are generally believed to be the product of their owners' political "entanglement". The Left certainly supported these movements but hardly initiated them. The movements had managed to win a promise of across the board reduction on toll fees (which it seems now the government has no intention of carrying out). They have also opened up with their actions, both on the road and in the courts, a new area of public inquiry, regarding the enormous costs that Greek roads seem to have incurred, as part of the corrupt relationships between some construction companies' owners and government cadres from both ruling parties...And it's far more than the voters of the Left who are furious with the toll prices: 66% of the public consider that the Minister of Infrastructure is a tool for the contractors. 52% suppport the "Won't pay" activists (vs 33% against). These people are not ideologues of any sort of "hard left" Michas is terrified of. They are people at the edge of bankruptcy and disaster. Even the regional chambers of commerce for Pieria and Thessaloniki are participating actively in these protests. So much for wild-eyed radicals...A similar story pertains to the metro/bus ticket boycott: fares went up by 40% this January, meeting a determined resistance from many commuters who have refused to pay these price hikes. In both cases the government legislated draconian measures to break these movements, and it is rumored that the toll companies are paying police officers and police departments to be present at the toll stations and force payment on anyone who denies payment, while they have tried to scare ticket dodgers with heavy penalties and fines - and even jail for a 1,4 Euro ticket!

Then there is the Marfin Bank incident last May, where, in one of the largest union rallies ever in Athens, a group of hooded "anarchists" threw molotov cocktails inside a bank, a mind-bogglingly criminal act that resulted in the death of three bank employees, who were trapped inside. This was a depraved act, no doubt about it, but the fire-bombers, who were possibly not aware of the fact that there were people inside the shuttered bank, were a small group (3-4 people strong) acting around the main demo, with no connection to Michas' "hard left" at all. Michas' claim, that activists of the main parliamentary leftist parties go after "people who refuse to participate in strikes and demonstrations" stating that: "In May 2010 three employees of the private bank Marfin suffocated to death when a hard-left mob fire-bombed their offices during a riot" is slanderous and dishonest.

The ghost of Greek liberals past

This tale of nefarious leftists firebombing villages and occupying banks or whatever, is of course par for the course for the socialist government and its supporters in the media as well as the ultra-right wing LAOS party.This is not the only policy area where the "serious" parties converge: This January the government, the conservative opposition and the extreme right were trying to outdo each other in anti-immigrant, xenophobic and racist rhetoric when 300 (mainly North African) "illegal" workers went on a hunger strike to demand that they have the opportunity to employ themselves legally. Seeing this as a rare opportunity to gain popular points, the government rode the xenophobic horse almost until the end when, faced with the prospect of dozens of dead hunger strikers, as one after the other were fading in critical condition in Greek hospitals, they accepted some sort of deal - which after the hunger strike was over they made sure to reinterpret. The compliant government-dependent media moguls and their TV stations went on what can only be described as a week of inciting racist hatred: the intensity of rhetoric was at KKK levels and it was truly scary to realize that one was witnessing what amounted to a immigrant hate-fest in the most mainstream of Greek TV news shows. This was unfolding in an already ominous context of sky-rocketing unemployment and Dublin II, an EU treaty on migration which guarantees that Greece is and will remain a massive EU immigrant detention camp for the forseeable future, with a desperate, unemployed and hopeless detainee population that is now dying to get out of the country on top of dying to get in... The Democratic Alliance, the party which Mr. Michas writes as a representative of in the WSJ article, was a very vocal part of that broad coalition of xenophobia. Note that as an independent journalist Michas showed a libertarian bend, and it is doubly astonishing to read such calls to authoritarianism by him especially...

The immigrant hunger strike was the most obvious example of the "respectable" part of the political spectrum seeming to have decided that, in the face of mass popular delegitimization of the political system, the proper response is to move ever rightwards on social issues. This is some sort of a collective "Sarkozy strategy", which ignores, among other things, how this is currently playing out in France. The marriage of neoliberal economics with extreme conservative, nationalist and xenophobic currents, seems to be a viable vehicle for preserving elite privilege. This has the effect of further strengthening an already empowered extreme right: the Nazi party (not a metaphor - the actual Nazi party) is polling at 1,5% according to a recent poll, ten times its historical size, and the original xenophobic extreme right-wingers at LAOS have also shown signs of a significant rise in the polls. Since Michas' article, the Nazis and the mainstream apologists for xenophobia who have fanned the flames of the racism that feeds them, have gone on an anti-immigrant rampage, a pogrom of real and horrific criminal violence, illustrating where the danger of blind and mindless destruction and societal dissolution come from and where criminal intent really is indiscernible from the effects of a programmatically antidemocratic platform. These events happened a month after Michas' aricle in the WSJ, and the trend was visible well before then. Strangely Michas' libertarianism was blind to this actual rather than invented rise of political violence.

What is even more worrying is the fact that these pogroms happened under the indifferent eye of the police, and they were then only peripherally highlighted and lightly condemned by mainstream media. What is more: as the Minister of Public Protection mumbled a few words about dissolving the nuclei of neonazi sympathizers in the police force, "serious" newspapers, the conservative and far-right opposition, members of his own "socialist" party and pundits of every sort, actually protested against "starting witch hunts" in the police force and "hurting an already diminished morale". Thus it is plainly clear that the toleration of the far right is a reasoned choice for sections of the Greek elite.

This will not be the first time the Greek liberal right and center and the elites that run them, will have allied themselves with the extreme right: During the civil war in Greece the "traditional" parties allied themselves with Nazi collaborators, black-marketeers and goons, and proceeded to impose a national security state that, with varying ferocity, continued until 1974, after attempts at democratization were quashed by royalist parliamentary coups and then the brutal military junta of 1967-74. Thus it is truly ironic for Michas to dangle the spectre of an imaginary authoritarian left: in Greece it is the liberal and not too liberal center and conservative parties that have a history of violence, using the extreme right as their "muscle". The parties Michas slanders and their ideological forebears, have been fighting for more not less democracy in Greece over the last 60 years. Kim Il Sung would feel much more comfortable with the government's LAOS allies than he would with the independent (to say the least) minded members of the components of SYRIZA's coalition. much less of course an anarchist of any sort...

Societal Tensions

There are other things happening in Greek society, as well, other ways in which the current increasingly desperate situation expresses itself. Suicide rates have shot up in 2010, and continue unabated in 2011, a quarter of shops in downtown Athens are now empty, people are leaving Athens in panic to become farmers, organized crime is booming, while unemployment almost reached 16% this February, homelessness has become a visible issue, soup kitchens almost cannot serve all the needy...

This collapse has created hopelessness, anger and violence. Criminal violence, racist and nazi violence, police violence and anarchist / protest violence. The events of the past weeks I have described elsewhere, but a day after the brutal and murderous police attack against peaceful demonstrators - a practice so entrenched and widespread that it suggests a permanent strategy of intimidation in order to "discourage" participation - a gang of anarchists attacked a central police station with molotov cocktails, running through a street market full of people. In the ensuing mess, three bystanders were burned by the fire bombs and one was until yesterday in serious condition, fighting for his life in a hospital...

So this explains somewhat the results that Public Issue, a polling company, published, of a survey that reported that:
- 62% of Greeks think that the memorandum with the troika has harmed the country and the same percentage is against it (13% it benefited the country - 15 support it),
- 16% think that there is no alternative (69% think there are alternatives).
- 77% do not trust the Prime Minister to manage the economy (22% trust him).
- 75% have a negative view of the IMF (69% last year), and 74% of DSK (49% last year).
- 69% believe that the IMF must leave Greece now (up 4% from 6 months ago).
- Only 52% have a negative view of the ECB (vs 33% positive) and 61% of Trichet. 59% have a positive view of the EU (up three points from 6 months ago).
- 53% want to bargain and default on at least a part of the public debt. 17% want to default completely and unilaterally.
- 33% think that the country needs a revolution and 56% deep changes.
- Greeks support strikes (74 - 20) and protests & marches (69 - 25) and are marginally not supportive of electoral abstention (45 - 54) and public deprecation and jeering of politicians (43 - 54)...
- 78% vs 21, believe that a social explosion is impending...
- 29% feel mainly angry, 18% dissapointed, 15% anxious, 11% shamed, 8% sadness and 13% all of the above.

Interestingly 48% believes that the stage is set for a successful far right party to emerge, versus 27% for a far left.

Thus contrary to Michas' assertions this is not about a leftist coup d' etat: The natives are restless and unhappy because of the, probably unprecedented during peacetime, drop of living standards they are suffering, with large swathes of the population being pushed to extremes of poverty that were unimaginable a few years ago, at the same time as prices rise, with incredibly high inflation due to a continuous barrage of indirect taxes and the backbone of state services and companies is being privatized in a gigantic sell out: Schools are being shut down, hospitals are in jeopardy (while corruption in and around them is still rife), as per yesterday the electric utility, the healthiest bank in the country, the state gambling and betting monopolies (very profitable), the power company (again profitable), petroleum, water services etc - are on sale, a true sell out that will happen at fire-sale prices (the depression has driven the Athens stock market at an all time low, it will be interesting in a morbid way to see how low will the sell out prices go). The sad thing about the left in these circumstances is not that it does to much. But that it is still doing too little to stop the asset stripping and the destruction of a whole generation of Greeks. If only they were as dangerous as Michas claims!

Yet this work of political fiction Michas has concocted must serve a purpose. I fear it is one of creating alibis. "If you see us rolling out the tanks, rescinding a few articles of the constitution, or if you see demonstrators being trampled, beaten like it's Mubarak's Tahrir Square, Manama, or Baniya, Syria", signals Michas to US and global elites, "it's OK": It's only communists and "anarchostalinists" who are being punished for their love of Kim Il Sung. Everybody else just loves being reduced to poverty and insecurity.

P.S: And so it was until the #spanishrevolution. There are as we speak twenty or more facebook groups planning #greekrevolution gatherings around the country, today 25/5/11. Let's see how succesful and how nonviolent these turn out to be. Unlike the #spanishrevolution however, everybody expects the #greekrevolution right now...

In other news...

2011-03-14T04:05:00.000+02:00

European austerity and other madness:

- Portugal: Precarious generation on the march:

The Precarious Generation Manifesto

We, unemployed, “five hundred-eurists” and other underpaid workers, disguised slaves,those who are underemployment or on fixed term contracts, self employed, casual workers, trainees, scholarship holders, working students, students, mothers, fathers and young people of Portugal.

We, who have up to now been complacent about the conditions imposed upon us, stand here, today, to contribute to a qualitative change in our country. We stand here, today, because we can no longer accept the situation that we have been dragged into. We stand here, today, because every day, we strive hard to be deemed worthy of a dignified future, with stability and safety in all areas of our lives.

We protest so that those responsible for our uncertain situation – politicians, employers, and ourselves – act together towards a rapid change in this reality that has become unsustainable.

Otherwise:

a) The present is betrayed because we are not given the chance to show our potential, thus blocking the improvement of the country’s social and economic conditions. The aspirations of a whole generation, which cannot prosper, are wasted.

b) The past is insulted, because previous generations have worked hard for our rights, our access to education, our security, labour rights and our freedom. Decades of effort, investment and dedication, risk being compromised.

c) The future is morgaged , and we foresee it without quality education for all and no fair retirement pensions for those who have worked their whole lives. The resources and skills that could put the country back on track of economic tsuccess will be wasted.

We are the highest-qualified generation in the history of our country. So do not let us down with the prospect of exhaustion, frustration or lack of future perspectives. We do believe we have all the resources and tools to provide a bright future for our country and ourselves.

This is not a protest against other generations. Quite simply, we are not, nor do we want to, wait passively for problems to sort themselves out. We protest because we want a solution, and we want to be part of it.

- France: 10% unempoyment
- Angela Merkel's Grab for Power
- Spiralling into the Moussaka (Which I should give more space to, since it pretty much spells out how doomed we are over here, as I have been pointing out in most of my latest posts, but I'm posting here for reference puroposes):

But that is not the worst of it. As I explained in my recent post on Europe's continuing mess, Greece was always going to be in trouble as soon as there was an economic downturn in Europe because they are trapped between the domestic policies of Germany and the inflexibility of the monetary system they signed up to when they joined the Euro. The austerity package is failing, but it is only failing to fix the symptoms. Without currency deflation the only possible outcome is lower wages for the Greeks, which will inevitably lead to default on loans, the exact thing the Germans and French are attempting to stop happening.
However I have to ask exactly what the EU are hoping to achieve. Let us for a minute pretend that the Austerity package does work without the collapse of the Euro banks and the Greeks accept the fact that they need to move onto a lower pay structure. Once the debt is cleared away Greece will suddenly appear as modern stable well educated economy with a low wage base that is extremely attractive to international companies. Under these conditions they may even become a net exporter into Europe.
Does anyone think that this will be acceptable to the French or the Germans ?

- Call for a European Conference against Austerity, Cuts and Privatisation and in Defence of the Welfare State:

We... call for a European Conference against Austerity, to take place in London provisionally on Saturday 1st October, with delegations and representatives from trade-unions, social movements and progressive organisations across Europe

- The creaking European austerity machine

Class War in the USA

- A table is worth 1000 words
- Financial dismantling of the American middle class in 8 charts
- 100.000 protesters in Wisconsin against the law that quashes union rights
- From American Dream to American Nightmare
- U.S. job gains concentrated in low-wage industries (A model for future "recoveries" elsewhere?)
- 25 graphics showing upward redistribution of income and wealth in USA since 1979

The World as a System

- Immanuel Wallerstein: Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?
- The great World Liquid Fuel Supply gap
- Polar ice loss quickens, raising seas
- P.Patnaik: The World food crisis:

Per capita foodgrain absorption, taking direct and indirect absorption together, has declined in India since the beginning of "liberalisation", first gently and of late precipitously, so much so that the level in 2008 itself was lower than in any year after 1953. In China too, there was a sharp decline in per capita total absorption of foodgrains between 1996 and 2003. It improved thereafter but even by 2005 had not reached the 1996 level; it could not have jumped suddenly in 2008. Since the population growth in both these countries has come down substantially, even their absolute absorption in 2008 could not have been much higher than in say the mid-nineties...

... An argument is often advanced that to overcome the world food shortage, agriculture everywhere should be opened up for corporate capital. Even if we assume for argument's sake that such a move will augment food output, it will only compound world hunger by imposing a massive squeeze on the purchasing power of the peasants and agricultural labourers who will get uprooted to make way for corporate agriculture. There is no escape therefore from the fact that overcoming the world food crisis requires a revamping of peasant agriculture, through land reforms, through State support, through protection from encroachment by corporate and MNC capital, and through State-funded transfers and welfare expenditures for improving the quality of rural life. The point is: will neo-liberalism allow it?

The Great Arab Revolt of 2011

- Saudi Arabia, now

- And investors don't like it:

Fears of sectarian uprisings in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have set off the first serious wave of investor flight from the Gulf

- Lenin's Tomb on Libya: Libya and Transnational Solidarity and The Revival of Imperialist Ideology

China

- China reports largest trade deficit in 7 years
- China's Coal Reserves "Will Make it New Middle East", Says Energy Chief

- Population now stands at 1.341 billion

- China targets 7% growth, to rein in inflation:

Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday said China had set a lower than usual economic growth target and pledged to contain soaring prices as concern over runaway growth mounts.

High Drama: Greece under the IMF - the series

2011-02-17T04:15:00.002+02:00

Translation of a poster by the king of Greek web agit-prop, Antista-chef

A couple of weeks ago a rather obscure dairy company, Neogal, based in the town of Drama, near the Greek-Bulgarian border, received a phone call from a representative of the troika (Greece's ruling authority, comprised of representatives of the IMF, the ECB and the EU Comission) - others say that they actually visited the town, but that's probably not true. They wanted to ask a few questions regarding the wage deal it had agreed with its workers.

A month earlier Neogal was the first company to announce that it would take advantage of the special company contracts mandated by the troika, a blunt instrument of destruction of Greece's supposedly stringent, but in practice rather laxly enforced, labor laws, and cut wages 9% beyond the collectively bargained levels. In return it promised not to cut back on any jobs. This was the neoliberal programme to further depress Greece's laughably low (private sector) wages was all about...

Anyway back to Drama: Neogal soon found out that the uproar against its wage decrease in the broader area of Northern Greece and the negative publicity it was receiving, was bad for business, so they went back on that agreement, especially after the Labour Inspectors [in Greek] noticed that they were a profit-making company with an improving balance sheet. Despite the fact that it could unilaterally impose it's "agreement" with the terrified workers (based as it was in an area where unemployment is over 30%), they decided to keep wages at current levels (which is a wage-cut anyway since inflation thanks to our IMF overlords is running at 5% annually - possibly more on a bare necessity budget) and promised to not fire anyone for the next two years, anyway.

This worried the IMF/ECB inspectors, whose main duty here seems to be overseeing the impoverishment of as great a slice of the population as possible, so they went calling to find if this was a result of any government pressure. It turns out that it wasn't, the Greek government was not subverting the troika's carefully planned disaster. All was well - no, not well, because those damn wages wouldn't free-fall fast enough. Apparently the troika members (known as "i troikani" - "troikans" - in Greece) had some other aces up their sleeves: It seems that they first demanded cutting across the board what amounts to 2/14 of Greek private sector salaries (Greek annual salaries are paid in 15 installments - one extra during Christmas and 50% of a salary on Easter and before summer leave). These they called "bonuses" when they demanded their elimination in the public sector, but really are part and parcel of already meager annual wages. This would have been a mandated wage cut in the private sector across the board. So much for state intervention in the economy.

We haven't escaped that danger yet. However it seems that the government has managed to appease the troikans: They are planning instead to abolish what little is left of collective bargaining (shreds of bargaining on a company level mainly) after their latest attack last autumn, and are aiming for generalized individual labor agreements, fewer and cheaper layoff remunerations (2d round), and diminished overtime pay. These measures they hope, will have the same effect...

Boldness

The Commissioner [Olli Rehn] said Greece, Sweden and Latvia were examples of countries that have managed to promote bold reforms without consideration of any political costs.

Lets see what the reforms they're praising actually mean for the populace and what it is that makes them "bold". Here are some of the results that their implementation has inflicted over a very brief period of time:

- Recently, the Greek Statistical Authority (NSA) published its unemployment data for November 2010: Unemployment reached 13,9%, the highest I think I ever remember it at, up from 10,6 in November 09, and from 13,4 in October 2010. Youth unemployment in the country has reached 35,6%. At this pace, unemployment might reach 15% in 2011.

- Yesterday the NSA also published some more data:

Greece's economy slumped more than expected last year and will stay in recession for a third straight year in 2011 with economists seeing little hope for a strong recovery even after that.
The 230 billion euro economy shrank at an annual 6.6 percent pace in the last quarter of 2010, as the austerity-induced recession deepened from a revised 5.7 percent decline in the previous quarter, data showed on Tuesday.
Flash Eurostat estimates showed the downturn in economic activity for the whole of 2010 was 4.52 percent, worse than the government's forecast decline of 4.2 percent, as it struggled to cut deficits and tackle debt

The IMF's forecast in May was at 4% and the government's forecast in June was for an under 4% contraction (the low 3% range being hyped up by various banks' economic analysts).

This had the, expected, result of pumping up the spreads (again):

The Greek/German 10-year bond yield spread widened by 26 bps to 860 bps as the outright Greek yield climbed to 11.93 percent.

The Reuters report includes the following assessment regarding Greek economy prospects:

"We expect the economy to bottom out in the second half of 2011 but after that we do not see a strong recovery taking hold, rather stagnation with growth rates around zero," said Christian Melzer, euro zone analyst at DekaBank.
"The growth figures are miserable, the situation in the real economy is bad -- 2011 and 2012 are going to be difficult years for the Greek economy," he added

This should be seen in the context of the IMF's original forecast (which the Greek government subscribed to) which stated:

Real GDP growth is expected to contract sharply in 2010–11 and recover thereafter. Growth is expected to follow a V-shaped pattern: the frontloaded fiscal contraction in 2010–11 will suppress domestic demand in the short run; but from 2012 onward, confidence effects, regained market access, and comprehensive structural reforms are expected to lead to a growth recovery. Unemployment is projected to peak at nearly 15 percent by 2012

Note that the 15% unemployment mark seems likely to be reached a year earlier than the IMF said it would and that the Unions' analysts expect that number to reach above or near 20% in a year at most.

The Governor of the Bank of Greece (Greece's Central Bank) expects contraction in 2011 at -3%. This is down from last May's government forecast of 2,6% and is already considered by many to be very optimistic.

- 188.000 jobs were lost during 2010 [in Greek] while one in four Greek businesses (225.000) are in the red, at the brink ready to shut down. Most shopping areas around Athens are full of shops vacant, closing or empty of customers

"70% off, the crisis is shutting us down"

- A quarter of those that do work in the private sector, work uninsured. Thus no benefits, unemployment or otherwise, no pensionable work years, no health coverage. This, in the context of the depression and the undercutting of the economic capabilities of the Greek family which has served as a societal safety net in hard times so far, is slowly creating a new underclass...

- Unrelated to the troika, but indicative of the unfairness of the austerity policies it is imposing through the "Socialist" government, is a story in Spiegel that made the rounds in the Greek press, apparently claiming that the total of (mostly untaxed and unreported) deposits of Greek nationals in Swiss banks reach 600 billion Euros, or 2,5 times the country's GDP. The number might be a bit high, but this is only Switzerland we're talking about. There are estimates floating around stating that total deposits of Greeks in banks around the world (tax and banking havens mostly) might be close to 1 trillion Euros. I note that a 10% tax on the 600 billion would solve most of the country's fiscal problems at a stroke - and we can't have that now, can we...

Sell, sell, sell

This was the situation, until a couple of days ago, when the troika gave a press conference at the end of its latest inspection round, their "Third Review Mission to Greece". In it they suggested, or announced depending on who you ask, that Greece should raise 50 billion euros over the next 5 years by selling assets it owns, including land. Mr. Tomsen of the IMF was also kind enough to inform the Greek public that some of the groups protesting the IMF-inspired "rationalization" measures are doing this only to protect their privileges. In fact he was quite prime-ministerial.

This provoked an angry reaction from the Greek government, it's first ever against the trio. They sounded upset:

Government spokesman Giorgos Petalotis told reporters early Saturday that the comments were unacceptable and amounted to interference into Greece's domestic affairs...
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou also issued a statement Saturday saying he has expressed his dismay about the comments in a phone call with IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Spokesman Petalotis said Saturday that while Greece is in need, it also has its limits. He said the Greek government only takes orders from the people of Greece and that no state land would be sold.

One would deduce from this fierce reaction, that was met with ostensible contrition by the triadic overlords themselves, that the Greek government was absolutely not willing to give up a shred of its sacred territory to the fiendish imperial scum who finally made one demand too many.

Well. No:

There is no divergence of views between the Greek government and the European Union/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank (“Troika”) regarding the essence of an agreement, which includes a EUR50bn privatization program.

In fact:

Greece's harsh criticism of the EU and the IMF over its comments on the need for privatization is unlikely to affect Athens' austerity plans as it was mostly aimed at placating a sensitive domestic audience.
Government officials said on Saturday that the EU and IMF had interfered unacceptably in domestic affairs by announcing a high privatization target for Greece and criticising strikes after its review of progress on the country's 110 billion euro bailout deal.
Greece lashes out at EU/IMF but will stick to reform
Selling public assets is a sensitive issue in Greece, especially for the ruling Socialists. No privatisations have been completed in the party's 16 months in office.
But Athens' harsh comments appear to have been mostly a response to a media outcry and to some ruling socialists being caught out by EU, IMF and ECB officials -- dubbed the 'troika' -- telling a news conference on Friday that Greece should target 50 billion euros in privatisations over the 2011-15 period.
"I don't think this showed any difference on substance between the troika and the government," said Yannis Stournaras, head of the Athens-based Foundation of Economic Research.
"It was a communication error," Stournaras said.
"Perhaps the government did not expect the troika to come out and specify things in detail before parliament, or at least the ministerial council, have been informed."
Indeed, the government admitted in a note circulated shortly after the IMF/EU news conference that it had agreed to the higher target, which became the focus of the week-end uproar.

And then the government went on to claim that the 50 billion sale was its own idea after all, but they were not willing to sell land, actually, but "utilize" it somehow, unless of course the parliament authorized a sale, yet the details pertaining to this miraculous utilization have not been leaked yet. But anyhow they're not going to give up the majority share in DEI, the public power utility. Or water services. Nor sell coastlines.

Now the total value of privatizations over the past 12 years in Greece was around 10 billion Euros. The total value of Greek government land and building assets might be around 300 billion (no one knows for sure yet) but that is assuming someone is willing to buy at nominal values, which is unlikely. Thus, raising 50 billion Euros in 5 years is not feasible really, despite the Greek government's claims, without the intervention of fairies and benevolent deities, unless we are talking about fairly extensive asset stripping. Yet even if a government managed to pawn everything, and indeed raise against all expectations 50 billion in 5 years, this - given the size of the national debt - will barely equal the amount paid as interest alone by the national government to its lenders between 2011 and 2013. Since this will be a one-off payment, it won't go very far.

So what we saw was theater. And rather poorly acted theater at that. The only explanation for such a spectacular plunge into empty rhetoric, is that the Papandreou government is preparing for elections, since it knows that it cannot carry out this agenda of wholesale plunder and misery by itself much longer. Already cabinet members refrain from appearing in any unpoliced public space for fear of their safety. There seems to be a general acceptance of the idea that only a grand coalition ("socialists" and conservatives) might be able to keep up with the increasingly painful measures needed to satisfy the troika's need for blood. In the meantime, Greece is sheepishly supporting Ms. Merkel's plans in the summit and has shown no interest in resisting even the most wildly irrational of the policy choices that are being rammed down people's throats, as the mantra "we are all to blame" plays increasingly unconvincing in the background.

Yet as unions have failed up to now to demonstrate convincing muscle (here the president of the Greek Confederation of Labor is portrayed as "missing"), society is far from calm, its temperature reaching feverish heights, as demonstrated in actions of political disobedience and outright clashes and in the increasing frequency of strikes and labor actions against employers and government policies. At the same time the socialist government is reverting to a law and order agenda flirting with the far-right and xenophobia, while controlling or being in cahoots with practically all of the mainstream media (owned by government contractors and other IMF beneficiaries). Thus the cocktail of personal despair, anger, misinformation, racism and futurelesness, is ominous. In my next post, I'll discuss the faces of public anger, fight-back, despair and moral morbidity that the IMF/ECB/EC is presiding over...

Cross posted at the European Tribune

The blimp... Cpt. Beefheart: genius

2010-12-22T19:25:00.000+02:00

Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010

The blimp

Master master
This is recorded thru uh flies ear
'n you have t' have uh flies eye t' see it
It's the thing that's gonna make Captain Beefheart
And his magic band fat
Frank it's the big hit
It's the blimp
It's the blimp Frank
It's the blimp

When I see you floatin' down the gutter
I'll give you uh bottle uh wine
Put me on the white hook
Back in the fat rack
Shad rack ee shack
The sumptin' hoop the sumptin' hoop
The blimp the blimp
The drazy hoops the drazy hoops
They're camp they're camp
Tits tits the blimp the blimp
The mother ship the mother ship
The brothers hid under their hood
From the blimp the blimp
Children stop yer nursin' unless yer renderin' fun
The mother ship the mother ship
The mother ship's the one
The blimp the blimp
The tapes uh trip it's uh trailin' tail
It's traipse'n along behind the blimp the blimp
The nose has uh crimp
The nose is the blimp the blimp
It blows the air the snoot isn't fair
Look up in the sky there's uh dirigible there
The drazy hoops whir
You can see them just as they were
All the people stir
'n the girls knees trembles
'n run 'n wave their hands
'n run their hands over the blimp the blimp
Daughter don't yuh dare
Oh momma who cares
It's the blimp it's the blimp.

Plus something more "conventional":

Electricity:

The Greek Economy on a Crucifix: IMF lies and misrepresents yet again

2010-12-19T04:16:00.002+02:00

This much I have learned from watching the output of various IMF mouthpieces on Greece these past months: Even high level spokespersons lie, are ignorant of and misrepresent the facts, even easily available facts, ideoleptically making the case for the disaster they are imposing not on actual shortcomings or economic problems but, rather, on what the IMF would expect these measures to be in order to implement its (highly ideological and scantily backed by any sort of empirical evidence anyway) shock therapy on the country. This is a "therapy" that was imposed at the behest of the ECB and the Central Wankers in the process (and I'm not sure yet if it was a conscious decision or just massive ineptitude) of creating a Peripheral "Latin" Europe: the EU as a relatively wealthy (but more unequal) core, surrounded by pauperized ~~banana~~ cheap-service republics destroyed by policies that can only be described as "a Versailles treaty without the war".
The other thing that I've learned from our IMF experience, is that the docility of Greek Media Magnates / Public Contractors and their petty little shops towards our new Overlords and our post-quisling government that is assisting them in the most slavish manner, knows no bounds. Only the dissident media actually take the trouble of pointing out these sorts of inconsistencies. But this is a different issue, for a different post... Let us return to the IMF's latest communique...

I will eschew commenting on all of the BS that Thomsen spouts in his latest interview on IMF Survey magazine. I will specifically focus on one of his statements that is so obviously and transparently bogus (and repeated in every IMF communication), that in an ideal world it would automatically disqualify him and the organization he represents from managing having anything to do with the Greek economy:

IMF Survey online: Why is legislation to allow firm-level wage agreements so important? Will this lead to massive wage cuts?
Thomsen: The way the Greek labor market was operating contributed to a disproportionate increase in wages over the last decade and a loss of competitiveness. So wages need to be brought more in line with productivity. Over the medium term, wage developments in Greece will be governed by productivity improvements. A more open and dynamic labor market will offer more and better employment opportunities as the business environment improves, investment increases, and the economy expands.

False premises

The IMF, an organization that has been promoting such sociopathic policies around the world for a third of a century now at least, have indeed forced pretty much a complete dismantling of the collective bargaining system in Greece, in order to make it much more like those of the third world countries that were, until recently, their main victims. This is a deregulation so drastic that, in the real world, it is expected to diminish wages in the private sector by 20% - nominal wages that is, in a country which has been running up a 6% inflation rate this year on top of chronic high prices, and thus combines Swiss prices with Portugese (going on Bulgarian) wages. On top of this, in a previous obscenity the IMF/ECB demanded that lay-off compensation be drastically reduced. On top of all of this, Greek unemployment is at 12,4% this month – the highest in decades, but in reality what people actually call un- or under- employed are close to 20 to 25%.
Already we have seen unilateral action by employers who have no or few profitability problems, reducing their workers salaries by arbitrary amounts. And these “firm-level” wage agreements that the IMF and the WB has had two decades worth of experience imposing on Latin American countries, have been a failure everywhere, as has been this idea that labor flexibility will bring more and better employment. In 2001 the Multinational Monitor noted that:

The theory behind labor flexibility is that, if labor is treated as a commodity like any other, with companies able to hire and fire workers just as they might a piece of machinery, then markets will function efficiently. Efficient functioning markets will then facilitate economic growth.
Critics say the theory does not hold up. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz described the problem to Multinational Monitor: “As part of the doctrine of liberalization, the Washington Consensus said, ‘make labor markets more flexible.’ That greater flexibility was supposed to lead to lower unemployment. A side effect that people didn’t want to talk about was that it would lead to lower wages. But the lower wages would generate more investment, more demand for labor. So there would be two beneficial effects: the unemployment rate would go down and job creation would go up because wages were lower.”
“The evidence in Latin America is not supportive of those conclusions,” Stiglitz told Multinational Monitor. “Wage flexibility has not been associated with lower unemployment. Nor has there been more job creation in general.” Where “labor market flexibility was designed to move people from low productivity jobs to high productivity jobs,” according to Stiglitz, “too often it moved people from low productivity jobs to unemployment, which is even lower productivity.”

Meanwhile in 2004 Eckhard Hein & Thorsten Schulten noted in “Unemployment, wages and collective bargaining in the European Union”:

Analysing the developments in the EU during the last four decades, no strictly inverse relationship between real wage growth and unemployment can be found. On the contrary, persistently high unemployment has had strong adverse effects on nominal wage growth and on the labour income share. Weakened labour union bargaining power and changing collective bargaining strategies have contributed to this result. It is therefore concluded that the current EU economic and employment policies aiming at further wage restraint, wage differentiation and decentralisation of collective bargaining are deeply misguided and have to be replaced by an alternative wage policy in Europe as part of a growth and employment oriented coordination of macro-economic policies

I should add that Greece already had a very flexible job market: between unreported and semi-reported labor, pseudo-apprenticeships and "illegal" immigrant labor, as well as the high proportion of the self-employed in Greece, well over 80% of the workforce had no employee payroll taxes, no job security, no benefits - nothing. Greece's was probably the most flexible job market in the EU, unofficially "liberalized" up till now. And this did not have much of a beneficial effect on anything...

A disproportionate increase in wages?

The first lie is included in the first line of text: the "disproportionate increase in wages over the last decade" is patent nonsense, Greek wages were very much in line with productivity and in purchasing power terms were pretty much stagnant for most of the past decade. I have discussed this in previous posts so I'll just copy & paste here the relevant parts:

@Eurotrib:...Debunking IMF propaganda

It is far from obvious how the IMF measures competitiveness, the FAQ section is not referenced at all, and it's not clear how this quantification arises or what does it mean. Erik Jones, writing in Euro Intelligence, was already debunking part of the competitiveness mythology, as pertains to labor costs, in March:

...What matters in terms of a head-to-head competition is how Greece and Germany compare in the cost of labor per unit of output and not the real compensation of employees. Moreover, we should look at their performance across the European marketplace as a whole. By that measure, if we set the year 2000 equal to 100, then by 2009 Greece was at 98 while Germany was at 95. Germany is still doing better than Greece, but only by a little and both have improved against the rest of Europe.

...Using national accounts data for relative real unit labor costs in manufacturing, Greece goes from 100 in the year 2000 to 87 in 2008. Over the same period, Germany goes from 100 to 90. It is hard to see how Germany comes off better in the comparison.

...Even if Greece is not suffering in terms of manufacturing, the high real incomes that Greek employers are doling out must surely be hitting the bottom line in the service sector, shouldn't they? Again, that's hard to see in the data. Total compensation per employee was 53.8 percent in Greece and 57 per cent in Germany...
Furthermore the "since Euro adoption" part is misleading. Greek productivity was surging until 2007, after that year, influenced of course by the global crisis, and affected by real fiscal imbalances (about which more later) productivity (and competitiveness, however defined) fell faster than the Dow Jones average after a computer glitch, but that was surely not a uniquely Greek phenomenon.
In fact Greece was receiving praise by the IMF itself for its improved competitiveness, singled out as the most successful economy in Southern Europe.

Source: IMF

While in a recent post here a few days ago I mentioned:

Let's kill the meme that somehow in Greece workers were benefiting from unreasonable pay-hikes this past decade:
Here we are: real wages have been growing faster than productivity perhaps between 2007-2009 in Greece. Before they were not:
Based on real wage increases during 2007 (3.9%), pay increases in Greece were the highest of the countries of the EU15. Prior to the 2007 increase, there had been four years during which the average annual increase in Greece was around 3%. These big increases, by international standards, in the average real wage in Greece were fully offset by increases in labour productivity, leaving unit labour costs stable in real terms at 2000 levels.

In the private sector during the 2000-2007 period, there was a cumulative decrease of 1.2% in real unit labour costs. Average real wages increased more slowly than average labour productivity, which left companies with leeway to benefit from higher labour productivity. The effect of this development was that at the end of 2007 real wages in the private sector had increased by 27% over the 2000-2007 period, while productivity increased by 36.5%. Thus, there was a benefit to companies of around 7% in unit labour costs in real terms.

For the year 2007, Greece was in second to last place as regards the level of gross wages in € (net wages plus employee contributions). In Greece, average monthly earnings in 2006 amounted to €1,668 for full-time employees, compared to an average of €2,366 in the other countries of the EU15...

... Whereas monthly labour costs in Greece were 83% of the comparable mean costs in the EU15 (in purchasing power parities), labour productivity in Greece stood at 91% of the European average.

In recent years unit labour cost in Greece has become the lowest in the EU15. This development relates to the fact that in Greece labour productivity increased substantially in 1996-2004 and increased in the range of 1.7%-2.7% a year during the four years from 2005 to 2008.

To make things even clearer, here's a chart that shows the profit per employee in the EU market economy in 2005
[source EU KLEMS, shown here]:

The 2006 numbers for Greece are even higher (~44k, >51k in the banking sector) and these sorts of numbers were typical for the past decade up to the crisis.

Greek wages in the private sector were underperforming compared to profits during the same period. The loss of competitiveness has an insignificant labor cost component, a huge inflation component and a large profit component. Yet wage earners are asked to accept massive cuts de facto, and a general return to the 1950s in terms of worker rights and protections...

Over the medium term

...Over the medium term wages will not follow productivity. Or perhaps they will, if more and more young and skilled younger workers leave the country for abroad, leaving manual and semi-skilled labor to man the sweatshops of a new euromaquilladora economy that seems to be the only visible goal of this exercise in thirdworldization. Over the medium term, farmers' markets garbage heaps will be turned increasingly more into senior-citizen mosh pits, as pauperized pensioners fight over pieces of half-rotten tomatoes. Others, less spritely grampas and granmas, will be heading for their neighbourhood garbage cans - and it ain't just the elderly. One in five children under 17 were in poverty last year, there is no telling what the numbers will be this year...

Reforms

Finally, about those reforms that the IMF will be imposing and are supposed to take us out of the slump and into the promised land of growth, sometime, somehow... Where exactly have they been succesful in doing so Mr. Thomsen? What about the Greek government selling off pretty much everything under public control today - including public parks and water companies it seems? Where was that a success? And in doing what?

I wonder if there is somewhere *one* instance of an IMF bureaucrat daring to give an interview against a team of journalists / economists playing hardball and not acting as de facto cheerleaders for the neoliberal voodoo remedies they are peddling?

Greek general strike today: anger and violence

2010-12-15T21:35:00.000+02:00

Riots erupt as anger colors the 7th general strike this year in Greece:

The strike comes at the heels of a new law that dismantles the system of collective bargaining in the Greek private sector, and sets up a large number of Greek public companies for privatization. Working people are expected to lose around 20-30% of their (already contracting) nominal wage, with an inflation rate that is expected to reach close to 6% this year. Last night the "socialists", losing (and expelling from the party) one more MP, voted by themselves the new measures (mandated by the ECB and the IMF as part of the deal that will allow Greece to receive the 3d installment of the "stabilization" package).

There were close to 100.000 protesters I reckon that took part in the Athens demo from early morning to late afternoon, and tens of thousands more in other major Greek cities... The mood of the crowd and society at large is murderous. A Conservative MP and former development minister Costis Hadjidakis was near-lynched by a group of demonstrators as he left the Parliament building amidst the demo:

While clashes with the police were extensive (and we still don't know how many were hospitalized)

You can follow some of the on the spot coverage and the discussion it generates at twitter at the hashtag gstrike...

The 11th thesis on wikileaks

2010-12-09T05:05:00.002+02:00

The highly sage, practical bureaucrats who secretly and unjustifiably think of themselves in the way that Pericles openly and rightly boasted of himself: "I am a man who is the equal of anyone both in knowing the needs of the state and in the art of expounding them" — these hereditary leaseholders of political intelligence will shrug their shoulders and remark with oracular good breeding that the defenders of freedom of the press are wasting their efforts, for a mild censorship is better than a harsh freedom of the press. We reply to them with the words of the Spartans Sperthias and Bulis to the Persian satrap Hydarnes:

"Hydames, you have not equally weighed each side in your advice to us. For you have tried the one which you advise, the other has remained untried by you. You know what it means to be a slave, but you have never yet tried freedom, to know whether it is sweet or not. For if you had tried it, you would have advised us to fight for it, not merely with spears, but also with axes."

Karl Marx: On freedom of the Press

1. What is in the long run more important than the content of the leaked cables, and the revelations of atrocities uncovered and admitted in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the reflexive response of what is practically a system of internet control. From Amazon to Pay Pal, from DDOS attacks to credit cards and data visualization companies, and then outside the web to banks, the Swedish and British court systems, Interpol, the whole world it seems - everybody fell on wikileaks with a vengeance that was meant I figure, less to silence this particular story (something that I imagine even the most deluded of state and corporate technocrats knew was pointless) but rather to inflict damage against the organization at a time when it was growing stronger and, more importantly I imagine, to discourage any further groups or networks from joining the game. This is not I feel mainly an attempt to shut down, but rather to intimidate and contain...

2. This comes at a time when the basic liberties of the Internet as we have hitherto known it, are under attack, and attempts are made to tame the worldwide web wilderness it into a commercialized and controlled greenhouse: See the developments on ACTA, Google's apparent decision to censor torrent searches, apparently illegal domain seizures in the US among other developments. These have to be seen in the context of the unprecedented attack in much of the first world against democracy, social welfare and worker incomes, a final push for the Neoliberalization of Everything. It is an integral part of this ongoing attempt at a neofeudal counter-reformation.
3. The resilience of wikileaks and the broad and widespread support it has garnered is a cause for jubilation. Not only has the whole operation proved that it can survive under the most profound threats and attacks, it has created a world-wide movement of support. The speed at which the whole web was mobilized to preserve and keep track of the wikileaks site , as well as the campaigns and solidarity moves in support is impressive.
In recent developments the nebulous collective of web commando/trolls working under the name Anonymous, a swarm of magnificent/annoying vigilantes, has been active today wreaking revenge on Wikileaks' adversaries and frightened twitter to reinstate their briefly banned account, showed that a loosely organized bunch of LOIC-wielding guerilla nerds can survive on the friendly cyber-terrains of the Internets and cause as much trouble to (what I cannot help but call) The Man, as a bunch of AK-47-toting Iraqi goat-herders caused the US occupation forces. Make no mistake this is an unfolding war... (Facebook is as I'm writing this, in trouble)
4. In an age of generalized state and corporate surveillance it offers some consolation that there exist ways to reverse the tables and give citizens an opportunity to spy on their governments for a change.
5. Wikileaks is bound to grow stronger from these events. It has extra street cred now, a hero's status for many, and it is bound to attract more, not fewer, leakers of all sorts in the future. Assange has stated that a big bank is next in line. This too will not hurt wikileaks status. But it will gain them some really powerful enemies. This doesn't mean that Julian Assange personally is safe yet. However I do think that if he survives this first round of charges and legal clashes he will live to become a legend in his own time. But Wikileaks is not Assange anyway. I have no doubt that the organization will continue regardless of what happens to Assange himself.
6. The wikileaks affair is bound to change the way classified information is circulated and increase the vigilance of state and corporate actors regarding the safety of their communications.
7. In the process wikileaks is inventing a new form and process of muckraking journalism for the 21st century. The synergy between wikileaks and major world newspapers, is something that will be repeated, tinkered with and copied, I'd wager, around the world. Especially in a world with a growing deficit of incisive and reporting it might lead to a quantum jump to an emerging world-wide citizen supported network of really free journalism.
8. The wikileaks saga will also serve as a model for alternative web survival strategies. In fact, it raises the issue of inventing even more fall-back routes and methods for projects that run afoul of state and corporate rules. This is something that should be developing from the ground up I reckon over the next few years. I believe that at the end what is needed is an emergent shadow infrastructure that will be able to "hide" and support alternative ventures, as much as possible, outside of the control of government or supranational bodies.
9. In order to do this, some sort of alliance needs to be built to protect Internet freedom and independence, around the world and across ideological lines. From universities and research centers to labor unions, from hacker teams to NGOs and from political parties to newspapers and content commons, at least some sort of unspoken understanding needs to emerge that will allow implicit collaboration in such a project.
10. Thus wikileaks can and should serve as an example that needs imitators on all fronts. It isn't just a fixed organization, it's an idea, an open proposal, a template. It offers more than a particular batch of information that reveals government crimes and hypocrisy: it offers proof that such an organization can exist and have an effect.

Thus one arrives finally at the 11th thesis:

11. Philosophers and pundits have only interpreted wikileaks in various ways - the point however is to emulate it...

[Based on some thoughts and reactions after reading Geert Lovink's ten theses on wikileaks, where he raises some very valid and important points...]

[An edited an improved version is now up on Eurotrib]

Wikileaks appreciation image repost

2010-12-03T01:18:00.001+02:00

Via the brilliant collective that is Monochrom. In honour of all those that help make governments cry, governments harboring a profound hatred for Democracy enforced by the oligarchical tyrannies of corporate America...

- Boycott the censors at Amazon
- Free Bradley Manning, this generation's Daniel Ellsberg

Greece: Devoured slowly by lying, bloodsucking, neoliberal vampires

2010-11-25T19:50:00.002+02:00

Statement by the EC, ECB, and IMF on the Second Review Mission to Greece

Abstract: IMF / ECB / EC to Greek workers: You're screwed and there's nothing you can do about it. We own your asses.

Selected highlights (blockquotes in italics) with commentary:

The objectives underpinning the program are to restore fiscal sustainability, safeguard financial sector stability, and boost competitiveness—to create the conditions for sustained growth and employment. Maintaining fairness in the program also remains of paramount concern and this will continue to guide the direction of policies in the period ahead.

Translation: The objectives underpinning the program are to promote the German Stupidity Pact at the expense of the taxpayers and working people in particular, promote widespread social instability, poverty and gaping income differentials, and boost competitiveness by squashing already meager wages and salaries in the country to third-world levels. Maintaining fairness in the program is absolutely of no real concern to anyone, although a show of concern is put on for PR purposes just in case anyone in Greece is dense enough to fall for this bullshit or any bleeding hearts in Germany start wondering.

Comment: This is a Grand Canyon's worth of bullshit

Regarding the outlook, the economy is expected to begin turning around in 2011. Wage and price inflation is beginning to moderate, setting the stage for improvements in competitiveness.

Comment: These are the same people who expected inflation to be around 1,9% this year (as opposed to ~5% at least in reality), despite having prescribed the blitzkrieg of indirect tax increases that have played the major role in pulling the inflation rate to numbers not seen in Greece the last 10 years. Inflation from where I am does not seem to moderate. In fact the new batch of VAT increases (in basic foodstuff as well) and other tax hikes (such as toll road fees, bus tickets etc) that they have imposed on our sorry asses, are almost certain to have a positive effect on price inflation.

Wage inflation is certainly beginning to "moderate": in fact wages are in free fall - its like saying of a sinking ship that "its upwards momentum has began to moderate". Public sector wages having been cut by 20-40% this year and private sector wages plummeting as employers take advantage of widespread insecurity and galloping unemployment (suffered even before the "troika" basically destroyed the small and ineffective fig-leaf that was Greek labor laws and collective bargaining system - see below), in a country where "half of Greece’s paid employees [had] net incomes of between €501 and €1000" in 2006. Of course "wage moderation" in the private sector was created by forbidding by law any wage increases in any company regardless of any agreements.

See also previous post, on Greek labor compensation and productivity...

As for competitiveness, coming from their lips this has the sole meaning of more impoverished and desperate workers. The troika is hard at work indeed (along with their henchmen in the Greek government) to increase that sort of competitiveness - yet why would the average Greek worker set to join the working destitute and live in a desert of vanishing social welfare safety nets, give a damn about such "competition" towards penury?

Finally, the laughable prediction of "turning around the economy within 2011" has few outside observers agreeing, as they seem to see the depression in Greece extending to well beyond 2011:

"The Greek Government's 2011 budget should be enough to ensure that it can continue to tap its euro 110bn bailout facility, but it does nothing to improve the medium-term outlook for the economy and public finances," said Ben May, European economist at Capital Economics.

The budget also forecasts a sharper recession next year than originally predicted, with the economy expected to contract by 3 percent compared to the originally forecast 2.6 percent. This follows from a 4.2 percent contraction this year.

"With the economy likely to remain in recession well beyond 2012, we think that the debt to GDP ratio could eventually exceed 170 percent of GDP, implying that a restructuring of government debt is eventually all but inevitable," May said.

In the fiscal area, the deficit reduction by 6 percent of GDP in 2010 is larger than the initially targeted change. At the same time, data revisions for 2009 and weaker-than-projected revenue collection mean that an extra effort will be needed to meet the deficit target of 7.5 percent of GDP in 2011, which the government has reaffirmed.

Translation: Because an acknowledgment of higher than expected deficit reduction would create problems in the legitimization of the implicit goal of thirdwoldization, we had to run the numbers yet again so as to show that the original deficit was in fact higher than originally determined. This allows us to put in effect measures regarding (what will, we hope, become) a path to a sweatshop economy, that will make the "satanic mills" of the 19th century look like the Swedish welfare state. Since it is inconceivable that our, wholly arbitrary but nevertheless sacred, numerical targets might be revised in light of this re-estimation of the 2009 deficit, all else follows inescapably.

Comment: It is indicative as to what passes for logic in the IMF's communiques, that they use as an excuse for the latest series of attacks against working people in Greece the fact that their (totally unrealistic and consciously unrealistic) revenue "projections" have not been met. However even an Athens cabdriver could certainly have guessed that by asphyxiating the economy and creating a depression from this recession, these projections (which were based on assuming little decline in real taxable incomes and an inspection mechanism that was both crooked and inefficient already, before being further defunded by the measures imposed by the troika itself) were ludicrously unrealistic to begin with. Thus as Greece "fails" unavoidably to meet other unrealistic projections one should expect further measures to correct this "underperformance"...

New measures have been agreed to broaden tax bases and eliminate wasteful spending, particularly in the areas of:

• Health spending—which is inefficient relative to other euro zone countries;

• State enterprises—which are a heavy burden on the economy with perennial losses for Greek taxpayers; and

• Tax administration—which has instruments now coming into place to strengthen compliance.

Translation: New measures have been agreed, to rob the working classes of any meager savings they might have retained and to destroy the last vestiges of a (sub-standard even before the IMF plague) social state.

Noteably:
- Truly inefficient health spending is being cut *without* being made more efficient, thus making it *even less efficient* and creating in the medium run a greater economic burden: I.e. as the number of nurses in public hospitals declines (due to the "no new hiring" clause in the troika's mandates) doctors report a marked acceleration in the spread of contagious microbes in hospitals, due to a huge increase in the number of patients each nurse treats (note that due to the overprescription of antibiotics Greece is already a world leader in superbugs), something that will lead to an even greater burden on the public health system and society as it will have to face the consequences of spreading epidemics.

- Greece will be left with practically no train system outside of Athens and Thessaloniki, mass transportation will be priced out of range of the poorest and will be made scarcer. Bus and metro tickets prices (in a country where already before the crisis average wages were half those in Germany and northern Europe, and gas prices are already the highest in Europe due to the indirect taxes on gasoline imposed by the troika) will be increased by 50%. Water services might also be privatized with the well known effects that has on prices...

- Tax administration will be understaffed (as there is a ban, practically, on hiring people in the public sector) and more susceptible to corruption, since the inspectors salaries have been cut severely as well. The ban on public sector hiring
will also result in a less efficient tax collection system.

The government’s fiscal policy remains anchored in reducing the deficit to below 3 percent of GDP by 2014. The government’s medium-term budget strategy paper, to be discussed in the next review, will specify time-bound action plans for crucial structural reforms needed to achieve the remaining fiscal adjustment, and to do so in a socially balanced way.

Translation: The government’s fiscal policy remains anchored in reducing the deficit to a completely outlandish and arbitrary number by a completely outlandish and arbitrary date, which, if achieved will have had the result of reducing the country to third world levels in all sorts of measures of living standards. That this goal is unachievable will allow the ECB and the IMF bastards to claim that Greece failed in its programme, and force an onerous default on the country at some point, on colonial terms.

Structural reforms are needed to secure Greece’s competitiveness, reinvigorate output, and increase employment. While significant progress has been made, with some landmark reforms—including pension reform—the program has now reached a critical juncture.

Translation: ~~We are neolib wingnuts and actually enjoy inflicting pain on the plebs~~ Structural reforms, and by such we mean the many ways we have devised to redistribute wealth to the richest, inside the country, and to the core EU from the periphery, at the EU level, are needed to secure that workers will be so disempowered as to accept working for crumbs... Old people will die before they receive pensions: even if they don't keel over through overwork and disease, they will starve or freeze to death given the minuscule amounts they will receive as what will be laughably called "wages".

Many of the reforms that are necessary to transform Greece into a dynamic and export-driven economy require skillful design and political resolve to overcome entrenched interests.

Translation: First of all some terms: Entrenched interests = The great majority of the population. Then "export driven economy", as trained and skilled labor flees to other countries in order to feed themselves and their families, = a labor intensive export economy... Thus Greek wages will certainly float down to those of their Balkan neighbors and, who knows, if labor flexibility is aggressively pursued, perhaps below that. Of course one could argue that it is impossible to turn a country which has been seriously deindustrialized, as is par for EU policy regarding periphery countries from 10% of GDP exports to a net exporter - exporting what? What would it mean for Greece to become an "export driven economy"? How wise is it to prescribe as a cure something which is by design impossible to implement on a global level and which will be antagonized continuously by the hard Euro policy?

The challenge now is to implement an ambitious schedule for these next-stage reforms:
• Aligning wages more closely with firm-level productivity, including through reform of arbitration and collective bargaining systems.
• Opening up access to services, trades, and professions.
• Unlocking the potential of Greek industries by cutting red tape and barriers to entry, and privatizing state assets.

Let me point out that "aligning wages more closely with firm level productivity" is bullshit. On two counts: One, currently they have forbidden any wage increases at all in Greek companies, even if there is agreement between workers and management, thus the alignment they're referring to is only downward. Second, what they have done by prioritizing "firm level wage agreements" over collective general or even sectoral agreements, isn't aligning "wages to productivity" but aligning them to despair, given that real unemployment in Greece is scheduled to reach at least 20% by next year. Thus firms will be able to coerce workers into working for a pittance regardless of firm profits or "productivity".

All the measures they have imposed have this common denominator: wage depression. To an unprecedented extent. However even Eurobank Research, hardly a paragon of worker advocacy, seems to think that they are overdoing it:

The Greek economy has experienced productivity increases of 2.4% per annum on average over the past decade, compared with 0.8% per annum in the EU-16. If productivity continues to increase at comparable rates in the future, ULCs of Greek exporters will likely decline to their level of 2000 within the next two years without the need for radical wage cuts.

Note also that they are creating with all of this a society of even higher criminality and graft, something that isn't likely to help with "competitiveness in tourism", a cornerstone of the greek economy, obviously...

In summary: the reforms needed to return Greece to robust economic growth are underway, but developments to date also reveal that structural issues must be dealt with to make the adjustment sustainable.

Translation: In summary: the reforms needed to return Greece to third-world status are underway, but developments to date also reveal that structural issues must be dealt with to make the adjustment sustainable, so that the country remains a basketcase for the foreseeable future.

I'll let Jarvis Cocker sum it up, and you all can sing along with him:

A revised and augmented version of this post can be found at the European Tribune

A comment on the alleged lack of productivity of Greek workers

2010-11-19T12:46:00.007+02:00

[This was originally a comment at Eurotrib, which I repost here, augmented and edited:]

Let's kill the meme that somehow in Greece workers were benefiting from unreasonable pay-hikes this past decade:
Here we are: real wages have been growing faster than productivity perhaps between 2007-2009 in Greece. Before they were not:

Based on real wage increases during 2007 (3.9%), pay increases in Greece were the highest of the countries of the EU15. Prior to the 2007 increase, there had been four years during which the average annual increase in Greece was around 3%. These big increases, by international standards, in the average real wage in Greece were fully offset by increases in labour productivity, leaving unit labour costs stable in real terms at 2000 levels.

In the private sector during the 2000-2007 period, there was a cumulative decrease of 1.2% in real unit labour costs. Average real wages increased more slowly than average labour productivity, which left companies with leeway to benefit from higher labour productivity. The effect of this development was that at the end of 2007 real wages in the private sector had increased by 27% over the 2000-2007 period, while productivity increased by 36.5%. Thus, there was a benefit to companies of around 7% in unit labour costs in real terms.

For the year 2007, Greece was in second to last place as regards the level of gross wages in € (net wages plus employee contributions). In Greece, average monthly earnings in 2006 amounted to €1,668 for full-time employees, compared to an average of €2,366 in the other countries of the EU15...

... Whereas monthly labour costs in Greece were 83% of the comparable mean costs in the EU15 (in purchasing power parities), labour productivity in Greece stood at 91% of the European average.

In recent years unit labour cost in Greece has become the lowest in the EU15. This development relates to the fact that in Greece labour productivity increased substantially in 1996-2004 and increased in the range of 1.7%-2.7% a year during the four years from 2005 to 2008.

AFAICS the problem with this analysis is that it does not take into account the very high (comparatively speaking) inflation during this period, which means that "real" wages in PP were not what counted. What is relevant in terms of "competitiveness", is absolute wage levels in Euros, and (outside the Eurozone the relative price of the Euro). However high inflation in Greece was due to vast monopolies in many sectors of the economy, that went practically unchecked, hardly the workers' fault. It is unfeasible to have real wages shrink during an expansion. Having said that, since 70% of the GDP was due internal consumption, and speaking of orders of magnitude another 10% was due to tourism and another 10% to shipping, the absolute wages are quite irrelevant. Corporate profits were hugely up during this period, any way you measure them. The OECD data show a huge (>15%) jump in ulc in 2002. The only thing that can possibly explain this (as nothing else spectacular happened at the time during the collective bargaining agreements) is euro adoption. Why this would result in reocketing labour costs is unclear to me... Some sort of data glitch perhaps?

Note also that even during the period 2000-2009 (that is, including the crash in productivity of 2007-2009) unit labor costs in Greece had indeed grown compared to Germany, but in fact fell compared to the EU average, and in manufacturing they were below German ULC as well. I've linked to Erik Jones's article before, but I'll quote him again:

...What matters in terms of a head-to-head competition is how Greece and Germany compare in the cost of labor per unit of output and not the real compensation of employees. Moreover, we should look at their performance across the European marketplace as a whole... By that measure, if we set the year 2000 equal to 100, then by 2009 Greece was at 98 while Germany was at 95. Germany is still doing better than Greece, but only by a little and both have improved against the rest of Europe.

...Using national accounts data for relative real unit labor costs in manufacturing, Greece goes from 100 in the year 2000 to 87 in 2008. Over the same period, Germany goes from 100 to 90. It is hard to see how Germany comes off better in the comparison.

...Even if Greece is not suffering in terms of manufacturing, the high real incomes that Greek employers are doling out must surely be hitting the bottom line in the service sector, shouldn't they? Again, that's hard to see in the data. Total compensation per employee was 53.8 percent in Greece and 57 per cent in Germany...

NB: these alleged pay increases came with increasing hours worked and do not apply to the black or gray economy... And of course the *private* sector was below this average - never mind the precarious workers not included because they were victims of a generalized private and public sector trainee scam to avoid paying social security contributions and allow employers to pay below minimum wage...

However the result of the imposed austerity that is being inflicted with special severity on the lower strata of the working population is to drop wages even further to average purchasing power that Greeks had in 1980 or something (which doesn't describe the depth of the crisis enough: moving from middle to low income, or from low income to poverty is a totally different animal than the steady state, much less improvement. And to push all that through the ECB is demanding inter alia circumvention of collective bargaining and lowering the minimum wage from 700 to 590 Euros (possibly below that in "exceptional cases").

The question on the original thread was about the viability of the Euro. Can Greece leave the Euro: my first reaction was that it would be a disaster. However if this madness is kept up (we're heading for a -4,5% recession at least this year and - -3% next year - and these are a slight negative correction on the IMF's forecast numbers, so they're probably idiotically optimistic - with inflation running at close to 6% this year) such a disaster might turn out to be the lesser evil compared with the ECB / IMF intensive thirdworldization programme.

2010-11-18T18:51:00.001+02:00

Back somewhat

The Return
So I'm back sort of, and we'll see how that goes... I imported here stuff I was writing (basically reposting) at Arachne which I'll re-purpose somehow, I'll see...

Things are getting out of hand here and I think I should lend a hand in reporting Greece's "socialist"-led plunge into ECB/IMF mandated poverty and despair.

I've been posting some sparse reports over at Eurotrib, an oasis of sane people angrily protesting the attempted return of what once was Social Europe to neofeudalism.

So let's see how long I'll keep posting this time...

Greece: Driven into Crisis

2010-05-01T04:09:00.002+03:00

ZCommunications | Greece: Driven into Crisis | Ingo Schmidt:

This is ironic inasmuch as the IMF, currently headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn who served as finance minister in Lionel Jospin's socialist government from 1997 to 1999, recently relaxed its long-time opposition against capital controls. An IMF policy paper published in February 2010 declared that countries that have capital controls in place fared much better during the financial crisis than countries that did not have them. Moreover, IMF chief-economist Olivier Blanchard openly plays with the idea of raising the inflation target for central banks to give them more leeway for monetary policies and also to ease debt burdens at least to some extent. Not surprisingly, the European Central Bank (ECB), which has neoliberal monetarist principles enshrined in its statute, rejects this Keynesian brew served by French economists

Mark Weisbrot, Greece: Who Needs"Success Estonian Style"

2010-04-30T03:41:00.001+03:00

Mark Weisbrot, "Greece: Who Needs 'Success Estonian Style'"

The European Union and the IMF have the money and the ability to engineer a recovery based on counter-cyclical policies in Greece as well as the Baltic states. If it involves a debt restructuring -- or even a haircut for the bondholders -- so be it. No government should accept policies that tell them they must bleed their economy for an indeterminate time before it can recover.

The Ugly Math That Shows Why Saving Greece Is Mission Impossible

2010-04-28T03:13:00.000+03:00

Here's The Ugly Math That Shows Why Saving Greece Is Mission Impossible

Rick Wolff: "Greece, Again: Demystifying 'National Debt'"

2010-04-28T03:09:00.000+03:00

Rick Wolff, @ MRZine "Greece, Again: Demystifying 'National Debt'":

"...Yet again, business leaders, politicians, academics, and media are blowing smoke around Greece's efforts to cope with "national debt" problems. Something far more important for the world than this small country's financial travails is at stake. Indeed, what is at stake affects us all. What is happening in Greece parallels developments everywhere; only details and timing vary...
...Today, the employer class is anxious that its long-successful use of national debts to avoid taxes is in difficulty. The risks of that indirect way to manipulate states into serving its class needs while charging the working classes have risen sharply. Employers now reckon that states must restore their credit worthiness first, before new lending can resume. And the way for states to do so -- in the employers' view -- is to levy more taxes on the working classes and/or cut state programs serving those classes. The alternative, taxing employers and the rich while cutting state supports for them, is largely omitted from public discussion.

That is the meaning and content of today's Greek debt crisis and tomorrow's parallel crises in Ireland, Spain, and Portugal and future crises in most other capitalist economies. In each case, particular conditions and past histories will shape the specifics. Most important, the political organization and mobilization of the working classes will shape how far (and perhaps whether) those crises get resolved at the workers' expense."

Rainer Kattel, "Should Greece Follow Estonia's Example?"

2010-04-24T12:21:00.000+03:00

Rainer Kattel, "Should Greece Follow Estonia's Example?":

...Simply put, the eurozone assumed and still tacitly assumes either growing German wages or growing productivity in the rest of Europe. Neither has been the case.

The Baltic economies with pegs, and with its insistence on keeping the pegs, have simply tied the noose around their own necks, trading monetary stability for, first, high financial fragility, and second, very probably long-term high unemployment and debt deflation in the private sector. This will probably result in waves of emigration, growing social problems, and the like. In other words, the costs have been shifted to the future, and they are more than likely to equal Greek troubles in fiscal terms. Estonia is Greece in disguise. It remains to be hoped that the EU and the IMF recognize that and refrain from simplistic fiscal retrenchment that makes problems only worse as the Greek domestic demand and, accordingly, government fiscal position will only weaken further. This results, as we have seen in Estonia, in real economic depression, which is GDP contraction in double digits.

Pixel Armageddon

2010-04-17T13:33:00.000+03:00

"Pixels" by Patrick Jean:

Karl Marx on public debt

2010-02-24T03:31:00.000+02:00

Karl Marx: Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty-One:

...The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.

The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state-creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation-as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven-the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.

Zizek's Joke

2010-02-24T00:51:00.000+02:00

Includes greek subs:

Mark Weisbrot, "Central Bank Independence: From Whom?"

2010-02-19T01:09:00.000+02:00

Mark Weisbrot: Central Bank Independence: From Whom?:

There is no obvious reason why monetary policy -- the central bank's decisions with regard to interest rates and money supply -- is so different from other major policy decisions that it should be specially insulated from the electorate. There is no valid analogy, for example, to the independence of the judiciary -- which is based on a theory of separation of powers, or checks and balances, ostensibly to limit abuses of power or infringements on civil rights and liberties.

The argument for an independent central bank is more purely an elitist argument. It really boils down to the idea that monetary policy is too important for the "uneducated" masses to have an influence over it.

Ironically, the reality is quite the opposite: monetary policy is an area where pressure from the majority is sorely needed. There is a grand conflict of interest between the financial sector and the rest of society.

Is Democracy Good for the Poor?

2009-12-13T02:01:00.000+02:00

Many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor. This article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim. Cross-national studies tend to exclude from their samples nondemocratic states that have performed well; this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies. Once these and other flaws are corrected, democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates. Democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies, but these benefits seem to accrue to middle- and upper income groups.

The spread of central bank political unaccountability

2009-11-14T13:33:00.000+02:00

GLOBALIZATION PRESSURES AND THE STATE: THE WORLDWIDE SPREAD OF CENTRAL BANK INDEPENDENCE [pdf]

"We predict that countries boost the independence of their central bank from the political power as their exposure to foreign trade, investment, and multilateral lending increases. We also model the cross-national dynamic process of diffusion of central bank independence by examining the impact of cohesive and role-equivalent trade relationships between countries. We test our hypotheses with information on 71 countries between 1990 and 2000, using both event-history modeling and fixed-effects panel-corrected regression. Controlling for domestic variables of a macroeconomic and political nature, we find empirical support for each our predictions. We conclude that globalization pressures have the effect of strengthening certain parts of the state at the expense of others, and raise concerns about the degree of democratic oversight of technocratic institutions."

3 views on the Crisis

2009-11-08T02:14:00.000+02:00

David Harvey, The Crisis Today: Marxism 2009 July 15, 2009:

The Roots of the World Ecological Crisis
by John Bellamy Foster, October 29. 2009 (starts at ~17'):

Tom Reifer, July 8 2009
Histories of the Present: Giovanni Arrighi, the Longue Duree of Geohistorical Capitalism, and the Current Crisis

2009-11-02T16:57:00.006+02:00

Déjà vu

/ history / repeating itself /

1. The military and political situation in the country is characterized by an exceptional tension, and the increasing aggravation and instability. A deep political crisis of the Afghan society is obvious... [Democracy has] entered the phase of "rollback". The coalition of social forces continues to change in favor of the [insurgency]. The state regime is not capable of stopping the insurgency on its own without principally new cardinal changes.

2. We should honestly admit that our efforts over the last 8 years have not led to the expected results. Huge material resources and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result -- stabilization of military-political situation in the country. The protracted character of the military struggle and the absence of any serious success, which could lead to a breakthrough in the entire strategic situation, led to the formation in the minds of the majority of the population of the mistrust in the abilities of the regime. That objectively led to demoralization of the masses, and to the erosion of the social base of the revolution. The experience of the past years clearly shows that the Afghan problem cannot be solved by military means only. Within the framework of the old thinking, old approaches we are doomed to the negative end result in... Afghanistan. We should decisively reject our social illusions and undertake principally new steps, taking into account the lessons of the past, and the real situation in the country. . . .

3. The national reconciliation, announced by the Afghan leadership, has not led to a breakthrough in the military-political situation in the country and will not lead to one.

From:
Letter to USSR Minister of Defense on the Situation in Afghanistan, 13 August 1987
by Colonel K. Tsagolov

See also:
Regarding the Further Measures in Afghanistan
Politburo Session, 13 November 1986
About the Results of Eduard Shevardnadze and Anatoly Dobrynin's Visit to Afghanistan
Politburo Session, 21 January 1987

Overview:
Same old mistakes in new Afghan war
Soviet military archives show latest international intervention in Afghanistan has learnt nothing from the war two decades ago

A healthy recession

2009-09-29T23:50:00.000+03:00

Life and death during the Great Depression — PNAS:

Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

This is not new: "Are Recessions Good For Your Health?" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000:

Total mortality and eight of the ten sources of fatalities examined are shown to exhibit a procyclical fluctuation, with suicides representing an important exception. The variations are largest for those causes and age groups where behavioral responses are most plausible, and there is some evidence that the unfavorable health effects of temporary upturns are partially or fully offset if the economic growth is long-lasting

Although the effect is apparently real, the health benefits during recessions are unequally distributed and widen the income induced health gap:

Self-rated health improved in absolute terms for all occupational groups even after the economic recession. However, the relative disparity increased between the top and middle occupational groups in men.

The health debacles that occur during periods of rapid growth are equally obvious:

Cancer casts a shadow over the villages in this region of China in southern Guangdong province, nestled among farmland contaminated by heavy metals used to make batteries, computer parts and other electronics devices.
Every year, an estimated 460,000 people die prematurely in China due to exposure to air and water pollution, according to a 2007 World Bank study.

.

...Thus adding a few more exhibits to the question of relevance of GDP as any sort of measure of human happiness, or the obviousness of the need for its incessant growth...

Labor History / US

2009-09-15T02:20:00.000+03:00

In Memoriam: Crystal Lee Sutton ('Norma Rae'). Working Class Hero.

Ampersand: Labor History: A Brief History of Corporate Whining

By B. Deutsch

Some notes:

1. Commonwealth v. Hunt 1842
2. The Thibodaux Massacre of 1887
3. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (I think this is what the 1912 cartoon refers to)
4. Yellow Dog contracts legal, 1915
5. Child Labor Amendment, 1924
6. Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938
7. Equal Pay Act, 1963
8. Occupational Safety and Health Act, 1970
9. Today

... All this to make a point: it was never easy and they always whined. Not to mention the fact that it always bears reminding that the US was the stage of a hard, bloody and bitter class struggle. And, hey! What do you know, the tide is turning. I did not believe that I'd see the day when an overtly anti-capitalist documentary would be poised to become a major box-office hit in the US, but things sure change fast:

A Marxist History of the 20th century

2009-09-14T08:46:00.000+03:00

A Marxist History of the 20th Century. Narrated by Alan Woods, with Lal Khan, Ted Grant and Noam Chomsky. Produced by Heiko Khoo.

The aftereffects

2009-07-31T02:11:00.000+03:00

As is generally known, at Semipalatinsk Nuclear Tests Site (SNTS) in the republic of Kazakhstan, 456 nuclear tests were carried out from 1949 to 1989, including 111 atmospheric explosions between 1949 and 1963...
Because of those tests, according to the Kazakh government, approximately 1.6 million people suffered from the tests, and about 1.2 million people are still now troubled with the aftereffects...

Human Suffering Effects of Nuclear Tests at Semipalatinsk,Kazakhstan: Established On the Basis of Questionnaire Surveys Kawano et al. J. Radiat. Res., 47, Suppl., A209–A217 (2006)

The aftereffects (warning: link contains disturbing images)

Back to Kawano et al:

…I believe that my parents, sister - they all died as a result of the nuclear tests. My grandson was born in 1990 having infantile cerebral palsy; we treated his disease for 10 years. In 2000 he died. I also believe that he became sick as a result of the nuclear tests and all people in the area are the victims of the nuclear tests. (Karauyl, M, 1946)

…My daughter was born in 1970, she was also sick from the moment of birth, had dystrophy in feet and lower legs and she was a mentally defective child. She died in 1997. In 1976, my son was born also mentally defective; he is the 2nd category invalid. I think they all suffered [because we live close to] the nuclear test site. (Dolon, F, 1938)

...When talking about the consequences of the nuclear explosions, there standing before my eyes is the image of my innocent daughter born in 1976, who became a victim of nuclear tests. She graduated from teachers’ training college and became a teacher. Her life had just begun, yet at the age of 20 she committed suicide. This is a result of nuclear tests. I curse the Soviet Union, which put the testing ground on Semipalatinsk soil. (Saryzhal, M, 1946)

…People who used to swim in Irtysh River before had some skin disease. Later on it became clear that, especially in the testing ground area (epicenter), an increase in the number of invalid kids and people who committed suicide, and an increase in kinds of illnesses that people were not aware of, were due to the explosions. … (Karauyl, M, 1936)

…I remembered every nuclear test, because we waited for them in fear. It seemed the earth would tumble down at any moment. Such fears have certainly affected our nerves. There are many mentally ill and mentally handicapped people in the village. … (Saryzhal, F, 1945)

ibid

The Monster of Semipalatinsk:

Background radiation levels in the Atomkul district now reach more than 5,000 microroentgens per hour*. Nonetheless, the local people continue to pasture their livestock and grow crops there. A local shepherd told us that the military had warned him that he was grazing his flock on contaminated land, but since he had no dosimeter, he was unable to determine where it would be safe to pasture his animals. Supplying the population with dosimeters, however would not really solve the problem because they are being exposed to the strongest carcinogens, plutonium and americium, particulates of which are carried in the air and breathed by people and animals.

* "Prolonged exposure to 150 microroentgens per hour is the borderline figure for serious health risk hazards. A reading of 1,000 microroentgens is more than 80 times the level of normal "background" radiation. "

The whole Semipalatinsk project brought to you my that shining colossus of socialist compassion Lavrenty Beria!

Neo-Liberal Democracy: A Contradiction in Terms

2009-07-21T02:55:00.000+03:00

...in its current form, economic liberalism is perpetuating an inherently undemocratic hegemonic structure through an institutional and coercive manner that not even an authoritarian government could duplicate...

He May Be a Communist

2009-07-10T15:15:00.000+03:00

Related: Red Scare

Interview: Hungary—“Where we went wrong”, GM Tamás

2009-07-06T18:26:00.000+03:00

ISJ: GM Tamás, a prominent Hungarian dissident and now professor of philosophy in Budapest, spoke to Chris Harman about developments in Eastern Europe since the fall of Stalinism.

What was important in hindsight was that in the first two years I spent in the highest chamber of my country as a lawmaker two million jobs were lost—and I don’t think I noticed. That is one of the greatest shames of my life. I don’t think it figured in political debates at that time. There were important debates concerning constitutional rights and republican versus monarchist symbols, fights over control of state radio and television. I won’t say political conflicts were not important but compared to the economic disaster they were of less importance, and we did not see the interdependence between the two. Why did the ruling class need the centralisation of media power? Because it was losing majority support from the population that were getting impoverished. We were totally naive and our discourse at the time was that of classic liberalism and pretty ineffective. This liberal party will probably now, and quite deservedly, disappear from parliament.

...

From the 1920s the Stalinist system—however monstrous, tyrannical and state capitalist it was—had through urbanisation and industrialisation created the livelihoods and life forms of hundreds of millions of people. They may have been disappointed and dissatisfied with the way of life but nevertheless it was theirs. And nobody had prepared them for what was to replace it. It was not something better, not something we might call “change”, but instead the end to economy as such.
In large parts of Eastern Europe and the Eurasian landmass there was the loss of what we knew of as civilisation, which was very much dependent on the state. The state has barely started to function again in Putin’s Russia—in a very unpleasant way—but it is starting to work regularly, making records, collecting revenue, paying civil servants, answering letters, receiving citizens with complaints. But in the early 1990s even that was not available: it was a total disaster. Meanwhile we, the froth at the top of it, were celebrating the triumph of freedom and openness and plurality and fantasy and pleasure and all that. That was frivolous, and I am deeply ashamed.

...

Soviet-type state capitalism was a commodity-producing, wage labour based, unequal, hierarchic, repressive money economy and a class society to outclass all class societies which was extremely efficient in suppressing proletarian resistance. Revolts against that regime have always been socialist revolutions, in 1956 the workers’ councils in Hungary, in 1968 the humanistic socialism in Czechoslovakia. Solidarność was in fact no trade union but a network of territorially organised workers’ councils which initially wanted a self-management proletarian republic of a self-governing people, before repression made it into a bitterly conservative, pessimistic and Catholic movement to disintegrate at the moment of political “victory”. The Central European style of “enlightened absolutism”, of top-down reforms devised by scientifically and philosophically trained elite planners has not changed since the 18th century. “Communist” economic planners were painlessly transmogrified into neoconservative monetarist planners. For them, in a characteristically positivist manner, “socialism” was but an error in economic calculus. Marginal utility seemed more “modern” than the labour theory of value—and bureaucrats go more willingly with the prevailing fashion than couturiers.

...

Ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long

2009-07-05T00:13:00.000+03:00

This, I was looking for, for ages. "Jesus built my hot rod", the Ministry. Amphetamines in song form:

Ministry Jesus Built My Hotrod
by the-worms

It has fire in it already: a vietnamese war diary

2009-06-27T02:08:00.000+03:00

July 25, 1968: Oh, my God. How hateful the war is. And the more hate, the more the devils are eager to fight. Why do they enjoy shooting and killing good people like us? How can they have the heart to kill all those youngsters who love life, who are struggling and living for so many hopes?

In December 1969, Frederick Whitehurst was stationed in Quang Ngai province, in what was then South Vietnam. Assigned to the 635th Military Intelligence Detachment near Duc Pho, he was burning captured enemy documents that seemed to have no military value.
...
"I'm throwing things in there and they're burning, and over my left shoulder, and I remember this, Nguyen Trung Hieu was looking at the diary and said, 'Fred, don't burn this. It has fire in it already,'" Whitehurst says.

The diary was that of 27-year-old Dang Thuy Tram.

various cool music videos

2009-06-26T02:57:00.000+03:00

Le Tigre - Deceptacon

Le Tigre - All That Glitters

Bikini Kill - Rebel Girl (αφιερωμένο στην ΚΟΕ)

Ladytron - Seventeen

Clinic - If you could read your mind

The Horrors - "Sheena Is a Parasite"

Peaches and Iggy - Kick it

Massacre (and victory) in Bagua, Peru

2009-06-24T01:12:00.000+03:00

More-info: MADRE INDÍGENA HABLA AL PRESIDENTE ALAN GARCIA PEREZ MASACRE EN BAGUA TRADUCCION SUBTITULADA
A native mother who is in pain for the lost of her people talks in her language and she has the right to be listened and understood around the world: " Listen please president Alan Garcia, you are responsible because you have exterminated us, you are killing us, you are selling us. You are the terrorist. We defend our territory from armament Our only weapon of defense is just arrows and sticks, that aren't long range and they aren´t meant to kill like you did with us. You exterminated us using armament, bullets, helicopters and killed our brothers, sisters, students, teachers, sons... Alan we ask you to come over here to our territory to pay the debts you have to us. Alan, you sell our country, you sell our people, you sell our natural resources, gold, oil, water, air You pollute our environment and so you will leave us even poorer as you can see us now.. this is how we are and how we are left. We, the awajón-wampis people haven´t elected you to exterminate us, but to help us, to provide us with education for the kids you killed now. We aren´t taking your private property, we haven´t killed your kids or family, you already exterminated us and now we have NOTHING!".

The background: Trade Agreement Kills Amazon Indians
The jungle massacre: Peru's tribal chief flees country
A first hand account: Massacre in Peru: A trip into the Amazon brings answers and more questions
Families of Dead Native Protesters Tell Their Stories

But all of this was not in vain: Victory in the Amazon

Rosa, dead yet pleased. Or is she?

2009-06-01T03:16:00.000+03:00

During an interview (not quite friendly at that) with Oscar Lafontaine, leader of Die Linke (the party of the German left), which is polling near double digits, words were heard from a German parliamentary leader's lips that hadn't been heard much in the area since... ooh I don't know... the late 1910s?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your Left Party colleague Sahra Wagenknecht does not want to fix capitalism; she wants to overthrow it. What do you think?

Lafontaine: The entire Left Party sees it that way. We want to overthrow capitalism.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How would that be possible?

Lafontaine: We will change the economic order. That begins with regulating international financial markets. When we first put this subject on the agenda, our critics were still in the process of rolling out the red carpet for financial capitalism. Financial capitalism has failed. We need to democratize the economy. The workforce needs to have a far greater say in their companies than has been the case so far.

Not too far away, a few days after the interview, a mystically minded radical, were such a beast to exist, might believe that Rosa Luxemburg transcended her spaciotemporal confines, to guide the rediscovery of her mutilated and tortured corpse (a testament by itself of the stark reality of the "socialism or barbarism" dilemma she posed). She was happy to hear from the living again.

... Or was it despair, that in a country far away, the political heirs of those complicit in her murder, are abusing her words, squeezing them into a PR campaign that turns the sharpness of her dilemma into a blunt pre-electoral trick? Was that what made her turn so violently in her grave that Dr. Tsokos, noticed the sound coming from the cellar and ran downstairs to check?

Who knows...

Birth rate myths

2009-05-26T02:32:00.000+03:00

...three deeply misleading assumptions about demographic trends have become lodged in the public mind. The first is that mass migration into Europe, legal and illegal, combined with an eroding native population base, is transforming the ethnic, cultural, and religious identity of the continent. The second assumption, which is related to the first, is that Europe’s native population is in steady and serious decline from a falling birthrate, and that the aging population will place intolerable demands on governments to maintain public pension and health systems. The third is that population growth in the developing world will continue at a high rate. Allowing for the uncertainty of all population projections, the most recent data indicate that all of these assumptions are highly questionable and that they are not a reliable basis for serious policy decisions...

From The World's New Numbers by Martin Walker. See also this [in Greek, first part] for pretty much the same points.
Also in the news: France, UK, NZ, US, UAE, Ukraine...

Ecology, Capitalism, and Socialism

2009-05-22T19:20:00.000+03:00

by John Belamy Foster. Also.

2009-05-08T01:59:00.004+03:00

The Propaganda Model, exhibit 15432

/ good victims rule, boring victims suck /

From Julie Hollar's Congo Ignored, Not Forgotten, [via] in FAIR, this chart is impressive:

As the article mentions:

To put the death rate in perspective, at the peak of the Darfur crisis, the conflict-related death rate there was less than a third of the Congo’s, and by 2005 it had dropped to less than 4,000 per month (CRED, 5/26/05). The United Nations has estimated some 300,000 may have died in total as a result of the years of conflict in Darfur (CRED, 4/24/08, SSRC.org, 3/25/09); the same number die from the Congo conflict every six and a half months.

And yet, in the New York Times, which covers the Congo more than most U.S. outlets, Darfur has consistently received more coverage since it emerged as a media story in 2004 (Extra!, 1–2/08). The Times gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, while Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly 10 times the rate of those in Darfur.

Let me make this clear: undoubtedly there are crimes against humanity committed in Darfur. Yet the incredible relative indifference of the US press (but not just the US press of course) to the astonishingly bloody Congo conflict speaks about something different: about the media propaganda model. This is right off the book:

Using a propaganda model, we would not only anticipate definitions of worth based on utility, and dichotomous attention based on the same criterion, we would also expect the news stories about worthy and unworthy victims (or enemy and friendly states) to differ in quality. That is, we would expect official sources of the United States and its client regimes to be used heavily-and uncritically-in connection with one's own abuses and those of friendly governments, while refugees and other dissident sources will be used in dealing with enemies. We would anticipate the uncritical acceptance of certain premises in dealing with self and friends-such as that one's own state and leaders seek peace and democracy, oppose terrorism, and tell the truth-premises which will not be applied in treating enemy states. We would expect different criteria of evaluation to be employed, so that what is villainy in enemy states will be presented as an incidental background fact in the case of oneself and friends. What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other. We would also expect great investigatory zeal in the search for enemy villainy and the responsibility of high officials for abuses in enemy states, but diminished enterprise in examining such matters in connection with one's own and friendly states.

Running out of everything: minerals

2009-05-04T21:05:00.000+03:00

Minerals scarcity: A call for managed austerity and the elements of hope, by André Diederen:

If we keep following the ruling paradigm of sustained global economic growth, we will soon run out of cheap and plentiful metal minerals of most types. Their extraction rates will no longer follow demand. The looming metal minerals crisis is being caused primarily by the unfolding energy crisis. Conventional mitigation strategies including recycling and substitution are necessary but insufficient without a different way of managing our world’s resources. The stakes are too high to gamble on timely and adequate future technological breakthroughs to solve our problems. The precautionary principle urges us to take immediate action to prevent or at least postpone future shortages. As soon as possible we should impose a co-ordinated policy of managed austerity, not only to address metal minerals shortages but other interrelated resource constraints (energy, water, food) as well. The framework of managed austerity enables a transition towards application (wherever possible) of the ‘elements of hope’: the most abundant metal (and non-metal) elements. In this way we can save the many critical metal elements for essential applications where complete substitution with the elements of hope is not viable. We call for a transition from growth in tangible possessions and instant, short-lived luxuries towards growth in consciousness, meaning and sense of purpose, connection with nature and reality and good stewardship for the sake of next generations.

You jail them and they multiply!

2009-05-04T20:47:00.000+03:00

A metric of the historical development of the hard, incessant and fucking pointless war against a plant and the criminalization of peace-loving yet fiendish pot-smokers:

Cassini's continued mission - The Big Picture - Boston.com

2009-04-24T02:48:00.000+03:00

Incredible images from Saturn:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is now a nearly a year into its extended mission, called Cassini Equinox (after its initial 4-year mission ended in June, 2008). The spacecraft continues to operate in good health, returning amazing images of Saturn, its ring system and moons, and providing new information and science on a regular basis. The mission's name, "Equinox" comes from the upcoming Saturnian equinox in August, 2009, when its equator (and rings) will point directly toward the Sun. The Equinox mission runs through September of 2010, with the possibility of further extensions beyond that. Collected here are 24 more intriguing images from our ringed neighbor.

Max Ernst, 02.04.1891 - 01.04.1976

2009-04-02T02:55:00.000+03:00

Max Ernst "Europe After the Rain II", perhaps waiting for III...

Max Ernst
100' documentary on the artist

2009-04-02T02:33:00.006+03:00

Durnovo!

/ historical clairvoyance /

An early 20th century Hari Seldon: applied psychohistory, only in a real memorandum written in 1914 predicting pretty much the coming course of WWI. Via Doug Muir at FFOE.
Ref:
- Pyotr Nikolayevich Durnovo (Пётр Николáевич Дурновó)
- WWI

For Yugoslavia 10 years ago

2009-03-25T01:20:00.000+02:00

Yugoslavia (link includes translated lyrics) by Tatu member Lena Katina
On the Tenth Anniversary of the NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia by the Global Balkans Network.

Jump You Fuckers!

2009-03-20T11:15:00.000+02:00

Dan Hind on the obvious (pdf)

"...we should try to establish exactly what caused the crisis, who is responsible, and how. And that does require a certain amount of finger‐pointing. Not because it is fun, although it is, but because we can’t afford to be magnanimous to the policy‐makers and opinion‐formers who steered us into this. If we do we’ll leave them in place to manage the crisis as confidently and ineptly as its prelude. They will seek to reconstruct a system on the same disastrous lines, they will fail, and they will, with every appearance of regret, resort to ever more desperate measures. You probably found this article online, so I shall say no more."

What was once not so radical a notion

2009-03-19T01:56:00.000+02:00

"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves... is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous--and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed."

John Maynard Keynes, "National Self-Sufficiency," The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), pp. 755-769..

Via "Keynes, Capitalism, and the Crisis", John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Brian Ashley, Co-Managing Editor of Amandla...

From the Crisis of Distribution to the Distribution of the Costs of the Crisis

2009-03-16T00:40:00.000+02:00

From the Crisis of Distribution to the Distribution of the Costs of the Crisis:
What Can We Learn from Previous Crises about the Effects of the Financial Crisis on Labor Share?
by Özlem Onaran

"The paper analyzes the possible distributional consequences of the global crisis based on the lessons of the past crises experiences. The decline in the labor share across the globe has been a major factor that led to the current global crisis. What we are going through is a crisis of distribution, and similarly the policy reactions to the crisis are part of a distributional struggle. The paper presents the effects of the former crises in the developing countries and in Japan on income distribution, wages, and unemployment. This comparison is important not only because it compares developing vs. developed country cases, but also because it highlights the differences of the currency crises vs. domestic financial crises regarding the distributional consequences. However, despite differences, the cumulative effect is in both cases a dramatic pro-capital redistribution. Building on these lessons, the paper discusses the possible different effects of the current global crisis in the developed countries, Eastern Europe, and developing countries, and concludes with policy alternatives to avoid the socialization of the costs of the crisis."

Selected excerpt from policy alternatives:

In order to fundamentally solve the problems of this crisis, economic policy must most of all solve the distributional crisis. A new socio-economic and political paradigm is required focusing on full-employment, productivity led wage growth, and a shortening of work-time. This process should also decide on critical sectors for the society, in which the ownership rights cannot be left to the private sector and private profit motive. The crisis has indicated that the finance and the housing sectors are clear candidates for public ownership enhanced with democratic and transparent control mechanisms of all the stakeholders. The energy crisis is indicating that the energy sector and alternative energy investments also require public ownership. The problems with the private pension funds as well as private supplies of education, health, and infrastructure are showing that social services are also too critical to be ruled by private profit motives. A creative and participatory public discussion should question, in which other sectors public ownership would produce more egalitarian as well as more efficient outcomes. This does not mean to praise the public sector as such, but calls for the participation and control of the stakeholders (the workers, consumers, regional representatives etc.) in the decision making mechanisms within a public and transparent economic model. Such a shift in decision making also facilitates economy wide coordination of important decisions for a sustainable and planned development based on solidarity.

2009-03-12T03:58:00.003+02:00

Violence? I'll show you violence

/ rage to beat the machine /

Getting angry at work may not be a bad thing, and may in fact help you move up the career ladder, researchers believe.

The Harvard Medical School study found those who repressed frustration were three times more likely to say they had reached a glass ceiling.

Thankfully it is noted that "Outright fury was destructive". One can thus assume that the rather intense outbursts of ~~slave~~ worker outrage, all around the world are not helping the upward mobility of those involved...

Also note the conflicting advice laid-off workers are presented with:

Experts warn against real displays of [email] anger [at being fired] over concerns that it could hurt a future job search. Many caution against even a hint negativity.

"Don't show any bitterness. Don't complain. Just be positive," says Donna Flagg, a workplace expert and the President of The Krysalis Group, a business and management consulting firm in New York.

... or prehaps venting your anger is ok only when employed. When you're fired it's a liability one should watch out for.

Reposted from The Ames Prophecy, which I'm trying to resurrect, by plugging here

Do Communists Have Better Sex?

2009-03-12T01:18:00.000+02:00

Link:

This film ["Do Communists Have Better Sex"], a mixture of scholarly research and light-hearted presentations of stereotypes about the role of sex in divided Germany (from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall), is a welcome addition to recent discussions of sexuality in East and West Germany...
...But where the director might have offered in-depth analyses of the private and public topic of sexuality and sexual mores, the insertion of numerous "humorous animation sequences"... throughout the film take the place of critical discussion, offering the viewer instead facile stereotypes that all too often leave one cringing in embarrassment. It will be difficult for some scholars or students to get beyond one of the first animated scenes, in which a doctor measures the penises of a West German man (16.9 cm) and an East German man (17.5 cm). No evidence in the film backs up such an absurd cartoonish claim...

Distantly though clearly related in a very essential, if conceptual way, see Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' masterpiece, titled Cunnilingus in North Korea, if you haven't already...

2009-03-04T01:21:00.002+02:00

Would you bank on them?

/ who hired these guys again? /
If you follow a disastrous path and not only fail miserably at your job but drag the whole Earth along with you, shouldn't you get another chance to implement the exact same philosophy that caused the disaster? Well yes, if the persons hiring you are the European Commission and you are among the elite economists that were proven so spectacularly wrong on anything they said prior to the crash. I paste from the executive summary of the Corporate Europe Observatory report "Would you bank on them?":

The financial crisis has unleashed a huge debate on the state of the global financial system.
As politicians examine fiscal solutions and regulatory reforms, the big question is how supervision and regulation should be changed to avoid a repetition of the present meltdown. In the EU, the Commission and the Council has set up a High Level Group of eight experts to advise them on how to reform the financial system in terms of supervision and regulation. Given the now obvious failings of the current system and individual financial sector
institutions, it would seem prudent to seek advice from a diversity of sources, including from independent experts who had expressed concern about the flaws in the current financial architecture.
However, the group - named the de Larosière Group after its chairman - is comprised of people closely linked to the financial industry, or to institutions that, to a greater or lesser extent, have been implicated in the crisis. Four members of the group are closely linked to giant financial corporations that have all played a major role in the current financial crisis, a fifth was the head of the UK Financial Services Authority that completely failed in its supervision of bust bank Northern Rock, a sixth is a fierce enemy of regulation and a seventh works for a company whose clients include major banks.
Beyond this, some members of the Group failed to warn of the impending financial crisis and lately they have even played down its extent and severity. The majority have expressed strong support for a deregulated financial sector and can be deemed to have supported hard-line, neo-liberal policies that arguably created the financial crisis. They are the very kind of people who got us in to the mess. The eight members are:

Jacques de Larosière: Co-chair of the financial sector lobby organization, Eurofi and until recently, adviser to the French bank BNP Paribas for a decade
Rainer Masera: Former Managing Director of a European branch of Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt after heavy losses on subprime loans
Onno Ruding: An adviser to Citigroup, owners of Citibank that received billions of US dollars in a bail-out
Otmar Issing: Adviser to the financial giant Goldman Sachs
Callum McCarthy: Former head of the UK Financial Services Authority, accused of systematically failing in its duty over bust British bank, Northern Rock
Leszek Balcerowicz: A strident advocate of deregulation
José Pérez Fernández: Works for a financial market intelligence company, which counts big banks as clients
Lars Nyberg: A career banker, now vice chair of the Swedish National Bank.

That such a group has been selected to play a key role in the EU debate on the response to the crisis is deeply worrying. It is unlikely to open up any debate on real alternatives to the present financial architecture.
Policy capture by vested interests results in flawed policies and regulations. Europe’s leaders must end the privileged access to decision makers enjoyed by the powerful finance sector lobby. At the same time, they must also curb the power that the private sector holds over the political process in the EU and make decision-making democratically accountable.

Crop Scientists Say Biotechnology Seed Companies Are Thwarting Research

2009-02-27T01:36:00.000+02:00

So yes, it turns out that, as rational people expected all along, biotech companies aren't keen on safety an other assessments of their products:

"Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.

“No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions,” the scientists wrote in a statement submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. is seeking public comments for scientific meetings it will hold next week on biotech crops.

The statement will probably give support to critics of biotech crops, like environmental groups, who have long complained that the crops have not been studied thoroughly enough and could have unintended health and environmental consequences."

In related news, research on transgenic maise contamination of wild corn, attacked and discredited eight years ago as methodologically deficient, is vindicated.

Could Living in a Mentally Enriching Environment Change Your Genes?

2009-02-25T01:09:00.000+02:00

Could Living in a Mentally Enriching Environment Change Your Genes?: Scientific American:

"Lamarckian theories about the influence of the environment were largely abandoned after scientists discovered that heritable traits are carried on the genes encoded by our DNA. A recent study, however, published by neuroscientists Junko A. Arai, Shaomin Li and colleagues at Tufts University, shows that not only does the environment an animal is reared in have marked effects on its ability to learn and remember, but also that these effects are inherited. The study suggests that we are not the mere sum of our genes: what we do can make a difference."

The disease of privatization

2009-02-23T02:52:00.000+02:00

Shawn Hattingh on Cholera in South Africa:

Cholera outbreaks in South Africa are due to the ANC-led state's failure to address the inequalities of apartheid. In fact, both national and local governments in South Africa have promoted the idea that water should be sold as a commodity. Consequently, millions of people, even where the infrastructure exists, don't have access to clean water because they can't afford the high prices charged for it. Over 40% of South Africans are unemployed and simply don't have the money to pay for clean water. Unfortunately, there is little hope that free water for all will be rolled out across the country. All of the parties involved in the upcoming election, including the ANC,26 COPE,27 and the DA,28 remain committed to neo-liberalism and the commercialization of services -- in other words, committed to selling water as a commodity and cutting off people's water if they don't pay for it. This, in turn, is going to force people to reuse the water they do manage to get or access water from other sources such as streams. Therefore, cholera is set to break out again and again in South Africa. Only by organizing themselves and winning free water for all through their own actions can people put an end to this disease of privatization. Water is essential for life -- it mustn't be turned into a commodity to be sold and bought.

The marriage of reason and nightmare...

2009-02-19T18:45:00.000+02:00

From JG Ballard's introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974?):

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century–sex and paranoia. [...] Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

[...] Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

[...] I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

Via

The Soviet Roots of Breakdancing

2009-02-15T00:28:00.000+02:00

You, really can't touch this:

So this has solid historical roots one can say...

Brilliant

2009-02-12T01:03:00.000+02:00

The Invasion from Outer Space. A short story. New Yorker magazine. Very good.

Get to their homes

2009-02-11T18:49:00.000+02:00

Mortgage Madness: Protest targets 'predator':

Stamford and Greenwich became the stomping grounds of a grassroots campaign against corporate greed Sunday as part of a three day homeowners' workshop sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. Between 350 and 400 people, most of them members, staff or volunteers for the Boston-based nonprofit organization, converged outside the Greenwich home of William Frey, manager of Greenwich Financial Services, at around 1 p.m.

Wearing bright yellow hats and t-shirts with pictures of sharks and the words "Stop Loan Sharks," protesters had already targeted the home of John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, at 6 Club Road, Rye, N.Y. earlier in the day.

At Frey's house, 10 Glenville Road, Greenwich, they chanted slogans such as "Fix our loans, save our homes." They placed furniture on the lawn to symbolize the dislocation felt by people who have had their homes foreclosed upon and been evicted, their belongings tossed outside by state marshals.

"We did it to make them feel what it must be like for someone to have their home foreclosed upon," NACA mortgage counselor Carmen Orta said.

Called the "Predators Tour" these actions were the start of NACA's "accountability campaign," an aggressive, confrontational protest aimed at several top executives of companies that refuse to allow NACA to renegotiate the terms of loans on behalf of members, according to NACA CEO Bruce Marks.

Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-national analysis : The Lancet

2009-02-03T00:18:00.000+02:00

The privatisation plague in Eastern Europe, during the last decade of the 20th century:

Background
During the early-1990s, adult mortality rates rose in most post-communist European countries. Substantial differences across countries and over time remain unexplained. Although previous studies have suggested that the pace of economic transition was a key driver of increased mortality rates, to our knowledge no study has empirically assessed the role of specific components of transition policies. We investigated whether mass privatisation can account for differences in adult mortality rates in such countries.
...
Findings
Mass privatisation programmes were associated with an increase in short-term adult male mortality rates of 12·8% (95% CI 7·9—17·7; p<0·0001), with similar results for the alternative privatisation indices from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (7·8% [95% CI 2·8—13·0]). One mediating factor could be male unemployment rates, which were increased substantially by mass privatisation (56·3% [28·3—84·3]; p<0·0001). Each 1% increase in the percentage of population who were members of at least one social organisation decreased the association of privatisation with mortality by 0·27%; when more than 45% of a population was a member of at least one social organisation, privatisation was no longer significantly associated with increased mortality rates (3·4% [95% CI −5·4 to 12·3]; p=0·44).

considered as a race

2009-02-02T23:34:00.000+02:00

The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race - By JG Ballard, 1969

vs. its father, who arts in heaven:

The Crucifixion Considered as an uphill bicycle race - by Alfred Jarry, 1911

Bad Science » The Medicalisation of Everyday Life

2009-02-01T02:53:00.000+02:00

Bad Science » The Medicalisation of Everyday Life:

"People die at different rates because of a complex nexus of interlocking social and political issues including work life, employment status, social stability, family support, housing, smoking, drugs, and possibly diet, although the evidence on that, frankly, is pretty thin, and you certainly wouldn’t start there.

But we do, because it’s such a delicious fantasy, because it’s commodifiable and pushed by expert PR agencies, and in some respects this is one of the most destructive features of the whole nutritionist project... Food has become a distraction from the real causes of ill health, and also, in some respects, a manifesto of rightwing individualism. You are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. You hear it from people as they walk past the local council estate and point at a mother feeding her child crisps: “Well, when you look at what they feed them,” they say, “it’s got to be diet, hasn’t it?” They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 80. You deserve it. Not like them.

Genuine public-health interventions to address the social and lifestyle causes of disease are far less lucrative, and far less of a spectacle, than anything a lifestyle magazine editor or television commissioner would dare to touch. What prime-time TV show looks at food deserts created by giant supermarket chains, the very companies with which the stellar media nutritionists so often have their lucrative commercial contracts? What glossy magazine focuses on how social inequality drives health inequality? Where’s the human interest in prohibiting the promotion of bad foods, facilitating access to healthier foods by means of taxation, or maintaining a clear labelling system?

...We love this stuff. It isn’t done to us, we invite it, and we buy it, because we want to live in a simple universe of rules with justice, easy answers and predictable consequences. We want pills to solve complex social problems like school performance. We want berries to stop us from dying and to delineate the difference between us and the lumpen peasants around us. We want nice simple stories that make sense of the world.nd if you make us think about anything else more complicated, we will open our mouths, let out a bubble or two, and float off - bored and entirely unphased - to huddle at the other end of our shiny little fishbowl eating goji berries.

Excerpt from Ben Goldacre's book: Bad Science (which is based on his Guardian column).

Skewed views of Science

2009-01-31T02:36:00.000+02:00

Some obvious yet nicely put stuff, that deeserve to be bounced around the web:

Heh!

2009-01-30T01:40:00.000+02:00

The Numbers Racket

2009-01-30T00:42:00.000+02:00

Harper's Magazine, May 2008: Numbers racket | Why the economy is worse than we know:

Transparency is the hallmark of democracy, but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque—and as vulnerable to double- dealing—as a subprime CDO. Of the “big three” statistics, let us start with unemployment. Most of the people tired of looking for work, as mentioned above, are no longer counted in the workforce, though they do still show up in one of the auxiliary unemployment numbers. The BLS has six different regular jobless measurements—U-1, U-2, U-3 (the one routinely cited), U-4, U-5, and U-6. In January 2008, the U-4 to U-6 series produced unemployment numbers ranging from 5.2 percent to 9.0 percent, all above the “official” number. The series nearest to real-world conditions is, not surprisingly, the highest: U-6, which includes part-timers looking for full-time employment as well as other members of the “marginally attached,” a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one. Yet this does not even include the Americans who (as Austan Goolsbee puts it) have been “bought off the unemployment rolls” by government programs such as Social Security disability, whose recipients are classified as outside the labor force.

Second is the Gross Domestic Product, which in itself represents something of a fudge: federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising U.S. international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. The GDP has been subject to many further fiddles, the most manipulatable of which are the adjustments made for the presumed starting up and ending of businesses (the “birth/death of businesses” equation) and the amounts that the Bureau of Economic Analysis “imputes” to nationwide personal income data (known as phantom income boosters, or imputations; for example, the imputed income from living in one’s own home, or the benefit one receives from a free checking account, or the value of employer-paid health- and life-insurance premiums). During 2007, believe it or not, imputed income accounted for some 15 percent of GDP. John Williams, the economic statistician, is briskly contemptuous of GDP numbers over the past quarter century. “Upward growth biases built into GDP modeling since the early 1980s have rendered this important series nearly worthless,” he wrote in 2004. “[T]he recessions of 1990/1991 and 2001 were much longer and deeper than currently reported [and] lesser downturns in 1986 and 1995 were missed completely.”

Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted “owner equivalent rent” for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points. Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and services in which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service.

Researchers Evaluate Climate Cooling Potential of Different Geoengineering Schemes

2009-01-29T01:15:00.000+02:00

Green Car Congress: Researchers Evaluate Climate Cooling Potential of Different Geoengineering Schemes: "Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have carried out the first comprehensive assessment of the relative merits of different geoengineering schemes in terms of the climate cooling potential. Their paper appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions."

The paper: The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options. From the conclusion:

Climate geoengineering is best considered as a potential complement to the mitigation of CO2 emissions, rather than as an alternative to it.

2008-12-11T12:30:00.005+02:00

"After four decades of rapid modernization, the social fabric has worn paper-thin"

/ a government of clowns /

The Nation has an excellent piece by Maria Margaronis, on the Greek riots. It's right on the money, excerpt:

The rioters' first targets were banks and corporate headquarters. One in five Greeks already live below the poverty line; as the recession hits, the simmering resentment has taken on an edge of panic. Young people in low-wage, dead-end jobs--the "700 euros generation"--fear losing even those. Thirtysomethings live with their parents; parents work in shifts to earn enough to support their families. After four decades of rapid modernization, the social fabric has worn paper-thin. Discontent is policed with zero tolerance. Methods honed on the refugees who crowd Greek shores and have to be kept from seeking asylum in Europe's wealthier north can also be applied to permanent residents.

Also from "Le Monde Diplomatique":

The riots that have ravaged Greece's big cities - especially Athens - the last three days testify to the disequilibria of a society that over several years only went from being part of the Balkans to part of Europe. The December 6 death of a fifteen-year-old, Andreas Grigoropoulos, from police fire was the spark thrown into a powder keg primed to explode. Faced with thousands of young people who are conducting a veritable urban guerilla action - burning shops and cars, stoning the forces of order - the government seems incapable of restoring the peace.

It is impotent because it is in decay, undermined for a long time by pork, corruption and cronyism. It had already demonstrated its incompetence during the wave of fires that enflamed the Peloponnesus and Attica during the summer of 2007. And that was a natural phenomenon to a certain extent. Costas Caramanlis's Conservative government, which was then getting ready for general elections, quickly announced the release of millions of Euros for the benefit of those who had incurred losses from the fires. Once the balloting was over, the victims never saw a cent.

It's not a question of political party. The (Socialist) PASOK, which controlled the government from 1980-1990, suffers from the same evils as the right. It was unable - or unwilling - to build a modern state of law. The big families - the Caramanlis, Mitsotakis, Papandreou - that have followed one another in power for decades, have, along with their loyalists, profited from a system of which the scraps and crumbs have nourished a large part of the population.

Things are settling down today. At least for now. Mostly students protesting in various forms and intensity, from sit-ins to rock throwing. Reports of wide participation of undercover policemen in the riots and the destruction. Unless the people going in and out of an Athens precinct, as reported (in Greek) here.

Teacher Dude is covering the developing events from Thessaloniki.

2008-12-10T13:28:00.005+02:00

The riots

/ the fire of youth /

By all accounts Alexis Grigoropoulos was an unlikely martyr. A "good kid", top student and nice with friends, he was born into relative upper middle class privilege and wealth. He attended good private schools. His mother and father were successful professionals. He didn't hang out in Exarchia regularly, and all his friends agree that he wasn't some sort of anarchist. A progressive kid, sure, but not someone who habitually clashes with the police.

He seems to have been, however, in the wrong place, the wrong time and he didn't realize the "cops" who are patrolling Exarchia, meant deadly business - more like rival gang members than cops. This was about to cost him his life and produce the most violent extensive and persistant rioting the country has ever seen in peacetime, since the Polytechnic uprising against the Junta in 1973.

[by: murplejane]

So it started: like something seen ten times daily in the neighborhood. The "anarchist heartland" of Athens, the Mecca of local protest. A no-go area for the police, supposedly, despite the fact that the neighbourhood has been frequently overrun by the authorities. It is a weird kind of lawlessness: it was, and probably still is, the safest neighborhood say, for a woman to walk alone at night (in a generally safe city, comparatively speaking).

Because of the frequent skirmishes with various anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups (understand that the majority aren't Wobbly activists, nor Kropotkin scholars - they are mostly teenagers with a very broad and possibly slanted idea of what anarchism is: they don't like cops mostly) the cops send the "worst" kind of police: untrained ramboid "special guards".

Two of those Special Guards were on patrol Saturday night. Witnesses state that they were jeered when passing by Exarchia square by a group of kids. Water-bottles were possibly thrown at the patrol car. The two officers left, they parked their car a couple of blocks away, they notified a squad of riot police that were in the area, and they proceeded to the square. There they start threatening and swearing at the group of kids - quite possibly (though this is still murky AFAIK) a different or larger group of kids - from a distance of possibly twenty meters. The kids swear back. It's like a street quarrel, only one side is armed and dangerous. No side moves towards the other. There are dozens of witnesses to all of this because the area is packed with cafes and shops. The police officer by all eyewitness accounts raises his gun, aims and shoots at a figure from the other side. he shoots at Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15, not an "Exarchia regular", who dropped by that day to meet some friends. The bullet hits the kid in the heart. He drops. Friends think he slipped and try to pick him up. They realize he's dead. The news spreads like wildfire.

I reported the following in a comment here, on December 7th:

It's difficult to describe, because it is unfolding right now even, but we're seeing large-scale, uncontrollable riots here, going on for a second night. Although there is a long history of anarchist and autonomist actions and (mostly) reactions, bordering often on a cowboy-and-indian style ritualized confrontation with the cops, last night (and today and tonight), the rioting was unprecedented in participation, in speed of reaction and in geographical extent. As I write this parts of Athens are burning, main University buildings are occupied by students, and looting has started. Most shops in Athens' main commercial boulevard, Ermou Str. have been burnt or smashed, and riots are ongoing in the country's second largest city, Thessaloniki, as well as Patras, Ioannina, Mytilene, Iraklion ,Chania, Agrinio, almost every town larger than 20k people it seems. From what I understood from the description of the Paris riots three years ago, this is pretty close in terms of the extent of damage inflicted on the city.

The trigger was the murder of the 16 year old kid in Exarchia, the alternative/atiauthoritarian hotbed of Athens, in what eyewitnesses describe as a shooting in cold blood by a Special Guard (like a policeman only less trained and more eager to shoot as not a few recent incidents have shown). But the tension that has created the possibilities of riots has been brewing for some time now, certainly since last year's student protests, when the police started a de facto feud with anyone under 30. And it isn't just the youth. The police were pelted with lemons thrown by apartment residents of all ages from their balkonies, I heard, as they were passing through Alexandras Ave and the composition of the crowd yesterday (2500 three hours after the event at midnight, of all ages), included some not so young faces.

There is a climate of utter disappointment with the government (and the political system as a whole I'd say), coupled with the grimmest mood I can remember, insecurity, high unemployment, high cost of living along with low paying and precarious work especially for young people - plus of course the ominous shadow of the Crisis.

IOW, in terms of societal weather: its rioty with a good chance of local revolts.

Rioty indeed. Even tonight the heat is still on and it seems like its not abating. Fires are still burning. There were up till a short while ago possibly 1000 people barricaded inside the Polytechnic schools. Looters were near lynched in down-town Athens. Neonazis "assisted" shopowners against the rioters in the port city of Patras.

Since Saturday there seems to have been few towns in Greece without some sort of disturbance: In the usually pacific island of Chios there was a demonstration of 1000 people. Protests were reported in the staunchly conservative town of Gytheio in the SOuthern Peloponnese. Down-town Thessaloniki is burning since Saturday.

Monday was the day the schools sprang into action. Pissed off but cheery, mourning but laughing, they flooded town and city senters. In Athens a humongous demonstration poured in from the more or less affluent Northern and Southern Suburbs, from the working class Western Suburbs, from the city's downtown semi-ghettos, from everywhere in Attiki. They marched to besiege Attiki Police Headquarters. There, students hurled stones and invective against the guards. At some point three students moved towards the building, stripped and fell on the steps of the Police HQ, as corpses:

In Pireus (Athens' port), students turned the square where the local police is headquartered into a... well a rather original work of conceptual art, but flipping over all civilian police vehicles:

Moving stuff, that had even conservative commentators "understanding" the students' rage. But the violence kept coming and it wasn't just clashes with the police, or against ministries and banks (I noticed that no one minded when banks were burned: everybody seems to love a burning bank these days). Monday night along with massive, and strong demonstrations of the parties of the left, small anarchist groups spread chaos by breaking shop windows, burning and/or looting shops of all sizes. This was a first and an indication that this wasn't your run of the mill anarchists who had up till now the political sense not to antagonize small business owners by destroying them. The looting spread. In Pireus' Str and Patission str. near the Polytechnic, rather poor commercial areas, looters that had nothing to do with the demonstrations rampaged through the broken shops, large and small. A certain part of the young demonstrators from all over the suburbs (local and immigrant) came to the demonstration singing football chants and ready for a different type of action. The poor and the marginalized in the city's center saw this as an opportunity. With cops overwhelmed and unprepared for anything of this scale (no longer 50-100 "anarchists" - they were facing over a thousand people going berserk, drunk on the joy of destruction) the ability of the police to intervene collapsed. It was a free-for-all of looting in the city center. The same more or less for the country's biggest cities - and beyond Greek students occupied the Greek embassy in Berlin for a while, demonstrations of Greek students happened outside the embassies in London, paris and Madrid (I think). The state seemed to collapse.

As Athens' huge Christmas tree was burning early Tuesday morning, along with tens of cars, there was certainly no joyful festive mood.

Today, events started slow. Students had the day off (officially: the ministry of education declared the day a holiday). The teachers demo was pretty much uneventful. Minor skirmishes down-town were tame enough for spectators to gather around them. The funeral of Alexis was respectful, silent, grieving and massive. Then the police units near the funeral started displays of strength. There were pistol shots fired by the police's motorcycle squad members. Violence broke out nearby. Then as the day ran out the riots continued, all over Greece again. A friend who was checking out the situation from up close described the people on the street breaking stuff as "undercover police, common law criminals and assorted bums" (but yet another as "the true face of modern disadvantaged proletarian youth bereft of any political ambition whatsoever). These are people a lot of anarchists even, are pissed off with.

There is, I repeat, no obvious end in sight. The government is at a loss. The police is demoralized, pissed-off, incompetent and dangerous at the same time. Will the riots fizzle off? Will the students back down? I don't think so, though there is an obvious difference in intent and consequences between the organized students (and not just schools - the universities have also joined the demonstrations and the hullabaloo) and the shop-window smashers (though the intersection of these two sets is certainly not null). Will the latter give up?

Tomorrow the unions in both public and private sectors have called for a general strike (planned before the riots started) protesting against the government's economic policies (in short 28 billion Euro bail-out for the bankers - who haven't even offered proof that they need it - versus half a billion for the cohesion/anti-poverty fund - less than half of what was promised last year). The mix might be very dangerous. The papers are suggesting that if the riots continue past Thursday the government is considering enacting "special measures". Meanwhile the fascists are already in the streets mingling with infuriated shop-owners, building their base for the next decade possibly. The Conservative government has also the suicide option of quitting - but it seems unlikely that it would voluntarily do so since they are trailing in the polls by as many as 7 points behind the Socialists, despite a total Green/Left vote that surpasses the 20% mark.

Lastly, let me sum up the reasons that have converged to bring this enormous riot to a start: ubiquitous police brutality against youth, immigrants, the weak - brutality that routinely goes unpunished as it is swept under the rug; deep systemic corruption and perception of corruption; increasing income gaps; entry level monthly wages in specialized jobs < 700 euro that don't visibly lead to something better; precarity for the under 35s; a life-suppressing yet utterly ineffective educational system; the death of hope; the break-up of existing social patterns; the decay of public services; a justice system plagued with scandal itself; massive bailouts for the bankers - the same bankers who simply refuse to enact laws that they don't like (no, really). And on top of that the Crisis promising even more immiseration and discomfort... Now that I look at the list, the question really is: why didn't this explosion happen sooner?

[cross-posted in the European Tribune]

2008-09-12T23:57:00.004+03:00

Naomi Klein responds to critics

/ a mob of straw men /

A while ago I ran across a criticism of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" by Jonathan Chait, editor at the New Republic, and not an impressive prognosticator, titled Dead Left. Had one not read the book, it could possibly sway somebody into believing that it was some sort of debunking of Klein's positions regarding disaster capitalism and neoliberalism (an excerpt of the book can be found here). Reading the criticism however after having actually read the book, you're left to fume about the hordes of wild straw men that Chait has let loose, the implicit ad hominems and the disingenuousness displayed. Simply put Chait either skimmed through the book, or he was consciously distorting Klein's positions.

I was fairly sure that Klein would respond to this and as mentioned in the Opinion Mill that this would produce "a debate in which she defends The Shock Doctrine against Chait’s schlock snarking... [making] mincemeat out of him." Well she responded and she did make mincemeat out of him - and the Cato Institute which published a briefing paper with what seems as an equally unconvincing attack against Klein.

In Naomi Klein's response, she tears down among other claims, the single argument against the book that I though had merit: the assertion that she doesn't mention Milton Friedman's opposition to the Iraq war, despite attributing to him the political ancestry of the ideas that leas to the Shock treatment of Iraq. Yes, it wasn't an essential part of the argument, surely, but it should have been mentioned. Well I was wrong. Although Friedman was against the war in 2006 (taking his word for it: "As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression"), Klein points to an interview with the Nobel Laureate in the German magazine Focus in April, 2003 (original German, English translation), where Friedman sounds pretty much the cheerleader for Bush's invasion, and mixes cynicism with quite astonishingly poor predictions about the near future (and not only about Iraq) - a magnificent display of assertive non-wisdom, really.

Anyway, I yearn for the day when anyone meaningfully left of center will be attacked for things he or she said and wrote, rather than for the reviewer's misunderstanding of it (there must be some valid criticism of Chomsky somewhere, by people who have actually read him and are to his right - right? So far I haven't found any). It has been pointed out that among the serious, you can't even agree pretty much with Naomi Klein, without first denouncing her in some way.

2008-08-07T20:41:00.003+03:00

On drug resistant bacteria and the invisible hand

/ deadly efficiency /

From the New Yorker, Superbugs:

In the past, large pharmaceutical companies were the primary sources of antibiotic research. But many of these companies have abandoned the field. “Eli Lilly and Company developed the first cephalosporins,” Moellering told me, referring to familiar drugs like Keflex. “They developed a huge number of important anti-microbial agents. They had incredible chemistry and incredible research facilities, and, unfortunately, they have completely pulled out of it now. After Squibb merged with Bristol-Myers, they closed their antibacterial program,” he said, as did Abbott, which developed key agents in the past treatment of gram-negative bacteria. A recent assessment of progress in the field, from U.C.L.A., concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

Beyond this, the article is rather unsettling; we're overusing antibiotics to ineffectiveness it seems, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way out, maggot saliva notwithstanding. Vaccines might help in the not so near future, or then again maybe not that much. Their lethal impact is however terrifying.

2008-06-24T11:18:00.002+03:00

Going privately postal

/ letters to nowhere /
The EU commission warns over "ploys" to protect public postal services, meaning attempts to minimize public cost. These ploys include apparently wildly unreasonable demands:

...Finland has in theory opened its market to full competition but insists on a fee from new entrants if they won't offer their service across all the territory, the official said.

"That, for us, is a freedom of establishment issue," the official added, referring to a plank of EU law that can be mobilised to stop a country hindering competition.

Brussels is also concerned about "protectionist thoughts" in Belgium where a plan is mooted to make all new entrants offer a service across the entire country, a costly undertaking...

Any attempts to "impose" universal service, are thus deemed unacceptable by the folks in the EU commission (the sensitivity of whom to public sentiment and common sense in the EU will virtually guarantee that any EU related issue put to referendum will fail). As the Apostate Windbag has explained some while ago:

So if the directive supposedly guarantees universal service provision, how exactly will the market provide?

The answer is it won’t, as, again, the Commission admits. In order to ensure universal service provision member states ‘may choose’ from a range of different options: state aid (subsidizing private businesses), public procurement, compensation funds or cost-sharing. In other words, recognizing that private providers will be extremely reluctant to provide loss-making services, the Commission has concluded that to continue to ensure universal service provision, governments will still have to pay for it.

Essentially, we are selling the goose that lays the golden egg. While still having to fund universal provision of service, governments will no longer have the subsidy for this service that business-originated and parcel post previously provided.

But what's the empirical evidence regarding the mythical beast called "benefits to the consumer" the appearance of which precedes but rarely follows privatisations the world over? In the British case, a recent report is rather unequivocal, and I'll let the impeccably unsocialist Telegraph, summarize it as "'No benefit' to opening up mail market":

Opening up the postal market to competition has undermined the future of the Royal Mail and provided “no significant benefit” to consumers or small businesses, a report has said.

It found that since liberalisation individual customers had no more choice in who delivered their letter, but were now faced with a complicated sizing and pricing system.

The review, by a Government-appointed panel, also warned that ending the Royal Mail’s monopoly posed a “substantial threat” to the financial stability of the company and the universal postal service in general.

The Telegraph puts it even more explicitly in a related article eloquently titled "Royal Mail privatisation 'hurts customers'":

Posting a letter has become more expensive and more difficult since the market was opened to competition, a government-backed report said yesterday.

Individual Royal Mail customers now have to contend with higher stamp prices and a complicated sizing system as a result of liberalisation, which has provided them with "no significant benefit".

Seumas Milne notes in the Guardian that:

"...The farce of [Labour's] claims [about the effectiveness of its policies] couldn't have been more clearly demonstrated than in the liberalisation and creeping privatisation of Britain's postal service. Far from "working" or delivering the goods, the corporate-skewed opening up of the market is progressively destroying a publicly owned network at the heart of Britain's social and business life. When New Labour came to power, the Post Office was an effective public monopoly handing over more than £100m profit a year to the public purse. Public and political support saw off successive attempts by the Tories and, more tentatively, Tony Blair to privatise what had become Royal Mail.

But eight years after New Labour began exposing the network to private competition and two years after Royal Mail's 350-year-old monopoly was finally abandoned, the postal service is in crisis and the universal service which guarantees delivery of mail anywhere in the country at a single price is in peril..."

Failures however can always be explained by arguing that reforms haven't been deep enough, or that any shortcomings are temporary etc - while governments are advised to leave the services up for privatisation to rot for a while, so that a demand for reform will make privatisation seem sensible. Local developments of course couldn't be allowed to trail behind.

2008-06-23T10:44:00.004+03:00

George Carlin, comedic genius, dead at 71

/ fuck /

"...But we have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, "Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I'm way to far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them..."

A few days ago in a rather absurd debate in the Greek blogosphere, I posted in an aggregator forum a link to George Carlin's "euphemism" sketch, the first time I've posted anything about my favorite stand-up comedian (comedic philosopher, really). It didn't help [around 9:05]. He died anyway. Apparently the simple act of my quoting him didn't relieve his heart problems as I learn today, to my utter grief. So in memoriam, Euphemisms:

2008-06-18T19:13:00.002+03:00

Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?: The Independent Review

/ the raw story from an idealized past /

This Independent Institute review by James L. Payne, casts doubt on claims, current around the time of the invasion of Iraq all over the mainstream media and published by both scholars and think tanks (see this [pdf] on the subject; the whole report was critiqued by Le Monde Diplomatique at the time) in the aftermath of Iraq, that the US had successfully exported democracy to Germany in WWII:

Both advocates and opponents of nation building say that the United States played a key role in helping post-war Germany become a democracy. In fact, a close look reveals that, from the standpoint of democratic nation building, the U.S. occupation of Germany is actually a lesson in what not to do.

The full report can be found here, in PDF format: Did the United States Create Democracy in Germany?. Note that the report is written from a libertarian perspective and it shows in certain criticisms regarding the handling of the German economy and its view of the Marshall plan. However a lot of the facts mentioned are surprising and quite interesting and it seems like a valid case is being made. Quite interesting reading.

via monochrom

2008-06-09T17:27:00.003+03:00

The eXile shutting down?

/ in fact I was amazed they got away with all that for so long /
According to the Moscow Times the english language Moscow entertainment (in the broadest possible sense) daily, the eXile, is being "inspected" "to check whether the newspaper had violated media laws or its license". The newspaper's editor Mark Ames, has said that "I get the general sense that they have decided it's time to shut us down, that they're not going to tolerate us anymore". I'm not sure if it has any bearing on the situation, but the last Feature Story - a review of the newspaper's misdeeds over the past 11 years - is currently missing from the newspaper's site (google cached here). [Correction June 11: It's up and working now]

I "discovered" the paper's site in 1999, while in the US, as the Kosovo war was starting. I remained a loyal reader (and in fact a buyer of Taibbi's and Ames' books) ever since. They seemed to offer one of the few sane descriptions of the feeding frenzy of the Yeltsin years - in fact the only western source people I met from or residing in Russia could recognize as having any relation with the reality of the times. Beyond that a mega-dose of cynicism and political incorrectness that was definitely missing from the media on everything in the world. I've been reading more or less regularly, stuff ranging from the infuriating to the sublime from the eXile for nearly a decade now (always expecting its demise - in fact the aforementioned Moscow resident told me that they must be CIA agents or something, because it's amazing they're not dead, much less still in press).

Hopefully they'll weather this one out too.

Update: And you can help them too! Apparently they need money to relocate and they're asking for donations.

2008-05-22T20:02:00.002+03:00

"Give me more oil or I'll hold my breath", a new school of American foreign policy is growing

/ how to generate Onionnesque headlines - for real /
On the heels of US presidential candidate Clinton's pledges to smash OPEC in a confident if utterly vague and unspecified way, reaching the "hollow threat" concept to unprecedented heights, the US congress has one-upped her, passing a bill to sue OPEC over oil prices, under US law, a move that even the hypertrophic jurisdiction cheerleaders in the current White House think is a bad idea. Ignore that in the current price range most oil producers are producing at near capacity. Notice however that the implementation of their proposals can only be established militarily and would certainly destroy supply along with demand (demand destruction in the form of mountains dead people, I mean to imply), to reach an uncertain final balance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the International Energy Agency (hardly an alarmist institution, one is obliged to notice), flinches, as it is...:

...preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought...

We're heading to a broad acknowledgment of the reality of Peak Oil, it seems, albeit obliquely, and a wide range of experts are predicting rough but promising to scary times, the last link being about the latest predictions of the man who wrote the Hirsch Report. Our world is about to be not very subtly transformed it seems.

This post came about through the utilization of this Eurotrib Diary, a website where peak-oilers (and other commie pinkos such as myself) abound. For a more dedicated peak-oil hub, check out The Oil Drum.

2008-05-08T02:14:00.005+03:00

The Milgram dissident

/ who disobeys? /
If you do not know about the Milgram experiment on obedience, see the relevant Wikipedia article first. Then, if you want, see Milgram's fascinating short (44') film on the subject, Obedience:

[update: removed due to a copyright claim (no, seriously), you can buy the video here]

I stumbled upon (via Metafilter) a first person account from one of the people who actually refused to continue the experiment (one of the 15 out of 40 only to do so in Milgram's first experiment), titled Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience Experiments. It is a fascinating story that reveals - aside from the fact that this guy sort of figured that the whole thing might be staged that the man in question was a member of the Communist Party of the USA. This I think is highly relevant and I quote the man in full on his political opinions and their relevance to his behavior in the experiment:

In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine. That attitude stayed with me during my three and one half years of service in the army, in Europe, during World War II. Like all soldiers, I was taught to obey orders, but whenever we heard lectures on army regulations, what stayed with me was that we were also told that soldiers had a right to refuse illegal orders (though what constituted illegal was left vague).

In addition, in my position during the late 1940s as a staff member of the Communist Party, in which I held positions as chairman in New Haven and Hartford, I had become accustomed to exercising authority and having people from a variety of backgrounds and professions carry out assignments I gave them. As a result, I had an unorthodox understanding of authority and was not likely to be impressed by a white lab coat.

In the early 1950s, I was harassed and tailed by the FBI, and in 1954, along with other leaders of the Communist Party in Connecticut, I was arrested and tried under the Smith Act on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence." We were convicted, as expected, and I was about to go to jail when the conviction was overturned on appeal. I believe these experiences also enabled me to stand up to an authoritative "professor."

This is not to say that membership in the Communist Party made me or anyone else totally independent. Many of us, in fact, had become accustomed to carrying out assignments from people with higher positions in the Party, even when we had doubts. Would I have refused to follow orders had the experimental authority figure been a "Party leader" instead of a "professor"? I like to think so, as I was never a stereotypical "true believer" in Party doctrine. This was one of the reasons, among others, that I left the Party in the late 1950s. In any event, I believe that my political experience was an important factor in determining my skeptical behavior in the Milgram experiment.

Update June 20 2008: A recent trial of the Milgram experiment concludes that: "Among other things, we found that today people obey the experimenter in this situation at about the same rate they did 45 years ago"...

2008-05-07T15:38:00.005+03:00

Guantanamo:..."rats are treated with more humanity"

/ sami al-hajj is free /
Sami Al-Hajj the AL Jazeera cameraman arrested and detained without cause in the Guantanamo prison camp, is now free, realeased on May 1st. A campaign for the release of Al Hajj has been active these past six years, a cause which was well known in the Arab world, but not as much reported in the West (see this recent NYT article though). His case was picked up by Amnesty International and there was a campaign for his release. Recently sketches/cartoon of his from Guantanamo were forbidden release by the gulag's authorities, but were re created from their descriptions by Lewis Peake, a political cartoonist:

This is Sami Al Hajj's interview after he was released:

I quote from the moving interview as reported in the World Socialist Web Site the following shocking (well, for those whose view of the world is informed by the Mainstream Media, anyway) statement:

Although US officials have given multiple rationales for his detention, al-Hajj told reporters that a primary purpose was “to abort free media reporting” in the Middle East. He said that in the hundreds of interrogations to which he was subjected, his captors repeatedly tried to get him to say there was a link between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda.

Thus Al Hajj was used as a hostage and abused as a mafia abductee in the war against Al Jazeera. The War against Al Jazeera I emphasize not Al Qaeda. But hey what's he gonna do? Sue? Yeah right...

2008-03-26T03:00:00.007+02:00

Warzone business opportunities or Why Kill 'Em If you can't Use 'Em

/ balkan mortuary /

Tales of organ trafficking by the KLA during the Kosovo campaign surfaced recently:

BELGRADE, Serbia: Serbia's war crimes prosecutor is looking into reports that dozens of Serbs captured by rebels during the war in Kosovo were killed so their organs could be trafficked, the prosecutor's office said Friday.

The Serbian prosecutor's office said it received "informal statements" from investigators at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, that dozens of Serbs imprisoned by Kosovo Albanian rebels were taken to neighboring Albania in 1999 and killed so their organs could be harvested and sold to international traffickers.

Bruno Vekaric, the Serbian prosecutor's spokesman, said later on B92 radio that Serbian war crimes investigators have also received their own information about alleged organ trafficking, but not enough for a court case. Vekaric said Serb investigators also received reports suggesting there might be mass graves in Albania containing the bodies of the Serb victims.

Serbian media reported that the issue was brought into the open in a book written by former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte that is to be published in Italy on April 3.

According to Serbia's Beta news agency, which carried parts of the book in Serbian, Del Ponte said her investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking.

The Beta report quoted Del Ponte as saying in the book that her investigators were told the imprisoned Serbs were first taken to prison camps in northern Albania where the younger ones were picked out, and their organs were later sold abroad.

Here's the more detailed story from Belgrade's B92 and here is the story in Jurist.

To this Doug Muir responded over at A Fistful of Euros claiming that the story is unlikely on a number of grounds. While it is a matter of speculation and no one can positively determine that the crimes described did indeed happen, all of Doug's points seem moot to me:

- DM claims that 300 Serbs is over a half of all missing Serbs; this is debatable. The Serb side is claiming that over 3000 Kosovar Serbs are missing, but even if we are talking about a total of 400 missing, it doesn't stretch imagination much to picture an organized operation in which prisoners were directed to such camps - anyway the IHT article quoted above speaks of "dozens" of Serb prisoners. Other sources state that the number seems to be "at least 100" or "two trucks full of people". Thus, even if 300 is an inflated number (which it might well be) this does not disallow the possibility of the gist of the story being true.

- DM suggests that the great difficulty of disposing 300 bodies and of keeping silent about it afterwards makes the story unlikely. He compares the situation with the fact that the Serbian state didn't manage to keep secret neither the executions or the mass graves of abducted Albanian Kosovars. He thus seems to mistake state efficiency in Serbia and Albania with Mob efficiency (in either of these countries actually). Since the organ snatchers, if indeed they existed, would have to be connected with the mob, this isn't much of a problem. I'm sure that neither disposing 300 people a year or, much more, convincing people to remain silent about it, is something that is way beyond the capabilities of any self-respecting Mafia (see John Stanfa on corpse-disposal technique).

- Doug also suggests that the Albanian government would have to be complicit in such an operation. Not at all. Trafficking in people, including cases of organ snatching, already occur and have been occurring for way over a decade in much of the developing world and Eastern Europe, certainly including both Albania and Kosovo, and certainly without government complicity in most cases. In fact a few years ago a Greek-Albanian organ smuggling ring (mentioned here) was, according to investigations, active in Greek and Albanian hospitals and smuggled human organs through diplomatic pouch, having certain Albanian diplomats on the payroll as well. This was certainly neither done with the assistance or help of the Albanian government (DM brushes off a bit too lightly the connection between Berisha the Socialist Party and the KLA,but that's another story). I remind everybody that the border at the time we're talking about was quite porous with refugees coming in and out of Albania.

- The idea that this is a really difficult process, given the assistance of organizations that are superb smugglers of goods and people, have access to hospitals and doctors and very fast vehicles of all types, seems likewise an exaggeration. Again any decent-sized mafia could easily pull this over. Otherwise there would be no illegal organ trafficking trade at all. Something which is not the case.

Thus, while I agree that this is very far from proven, I'm much less confident that the whole story can be dismissed as "probably bullshit". If the story is totally bogus what in the world could make Carla Del Ponte of all people, include it in her book? And neither of Doug's two alternative scenarios regarding the "yellow house" is plausible IMHO. Firstly because no one in Albania would deny involvement in setting up a hospital for the KLA (which anyway could easily be disguised as a hospital for fleeing Kosovars) and secondly because the "torture-camp" idea, as Doug himself notes, doesn't explain why anybody would do this in Albania rather than on the field in Kosovo.

Two things to add:

1. The story itself is important in a sense that has little to do with whether it is actually true: This is an innovation, an idea that merges seamlessly with the current zeitgeist of market-driven-everything. It is a brilliant way to make a direct profit from what are usually considered to be martial waste products. The idea is so good that I'm willing to bet that if Dick Cheney has heard about it, having already dispensed with the most of the provisions of the Geneva conventions, he has his legal team turning the idea into some sort of non-biddable contract for KBR to sign, giving it full authorization for the expedient ~~trafficking~~ salvaging of usable organs from terrorists and other Arabs. This has the potential to be something that is praised in the OpEd columns of the WSJ, blessed by various US congregations and sold as some form of yet another triumph in the annals of ~~ghoulishness~~ ~~graverobbing~~ ~~colonialism~~ humanitarian-war. Similarly, smaller markets could emerge, as a vast array of mafias big and small will be rushing to war zones with medical trucks, doctors and nurses, in order to utilize the soon to be remains of those about to die. Thus, both legal and black market supply of organs will increase. The only problem will be keeping supplies of bootleg organs at low enough levels as to not effect prices by much. Everybody (that matters, anyway) wins! ~~$$$$$$!!!!~~ € € € € €!!!!!

2. Regardless of the plausibility and validity of the scenario, one can be certain that, had Carla Del Ponte heard of any similar reports of organ trafficking in 1999, but from the other side, i.e. were the accused body snatchers Serbs, with exactly the same evidence to back this up:

a. It would be out in the open well before CDP decided to write a book.
b. A Hollywood film about it would already have been released with a star cast and presented as fact
c. The alleged center of detention and organ snatching would be by now a byword for modern evil, casually referred to as such by pundits on both sides of the Atlantic.
d. The people claiming that the story was "possibly bullshit" would be dismissed as pro-Milosevic patsies or something like that.
e. I'd be writing a similar post complaining that were the perpetrators of the alleged crimes, anything other than Serbs and were the victims Serbs, people would dismiss the story as not very plausible and in fact it would barely make the news.

2008-03-05T09:43:00.001+02:00

The Covert War in Palestine

/ making civil wars /
A small price (for others) to pay for building democracy no doubt:
The Gaza Bombshell:

"Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza."

2008-03-04T16:43:00.002+02:00

UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories

/ simple truths /
This report: A/HRC/7/17 of 21 January 2008, was presented to the UN Human Rights Council by Special Rapporteur John Dugard, a South African legal scholar and 1980s anti-apartheid activist. From the report, which is of significant relevance given the current situation in Occupied Palestine, I would like to highlight the following very clear and very insightful assessment:

...Terrorism is a scourge, a serious violation of human rights and international humanitarian law. No attempt is made in the reports to minimize the pain and suffering it causes to victims, their families and the broader community. Palestinians are guilty of terrorizing innocent Israeli civilians by means of suicide bombs and Qassam rockets. Likewise the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are guilty of terrorizing innocent Palestinian civilians by military incursions, targeted killings and sonic booms that fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians. All these acts must be condemned and have been condemned.3 Common sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation. While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation. History is replete with examples of military occupation that have been resisted by violence - acts of terror. The German occupation was resisted by many European countries in the Second World War; the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) resisted South Africa's occupation of Namibia; and Jewish groups resisted British occupation of Palestine - inter alia, by the blowing up of the King David Hotel in 1946 with heavy loss of life, by a group masterminded by Menachem Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel. Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in historical context. This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. U ntil this is done peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue. In other situations, for example Namibia, peace has been achieved by the ending of occupation, without setting the end of resistance as a precondition. Israel cannot expect perfect peace and the end of violence as a precondition for the ending of the occupation.

... A further comment on terrorism is called for. In the present international climate it is easy for a State to justify its repressive measures as a response to terrorism - and to expect a sympathetic hearing. Israel exploits the present international fear of terrorism to the full. But this will not solve the Palestinian problem. Israel must address the occupation and the violation of human rights and international humanitarian law it engenders, and not invoke the justification of terrorism as a distraction, as a pretext for failure to confront the root cause of Palestinian violence - the occupation.