EU-MENA revolution consolidation

[JackRiddler]

.

Sorry, didn't mean to make things so complicated. We could use some kind of keyword system. (Maybe even a wiki?! Never mind, I'd be too lazy to play.)

.

[vanlose kid]

*

apropos of my reply above.

*

"If the January 25th revolution results in no more than a retrenchment of neoliberalism, or even its intensification, those millions will have been cheated. The rest of the world could be cheated as well. Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt.[/color] Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next)."

Arab revolutions mask economic status quo
Despite talk of a "new social contract", financial powers seek to maintain their grip on the poor of the Middle East.
Mark LeVine Last Modified: 10 Jun 2011 15:56

Business and trade were hard hit by the uprisings across much of the Arab world - and now the IMF and World Bank say they want to help economies get back on their feet. But privatisation and enforced 'structural adjustment' will keep many of the poorest on their knees [GALLO/GETTY]

The World Bank and IMF have been restructuring the economies of the Middle East for decades, with largely negative results. Yet they are poised to play a major role in the post-revolutionary efforts to stabilise Egypt, Tunisia and other post-authoritarian states.

The post-1967 era of the Middle East can, in many ways, be defined by the turn towards market liberalisation across the region, although the attempts by Western lending institutions to pressure local governments to initiate structural reforms goes back to the Nasser period. From the start of the 1970s-era infitah, or opening, under Anwar Sadat, there have been over a dozen episodes of mass protest and even revolt against IMF and World Bank-imposed austerity measures. Not just in Egypt, which has had at least four such episodes, but in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey as well.

At times local governments made some effort to resist the imposition of what is today referred to as "Washington Consensus" policies, which advocate trade liberalisation, privatisation, opening economies to foreign goods and investment, stabilising budgets and exchange rates, and cutting government expenditures and presence in the economy. As one left-wing paper headlined a story in 1978: "Egypt puts the IMF on notice, heralding new era of economic development."

But the new era was stillborn; Egypt would soon be far too tightly enmeshed within the US-led order to pursue an independent path towards development, continuing a history of frustrated economic development that stretches from the mid-19th century, when Muhammad Ali's attempt at independent modernisation was met by a joint European-Ottoman front that ultimately forced Egypt - and the Ottoman state - into a European-dominated economic fold that, within three decades, led both states to bankruptcy (and soon thereafter, for Egypt, to more than half a century of British occupation).

Today, some Egyptian observers argue that one of the main reasons the army was willing to sacrifice Mubarak was because of its anger at the increasing power of his son Gamal and his colleagues, such as former - and recently convicted - IMF official Youssef Boutros-Ghali, who were accruing significant power through the financialisation of the economy and other policies that weaken the power of the army and the more traditional national capitalist elite.

In short, resentment against the kind of neoliberal policies championed by the IMF and World Bank runs deep in Egypt and other Arab countries. Today, even senior officials of the Bank and Fund blame the imposition of "Washington Consensus" models of restructuring developing economies for helping create the situation of economic hopelessness that sparked the Tunisian revolution.

While few people are making the link today, such policies also helped torpedo the Oslo peace process. They justified the economic integration through physical separation and isolation of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories that became a defining motif of the so-called peace process, reinforcing Israeli economic dominance over Palestinians in the same manner that its territorial footprint in the West Bank grew wider rather than trimming down, which is what most people assumed would happen on the way to a final status agreement.

Lessons learned?

Despite the less than encouraging history of involvement in the region, the World Bank, IMF and other mainstream institutions have all sought to insert themselves into the economic reform process that most observers believe must accompany political reform in order for the latter to succeed. At least, at the leadership level, officials are saying the right words. Bank head Robert Zoellick argues that "we must act now ... In revolutionary moments, the status quo is not a winning hand".

Zoellick has declared that the Bank understands that "we need a new social contract where governments listen to their people and include them in their development process". Similarly, incoming IMF chief Christine Lagarde admitted that one of the lessons of the region's uprisings is that "if priority is to be accorded to inclusive and sustainable growth, issues of justice, security and employment, particularly in the private sector, can no longer be addressed separately".

Similarly, in a heated exchange with Egyptian pro-democracy activist Wael Ghonim, then IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn admitted that the Bank had erred in helping to prop up the Mubarak regime and offering analyses which celebrated policies of the government which clearly were harming the interests of most Egyptians.

Both the IMF and the Bank now state loudly that the Arab Spring has taught them the appropriate "lessons" and that they now realise that "we have to listen to people" and help ensure that wealth is now "for everyone" and not just the privileged few.

Such language - of inclusiveness and accountability to the broader population, of focusing on human development rather than merely aggregate economic indicators - is laudable, and reflects the commitment of the Bank specifically to support the millennium development goals. Yet it runs hard into almost insurmountable obstacles.

First, the entrenched institutional ideology and policies of the Fund and Bank. Thus, for example, increasing "productivity" and "efficiency" in the Egyptian or Tunisian economies would demand trimming supposedly bloated workforces, at a time when the institutions' leaders have admitted that joblessness is among the most difficult problems faced by Egypt and its neighbours. Similar problems occur with opening economies too far towards foreign investment and export-oriented growth, when the strengthening of locally based production, consumption and credit would be more beneficial.

Second, the desire to change course runs into the problem that the larger structural imbalances in economies such as Egypt - rampant corruption and concentration of wealth tied to long-term authoritarian rule - are globally systemic in nature. They mirror (in fact amplify) problems that plague the most market-devoted advanced industrial countries, such as the United States. But at the same time they are exacerbated by the fact that US policy has long had little interest in encouraging the kind of autonomous development that the Bank and Fund now say they support.

In the case of Egypt (and the Middle East more broadly), the US supported Mubarak and other dictators because he backed US policies which were antithetical to the desires and interests of most Egyptians. Neither authoritarian governments nor their patrons have any interest in encouraging the development of a robust civil society and autonomous middle-class led economy, now named among the chief goals of the Bank and Fund. Rather, keeping civil societies relatively weak (or at least disempowered) and individual citizens dependent on the state are among the few tools governments have left to maintain some form of control, or at least power, over populations.

Despite this obvious reality, it remains almost impossible to find officials or researchers associated with the Bank or Fund acknowledging that disparities in economic and political power within developing countries and between their nations and more powerful countries impacts the way policies are experienced on the ground.

A more realistic portrayal of the view of Washington Consensus insiders to the Arab Spring comes from a recent report issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Written by two former senior Bank officials, Uri Dadush and Marwan Muasher, it called on the Fund and Bank to step in to ensure that political changes sweeping the region didn't encourage governments to abandon Washington Consensus policies.

Bluntly, the authors warn that "there is a significant possibility that the government that ultimately emerges out of this crisis will renounce previous economic reforms as misguided and argue that they contributed to the region's plight ... It is in the large economies' own interest to insure that economic reforms continue apace with political reforms." Worse, they fear, local governments might "lose faith in liberal economic reform" and "essentially 'buy' peace with domestic handouts and new spending packages".

Roots of de-development

The roots of the neoliberal policies against which not merely "ordinary" Arabs, but even the leaders of the Bank and Fund would seem to be pushing run extremely deep, to the emergence of a global capitalist system in the 16th century that was inextricably tied to the rapid development of European empires and all the violence and exploitation they wrought - through centuries of imperial power, colonial rule, and enforced exploitation and slavery.

Equally important was the rise of nation-state ideologies and institutions that helped manage the increasingly globalised economic order. When colonised peoples finally achieved independence and sought to create autonomous institutions and networks, they were met with concerted efforts to frustrate their drive towards independent development, setting up a showdown between Arab "socialism" and Western capitalism that lasted for the better part of the 1950s and 1960s.

Despite the conflict with the United States and other Western powers, this period was in fact marked by unprecedented levels of both economic growth and relative economic equality within ostensibly socialist-inspired societies such as Egypt, Syria or Iraq. But by the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, leaders of these countries began to integrate themselves into the Western political-economic fold, and such growth and egalitarian distribution of wealth changed for the worse.

I explored this trend and the experience of globalisation more broadly in the Middle East in my 2005 book Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil. What was striking about the data I collected was both how often growth was the result of following policies at odds with the Washington Consensus model, and how following this model produced greater inequality and poverty in countries where there was economic growth. For this and other reasons, it's not surprising that the region was largely left completely out of mainstream analyses of economic globalisation in the 1990s and first half of the 2000s, as if the world did not include the Middle East.

Instead, analyses by the IMF and World Bank "extensively praised this stabilisation success in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco", ignoring the social costs of policies such as reducing the size of the public sector through privatisation, removing controls over investment, eliminating subsidies and most tariffs on imports and liberalising trade regimes. Nor was there significant analysis of the "conditions" attached to loans granted by the Fund or Bank, which demanded that recipient governments engage in significant "structural adjustments" of their fiscal and monetary policies that could go against the interests of the majority of a population, especially during periods of economic downturn - when people are already living at the margins.

Such policies of "conditionality" made loans into tools of policy by Western governments. Such policies could afford sides being based on very inaccurate modelling of how real life economies function or have no appreciation for political circumstances or economic realities of poor people, because their main function was to help pry open developing economies to foreign control. In the process, across the region, structural adjustment encouraged the destruction of existing industries and even deindustrialisation more broadly.

At best, more critical scholars have observed, IMF and World Bank loans have often been used as if they were remittances, being distributed to the population in "inefficient" ways to maintain social peace while strategic public sector investment was significantly reduced (particularly in Egypt). At the same time, the negative impact of the structural adjustment policies attached to them have forced Western donors, such as Sweden, to redirect aid away from encouraging local development and towards ameliorating the worst negative effects of the adjustments forced upon local economies.

Recutting the pie

In a recent article for al Jazeera, Oxford University Egypt expert Walter Armbrust makes two key points that need to be borne in mind as the World Bank, IMF and other international financial institutions seek to reorder the economies of the region for a supposedly post-revolutionary political economic landscape. First, he points out that the corruption that everyone now laments was, in fact, "a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatisation" that was "less a violation of the system than business as usual".

Not only that, such practises were not just endemic to Egypt. They are "as American as apple pie" - part of the larger global system I mentioned above. As Armbrust points out, in sheer scale, audacity, and - incredibly - legality, the conflation of business and government in the US makes the same process in Egypt look like amateur hour by comparison.

Ultimately, what this analysis reminds us is that even if IMF or Bank officials might have gone a bit soft, the US under President Obama, as under his predecessors, has as little interest or ability to change a system it has profited from enormously over the past half century. Ultimately, neither the generals of Egypt's Supreme Military Council, nor the barons of Wall Street (and their allies among the generals in the Pentagon) will willingly allow anything more than "cosmetic changes" to the political economy of either country.

And so when Egypt's finance minister, Samir Mohamed Radwan, exclaims to a Chamber of Commerce audience that, "it's very simple, I need cash" to keep the economy functioning - while Egypt struggles with billions in debt and lost revenues from the uprising, it is still quite difficult to imagine the "I" he mentions representing the "we", of all of Egypt, Mr Radwan officially represents. With tens of billions of dollars in loans, aid and investment slotted to enter Egypt in the next few years, a system which has been nourished by industrial scale corruption for decades will find it hard to suddenly function efficiently and for the good of the average Egyptian rather than the economic elite which still controls the country - even if that elite has had to sacrifice a few of its own to maintain power.

The struggle for these billions, far more than inter- or intra-religious conflict, changes in Egypt's foreign policy orientation, or the power of the youth movement that toppled a dictator, will likely decide the future of the country for the next generation.

________
Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. He has authored several books including Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine (University of California Press, 2005) and An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/op ... 45689.html

*

A revolution against neoliberalism?
If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
Walter Armbrust Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 20:27

On February 16th I read a comment that was posted on the wall of the Kullina Khalid Saed's ("We are all Khaled Said") Facebook page administered by the now very famous Wael Ghonim. By that time it had been there for about 21 hours. The comment referred to a news item reporting that European governments were under pressure to freeze bank accounts of recently deposed members of the Mubarak regime. The comment said: "Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen … because this is the money of Egyptians, 40 per cent of whom live below the poverty line."

By the time I unpacked this thread of conversation, 5,999 people had clicked the "like" button, and about 5,500 had left comments. I have not attempted the herculean task of reading all five thousand odd comments (and no doubt more are being added as I write), but a fairly lengthy survey left no doubt that most of the comments were made by people who clicked the "like" icon on the Facebook page. There were also a few by regime supporters, and others by people who dislike the personality cult that has emerged around Mr. Ghoneim.

This Facebook thread is symptomatic of the moment. Now that the Mubarak regime has fallen, an urge to account for its crimes and to identify its accomplices has come to the fore. The chants, songs, and poetry performed in Midan al-Tahrir always contained an element of anger against haramiyya (thieves) who benefited from regime corruption. Now lists of regime supporters are circulating in the press and blogosphere. Mubarak and his closest relatives (sons Gamal and 'Ala’) are always at the head of these lists. Articles on their personal wealth give figures as low as $3 billion to as high as $70 billion (the higher number was repeated on many protesters’ signs). Ahmad Ezz, the General Secretary of the deposed National Democratic Party and the largest steel magnate in the Middle East, is supposed to be worth $18 billion; Zohayr Garana, former Minister of Tourism, $13 billion; Ahmad al-Maghrabi, former Minister of Housing, $11 billion; former Minister of Interior Habib Adli, much hated for his supervision of an incredibly abusive police state, also managed to amass $8 billion — not bad for a lifetime civil servant.

Such figures may prove to be inaccurate. They may be too low, or maybe too high, and we may never know precisely because much of the money is outside of Egypt, and foreign governments will only investigate the financial dealings of Mubarak regime members if the Egyptian government makes a formal request for them to do so. Whatever the true numbers, the corruption of the Mubarak regime is not in doubt. The lowest figure quoted for Mubarak’s personal wealth, of "only" $3 billion, is damning enough for a man who entered the air force in 1950 at the age of twenty two, embarking on a sixty-year career in "public service."

A systemic problem

The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead astray efforts to reconstitute the political system. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad Ezz and Habib al-Adly.

To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.

What is neoliberalism? In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social geographer David Harvey outlined "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the "proper functioning" of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them.

Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions.

And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.

Rhetoric vs. reality

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.

The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments.

Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to "private" investors).

Parallels with America

The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.

The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have one foot planted in "business" and another in "government" to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again.

As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).

So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades.

However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was emblazoned with the headline "Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700 Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries."

A vast economic powerhouse

But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian public sector.

But the generals also receive plums from the private sector. Military spending itself was also lucrative because it included both a state budget and contracts with American companies that provided hardware and technical expertise. The United States provided much of the financing for this spending under rules that required a great deal of the money to be recycled to American corporations, but all such deals required middlemen. Who better to act as an intermediary for American foreign aid contracts than men from the very same military designated as the recipient of the services paid for by this aid? In this respect the Egyptian military-industrial complex was again stealing a page from the American playbook; indeed, to the extent that the Egyptian military benefited from American foreign aid, Egypt was part of the American military-industrial complex, which is famous for its revolving-door system of recycling retired military men as lobbyists and employees of defense contractors.

Consequently it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly. The army is a blunt force, not well suited for controlling crowds of demonstrators. The latest statement of the Supreme Military Council reiterated both the legitimacy of the pro-democracy movements demands, and the requirement that demonstrations cease so that the country can get back to work. If demonstrations continue to the point that the Supreme Military Council feels it can no longer tolerate them, then the soldiers who will be ordered to put them down (indeed, in some accounts were already ordered to put them down early in the revolution and refused to do so) with deadly force, are not the generals who were part of the Mubarak-era corruption, but conscripts.

Pro-democracy demonstrators and their sympathisers often repeated the slogans "the army and the people are one hand," and "the army is from us." They had the conscripts in mind, and many were unaware of how stark differences were between the interests of the soldiers and the generals. Between the conscripts and the generals is a middle-level professional officer corps whose loyalties have been the subject of much speculation. The generals, for their part, want to maintain their privileges, but not to rule directly. Protracted direct rule leaves the officers of the Supreme Military Council vulnerable to challenges from other officers who were left on the outside. Also, direct rule would make it impossible to hide that the elite officers are not in fact part of the "single hand" composed of the people and the (conscript) army. They are instead logically in the same camp as Ahmad Ezz, Safwat al-Sharif, Gamal Mubarak, and Habib al-Adly — precisely the names on those lists making the rounds of regime members and cronies who should face judgment.

Ultimately the intense speculation about how much money the Mubarak regime stole, and how much the people can expect to pump back into the nation, is a red herring. If the figure turns out to be $50 billion or $500 billion, it will not matter, if Egypt remains a neoliberal state dedicated (nominally) to free-market fundamentalism for the poor, while creating new privatised assets that can be recycled to political insiders for the rich. If one seeks clues to how deeply the January 25th Revolution will restructure Egypt, it would be better to look at such issues as what sort of advice the interim government of generals solicits in fulfilling its mandate to re-make Egyptian government. The period of military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming permanent.

Technocrats or ideologues?

One sometimes hears calls to set up a government of "technocrats" that would assume the practical matters of governance. "Technocrat" sounds neutral — a technical expert who would make decisions on "scientific" principle. The term was often applied to Yusuf Butros Ghali, for example, the former Minister of the Treasury, who was one of the Gamal Mubarak boys brought into the cabinet in 2006 ostensibly to smooth the way for the President’s son to assume power. Ghali is now accused of having appropriated LE 450 million for the use of Ahmad Ezz.

I once sat next to Ghali at a dinner during one of his trips abroad, and had the opportunity to ask him when the Egyptian government would be ready to have free elections. His response was to trot out the now discredited regime line that elections were impossible because actual democracy would result in the Muslim Brotherhood taking power. Conceivably Ghali will beat the charge of specifically funneling the state’s money to Ahmad Ezz. But as a key architect of Egypt’s privatization programs he cannot possibly have been unaware that he was facilitating a system that enabled the Ezz steel empire while simultaneously destroying Egypt’s educational and health care systems.

The last time I encountered the word "technocrat" was in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine — a searing indictment of neoliberalism which argues that the free-market fundamentalism promoted by economist Milton Friedman (and immensely influential in the United States) is predicated on restructuring economies in the wake of catastrophic disruptions because normally functioning societies and political systems would never vote for it. Disruptions can be natural or man-made, such as … revolutions.

The chapters in The Shock Doctrine on Poland, Russia, and South Africa make interesting reading in the context of Egypt’s revolution. In each case when governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, "technocrats" were brought in to help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create the institutional infrastructure for their successors. The technocrats always seemed to have dispensed a form of what Klein calls "shock therapy" — the imposition of sweeping privatization programs before dazed populations could consider their options and potentially vote for less ideologically pure options that are in their own interests.

The last great wave of revolutions occurred in 1989. The governments that were collapsing then were communist, and the replacement in that "shock moment" of one extreme economic system with its opposite seemed predictable and to many even natural.

One of the things that make the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions potentially important on a global scale is that they took place in states that were already neoliberalised. The complete failure of neoliberalsm to deliver "human well-being" to a large majority of Egyptians was one of the prime causes of the revolution, at least in the sense of helping to prime millions of people who were not connected to social media to enter the streets on the side of the pro-democracy activists.

But the January 25th Revolution is still a "shock moment." We hear calls to bring in the technocrats in order to revive a dazed economy; and we are told every day that the situation is fluid, and that there is a power vacuum in the wake of not just the disgraced NDP, but also the largely discredited legal opposition parties, which played no role whatsoever in the January 25th Revolution. In this context the generals are probably happy with all the talk about reclaiming the money stolen by the regime, because the flip side of that coin is a related current of worry about the state of the economy. The notion that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave the incestuous relation between governance and business intact.

Or worse, if the pro-democracy movement lets itself be stampeded by the "economic ruin" narrative, structures could be put in place by "technocrats" under the aegis of the military transitional government that would tie the eventual civilian government into actually quickening the pace of privatization. Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell. In other words, the logic could be that it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but the faulty application of neoliberalism.

Trial balloons for this witchcraft narrative are already being floated outside of Egypt. The New York Times ran an article on February 17th casting the military as a regressive force opposed to privatization and seeking a return to Nasserist statism. The article pits the ostensibly "good side" of the Mubarak regime (privatization programs) against bad old Arab socialism, completely ignoring the fact that while the system of military privilege may preserve some public-sector resources transferred from the civilian economy under pressure of IMF structural adjustment programs, the empire of the generals is hardly limited to a ring-fenced quasi-underground public sector.

Officers were also rewarded with private-sector perks; civilian political/business empires mixed public and private roles to the point that what was government and what was private were indistinguishable; both the military and civilians raked in rents from foreign aid. The generals may well prefer a new round of neoliberal witchcraft. More privatization will simply free up assets and rents that only the politically connected (including the generals) can acquire. Fixing a failed neoliberal state by more stringent applications of neoliberalism could be the surest way for them to preserve their privileges.

A neoliberal fix would, however, be a tragedy for the pro-democracy movement. The demands of the protesters were clear and largely political: remove the regime; end the emergency law; stop state torture; hold free and fair elections. But implicit in these demands from the beginning (and decisive by the end) was an expectation of greater social and economic justice. Social media may have helped organise the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to neoliberalism. These grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protestors.

If the January 25th revolution results in no more than a retrenchment of neoliberalism, or even its intensification, those millions will have been cheated. The rest of the world could be cheated as well. Egypt and Tunisia are the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America 'uqbalak (may you be the next).

___________
Dr. Walter Armbrust is Hourani Fellow and University Lecturer in Modern Middle East Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

This article first appeared on Jadaliyya.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/op ... 49621.html

*

[vanlose kid]

Syria's state TV director tells BBC 'refugees' just visiting family in Turkey

Reem Haddad puts spin on the desperate attempt of hundreds of locals to flee Jisr al-Shughour before government clampdown

Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 June 2011 19.05 BST


Reem Haddad acts as Syria's information ministry spokeswoman and has tried to portray the emerging humanitarian crisis as 'normal'.

She may look like the actor Isla Fisher and speak like a Mayfair lady who lunches, but appearances – and words – can be deceptive. As hundreds of refugees fled the Syrian border town Jisr al-Shughour on Thursday, desperate to avoid an expected government clampdown after the killing earlier this week of 120 soldiers, Reem Haddad , the director of Syria's state TV network, gave an interview to the BBC to account for the crowds pouring into Turkey.

Many have relatives in villages just the other side of the border, she said. "A lot of them find it easy to move across because their relatives are there. It's a bit like having a problem in your street, and your mum lives in the next street, so you go and visit your mum for a bit."

As Syria's security and humanitarian crisis escalates, Haddad, who acts as a spokeswoman for the country's information ministry, has become one of the most familiar faces of President Bashar al-Assad's regime, with a talent for insisting on innocent explanations for the brutal government response to the protests.

In this she has drawn comparisons to Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, whose exuberant insistence on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government that the Iraqi army was invincible earned him the nickname Comical Ali before the 2003 allied invasion.

Little is known about Haddad's early career to date, though her father served as Syria's ambassador to East Germany and is said to have modelled Syria's secret police on the Stasi.

"I don't think she believes all of what she's saying, though I think she believes some of it," Amr al-Azm, a former colleague at a Damascus language school in the early 1990s, told the Times. "She believes there's a war here between two ideologies, two groups, and she believes she's on the right side."

Would the government allow the gathering protesters to make their demonstrations peacefully, she was asked by al-Jazeera in late April.

There were no demonstrators, she said. On the contrary, said the journalist, many people on the ground were reporting gathering crowds.

"I know, you have this 'eyewitness phenomenon' thing," replied Haddad. "But we have our cameras everywhere and we have seen no gathering at all." In principle, however, demonstrations were permitted. "But they have to apply for a licence and they have to tell the police, and the police will tell them along which routes they should follow, and how long they should demonstrate and how many people there should be."

The same broadcaster, some weeks later, asked about 500 civilians thought to have been shot dead by security forces in street protests (that figure is now more than 1,000). "How do you know that sir, may I ask?" replied Haddad. "How do you know that 500 people have been shot dead, where is your information coming from?" It was a figure compiled by human rights organisations in Syria and London, among others, said the journalist.

"But my dear they are sitting in London. How can they confirm anything!" The world should confirm its facts independently, said the spokeswoman, "rather than taking shoddy, shoddy if I may say, eyewitness accounts." As Haddad well knows, all foreign journalists are banned from Syria.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ju ... eem-haddad

*

[vanlose kid]

In Radical Change To ECB's Tune, Bundesbank Confident Euro Can Withstand Greek Default

In yet another bad omen for Greece, now that Bailout Plan #2 has been demonstrated to be impractical and every question related to it is met at best with silence, it is back to plan B: letting Greece default. And in what is very good news for longs in the Drachma black market (which is already offered on an "when issued" basis by several large financial institutions), the Bundesbank's president Jens Weidmann just announced that “If the [Greek] commitments are not met, that cancels the basis for further funds from the aid package,” Weidmann told the newspaper. “This would be Greece’s decision, and the country then would have to bear the surely dramatic economic consequences of a default. I don’t think this would be sensible, and it would surely put partner countries in a difficult situation. But the euro would even in this case remain stable.” Translation: we now believe our banks are well enough reserved for what comes next. It also means that the rift with the ECB, which will be exposed as near-insolvent courtesy of using Greek collateral for tens of billions of loans that will have to be impaired, is now terminal. As for the far trickier, and now answered, question where the money to withstand this upcoming systemic shock comes from, just read this expose on the Fed's use of QE2 reserves.

From Bloomberg:

Weidmann’s depiction of a default as a liveable outcome contrasts with warnings from fellow ECB officials Lorenzo Bini Smaghi and Christian Noyer, as well as European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn, who described it as a “Lehman Brothers catastrophe” last week.

European officials are racing to find a plan to stem Greece’s debt crisis by June 24 while sharing the cost of a new rescue with bondholders. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is calling for Greek bondholders to extend the maturities of their debt by seven years, a move ECB officials say is akin to a default.

A bailout for Greece must include “voluntary” investor participation and meet the approval of central bankers, Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker said yesterday in an effort to narrow the dispute.

“We cannot push through private investor participation without, or against, the ECB,” Juncker said on Radio Berlin- Brandenburg. “A default would mean the ECB would have to end its accompanying programs. A default would mean we have reached the end of the line.”

Naturally, those German banks that did not have enough time to soak up Federal Reserve indulgences, are nervous:

Forcing losses on creditors may also hurt confidence, Commerzbank AG Chief Executive Officer Martin Blessing said in an interview published today in Welt am Sonntag. Investors had been told they wouldn’t need to join any efforts before 2013, and reneging on that pledge would “not exactly help build trust in the markets,” Blessing said, according to the newspaper.

Alas poor Angela, who is now caught between her electorate which will have her scalp should Germany proceed with some impractical Greek bailout, her bankers, which now are convinced they have enough cash to face principal writedowns, and the ECB and the europarliament which realize that a Greek bankruptcy is far from a contained exercise in Lehmanism, has to pick her words very carefully:

“We cannot accept an uncontrolled bankruptcy of a country,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday in her weekly video message. Such an event may endanger the recovery of Germany’s economy, she said.

As usual, with a healthy dose of grandstanding, posturing and jawboning over the weekend, we expect the delayed reaction in the gravitational pull on the EURUSD to continue with full force in 5 hours.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/radica ... ek-default

Exclusive: The Fed's $600 Billion Stealth Bailout Of Foreign Banks Continues At The Expense Of The Domestic Economy, Or Explaining Where All The QE2 Money Went
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/12/2011 00:25 -0400

Courtesy of the recently declassified Fed discount window documents, we now know that the biggest beneficiaries of the Fed's generosity during the peak of the credit crisis were foreign banks, among which Belgium's Dexia was the most troubled, and thus most lent to, bank. Having been thus exposed, many speculated that going forward the US central bank would primarily focus its "rescue" efforts on US banks, not US-based (or local branches) of foreign (read European) banks: after all that's what the ECB is for, while the Fed's role is to stimulate US employment and to keep US inflation modest. And furthermore, should the ECB need to bail out its banks, it could simply do what the Fed does, and monetize debt, thus boosting its assets, while concurrently expanding its excess reserves thus generating fungible capital which would go to European banks. Wrong. Below we present that not only has the Fed's bailout of foreign banks not terminated with the drop in discount window borrowings or the unwind of the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, but that the only beneficiary of the reserves generated were US-based branches of foreign banks (which in turn turned around and funnelled the cash back to their domestic branches), a shocking finding which explains not only why US banks have been unwilling and, far more importantly, unable to lend out these reserves, but that anyone retaining hopes that with the end of QE2 the reserves that hypothetically had been accumulated at US banks would be flipped to purchase Treasurys, has been dead wrong, therefore making the case for QE3 a done deal. In summary, instead of doing everything in its power to stimulate reserve, and thus cash, accumulation at domestic (US) banks which would in turn encourage lending to US borrowers, the Fed has been conducting yet another stealthy foreign bank rescue operation, which rerouted $600 billion in capital from potential borrowers to insolvent foreign financial institutions in the past 7 months. QE2 was nothing more (or less) than another European bank rescue operation!

For those who can't wait for the punchline, here it is. Below we chart the total cash holdings of Foreign-related banks in the US using weekly H.8 data.



Note the $630 billion increase in foreign bank cash balances since November 3, which just so happens is the date when the Fed commenced QE2 operations in the form of adding excess reserves to the liability side of its balance sheet. Here is the change in Fed reserves during QE2 (from the Fed's H.4.1 statement, ending with the week of June 1).



Above, note that Fed reserves increased by $610 billion for the duration of QE2 through the week ending June 1 (and by another $70 billion in the week ending June 8, although since we only have bank cash data through June 1, we use the former number, although we are certain that the bulk of this incremental cash once again went to foreign financial institutions).

So how did cash held by US banks fare during QE2? Well, not good. The chart below demonstrates cash balances at small and large US domestic banks, as well as the cash at foreign banks, all of which is compared to total Fed reserves plotted on the same axis. It pretty much explains it all.



The chart above has tremendous implications for everything from US and European monetary policy, to exhange rate and trade policy, to the current account on both sides of the Atlantic, to US fiscal policy, to borrowing and lending activity in the US, and, lastly, to QE 3.

What is the first notable thing about the above chart is that while cash levels in US and US-based foreign-banks correlate almost perfectly with the Fed's reserve balances, as they should, there is a notable divergence beginning around May of 2010, or the first Greek bailout, when Europe was in a state of turmoil, and when cash assets of foreign banks jumped by $200 billion, independent of the Fed and of cash holdings by US banks. About 6 months later, this jump in foreign bank cash balances had plunged to the lowest in years, due to repatriated fungible cash being used to plug undercapitalized local operations, with total cash just $265 billion as of November 17, just as QE2 was commencing. Incidentally, the last time foreign banks had this little cash was April 2009... Just as QE1 was beginning. As to what happens next, the first chart above says it all: cash held by foreign banks jumps from $308 billion on November 3, or the official start of QE2, to $940 billion as of June 1: an almost dollar for dollar increase with the increase in Fed reserve balances. In other words, while the Fed did nothing to rescue foreign banks in the aftermath of the first Greek crisis, aside from opening up FX swap lines, one can argue that the whole point of QE2 was not so much to spike equity markets, or the proverbial "third mandate" of Ben Bernanke, but solely to rescue European banks!

What this observation also means, is that the bulk of risk asset purchasing by dealer desks (if any), has not been performed by US-based primary dealers, as has been widely speculated, but by foreign dealers, which have the designatin of "Primary" with the Federal Reserve. Below is the list of 20 Primary Dealers currently recognized by the New York Fed. The foreign ones, with US-based operations, are bolded:

• BNP Paribas Securities Corp.
• Barclays Capital Inc.
• Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.
• Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
• Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC
• Daiwa Capital Markets America Inc.
• Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.
• Goldman, Sachs & Co.
• HSBC Securities (USA) Inc.
• Jefferies & Company, Inc.
• J.P. Morgan Securities LLC
• MF Global Inc.
• Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated
• Mizuho Securities USA Inc.
• Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC
• Nomura Securities International, Inc.
• RBC Capital Markets, LLC
• RBS Securities Inc.
• SG Americas Securities, LLC
• UBS Securities LLC.

That's right, out of 20 Primary Dealers, 12 are.... foreign. And incidentally, the reason why we added the (if any) above, is that since this cash is fungible between on and off-shore operations, what happened is that the $600 billion in cash was promptly repatriated and used by domestic branches of foreign banks to fill undercapitalization voids left by exposure to insolvent European PIIGS and for all other bankruptcy-related capital needs. And one wonders why suddenly German banks are so willing to take haircuts on Greek bonds: it is simply because courtesy of their US based branches which have been getting the bulk of the Fed's dollars in 1 and 0 format, they suddenly find themselves willing and ready to face the mark to market on Greek debt from par to 50 cents on the dollar. And not only Greek, but all other PIIGS, which will inevitably happen once Greece goes bankrupt, either volutnarily or otherwise. In fact, the $600 billion in cash that was repatriated to Europe will mean that European banks likely are fully covered to face the capitalization shortfall that will occur once Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain and possibly Italy are forced to face the inevitable Event of Default that will see their bonds marked down anywhere between 20% and 60%. Of course, this will also expose the ECB as an insolvent central bank, but that largely explains why Germany has been so willing to allow Mario Draghi to take the helm at an institution that will soon be left insolvent, and also explains the recent shocking animosity between Angela Merkel and Jean Claude Trichet: the German are preparing for the end of the ECB, and thanks to Ben Bernanke they are certainly capitalized well enough to handle the end of Europe's lender of first and last resort. But don't take our word for this: here is Stone McCarthy's explanation of what massive reserve sequestering by foreign banks means: "Foreign banks operating in the US often lend reserves to home offices or other banks operating outside the US. These loans do not change the volume of excess reserves in the system, but do support the funding of dollar denominated assets outside the US....Foreign banks operating in the US do not present a large source of C&I, Consumer, or Real Estate Loans. These banks represent about 16% of commercial bank assets, but only about 9% of bank credit. Thus, the concern that excess reserves will quickly fuel lending activities and money growth is probably diminished by the skewing of excess reserve balances towards foreign banks."

Which brings us to point #2: prepare for the Bernanke hearings and possible impeachment. For if it becomes popular knowledge that the Chairman of the Fed, despite explicit instructions to enforce the trickle down of "printed" dollars to US banks, was only concerned about rescuing foreign banks with the $600 billion in excess cash created out of QE2, then all political hell is about to break loose, and not even Democrats will be able to defend Bernanke's actions to a public furious with the complete inability to procure a loan. Any loan. Furthermore the data above proves beyond a reasonable doubt why there has been no excess lending by US banks to US borrowers: none of the cash ever even made it to US banks! This also resolves the mystery of the broken money multiplier and why the velocity of money has imploded.

Implication #3 explains why the US dollar has been as week as it has since the start of QE 2. Instead of repricing the EUR to a fair value, somewhere around parity with the USD, this stealthy fund flow from the US to Europe to the tune of $600 billion has likely resulted in an artificial boost in the european currency to the tune of 2000-3000 pips, keeping it far from its fair value of about 1.1 EURUSD. If this data does not send European (read German) exporters into a blind rage, after the realization that the Fed (most certainly with the complicity of the G7) was willing to sacrifice European economic output in order to plug European bank undercapitalization, then nothing will.

But implication #4 is by far the most important. Recall that Bill Gross has long been asking where the cash to purchase bonds come the end of QE 2 would come from. Well, the punditry, in its parroting groupthink stupidity (validated by precisely zero actual research), immediately set forth the thesis that there is no problem: after all banks would simply reverse the process of reserve expansion and use the $750 billion in Cash that will be accumulated by the end of QE 2 on June 30 to purchase US Treasurys.

Wrong.

The above data destroys this thesis completely: since the bulk of the reserve induced bank cash has long since departed US shores and is now being used to ratably fill European bank balance sheet voids, and since US banks have benefited precisely not at all from any of the reserves generated by QE 2, there is exactly zero dry powder for the US Primary Dealers to purchase Treasurys starting July 1.

This observation may well be the missing link that justifies the Gross argument, as it puts to rest any speculation that there is any buyer remaining for Treasurys. Alas: the digital cash generated by the Fed's computers has long since been spent... a few thousand miles east of the US.

Which leads us to implication #5. QE 3 is a certainty. The one thing people focus on during every episode of monetary easing is the change in Fed assets, which courtesy of LSAP means a jump in Treasurys, MBS, Agency paper, or (for the tin foil brigade) ES: the truth is all these are a distraction. The one thing people always forget is the change in Fed liabilities, all of them: currency in circulation, which has barely budged in the past 3 years, and far more importantly- excess reserves, which as this article demonstrates, is the electronic "cash" that goes to needy banks the world over in order to fund this need or that. In fact, it is the need to expand the Fed's liabilities that is and has always been a driver of monetary stimulus, not the need to boost Fed assets. The latter is, counterintuitively, merely a mathematical aftereffect of matching an asset-for-liability expansion. This means that as banks are about to face yet another risk flaring episode in the next several months, the Fed will need to release another $500-$1000 billion in excess reserves. As to what asset will be used to match this balance sheet expansion, why take your picK; the Fed could buy MBS, Muni bonds, Treasurys, or go Japanese, and purchase ETFs, REITs, or just go ahead and outright buy up every underwater mortgage in the US. This side of the ledger is largely irrelevant, and will serve only two functions: to send the S&P surging, and to send the precious metal complex surging2 as it becomes clear that the dollar is now entirely worthless.

That said, of all of the above, the one we are most looking forward to is the impeachment of Ben Bernanke: because if there is one definitive proof of the Fed abdicating any and all of its mandates, and merely playing the role of globofunder explicitly at the expense of US consumers and borrowers, not to mention lackey for the banking syndicate, this is it.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/exclus ... c-economy-

*

[vanlose kid]

Greek Parliament Preparing Evacuation Tunnel Ahead Of Wednesday Vote On IMF Bailout, General Strike And Parliamentary Blockade
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/13/2011 18:50 -0400


June 15, the day of a general strike in Greece, is also the day when the critical "mid-term agreement" between the insolvent country and the Troica will be voted on by the general assembly. "The agreement includes tax increases, slashing of wages and pensions and the lay-off of approximately more 100,000 civil servants in the next few years." Already the blog Occupied London has called for a blockade of the Athens parliament: "Last night (June 11th) the popular assembly of Syntagma square announced a call to blockade the Greek parliament ahead of the voting of the so-called Mid-term agreement between the Greek government and the troika (IMF/ECB/EU). The call-out for the blockade below is one of the most important acts we have seen by the Syntagma assembly so far. June 15th is gearing up to become a historical day in Greece, a crucial chance to block off the charge-ahead of neoliberalism here. Don’t be a spectator to this – translate and disseminate the text below; organise a gathering where you are, or come join us at Syntagma. This is the struggle for and of our lives." Needless to say, should the vote pass, and should the Parliament be blockaded, which it will be, the chances of politicians to leave general assembly unscathed may be compromised. Which is why we were not surprised to learn, courtesy of Covering Delta, that the Greek parliament has hired foreign workers to clean out the underground tunnel which leads from the parliament to the port of Piraeus (soon to be privatized) in order to avoid what some fear may be the popular lynchings of MPs by the disgruntled masses.

From Covering Delta:

I just became aware of this report from Kontra channel here in Greece. Apparently, a tunnel that leads from Lykavitos to the Greek parliament, and from there to the sea port of Piraeus, is being cleaned out by foreign workers in preparation for the possible evacuation of Greek MP’s in the event of a storming of parliament ahead of wednesday’s vote on the new memorandum.


The situation here is getting completely out of control. I really don’t know how much longer the people will be willing to wait this thing out. The mood here in Athens is one of intense disillusionment with a government that seems increasingly detached from its own people.

In the spirit of 2011 being a (slightly delayed) carbon copy of 2010, what May 6th was to 2010, June 15 just may end up being for 2011. The vote is expected to come in the late morning on Wednesday EDT, so there will be enough time to observe the market's reaction should violence return to Athens.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/greek- ... ral-strike

*

[vanlose kid]

The day Italians finally said no to Silvio Berlusconi

Berlusconi's propaganda machine tried everything to scupper the success of the referendum on his key policies – yet it still failed

Benedetta Brevini
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 June 2011 09.59 BST


Campaigners for the yes vote celebrate in Rome following results in Italian referendums on Silvio Berlusconi's key policies. Photograph: Roberto Monaldo/AP

The Italian government tried everything possible to delay, compromise and negate the possibility of Italian people expressing dissent. It wasted €300m (£265m) preventing a high turnout at the ballot for a referendum on three crucial issues. It even passed a decree in the hope of nullifying one of the referendum's counts. In addition, it attempted to prevent adequate television coverage of the ballot. Yet the referendum held on 12-13 June succeeded. The result constitutes another huge setback for Silvio Berlusconi's government.

Italians were called to the ballot box to give their verdict on three crucial government policies: first they had the opportunity to repeal the famous "legitimate impediment" – the law that gave Berlusconi automatic immunity from trial proceedings (already partially revoked by the constitutional court). Second, they had the chance to stop another controversial reform brought in by Berlusconi's government: water privatisation. Finally, they were able to vote against Berlusconi's energy policy, which bucks the current European trend in proposing the construction of nuclear plants in high-risk seismic Italy.

And Italians have spoken. They said no to the current government's most controversial policies. They said no to an undemocratic law that placed the prime minister above the law and prevented him from ever coming to trial. They said no to water privatisation and, again, no to nuclear energy.

The result is exceptional for various reasons. It comes after the recent defeat for the ruling party at the May local elections, where even Milan, Berlusconi's home city – ousted his party's candidate for mayor. Not only did Berlusconi's coalition lose control of important cities such as Milan, Naples, Trieste, Cagliari and Novara, but Berlusconi's loyal ally, the Northern League, also suffered election losses in its own northern heartland. The referendum result will further damage the weakened alliance between Berlusconi's party and the Northern League. The latter has already started detaching itself from Berlusconi's policies on various issues, from the mission in Libya to fiscal reform. Recent weeks have also seen the ruling coalition suffer defeats in parliament. This shows clear signs of turmoil within the coalition that the referendum result can only exacerbate.

Yet the result is exceptional for other reasons. First and foremost because it defeated the government machine that tried every measure possible to scupper its success.

In fact, Berlusconi tried to make it difficult for the vote to reach the target it needed – according to article 75 of the constitution, this needs to be more than 50% – or precisely 25,209,345 million votes. In gloomy times for the Italian economy, Berlusconi's government wasted €300m on another ballot immediately after the local elections instead of combining the two. Furthermore, once the date of the ballot was set, the government tried to invalidate one of the referendum's four counts: the so-called omnibus decree placed a last-minute moratorium on the government policy that sought to establish nuclear plants in a notoriously anti-nuclear country. As Berlusconi himself has since explained, the construction of nuclear plants is still a priority for the government. In the words of Berlusconi, the omnibus decree was a "wise decision" to prevent "people voting to ban nuclear plants in Italy and therefore thwarting the government's nuclear agenda for many years to come". Yet, the highest court in Italy subsequently decided that the referendum on nuclear plants should go ahead despite the changes proposed by the decree.

Furthermore, the government played its final card in making an appeal to the constitutional court just a few days before the consultation. On 7 June, the constitutional court once again reaffirmed the legitimacy of the referendum in its new post-Omnibus decree framework. If this verdict is a victory for the Italian people, there are still about 3 million Italians who risk seeing their votes nullified by the government's strategies. Italians living abroad have been asked to vote on a count that has not been updated post-omnibus decree, precisely because of the government's subsequent delaying tactics. The decision on the validity of the vote abroad will come on Thursday. Still, the strong turnout at the referendum is a great consolation as the 50% target has been achieved at any rate.

In addition, the government propaganda machine has been widely employed to compromise the referendum. RAI – supposedly the Italian BBC – failed to inform the Italian public about the referendum. So deficient has been its referendum coverage that Agcom – the Italian Ofcom – repeatedly called for RAI to increase its coverage in order to better inform the public about the consultation. On the positive side, social media has, for the first time, been used to update people on the vote. Facebook, Twitter and blogs have been used to reach Italian people outside the zone of Berlusconi's televisual control.

Yet, technology alone cannot determine revolutions. Berlusconi is likely to maintain his grip on Italy until a vote of no confidence by parliament forces him out. Nonetheless, Italians have spoken and have clearly said no. The effects on the ruling coalition should manifest themselves soon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... referendum

*

[vanlose kid]

The Battle against Neoliberalism: Massive Popular Uprising in Greece

by Yorgos Mitralias
Global Research, June 11, 2011
Greek Committee Against the Debt and CADTM

Hundreds of thousands of Greek ‘Indignés’ (‘Outraged’) walk out to wage war against their neoliberal persecutors

Two weeks after it started the Greek movement of ‘outraged’ people has the main squares in all cities overflowing with crowds that shout their anger, and makes the Papandreou government and its local and international supporters tremble. It is now more than just a protest movement or even a massive mobilization against austerity measures. It has turned into a genuine popular uprising that is sweeping over the country. An uprising that makes it know at large its refusal to pay for ‘their crisis’ or ‘their debt’ while vomiting the two big neoliberal parties, if not the whole political world in complete disarray.

How many were there on Syntagma square (Constitution square) in the centre of Athens, just in front of the Parliament building on Sunday 5 June 2011? Difficult to say since one of the characteristic features of such popular gatherings is that there is no key event (speech or concert) and that people come and go. But according to people in charge of the Athens underground, who know how to assess the numbers of passengers, there were at least 250,000 people converging on Syntagma on that memorable night! Actually several hundreds of thousands of people if we add the ‘historic’ gatherings that took place on the main squares of other Greek cities (see map).

At this juncture we should however raise the question: how can such a mass movement that is shaking the Greek government (in which the EU has a particular interest) not be mentioned at all in Western medias? For these first twelve days there was virtually not a word, not an image of those unprecedented crowds shouting their anger against the IMF, the European Commission, the ‘Troika’ (IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank), and against Frau Merkel and the international neoliberal leaders. Nothing. Except occasionally a few lines about ‘hundreds of demonstrators’ in the streets of Athens, after a call by the Greek trade unions. This testifies to a strange predilection for scrawny demos of TU bureaucrats while a few hundred yards further huge crowds were demonstrating late into the night for days and weeks on end.

This is indeed a new form of censorship. A well-organized political censorship motivated by the fear this Greek movement might contaminate the rest of Europe! Confronted as we are with this new weapon used by the Holy Alliance of modern times, we have to respond together both to expose this scandal and to find ways of circumventing such prohibition to inform public opinions, through developing communication among social movements throughout Europe and at once creating and reinforcing our own alternative media…

Going back to the Greek ‘Outraged’, or ‘Indignés’ or Aganaktismeni, we have to note that the movement is getting more and more rooted among lower classes against a Greek society that has been shaped by 25 years of an absolute domination of a cynic, nationalist, racist and individualist neoliberal ideology that turned everything into commodities. This is why the resulting image is often contradictory, mixing as it does the best and the worst among ideas and actions! For instance when the same person displays a Greek nationalism verging on racism while waving a Tunisian (or Spanish, Egyptian, Portuguese, Irish, Argentinian) flag to show his internationalist solidarity with those peoples.

Should we therefore conclude that those demonstrators are schizophrenic? Of course not. As there are no miracles, or politically ‘pure’ social uprisings, the movement is becoming gradually more radical while still branded by those 25 years of moral and social disaster. But mind: all its ‘shortcomings’ are subsume into its main feature, namely its radical rejection of the Memorandum, of the Troika, the public debt, the government, austerity, corruption, a fictional parliamentary democracy, the European Commission, in short of the whole system!

It is surely not by chance if for the past two weeks demonstrators shout such phrases as ‘We owe nothing, we sell nothing, we pay nothing’, ‘We do not sell or sell ourselves’, ‘Let them all go, Memorandum, Troika, government and debt’ or ‘We’ll stay until they go’. Such catchwords do unite all demonstrators as indeed all that is related to their refusal to pay for the public debt.[2] This is why the campaign for an audit Commission of the public debt is a great success throughout the country. Its stall in the middle of Syntagma square is constantly besieged by a crowd of people eager to sign the call or to offer their services as voluntary helpers…[3]

While they were first completely disorganized the Syntagma Aganaktismeni have gradually developed an organization that culminates in the popular Assembly held every night at 9 and drawing several hundreds speakers in front of an attentive audience of thousands. Debates are often of really great quality (for instance on the public debt), actually much better than anything that can be seen on the major television channels. This in spite of the surrounding noise (we stand in the middle of a city with 4 million inhabitants), dozens of thousands of people constantly moving, and particularly the very diverse composition of those huge audiences in the midst of a permanent encampment that looks at times like some Tower of Babel.

All the qualities of direct democracy as experimented day after day on Syntagma should not blind us to its weaknesses, its ambiguities or indeed its defects as its initial allergy to anything that might remind of a political party or a trade union or an established collectivity. While it has to be acknowledged that such rejection is a dominant feature among the Aganaktismeni, who tend to reject the political world as a whole, we should note the dramatic development of the Popular Assembly, both in Athens and in Thessaloniki, that shifted from a rejection of trade unions to the invitation that they should come and demonstrate with them on Syntagma.

Obviously, as days went by, the political landscape on Syntagma square clarified, with the popular right and far right located in the higher section, in front of Parliament, and the anarchist and radical left on the square itself, with control on the popular assembly and the permanent encampment. Of course, though the radical left is dominant and tinges with deep red all events and demonstrations on Syntagma, this does not mean that the various components of the right, from populist, to nationalist, to racist and even neonazi, do not further attempt to highjack this massive popular movement. They will endure and it will very much depend on the ability of the movement’s avant-garde to root it properly in neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools while defining clear goals that throw bridges between huge immediate needs and a vindictive outrage against the system.

While fairly different from the similar movement in Spain through its dimensions, its social composition, its radical nature and its political heterogeneity, the movement on Syntagma shares with Tahrir square in Cairo and Puerta del Sol in Madrid the same hatred against the economic and political elite that has grabbed and emptied of any significance bourgeois parliamentary democracy in times of arrogant and inhuman neoliberalism. The movement is stirred by the same non violent democratic and participative urge that is to be found in all popular uprisings in the early 21st century.

Our conclusion can only provisional: whatever is to come (and the consequences may be cataclysmic), the current Greek movement will have marked a turning point in the history of the country. From now on everything is possible and nothing will ever be the same again.

Translated by Christine Pagnoulle

Yorgos Mitralias is founding member of the Greek Committee Against the Debt, which is affiliated to the international network of CADTM (www.cadtm.org ). See the web site of the Greek Committee : http://www.contra-xreos.gr/

Notes

[2] See http://www.cadtm.org/Greece-the-very-symbol-of and http://www.cadtm.org/ La-campagne-pour-un-audit-de-la (in French).

[3] http://www.cadtm.org/Why-a-debt-audit-in-Greece

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=25219

*

[vanlose kid]

Why a debt audit in Greece

13 May by Maria Lucia Fattorelli
printer Save this article in PDF

After 6 days in Greece, all I could hear from many Greek people is: “we don’t know what is our public debt; we can’t understand how come it became so immense, because we don’t see it’s correspondence in investments, benefits, or anything to the country; workers only know we are paying too much taxes and having our rights being cut down every day with closing of schools, hospitals, kindergartens; employee going high and we’re are hit every day with terrorist information about the future of our country’s economy and even risk for our historical monuments”.

The women are the main victims of these measures, because they are the first ones to be filled from their jobs, and the last ones in line for new jobs. Also, when social services are cut down or eliminated, it’s expected that women will take care of services like health, education, assistance, children care, and many others, without any payment.

People is confused because everything is going on too fast and day by day new adjustment measures are announced, with the strong interference of IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission – the Troika - in the internal matters of Greece economy and policies, interfering directly in the people’s life and in Greek’s sovereignty.

One year ago, the memorandum was signed with IMF. Since then, currently new revisions and new measures are imposed directly to the Greek society, because the Greek Parliament is not even voting these measures that are recommended by the Troika and, in the next day, are already being practiced. The direct intervention of the Troika is a completely new situation for a society who gave birth to democratic way of government in the world history.

All this social, economic and political damage is a consequence of the so called “debt” crisis. But we must remember that it didn’t start as a debt crisis, but as a bank crisis: a financial private sector problem.

In 2008, the largest financial crisis beat the main financial institutions in the USA, because of a huge “bubble” originated by the issuing of an immeasurable amount of series and series of derivatives and other kinds of financial products without any real value, which loaded the financial market of “garbage”. This procedures were possible because the existing controls under the SEC |1| - that had the role, since the 1929 crisis, to control the “quality and authentic” of papers deal in the financial market – were disrespected and bypassed for the many financial institutions.

The media generally nominates these “garbage” papers as “toxic assets”. The amount of derivatives and all toxic papers was so large that Obama thought about creating “bad banks” in order to “clean up” the financial system. That idea also came up in Europe in early 2009:


It’s very important to know that the institutions who issued these papers are the largest and most important ones of the financial world, because they are the ones who have “credibility” to have their own papers accepted and negotiated in the financial market. Only very few of these important institutions broke up - Lehman Brothers, for example - but soon the USA approved a plan to bailout the financial system, by transferring great amount of public resources into financial institutions in order to rescue them, saving them from bankruptcy. The same plan went on in Europe in 2009, and since the beginning, everyone knew this plan represented a serious risk for all countries, as shown on the Feb 2009 new:


Thus, in a certain point, besides aware of the risk of economic ruin, all countries in the North started to put a lot of money in the financial sector, in order to rescue institutions. There is no transparency about this amount of money that has been given by countries to the financial sector. Estimative goes up to trillions, but no country has revealed clearly the right amount that has been given to bailout banks since 2008, and many “secret” documents – as mentioned in the notice above – has been produced.

The worry part of the history is that the northern countries didn’t have, on their budgets, all the money they decided to give to banks. This way, countries created public debt by issuing public bonds to give to banks in order to fill up the big role created by their “toxic assets”. So, a significant part or the “sovereign bonds” of these countries did not represent real “public debt”, or bond issuing to obtain resources to the country, but simply the utilization of debt mechanism to guaranty funds to financial institutions.

Besides this, the deregulation of the financial market is permitting the use of sovereign debt bonds as if they were cards or chips of a casino, used for gamblers bets and games. How can a society be responsible for the losses of such irresponsible and immoral operations, which are taking money from essential services like Health, Education, Assistance, Security, Sanitation, provoking the loss of thousands of employee and, in the other side, making many gamblers very very rich?

Can the result of these operations be considered as “public debt”? The good economy books explain that public debt is an instrument that can be used to finance the stat needs. The bonds issued to bailout banks can’t be considered as public debt, but should be treated as a separated loan to be paid by the banks, not by the entire society.

The instrument of “public debt” is being used now in Europe as it has been used in Latin America since the 70’s. The experiences of debt audit – official audit in Ecuador and citizen initiative in Brazil – have proved that in the last 40 years the only beneficiary of the commercial external debt were the large international banks; instead of being an instrument to finance state activities, this kind of debt in bonds was a mechanism to transfer public resources into the private financial sector.

The debt-audit also proved that the financial crises we had in 1982 were provoked by the same international private creditors and that crises opened the opportunity for an intense interference of IMF in our economies with fiscal adjustment plans – just like it’s happening now in Europe – that cost as at least 2 decades of heavy social sacrifice (that we call lost decades) in order to guarantee benefits for the financial sector.

It’s very important that European countries, who are not under dictatorships as we were in the 80’s in South America, organize civil commissions, like our organization in Brazil - to research documents, encourage popular investigations, studies, social mobilization and elucidation about this debt process as soon as possible.

A debt-audit is an opportunity to have documents and proves of the real nature of the so called “public” debt. The findings of the audit can push concrete actions in all fields: popular, parliamentarian, legal and any other policies.

Most part of Greek public debt is reflected in sovereign bonds. The first question we must ask is: What part of Greek public debt comes from bonds issued to rescue banks? What part of this debt has never being really received by Greece, because is just a result of financial mechanisms, attacks, and speculations in financial market? Does anyone own what has never received? Is it right that all Greek people pay for this?

That’s why it’s so important to have a debt audit in Greece and the organizers of the recent Conference of Debt Audit in Athens and Seminar in Tessaloniki deserve all congratulations for opening this urgent debate.

Footnotes

|1| SEC - Securities and Exchange Comission in United States of America.
P.S.

Maria Lucia Fattorelli is Coordinator of Citizen Debt Audit-Brazil since 2001; Member of the Commission of Debt Audit of Ecuador (2007-2008) and Assessor of Brazilian Parliamentarian Investigation of Public Debt (2009-2010): CPI da Dívida da Câmara dos Deputados em Brasília. www.divida-auditoriacidada.org.br Citizen Debt Audit-Brazil is part of CADTM international network.

http://www.cadtm.org/Why-a-debt-audit-in-Greece

*

[vanlose kid]

Support the campaign to audit Europe’s public debt

4 March by Costas Lapavitsas

Public debt is at the heart of the eurozone crisis. Greek public debt, already very high for years, has grown extraordinarily since 2009. Irish public debt has escalated once the debts of private banks were added to it. Portugal and Spain threaten to go the same way. Similar trends can be seen in other European countries, the UK not excluded.

Common patterns usually have common causes. The global crisis of 2007-9 resulted in huge costs, partly due to rescuing the financial system, partly due to falling output and rising unemployment. In the eurozone things were made worse because the common currency had weakened peripheral countries, giving rise to large current account deficits. Peripheral weakness was masked for a while by credit-fuelled booms in real estate and consumption, but this only made the blow of the crisis more severe.

Rising public debt has eventually led to adoption of austerity policies by several European governments. Public expenditure, including on health and education, has been cut; wages and pensions have been compressed; indirect taxes have been raised. The costs of the crisis have been transferred onto the shoulders of people who had nothing to do with the financial orgy of 2001-7. In the periphery of the eurozone the transfer of costs has taken catastrophic dimensions, with collapsing incomes and mass unemployment.

These austerity policies pose major problems of democratic accountability, quite apart from their social and economic implications. Working people have been called upon to shoulder the burden of public debt, but have they been properly informed about its composition, its terms, and its sources? The answer is a resounding no in several European countries. Publicly available information is scant, partial and hard to obtain. Important aspects of issuing debt, such as the operations of banks in the bond markets, remain shrouded in mystery. Even less is known about the role of politicians and their connections with financial institutions, property developers and other captains of private enterprise. Parliamentary elections are completely insufficient to shed light on these questions.

In Greece and Ireland the issue is burning. Can we be certain that the bulk of Greek public debt is legal, given especially that it has been contracted in direct contravention of EU treaties which state that public debt must not exceed 60% of GDP? The creditors – mostly core European banks – were fully aware of flouting this legal requirement when they lent to the Greek state. Is Irish public debt legitimate, given than much of it is speculative bank lending with a public tag placed on it? Is debt in both countries ethically and morally sustainable if servicing it implies the destruction of normal social life?

To find answers, countries should form audit commissions that will be independent of political parties but also of parliament and other mechanisms of the state. They should comprise public auditors, economists, lawyers and other specialists, but also representatives of civil society and organised labour. They must have powers to demand public documents, call upon civil servants and others to give evidence, and even access bank accounts. On this basis they should examine public debt to determine whether it is illegal, illegitimate, odious, or simply unsustainable. Society will then have more secure grounds to decide how to tackle public debt. Not least, audit commissions could act as a first step in exercising democratic control over future public debt, instead of accepting the arbitrary rules that Germany now wishes to impose on the constitutions of eurozone members.

There is plenty of experience of forming audit commissions in developing countries. It is time to transfer this know-how to Europe, adapting it to the conditions of richer and more complex societies. For once, Greece is taking the lead. A campaign to form an audit commission was launched on 3 March with support by 200 prominent signatories from across the world and thousands of others in Greece. The aim is to create a broad movement that will demand independent knowledge and control over public debt. Given the parlous state of the country, the omens are favourable.

If the Greek people succeed in this endeavour, there is no reason why the Irish people, and still others across Europe, could not follow in their footsteps. We shall then see for ourselves how irresistible the international bond markets truly are.

http://www.cadtm.org/Support-the-campaign-to-audit

*

[vanlose kid]

Greece must deny to pay an odious debt

11 June by Nicolas Mottas
printer Save this article in PDF

Today is the 11th consequent day of mass demonstrations in front of the Greek Parliament in Athens, as well as in other cities of the country. One year after the signing of the notorious bailout deal between the Greek government, the IMF and the EU, the fiscal situation is dissapointing. But even more than that, the living standards of the Greeks have been enormously affected by the unprecedented neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the deal.

The whole situation seems to be a vicious circle: Greece borrows money in order to pay off her mounting debt ( 262 billion) by creating a new future debt - the one of the IMF-EU bailout deal. On the same time the country’s financial and political sovereignty is bound hand and foot by an agreement which, although signed by the government, is not endorsed by the vast majority of the people. The future generations of Greeks will have to carry in their backs the results of an unholy alliance made by international bankers, foreign creditors and European governments. This is neither moral nor rightful.

Ecuador was in a similar position four years ago - it was then when President Rafael Correa had bravely decided to default of the latin American country’s $3.8 billion debt by unilateraly eliminating it as "illegitimate". That should be the example for Greece, as well as for other countries which have been victims of financial speculations and neoliberal austerity. It is a historical need for the European governments which feel the loop of debt around their necks to take generous decisions contrary to the demands of the technocratic elites in Brussels, Berlin or Washington. Greece has the opportunity do the beginning of a revolutionary action against the global capitalist establishment.

1. The IMF-EU bailout deal for Greece is in fact an anti-constitutional agreement. Constitutional Law Professor at Athens University, Georgios Kasimatis, has pointed out that "the provisions included in the loan contract and the bailout deal violate all principles of the Greek constitution, the European and International Law" . Therefore, the Greeks have every legal and moral right to defend their constitution against policies which tend to eliminate the country’s very sovereignty.

2. The debt crisis in many countries of the eurozone (Greece, Ireland, Portugal etc) is nothing but part of the severe crisis which modern capitalism is passing by. The neoliberal experiments in the European Union have been proved a total failure for the working and middle-classes while it has created profit-addicted economic elites. The denial to pay off the debt would be a blow to this anti-social liberal madness and would send a strong message to international loan sharks.

3. The case of Ecuador can be used as an example. Although the Greek debt is much higher and the economies of the two countries are generally different, Eric Toussaint (Campaign for the Cancellation of Third World Debt CADTM) argues that there are some similarities: "First, Greece is financing a part of debt in the form of bonds by the Government authorities ("securitization of public debt"), a technique used by Ecuador. Second, another large part of the Greek debt is in the form of bank loans, which is also the case for developing countries. [...] "Ecuador s debt was mainly owed to the banks in the U.S. In 200 Ecuador abandoned its national currency and adopted the U.S. Dollar, the currency of its lender. Similarly Greece has the same currency with its lenders, such as France and Germany, the Euro". (Ethnos, 9 January 2011).

4. The cancellation of the vast majority of the Greek debt is definitely a prerequisite for the recovery of the country’s economy and the relief of the population from the harsh austerity policies. The same applies to the cases of Ireland and Portugal. By challenging the overcharging debt, the Europeans can directly challenge the E.U. economic establishment itself thus rejecting the neoliberal practices of the last decades. A new policy is needed which will take into consideration the real needs of the masses, the vested rights of the working class and the strengthening of social solidarity within the Union.

5. The theory of the "odious debt" is not a general or newly-founded concept. It is based on the principles of international law (U.N. Charter) and can be legally used when the debt "has been incurred, not in the interests of people, but against its interests and/or in the personal interest of the rulers or persons close to the regime". According to Law Professor at University of Michigan Robert Howse "the international law obligation to repay debt has never been accepted as absolute". (U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, July 2007). But, furthermore, institutions like the World Bank and the IMF must be checked for their policies towards lending money, advocating exhausting austerity mechanisms and, moreover, co-operating with corrupt and dictatorial regimes.

6. The cancellation of the debts for third-world countries as well as for states which has been severely hitted by the recent financial crisis is, in the end of the day, a demand for a fairer world - an international environment where people will be above profits and where elected governments, not bankers, multinational companies or rate agencies, will manage the fate of a country’s economy.

When these lines were written, more than 100,000 Greeks were demonstrating outside the Parliament in central Athens - public anger and desperation becomes bigger day by day and the concequences cannot be predicted. The "indignants" are asking for jobs, social policies, fair distribution of wealth, justice and that those who are responsible for the crisis to pay for it. They are asking for hope, without the nightmare of austerity and misery imposed by a corrupted political system. The Greek government along with the EU have the moral responsibility to stand in solidarity with the people and relieve them from the unbearable weight of an illegitimate and "dirty" debt.

See online : http://www.aganaktismenoi.com/index...

http://www.cadtm.org/Greece-must-deny-to-pay-an-odious

*

[vanlose kid]

Hackers Deface Website Of Greek Presidency
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2011 10:38 -040


Update: the website has now been taken offline

First Citi, next the Senate, now the website of the Greek presidency: the global hacking campaign is getting ever more "effective."

Before:



After (now with its own remixed Requiem for a Dream soundtrack):



The caption says:

I woke up! We are strong and many no one can bury us, nobody can take advantage of us, we do not owe them
we want our dreams to reality, we want to live, we want to breathe freely WE WANT THE GREEKS IN GREECE!

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hacker ... presidency

Kathimerini Reports Of An Imminent Greek Cabinet Reshuffle, Finance Minister Likely To Be Ousted
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2011 10:18 -0400


It appears that "Goldman employee of the decade", Greek Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou's days in parliament may be numbered. According to Greek daily Kathimerini, following the commencing of the Troica's midterm fiscal plan review by the parliament tomorrow, there could be a substantial reshuffling in the Greek cabinet: "Prime Minister George Papandreou will soon conduct a Cabinet reshuffle but has not yet decided if it will be before or after the government’s medium-term fiscal plan is voted through Parliament, sources told Kathimerini. From the website: "The two options being discussed by Papandreou and his closest advisers are either to shakeup his team of ministers as soon as possible, possibly even as early as this week, or to make changes to his Cabinet after the government’s economic proposals have been debated and voted on in Parliament. This would mean that the reshuffle would happen in early July." While there are risks that the vote on the IMF-imposed fiscal plan may fail, this appears to not be a big concern in Greece currently: "Papandreou and his aides appear confident that PASOK MPs will not scupper the midterm fiscal plan in Parliament. The government has a six-seat majority and while it is expected that one or two deputies might vote against the proposals, which include further cuts to public spending and more tax hikes, there will not be a large rebellion." Yet, several high profile pink slips are expected: "It is expected that one of the casualties of the reshuffle will be Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou, who has been severely criticized by PASOK deputies in recent weeks, both because of the measures he has adopted and due to claims that he has failed to consult with them." Of course, all of this ignores the popular mood which so far has been peaceful, although it may all come to a head during tomorrow's major strike and Parliament blockade. We hope to webcast from Athens as soon as practical.

More from Kathimerini:

The passage of the fiscal plan through Parliament will mark a crucial few days for the government. A parliamentary committee is due to begin reviewing the bill tomorrow. This process will last until the end of the week and the committee is due to sit again for a second review a week later. The draft law is likely to be submitted in Parliament on June 27 or 28 before a vote on June 30. It is possible that the vote will be delayed by a week.

It is expected that one of the casualties of the reshuffle will be Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou, who has been severely criticized by PASOK deputies in recent weeks, both because of the measures he has adopted and due to claims that he has failed to consult with them.

A number of people have been linked to the role of finance minister, including the former vice president of the European Central Bank Lucas Papademos, who has recently been acting as an informal adviser to Papandreou. However, sources suggested that the prime minister might opt to place one of the government’s better communicators in the post, which could mean either Regional Development Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis or Education Minister Anna Diamantopoulou taking over.

In an interview with Sunday’s To Vima newspaper, Papandreou said he was open to the idea of bringing people with “wide appeal” into the government, suggesting that he may look to recruit ministers from outside of his party.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/kathim ... -be-ousted

*

[JackRiddler]

SNIP



The caption says:

I woke up! We are strong and many no one can bury us, nobody can take advantage of us, we do not owe them
we want our dreams to reality, we want to live, we want to breathe freely WE WANT THE GREEKS IN GREECE!

SNIP

I woke up! Yeah! Put the Greeks in Greece! (Huh?)

Hi ya VK! So in exchange for an improvement on that pretty bad translation, I'll probably steal all your Greek stuff for the Wall St. thread. Thanks!!!

Here's a better if not perfect translation - it's a run-on so I punctuated to break up the phrases:

WE HAVE AWAKENED! We are here, strong and many - no one can bury us anymore - no one can exploit us - they owe us, we don't owe them - we want our dreams to become flesh and bones - we want to live, we want to breathe free.
WE WANT GREECE TO THE GREEKS!!

- orestis

[/quote]

The latter surely means: As opposed to giving Greece to the Troika. (I have heard nothing about xenophobic or anti-immigrant sentiments in the protests.)

The Greek paper in New York (the National Herald) today headlines a warning of Greece as the possible new Lehman (again?). They also urge Greek-Americans to visit the mother country this summer. They've been running an editorial campaign to guilt-trip Greek-Americans into vaguely feeling more connected and getting involved, without specifying on behalf of what. The presumption near as I can dope out the bourgeois euphemisms is that Greek-Americans will support the "responsible" option, but the paper is wise not to spell that out too explicitly. Also, we should lobby Obama for help against Mean Old Merkel.

They had a photo of a protester with a sign bearing the three slogans:

We don't owe
We won't sell
We won't pay

This rhymes and has good rhythm: De Hrostame, De Poulame, De Plironoume.

The paper's been backing Papandreou as the responsible steward in the face of the mean old troika, there's no choice about taking the medicine and bankruptcy would be terrible (as opposed to eternal debt slavery?!).

(I wake up - and nothing gets me down. You got to ro-o-oll with the punches! Just gotta say jump! Jump! Hey hey hey hey.)

.

[vanlose kid]

*

efxaristo para poli Jack. excellent!

*

[vanlose kid]

*

Greek Ruling Party Members Rebel: Another MP To Vote Against Bailout So "He Can Safely Walk The Streets"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2011 16:15 -0400

Earlier today, we reported about Kozani Alekos Athanasiadis, a member of parliament for the Greek ruling PASOK party, who in a radio interview said that he would vote against the medium-term program. Next up is Giorgos Lianis who has just tendered his resignation as a member of Pasok's central committee, but is keeping his parliament seat and will continue to serve as an independent, leaving the ruling Pasok party with 155 MPs. Athens News reports: "Commenting on the public anger over the austerity measures on the Alter television channel late last year, Lianis had declared his intention to leave politics in order to be able to safely "walk the streets." It is uncler what the state of the other 155 or so PASOK members will be when walking the streets should they indeed proceed to go ahead and vote on the medium-term fiscal program, whose discussions begin tomorrow and which is expected to see a vote on June 28. Elsewhere both the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and Radical Left Coalition (Syriza) announced that they will refrain from all Parliamentary procedures that concern the Mid-Term Fiscal Strategy, including participation in the competent committee and the Parliamentary plenary session. A statement issued underlined that "the anti-popular monstrosity is condemned and voted down because it serves the interests of plutocracy and levels off the rights of the workers and the people."

More details on Lianis' decision from Protothema:

Mr. Lianis is expected to make a public statement during the day. At the same time a government communiqué is also expected.

“I no longer believe in the economic policies that we have followed. Since we failed, we have been trying to hide the truth from the people”, states the four-page letter from the Florian MP.

“Everyone now admits that our economic policy was wrong. It is up to us to admit our mistake. It is up to us to apologize to the Greek people and to radically change our policies, as hard as that may prove”, he states.

Mr. Lianis notes that he voted for Memorandum 1, thinking that otherwise, Greece would go bankrupt and thousands of Greeks would remain unpaid.
“If the medium-term plan is the only thing that can save Greece from destruction, it should be decided on by a nationwide commitment of all parties and all Greeks”, he said.

“It would be wonderful for three or four parliament members to be able to save the country each time. Wonderful is one step away from ridiculous. I cannot be coerced to enter the same process again (…). Voting is coercive, and they should be anything but that. I cannot bear the Sisyphic burden that you are putting on our shoulders, while at the same time you baptize us as the country’s saviors. This is hypocritical”, states Mr. Lianis in the letter.

The MP also mentions the situation of his county, complaining that Florian has the highest unemployment rate in Greece and the European Union. Its train line has been denied since the line between Thessaloniki and Florina was described as sterile. Two sections of the university were closed reducing the students in the county by 2000. Mines are closed, the dam covering ten villages worth of water requirement has been shut down.

“Maybe we are talking about two types of borders” states Giorgos Lianis. “Achievements of 25 years of labour, made under your own contribution are either shrunk to nothingness of auctioned off”, he underlines, referring directly to the Prime Minister.

“Mr. President, we have humiliated, hurt and wronged the Greek people. A proud people, full of fighting spirit. That’s why the people humiliate us now. We have hurt and wronged Florina. I feel the urge to apologize to the Greeks and my compatriots. We have taken human dignity away from them”, he includes in his statement.

Last but not least, Mr. Lianis states that he does not intend to run in the upcoming elections and does not intend to resign. “It is neither fitting to my personal beliefs nor to the voters of Florina, that I would set another parliament member representative of the country. That will only be up to the people of the county in the elections”.

Lastly, a third PASOK member appears to have also resigned in symbolic revolt over what increasingly more even within the ruling party are realizing is treason of their own people:

The resignation of former MP and minister Antonis Kotsakas from the PASOK National Council had preceded Mr. Lianis’. In a statement towards the Prime Minister stated that he is quitting “the party formerly known as PASOK”, clarifying that “I am not leaving the party. The party left itself”.

All this is happening as all eyes turn to Athens tomorrow, where a general strike is expect to paralyze the country, and hundreds of thousands will be piling in front of the Parliament as the protest meetings, so far peaceful, now enter into their 3 week.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/greek- ... walk-stree

*

[vanlose kid]

*

can't embed, so i'm pasting the links only.

Televizing The (Second) Greek Revolution - Three Live Streams From Syntagma Square
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/15/2011 07:03 -0400

Greece's D-Day has arrived: June 15 may soon be the 2011 equivalent of May 6, 2010 when the reaction to the realization that Greece was insolvent hit the population, together with a peak in hostilities, not to mention the US market flash crashing. In addition to a general strike, thousands are already packing the central Syntagma square in Athens, where MPa have started congregating to commence deliberations on the Troica's mid-term fiscal proposal. Already there has been tear gas fired at protesters who are gradually shifting away from their peaceful posture and slowly becoming unruly. Below is a live feed of the square as well as a link to an English live blog following up to the minute events.

Live stream 1:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjap5w ... yyyyy_news
LIVE STREAMING: Η Αγαν?κτηση των Ελλ?νων by News247

Live stream 2:

protothema.gr

And a catch-it-all multistream:

http://www.livestream.com/stopcarteltvgr
Watch live streaming video from stopcarteltvgr at livestream.com

And the latest developments courtesy of Keeptalkinggreece.com

11:30 am Thousands gather at the rally of public and private sector labour unions GESEE & ADEDY at Pedio toy Areos Park.

Athens Metro Station ‘Evaggelismos’ is closed. The metro passes through but passengers can not get on or out.

11:40 Greek media decided to cancel their strike after 12:00 at noon time – Greeks want information on such important day, right!?

PM Papandreou will hold an extraordinary meeting with President Papoulias at 1 pm. He will reportedly call another meeting with political leaders to seek consensus for the Mid-Term Package.

11:55 Thousands Boos were heard when the Prime Minister’s convoy headed to PM’s manor.

Protesters hurled eggs, bitter oranges and bottles with water over the riot-police ‘wall’ to the President’s convoy

The rally organized by Greek Communist Party labour union PAME is heading to the Parliament. Estimated more than 15,000 people.

12:30 Tension as protesters tried to push down the ‘iron blockade’. They hurl water bottles over the blockade to riot policemen.

For 21 days the protests were peaceful. However the ‘iron & plexiglass wall’ seems to have the same effect as a piece of a red cloth has on a bull.

[athens june15_2]

video earlier

12:35 Tear gas against protesters attacking the iron blockade – protesters very very angry
Σ?νταγμα 15062011 by cosmogr

12:38 Athens Stock Exchange down -3.65% – It cannot stand the rapid political developments, the emerging parliamentary stalemate, the scenarios about early elections and the unprecedented protests in the city center.

12:40 Live Streaming and Live Blogging in Greek news247

12:48 Riot police has orders to ‘answer’ protesters’ attacks (skai tv). Tension is still high around the ‘iron blockade’, protesters hurl stones and water bottles.

[athens june15_3]

see more pictures in www.newsbeast.gr

12:57 There are reports of fired tear gas against protesters at Rigilis Sq – 500 me from Parliament – there are reports of clashes among protesters’ groups

video – earlier: protesters attack the iron blockade

13:10 Big tension at Rigilis Sq – Tear gas – Protesters tried to break through riot police – Police and protesters chase each other

PM Papandreou meeting with the President ” National effort is needed, we are in crucial historical moment. National consensus is needed. I am in contact with political leaders on this. We will continue with responsibility to bring the country out from the crisis”.

Scenarios speak of the establishment of a broader governement , after Friday, with the participation of all political parties.

13:16 small scale riots hooded, indignants, far-leftists and far-rights, riot police, tear gas right in front of the Parliament. Efforts to push away the hooded – provocation to spoil the peaceful protest???

13:46 Still tension – Indignant Greeks chase hooded Greeks hurling molotof cocktails. Sticky air due to exessive use of tear gas in front of the Parliament.

More here

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/livest ... t-blockade

*