Category Archives: Lands

Yanis Varoufakis explains why he resigned as Greece’s finance minister

Yanis Varoufakis writes: The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage.

Like all struggles for democratic rights, so too this historic rejection of the Eurogroup’s 25th June ultimatum comes with a large price tag attached. It is, therefore, essential that the great capital bestowed upon our government by the splendid NO vote be invested immediately into a YES to a proper resolution – to an agreement that involves debt restructuring, less austerity, redistribution in favour of the needy, and real reforms.

Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my… ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.

I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum.

And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.

We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office. I shall support fully Prime Minister Tsipras, the new Minister of Finance, and our government.

The superhuman effort to honour the brave people of Greece, and the famous OXI (NO) that they granted to democrats the world over, is just beginning.

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Greece votes No: experts respond

By Costas Milas, University of Liverpool; George Kyris, University of Birmingham; James Arvanitakis, University of Western Sydney; Marianna Fotaki, University of Warwick; Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne; Remy Davison, Monash University; Richard Holden, UNSW Australia; Ross Buckley, UNSW Australia, and Sofia Vasilopoulou, University of York

The Greek people have voted, saying a resounding No to the terms of the bailout deal offered by their international creditors. What will this mean for Greece, the euro and the future of the EU? Our experts explain what happens next.

Costas Milas, Professor of Finance, University of Liverpool

Greek voters have confirmed their support for their prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, who now has the extremely challenging task of renegotiating a “better” deal for his country.

Nevertheless, time is very short. Greece’s economic situation is critical. On July 2, Greek banks reportedly had only €500m in cash reserves. This buffer is not even 0.5% of the €120 billion deposits that Greek citizens have to their names. It is only capital controls preventing Greek banks from collapsing under the strain of withdrawal.

Basic mathematical calculations reveal how desperate the situation is. There are roughly 9.9m registered Greek voters. Assume that – irrespective of whether they voted Yes or No – some 2.8m voters (that is, a very modest 28.2% of the total number of registered voters) decide to withdraw their daily limit of €60 from cash machines on Monday morning. Following this pattern, banks will run out of cash in three days and therefore collapse (note: 3 x 2.8m x 60 ≈ 500m).

There is therefore very little time for the Greek government to strike the deal with their creditors that will instantaneously give the ECB the “green light” to inject additional Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to Greek banks to support their cash buffer and save them from collapse. In other words, Greece does not have the luxury of playing “hard ball” with its creditors. An agreement has to be imminent.

Financial markets, expected to start very nervously on Monday morning, will probably stay relatively calm as the reality of the economic situation spelled out above is more likely than not to lead to some sort of agreement (provided, of course, that Greece’s creditors will listen to Tsipras). Whether this agreement is good for the Greeks, this is an entirely different story.

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Backing down on Greece’s debt is the safest, most rational option

John Quiggin writes: Lots of people have raised the suggestion of applying game theory to the the Greek debt crisis. I haven’t attempted this, reflecting my general scepticism about game theory in the absence of a well-defined strategy space.

But now the Greek government and public have made what is, in effect, a final move.

In view of the No vote, Syriza can’t accept a deal that doesn’t include an explicit debt write-off, or one that obviously crosses its stated red lines. Within those parameters, it’s clearly eager for a face-saving compromise.

For the other side (effectively the Troika and the German government), since Syriza’s move has already been made, the problem has now been reduced to one of decision under uncertainty, which is something I am comfortable with.

More precisely, it’s a choice between a “safe” option, with an outcome that is fairly predictable, and a “risky” option where the outcome is uncertain.

The safe option for the European institutions is to back down, write off lots of debt and lose a lot of face. [Continue reading…]

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More than 2,800 people are dead in Yemen – so why aren’t we outraged?

By Sophia Dingli, University of Hull

In the summer of 2014, our screens were inundated with videos of the carnage from the streets of Gaza. The European media was outraged, and the sense of moral urgency was amplified across social media. Similar outrage greeted the destruction of UNESCO heritage sites in both Iraq and Syria with the condemnation of Islamic State’s barbarism reaching a crescendo when it overtook Syria’s majestic city of Palmyra.

Compare this coverage to the almost universal silence on the ongoing war in Yemen, which is largely absent from our TV screens, Facebook and Twitter trending topics sections and the front pages of broadsheet papers.

Admittedly, the Yemen conflict is a complicated matter, where the Saudi “bad guys” in the northern half of the country are looked upon as potential saviours in the southern half. The war includes a number of factions, and provides no easy narratives for the casual news watcher to follow.

Of course, neither the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor the Islamic State’s onslaught are simple matters, but the Western media has plenty of simplified narratives and stereotypes at its disposal to structure its coverage. And crucially, the media coverage of both Israel-Palestine and Islamic State is loud and clear in its condemnation of the human cost, both civilian and cultural.

So it may come as a surprise to learn the the damage inflicted upon Yemen and Yemenis since March 2015, when the Houthi rebels’ march toward Aden was met with a massive Saudi-led offensive, has already claimed more casualties than the last Israeli offensive in Gaza and has destroyed parts of a UNESCO world heritage site. Worse yet, it shows no signs of stopping.

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ISIS’s strategy: Lasting and expanding

Lina Khatib writes: The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS and ISIL, for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) has signaled the start of a new jihadist era. The Islamic State has declared a long-term goal, which is to establish an Islamic state, or a caliphate, based on an extremist interpretation of sharia, making it more than just a terrorist organization despite its origins as an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic State is a hybrid jihadist group. It has appropriated the radical Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda while implementing the centralized command model of the paramilitary Hezbollah and some tactics from the Taliban’s local governance structures.

Its strategy for survival and growth has relied on a number of components: pragmatism regarding the Syrian regime; the control and development of territories as a method of commanding local populations and attracting foreign fighters; the use of ideology and the media as tools to control populations, recruit fighters, and raise funds; and a centralized military strategy.

Since its expansion into Syria in 2013, the Sunni extremist group has been engaged in an existential battle with al-Qaeda. And, with all of its strategic tools, the Islamic State has presented itself as the “true” al-Qaeda, asserting that it is making al-Qaeda’s ideological goal of an Islamic state a concrete reality, which provides a cloak of authenticity that has appealed to donors and recruits.

But although ideology plays an important role in how the Islamic State operates, the organization’s strategic objectives are not driven by ideology but instead revolve around the acquisition of money, resources, and power. Establishing a caliphate in Iraq and Syria is therefore the beginning, not the end, for the group—the clue to the Islamic State’s long-term aims lies in its slogan, “lasting and expanding” (baqiya wa tatamaddad). However, this does not mean simply the indefinite geographical expansion of the caliphate’s physical boundaries, but also the expansion of its global influence in order to support the viability of the state project. [Continue reading…]

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Why isn’t U.S. tougher on Turkey’s hesitance to fight ISIS?

McClatchy reports: Last fall, when faced with questions about why NATO partner and regional ally Turkey wasn’t pulling its weight in the fight against the Islamic State, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that there was “no discrepancy” between U.S. and Turkish policy on the extremists and said Ankara would define its role on its own timetable.

Eight months later, that role is as undefined as ever, and Washington is no more likely to criticize Turkey for it.

Analysts of Turkey’s foreign policy say that Ankara’s often contradictory measures and messages come from two main sources: pockets of Islamic State sympathizers within the leadership, and the broader alarm over Kurdish land grabs as a result of the Syrian conflict. Ankara’s mission is ensuring that the Kurds next door don’t gain ground for a future autonomous state that could affect Turkey’s own conflict with its large Kurdish population. The Kurdish YPG militia in Syria, with U.S. assistance, has scored several recent military victories over the Islamic State, a situation that has drawn criticism, not praise, from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the analysts also acknowledge that Turkey remains unhappy that the Obama administration won’t more aggressively help topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and hasn’t outlined how it would protect Turkey from Islamic State retaliation or an influx of even more refugees; thanks to the Syrian civil war, Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country.

In short, the analysts say, how could the Obama administration expect Turkey to do more when the United States has not provided a clear idea of objectives or identified an acceptable on-the-ground partner in Syria? [Continue reading…]

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Koch-backed group calls for no more national parks

Claire Moser writes: Just in time for the Fourth of July — when millions of people across the country will visit America’s national parks and other public lands — the Koch brothers are rolling out their latest campaign against these treasured places: pushing for no more national parks.

In an op-ed published in Tuesday’s New York Times, Reed Watson, the executive director at the Koch-backed Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), along with a research associate at the Center, call for no more national parks, citing the backlog in maintenance for existing parks.

“True conservation is taking care of the land and water you already have, not insatiably acquiring more and hoping it manages itself,” the op-ed reads. “Let’s maintain what we’ve already got, so we can protect it properly,” it concludes. [Continue reading…]

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Greek referendum No vote signals huge challenge to eurozone leaders

The Guardian reports: Five years of failed austerity policies in Greece and a total breakdown in trust between the leftwing Syriza alliance and the political leaders of its creditors climaxed in a national vote in which Greeks said no to the spending cuts and tax increases demanded by its lenders.

As the magnitude of the result became clear, thousands of no vote supporters began pouring into the central Syntagma Square in front of the parliament in Athens to celebrate, waving Greek flags and chanting “No, No.”

The sweeping victory for Tsipras, who challenged the might of Germany, France, Italy and the rest of the eurozone, represented a nightmare for the mainstream elites of the EU. With Greek banks closed, withdrawals limited, capital controls in place and the country rapidly running out of cash, emergency action will be needed almost immediately to stem the likelihood of a banking collapse. But it is not clear whether the European Central Bank will maintain a liquidity lifeline to Greece and whether the creditor governments of the eurozone will sanction instant moves to salvage Greece’s crashing financial system.

Germany’s vice-chancellor and social democratic leader, Sigmar Gabriel, said Tsipras had burned his bridges with the rest of the eurozone. But the Greek leader believes he has strengthened his negotiating hand.

Tsipras campaigned for a no vote, arguing that this was the best way to secure a better deal, keeping Greece in the euro while obtaining debt relief from its creditors. The leaders of Germany, France and others stated the opposite, that a no vote meant the Greeks were deciding to become the first country to quit the currency, membership of which is supposed to be irreversible.

It is not clear which view will prevail. The EU mainstream hoped for a yes vote, not only because it would have represented democratic assent to the euro and acceptance of austerity, but also because the Tsipras government would have come under strong pressure to stand down. Negotiations between the two sides have gone nowhere for five months and have become particularly rancorous in the past month as bailout and debt repayment deadlines came and went, with Athens missing a €1.5bn repayment to the IMF. The country now faces a €3.5bn payment to redeem bonds at the European Central Bank in two weeks.

Eurozone confidence in Tsipras is at rock bottom and there is virtually zero faith that he will implement reforms needed to secure cash even if he agrees to them. For his part, the fiery Greek leader as recently as Friday accused his eurozone creditors of blackmail, extortion, and seeking to humiliate his country.

What happens next in the five-year saga that has shaken the eurozone to its foundations is sheer guesswork.

But the Greek vote is a huge blow to EU leaders, particularly the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has dominated the crisis management through her insistence on fiscal rigour and cuts despite a huge economic slump, soaring unemployment and the immiseration of most of Greek society.

“The failure of the euro means the failure of Merkel’s [10-year] chancellorship,” said the cover of the latest issue of Der Spiegel, the German weekly. It depicted her sitting atop a Europe in ruins. [Continue reading…]

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How Europe played Greece

Alex Andreou writes: “They have decided to strangle us, whether we say yes or no”, said a Greek woman to me yesterday. “The only choice we have is to make it quick or slow. I will vote “oxi” (no). We are economically dead anyway. I might as well have my conscience clear and my pride intact.”

Her view is not atypical among friends and relations I have canvassed in the last few days. Trust has evaporated. Faith in European Institutions is thin on the ground. Lines have been crossed. At times of financial strain, a country’s currency issuer, its central bank, should act as lender of last resort and prime technocratic negotiator. In Greece’s case, the European Central Bank, sits on the same side as the creditors; acts as their enforcer. This is unprecedented.

The ECB has acted to asphyxiate the Greek economy – the ultimate blackmail to force subordination. The money is there, in our accounts, but we cannot have access to it, because the overseers of our own banking system, the very people who some months ago issued guarantees of liquidity, have decided to deny liquidity. We have phantom money, but no real money. There is a terrifying poetry to that, since the entire crisis was caused by too much phantom money in the first place. [Continue reading…]

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Greece, honor and the ancient ties of wergeld

By Alexander Douglas, Heythrop College, University of London

On the surface, it seems the Greek crisis is all about money. The Greek government has defaulted on a €1.6bn loan repayment to the IMF and is seeking a new bailout programme. Meanwhile, the Greek people are to take part in a referendum that is being billed as a choice between the euro and the drachma.

In fact this crisis is not about money. Greece’s creditors are well aware that Greece cannot repay or even service its debt. They are happy to keep finding ways to refinance it, so long as Greece agrees to punitive austerity policies. They aim for punishment, not repayment. They care about honour and vengeance, not money.

Modern Europe is witnessing an enactment of an ancient law known as wergeld. Greece is expected to continue paying, not until its financial debt has been cleared, but rather until its creditors think it has suffered enough.

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Quartet of crises threatens Europe’s core

Paul Taylor writes: An economic collapse of Greece, apart from the suffering it would cause and the lost billions for European taxpayers, could aggravate all three of Europe’s other crises and destabilize the fragile southern Balkans.

With tension already high in the eastern Mediterranean due to civil war in Syria, the eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the unresolved division of Cyprus and disputes over offshore gas fields, a shattered Greece might turn to Russia for help. In exchange, it might veto the next extension of EU sanctions against Moscow, or even offer access to naval facilities once used by the United States.

Athens is already struggling with an influx of refugees from the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts who wash up on its Aegean islands, seeking the safest transit route to Europe’s prosperous heartland in Germany or Sweden.

Cash-starved Greek authorities are more than happy to see them head north in search of asylum elsewhere in the EU. It is not hard to imagine a government cast out of the euro zone using migrants as a means of piling pressure on EU countries.

The “boat people” crisis has proved divisive in the EU, with Italy and other frontline states accusing their northern and eastern partners of lacking solidarity by refusing to co-finance or take in quotas of refugees. Britain has refused to take any.

Failure to resolve Greece’s debt crisis after five years of wrangling makes the EU look weak and divided in the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and others looking to expand their power.

Brussels officials acknowledge that the euro zone crisis has caused a renationalization of decision-making on some policies and sapped the “soft power” of Europe’s model of rules-based supranational governance. It has weakened the EU’s hand in world trade and climate change negotiations.

Worse may yet be to come.

Britain’s demand to renegotiate its membership terms and put the result to an uncertain referendum by 2017 raises the risk of the EU losing its second largest economy, main financial center and joint strongest military power. [Continue reading…]

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Europe wants to punish Greece with exit

Clive Cook writes: There’s no doubt that Greeks want to stay in the euro system — though I find it increasingly difficult to see why. If Greece leaves the system, it won’t be because Greeks decide to leave; it will be because Europe decides to kick them out.

This isn’t just semantics. There’s no reason, in law or logic, why a Greek default necessitates an exit from the euro. The European Central Bank pulls this trigger by choosing — choosing, please note — to withhold its services as lender of last resort to the Greek banking system. That is what it did this week. That is what shut the banks and, in short order, will force the Greek authorities to start issuing a parallel currency in the form of IOUs.

A truly independent ECB, willing to do whatever it takes to defend the euro system, could have announced that it would keep supplying Greek banks with liquidity. If the Greek banks are deemed in due course to be insolvent (which hasn’t happened yet), that doesn’t have to trigger an exit, either. Europe has the wherewithal and a bank-rescue mechanism that would allow the banks to be taken over and recapitalized. These options are foreclosed because the supposedly apolitical ECB has let Europe’s finance ministers use it as a hammer to extract fiscal concessions from Greece.

Nobody ever imagined that a government default in Europe would dictate ejection from the euro zone. The very possibility would have been correctly recognized as a fatal defect in the design of the system.

If the Greeks vote no, a Greek exit is a possible and even likely consequence. But if it happens, the reason won’t be that Greece chose to go. The reason will be that the European Union and its politicized central bank chose to inflict exit as punishment. [Continue reading…]

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Greek economy close to collapse as food and medicine run short

The Guardian reports: Greece’s economy is on the brink of collapse after the capital controls imposed ahead of Sunday’s referendum left the country with shortages of food and drugs, the tourist industry facing a wave of cancellations and banks with barely enough money to survive the weekend.

Banks said they had a €1bn cash buffer to see them through the weekend – equal to just €90 (£64) a head for the 11 million-strong population – and would require immediate help from the European Central Bank on Monday whatever the result of the referendum, in which the two sides are running neck and neck. [Continue reading…]

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Large majority of Democrats say Israel has ‘too much influence’ over U.S. foreign policy

The Times of Israel reports: Three quarters of highly educated, high income, publicly active US Democrats — the so-called “opinion elites” — believe Israel has too much influence on US foreign policy, almost half of them consider Israel to be a racist country, and fewer than half of them believe that Israel wants peace with its neighbors. These are among the findings of a new survey carried out by US political consultant Frank Luntz.

Detailing the survey results to The Times of Israel on Sunday, Luntz called the findings “a disaster” for Israel. He summed them up by saying that the Democratic opinion elites are converting to the Palestinians, and “Israel can no longer claim to have the bipartisan support of America.”

He said he “knew there was a shift” in attitudes to Israel among US Democrats “and I have been seeing it get worse” in his ongoing polls. But the new findings surprised and shocked him, nonetheless. “I didn’t expect it to become this blatant and this deep.”

“Israel has won the hearts and minds of Republicans in America, while at the same time it is losing the Democrats,” he said. On US politics, “I’m right of center,” he added. “But the Israeli government and US Jews have to focus on repairing relations with the Democrats.”

Luntz put a series of largely Israel-related questions to 802 members of the opinion elites and his findings have a 3.5% margin of error. The survey, sponsored by the Jewish National Fund, was conducted last week. Among the key findings: [Continue reading…]

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Yemen: The world’s newest humanitarian catastrophe, and how Britain helped to create it

David Wearing writes: Britain has actively contributed to the creation a humanitarian disaster in Yemen, and potentially helped turn the Middle East’s poorest state into the new Syria. Not hyperbole or rhetoric; just a bald statement of fact. I’ll leave it to others to try to explain the near total silence on this issue throughout the British media and across the political spectrum. For now, it will suffice simply to tell the story.

This week the UN declared its highest level of humanitarian emergency in Yemen, with more than 21.1 million people (over 80 per cent of the population) in need of aid, 9.4 million with little or no access to water, and 13 million facing “a food security crisis” as the country teeters on the brink of famine. A fortnight ago the World Health Organisation confirmed an outbreak of potentially lethal dengue fever as a result of the general collapse of the state, civilian infrastructure and health services, with over 3,000 cases recorded since March. The total of internally displaced people has now reached a million, with a quarter of a million made refugees.

Aid agencies have placed the blame primarily on a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, including the likes of Qatar, the UAE and Egypt, and backed by the US and UK, whose air campaign and naval blockade have dramatically worsened the situation in an already desperately impoverished country. The assault began in late March, when the Saudis and their allies waded into a civil conflict on the side of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi against the northern Houthi rebel movement. It is a case of the wealthiest Arab states joining forces to bomb and starve the poorest, with the assistance of two of the world’s richest and most powerful countries. [Continue reading…]

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State of emergency is declared in Tunisia

The New York Times reports: Speaking on national television, President Beji Caid Essebsi declared a state of emergency in Tunisia on Saturday, eight days after a terrorist attack killed more than 30 foreign tourists.

“Tunisia, which is dear to all of us, is going through difficult circumstances, exceptional circumstances, that necessitate exceptional measures to face them and prevent a worse situation,” Mr. Essebsi said.

“Our security forces are in a full alert status, but we do have weaknesses as our prime minister admitted,” he said. “We are not blaming anyone, but we are calling for everyone to feel and act responsibly. If such incidents happen again, the state will collapse. It is the duty of the president to take a stance.” [Continue reading…]

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In defense of equality

In a review of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, by Danielle Allen, Gordon S. Wood writes: This is a strange and remarkable book. There must be dozens of books on the Declaration of Independence written from every conceivable point of view — historical, political, theoretical, philosophical, and textual — but no one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us — not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people — can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens.

Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to this extraordinary conclusion when she was teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. But it was not the young bright-eyed undergraduates whom she taught by day who inspired her. Instead, it was the much older, life-tested adults whom she taught by night who created “the single most transformative experience” of her teaching career.

As she slowly worked her way through the 1,337 words of the Declaration of Independence with her night students, many of whom had no job or were working two jobs or were stuck in dead-end part-time jobs, Allen discovered that the document had meaning for them and that it was accessible to any reader or hearer of its words. By teaching the document to these adult students in the way that she did, she experienced “a personal metamorphosis.” For the first time in her life she came to realize that the Declaration makes a coherent philosophical argument about equality, an argument that could be made comprehensible to ordinary people who had no special training.

By reading and analyzing the words of the Declaration deliberately and with care, her night students

found themselves suddenly as political beings, with a consciousness that had previously eluded them. They built a foundation from which to assess the state of their political world. They gained a vocabulary and rhetorical techniques for arguing about it.

The entire experience with her students “re-gifted to me a text that should have been mine all along. They gave me again the Declaration’s ideals — equality and freedom — and the power of its language.”

Allen is most interested in the idea of equality, and rightly so. Equality has always been the most radical and potent idea in American history. [Continue reading…]

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