Video: Has the UN observer mission failed in Syria?
Greek election ‘too close to call’
BBC News reports: Greece’s right-wing New Democracy and left-wing Syriza parties are almost neck-and-neck after parliamentary elections, exit polls suggest.
New Democracy, which broadly supports a European bailout deal, looked to be almost tied with Syriza, which opposes the measure.
The outcome could decide Greece’s future inside the euro.
The election was the second in six weeks, called after a 6 May vote proved inconclusive.
The two main parties are thought to have polled between 27 and 30%, the exit poll showed.
But though the result could be almost a dead heat, the party that does come out on top will receive an extra 50 seats.
The BBC’c Chris Morris says that with the parties so close, the cliche that “every vote counts” has never been more true.
A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy
Costas Douzinas and Joanna Bourke write: The Financial Times Deutschland last week published an article on its front page headlined “Resist the demagogue“. It was written in Greek. The article advised the Greeks to reject the radical left Syriza party and vote for the rightwing New Democracy today. It is the culmination of an astounding campaign of fear and blackmail against the democratic right of Greeks to elect a government of their choice.
Angela Merkel, the European commission president José Manuel Barroso, and even George Osborne, have ordered the Greeks to vote the right way. This direct intervention into the democratic process of a sovereign state follows a plethora of threats and rumours, secrets and lies, telling people that if they vote for Syriza, the country will be ejected from the euro and untold catastrophes will follow.
Why are the European elites carrying out this unprecedented campaign, which strikes at the heart of the EU and would lead to outrage if the target were the British, the Italians, or the French? The reason is simple. If the Greeks vote a Syriza government into office, the EU and the IMF will have to drastically change the austerity policies that created an economic disaster and a humanitarian crisis.
The 6 May result saw Syriza’s share of the vote jump from 4% to 17%, while the New Democracy and Pasok parties, which had alternated in government with a combined 80% of the vote in the last 40 years, collapsed to 32%. On 7 May, the Europeans started admitting the Greeks have been punished disproportionately, and that austerity does not work and must be mitigated. On 17 June, a Syriza victory will be the first defeat of austerity in Europe and will have international repercussions.
The belated admission by the IMF and EU “experts” that austerity does not work is a direct result of the 6 May results. The figures are staggering: more than 20% contraction of output over four years; 22% unemployment and 54% youth unemployment; a 24-point jump in the poverty index; and a 50% reduction in the salaries and pension of civil servants. The second memorandum moved to the private sector, abolishing collective bargaining and other basic labour law protections, as well as cutting the minimum wage and unemployment benefits by up to 32%.
The Guardian has documented the humanitarian catastrophe that followed. Soup kitchens for the middle class, a huge jump in homelessness and mental disease, daily suicides, lack of basic medicines, cancer patients turned away from pharmacies, and hospitals ceasing operation because of a lack of basic supplies. The question on Sunday is not between the euro and the drachma, but between the continuation of these policies or salvation from the greatest destruction a people have experienced in peacetime. If something is leading to the exit from the euro, a probable collapse of the eurozone and a possible world crisis of 1930s magnitude, is not the Syriza policies but extreme austerity and mad economic recipes. [Continue reading…]
A global perfect storm
Nouriel Roubini writes: Dark, lowering financial and economic clouds are, it seems, rolling in from every direction: the eurozone, the United States, China, and elsewhere. Indeed, the global economy in 2013 could be a very difficult environment in which to find shelter.
For starters, the eurozone crisis is worsening, as the euro remains too strong, front-loaded fiscal austerity deepens recession in many member countries, and a credit crunch in the periphery and high oil prices undermine prospects of recovery. The eurozone banking system is becoming balkanized, as cross-border and interbank credit lines are cut off, and capital flight could turn into a full run on periphery banks if, as is likely, Greece stages a disorderly euro exit in the next few months.
Moreover, fiscal and sovereign-debt strains are becoming worse as interest-rate spreads for Spain and Italy have returned to their unsustainable peak levels. Indeed, the eurozone may require not just an international bailout of banks (as recently in Spain), but also a full sovereign bailout at a time when eurozone and international firewalls are insufficient to the task of backstopping both Spain and Italy. As a result, disorderly breakup of the eurozone remains possible.
Farther to the west, US economic performance is weakening, with first-quarter growth a miserly 1.9% – well below potential. And job creation faltered in April and May, so the US may reach stall speed by year end. Worse, the risk of a double-dip recession next year is rising: even if what looks like a looming US fiscal cliff turns out to be only a smaller source of drag, the likely increase in some taxes and reduction of some transfer payments will reduce growth in disposable income and consumption.
Moreover, political gridlock over fiscal adjustment is likely to persist, regardless of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney wins November’s presidential election. Thus, new fights on the debt ceiling, risks of a government shutdown, and rating downgrades could further depress consumer and business confidence, reducing spending and accelerating a flight to safety that would exacerbate the fall in stock markets.
In the east, China, its growth model unsustainable, could be underwater by 2013, as its investment bust continues and reforms intended to boost consumption are too little too late. A new Chinese leadership must accelerate structural reforms to reduce national savings and increase consumption’s share of GDP; but divisions within the leadership about the pace of reform, together with the likelihood of a bumpy political transition, suggest that reform will occur at a pace that simply is not fast enough.
The economic slowdown in the US, the eurozone, and China already implies a massive drag on growth in other emerging markets, owing to their trade and financial links with the US and the European Union (that is, no “decoupling” has occurred). At the same time, the lack of structural reforms in emerging markets, together with their move towards greater state capitalism, is hampering growth and will reduce their resiliency.
Finally, long-simmering tensions in the Middle East between Israel and the US on one side and Iran on the other on the issue of nuclear proliferation could reach a boil by 2013. The current negotiations are likely to fail, and even tightened sanctions may not stop Iran from trying to build nuclear weapons. With the US and Israel unwilling to accept containment of a nuclear Iran by deterrence, a military confrontation in 2013 would lead to a massive oil price spike and global recession. [Continue reading…]
Music: Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘Hope’
Egypt: Who’s unhappy about the coup against parliament?
Issandr El Amrani writes: The ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court on Thursday has been described by many, including myself, as a coup by proxy. The only democratically elected institution in Egypt is now gone, the SCAF has regained full legislative powers — i.e. the power to rule by decree — and it’s not clear whether the president who will be elected in the next two days will be able to assume his position in any case. Furthermore, we know that SCAF intends to ammend the constitutional declaration now in place or perhaps issue a new one altogether. If it looks like a coup and smells like a coup and is based on absurd legal reasoning, it probably is a soft coup.
The strange thing is that I don’t see much outrage about it outside of Twitter.
The Muslim Brotherhood has chosen to accept the decision and focus on the presidential race. This may be simply a tactical choice to boost its premise that Mohammed Morsi is the revolutionary candidate at a time when the MB has lost its main claim to legitimacy, its parliamentary majority. Others whisper that this indicates a deal in the making, where Morsi will take the presidency. Many MB members grumble but for now their focus is the presidential race, even though SCAF now has the leeway to redefine presidential powers depending on which candidate wins. It may be that the MB is keeping its outrage bottled in case its candidate loses, but the decision not to push on the court’s verdict as illegitimate is certainly puzzling. [Continue reading…]
Syriza party takes aim at corruption in Greece’s news media
McClatchy reports: Greece’s crushing economic crisis, which has upended the country’s politics and jeopardized its currency tie with the European Union, has also put another institution on the spot: the news media.
Amid allegations of unethical journalistic practices that may have contributed to the mess the country’s in, the outsider political coalition, whose popularity has skyrocketed, says it wants to abolish the cozy relationship that’s long existed between media owners and politicians, and to halt the practice of government payments to individual journalists.
On the eve of Sunday’s second-round election, the outsider coalition, known as Syriza, or the Radical Left, was reported neck-and-neck with the conservative New Democracy party. Both parties were expected to draw less than the 35 percent of the vote needed to form a government, and the winner is likely to have to search for a coalition partner.
Public support for the upstart Syriza party has surged largely because of its pledge to suspend the EU-imposed economic austerity measures that have led to a dramatic economic contraction here, but in demanding reforms to the rules governing the news media the coalition may have tapped into another source of voter disaffection. A poll earlier this month published by Mono magazine showed that more than 80 percent of the public do not view the Greek news media as objective.
While Greece has some excellent investigative journalists and some mavericks who challenge the system, the absence of a prevailing ethos of independent reporting helped enable the government to overstate Greece’s readiness for adopting the euro, and later precluded public awareness that the government was lying about its deficit to the European Union, said George Pleios, head of the department of communications at the National University in Athens.
One reason for the lack of trust may be that a significant number of journalists have two masters – their own news outlet and the organizations or firms they are covering. A Syriza official alleged that thousands of reporters maintain conflicts of interest and that 500 to 600 journalists are or have been on the payroll of a government agency.
Video: Racist attacks in Greece as economy struggles
Obama’s drift toward war with Iran
Robert Wright writes: The most undercovered story in Washington is how President Obama, under the influence of election-year politics, is letting America drift toward war with Iran. This story is the unseen but ominous backdrop to next week’s Moscow round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
The basic story line, pretty well known inside the beltway, is simple: There are things Obama could do to greatly increase the chances of a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, but he seems to have decided that doing them would bring political blowback that would reduce his chances of re-election.
The good news is that Obama’s calculation may be wrong. The blowback he fears–largely from Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, and other “pro-Israel” voices–is probably less forbidding than he assumes. And the political upside of successful statesmanship may be greater than he realizes.
But suppose Obama’s right about the politics. It’s still a little scandalous that he’s imperiling peace and America’s security in order to increase his chances of re-election by 1.5 percent, or whatever the imagined number is. And it’s even more scandalous how unscandalous this is, how people throughout the Washington establishment–in government, in NGOs, in journalism–are so inured to the corruption of policy by politics that almost nobody bothers to complain about it even when it could lead to war. [Continue reading…]
The troubled revolutionary path in Egypt: A return to basics
Hossam El-Hamalawy writes: While many in Egypt are mourning the “death of the revolution” and the ensuing “military coup,” it is time to highlight, or re-highlight some points:
1- To talk about a military coup in June 2012 is to assume that Egypt was run by a civilian government since the toppling of Mubarak, which is completely farcical. The coup, more or less, has been in effect since 11 February 2011, when revolutionaries managed to overthrow Mubarak, and he was replaced by his handpicked army generals.2- The military junta from the start of the “transitional process” has been in control, and are using all their constitutional, legal, and political weapons to shape the process, and they did not hesitate to use bullets when their “soft power” failed.
3- The military junta are the most keen among all the political players to “handover power” to a civilian government. As of the time of this writing, and over the past week, military APCs and trucks have been roaming the streets, handing out statements, and encouraging people to vote in the second round. Similar propaganda messages, both explicit and indirect, are aired continuously on the state-run TV. The junta wants to “leave,” head back to the barracks, with legal, political, and constitutional assurances that their position, privileges, control over the economy, and decision making, remain unchanged. In short, they dream of the old “Turkish model.”
4- No revolution gets settled in 18 days or 18 months. If we all agree that this is a war with the regime that will last for several years, then why everyone is suddenly panicking and saying it’s over? Did anyone expect that the revolution would be one linear curve of victories? We are definitely going through a catastrophic period, when the counterrevolution is on the offense, but by no means should we expect the revolution to be finished. How many times did we hear or read over the past year and a half, “it’s over! the revolution is defeated,” only to be surprised with a resurgence of street protests, occupations, and labor strikes that force the junta to retreat? [Continue reading…]
Video: Egypt presidential runoff vote under way
Video: Egypt moves towards outright dictatorship
Contractors run U.S. spying missions in Africa
The Washington Post reports: Four small, white passenger planes sit outside a hangar here under a blazing sun, with no exterior markings save for U.S. registration numbers painted on the tails. A few burly men wearing aviator sunglasses and short haircuts poke silently around the wing flaps and landing gear.
The aircraft are Pilatus PC-12s, turboprops favored by the U.S. Special Operations forces for stealth missions precisely because of their nondescript appearance. There is no hint that they are carrying high-tech sensors and cameras that can film man-size targets from 10 miles away.
To further disguise the mission, the U.S. military has taken another unusual step: It has largely outsourced the spying operation to private contractors. The contractors supply the aircraft as well as the pilots, mechanics and other personnel to help process electronic intelligence collected from the airspace over Uganda, Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.
In October, President Obama sent about 100 elite U.S. troops to central Africa to scour the terrain for Joseph Kony, the messianic and brutal leader of a Ugandan rebel group. But American contractors have been secretly searching for Kony from the skies long before that, at least since 2009, under a project code-named Tusker Sand, according to documents and people familiar with the operation.
The previously unreported practice of hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory — in this region and in North Africa, where a similar surveillance program is aimed at an al-Qaeda affiliate — has been a cornerstone of the U.S. military’s secret activities on the continent. Unlike uniformed troops, plainclothes contractors are less likely to draw attention.
But because the arms-length arrangement exists outside traditional channels, there is virtually no public scrutiny or oversight. And if something goes wrong, the U.S. government and its partners acknowledge that the contractors are largely on their own.
U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent, declined to discuss specific missions or its reasons for outsourcing the gathering of intelligence.
In response to written questions from The Washington Post, the command stated that contractors would not get special treatment in case of a mishap. Instead, they “would be provided the same assistance that any U.S. citizen would be provided by the U.S. Government should they be in danger.”
There is precedent for the use of contractors in spying operations. The military hired private firms to conduct airborne surveillance in Latin America in the 1990s and early 2000s, with sometimes-disastrous results.
In 2003, for instance, one American was killed and three others were taken hostage by Colombian insurgents after their plane crashed in the jungle. The contractors, who were working for Northrop Grumman on a Defense Department counter-narcotics program, endured five years of captivity before they were freed in a raid by Colombian police.
Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and an expert on military contracting, said the Pentagon typically turns to the private sector for “deniability,” but he added that “it rarely turns out that way.” [Continue reading…]
U.S. declassifies attacks in Yemen and Somalia
The Associated Press reports: The White House is partially lifting the lid of secrecy on its counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaida in Yemen and Somalia by formally acknowledging for the first time that it is conducting lethal attacks in those countries.
The White House’s semiannual report to Congress on the state of U.S. combat operations abroad, delivered Friday, mentions what has been widely reported for years but never formally acknowledged by the administration: The U.S. military has been taking “direct action” against members of al-Qaida and affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.
The report does not elaborate, but “direct action” is a military term of art that refers to a range of lethal attacks, which in the case of Yemen and Somalia include attacks by armed drones. The report does not mention drones, which are remote-controlled, pilotless aircraft equipped with surveillance cameras and sometimes armed with missiles.
The report applies only to U.S. military operations, including those by special operations forces — not those conducted by the CIA.
“In all cases we are focused on those al-Qaida members and affiliates who pose a direct threat to the United States and to our national interests,” Pentagon press secretary George Little said after the report’s release. “This report contains information about these operations owing to their growing significance in our overall counterterrorism effort.”
The report does not provide details of any military operations in either Yemen or Somalia. It merely acknowledges they have happened. Killings of terror suspects overseas are acknowledged by the administration, but it does not mention the involvement of drones. The CIA and military have separate drone fleets.
The UN war over calling Syria a ‘civil war’
Colum Lynch reports: Herve Ladsous, the U.N.’s peacekeeping chief, acknowledged on Tuesday that Syria was now effectively in a state of civil war.
The statement may seem self-evident to anyone watching the escalation of fighting between the Syrian government, which is using attack helicopters, tanks, and mortars against civilians and armed opposition fighters, which have themselves stepped up attacks against government targets.
But the declaration triggered a sharp rebuke from the Syrian government and prompted the U.N. leadership to say that Ladsous has no legal standing to judge the nature of the Syrian conflict. Ban Ki-moon’s office issued a statement saying the “UN secretariat will not characterize the conflict in Syria.”
“Talk of civil war in Syria is not consistent with reality,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “What is happening in Syria is a war against terrorist groups plotting against the future of the Syrian people.”
The determination has real implications, according to legal scholars, subjecting Syria to laws of war under Geneva Conventions.
It is up to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, to determine whether a country has crossed the threshold from a violent disturbance into a full fledged civil war, or internal armed conflict.
Under the laws of war, a government has a permit to kill combatants in the course of a conflict, but it is also subject to prosecution for committing war crimes, like bombarding residential neighborhoods.
So far, the Red Cross has not rendered a judgment. [Continue reading…]
Anti-African hysteria sweeps Israel
Uri Avnery writes: “We shall not be a normal people, until we have Jewish whores and Jewish thieves in the Land of Israel,” our national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, said some 80 years ago.
This dream has come true. We have Jewish murderers, Jewish robbers and Jewish whores (though most prostitutes in Israel are imported by international slave traders from Eastern Europe through the Sinai border).
But Bialik was too unambitious. He should have added: We shall not become a normal people until we have Jewish Neo-Nazis and Jewish concentration camps.
The central news item nowadays in all our electronic and print media is the terrible danger of “illegal” African migrants.
African refugees and job seekers are drawn to Israel for several reasons, none of which is an ardent belief in Zionism. [Continue reading…]
How climate change got removed from the agenda of the Rio+20 Summit
In These Times reports: The Durban Climate Conference last winter ended in almost unqualified failure. The original framework of U.N. climate negotiations was all but abandoned in favor of a new global pact that may or may not be negotiated by 2015 and may or may not be legally binding. Climate change deniers literally crashed the party by parachuting onto a beach in Durban carrying a “Climategate 2.0” banner—and public perception in the U.S. on the reliability of climate science continued to shift in their direction, cementing the stalemate on a domestic climate deal.
Now, it would seem, many international negotiators have altogether given up on the idea of establishing a global regulatory framework for reducing carbon emissions. Next week, more than 130 national leaders will gather at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to discuss proposals ranging from replacing GDP as the indicator of economic prosperity to conducting annual “state-of-the-planet” assessments. Notably absent, particularly given a new U.N. study finding that carbon emissions have increased by 40% in the past two decades, will be any concrete negotiations on climate change.
The summit, to be held in Rio from June 20 – 22, is the follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit that produced multilateral agreements on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. But this time, no binding agreements are expected to result from the three-day meeting. At best, the talks may result in a commitment to drafting new goals for sustainable development by 2015.
The summit’s dodge of continued climate talks is an intentional move to avoid politics in favor of platitudes. After Durban, U.N. officials sought to redirect the agenda for Rio away from the contentious territory of emissions cuts and climate finance and toward issues of trade and technology. In an interview with Reuters in January, when pre-Rio talks were underway, Brazilian negotiator Ambassador Andre Correa do Lago acknowledged that the focus on sustainable development was more palatable to politicians and business leaders with a stake in the negotiations. [Continue reading…]
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