Those who govern us are now governed by the banks

In Der Spiegel, Dirk Kurbjuweit writes:

We are doing well. In fact, we’re doing splendidly. The economy is booming, with 1.5 percent growth in the first quarter. We are as prosperous as we were before the crisis, which has finally been overcome. Congratulations are in order for everyone.

The banks, Deutsche Bank above all, deserve particular congratulations. In the first quarter, it earned €3.5 billion ($5.1 billion) in pretax profits in its core business, and by the end of the year the bank will likely report a record €10 billion in pretax profits, its best results ever. That number is expected to rise to €11 billion or even €12 billion in two or three years.

Less than three years after the peak of the crisis, it seems as if it never happened. That is true of the economy, but it also true of us as economic subjects. But is that all we are?

No, we are also citizens and participants in a democratic society. As such, we have no reason to be celebrating. Instead, we ought to be sad and outraged. Democracy, after all, is not doing splendidly, or even well. It is gradually becoming a casualty of the financial crisis.

Trouble is brewing all over Europe. Young people with little hope for the future are protesting in Spain. In France, 1.4 million copies were sold of a manifesto titled “Be Outraged.” Young Frenchmen and -women are devising utopias that extend well beyond civil society because they no longer expect anything from it. A deep depression has descended upon Greece, combined with a rage directed at politicians and the rest of Europe.

In Germany, this is what politicians are hearing from their citizens today: “You spent billions to rescue the banks, and now I’m supposed to be footing the bill? Forget it!” Hardly anyone is willing to put up with their politicians any more. And German leaders have lost support — and some of their own legitimacy.

They seem helpless, unable to come to grips with the euro crisis. They meet in Brussels, and they talk, argue and adopt resolutions, and yet nothing improves. Greece isn’t getting out of its hole, Ireland and Portugal are teetering on the brink, and Spain and Italy are heavily indebted to a dangerous degree. And no politician is providing leadership.

And then there were the lies. Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, had his spokesman deny that a meeting of European Union finance ministers on the Greek crisis was taking place, even though that meeting was in fact taking place. It wasn’t the kind of lie that frequently crops up in politics: the broken campaign promise. Rather, it was more crass type of untruth: the denial of a reality. Juncker no longer had the courage to speak the truth. He was guided by fear of the financial markets. His lie was a capitulation of politics.

This is what is so disturbing about the current situation: the fact that politicians seem so helpless and powerless. They have been given a new master, and it’s not us, the people, who tend to intervene in milder ways. Rather, it’s the ruthless financial markets. The markets drive politicians even further into anxiety, weakness, incapacity and lies. Those who govern us are now being governed by the banks.

Facebooktwittermail

It’s not just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF itself should be on trial

Johann Hari writes:

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.

So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.

To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.

The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests, every step of the way.

Let’s look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small country of Malawi in Southeastern Africa was facing severe economic problems after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the IMF had acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the country to develop in the same way that Britain and the US and every other successful country had developed – by protecting its infant industries, subsidising its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its people.

That’s what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people – and accountable to them – would look like. But the IMF did something very different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the ‘structural adjustments’ the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidising fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for farmers – most of the population – to grow anything in the country’s feeble and depleted soil. They told them to prioritise giving money to international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.

So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks were paid.

The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Israeli public is shielded from the realities of West Bank life

Gershom Gorenberg writes:

The settlement’s security man did not like us. He did not like the cameraman with his bulky gear, or the two documentary film producers who’d brought Dror Etkes and me to the outpost of Derekh Ha’avot south of Bethlehem, and he certainly didn’t like Etkes, an Israeli activist known for expertise on land ownership and for his legal challenges to West Bank settlement. The security coordinator wore civvies but bounced a bit on the balls of his feet in the spring-coiled posture of junior combat officers, or recently discharged officers.

“You can’t film in the neighborhood,” he told us. Neighborhood is a euphemism for an outpost, a mini-setttlement ostensibly established in defiance of the Israeli government but actually enjoying state support. Derekh Ha’avot — the name means “Forefathers’ Road” — is next to the veteran settlement of Elazar but outside its municipal boundaries. The security man worked for Elazar. Filming would be “a security risk. I don’t know a lot about security, but I know a little,” he sneered, meaning, I know a whole lot.

That security argument, I can say with very little risk, was a bluff. Derekh Ha’avot, home to three dozen families, stands on privately owned Palestinian land, as military authorities confirmed in an October 2007 letter to another activist, Hagit Ofran (in Hebrew). But last year, in a ploy to evade a Supreme Court order to demolish the outpost, the Defense Ministry announced it was reexamining the land’s status to see whether it was actually state property.

The man facing us at the outpost who wanted nothing filmed was making his small contribution to keeping the occupation’s realities out of the sight of the majority of the Israeli public. For that, he deserves thanks from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Comfortable public ignorance of West Bank realities is essential to the Netanyahu’s domestic efforts to paint a fictional picture of the West Bank and of Israel’s deteriorating diplomatic situation.

Facebooktwittermail

AIPAC’s unrivaled influence

MJ Rosenberg writes:

Not surprisingly, my recent column on an ugly 1988 experience with AIPAC, the Israeli government, and late New York Times columnist William Safire elicited some controversy. I knew it would.

There aren’t that many first-person accounts of encounters with the lobby (for obvious reasons) so my recollections of how it went down on Capitol Hill fill a vacuum. Hopefully, there will be more such accounts as those of us who dealt with the lobby in the 1980s move into a position (career-wise or financially) where we feel free to talk and write about it without any fear of retribution.

If I were 35, there is no way that I would challenge an institution which has a long history of preventing its critics from advancing professionally. I am not that brave — although the terrain is finally changing for the better thanks to the internet.

Facebooktwittermail

In the Middle East, who cares what Obama says?

Robert Fisk writes:

This month, in the Middle East, has seen the unmaking of the President of the United States. More than that, it has witnessed the lowest prestige of America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America’s new role in the region. It was pathetic. “What is this ‘role’ thing?” an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. “Do they still believe we care about what they think?”

And it is true. Obama’s failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab “spring”, save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain’s cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions.

Facebooktwittermail

Yemeni president ‘injured in attack’

Al Jazeera reports:

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, has reportedly been injured in an attack on the presidential palace in the capital, Sanaa.

The country’s prime minister was also reportedly injured in the attack as street fighting between Saleh’s forces and a tribal federation widened on Friday in the capital, the Reuters news agency reported.

Four presidential guards and the speaker of parliament are reportedly in critical condition.

In an assurance to the Yemeni public, state television later said that the president was “well”.

The attack was blamed by the authoritites on dissident tribesmen loyal to Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, who have been locked in fierce clashes with government forces in Sanaa since Tuesday.

“The prime minister, head of the parliament and several other officials who attended the Friday prayers in the mosque at the presidential palace were wounded in the attack,” Tareq al-Shami, spokesman for the ruling General People’s Congress, told AFP.

“The Ahmar (tribe) have crossed all red lines,” he added.

The attack came soon after Yemeni troops, who have deployed heavy weaponry in their battle against the tribesmen, sent a shell crashing into the home of Sheikh Hamid al-Ahmar, a leader of the biggest opposition party and brother of Sheikh Sadiq.

Facebooktwittermail

Rebels in western Libya seize mountain towns

The Associated Press reports:

A rebel leader says his forces have seized two western mountain towns from Moammar Gadhafi’s forces in a push toward the Libyan leader’s stronghold in the capital, Tripoli.

Col. Jumaa Ibrahim of the Nafusa mountain military council says Yefren and Shakshuk, the site of a strategic power station, were freed the day before. Ibrahim says the rebel forces are still battling with Gadhafi forces over a small town at the base of the mountain. He said Friday “our aim is the capital.”

The victories are a significant breakthrough for the rebels as they try to break Gadhafi’s hold on the western half of the coastal nation. The rebels so far have mainly been centered in the east, leaving the two sides locked in a stalemate.

Facebooktwittermail

IDF gearing for next wave of Palestinian protests

Ynet reports:

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz has ordered the increased deployment of security forces across all Israel’s borders starting Friday and pending the conclusion of all “Naksa Day” events.

The Palestinians are planning a series of events to mark “Naksa Day” – the 44th anniversary of the Six Day War – starting Sunday.

Most disconcerting, as far as Israel is concerned, are calls by pro-Palestinian supporters – issued mostly on social media website – for Palestinians to march on and possibly storm all of Israel’s borders.

Facebooktwittermail

Locked up for reading a poem

Patrick Cockburn reports:

Bahrain’s security forces are increasingly targeting women in their campaign against pro-democracy protesters despite yesterday lifting martial law in the island kingdom.

Ayat al-Gormezi, 20, a poet and student arrested two months ago after reading out a poem at a pro-democracy rally, is due to go on trial today before a military tribunal, her mother said. Ayat was forced to turn herself in when masked policemen threatened to kill her brothers unless she did so.

She has not been seen since her arrest, though her mother did talk to her once by phone and Ayat said that she had been forced to sign a false confession. Her mother has since been told that her daughter has been in a military hospital after being tortured.

“We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery,” a film captures Ayat telling a cheering crowd of protesters in Pearl Square in February. “We are the people who will destroy the foundation of injustice.” She addresses King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa directly and says to him: “Don’t you hear their cries, don’t you hear their screams?” As she finishes, the crowd shouts: “Down with Hamad.”

Ayat’s call for change was no more radical than that heard in the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi at about the same time. But her reference to the king might explain the fury shown by the Bahraini security forces who, going by photographs of the scene, smashed up her bedroom when they raided her house and could not find her.

There are signs that Bahraini police, riot police and special security are detaining and mistreating more and more women. Many are held incommunicado, forced to sign confessions or threatened with rape, according to Bahraini human rights groups.

Facebooktwittermail

Europe is becoming a safe haven for Israelis

Gideon Levy writes:

The numbers are climbing rapidly and the phenomenon is intriguing: Many Israelis are longing for a second passport. If Shimon Peres (now president ) once promised “a car for every worker,” a second passport is now becoming the object of desire. If our forefathers dreamt of an Israeli passport, there are those among us who are now dreaming of a foreign passport.

A Bar-Ilan University study published in the journal Eretz Acheret has found that roughly 100,000 Israelis already hold a German passport. Over the past decade, the trend has strengthened and some 7,000 more Israelis join them every year. To these should be added the thousands of Israelis who hold foreign passports, mostly European countries. The excuses are strange and diverse, but at the base of them all are unease and anxiety, both personal and national. The foreign passport has become an insurance policy against a rainy day. It turns out there are more and more Israelis who are thinking that day may eventually come.

In recent years the Israeli passport has become useful and effective. It opens the gates of most countries of the world, except for parts of the Arab and Muslim world. It is hard to believe that those applying for a second passport are doing so in order to vacation in Tehran, tour Benghazi or take in the sights of San’a. The alibi that a European passport makes entering the United States easier cannot fully explain the phenomenon, which has no equivalent in other developed countries.

It should not be condemned, though. It reflects a mood, a natural and understandable consequence of the real and imagined fears that have been sown here. When Avrum Burg boasted of his French passport several years ago, a public outcry arose, but in vain. Presumably some of those who cried out did so because they do not have the option, like he does, of obtaining an additional passport for themselves. The others may have since crowded onto the line at one embassy or another.

Facebooktwittermail

Nato’s strategy in Libya is working – talks with Gaddafi won’t

Ranj Alaaldin writes:

On Monday, the South African president, Jacob Zuma, once again went to Tripoli in an attempt to broker a peace deal between Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the opposition forces. As expected, he failed.

But mediation or ceasefire initiatives such as South Africa’s, and others encouraged elsewhere, have something wrong with them: they offer Gaddafi a lifeline at a point when he is facing an increase in defections and significant opposition progress on the battlefield, and when he is becoming increasingly isolated internationally – as shown last week when Russia shifted its position by calling on him to stand down.

It is clear that the west, in the form of the Nato-led coalition, has a strategy in Libya and it is working. It should be left alone.

Three key components have comprised this strategy, the explicit objective of which has been to end Gaddafi’s reign of terror and the heart of which has been to ensure the Libyan uprising remains a Libyan-dominated enterprise, and not a western one.

Facebooktwittermail

Thousands flee Yemeni capital as battles rage

Al Jazeera reports:

Thousands of residents are fleeing Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, as fighting between opposition tribesmen and loyalist troops of president Ali Abdullah Saleh rages on.

Much of the fighting, which began late on Wednesday night, occurred in the Hasaba district of northern Sanaa, where Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, the powerful leader of the Hashed tribal confederation, has his base.

Yemen’s defence ministry said the Special Forces, headed by Saleh’s son Ahmed, have been deployed to “liberate” buildings held by al-Ahmar’s fighters.

Medics in Sanaa told the AFP news agency that 15 people had been killed in the overnight clashes, including a seven-year-old girl hit by a stray bullet.

They have yet to receive word on casualties from Thursday’s fighting as ambulance crews were unable to access the neighbourhood.

Hakim Al Masmari, editor of the Yemen Post, told Al Jazeera that an estimated 2,000 additional fighters “armed and ready to fight” have entered Sanaa to reinforce the Hashed confederation.

Facebooktwittermail

Saudi Islamists and the potential for protest

Stéphane Lacroix writes:

Saudi Arabia has remained fairly quiet during the recent months of Arab uprisings. A few demonstrations did take place, mostly in the Eastern province, but never gathered more than a couple of thousands. As for the Facebook calls for a “Saudi revolution” on March 11th, they had no real impact on the ground. Some observers found this surprising, given the fact that many of the causes of revolutions elsewhere in the region exist in Saudi Arabia. There is corruption, repression and, despite the country’s wealth, socio-economic problems that particularly affect the youth — it is said that at least 25 percent of Saudis below the age of 30 are unemployed.

Some observers argued that nothing had happened, or even could happen, in Saudi Arabia because the Kingdom possesses two extraordinary resources in huge quantities. This first is a symbolic resource, religion, through the regime’s alliance with the official Wahhabi religious establishment, while the second resource is a material one, oil. These resources, however, have their limits. The real reason that Saudi Arabia has not seen major protests is that the Saudi regime has effectively co-opted the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.

Neither Islam nor oil wealth necessarily shield the Saudi state from criticism. Religion can be, and has been, contested by opponents of the state, particularly by Islamists. The Wahhabi religious establishment is currently led by relatively weak figures. The current mufti Abd al-Aziz Al al-Shaykh lacks the strong credentials of his predecessor, sheikh Abd al-Aziz bin Baz. Oil money, however abundant, inevitably creates frustrations because its distribution follows established networks of patronage that favor some over others. This is especially notable at the regional level, where Najd receives much more of the state’s largesse than does the Kingdom’s periphery. What is more, the announcement on March 18th, 2011 by King Abdallah of a $100 billion aid package wasn’t only met by cheers as some expected. It also provoked angry reactions in some intellectual circles, who saw this as an insult to the Saudis’ “dignity.”

Saudi Arabia has more of a history of political mobilization than many realize. A pro-democracy current has evolved over the last 10 years. Its core component has historically been the dozens of intellectuals, Sunnis and Shiites, of Islamist and liberal backgrounds, who have come together since 2003 to repeatedly demand, through increasingly provocative petitions, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in the Kingdom. Among the latest, and boldest, moves made by members of this group have been the creation in October, 2009 of the Kingdom’s first fully independent human rights organization, the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, and the establishment in February, 2011 of the Kingdom’s first political party, Hizb al-Umma. Although members of this group have been repressed, many have pledged to continue their activism.

Facebooktwittermail

Rightwing Jewish protesters in East Jerusalem chant, “Butcher the Arabs” and “Death to Leftists.”

Ynet reports:

Dozens of right-wing activists marching through Jerusalem Wednesday were filmed chanting inflammatory messages and singing provocative songs in the capital, including “Muhammad is dead,” “May your village burn,” “Death to leftists,” and “Butcher the Arabs.”

The disturbing utterances were made during the traditional “Flag Dance” on the occasion of Jerusalem Day, which drew tens of thousands of Israelis to the capital to celebrate its unification following the 1967 Six-Day War.

Facebooktwittermail

Americans are joining flotilla to protest Israeli blockade

The New York Times reports:

When an international flotilla sails for Gaza this month to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Palestinian territory, among the boats will be an American ship with 34 passengers, including the writer Alice Walker and an 86-year-old whose parents died in the Holocaust.

A year ago, nine people in a flotilla of six boats were killed when Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish boat in international waters off the coast of Gaza. The Israelis said their commandos were attacked and struck back in self-defense, but the Turks blamed the Israelis for using live ammunition. The raid soured relations between Israel and Turkey and intensified pressure on Israel to end the naval blockade.

Organizers said the new flotilla, scheduled to leave in late June from a port they would not identify, had at least 1,000 passengers on about 10 boats. One boat will carry Spaniards, another Canadians, another Swiss and another Irish.

Facebooktwittermail