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Watch the summit of the SCO starting tomorrow Wed….in Astana, Kazakhstan!

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/us-afghanistan-secret-talks-on-security-partnership

Secret US and Afghanistan talks could see troops stay for decades

Russia, China and India concerned about ‘strategic partnership’ in which Americans would remain after 2014

 

US-Afghanistan security negotiations continue despite Hillary Clinton saying recently that Washington did not want any ‘permanent bases in Afghanistan’. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.

Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014 – the agreed date for all 130,000 combat troops to leave — despite continuing public debate in Washington and among other members of the 49-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan about the speed of the withdrawal.

American officials admit that although Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, recently said Washington did not want any “permanent” bases in Afghanistan, her phrasing allows a variety of possible arrangements.

“There are US troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently,” a US official told the Guardian.

British troops, Nato officials say, will also remain in Afghanistan long past the end of 2014, largely in training or mentoring roles.

Although they will not be “combat troops” that does not mean they will not take part in combat. Mentors could regularly fight alongside Afghan troops, for example.

Senior Nato officials also predict that the insurgency in Afghanistan will continue after 2014.

There are at least five bases in Afghanistan which are likely candidates to house large contingents of American special forces, intelligence operatives, surveillance equipment and military hardware post-2014. In the heart of one of the most unstable regions in the world and close to the borders of Pakistan, Iran and China, as well as to central Asia and the Persian Gulf, the bases would be rare strategic assets.

News of the US-Afghan talks has sparked deep concern among powers in the region and beyond. Russia and India are understood to have made their concerns about a long-term US presence known to both Washington and Kabul. China, which has pursued a policy of strict non-intervention beyond economic affairs in Afghanistan, has also made its disquiet clear. During a recent visit, senior Pakistani officials were reported to have tried to convince their Afghan counterparts to look to China as a strategic partner, not the US.

American negotiators will arrive later this month in Kabul for a new round of talks. The Afghans rejected the Americans’ first draft of a strategic partnership agreement in its entirety, preferring to draft their own proposal. This was submitted to Washington two weeks ago. The US draft was “vaguely formulated”, one Afghan official told the Guardian.

Afghan negotiators are now preparing detailed annexes to their own proposal which lists specific demands.

The Afghans are playing a delicate game, however. President Hamid Karzai and senior officials see an enduring American presence and broader strategic relationship as essential, in part to protect Afghanistan from its neighbours.

“We are facing a common threat in international terrorist networks. They are not only a threat to Afghanistan but to the west. We want a partnership that brings regional countries together, not divides them,” said Rangin Spanta, the Afghan national security adviser and the lead Afghan negotiator on the partnership.

Dr Ashraf Ghani, a former presidential candidate and one of the negotiators, said that, although Nato and the US consider a stable Afghanistan to be essential to their main strategic aim of disrupting and defeating al-Qaida, a “prosperous Afghanistan” was a lesser priority. “It is our goal, not necessarily theirs,” he said.

Though Ghani stressed “consensus on core issues”, big disagreements remain.

One is whether the Americans will equip an Afghan air force. Karzai is understood to have asked for fully capable modern combat jet aircraft. This has been ruled out by the Americans on grounds of cost and fear of destabilising the region.

Another is the question of US troops launching operations outside Afghanistan from bases in the country. From Afghanistan, American military power could easily be deployed into Iran or Pakistan post-2014. Helicopters took off from Afghanistan for the recent raid which killed Osama bin Laden.

“We will never allow Afghan soil to be used [for operations] against a third party,” said Spanta, Afghanistan’s national security adviser.

A third contentious issue is the legal basis on which troops might remain. Afghan officials are keen that any foreign forces in their country are subject to their laws. The Afghans also want to have ultimate authority over foreign troops’ use and deployment.

“There should be no parallel decision-making structures … All has to be in accordance with our sovereignty and constitution,” Spanta said.

Nor do the two sides agree over the pace of negotiations. The US want to have agreement by early summer, before President Barack Obama’s expected announcement on troop withdrawals. This is “simply not possible,” the Afghan official said.

There are concerns too that concluding a strategic partnership agreement could also clash with efforts to find an inclusive political settlement to end the conflict with theTaliban. A “series of conversations” with senior insurgent figures are under way, one Afghan minister has told the Guardian.

A European diplomat in Kabul said: “It is difficult to imagine the Taliban being happy with US bases [in Afghanistan] for the foreseeable future.”

Senior Nato officials argue that a permanent international military presence will demonstrate to insurgents that the west is not going to abandon Afghanistan and encourage them to talk rather than fight.

The Afghan-American negotiations come amid a scramble among regional powers to be positioned for what senior US officers are now describing as the “out years”.

Mark Sedwill, the Nato senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, recently spoke of the threat of a “Great Game 3.0” in the region, referring to the bloody and destabilising conflict between Russia, Britain and others in south west Asia in the 19th century.

Afghanistan has a history of being exploited by — or playing off — major powers. This, Dr Ghani insisted, was not “a vision for the 21st century”. Instead, he said, Afghanistan could become the “economic roundabout” of Asia.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

 

 

 

The moment of truth is approaching for Obama and his like who preach the high morality of non-violence to the powerless

 

The Guardian,    Monday 6 June 2011

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At a dark moment in postcolonial history, when many US-backed despots seemed indestructible, the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose centenary falls this year, wrote: “We shall witness [the day] when the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton”. That miraculous day promised by the poet finally came in Egypt and Tunisia this spring. We have since witnessed many of the world’s acknowledged legislators scrambling to get on the right side of history.

Addressing – yet again – the “Muslim world” last month, Barack Obama hailed “the moral force of non-violence”, through which “the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades”. But Obama failed to acknowledge to his highly politicised audience the fact that the United States enabled, and often required, the “relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity”. And he gave no sign that he would respect the moral authority of non-violent mass movements ranged against America’s closest allies, India and Israel.

Let’s not forget: before the Arab spring of 2011, there was the Kashmiri summer of 2010. Provoked by the killing of a teenage boy in June last year, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris took to the streets to protest against India’s brutal military occupation of the Muslim-majority valley. Summer is the usual “season for a face-off in Kashmir”, as the Indian filmmaker Sanjay Kak writes in Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, a lively anthology of young Kashmiri writers, activists, rappers and graphic artists. There is little doubt that Kashmiris, emboldened by the Arab spring, will again stage massive demonstrations in their towns and villages.

The chances of a third intifada in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel are just as high, as Binyamin Netanyahu devises ever greater hurdles to self-determination for his Arab subjects. In the next few months we will see more clearly than before how India and Israel – billed respectively as the world’s largest, and the Middle East’s only, democracy – respond to unarmed mass movements.

 

Certainly, they have shown no sign of fresh thinking, even as the victims of their occupations grow more inventive. India’s security establishment fell back last summer on reflexes conditioned by two decades of fighting a militant insurgency during which more than 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have died; 8,000 have “disappeared”, often into mass graves; and innumerable others have been subjected to “systematic torture”, according to a rare public outburst by the Red Cross.

Last summer soldiers fired at demonstrators, killing 112 civilians, mostly teenagers (Kashmir has many of its own Hamza al-Khatibs). The government imposed round-the-clock curfews (one village was locked in for six weeks) and banned text messaging on mobile phones, while police spies infiltrated Facebook groups in an attempt to hunt down demo organisers.

Faced with non-violent Palestinian protesters, who correctly deduce that their methods have a better chance of influencing world opinion than Hamas’s suicide bombers, Israel hasn’t varied its repertoire of repression much. For years now the West Bank village of Bil’in has campaigned against the Israeli government’s appropriation of its lands. Israel responded by jailing its leader, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, often called the Palestinian Gandhi, for 15 months – “solely”, according to Amnesty International “for the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression and assembly”.

Encouraged by Egyptians and Tunisians, masses of unarmed Palestinians marched last month to the borders of Israel to mark the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. Israeli soldiers met them with live gunfire, killing more than a dozen and wounding scores of others.

Of course, occupations damage the occupier no less than the occupied. Revanchist nationalism has corroded democratic and secular institutions in both India and Israel, which, not surprisingly, have developed a strong military relationship in the recent decade. Hindu nationalists feel an elective affinity with Israel for its apparently uncompromising attitude to Muslim minorities. In 1993 the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, reportedly advised the Hindu nationalist leader LK Advani to alter the demographic composition of the mutinous Kashmir valley by settling Hindus there. Advani, later India’s deputy prime minister, fondly quoted from Netanyahu’s book on terrorism, given to him by the author. Israeli counter-insurgency experts now regularly visit Kashmir.

India and Israel, both products of botched imperial partitions, were the Bush government’s two most avid international boosters of the catastrophic “war on terror”, fluently deploying the ideological templates of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – democracy versus terrorism, liberalism versus fundamentalism – to justify their own occupations.

Aggressively jingoistic media helped hardliners in both countries to demonise their political adversaries as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers. Meanwhile, liberal opinion grew almost inaudible. Writing recently in the New York Review of Books, the Israeli scholar and activist David Shulman lamented: “Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation.” This is also true of the Indian intelligentsia.

So the burden of non-violent protest in India and Israel has fallen almost entirely on the victims of the occupation. Indeed, many liberal commentators try to condone their passivity by deploring the absence of non-violent protests in Kashmir and Palestine (never mind the fact that the first intifadas in both places in the late 1980s turned violent only after being savagely suppressed).

The moment of truth is fast approaching for those powerful men who preach the high morality of non-violence to the powerless. Only an American veto seems likely to prevent the member states of the UN from declaring a new Palestinian state in September. But Palestinians may rise up against their colonial overlords well before this expected rejection. And, as the political philosopher Michael Walzer points out, Israel would then confront “something radically new. How can it resist masses of men and women, children too, just walking across the ceasefire lines?”

The tactics of young tech-savvy Kashmiris have already confused and bewildered the Indian government, whose recent actions – censoring the Economist, forcing spying rights out of BlackBerry and Google – evoke the last-minute desperation of the Arab world’s mukhabarat (secret police) states. The mass movement in Kashmir, which has emerged after two decades of a futile militant insurgency and has no compromising links to Pakistan, poses, as the Kashmiri journalist Parvaiz Bukhari writes in Until My Freedom Has Come, an unprecedented “moral challenge to New Delhi’s military domination over the region”.

The stage is set, then, for a summer of protests, of unarmed masses rising up to express, in Obama’s words, “a longing for freedom that has built up for years”. They may well meet with live bullets rather than offers of negotiation and compromise. It will be fascinating to see if Obama makes good his claim last month that the United States “opposes violence and repression” and “welcomes change that advances self-determination”. Certainly, as the corpses of the Palestinian and Kashmiri Hamza al-Khatibs pile up, there will be the usual flurry of intellectual rationalisations – the bogey of Islamic terror will again be invoked. And we will witness how the “enormous mountains of tyranny” in the world’s greatest democracies do not blow away like cotton.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

 

Bethlehem, 18 June 2011

The Most Reverend Dr Rowan Williams

Archbishop of Canterbury

Lambeth Palace

Lambeth Palace Road

London

Your Grace,

Kairos Palestine is deeply troubled by your recent comments regarding the situation of Christians in the Middle East in general and more particularly those related to the Palestinian Christians, as it was aired on the June 14 broadcast of the BBC news programme “The World at One.”

Your inaccurate and erroneous remarks cite Muslim extremism as the greatest threat facing Christians in Palestine, and the primary reason for our emigration. Your statements about Bethlehem areparticularly faulty and offensive especially when you say that the movement of Muslims into the

Bethlehem area, where space is limited, is forcing Christians to leave.

Equally shocking is how Your Grace managed, diplomatically –instead of being prophetic, as one would expect you to be, not to mention the Israeli occupation, the separation wall, Israel confiscation of Palestinian land, its policies that violate freedom of movement and worship (Palestinians in

Bethlehem cannot, for instance, go to Jerusalem), or its brutal crackdowns on nonviolent protests as one of the major reasons that push not only Christians to emigrate, but also many other Palestinians.

We were hoping that Your Grace would have a different voice than the one in mass media and other right wing political parties, which exploit our sufferings to fuel some islamophobic tendencies and negative images about Islam. Indeed, this is what the Israeli occupation persistently tries to do. It demonizes Islam in a way that deflects blame from the repression levied by the state itself. We are concerned that your comments are serving the same purpose.

We were deeply saddened by your declarations because we know that Your Grace is well informed about the situation in the Holy Land, and you know very well that in the Bethlehem area alone there are 19 illegal Israeli settlements (such as nearby Har Homa built on Jabal Abu Ghneim) and the wall that have devoured Christian lands and put Bethlehem in a chokehold. You know well that only 13%of Bethlehem area is available for Palestinian use and the wall isolates 25% or the Bethlehem area’s agricultural land. Not to mention the situation of Christians in Jerusalem, which you know very well, since you should have received reports from the Anglican Bishop in the City whose residency permit was denied by the occupying power. We can go on and on, but it is no longer important…

We are no longer expecting support from Church leaders around the world. Our Hope, Faith and Love come from elsewhere. However, at the same time, we request you and every leader, especially church leaders, not to use us and our cause for your own purposes. We are so thankful to Your Grace for the “International Conference on Christians in the Holy Land” that you are holding in your Palace in July, but we feel it will be useless, not to say harmful to us, indigenous Christians in the land of the Holy One, if the outcome will be in the same spirit as your interview.

Since Your Grace did not meet or consult with any Palestinian Christians during your recent visit here, we are wondering why you would be suddenly interested to speak on our behalf. This troubles us. Palestinian Christians are fully capable of expressing their situation without needing anyone to interpret what they mean; we are happy to meet directly with church leaders and, in solidarity, discuss our reality and what can be done to transform it. Finally, we would like to remind Your Grace that Christian Palestinians need advocates for the truth. Itis the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice in our home.

With all our due respect.

 

Kairos Palestine Coordinator

The full broadcast can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13769747.

See also the Archbishop’s web page:

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2071/christians-in-the-middle-east-archbishop-onworld-at-one

Sonja Karkar

Editor

http://australiansforpalestine.com

 

 

Phone: 0044 (0) 28 9066 3465 Fax:      0044 (0) 28 9066 3465 Email: info@peacepeople.com www.peacepeople.com

Fredheim 224 Lisburn Road Belfast BT9 6GE Northern Ireland

PEACE PEOPLE

 

 

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA, NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE

PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

FROM:  MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE, NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE.

20^th JUNE, 20ll.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT,

 

As you know, on  1st May, 2011, the  NATO forces tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the Libyan Head of State, Moammer Gadaffi.  This attempt to assassinate the Libyan Head of State under US Army law, was a war crime and punishable as an International crime in its own right.   During the attack by NATO forces, one of President Gadaffi’s sons, and three of Gadaffi’s grandchildren were killed by NATO forces.

The following day,  2^nd, May 2011, the extra-judicial killing and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, and killings of a woman and two men who were with him,  by the US Special Seals, continued the State Terrorism of the US Government.   After the assassination you, Mr. President, addressed the media and attempted to make acceptable the idea that such violence is just and acceptable.  Do you and your Government and Allies who support you, really believe that the vast majority of men and women around the world have lost all sense of what is right and what is wrong?  Do you really believe that we have all abandoned all sense of decency and ethical values exchanging them in support of your endorsed illegal,  killing  of unarmed civilians?  Do you really believe we will all remain silent whilst under your warrior leadership the  US Government and its allies dismantle  basic human rights and international laws, so long fought for by brave, courageous men and women (including Americans)replacing these with extrajudicial killings, torture and assassinations?

Three months into the French, English, Italian led NATO/US campaign (never sanctioned by US Law) and shamefully agreed by U.N. (who identified the purpose of the operation to be for the protection of citizens!) people of conscience are horrified to hear that, yet again, on l9th June,  NATO has carried out more air attacks on Libya, killing 15 unarmed civilians, including women and children.

After 9/11 the whole world shared the grief of the American people, and many hoped that those who carried out such horrendous acts would be brought to justice through the Courts.   We were moved by many of the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 when they started ‘Families for a peaceful tomorrow’ and called for justice not revenge.   However, violence and revenge was the chosen path of the US Government and its Allies, who for ten years embarked on a path of violence and war.  In this time over 6,000 USA soldiers have needlessly died and countless thousands injured physically and mentally.  Wars in Iraq (over l million Iraqis killed) and Afghanistan (over 50,000 Afghans killed) were carried out by the USA in their pursuit of vengeance.  The US Led so-called ‘war on terrorism’ in Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan has ‘terrorised’ unarmed civilians by carrying out aerial bombardments, night raids, death squads, extra-judicial killings and drone attacks killing many unarmed civilians, including women and children, and tragically they continue to this day.

In a world struggling to birth a new consciousness, it is not incredulous that the best the US Government, NATO and its allies can offer as a model to world citizens, is the outdated example of violence, militarism,  and war, destroying humans and their environment.?

I believe real change and leadership is coming from the people’s movements and what is happening around the world amongst the masses of extra-ordinary men and women rising up, mostly peacefully and non-violently, in country after country for human dignity, equality, freedom and democracy and against violence, oppression, injustice and war, is the real force for change.   We all take great hope and inspiration from the ‘Arab Spring’ and join in solidarity with our courageous Arab brothers and sisters in working for change.

A new dawn, a new age of civilization is coming.   It will be an age of solidarity, of each person dedicated to ‘protective love’ of each other and our World.    It will be an age of nonviolent evolution which shows we can solve our problems as the human family by peaceful means not by violence, nuclear weapons and war.

The peoples of the world are sending a clear message to you Mr. President, to NATO, and all our Governments, and armed opposition groups, that there will be no military solutions to these ethnic/political/economic problems, but only through ending occupations (USA -Iraq/Afghanistan,   Israel/Palestine) declaring ceasefires (Libya, etc.,) and entering into dialogue and negotiations with all parties to the conflicts, can we begin to solve these problems, the roots of which are inequality and injustice.

Mr. President, you came into Office promising Change and gave the world hope. You lit the passion in the hearts of many men and women longing for change, for dialogue and negotiation, to move beyond destructive militarism, nuclear weapons and war.   That passion remains in the heart of humanity as can be seen in the mass nonviolent movements for social and political change taking place around the world.   Will you, Mr. President, take this great opportunity in human history and help lead ,the world to a new beginning, so we can in the words of the late President John F. Kennedy  ‘begin again the quest for peace?’

Yours in Peace,

(Nobel Peace Laureate)

 

 

 

 

Published: June 21, 2011 at 7:11 AM

UPI Outside View Commentator

COLLEGE PARK, Md., June 21 (UPI) — Greece doesn’t have a liquidity problem — it is insolvent. Without transfers of wealth from richer states like Germany and France to retire significant amounts of its sovereign debt, Athens must restructure its bonds — essentially default on significant portions of its obligations to bondholders.

Germany and France are at wits’ ends, because their banks hold a good deal of that debt and would take big losses and other poor EU governments would likely follow Greece’s lead. Paying off Greek creditors may be distasteful but covering the problems of all the EU governments in trouble is beyond the capacity of Germany and the other richer EU states.

To patch things over for another year, Berlin and other rich governments want Athens to impose more cuts in government benefits and wages in exchange for more loans and relatively small private creditor haircuts. And they want Athens to sell off valuable state-owned assets to help lubricate the deal.

The Greek people have already taken major cuts in benefits and salaries and they understand gradualism isn’t solving the problem. They shouldn’t want their economy bought up by the Germans and others and they are correct to expect their government to consider other, more reasonable solutions.

The amount of aid the Greek government will receive through current negotiations will likely result in another crisis next year or the year after and then more cuts in benefits and wages.

Importantly, these deals do nothing about private debt — the mortgages, auto loans and credit card balances Greek citizens are expected to pay as their salaries are cut and cut.

As European integration progressed — for example, with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that harmonized taxes and product standards and the 1999 introduction of the euro — European voters in poorer states increasingly expected healthcare, job security and retirement benefits on a par with the richer states. Civil servants expected to be more adequately compensated — yes “adequately” because examination of Greek salaries doesn’t reveal payments that are very generous by German or French standards.

Sadly, these efforts at deeper market integration didn’t give Brussels the power to tax richer Germany to subsidize Greek social services in the way Washington taxes New York to subsidize healthcare and retirement benefits in Mississippi.

Over the decades, poorer countries have borrowed too much to keep up and now without continuous EU bailouts, they will default on their debts.

Prior to the euro, as poorer countries approached such crises they could let their individual currencies fall in value against the German mark to make their exports more competitive, grow more rapidly and boost debt payment capacity. It meant retirees and tourists from Germany and other rich countries could more easily afford to live in or visit poorer countries than the reverse — a small price to pay for keeping the ship of state from capsizing.

When countries are broke and locked into the same currency area with their major export customers — presently the condition of Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Belgium — their only option is deflation — cuts in government spending, wages and ultimately prices that make their exports more competitive and boost debt service capacity.

Essentially, this is what Germany is imposing on Greece but citizens have mortgages and other debts to pay just as the government have bonds to service. Deflation makes private debt nearly impossible to honor and many Greeks will lose their homes and just about everything else to foreign creditors before the madness ends.

The only real option is to drop the euro and resurrect the drachma, unilaterally remark public and private debt into drachma and let the drachma float to a value on currency markets that balances Greece’s export revenues against its imports and debt servicing obligations.

Abandoning the euro for the drachma would cause Greek gross domestic product and debt servicing capacity to grow more rapidly. Whatever losses imposed on private creditors, richer EU governments and Greek citizens, those would be smaller than the total losses imposed through an annual ritual of crises, aid packages and debt rollovers — conditioned on ever more draconian austerity — and the ultimate absolute default when the final charade ends.

(Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland School, and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.)

(United Press International’s “Outside View” commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Outside-View/2011/06/21/Outside-View-Greece-should-quit-the-euro-and-remark-its-debt/UPI-68341308654660/print/#ixzz1Q4HbeiFR

 

People often ask me why I am part of a team to organize a U.S. Boat to Gaza that will be sailing this month with the next International Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza. They often make clear they are asking because I am an American Jew, whose family survived the Holocaust with some surviving family members ending up in Israel. And my only answer is: How could I not?

My parents raised me with stories about what happened in Germany and their family’s escape. I came to see that Israel represented for them a safe haven should there be another attempt at annihilating Jews. And yet, at the same time, they worried it was not so safe a haven given the animosity and physical threats and violence in the area.

But no one ever mentioned the displacement of 750,000 Arabs that was the result of the creation of Israel. I vaguely knew there were people living there, but I was never curious about who these “others” were. All I took away from my family’s history and the atrocities endured was that this should never happen again to anyone, anywhere.

Growing up in the ‘60s, I became active in opposition to the war in Vietnam, the anti-apartheid struggle and the women’s rights movement and later became involved in opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a social worker, I was focused on social justice issues but never questioned the relationship between the U.S. and Israel and their policies regarding Palestinians.

Then came the war on Gaza and a real political awakening for me. Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report were the catalysts. In November 2008, the ceasefire ended: Israeli soldiers broke it in a cross-border raid killing six members of Hamas and, in response, rockets were launched into Israel. Israel, fortified with American weaponry, attacked the people of Gaza. Approximately 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed compared to 13 Israelis. Gaza was pulverized. Judge Richard Goldstone and his team did a thorough report of the causalities on both sides. There was no doubt that the people of Gaza were disproportionally affected.

Right after the invasion in Gaza I realized I could no longer remain silent. I became one of the organizers of a group called Jews Say No! in New York City. We wanted to speak out and to make clear that the Israeli government did not speak in our name as they claimed. I began reading about the occupation, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building of the separation wall, Jewish-only streets for Israeli settlers, special identity papers for Palestinian citizens of Israel (one step away from wearing a yellow star) and the other indignities endured by the people of Palestine on a daily basis. And I saw the total collusion by the U.S. government – its unconditional support no matter what the Israeli government did, including giving them 30 billion dollars over a 10-year period for weaponry (F16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous, Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in Bedouin encampments) used ruthlessly against the Palestinians. This was intolerable for me.

I understand the fears and frustrations of Israelis being fired upon by rockets and the resultant deaths and injuries. But what about the thousands of Palestinians being killed and whose homes, schools, hospitals, farms, mills, factories and infrastructure are being destroyed? What about a people living under a brutal occupation who are being denied the right to live with dignity in their own homeland?

The siege and blockade of Gaza continue. The Israeli government controls the land, sea and air of this small area (25 miles long and roughly six miles wide) where 1.6 million people live. There has been no movement in recent years unless Israel allowed it. (Egypt’s partial opening of the Rafah gate to human traffic, though not to commerce, is a positive sign if it is allowed to grow). Most people cannot travel in or out of Gaza because of continuing restrictions, 61 percent of the population is food insecure, the unemployment rate is around 45 percent, one of the highest in the world, and exports remain banned with the exception of limited items like strawberries and carnations for European markets. Gaza is called an open-air prison even by England’s Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Given all this, I can remain silent no longer. Every day Palestinians are confronting the Israeli government at the wall, at check points, at demolition sites. They risk their lives. Like the Freedom Rides our boat is sailing to call attention to the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza.

My humanity and my Jewishness – Jewish history – demand my being part of an organizing effort to end the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. The U.S. Boat, called The Audacity of Hope, will sail in late June to Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla 2-Stay Human. We will be approximately 50 individuals from across the U.S. committed to non-violence, human rights and freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.

To date, tens of thousands of individuals and over 80 organizations have endorsed this U.S. campaign and each day more sign on to travel with us in name. We travel in peace for justice, and I am proud to be part of this international effort.

Jane Hirschmann is a member of Jews Say No!, a psychotherapist from New York City, co-author of three books and one of the organizers of the U.S. Boat to Gaza. More information about the The Audacity of Hope is available at www.ustogaza.org.

 
20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

 

 

 

Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out

 

 

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 June 2011 20.18 BST

 

Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

 

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from “land grabs” that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.

 

The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one ofAfrica’s largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

 

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent’s clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

 

Emergent said the deals were handled responsibly. “Yes, university endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors,” a spokesman said. “We are investing in African agriculture and setting up businesses and employing people. We are doing it in a responsible way … The amounts are large. They can be hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive.”

 

Chinese and Middle Eastern firms have previously been identified as “grabbing” large tracts of land in developing countries to grow cheap food for home populations, but western funds are behind many of the biggest deals, says the Oakland institute, an advocacy research group.

 

The company that manages Harvard’s investment funds declined to comment. “It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report,” said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment.

 

Oakland said investors overstated the benefits of the deals for the communities involved. “Companies have been able to create complex layers of companies and subsidiaries to avert the gaze of weak regulatory authorities. Analysis of the contracts reveal that many of the deals will provide few jobs and will force many thousands of people off the land,” said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland’s director.

 

In Tanzania, the memorandum of understanding between the local government and US-based farm development corporation AgriSol Energy, which is working with Iowa University, stipulates that the two main locations – Katumba and Mishamo – for their project are refugee settlements holding as many as 162,000 people that will have to be closed before the $700m project can start. The refugees have been farming this land for 40 years.

 

In Ethiopia, a process of “villagisation” by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies.

 

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues.

 

In Mozambique, where up to 7m hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South Africans businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the US. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created.

 

“No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security,” said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia. “These agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors.”

 

“The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking”, said Mittal. “The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

 

Research by the World Bank and others suggests that nearly 60m hectares – an area the size of France – has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa in the past three years.

 

“Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms,” says the report.

 

“We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as squatters, are forcibly removed with no compensation,” said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at Oakland, said: “This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world’s poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens.”

 

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

 

With revolutions sweeping the Arab world and bubbling-up across Europe, aging tyrants or discredited governments are doing their best to cling to power. It’s hard to over-exaggerate the importance of these events: the global political and economic status-quo is in deep crisis. If pro-democracy or anti-austerity movements emerge victorious, they’ll have an immediate problem to solve — how to pay for their vision of a better world. The experiences thus far in Egypt and Greece are proof enough that money matters. The wealthy nations holding the purse strings are still able to influence the unfolding of events from afar, subjecting humiliating conditions on those countries undergoing profound social change.

This strategy is being ruthlessly deployed in the Arab world.   Take for example Egypt, where the U.S. and Europe are quietly supporting the military dictatorship that replaced the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Now Mubarak’s generals rule the country. The people of Egypt, however, still want real change, not a mere shuffling at the top; a strike wave and mass demonstrations are testing the power of the new military dictatorship.

A strike wave implies that Egyptians want better wages and working conditions; and economic opportunity was one of the central demands of the revolutionaries who toppled Mubarak.  But revolutions tend to have a temporarily negative effect on a nation’s economy. This is mainly because those who dominate the economy, the rich, do their best to sabotage any social change.

One defining feature of revolutions is the exodus of the rich, who correctly assume their wealth will be targeted for redistribution. This is often referred to as “capital flight.” Also, rich foreign investors stop investing money in the revolutionary country, not knowing if the company they’re investing in will remain privately owned, or if the government they’re investing in will strategically default and choose not to pay back foreign investors. Lastly, workers demand higher wages in revolutions, and many owners would rather shut down — if they don’t flee — than operate for small profits. All of this hurts the economy overall.

The New York Times reports:

“The 18-day [Egyptian] revolt stopped new foreign investment and decimated the pivotal tourist industry… The revolution has inspired new demands for more jobs and higher wages that are fast colliding with the economy’s diminished capacity…Strikes by workers demanding their share of the revolution’s spoils continue to snarl industry… The main sources of capital in this country have either been arrested, escaped or are too afraid to engage in any business…” (June 10, 2011).

Understanding this dynamic, the rich G8 nations are doing their best to exploit it. Knowing that any governments that emerge from the Arab revolutions will be instantly cash-starved, the G8 is dangling $20 billion with strings attached. The strings in this case are demands that the Arab countries pursue only “open market” policies, i.e., business-friendly reforms, such as privatizations, elimination of food and gas subsidies, and allowing foreign banks and corporations better access to the economy. A separate New York Times article addressed the subject with the misleading title, Aid Pledge by Group of 8 Seeks to Bolster Arab Democracy:

“Democracy, the  [G8] leaders said, could be rooted only in economic reforms that created open markets …The [$20 billion] pledge, an aide to President Obama said, was “not a blank check” but “an envelope that could be achieved in the context of suitable [economic] reform efforts.” (May 28, 2011).

The G8 policy towards the Arab world is thus the same policy the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have pursued against weaker nations that have run into economic problems. The cure is always worse than the disease, since “open market” reforms always lead to the national wealth being siphoned into the hands of fewer and fewer people as public entities are privatized, making the rich even richer, while social services are eliminated, making the poor even poorer. Also, the open door to foreign investors evolves into a speculative bubble that inevitably bursts; the investors flee an economically devastated country. It is no accident that many former IMF “beneficiary” countries have paid off their debts and denounced their benefactors, swearing never to return.

Nations that refuse the conditions imposed by the G8 or IMF are thus cut off from the capital that any country would need to maintain itself and expand amid a time of social change. The rich nations proclaim victory in both instances: either the poorer nation asks for help and becomes economically penetrated by western corporations, or the poor country is economically and politically isolated, punished and used as an example of what becomes of those countries that attempt a non-capitalist route to development.

Many Arab countries are especially appetizing to foreign corporations hungry for new investments, since large state-run industries remain in place to help the working-class populations, a tradition begun under the socialist-inspired Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser that spread across the Arab world. If Egypt falls victim to an Iraq-like privatization frenzy, Egypt’s working people and poor will pay higher prices for food, gas, and other basic necessities. This is one reason, other than oil, that many U.S. corporations would also like to invade Iran.

The social turmoil in the Arab world and Europe have fully exposed the domination that wealthy investors and corporations have over the politics of nations. All over Europe “bailouts” are being discussed for poorer nations facing economic crises. The terms of these bailout loans are ruthless and are dictated by nothing more than the desire to maximize profits. In Greece, for example, the profit-motive of the lenders is obvious to everyone, helping to create a social movement that might reach Arab proportions. The New York Times reports:

“The new [Greece bailout] loans, however, will only be forthcoming if more austerity measures are introduced…Along with faster progress on privatization, Europe and the [IMF] fund have been demanding that Greece finally begin cutting public sector jobs and closing down unprofitable entities.”  (June 1, 2011).

This same phenomenon is happening all over Europe, from England to Spain, as working people are told that social programs must be slashed, public jobs eliminated, and state industries privatized. The U.S. is also deeply affected, with daily media threats about the “vigilante bond holders” [rich investors] who will stop buying U.S. debt if Social Security, Medicare, and other social services are not eliminated.

Never before has the global market economy been so damningly exposed as biased and dominated by the super-wealthy. These consciousness-raising experiences cannot be easily siphoned into politicians promising “democracy,” since democracy is precisely the problem: a tiny minority of super-rich individuals have dictatorial power due to their enormous wealth, which they use to threaten governments who don’t cater to their every whim. Money is thus given to subservient governments and taken away from independent ones, while the western media never questions these often sudden shifts in policy, which can instantly transform a longtime U.S. ally into a “dictator” or vice-versa.

The toppling of dictators in the Arab world has immediately raised the question of, “What next”? The economic demands of working people cannot be satisfied while giant corporations dominate the economy, since higher wages mean lower corporate profits, while better social services require that the rich pay higher taxes. These fundamental conflicts lay just beneath the social upheavals all over the world, which came into maturity with the global recession and will continue to dominate social life for years to come. The outcome of this prolonged struggle will determine what type of society emerges from the political tumult, and will meet either the demands of working people or serve the needs of rich investors and giant corporations.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org )  He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

1)   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?_r=1&hpw

2)  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/world/europe/28g8.html?

pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=g8%20arab&st=cse&scp=1

3)  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/business/economy/01euro.html?hpw#
20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

 

 

MOSCOW — When Iraq auctioned rights to rebuild and expand its oil industry two years ago, the Russian company Lukoil won a hefty portion — a field holding about 10 percent of Iraq’s known oil reserves.

 

It seemed a geopolitical victory for Lukoil. And because only one of the 11 fields that the Iraqis auctioned off  went to an American oil company — Exxon Mobil — it also seemed as if few petroleum benefits would flow to the country that took the lead role in the war, the United States.

 

The auction’s outcome helped defuse criticism in the Arab world that the United States had invaded Iraq for its oil. “No one, even the United States, can steal the oil,” the Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said at the time.

 

But American companies can, apparently, drill for the oil.

 

In fact, American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before any of the oil producers start seeing any returns on their investments.

 

Lukoil and many of the other international oil companies that won fields in the auction are now subcontracting mostly with the four largely American oil services companies that are global leaders in their field: Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger. Those four have won the largest portion of the subcontracts to drill for oil, build wells and refurbish old equipment.

 

“Iraq is a huge opportunity for contractors,” Alex Munton, a Middle East analyst for Wood Mackenzie, a research and consulting firm based in Edinburgh, said by telephone.

 

Mr. Munton estimated that about half of the $150 billion the international majors are expected to invest at Iraqi oil fields over the next decade would go to drilling subcontractors — most of it to the big four operators, which all have ties to the Texas oil industry.

 

Halliburton and Baker Hughes are based in Houston, as is the drilling unit of Schlumberger, which is based in Paris. Weatherford, though now incorporated in Switzerland, was founded in Texas and still has big operations there.

 

Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and an authority on oil and conflict, said that American oil services companies were generally dominant both in the Middle East and globally because of their advanced drilling technology. So it is no surprise, he said, they came out on top in Iraq, too — whatever the initial diplomatic appearances.

 

United States officials have said that American experts who advised the Iraqi oil ministry about ways to restore and increase petroleum production did so without seeking any preferences for American companies.

 

And immediately after the 2009 auction round won by Lukoil, the United States Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Philip Frayne, told Reuters that “the results of the bid round should lay to rest the old canard that the U.S. intervened in Iraq to secure Iraqi oil for American companies.”

 

But Professor Klare said that the American officials who had advised the Iraqi government on its contracting decisions almost certainly expected American oil services companies to win a good portion of the business there, regardless who won the primary contracts.

 

“There’s no question that they would assume as much,” he said.

 

The American oil services companies, which have been in Iraq for years on contract with the United States occupation authorities and military, are expanding their presence even as the American military prepares to pull out.

 

For example, Halliburton, once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, has 600 employees in Iraq today and said in a statement that it intended to hire several hundred more before the end of the year. “We continue to win significant contracts in Iraq, and are investing heavily in our infrastructure,” Halliburton said.

 

The 11 contracts Iraq signed with oil majors, including the six for the largest fields, are intended to raise Iraqi output from about 2.5 million barrels of oil a day now to 12 million barrels daily in 2017. Some of the oil services contracts are for repairing currently productive fields, others to tap mostly unused sites.

 

Most outside experts, including those at the International Energy Agency in Paris, are skeptical of the production targets. The I.E.A. predicts that Iraq will not surpass six million barrels a day until 2030.

 

But there is little question that production is ramping up. On average in 2002, the year before the United States invasion, Iraq produced only 1.9 million barrels of oil a day.

 

Lukoil’s experience in Iraq shows how, while geopolitics steered the primary contracts largely away from United States oil companies, the process left the subcontracting wide open for American service providers.

 

Lukoil was originally granted rights by Saddam Hussein, in 1997, to develop a huge field called West Qurna 2 — rights that Mr. Hussein rescinded just before the war began in 2003.

 

After the invasion, Lukoil sensed that its best chances lay in working with the Americans. It formed a joint venture with the United States company ConocoPhillips, giving Conoco a small venture in the Russian Arctic and ceding it part of West Qurna 2.

 

By the time Lukoil was eventually compelled to bid again for the field at the 2009 auction, sentiment in both the United States and Iraqi governments seemed to have shifted to favoring non-American companies in awarding the main contracts. But one of Lukoil’s first steps after securing the West Qurna 2 deal was to subcontract the oil well refurbishment work to Baker Hughes.

 

While Baker and its American peers are poised to make significant profits from such work in Iraq, wafer-thin margins seem to await Lukoil and the other international oil producers — which include BP of Britain, CNPC of China, ENI of Italy and the Anglo-Dutch company Shell.

 

Lukoil’s contract, for example, is typical in paying a flat fee of $1.15 for each barrel produced, regardless of oil’s price.

 

That means even if Lukoil ramps up West Qurna 2 production from almost nothing now to 1.8 million barrels a day by 2017, as specified in the contract, it will require more than a decade of subsequent production just to recoup capital costs of about $13 billion. A good portion of those costs, meanwhile, will have gone to its drilling contractors. Lukoil says it intends to drill more than 500 wells over six years.

 

Lukoil and other winners of the 2009 auction are now quietly seeking to renegotiate the deals by slowing the upfront investment. On Wednesday, Lukoil executives met with Iraq’s oil minister in Moscow, the company said in a statement. A spokesman declined to provide more details.

 

Andrei Kuzyaev, the president of Lukoil Overseas, the company’s subsidiary for foreign operations, said in an interview that he was choosing oil services contractors in Iraq through open tenders, as required by the contract. But in fact, Lukoil officials say privately, only American companies have bid.

 

“The strategic interest of the United States is in new oil supplies arriving on the world market, to lower prices,” Mr. Kuzyaev said.

 

“It is not important that we did not take part in the coalition,” he said, referring to the military operations in Iraq. “For America, the important thing is open access to reserves. And that is what is happening in Iraq.”

 

 

Rome : It’s an accumulative kind of thing, the demise of capitalism worldwide: at first the waning and the dwindling, now the rapid corkscrew-like downwards spiraling, of greedy, vicious, cannibalistic capitalism busily devouring itself. Today, one can only conclude the imminence of its just demise.

Just as one once said in Italy during the agony of the death of the Italian Communist Party, just as one once spoke of the loss of the propulsive force of the French Revolution, current events show that also capitalism, the capitalist system itself, has lost its self-proclaimed propulsive force. Today, for a growing number of capitalists it is a case of si salvi chi puo , every man for himself. No one can logically claim that capitalism as an economic-social-political idea propels forward world society.

In the face of the current disaster of the capitalist system, one can ldetermine that capitalism’s ideology, its promises for societal well-being, were false from the start. One can no longer defend capitalism in good faith. Marx was right, over a century and a half ago: capitalism has hung itself in its excess, in its greed for more and more and more.

Underlying what I prefer to call the Mediterranean Spring rather than the European Spring are a host of symptoms of a highly infectious pandemic of rejection of the capitalist system. The movement of the movements infecting Spanish youth camping on the plazas of their nation today is transversal. Its common denominator is anti-system, which, though they might not yet realize it, I believe translates into anti-capitalism.

Rejection of what is and what has been in Europe . The fever has spread across all of southern Europe , from Portugal to Greece . The Spanish-Portuguese mood is almost identical in Greece , where working people, especially youth, refuse to pay for the greed of capitalism. Also some similarities are visible in the overturn of systems in Tunisia and Egypt . Now today also in Italy , the grass roots—youth and workers. the unemployed and the underpaid underemployed—demand the same rights claimed by protesters in Spain and Portugal and Greece .

It has become contagious. A fever. The Mediterranean world is burning: the demand is economic democracy, political justice and peace. In Spain , Real democracia ya ! Real democracy now. The time of indifference seems over and past. Society has awakened. Spain ‘s indignados , modern Don Quixotes, have occupied sixty plazas across the Spain . The Indignant Ones movement in Portugal is the same. The movement is hailed and imitated by Greeks and Italians. In France , they occupied for a brief time the Bastille. Capitalism should tremble. For when indifference ends, social activism takes over. Revolution is in fact already underway.

It is clear that capitalism cannot change its very nature. Reform has become an obscene word since it today means change so that nothing changes. Reform has come to mean shifting gears so that the strain of economic crisis shifts ever more onto the backs of the socially weak and undefended.

Who then are the weak and undefended? As always in social history of the over one hundred years of rampant, unbridled, excessive capitalism, they are the working class. As an irony of history that class today is bigger than it has ever been. It now includes also a great part of the former middle class. Simultaneously however, the ruling capitalist class has shrunken in numbers to that infamous one per cent who hold and use the social wealth to crush and humiliate the weakened classes.

In Italy , the symptoms of the socio-political revolution underway have suddenly, overnight, exploded onto the scene. Everything has been commented on in Italy : the lowest salaries, the highest prices, the lowest pensions, the hardest workers, the greatest insecurity, the highest real unemployment, the highest number of precarious workers, the highest emigration from Italy of qualified university graduates in search of better lives elsewhere.

Wherever you look in southern Europe you hear the same cries of indignation. While financial collapse threatens Mediterranean Europe, the cries of the indignant ones are rising in intensity. What at first seemed like just another protest movement similar to 1968 has changed gears and entered a slow-motion period of still non-violent but constant, unrelenting dissidence which is also becoming an accelerated socio-political catastrophe. In Spain and Portugal , in Italy and Greece , while the political elite struggles with economic recovery from the disaster it created, everyday life is worsening: economically, politically, and socially. Today’s non-violent protest seems on the verge of violence.

Debt defaults, impossible state bond sales, hopeless bailouts and failed debt restructuring threaten. In this eschatological atmosphere, suddenly appeared the indignados. As if from nowhere, university-educated, networked youth, especially in Italy and Spain, many still living with their parents, are all acutely aware that their post-bubble nations have little or nothing to offer them as unemployment soars, precarious part-time employment becomes the norm and health benefits are reduced,

Until now their demands have been restrained: they have aimed at making the political elite accountable, called for new electoral laws geared to end the fake two-party system in Spain and the stale political systems in Italy and Greece . Electoral reform is a modest demand for what in south Europe is widely labeled a lost generation.

On the other hand, in Eurolandia, as in the USA , politicians and bankers are joined at the hip in their response to the economic crisis.

Therefore, one is surprised by protester statements such as: “We are not against the system, but we want a change in the system. We want change— not in the future; we want a change in the present. We demand a change, and we want it now.” But not even that voice of the people is heard.

In this atmosphere of socio-economic hopelessness, reform seems enough in the immediate future. Still, I believe the still unconscious demand reaches much more deeply into society and that the ante is rising with each passing day. We know that as a rule people don’t rebel easily. People do everything possible to avoid real social convulsion and upheaval, even compromising with a Fascist police state.

On the other side of the fence, today’s government is aware that a spirit of mutiny is brewing. That is why it has armed itself with a set of illegal and anti-constitutional laws to crush it. But the evident reality is that at this point the alternative to ousting today’s corrupt system is a permanent police state, which if it becomes any more fixed than it is now just might last a thousand years.

Acceptance of the legitimacy of Power, indifference to Power’s deviations and passivity in the face of Power’s threats against external enemies at least seem to have peaked. It commonly accepted that Power gone mad has to be put aside. The eventual end of acceptance and passivity could result in a kind of explosion the world has never seen. Clash between people and corrupt systems appears logically inevitable.

At the same time, and on another front, more and more people are losing faith in nonviolence, even though capitalism itself is extremely violent. If you’re not nice and polite, some people consider that violence. But most violence is in business as usual and capitalism grinding on, killing workers, forests and oceans. We’re surrounded by normalized violence and don’t recognize it for what it is. Confronting this normalized violence in a direct way is not violent; it is necessary.

Yet, many people still argue that you have to work within the system, that is, within the capitalist system. But it is a truism that you can’t have it all. You can’t have your air conditioning and not use up limited energy. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that endless economic growth is unsustainable. Climate change is a reality, so drastic change in the field will come about whether we like it or not.

The romantic word Revolution is terrifying to most people. There is just reason to mistrust it. Since the heroic times of the American and French revolutions and the Great Russian Revolution the word has degenerated. The student revolution of the 1960s, though leaving behind many lasting effects, petered out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine comes to mind as an example of a political class abusing the word Revolution.

If we discard the idea of armed revolution, at the same time let’s don’t confuse revolution with mere reform on the one hand or with armed insurrection on the other. Insurrection is a local, usually spontaneous and one-issue matter. Reform is simply adjustment made by the rulers in order to maintain power as happened time and time again in Tsarist Russia. As a rule, reforms are too little and too late, and besides are offset by negative developments in other sectors.

Resistence against oppression causes a rupture between rulers and the ruled. That is the beginning of revolution. The thing about revolution is that it is gradual and elusive. You don’t even realize it is revolution when in fact you are already in it.

Resistence and rebellion against unjust power remains a leitmotiv in the history of mankind. With that tradition in mind the present rulers of Europe must wonder what form the next explosion will take and when it will arrive. For when the gap between rulers and people becomes unbridgeable and the scared people re-learn the sense of social solidarity and widespread Resistance sets in, the revolutionary step is inevitable. In an adult and mature people the passage from one step to the next in the dialectical chain appears historically ineluctable. Once underway, such a process doesn’t just stop.

The masses of the oppressed of America and Europe have thus far appeared surprisingly nonchalant about their lost freedoms. Most snicker at suggestions of rebellion. Of any kind of rebellion. Many still see America and Europe as the cradle of democracy and freedom. But what if, for example, in the United States of America—shaky super power today, in decline and tottering on the brink of disaster—what if the next step by the people was mutiny against the long, gradual counter-revolution in America, as of yet little charted by historians? What if real revolution broke out in Greece and then spread westwards? Is it science fiction, the image of people taking to the streets? Is the idea of revolution really far-fetched?

Globalization has accelerated the crises of traditional, national political systems, reorganizing and transforming the nature of power, relocating it to international political bodies. The institutions of the European Union—the European Commission, the European Council, The European Central Bank—are not democratic representatives requested by popular majorities. Instead they represent the bureaucratic and technocratic structures instituted to permit capitalism to continue to expand its hegemony on a continental and global scale. Within the revolutionary process underway in the world, Europe is attempting to cut its own vital space pointed toward monopolizing planetary resources. The size of this space will be determined by the European Union’s capacity to develop a new regime of accumulation, integrating territories, capital and consumers/workers. In fact, the real revolution of the unification of world markets is not the vaunted liberal revolution, but instead a financial revolution, affecting all the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea .

Protesters worldwide do not yet realize that the factor that has accelerated the transformation of markets and the degradation of the situation of workers in recent years has been the savage deregulation of the mechanisms governing financial transactions. This deregulation paved the way for the change from an economy based on productivity of industrial systems to a drugged economy based on incomes for the top 1% of the population derived from monetary and financial transactions.

Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture, have been published (and translated) on many leading online and print venues.

20 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org