Alternatives International

Understanding the Greek Debt Crisis: Lessons from Structural Adjustment

Sophia Reuss — 2015-08-03T14:56:47Z

The Troika has once again tightened their debt shackles around Greece's wrists, despite having already cut off the nation's circulation. By forcing Alexis Tsipras to accept another round of austerity measures, the European Union and IMF have further undermined Syriza's initial promises of debt restructuring and reform.

The terms of the recent agreements — which to many signal a point of no return — ought to provoke déjà vu. The bailouts, now in their fifth year of domination over the Greek government and populace, harken back to the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) implemented by the World Bank and IMF in African, Latin American, and Asian countries from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Structural Adjustment Programmes were the IMF and World Bank's economic dogma and modus operandi for several decades. The institutions would disburse loans conditional on the implementation of a host of neoliberal economic policies aimed at market liberalization. These policies, dubbed the Washington Consensus, revolved around a simple motivation: to maintain developing countries and ex-colonies' positions as pawns in the global economy, thus ensuring the West's hegemony.

Of course, this is not how the IMF and World Bank will spell it. They describe the Washington Consensus as economic reform aimed at restructuring economies and minimizing government intervention in order to stimulate free-market growth. The four tenets of SAPs, as described in a Guardian interview with ex-World Bank economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, are: privatization, capital market liberalization, market-based pricing, and free trade. A healthy dose of each, according to the IMF and World Bank, ought to cure a stagnating economy. Neoliberal medicine.

SAPs involved a combination of short-term measures, or shock measures, and long-term policies intended to stimulate the economy. The shock measures often began with the discontinuation of government subsidies on necessary products and services, such as foodstuffs, electricity, and fuel. In turn, the prices of these vital goods and services skyrocketed, which made it difficult for populations to buy food and producers to transport their goods. Local producers were forced to increase their prices, leading to price inflation. The result? Hunger, bankruptcy, and economic destabilization.

In reaction to these cutbacks, many “anti-IMF” and “anti-hunger” riots occurred, and thousands of protesters worldwide demanded a decrease in food prices. In Venezuela, hundreds of deaths occurred during the 1989 anti-IMF riots, though unofficial sources have estimated the death toll at over 4,000. The repercussions of these cutbacks in government subsidies were felt into the early 2000s, when in 2008, a global hunger crisis erupted and hunger riots began in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Bangladesh, Morocco, and the Philippines.

Along with cutbacks in subsidies, SAPs required governments to dramatically reduce social expenditure by slashing education, health, housing, and infrastructure budgets, and freezing the salaries of civil servants. These measures, combined with the sudden hike in prices, severely affected populations, most harshly the poor. SAPs were thus responsible for perpetuating inequalities and institutionalizing systems of structural violence, whereby governments systematically denied their populations fundamental services and basic human rights.

Long-term measures involved developing exports (usually in the form of a monoculture), eliminating customs barriers to open up markets, liberalization, and the privatization of public companies. These policies institutionalized the dependency on Western multinationals and imports. Lowering tariffs and customs barriers allowed foreign multinationals to enter markets and compete with local producers, which derailed local economies. In contrast to local producers, foreign multinationals benefitted from financial and technological strength, and since countries were no longer allowed to tax imports, products from the West often became cheaper than local items. In Jamaica, for example, SAPs have rendered powdered milk from the United States less expensive than fresh milk from Jamaican dairy farms. This continues to guarantee the United States's ability to sell in the Jamaican market, and causes the local dairy farms to struggle financially. While the vast majority of Western countries protect their own producers with subsidies and higher taxes on imported products, SAPs forced governments to do the opposite, thus ensnaring countries in a snafu: dependency on foreign products and destabilization of the local economy.

SAPs worked to increase poverty and dependency while intensifying inequality within a population. Since eliminating custom barriers reduced tax revenue, countries were required to adopt the value-added tax (VAT), a tax on purchase price, instead of implementing a progressive taxation on income. Unlike income tax, VAT disproportionately affects the poorest members of society. In West Africa, where VAT is 18 per cent, families with higher incomes who spend, for example, 10 per cent of their total income on staple products, pay only 1.8 per cent of their total income on VAT. Lower-income families, who spend 100 per cent of their total income on staple products, effectively pay 18 per cent tax on their income. Thus, the taxation system under SAPs increased socio-economic disparity, concentrating wealth in the hands of the elite.

Along with other short- and long-term measures like currency devaluation and high interest rates, SAPs caused the cost of living to rise, purchasing power to decrease, the destabilization of local economies, the exacerbation of inequalities, and the ballooning of both public and private debts. Furthermore, leaders and government officials often embezzled the revenues gleaned from privatization, which not only worsened inequality but necessitated the acceptance of additional loans in order to pay back the original loans. SAPs thus forced countries to take on intractable debt.

A rose by any other name would smell as….catastrophic. And by any other name, SAPs are the same sort of austerity measures the European Union and IMF are enforcing in the Greek agreements. The Greek bailouts, including the recent agreement, have come with SAP-like conditions: severe austerity measures, including budget cuts on social expenditure, tax increases, and privatisation. The recent bailout includes, most notably, a reform (read: rollback) of Greece's pension programme, an increase in the number of items covered by the highest VAT rate (23%), further liberalisation measures, potential reform of pharmacy ownership, milk marketing, and designation of bakeries, and another dose of lethal austerity. All this to simply pay back debt from the previous bailouts.

While Christine Lagarde has stated that debt restructuring is a condition for IMF participation in the new bailout deal, it is clear that, for the EU and IMF, imposing more austerity measures trumps any significant debt relief or forgiveness. As Alexis Tsipras continues to battle Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel, and the predatory EU, the Greek population continues to suffer, and the tensions within Syriza continue to intensify.

The major difference between SAPs and the Greek crisis? While the Greek debt crisis is unfolding on western European soil, the SAP-related debt crises transpired in countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The Greek crisis raises questions about the viability of the euro and European hegemony, while SAPs provoked questions about neo-colonial processes and global power dynamics. However, the broader philosophical implications of both situations remain largely the same: the Greek bailouts and the SAPs are both part of a neoliberal agenda, whereby debt is a geopolitical tool for retaining power. The incredible social consequences of this debt are largely ignored.

There has been little acknowledgement of the similarities between the terms of the Greek bailout and SAPs. This is perhaps due to a skewed international memory (the Western media rarely compares political or socio-economic situations in the ‘centre' with those in the ‘periphery'), and because SAPs have been widely criticized for their negative consequences. An examination of the consequences of SAPs bears witness to the perils of austerity politics mandated by the IMF and international institutions. History, and debt, continue to repeat themselves.

Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/greece-bailout-agreement-key-points-grexit
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/apr/29/business.mbas
https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/greece-and-africa-learning-the-lessons-of-structural-adjustment/

A Few Observations on the Greek Crisis

René Charest and Roger Rashi — 2015-08-03T14:54:16Z

Democracy and Break in the Fight Against Austerity

“Moreover, we have the same issues at stake as does Europe: how to combine the electoral process and the mobilization of the masses, how to establish a strategic link between the political organizations and the social movements, how to develop a break strategy supported by the working classes.”

Like many anti-austerity leftist militants in the world, we have closely followed the Greek crisis unravel in the past few weeks. Like everyone else, we are not happy with the outcome. That Greece should be placed under such a trusteeship set up by the European commission is sad news. Nonetheless, we see that the situation is not static, and the struggle will continue on an ideological, economic and political front. History never ends; even less so the eternal class struggle.

We would like to use this opportunity to draw some observations from this period that will certainly be linked to the history of the left in the world. We want to draw some lessons in order to continue the struggle against austerity; a struggle that has become, by the force of things, the key issue at stake that binds the different organizations from the new radical left, whether it be in Germany, Spain, Scotland, Portugal or here in Québec.

Some will say that the electoral strategy pursued by Syriza was the wrong one, as evidenced by the appalling agreement that the Greek government has been forced to accept. We hear echoes of Badiou or of other anarchists who repeat modern variations of the slogan: « Élections, Pièges à con » (Elections, traps for idiots). Instead, we believe that the electoral path was necessary for a party such as Syriza with multiple radical left tendencies. Without such a path, the party would have remained in the shadows and the Greek government would not have succeeded in stoking fear in the central banks and European governments for as long as they did. And these governments will continue to feel this fear for a long time because the struggle, as we said, is not over. We quote here the warning from Poulantzas in his most recent book, which refers to the writings of Rosa Luxembourg: direct democracy cannot do without parliamentary democracy, and the reverse is true. In this sense, the internal opposition that made up the Leftist Platform at the heart of Syriza, and its strategic alliance with Antarsya or other radical and revolutionary movements, has proven to be crucial for the future of the class struggle in Greece. What it does is allow these sections of the militant left of the parliamentary democracy to come out into the direct democracy process and carry out the political work needed in Greece and throughout the world, i.e. to fight against austerity and forge a break with capitalism.

This new makeup, with its inevitable splits and new associations, which can appear harmful for the left does not have to be since it breathes new life in democracy generally and allows the struggle to be reactivated. Imagine for a moment what the situation would look like if there had been unanimous consent amongst Syriza deputies in the Greek parliament. The party would have cut itself off from social movements and could have started to break down rapidly. A true militant left must not be simply practical and seek to avoid debates by all means in order to maintain organizational links. The left must be conflictual, insofar as it must put forth uncompromising, clashing ideas with the risk of sometimes undermining the political organizations that represent this left. The Leftist Platform is a courageous example of this determination to pursue the struggle through extra-parliamentary means in collaboration with social movements. In the end, street power overrides the voting booth because that is where the true potential to get around the system resides.

Must one however accuse the other Syriza branch, represented by Tsipras and his colleagues, in a brutal manner? We must criticize him for putting too much trust in a pro-European centrist tendency that was looking for an agreement, more than a true improvement in the living conditions of the Greek people. He made a fatal mistake by refusing to have a plan B, and by wasting the overwhelming victory of the referendum's “no” outcome. Nonetheless, we cannot reject the work that he has accomplished over the past five months whilst in power, including during the referendum campaign. We believe that some members of the international left are too focused on hatred. This is obviously not something new, especially when the Left assumes power. Lula, Chavez, and today Morales have all been severely criticized, and oftentimes with good reason. However, the most trenchant critics of leaders, governments, or political parties do not automatically reject those who are subject to such criticism from the Left in which we fight. We stand for an active international solidarity; one that must also engage in criticism. In the end, political practice will decide whether one's leftist involvement is genuinely anti-neo-liberal.

Above all, we must express solidarity with the Greek people who will have no other choice but to fight against the new memorandum. This is the primary issue at stake. We must side with the people of Europe who are grappling with scandalous austerity measures. We must also hope that these struggles may bring other leftist militant political parties to power, or in the quasi-official opposition.

Nevertheless, the best way to show solidarity is by leading the fight in Québec against the neo-liberal governments in Québec and in Ottawa. Moreover, we have the same issues at stake as in Europe: how to combine the electoral process and the mobilization of the masses, how to establish a strategic link between the political organizations and the social movements, how to develop a break strategy supported by the working classes. Furthermore, the issue of sovereignty of the majority plays a pivotal role in our political decisions, as we have seen with the example of the Greek government and its relation with Europe. And, the Québécois left knows that reality very well!

This is a joint process of reflections by Roger Rashi and René Charest that will appear on the Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme site.

https://www.facebook.com/rene.charest.395/posts/10205924342800980?fref=nf&pnref=story

Let Me Tell You A Story About Your Money

Dylan Boyko — 2015-08-03T14:51:51Z

Everyone loves to create debt narratives. From politicians to economists, local pundits to talking heads, the use of debt – loaded with historical baggage – refers pejoratively to the money spent by unwise nations. With even less tact, economists love to slam current conditions – the impending Eurozone death-knell being the disaster-du-jour – with recalcitrant reminders that history could have prepared us for the difficulty of today. Debt is universal for nations, and economists like Paul Krugman champion certain traditional debt management complete with associated historical imperatives. National debt, while not separate from history, can be understood as a tool for the public good, coopted in its current state by private investment. Tradition, derided in most other aspects of contemporary life, still supposedly holds the curative for all current economic ills. Instead, the impetus behind debt acquisition and economic stimulation should be held up to the light, and examined in terms of how it does or does not meet the needs of the nation's citizens.

As Paul Krugman notes, “debt is money we owe ourselves” where payment does not lead to richness nor having it lead to poverty. While national debt may “pose a threat to financial stability,” the march towards austerity offers just as much danger, leaning towards cost cutting that stalls economic growth and perpetuates existent financial depression. National debt nominally represents an economic balancing force, a social tool for well-to-do nations to stimulate struggling economies without the direct cost of material wealth or specie. When the balance tips all together towards budgetary restriction and austerity, the entire global market suffers dramatically.

Total austerity compounds the financial instability of debt with an increased focus on saving non-existent money. Krugman's microscopic example outlines the broader macrocosmic reality: “[M]y spending is your income, and your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending at the same time, incomes go down around the world.” Debt, or the allocation of debt, from Krugman's “core economies” to the “belt-tightening … periphery” maintains growth through a sustainable measure of balanced spending and saving. Frugality applied en masse quickly turns cost-saving into car-crash disaster economics.

Turning the balance beam of debt into a slip n' slide leads directly to financial purgatory. While suffering nations could potentially cut certain costs, Krugman notes that a correspondent increase in spending from stable nations just is not coming. Debt, at the best of times, harbors potential salvation in the trading of non-existent currency for real products or social services. At its worst, that is, when every nations attempts to lower their piece of the debt-pie, national debt becomes a toxic portion of national spending, where interest rates skyrocket and the economic deflation decimates any possible internal growth. The macroeconomic movements of debt avoid the odious motivations for such climactic national decisions.

Historical justifications heighten the untenable modern usage of national debt. Krugman's later condemnations of “self-indulgent politicians ignor[ing] arithmetic and the lessons of history” at once massages the ego of the prognosticator while ignoring general suffering. Dealing in “fantasy economics” is not just the purview of the German or British governments demanding austerity from pained debtor nations, but also the antiquated esteem that Krugman has for governmental financial control. The economic meandering of powerful nations stop being a game of knights and kings once the general population drowns in unemployment and deferred state welfare. Debt, again and again, must be used to service the nation as a tool for the public, not a plaything for the economic posturing of Europe and North America.

Krugman's digression into the tale of the Euro's creation further codifies the manipulation of national debt as a tool for imperialistic financial ventures. Phrases referencing Europe's “monstrous self-indulgence” or the initial American critiques of the Euro as preservation of the U.S. Dollar's “exorbitant privilege” – from Krugman, but also in the generative discussion of currency – further distance debt from reality. The imperialism inherent to such discussion takes the public utility from national finances, and moves discussion towards pointless exercises in legacy building. The Euro and the U.S. Dollar are not metaphorical extensions of a nation. When conceived as such, only the public suffers, as imaginary currencies wars cripple the economic wherewithal to use debt to alleviate real problems. Krugman himself participates in a different kind of “monstrous self-indulgence” where hindsight fails to see the economic forest for the trees: people suffer when debt becomes the obstacle to social spending.

There is inherent danger in blindly following the current debt model. As Conn Hallinan astutely observes, economic “[m]yths are dangerous because they rely more on cultural memory and prejudice than facts.” There is no need to complicate the application of national debt, yet we do. There is no need to apply historical rationales on the motivations of debt manipulation, yet we do. There is a need to break from the capitalistic exploitation of debt, yet we do not. Hallinan details a myriad of examples of private exploitation that restrict national spending. Chilling largesse emphasizes a need for debt to somehow split from contemporary usage and historical ad hominem descriptions of its failure as a financial tool.

Fact is the best illustrator to debunk the need for austerity and reduced national debt. Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz described the economic conditions as Europe moving its debts “from the private sector to the public sector – a well-established pattern over the past half-century.” Ireland used a thirty-billion Euro bailout to save the Anglo-Irish Bank. Currency speculators submarined Portugal's economy to the point of IMF-mandated austerity measures. Despite Greeks spending less of their GDP on social services than Germany or Sweden and working 600 more man hours a year than Germans, the cooked financial books via Goldman Sachs that gained Greece entrance into the Eurozone eventually tanked an economy already rife with top heavy corruption. Hallinan's statistical truisms show how little attention follows the plight of the citizen when dealing with privatized greed.

Lazy turns-of-phrase aptly describe current debt application. The writing is on the wall, where Mark Blyth can correctly claim that admonishing the Greek government is just “political cover for the fact that what we've done is bail out some of the richest people in European society and put the cost on some of the poorest.” Faulty casino metaphors, where there is no risk for the private gambler, define the Greek bailout – roughly 89% of relief funds went to private equity firms and banks. Even Hallinan himself is caught in the trap of allegory, using Aesop's fable to describe the industrious ants pulling one over the much-maligned grasshoppers. While useful, the metaphors only serve as an economic meet cute that avoids the central misuse of debt. Staunch capitalism has betrayed the public trust, using an amalgam of historical imperatives about thriftiness to cover a piratical approach to privatization. What was once a tool for national uplift has become a verifiable yolk, as wealthy institutions and their indebted prosperous nations transfer financial mismanagement onto countries carrying too much of a good thing. National debt kills quietly, but never quickly, as creditors pursue exactitude of cents without any common sense.

Narrative control is important when maintaining power. Whether covered in the regalia of tradition or coated in the slick veneer of modernity, debt, austerity, and all the associated codes of financial conduct come from atop a shining hill. Never mind how the hill only shines because of its dubious financial origins. Pay no attention to the scaffolding, built on the misery of many to preserve the excesses of the few. Just pay attention to the speaker. They will instruct you on how best to save your nation! How to avoid the poor house, by simply spending less and walking back your goals, or expectations of social assistance. Debt is yours to carry and repay, but not yours to use for any kind of economic stimulus. If you listen carefully enough, you might even hear whispers that it was never yours in the first place. Remember though, maybe Paul Krugman is right, and the money is imaginary anyways.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/paul-krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?rref=collection%2Fundefined%2Fundefinedover

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/opinion/paul-krugman-europes-impossible-dream.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

http://fpif.org/turning-european-debt-myth-upside/

News From Greece Must Spark a Challenge to Austerity in Canada

Stefan Christoff — 2015-08-03T14:49:44Z

Reflecting closely on both the crisis and movement against austerity in Greece here in Canada is clearly important, not simple due to the unprecedented nature of the latest events in recent history, but most critically because of the under-reported but very real impacts that deep austerity policies are having at home from coast-to-coast.

Austerity in Canada has been imposed and prescribed as viable economic policy by both Liberal and Conservative governments over the past couple decades.

Similar to austerity's proponents in Europe, the claim by politicians and also the Bay Street banking sector since the mid-1990s, is that through inflicting serious spending cuts to the public sector and public institutions, the easing of public debt would relieve the national economy and create growth for everybody.

In reality pro-corporate tax policies in Canada have worked to ensure that public debt was never seriously addressed, while neoliberal austerity simply has equaled extreme growth for those at the top of the financial strata. Canada has the lowest corporate tax rate within the G7 economies, which works to loot billions from potential public revenues.

In Canada the corporate sector has been increasingly relieved of facing the economic challenges facing our society, they are unjustly protected by corporate-oriented tax policies that we pay for. In parallel key public institutions, like health care, essential to the functioning of society and our also collective well being, are being severely destabilized.

In real terms Canada's invisible hand of the market has been stealing massive amounts from the wallets of working people, while receiving full backing by the state.

Austerity in Canada is real and urgently needs to be called out. The fact that all major politicians competing for the fall 2015 election are largely avoiding any deep criticism of austerity, NDP included, is a real problem. This relative silence on austerity today points to a potential future disaster, the deepening of a Liberal, Conservative and NDP consensus on the issue, that works to sustain much of the political space for the violence of corporate-driven austerity to continue. Sounding the alarm on this is important.

Looking at the sustaining impacts of austerity on public health care is also key within this context.

Since the 1994 IMF backed austerity budget, presented by former Liberal Finance Minister Paul Martin, public health care has been on the cutting block. Aside from inflicting budgetary cuts then that have never been fully recovered, Martin's neoliberal budget over two decades ago began the drift away from federal policy responsibility toward national public health care. Martin worked to solidify a federal transfer payment funding method, which places the burden of dealing with systemic underfunding on the provincial administrations, who are intrinsically forced through systemic federal underfunding to deepen austerity measures in the health sector.

In reality the gradual, austerity-driven, undercutting of federal policy responsibility toward a viable public health-care system has only compounded the growing financial storm facing the public health sector.

One of the last critical major policy decisions that Conservative finance minister Jim Flaherty made on this front was in December 2011, during a top-down meeting with provincial politicians in Victoria. Flaherty outlined a non-negotiable plan to link federal health care funding to GDP, essentially linking health care spending with the uncertainty of the private market, an important ideological move, shifting health care away from being a collective public responsibility, toward being a 'service' facing at a fundamental level the instability of free market winds.

Also by extension, the Conservative government in Ottawa and Harper particularly, has refused to sign a new federal health care accord.

Canada's last federal accord expired in 2014 and the Conservatives have been very specific about not engaging in any efforts to secure a new framework agreement with the provinces to help secure public health care in the long term. Ideologically speaking, the free market oriented fundamentalism that drives these decisions around public health care, is driven by a basic view that sees public health care as an economic burden to the economy and views health services as a potentially enormous private sector market, as it has become in the U.S. At odds with this fundamentalist view is the collective health of society, as an austerity policy mentality views public policy shaping as simply as a process to open up as much possible space for private sector profits to grow.

Beyond health care, austerity in Canada is equaling incredible economic violence. A systemic violence that has been the most brutal for already oppressed communities, like Indigenous peoples, the homeless, low income and non-status communities.

On a basic level, two decades of austerity in Canada have equaled major growth at the top of the economic spectrum, while poverty in Canada continues to expand as corporate profits rise to new heights. There is an economic crisis in Canada for the majority, those who have little influence over the market-oriented narratives pushed by the mainstream media, which are in real terms largely ignoring the financial crisis facing so many today.

Last year Canada's banks made $31.7 billion profit, officially, that is state-sanctioned economic violence in action, the formalization of economic looting. By extension working to survive on minimum and low income wages is becoming basically impossible for the long term, as the basic costs of living go up especially in urban centres, as rents climb sky high as compared to relatively stagnant working wages.

Recent government statistic indicate that 4.8 million people Canada are living in poverty, a number that has increased successively over the past decade. Austerity in Canada is real and violent.

The fact that this real crisis is largely ignored by politicians and mainstream media, while being stoked on a policy level, speaks to a great need for grassroots anti-austerity action. Austerity is not a priority focus in the lead-up to the fall election, it needs to be, toward the election and way beyond.

Like in Greece, any real challenge to austerity in Canada needs to be rooted in the streets and community action. Recent global jubilation over the ballot victory against neoliberal-driven EU creditors is fair, but must be placed into a grounded context, that takes into account the long term work of activists on this issue.

Anti-austerity organizing in Greece extends over years and really took off in 2011 and 2012, when mass protests physically confronted symbols of political and economic power that backed the violence of austerity.

Recent demonstration-driven struggles in Québec are an inspiring start at home, both the 2012 strike against tuition hikes and the 2015 spring strike actions against austerity, really did take direct aim at the austerity framework as imposed in Québec.Clearly the struggle in Québec is profoundly linked to Canada and the Conservative push toward austerity, extending both via federal policies on the corporate sector and also the nature of federal transfer payments in health and beyond.

Finding commonalities in our struggle against austerity across these lands called Canada is important, Greece needs to serve as a profound wake up call for both the urgency and possibility for collective power and action to challenge austerity.

Stefan Christoff is a writer, community activism and musician living in Montréal who contributes to rabble.ca find Stefan @spirodon

Source: http://rabble.ca/news/2015/07/news-greece-must-spark-challenge-to-austerity-canada

Terrorism: The Great Challenge

Messaoud Romdhani — 2015-08-03T14:47:38Z

One essential observation is clear: terrorists struck a hard blow on this 26th June 2015, in Sousse, Tunisia, targeting the economy and the security of the country through slaughtering cold-bloodedly scores of innocent tourists. Recall that this tough blow had been preceded by no less painful terrorist acts: two political assassinations, some deadly attacks against the army and the security forces, and a gun attack in the Bardo Museum, last March.

According to a spokesperson from the government, the attack was orchestrated in Libya among Ansar-Al Sharia, an outlawed Islamist group that has been training Jihadist militants in camps over the border. And in the mountains.

This group of Ansar-Al Sharia, born in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 14 January 2011, has proceeded according to a clear strategy, a strategy that has been achieved in three successive stages:

• First, setting up the organizational apparatus,
• Then, putting up preaching tents and recruiting among desperate youth;
• Finally, comes the implementation of the military structure.

Moreover, the Tunisian revolution was for the Jihadists, a not-to be missed golden opportunity “to revive the flame of the Jihad,” as was declared in a letter signed by AbuMusaab Abdelwadoud, on 10 December 2012.

Let's admit that the turn of events was favorable for them to organize and gain ground: a general amnesty that emptied the Tunisian prisons of all Jihadists at once without any follow up or possible lawsuit a few weeks after 14 January 2011. That allowed their leader, Seifallah Ben Hassine, alias Abu Iyadh, to found the organization of Ansar Al Sharia, with no difficulty, building on a reserve force made up of hundreds of previous Jihadist inmates. (See Inkyfada, 1July 2015)

Organizing the group was not a tough task, either: in May 2012, following some meetings, they rose to prominence and held their congress in Kairouan, the spiritual capital of Islam, with the presence of more than 5000 persons, according to observers.

Then it was the period of preaching tents used for religious propaganda, launched under the slogan “hear from us rather than hearing about us.”To reassure people, worried by their sudden rise and their extremely violent language , their leader Abu Iyadh said many times that Tunisia was “a land of Dawa (predication), not a land of Jihad”. That was, also, the period of campaigns for recruiting supporters and sympathizers, mainly through “the basket of Ansar AlSharia”, charity donations to the poor (food, clothing, basic supplies..).

In fact, they rightly believe that marginalized and desperate youth in poor areas and slums are easy catch for them as they are often ready to be “soldiers of God” and welcome the “government of God on earth.” Many of them were even “ready for martyrdom” and “to leave” for a “better life in Heaven”. (See minutes of terrorist cases.)

Almost simultaneously, the new radical group managed to take control of hundreds of mosques, no less 700, just for the year 2011 (Inkyfada, same report): imams were violently evicted and replaced with their ultra conservative supporters, “Bandits, former drug dealers and former convicts helped in the dirty work of violence” (minutes in the case of the assassination of Chokri Belaid)

And how about today? According to Abubaker ElHakim,one of the group leaders ,who is believed to be in Syria and who allegedly masterminded the assassination of Mohamed Brahmi , nothing they “do is done in vain”. In an interview to with an English speaking newspaper, he said that the aim of political assassinations, attacks against army and police and cold-blooded tourist massacres is to create a climate conducive to the seizure of power. Indeed, the Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan experiences have shown that the weakening of the state and the destabilization of society could create a chaotic situation where everything becomes possible. In a video he released from ISIS, he threatened “we are coming back to kill you, you will not have a quiet life until Tunisia implements the Islamic law.”(Mail on line, 18 March, 2015)

So, Jihadist groups, including Ansar-AlSharia , have a clear strategy with the necessary steps to follow, taking advantage of the precarious regional situation, the loose control over the borders and the social and economic situation of the youth, which makes them an easy prey to Jihadist recruiters. Their ultimate aim is to destabilize this nascent democracy, a necessary prelude to chaos that is going to prepare for the extension of the caliphate.

The question is: are the democratic, partisan, associative and union forces aware of the scope of the dangers we face? Do we have a clear vision of how to immunize our young democracy on all levels: politically, socially, economically and culturally? So far, many gaps remain. On all levels.

Messaoud Romdhani is a member of The Committee for the Respect of Liberties and Human Rights in Tunisia

A Deal That Raised Hell

Sukumar Muralidharan — 2015-08-03T14:45:00Z

Israel's querulous reaction to a nuclear deal that has won wide-spread acclaim underlines how far removed it is from world opinion

A ‘historic mistake' — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reaction to the July 14 agreement between Iran and six world powers plus the European Union was brusque and bitter. There were no surprises there, nor in the spectacle of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobby known to make and unmake political careers, stepping up with vows to kill the nuclear deal in the US Congress.

The Arms Control Association (ACA), a Washington DC-based expert body, had a different assessment. The comprehensive agreement, it declared, “would verifiably block Iran's pathways to nuclear weapons development.” When implemented, it would be “a net plus for non-proliferation and (would) enhance US and regional security.” At a public forum two days later — coincidentally the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert — the ACA head described the agreement as “among the most complex and consequential of the nuclear age.”

On a mission of reassurance to Tel Aviv, British foreign secretary Phil Hammond was berated by his hosts for suggesting that Israel was opposed to any manner of a deal. And to be fair, Netanyahu had amply forewarned that no deal which preserved a vestige of Iranian sovereignty would be acceptable, brazenly wading into political partisanship in March and addressing the US Congress in a deliberate affront to President Barack Obama's investment in the talks.

As he sketched a scenario of mortal danger to Israel, Netanyahu reached for Biblical analogies and invoked a sinister Persian viceroy's plot against the Jewish people from two-and-a-half millennia back. He then segued into a weird diatribe more strident in its Islamaphobic tone than recent appearances at the UN General Assembly. The emergence of the Islamic State militia as a malevolent new presence in the West Asian region did not make Iran a potential ally of the west, he said. There was a ‘deadly game of thrones in play,' in which there would be ‘no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed.'

This was a clear overture to the most extreme elements in the US and Israel. Then facing a tense electoral battle at home, Netanyahu pinned his hopes on the loyalty of the fanatical right-wing that is now mainstream in Israel. As polls neared, he warned about a sinister leftist conspiracy to depose him, before playing his final card and vowing that a Palestinian state would never be reality under his watch.

It was that pivot to the extreme right that transformed a losing position into victory.

When Netanyahu put together a narrow majority in Israel's parliament, it was with an alliance anchored firmly in the most reactionary ideological commitments, akin in many ways to dominant elements in the Republican Party in the US.

In this ideological fraternity lies Israel's last hope of keeping Iran down. First reactions from kindred souls on Capitol Hill did not disappoint. But then, as various complexities dawned, they retreated into sullen silence, leaving it to AIPAC to work out a strategy.

In a fact-sheet produced to order, AIPAC identified five minimum requirements that had not been met in the deal. Among these were the failure to enforce a regime of ‘anytime, anywhere' inspections. The template Israel had in mind was undoubtedly the punishing regime that the US and UK — with the UN Security Council in mute acquiescence — imposed on Iraq through the 1990s. It was a disarmament agenda that scarcely masked intent to secure regime change, leading inexorably to the invasion of 2003.

US Republicans remain unrepentant but Democrats are visibly suffering buyer's remorse. A second ground advanced by AIPAC for rejecting the deal is its ostensible failure to insist that Iran ‘must come clean on its prior nuclear work.'

Here again, the record of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) paints a rather different picture. Most such inspections have followed declarations of intent by Iran to pursue nuclear fuel cycle activities as it is entitled to under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The response of the UN Security Council, which exercises ultimate oversight on IAEA decisions, has been to severely abridge Iran's rights. Heavy water production, for instance, though not classified as an activity subject to NPT safeguards, is now under strict monitoring in Iran.

Another ostensible omission, according to Israeli security briefings, is the covert Parchin military base, southeast of Tehran, “suspected of being the centre of Iran's secret nuclear weapons programme”. This is a clear distortion. As recorded in the agency's report of March 8, 2006, it was given access to the Parchin site in November the previous year. The IAEA “did not observe any unusual activities in the buildings visited.” And an analysis of numerous environmental samples “did not indicate the presence of nuclear material at those locations.”

Finally, AIPAC's worry is that the deal does not meet the requirement that “Iran's nuclear weapons' quest must be blocked for decades.” This is clear misrepresentation, since the intent of the deal is to completely eliminate the plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon and cut uranium enrichment capacity by over a third for an entire decade. If there is a breakout by Iran after that — and there is no reason to believe there will be — it would take at least a year to produce material sufficient for one explosive device.

The insistence on blocking Iran's capacities for unspecified ‘decades' is an accurate barometer of how long Israel intends to deny Palestinians their rights.

The Zionist state's angry and querulous reaction to a nuclear deal that has won almost unanimous acclaim underlines just how far it is adrift of world opinion.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer, researcher based in Gurgaon and Shimla

(This article was published on July 24, 2015)

Source : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/israels-querulous-reaction-to-a-nuclear-deal-that-has-won-widespread-acclaim-underlines-how-far-removed-it-is-from-world-opinion/article7460280.ece

Disinventing Democracy

George Monbiot — 2015-08-03T14:42:46Z

The assault on Greece is just the latest episode in a long history of shutting down choice on behalf of the financial elite.

Greece might be financially bankrupt; the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers: powers of the kind now afflicting us all.

Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes. It's controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It's now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and the other means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.

The same programme is imposed regardless of circumstance: every country the IMF colonises must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove its barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise its banking system; reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments; and privatise the assets which can be sold to foreign investors.

Using the threat of its self-fulfilling prophecy (it warns the financial markets that countries which don't submit to its demands are doomed), it has forced governments to abandon their progressive policies. Almost single-handedly, it engineered the 1997 Asian financial crisis: by forcing governments to remove their capital controls, it opened currencies to attack by financial speculators. Only countries such as Malaysia and China, which refused to cave in, escaped the crisis.

Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics; only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion, through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.

The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation was kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.

All this is but a recent chapter in the long tradition of subordinating human welfare to financial power. The austerity now imposed on Greece, brutal as it is, is mild by comparison to earlier versions. Take, for example, the Irish and Indian famines, both exacerbated (in the second case caused) by the doctrine then known as laissez-faire, but which we now know as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.

In Ireland's case, one eighth of the population was killed – one could almost say murdered – in the late 1840s, partly by the British refusal to distribute food, to prohibit the export of grain or to provide effective poor relief. Such policies offended the holy doctrine that nothing should stay the invisible hand

When drought struck India in 1877 and 1878, the British imperial government insisted on exporting record amounts of grain, precipitating a famine that killed millions. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted was forced work in labour camps, in which less food was provided than to the inmates of Buchenwald. Monthly mortality in these camps in 1877 was equivalent to an annual rate of 94%.

As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the gold standard – the self-regulating system at the heart of laissez-faire economics – prevented governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries from raising public spending or stimulating employment. It obliged them to keep the majority poor, while the rich enjoyed a gilded age. Few means of containing public discontent were available, other than sucking wealth from the colonies and promoting aggressive nationalism. This was one of the factors that contributed to the First World War. The resumption of the gold standard by many nations after the war exacerbated the Great Depression, preventing central banks from increasing the money supply and funding deficits. You might have hoped that European governments would remember the results.

Today, equivalents to the gold standard – inflexible commitments to austerity – abound. In December 2011, the European Council agreed a new fiscal compact, imposing on all members of the eurozone a rule that “government budgets shall be balanced or in surplus”. This rule, which had to be transcribed into national law, would “contain an automatic correction mechanism that shall be triggered in the event of deviation.” This helps to explain the seignorial horror with which the troika's unelected technocrats have greeted the resurgence of democracy in Greece. Hadn't they ensured that choice was illegal? Such diktats mean that the only possible democratic outcome in Europe is now the collapse of the euro: like it or not, all else is slow-burning tyranny.

This is hard for those of us on the left to admit, but Margaret Thatcher saved the UK from this despotism. European monetary union, she predicted, would ensure that the poorer countries must not be bailed out, “which would devastate their inefficient economies.”

But only, it seems, for her party to supplant it with a homegrown tyranny. George Osborne's proposed legal commitment to a budgetary surplus exceeds that of the eurozone rule. Labour's promised budget responsibility lock, though milder, had a similar intent. In all cases, governments deny themselves the possibility of change. In other words, they pledge to thwart democracy.

So it has been for the past two centuries, with the exception of the 30-year Keynesian respite. The crushing of political choice is not a side effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.

www.monbiot.com

Published in the Guardian 8th Juy 2015

Source: http://www.monbiot.com/2015/07/08/3796/

Syriza Surrenders: Time For Renewed Popular Resistance

Theodoros Karyotis — 2015-08-03T14:40:52Z

Now that Syriza has caved in to the creditors, the need for grassroots mobilization is more urgent than ever. A new cycle of struggles is ahead of us.

For two weeks now, political time has been condensed in Greece, and citizens live on the edge of their seats, struggling against forces that appear well beyond their control. On June 27, the Syriza-led government put the ultimatum of the creditors to a referendum and campaigned for a NO. The outcome of the referendum — a resounding rejection of perpetual austerity and continued debt bondage — will go down in history as an outstanding moment of dignity of a people under vicious attack by European creditors and the Greek elite.

Despite the patriotic overtones, this outcome was the culmination of five years of resistance to the steady downgrading of our lives. It signified breaking free of the choke-hold of the mass media, rising above fear to make the people's voice heard. It ratified the absolute discrediting of the political elites that have been ruling since the democratic transition of 1974, which campaigned for a YES.

Furthermore, the outcome revealed a society divided along class lines: the middle and lower classes, which have so far born virtually all the cost of austerity and structural adjustment, overwhelmingly voted NO. Nevertheless, the outcome resists the attempts of all political parties to capitalize on it; it is the categorical negation of the present political and economic arrangement, the refusal which necessarily precedes all acts of social self-determination.

However, less than a week after the referendum, the Greek government submitted a new proposal of financing to its creditors, tied to a package of austerity measures even harsher than the ones rejected in the referendum. After a weekend of ‘negotiations', which revealed a rift among Greece's creditors, a humiliating agreement was reached early on Monday, which all but turns Greece into a European debt colony.

How was this NO metamorphosed into a YES in a matter of days?

Syriza's dilemma

As many analysts expected, the government's strategy of using the popular verdict as a means of pressure in the negotiations backfired. Upon returning to the negotiation table, the hardliners around German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble made clear that they are prepared to let Greece go bankrupt — with all the economic and political implications this would have for the Eurozone — rather than see the slightest crack in the neoliberal austerity discipline.

The Syriza-led government found itself in a harsh and pressing dilemma: it would either have to oversee the implementation of a new neoliberal adjustment program, or it would have to assume the political cost of a bankruptcy, with all its disastrous effects on the Greek population.

It opted for the first, thus officially putting an end to this five-month stand-off between the Greek government and its so-called European ‘partners'. The terms of the capitulation are painful, as they go against the totality of Syriza's campaign promises: the new memorandum, even more so than the previous two, is an extreme experiment in social engineering and in redistribution of wealth in favor of the powerful. It maintains many of the unjust measures implemented by previous governments, such as ENFIA, a transversal tax on small property that has turned the lower class families into tenants within their own homes, or the abolition of the untaxable income limit for the self-employed, which makes it impossible for most skilled workers to get out of the unemployment trap.

The new deal also revamps and possibly renames TAIPED, an institution created to sell off all public assets, with all basic infrastructure, such as ports, airports and the power grid company, due to be privatized. Furthermore, the deal demands the lifting of the moratorium on home foreclosures, opening the road for a raw exercise of dispossession that threatens to create a humanitarian disaster, as we know from the Spanish experience. On top of that, it envisions an increase in indirect taxation, a hike in the prices of foodstuffs and transport as well as cuts in wages and pensions through a rise in social insurance contributions.

All in all, a package of measures designed to further compress the middle and lower classes, increase recession and unemployment, destroy the small and medium businesses, which form the backbone of Greek economy, and hand over all public assets and common goods to transnational capital. All the while perpetuating depression and increasing the debt burden, effectively crippling Greece's economy and destroying the country's capacity to get out of the crisis on its own feet.

The creditors went out of their way to ensure the measures are as punitive as possible. To further humiliate their opponents, they demanded the immediate voting in of reform laws and the return to Athens of the Troika supervisors, who were banished by the Syriza-led government in the early stages of negotiation.

The arguments of government officials and party cadres defending the ‘positive' aspects of the deal are risible, as they echo the arguments of all previous governments that there is long-term prospect for the Greek economy and that the cost of the adjustment will not be transferred to the underprivileged. It is more honest to see the agreement for what it is: a large-scale operation of dispossession, a sacrifice of a whole country in order to maintain the delusions upon which the Eurozone was built.

It seems that this is the end of the road for Syriza's ‘national salvation' government. It will be called to vote in and implement an austerity package that not only disregards the struggle of the anti-austerity movements of the past five years, of which Syriza was once a part, but also betrays the verdict of the 61% of Greeks who voted against austerity only a week before.

Of course many would argue that this is a collective gamble gone wrong, and in front of the “partners'” blackmail the government took the least painful way out. There is no doubt that a disorderly Grexit, along with the punitive measures that would be employed by neoliberal hardliners to make an example out of the Greeks, would in the short-term be a disaster, primarily for the popular classes. In any case, political developments will be swift: the government will surely be reshuffled or replaced, and Syriza faces an internal rift that could mean the end of this party as we know it.

A contradictory relationship

For about three years, grassroots social movements in Greece had deeplycontradictory sentiments towards the electoral rise of Syriza. On one hand, the prospect of a left government was an opportunity to bring the conflict to an institutional level; after all, many of the demands of the struggles were reflected in Syriza's program and the party always kept a movement-friendly profile.

On the other hand, Syriza has been an agent of demobilization, ending the legitimation crisis that gave a protagonistic role to the social creativity and self-determination of the movements, and by promoting the institutionalization of the struggles, the marginalization of demands that did not fit into its state management project, and the restitution of the logic of political representation and delegation, which promoted inaction and complacency.

At the same time, Syriza cultivated the illusion that real social transformation was possible without breaking with the mechanisms of capitalist domination, without calling into question the dominant economic paradigm, without building concrete bottom-up alternatives to capitalist institutions, without even calling into question the country's permanence within a monetary union that by design favors the export-driven economies of the North in detriment of the Europe's periphery.

Syriza's leaders detached themselves from the party base and their former allies within the movements, and stubbornly resisted a public debate on the elaboration of a ‘Plan B' outside the Eurozone, should the ‘Plan A' of an ‘end to austerity within the Eurozone' fail, for fear that this would be used against them by the pro-austerity opposition as proof that they had a hidden agenda from the very start.

Unfortunately, recent developments tend to confirm the views of those who claimed that, given the extreme delegitimation and fragility of the previous government, a new memorandum was only possible through a new and popular ‘progressive' government. This is probably the role that Syriza unwillingly ended up playing, using its ample reserves of political capital.

Lifting the veil of illusion

Syriza's failure to deliver on any of its campaign promises or to reverse the logic of austerity lifts the veil of illusion regarding institutional top-down solutions and leaves the grassroots movements exactly where they started from: being the main antagonistic force to the neoliberal assault on society; the only force capable of envisioning a different world that goes beyond the failed institutions of the predatory capitalist market and representative democracy.

Undoubtedly many honest and committed activists are linked to the Syriza party base. It is their task now to acknowledge the failure of Syriza's plan, and to resist the government's efforts to market the new memorandum as a positive or inevitable development. If Syriza, or a majority part of it, decides to stay in power — in this governmental arrangement or in some other, more servile, put in place by the creditors — and oversee the implementation of this brutal memorandum, it is the task of the party base to rebel and unite with other social forces in search of a way out of barbarity, to break the ranks of a party that might quickly be turning from a force of change into a reluctant administrator of a brutal system they have no control over.

The role of the left, broadly defined, is not that of a more benevolent manager of capitalist barbarity: after all, that was social democracy's original purpose, a project that exhausted itself already in the 1980s. There can be no ‘austerity with a human face': neoliberal social engineering is an attack on human dignity and the common goods in all its guises, right-wing and left-wing.

I have argued elsewhere that the NO in last week's referendum was ambivalent, and the struggle to give meaning to it has only just begun. Hours after the announcement of the result, Prime Minister Tsipras interpreted the verdict as a mandate to ‘stay within the Eurozone at any cost'. It is evident, however, that the new ‘bailout' package obviously is outside his mandate: Plan A, Syriza's only plan, envisioning an end of austerity without challenging the powers-that-be, has utterly failed.

Plan B, promoted in various forms by Antarsya, the Communist Party and Syriza's own Left Platform advocates a productive reconstruction outside the Eurozone. Although increasingly popular after the inflexibility of the European project has been made evident, it is still a productivist, state-centric, top-down plan that doesn't put into question the dominant meanings of capitalism: endless capitalist growth, an extractive economy, the expansion of production, credit and consumption. Furthermore, by promoting national entrenchment it entails the danger of authoritarian deviations.

A decisive turning point

As always, the Greek crisis is a turning point regarding the future of the European project. The Eurozone hardliners insist on blaming the people of the European periphery for the structural defects of the single currency and their own insistence on socializing private debt through the euphemistically called ‘bailout packages'. At the same time they have poisoned the minds of the people of the North of Europe with a neocolonial moralistic discourse propagated through the mass media.

The perceived loss of political power over their lives is turning many Europeans towards reactionary xenophobic parties that promise a return to the self-contained authoritarian nation-state. The European left looks on perplexed as its hopes of an EU based on solidarity and social justice vanish along with Syriza's bid to negotiate a humane way out of the Greek debt crisis.

Now is the moment for a broad alliance of social forces to bring forward a ‘Plan C', based on social collaboration, decentralized self-government and the stewardship of common goods. Without overlooking its significance, national electoral politics is not the privileged field of action when it comes to social transformation.

The withering away of democracy in Europe should be complemented and challenged by the fortification of self-organized communities at a local level and the forging of strong bonds between them, along with a turn to a solidarity- and needs-based economy, and the collective management and defense of common goods. The social counter-power of the oppressed should confront the social power of capital directly in its privileged space: everyday life.

Within Greece, after a full circle, the debate on our future beyond austerity has only now started. The resounding 61% rejection of austerity serves to remind us that this debate is now urgent, and the reactivation of the social movements that envision new social relationships built from below is imminent, after some years of relative demobilization. We have ahead of us a new cycle of creative resistance, of forging collective subjects and of tireless experimentation for the bottom-up transformation of our reality.

Theodoros Karyotis is a sociologist, translator and activist participating in social movements that promote self-management, solidarity economy and defense of the commons in Greece. He writes on autonomias.net and tweets at@TebeoTeo.

Source: http://roarmag.org/2015/07/syriza-bailout-movements-greece-crisis/

July 13, 2015