If you haven't heard, Dimitris Christoulas killed himself on Tuesday evening in protest of the policies of austerity that are brutalizing the people of Greece:

An elderly man who took his life outside the Greek parliament in Athens , in apparent desperation over his debts, has highlighted the human cost of an economic crisis that has not only brought the country to the brink financially, but also seen suicides soar.

As Greeks digested the news, with politicians clearly as shocked as society at large, mourners made their way to Syntagma square, where the retired pharmacist shot himself with a handgun.

The 77-year-old pensioner pulled the trigger as people were emerging from a nearby metro station in the morning rush hour. One witness told state TV that before shooting himself he had shouted, I'm leaving because I don't want to pass on my debts.

As the YouTube video report indicates, Christoulas isn't the only person who has recently killed themselves because of their personal and economic distress. In his handwritten statement, he concluded:

. . . . One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did with Mussolini in 1945 (at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto).

According to the Guardian:

A picture of the man who has come to embody the inequities of Greece's financial crisis has begun to emerge, with friends and neighbours shedding light on the life of the elderly pensioner who killed himself in Athens on Wednesday.

Named as Dimitris Christoulas by the Greek media, the retired pharmacist was described as decent, law-abiding, meticulous and dignified.

The 77-year-old had written in his one-page, three-paragraph suicide note that it would be better to have a decent end than be forced to scavenge in the rubbish to feed myself.

With his suicide he wanted to send a political message, Antonis Skarmoutsos, a friend and neighbour was quoted as saying in the mass-selling Ta Nea newspaper. He was deeply politicised but also enraged.

Until 1994 Christoulas was a local chemist in the central Athens neighbourhood of Ambelokipoi. A committed leftist, he was active in citizens' groups such as I won't pay, which started as a one-off protest against toll fees but quickly turned into an anti-austerity movement.

Christoulas planned his action so meticulously that he paid all of his debts in advance. Meanwhile, suicides continue to skyrocket in Greece, and so many children are going hungry that some of them are fainting in class:

The serious economic crisis that has gripped Greece for the last four years could have serious repercussions for even the youngest swathes of the population. The physical and psychological development of youngsters in the country is at risk because of malnutrition caused by poverty, and so, therefore is their very future. The alarm has been raised in a report on the situation of young people in Greece drafted by Unicef's Greek committee and by the University of Athens. The report, entitled The condition of youth in Greece, 2012 says that 439,000 children in the country are currently living below the poverty line - underfed and in insalubrious conditions - in families that represent 20.1% of Greek households

. . . . The report also cites a number of cases of children fainting in class because of malnutrition. These cases were given significant media coverage in December when the director of the Athens orphanage, Maria Iliopoulou, complained that around 200 cases of malnourished newborns had been registered in the space of a few weeks because their parents had been unable to feed them appropriately. Iliopoulou also claimed that teachers from schools close to her institution would queue up every day for a plate of food for their neediest pupils. In many schools in Athens the situation is even more dramatic, Iliopoulou said at the time, because some children have fainted from hunger in classrooms. The Ministry of Public Education, which initially dismissed the claims as propaganda, was forced to recognise the seriousness of the problem and subsequently decided to hand out to pupils from the poorest families meal vouchers with which to buy breakfast from the school canteen. The Unicef report ends with an estimate from the Ombudsman for children, who says that there are around 100,000 minors working in Greece to contribute to the meagre and often non-existent family budget.

No wonder Christoulas believed that the young are going to hang the politicians.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

UPDATE 2: A first hand account from Oscar Reyes in Barcelona, posted at Red Pepper:

* Over 1,000 people joined the march from our neighbourhood (Sant Andreu) into town. It wasn’t the 'usual suspects'. It was the regulars of our local high street – where most shops were closed – transplanted onto Meridiana, a major six-lane road into the centre of Barcelona. The good-humored march was one of numerous feeder marches that helped to bring the city to a standstill. The unions report an 800,000-strong demonstration. El Pais puts it at over 275,000.

* It isn’t hard to find evidence of clashes in the centre of town. Barricades had been lit on many of the road junctions around Diagonal, a well-off shopping district. These are being cleared away by street sweepers. But it’s the details that are telling here: the bin lorries are each placarded with 'serveis minims' [minimum service]. Most of the banks have had their windows smashed. They are cordoned off, but there is no attempt at a clean up here.

UPDATE 1: From the Guardian:

Demonstrators brought the centres of Madrid, Barcelona and other cities to a standstill as trade unions claimed the strike was more widely supported than previous nationwide stoppages in 2010 and 2002. Rajoy's officials claimed, however, that the 2010 strike against a socialist government had received greater support.

Electricity consumption fell by 17%, suggesting the strike was impacting on major industries – though most shops appeared to be open in Madrid.

Street fires were set in both Madrid and Barcelona, where roads into the city were blocked, but there were few reports of serious violence.

The strike was most successful where Spain's big two unions, the General Workers Union and the Workers Commissions, are strongest – in large factories, the civil service and transport.

General Workers leader Cándido Méndez put average participation at midday at 77% but said that it was 97% in industry and construction.

This strike has been an unquestionable success, he said.

Civilized protest looked unlikely to alter the determination of the government to drive on with reforms and austerity.

INITIAL POST:

There was a general strike in Spain today to protest the austerity policies being imposed by the government and the European Union. The police in Barcelona have used rubber bullets and tear gas, with reports of people smashing shop windows. Meanwhile, there have been large protest marches in Madrid and Barcelona. For a Guardian video report of events in Barcelona today, go here. For a livestream broadcast from Barcelona through the Global Revolution website, with English subtitles, go here. For Twitter updates in Spanish and English, go to the #M29 hashtag. Other video sources can be found through Twitter and YouTube as well.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Spain, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, YouTube

Even if, like me, you are unable to read French, you can still understand the contrast here between Anders Breivik and Mohamed Merah. According to Le Figaro, one is a terrorist, the other is not. Guess which one is which?

Hat tip to the Angry Arab.

Labels: Europe, France, Islamic Fundamentalism, Political Violence, Racism, Religion

UPDATE: From a CNN report:

The lives of ordinary Iranians have been deeply touched by the Western sanctions. Several spoke to CNN about how they are coping with staggering inflation and a plunging national currency, although none felt comfortable being fully identified, fearful of the Islamic Republic's long reach into private lives.

Farhad, 47, was once comfortable, but things began sliding downhill when sanctions came and the foreign oil firm that employed him packed up and left.

As a taxi driver, he works hard but saves little money. With the latest round of U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran's Central Bank last month, he has seen staggering inflation; the price of meat and milk have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent.

He and his wife have stopped having guests at their home or going out to eat. They can't remember when they bought new clothes and no longer send their suits to the cleaners.

I feel bad for the cleaners, he says. They must be suffering as a result of people like me not using their services.

Farhad has a savings account that is shrinking fast as he dips into it to make ends meet.

His 21-year-old son works two part-time jobs while he earns a degree in computer science. Farhad feels bad that he can't afford to buy him the computer equipment he needs.

I wait and pray for something to spark the economy and get it going, but I am not holding my breath, he says. Life must go on. We can only wait and see what the future has in store for us.

In the meantime, he says, the only way for his sons to live a decent life is to fall in with influential people or make shady business deals like trading foreign currency on the black market.

INITIAL POST: Alexander Cockburn believes that war with Iran is inevitable. Indeed, he maintains, as have a number of others, that the conflict has already begun. Beyond the black budget covert operations, there is the direct US assault upon the country's economy, as revealed by a precipitous decline in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. The embargo of Iranian oil, to be enforced by punitive measures against international corporations that facilitate the sale of it, is beginning to inflict greater and greater hardship upon the Iranian populace, no doubt in the expectation that the real US objective, regime change, will soon be accomplished. The European Union, consistent with its history of hesitant support for US imperial action, has agreed to embargo Iranian oil this summer.

Meanwhile, voices for war in the US have privileged access to the media, with outlets like the New York Times, NPR and PBS providing a veneer of understated, urbane legitimacy to the more populist, shrill expressions of militarism found elsewhere. Journalists and foreign policy analysts perpetually reference a non-existent nuclear weapons program, subject only to subsequent, tepid criticisms buried within newspapers and websites. Furthermore, as noted by John Glaser of antiwar.com, while opponents of military action have been granted the opportunity to challenge the case for war, the media has confined the debate within the boundaries of the acceptance of the necessity to stop the Iranian nuclear research program.

Of course, the reason for such a circumscribed debate is obvious. As already noted, the real objective of US policy is regime change. Indeed, it would not be shocking if, upon the emergence of a new, acceptable Iranian government, the US, Europe and Israel permitted the nuclear research program to proceed. After all, as explained here last year, there are few endeavors so perfectly suited to the proliferation of the hierarchy of specialization and the accumulation of capital than the construction of nuclear research facilities and power plants. Iranian nuclear research scientists currently trying to avoid assassination would find themselves welcome at academic conferences and research programs around the world. Accordingly, the Iranian nuclear research program is merely a MacGuffin that accelerates the plot of the regime change narrative.

Hence, any public discussion in the US that would result in a candid discussion of the US relationship with Iran, and the true objectives of US policy, must be suppressed. Cockburn, for understandable reasons, analogizes current US policy towards Iran with US policy towards Japan before the attack upon Pearl Harbor. But, a more contemporary, and perhaps, more apposite one, is US policy towards the Allende government in Chile. Just as the US waged an economic war upon Chile in the early 1970s, the US is now doing so against Iran. But, as Pepe Escobar has recognized, the consequences of such economic warfare are as likely to hurt the G-20 countries as much as Iran because of the growth suppression associated with increased oil prices. He astutely notes that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner actually argued against the sanctions bill as it made its way through Congress. With characteristic hyperbole that contains grains of troubling insight, Escobar concludes: the name of the game in 2012 is deep global recession. Conversely, Iranians may be able to offset the inflated prices of imported goods with increased employment as a devalued rial makes domestically produced goods more competitive.

Unfortunately, that's the more optimistic scenario. As Behzad Yaghmaian said today:

The United States and its allies are using elaborate economic sanctions to drain the resources of the Iranian regime, ignite domestic revolt, and force the government to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Sanctions are, however, chocking the Iranian people. While the government continues enriching uranium, sanctions penalize the Iranian people through dizzying increase in the price of food, gasoline and other basic items in ordinary people’s basket of consumer goods. Food inflation in Iran is currently at 50%, more than double the official inflation rate.

Fear of new sanctions and war also created an exodus from the local currency to the dollar and other major currencies. The nearly 60% depreciation of the Iranian rial, and the embargo on Iran’s oil exports will further increase food and other consumer goods prices. The dire economic conditions of Iranians with fixed income is a painful reminder of standing in long line for hours to buy milk, oil, and other basic necessities during the war with Iraq.

Yaghmaian concludes with a warning, that the passivity of the Iranian people should not be misunderstood as support for military confrontation. In this, they possess an insight beyond many Americans, particularly those who respond to the exhortations of Republican presidential candidates for military action with applause. Even more troubling is the possibility that the economic elites of the G-20 have decided that Iran is the next great capital accumulation opportunity of disaster capitalism. Just imagine the prospects for private military contractors, private security and surveillance firms and construction companies. Exponentially more in billions await them than they received over the course of the Iraqi occupation. For now, they are still patient enough to find out if the sanctions will work because they can avoid the risks associated with military conflict. But, with no fear of significant public resistance, the way is clear for them to seek a military resolution if they fail.

Given the acquiescence of liberals and social democrats in the US and Europe, the likelihood of protests against such a war on the scale of February 2003 is nil. This is most terrifying aspect of the current situation in the Gulf, the fact that there is not even the pretense of a restraint upon their ability to launch an indefinite, tremendously destructive war in order to further concentrate their wealth and power. But what comes afterwards? The great variable is the response of the burgeoning population of young people around the world, the people who fight the police on the streets of Athens, Cairo, Rome, Manama, London, Oakland, Lyon and Santiago, among other places, the people who realize that their future is bleak because of the avariousness and violence of those who have come before them. What will they do? The success or failure of this hideous venture is dependent upon the answer.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Europe, Iran, Neoliberalism, War with Iran

Too bad Fassbinder is no longer with us. Few, if any, so astutely recognized the perseverance of fascist values in postwar Germany, sublimated in the guise of the bourgeois values of work and frugality than he did, with its attendant consequences resulting from the suppression of the libido. In films like The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola, he addressed the joyful, contradictory features of contemporary capitalism, one defined by the duality of austerity and excess. Through the character of Maria Braun, a smart, savvy women, who, reminscent of Scarlett O'Hara during Reconstruction, exploits the entreprenuerial spirit of the time to rise to great heights during the German economic miracle of the 1950s, he prefigured the rise of Merkel.

In Katzelmacher, Fassbinder exposed the enduring German sense of racial superiority in regard to the peoples of southern Europe, and the sexual jealousies connected to it, dramatized by means of the hostility of the young German working class characters to the Greek immigrant, Jurgos. Such attitudes have been on prominent display during the current Eurozone crisis, with Germans and the German media purveying crude stereotypes about the purportedly profligate Greeks so as to justify the colonization of the country by financial interests aligned with the German state. Merkel's proposal for a new Eurozone is based upon implicitly bigoted assumptions about countries like Italy and Greece, as revealed through the notion that Germans, through the administrative processes of the European Union, must seize power from them and act as their firm, disciplinarian parents.

Labels: Europe, Film Notes, Germany, Greece, IMF, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

For those of you who haven't followed the implementation of austerity in Greece since 2009, the Guardian reports that the EU and European Central Bank have determined that the Greek economy will contract by 15% between 2009 and 2012. Think about that for a moment. 15%. From July 2009 to August 2011, unemployment rose from just under 9% to 16.3%, with the IMF projecting 18.5% unemployment for 2012. Earlier in the year, in May, unemployment for people between the ages of 15 and 19 was 55%, and 37% for people between the ages of 20 and 24. One can therefore reasonably assume that unemployment among young people continues to increase and will continue to do so through 2012.

Accordingly, stories like this one are common:

I have worked since I was 16 and I have lived in Athens since I was 24. I remember that many times I had to struggle in order to survive with two jobs, but never have I stayed unemployed for too long. During the past eight years there were times when things were tight and difficult and other times when things were more or less ok. But not even in the most difficult period of my life, as a University student, did I find myself in the position I am today. For thirteen years I struggled, I fought, I stood on my feet. But now I can’t take it anymore. I’m giving up.

I’ve been unemployed for ten months. Knowing that I was going to lose my job, I started searching for a new one from as early as the Easter of 2010. By now I’ve send 155 CVs but I only got two replies back, both saying that they didn’t need employees. For the first time in my life I’m facing an eviction order by the end of this month. The landlord says that I have no dignity and that I live on her expense, forgetting the eight years that I have been meeting my obligations regularly or even the improvements I ‘ve made to her house on my own expenses. Still, she’s right. She’s no charity – she wants her money. The movers ask for 1200 euros to take my stuff back to my mother’s city or 150 per month in order to store them in a container. I cannot afford either of the two scenarios. I will probably have to throw away my household of ten years. The tax service is demanding 300 euro as an emergency levy with a 3% interest for every month I don’t pay. Another emergency tax is expected with the next electricity bill and that’s going to be 420 €. I have to pay 640€ every two months for social security, although the company I worked for explicitly told me that they have no job to offer and that even if they did, they would pay a monthly salary of no more than 420 euro. In short: the city in which I have lived for the past 13 years is spitting me off to the margins like if I’m some kind of trash. For the first time in my life, I have no place to stay and no one to hold on to. Any stock of patience and courage I had has now vanished.

And, then, there is this publicly known incident where a debtor set himself on fire in front of the Piraeus Bank in Thessaloniki. While this man was saved, reported suicides have doubled in Greece since the imposition of austerity:

A suicide help line at Klimaka, the charitable group, used to get four to 10 calls a day, but now there are days when we have up to 100, says a psychologist there, Aris Violatzis.

The caller often fits a certain profile: male, age 35 to 60 and financially ruined. He has also lost his core identity as a husband and provider, and he cannot be a man any more according to our cultural standards, Mr. Violatzis says.

Heraklion, commercial center of the island of Crete, has had a spate of such deaths.

Mr. Petrakis, the fruit and vegetable dealer, was just one of three recent suicides at a single wholesale food market on the edge of the city.

Victims once were typically adolescent males or old people facing severe illness, and in normal times suicide cases often involve a mixture of factors including mental illness, says local psychiatrist Eva Maria Tsapaki.

But the economic crash has created a new phenomenon of entrepreneurs with no prior history of mental illness who are found dead every other week, she says. It's very unusual.

With this context in mind, this sort of response starts to make sense:

The Greek government’s Minister of Interior affairs (Home Office) Harris Kastanidis was spotted in a cinema in Thessaloniki watching a movie. So a few hundred students stormed the cinema chanting slogans and threw him yoghurt. Several members of the audience joined the students booing Kastanidis and clapping when the yoghurt was thrown to him. Among other slogans one can hears: Let’s see who will jump first in the helicopter when this marvellous night like Argentina will come, In Greece, Turkey and Macedonia the enemy is in the ministries and in the banks, Terrorism is the waged slavery, no peace with the bosses.

If the United Kingdom, France and Germany, with the US conspiring in the background, try to hold the EU together with a new Greek junta, we can only hope that the workers of Europe come to the defense of the Greek people. Meanwhile, protests and riots in Athens have been ongoing throughout the day as the government secured approval of yet another round of austerity measures. For updates of what has been happening on the streets of Greece, go here and here and here and here.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, IMF, Neoliberalism, Police, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

UPDATE 2: Greek unions are saying that the strike today was the largest in the country's history with 500,000 people participating in it, with the media reporting 100,000. Significantly, a BBC reporter familiar with Athens said that he had never seen so many people on the streets. Meanwhile, others note that the Greek government is showing a shocking inability to control the crowds. Follow tweets on the Greek protests here. Is there a Pinochet to restore order, and impose discipline upon the working class so that the banks can be paid?

UPDATE 1: Updates from Occupied London over the course of the day (start from the bottom and read up):

17:52 PM Syntagma has been completely evacuated by the police. A huge, diverse crowd has attacked the Bank of Greece, trashing it inside. Large groups of demonstrators are trying to regroup in Syntagma. There is an urgent need for medical help at the square.

17:42 PM Cops try to scoop clear Syntagma, attacking from different sides. There is DELTA/DIAS at the Olympiou Dios columns, blocking off people from leaving

16:55 PM Generalised clashes all around Syntagma at the moment. The bulk of the demo has been pushed away form the sq.

16:45 PM A huge black block is attacked massively by police at the moment in front of the Ministry of Finance in Syntagma Sq.

16:22 PM Reltevely passive attitide of the police and reletevly calm situation now all around Syntagma. The masses of people remain there. banners of I do not Pay movement and base unions are in front of the police in the Unkown Soldier.

16.09 PM Step by step police units are occupying the Unkown Soldier Square in front of the Parliament, pushing people back towards Syntagma Square but they meet strong opposition and do not manage to move much forward, demonstrators respond with stones and head to head clashes any time a police unit tries to move forwrad. Thousands still there, just a couple of metres away from the police cordons and attack to them.

15:44 PM Clashes all around the centre of Athens. Tear gases, shock grenades mainly on Akadimias st. but burning barricades are all around the centre. In Syntagma several hundernd of demonstrators attacked with stones and sticks in co-ordinated way against the cops, police uses chemical gases en mase there, but people do not retreat and hold their posiitions in front of the parliament defending themselves, however a part of the Unkown soldier is occupied by the police now. Thick black smoke can be seen in front of the University Refectory.

15:19 PM Police operation along Akadimias st. head to head clashes with the police there. Clashes on the Uknown Soldier Square on the bottom of the staircase leading to the parliament building. Police operation takes place there as well, as they are trying to push the people towards Syntagma Square, stones and molotov cocktails against the police and clashes in front of the parliament carries on.

15:05 PM Base Union and Anarchist blocks are enetring now Syntagma Square from the lower part, from Stadiou st.

14:56 PM Clashes in front of the parliament building still going on, on Panepistimiou stthere are clashes, taxi drivers union along fellow protesters hold a barricade on Akadimias st. and fighting with the cops, at the moment the only street leading to Syntagma is Stadiou st. Tear gases and chemical gases used by the police in Syntagma but people are not leaving the area.

14.44 PM Gas shot straight into crowd at Panepistimiou metro. Earlier on Patison, anarchists attached the government money-printing building.

14.43 PM In front of the parliament people now have reached the bottom of the staircases that leads to the main building of the Parliament. In front of the parliament again on the other side, stones, molotov cocktails and other items are thrown to the police units guarding the parliament. Tension goes high. Police does not dare to attack, while Syntagma and the Unkown Solider square are occupied by protesters-strikers.

INITIAL POST: Reports from Greece are confused, but indicate that the government has prevailed on a preliminary vote for another round of austerity, with the final one scheduled for tomorrow, while police and protesters clash on the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. Police have cleared protesters from the Syntagma Square in front of the parliament building after wounding 15 people, 6 of them seriously. Prior to the vote, protesters came close to storming the building. Tweets from Theodora Oikonomides give an impression of the intensity of the protests in Athens. For updates, consider the Guardian live blog as well. lenin has a good analysis of the situation here. A 48 hour strike commenced prior to the vote in Parliament continues.

Labels: Activism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, IMF, Neoliberalism, Police, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

Apparently not, if the populace of Libya has anything to say about it. Contradictions within the NATO assisted rebellion are rising to the surface pretty quickly. For a similar written account, consider the following:

The first cracks in Libya's rebel coalition have opened, with protests erupting in Misrata against the reported decision of the National Transitional Council (NTC) to appoint a former Gaddafi henchman as security boss of Tripoli.

Media reports said the NTC prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, is poised to appoint Albarrani Shkal, a former army general, as the capital's head of security.

Protests erupted in the early hours of the morning in Misrata's Martyr's Square, with about 500 protesters shouting that the blood of the martyrs would be betrayed by the appointment.

Misrata's ruling council lodged a formal protest with the NTC, saying that if the appointment were confirmed Misratan rebel units deployed on security duties in Tripoli would refuse to follow NTC orders.

Misratans blame Shkal for commanding units that battered their way into this city in the spring, terrorising and murdering civilians.

Such stories are important, because they remind us that the people of Libya have their own historical agency. They cannot be reduced to marionettes of the US, NATO and Saudi Arabia, as some on the left would have us believe. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that they will successfully resist the predation of the US and Europe. But they do possess an indigenous culture and resources that provide them with an opportunity to do so.

A truly left internationalist engagement with the situation in Libya would seek to understand and support those institutions of collective social organization capable of facilitating opposition to the reimposition of repressive social controls for the benefit of transnationals. Given that Gaddafi was perfectly willing to continue to provide such assistance, if a bit querulously, I still remain perplexed as to why NATO intervened. Was Gaddafi really demanding that big a slice of the pie? And, after all, he was reinvesting a lot of the proceeds from his hydrocarbon deals within Europe. But it did, and the question now is whether the Libyans will be allowed to chart their own destiny or have the State Department do it for them. Meanwhile, here is a profile of the CIA's favorite for leadership.

Hat tip to Hossam el-Hamalawy and Louis Proyect.

Labels: American Empire, Europe, Libya, NATO, Neoliberalism, YouTube

UPDATE 2: George Cicariello-Maher, a participant in the protests in response to the killing of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland in 2009, examines the complex sociology of riots such as those that convulsed London:

Essential to the imagery of the irrational mob is the insistence that the bulk of the destruction is centered on working-class communities, and here the logic is fundamentally colonial. The poor and the Blacks can’t be trusted: look what they do to their own. Incapable of governing themselves, they must be taught civilization, by blows if necessary. Here again Oakland resonates, as after the riots there a solitary African braid shop, one of many whose windows were smashed, became the media symbol of the irrationality of rioters hell-bent on destruction and nothing more. It is worth noting that the poor rarely own anything at all, even in their own communities.

To break this narrative, we must read the actions of the rebels as well as listening to their words. While working-class communities have indeed suffered damage (we should note that working-class communities always bear the brunt of upheaval), there has been less talk of more overtly political targeting: police stations burned to the ground, criminal courts windows smashed by those who had passed through them, and the tacitly political nature of youth streaming into neighboring areas to target luxury and chain stores. On just the first night, rioters in Tottenham Hale targeted Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet, whereas some in nearby Wood Green ransacking the hulking HMV and H&M before bartering leisurely with their newly acquired possessions.

This tendency was seemingly lost on analysts at The Guardian, who were left scratching their heads when the riot locations did not correspond directly to the areas with the highest poverty. And it’s not just the lefty news outlets that let such details slip: Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron observed that: The districts that took the brunt of the rioting on Monday night were not sink estates. Enfield, Ealing, Croydon, Clapham... these places have Tory MPs, for goodness’ sake. A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.

While refusing to denounce the rebellions, socialist thinker Alex Callinicos nevertheless suggests that such looting is a form of do-it-yourself consumerism… reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era. This view misses the far more complex role of the commodity during a riot, which was as evident in Oakland as in Venezuela: not only is the looting of luxury consumer items far more complex than Callinicos suggests, but the argument of looting as consumerism would have a hard time explaining both the destruction of luxuries and appropriation of necessities that often ensues.

Referencing the attention to police misconduct engendered by the riots in Tottenham, Cicariello-Maher observes:

This isn’t the only time riots have worked, either: in 2009 Oakland, it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant.

UPDATE 1: lenin explains Starkey within the context of the racist right in the UK:

But this raises the question of what Starkey was trying to do. Clearly, he earnestly expressed his own views as a High Tory historian with a monarchist, nationalist bent. Yet, he evidently went farther than the political establishment, including the mainstream right, is prepared to go at the moment, and may well have gambled with his future television career. In fact, there would be a strong case for his being arrested and charged with incitement to racial hatred. There are two answers that make sense. The first is that is that the entire aggressively offensive performance was a calculated attempt to injure and smear the targets of its racialised invective. It was malice. And it was intended that racists should enjoy this degradation, uttered with relish as it was. The second is that the presentation, in its deliberately excessive way, invited the disgust and disorientation of the audience, such that, amid a generalised moral panic, he would recalibrate the scales of what is publicly acceptable in a radical way. The pathfinders of the racist right often seek the "chorus of execration", as Powell put it, revelling in the temporary ex-communication, enjoying the ambiguous status of the heretic and the prophetic. This is both because they expect to be vindicated, and because they can enjoy the spectacle of their execrators making use of the space of relative 'respectability' that their provocation has created.

INITIAL POST:

Why did British youth loot their neighborhoods after the killing of Mark Duggan? British historian David Sharkey has the answer. British society has been degraded by blacks and black culture, inducing whites to talk like illiterates and steal whatever strikes their fancy. Contrary to BBC claims to the contrary, the interviewer, Emily Maithis, allowed him to elaborate on his theories of racial contamination without criticism. Other participants in the panel discussion, Dreda Say Mitchell and Owen Jones, did challenge Sharkey, but in remarkably understated fashion. Personally, I think that they should have just walked out.

Such gentle inquiry was in marked contrast to how another BBC interviewer, Fiona Armstrong, treated Darcus Howe when he sought to explain the social conditions associated with the riots, going so far as to assert he had participated in a riot himself:

It was so bad that the BBC was forced to issue an apology. Expect a more and more blatant recourse to racism and xenophobia to mask the sub-proletarianization of Europe as suggested by these BBC interviews.

Labels: Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Germany, Mainstream Media, Racism, United Kingdom

UPDATE 4: According to historian David Starkey, the riots have confirmed the prophecy of Enoch Powell as the whites have become black. Of course, the BBC allowed him to express his racist perspective about blacks and black culture unchallenged by the moderator, in marked contrast to the treatment of Darcus Howe when he attempted to explain the social context of the riots.

UPDATE 3: More, from Peter Oborne:

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be reclaimed by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. Yes, this is why it is difficult to ascribe a leftist social ethos to many of the rioters. Instead, they participated in a populist embrace of the values by which they have been governed for decades. They did, however, collectively organize themselves in ways common among anti-authoritarians. Perhaps, this is a seed that can germinate into a rejection of the hierarchical world of commodity consumption that they sought to enter, however fleetingly, in the last few days.

UPDATE 2 Novelist Hari Kunzru gets it:

In a society that has abandoned or devalued most forms of mutual assistance in favour of a solipsistic entrepreneurialism, it's hardly surprising that, faced with the end of the good times, people help themselves. Fear and greed are our ruling passions. That's true of the kids smashing shop windows to steal trainers. It's also true of the MPs fiddling their expenses, the police officers taking backhanders, the journalists breaking into phones. Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't any of us? The example has been set by our new masters, the one per cent for whom and by whom we're governed. The ability of powerful actors in the financial markets to socialise risk while privatising profit appears, to the financial peasantry, indistinguishable from organised crime. No reason for the rest of us to stand on ceremony.

Kunzu hits the nail on the head when he highlights the importance of the devaluation of mutual assistance. If the English unrest is to have any possibility of developing into a rejection of the existing social order, the rehabilitation of mutual assistance is a necessary precondition.

UPDATE 1: Oops, the Internal Police Complaints Commission make a mistake:

The police watchdog investigating the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked the first bout of rioting in London on Saturday, has said it may have inadvertently misled journalists into believing the Tottenham man had fired at police.

Responding to inquiries from the Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said in a statement: it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged.

Someone over at Lenin's Tomb described this process as lie immediately, recant at leisure, as manifested in other notorious episodes such as the killings of De Menezes and Tomlimson.

INITIAL POST: Prime Minister David Cameron rambled on and on about responsibility in relation to the London riots:

The prime minister revived his pre-election concerns about a broken society as he said that one of the main lessons from the riots was that too many children grew up not knowing the differences between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it's about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. In too many cases the parents of these children – if they are still around – don't care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing. The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

The fact that many children ended up in gangs would be the subject of renewed ministerial interest. The prime minister said: At the heart of all the violence sits the issue of the street gangs. Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes. They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders.

Much of the left response will probably be about the cause of the conditions condemned by Cameron, leaving aside the question as to whether he has exaggerated them. But there is another issue here that deserves more attention. For example, consider this statement: A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. And who are some of the avatars of this culture? Let's identify them.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President George Bush, President Barack Obama and, yes, Prime Minister David Cameron, not to mention French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, among others. All of them have perpetually emphasized violence as a means of achieving their objectives, regardless of any legal, institutional or international impediments. Bush and Blair are, of course, notorious for their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, wrapped in the cloak of human rights. Neither acknowledged any responsibility for the death and destruction that they inflicted upon Iraq and Afghanistan, except as a profit making opportunity for US and UK corporations supposedly involved in rebuilding the country.

Meanwhile, Obama has expanded US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, participated in airstrikes in Libya, and relied upon covert operations in Yemen. Sarkozy and Cameron have played leading roles in the Libyan debacle. As for Netanyahu, do will really need to chronicle his brutalities in the occupied territories? Barely a week passed when one of these leaders did not either engage in military attacks upon other countries or threaten them. In making these remarks, Cameron indicted himself as a cause of the riots.

Leaders like Bush, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama have sent a clear message to young people: violence works. Or, to put it differently, might makes right, a message that has been most effectively reinforced by the conduct of the police in their neighborhoods. So, when the young people of north and south London discovered that the police could not prevent them from looting and burning businesses, they went for it. Just like Bush and Blair went for it in the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003. A culture of imperialist state violence gave birth to a culture of collective violence against property. It remains to be seen whether this imperfect collective culture, a form of contemporary nihilism, is transitory, one that can be exploited by capital, as discussed yesterday, or one that has the potential to evolve into a challenge against the global capitalist order.

Labels: Barack Obama, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

UPDATE 4: Masked youths confronted the police in east London during the afternoon:

For three hours mayhem ruled in Hackney's Pembury Estate, the centre of the violence in east London. The police were there, but there was no doubt who set the law in the estate, comprised of local authority mansion-blocks of flats.

Masked youths – both men and women – helped carry debris, bins, sticks and motorbikes, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary to the estate.

The crowd in Hackney – numbering at least 300 – appeared larger than any from previous nights of rioting.

In one of the most shocking incidents, a police officer in a solitary parked vehicle was attacked shortly before 9pm.

His windscreen was entirely smashed as a young man scaled the roof and pounded down with a brick. Others attacked from the sides with sticks and bottles.

Trapped, and unable to see out, the officer accelerated through the crowd, and a hail of missiles.

UPDATE 3: The young take their revenge of the corporations that have so brazenly marketed to them?

On much of the footage of the widespread theft after the riots, looters can be seen brazenly taking the goods they want, some without taking the precaution of covering their face. In one video shot early on Sunday morning in Wood Green, people can be seen leaving H&M with a haul of goods, with others standing around JD Sports apparently waiting for their turn to take goods.

One north London resident, who wanted to be identified only as Tiel, described a conversation: I heard two girls arguing about which store to steal from next. 'Let's go Boots?' 'No, Body Shop.' 'Hit Body Shop after it's dead [meaning empty].' The girl came out of Boots nonchalantly, as if she'd done her weekly shop at 4:30am, he added. He described others, holding up clothes to themselves in the broken windows of H&M. They were just so blasé about what they were doing.

In Wood Green about 100 youths targeted shops, including electrical stores and clothes chains such as H&M. I've got loads of G-Star, said one teenager, emerging from a clothes shop. Other teenagers were seen with suitcases filled with stolen goods, and in the early hours of Sunday residential front gardens were used to sort and swap them.

If the elites can loot, why can't they? Is this what happens after the neoliberal expediency of transnational capital is exposed in the public square for all to see? There are accounts of kids as young as twelve years old involved in the looting of these stores.

UPDATE 2: Locations of confirmed riots in the United Kingdom.

UPDATE 1: lenin engages the ongoing riots and their social implications:

So, even if politicians are in denial, the rich aren't. You may well say, bollocks, they're not taking on the ruling class, they're just destroying their own nest, hurting working class people and small businesses. I can hear this, just as I can hear the sanctimony in its enunciation. The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

INITIAL POST: For the third day, there is widespread rioting in London, and reports that it has spread to the city of Birmingham. British youth, many of color, are no longer limiting themselves to non-violent protest and direct action, as they did in December 2010. Initially erupting in Tottenham, after the shooting death of Mark Duggan on Thursday, August 4th, the riots have spread throughout north London and Brixton. The police prevented Duggan's family from seeing his body for 36 hours, and forensics evidence has contradicted the initial police account that Duggan fired at them from a minicab.

As with the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the London ones have expanded into an all out assault upon the symbols of affluence and police power. Officers have been shocked at the level of violence directed against them, and cannot keep up with the mobility of the rioters. Meanwhile, looting is organized and widespread, reminiscent of a 1992 account about how people went into a leather goods store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley after the Rodney King verdict and marked the items that they came back and seized a few hours later. It is tempting to address the rioting in sociological terms, as Alexandra Topping did in this eerily anticipatory article published on July 29th, but there is probably more to it than the social work calculus of austerity equals crime. Austerity is the issue, but in broader terms than examined by Topping.

In Europe, especially, France, the United Kingdom and Greece, as well as the United States, young people live, in most instances, in conditions of poverty, with less and less opportunity to escape it. Racial divisions become acute during times of austerity, with, for example, unemployment in the US markedly worse among young African Americans and Latinos. To be poor is bad enough, to be poor and black, poor and Latino or poor and African American and Latino is even worse. Austerity, and the accompanying concentration of wealth within elites, disproportionately concentrates poverty among people of color, whether in the banlieues of Paris or the northern estate towns of London. In Paris in 2005, the electrocution deaths of two teenagers of color chased by the police ignited the riots, while the shooting death of Duggan has done so in London.

Not surprisingly, people respond by ransacking local businesses that sell goods that they would otherwise struggle to purchase. Unable to find a place within the classless society promoted by figures as disperate as Blair, Cameron, Bush, Sarkozy and Obama, they seize what they can only purchase with great difficulty, if at all. Others, acting upon the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos, loot stores and fence the goods, turning a nice profit on transactions with a zero investment cost. Lost in the condemnation of gangs, animals and thugs by the middle and upper class media is the fact that many rioters have actually internalized capitalist values. Like the great oligarchs, they don't hesitate to use violence to achieve their ends, and, also like the oligarchs, they expropriate the property of others.

In other words, the social nihilism of the elites has been embraced by some of their victims, to strikingly impressive effect. Furthermore, just as these elites have exploited new communications technologies to manipulate markets and financial transactions, the rioters have relied upon encrypted Twitter and Blackberry messages to organize themselves, select targets and evade the police, resulting in pathetic condemnations of these social networking platforms by the police. Possible ideological differences aside, anarchists no doubt appreciate the success of the decentralized communications methods of the rioters against the centralized CCTV network monitored by the police. Like those in the media, Scotland Yard public relations officers persist in claiming that gangs and thugs are responsible for the riots, but such perjorative terms have little meaning in a world where hundreds of people, many of whom do not know each other, can be organized for an attack upon a commercial district within a few hours. If it were merely a gang problem, the police could contain it, but it is the willingness of hundreds, and, probably, thousands of people, throughout London and Birmingham, to respond to such calls that makes the riots impossible to contain at this time.

For the left, the riots present a quandary. On the one hand, the rioters are from communities where many are victimized by police brutality and the austerity of neoliberal capitalism. There is a refreshing spontaneity to their actions, and they have shown a remarkable capacity for social organization on the fly. But, on the other hand, in the absence of additional information, it appears they have chosen their targets rather indiscriminately, with the result that many merchants of their own communities have been attacked, which stands in marked contrast to the calculated actions of people like the Greek anarchists, and possibly the youth of Lyon last fall, who have targeted transnational banks, luxury goods stores and surveillance firms. Accordingly, while many in their communities understand their sense of grievance, many are dismayed at the property destruction carried out by the rioters. Of course, there are personal and generational reasons for this, but it does point towards the urgency of developing a more coherent ideological motivation for the riots, beyond the mimicry of the powerful by the powerless (a subject masterfully examined by Fassbinder in many of his films), if they are to serve as the inception of an ongoing challenge to the neoliberal order.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, United Kingdom

Today, the Greek socialist parlimentary majority, PASOK, approved a rigorous plan of austerity and privatization in order to facilitate a bailout from the IMF and the ECB. It is pretty much acknowledged that, if implemented, the plan will consign a generation of Greeks to poverty. Police were unrestrained in their use of tear gas in an attempt to clear away protesters from nearby Syntagma Square:

Protesters fought pitched body-to-body battles with riot police, toxic levels of tear gas filled the air and Syntagma Square, the nerve centre of Greece's new resistance movement, descended into chaos.

Within minutes, the plaza resembled a war zone, more reminiscent of Gaza than the flourishing hub of a western capital with the detritus of battle everywhere: in its burning barricades, smashed pavements, shattered masonry, looted shops, destroyed kiosks and trees.

Dangerous amounts of tear gas are being used to terrorize people, said Athanasios Pafilis, a communist MP as parliament wrapped up two days of debate on the debt-reduction measures. It's an intolerable situation … what we are seeing is chemical warfare and it has to stop.

Unprovoked riot police were firing it all over the place, said Andreas Skourtis, an architect demonstrating against the measures.

They were clearly working to a very well-organised plan. This is a government that has gone out of its way to not only keep crowds away but pass the measures no matter what. People are really angry. Civilians have been attacked not only in Syntagma but all over the city centre.

Other accounts convey the eruption of violence throughout the central city of Athens:

18.25 GMT+2 About 20 DELTA motorcycle cops rushed through the crowd situated in Ermou Street near Kapnikarea. A clash between groups of protesters and joined DELTA, MAT forces followed. One of the DELTA cops crashed with the protesters and got badly beaten right afterwards.

18.18 GMT +2: The use of tear gas inside Syntagma metro continues; the cops invade now. The people disperse in all directions at the risk of being trampled.

18.15 GMT +2: The cops moved from the surrounding streets and have invaded Syntagma square. The people are encircled. The cops hit brutally, throwing chemicals and stepping over the demonstrators’ tents.

18.05 GMT +2: The forces of repression are shooting rubber bullets at Stadiou and Voukourestiou streets.

18.00 GMT +2: People have gathered in Propylaea, responding to the gathering call at 6 pm.

17.53 GMT +2: Attempted arson at the Agrotikil Bank on Panepistimiou Street. People are smashing the surrounding banks. The protesters who tried to burn the bank stopped when they realized that there were people inside.

17.20 GMT+2: Street battles now in Filellinon Street. Continuous reports of severely wounded protesters. A municipality pillar was burned. Everybody demands the withdrawal of cops; great fatigue and anger of the people. Apart from the merciless chemical warfare, the cops are throwing stones back against demonstrators since hours.

Beyond the ongoing struggle on the streets, there are some obvious lessons. First, there is no government on the European continent that will resist the dictates of international capital as given expression through the World Bank, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve, the Bundesbank and the ECB. Democratic processes exist for the purpose of legitimizing policies imposed by them. Second, social democratic parties, like the PASOK in Greece, stand ready to preserve state authority by acting as the intermediary by which these policies shall be approved and implemented. lenin has identified the problem:

One might expect social democratic parties to take a different approach, to mobilise their constituencies around a defence of public services and social security. But their long years of complicity in managing neoliberalism means they are unable to think of an alternative to spending cuts. In opposition, they offer gradual and responsible austerity, but they still mean to cut, and cut deep. In government, the emphasis shifts from gradual to deep.

This process doesn't only threaten the major parties. At stake is the very legitimacy of the states carrying out these measures. Hitherto, they have relied on two key sources of public support. One is the ideology of prosperity, in which great inequalities of wealth are tolerable so long as the economy keeps growing. But in the last 30 years, that has depended on record private debt, which is no longer sustainable. The other is welfare, in which the government will provide a basic minimum of nourishment, health and education so that, in theory, all can participate in the opportunities of a market economy. If the market fails, the government will be there with a safety net. This is now under unprecedented attack.

lenin recognizes the severity of the situation, but refuses to draw the obvious conclusion: social democratic parties in Europe, with Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyite influences, cannot conceive of a future in the absence of the state institutions by which which they have sought to create a more egalitarian society. Terrified of a collapse of state authority that would make it impossible to use the state's administrative apparatus to provide social welfare in the form of public services, universal education, health care and social security, they are willing to eviscerate these programs in the hope that future generations can revive them. Forced to choose between continued fidelity to neoliberal policy and alternatives that risk permanently reducing the authority of the state, if not fully eliminating it, they will always act in defense of the state. Here, in the US, we experience a peculiar variant of this in regard to the liberal embrace of the state as necessary to protect civil rights and people of color, thus rationalizing support for Democratic party policies that impoverish much of the country in much the same manner as previous Republican ones have done.

Despite the vote, Greece is stalemated. The government has obtained the legal authority to impose more merciless austerity measures upon the populace, but lacks the capability to effectively implement them. Accordingly, as already mentioned yesterday, foreign investors are already seeking to induce a Greek Pinochet to come forward and enforce workplace discipline because Papandreou, PASOK, and the labor unions associated with them, are rapidly losing the ability to do so. An attempt by PASOK affiliated transit unions in Athens to disrupt protests through the ruse of participating in the general strike failed as many workers, at the request of the movement, reported to work to operate the subway system.

Meanwhile, the left, despite its great successes, has not developed a sufficiently broad based coalition capable of rendering Greece ungovernable under conditions imposed by the EU, the IMF and the ECB. Such a coalition will be necessary as Greece enters a new phase of conflict. The centers of confrontation will be the workplaces of public sector workers and publicly owned resources, such as the port of Athens, which is designated, along with other public assets for privatization, as well as the banks and other European institutions that will adminster the Greek economy. We can anticipate a coordinated campaign, with violent and non-violent features, for the purpose of making it impossible to carry out the mass firings and asset sales mandated by the austerity plan. European bank branches in Greece, especially German and French ones, are going to be the targets of ongoing vandalism. But it is important to note that, as far as we know, the police are standing steadfast with the government.

The anti-authoritarian movements of Greece face a great challenge, the urgency of participating in a broader coalition of resistance in which many of the participants either do not understand or do not fully share their ideological vision of society. Hence, criticism of the protesters in Syntagma Square for their fetishization of non-violence is not particularly helpful, but engaging them about the synergy created by a movement with violent and non-violent features can release a tremendous radical potential. It is precisely for this reason that a reformist media outlet like the Guardian insists upon placing violent and non-violent protesters in opposition to one another in its coverage, characterizing the violent ones as hooligans, without a base of support, so as to maintain the spiritual purity of those who resist non-violently. Of course, it is not very persuasive, because, after all, there are a lot of people resisting the attacks upon the square and taking the initiative by vandalizing banks and corporate businesses in downtown Athens. And yet, there is, dare one use the word, some sectarianism that must be overcome. Ultimately, the question is not so much one of violence and non-violence, but, rather, the effectiveness of various forms of resistance against this onslaught. In other contexts, social movements have been able to bridge the violent, non-violent direct action divide, as was done during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Such an approach requires a willingness of all involved to recognize the possible consequences of their actions in relation to those undertaken by others.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, IMF, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

My mother is ill, and I am visiting her to assist with some medical issues. Meanwhile, there is a blockade of the Greek parliament planned for tomorrow to prevent it from approving yet another, more severe austerity plan imposed by the IMF, the EU, and the European Central Bank. For an anti-authoritarian perspective as events unfold, go here. While protesters are about to engage in a massive direct action, the bankers are haggling over the terms of the destruction of the Greek social welfare state, which may, if successful, serve as a model for application throughout the EU. Rumors of a possible coup, or other methods of extreme social repression, should not be discounted. I was troubled by the fact that Obama made an explicit reference to the importance of resolving the Greek problem, a subject that I never heard him speak about before, during a meeting with Chancellor Merkel of Germany last week. More recently, the New York Times published an article about the Greek crisis, suggesting that a default would result in an economic catastrophe analoguous to the 2008 one that it claims was precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Will the EU, ECB and the IMF, with US approval, impose austerity upon Greece through the barrel of a gun? It is a question that we should start taking seriously.

Labels: Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Europe, Greece, IMF, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

The leadership of the United States is bent upon proving that the truth of the old anarchist maxims about the relationship of the state to violence, as concisely articulated by Randolph Borne: War is essentially the health of the state. One cannot access any news source in the US without being confronted with stories about US military actions in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya, with articles about the prospects for an attack upon Iran appearing periodically. Curiously, the occupation of Iraq is downplayed, probably because of an interest in falsely persuading the public that this conflict has been brought to an end.

I am just over 50 years old, old enough to recall the latter stages of the Vietnam War, and I have never lived through a period in which US military operations were so ubiquitious, a period in which political figures and the media emphasize recourse to the violence of the US military as the primary, most effective means of imposing docility among those opposed to the US. In most instances, the possibility of resolving disputes through negotiation is derided, usually by villifying the leaders that we would have to speak with, Chavez, Ahmanijedad, Gaddafi, Hussein, the Taliban, among others. Anyone who refuses to play along with this polarizing binary opposition finds themselves subject to villification to varying degrees as well, as indicated by the surly treatment of Putin, Schroeder, Erdogan and Lula.

It is superficially tempting to ascribe this intolerance to the Israelification of US foreign policy, a process by which the global objectives of Israel and the US and the means by which they should be attained, appear more and more congruent. Superficially tempting, but false. First of all, as reflected by the most important, most enduring utterance of George W. Bush, it was the US that summarized its policies post-9/11 as You are either with us or against us. Bush's concise expression of policy had many influences with roots in American culture and politics, especially in regard to the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans on the frontier and imperial expansion in the Caribbean and East Asia. Bush's response echoed the jingoism that erupted after a border fight in disputed territory in Texas in 1845 and the explosion upon the Maine in Cuba in 1898. The objectives of his war on terror are remarkably similar to those of the US military during the Spanish American War. Just as the peoples of the Phillippines were initially described as victims of oppression, only to be subsequently maligned as ungrateful primitives when they sought independence from the US upon the defeat of Spain, the people of Iraq were subjected to the same perverse media manipulation.

Hence, Israel fits into this narrative as a projected colonial outpost, one that, as explained by the Retort collective, serves as an example of something more American than the US, a purer representation of our past ideals and willingness to put those ideals into practice through action. It is, in essence, the frontier transposed, from the prairies, the Rockies and the deserts of the western US to Palestine. If John Ford and John Wayne were alive and filmed The Searchers today, Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, would be searching for his niece in either Palestine or the greater Arab and Muslim world beyond it. For it is the wilds of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan that are desperately in need of pacification, and thus, full incorporation into the modern world of capitalist production and commodification. From a psychological perpective, a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians would be devastating blow to the American political psyche, as it would contradict one of the essential aspects of American exceptionalism, the necessity of forcibly imposing order and rationality to the frontier.

Bourne correctly observed that the state perpetuates itself and its control over its citizens through violence, but did not recognize that it frequently requires the permanent urgency of bringing order to a chaotic, elastic frontier to justify it. Of course, the US is not the only example of this phenomenon. One need only look to the Han Chinese empire, the British empire, the creation and expansion of the German state in the 19th and 20th centuries and the suppression of indigenous peoples in Central and South America for other ones. Within this context, there is a perverse logic to the recent public statements of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Last week, he was interviewed on National Public Radio:

And the Pentagon chief, who retires later this month, says that even as the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan hopefully wind down, there will be no shortage of threats for the U.S. military to be preparing for.

There are Iran and North Korea, he notes. Also, you have a very aggressive weapons building program in China and revolutions throughout the Middle East.

The U.S. military has never been at a loss in being told to find things to do," he says. They've always had a full menu.

Leaving aside Gates' oversimplification of American history in regard to the military, there's always an ever-shifting frontier of threat, of non-conformity, that must be addressed through military force. Interestingly, the paradox here is that the frontier must never be eliminated, it must instead evolve and transform, there must always be an us and a them, otherwise the US military would have no reason to exist.

Gates pursued this logic earlier today in a speech before representatives of the NATO countries in Brussels:

Three weeks before standing down as Pentagon head and retiring from decades at the heart of the US security establishment, Gates used a 20-minute valedictory speech in Brussels to read the riot act to a stunned elite audience of European officers, diplomats, and officials.

Nato had degenerated into a two-tiered alliance of those willing to wage war and those only interested in talking and peacekeeping, he fumed in his bluntest warning to the Europeans in nearly five years as the Pentagon head.

Washington's waning commitment to European security could spell the death of the alliance, he said. The speech was laced with exasperation with and contempt for European defence spending cuts, inefficiencies, and botched planning.

The Libya mission was a case in point, Gates said, pointing out that the Anglo-French-led campaign was running out of munitions just weeks into operations against an insubstantial foe. The US had again had to come to the rescue of the Europeans in a campaign on Europe's shores and deemed to be of vital interest to the Europeans, he complained.

As reported, Gates' remarks are striking. His condemnation of countries only interested in talking echoes back to the colonization of English colonies of North America. Talking is, at best, time wasting, at worst, a refusal to take action against obvious enemies, back then, usually Native Americans, now Arabs, Muslims and other dark-skinned people. Talking never gets you anywhere, but your fists and your guns, do. His comments about the Libyan campaign are a reflection of historic American arrogance. No one can calm the frontier like the US, and when others try to do so, they need the Americans to bail them out.

Beyond this, Gates is frustrated that the Europeans don't understand that permanence of the frontier of threat and the importance of allocating resources to address it. Perhaps, this is because the countries of Europe face a more immediate peril from people unwilling to accept the evisceration of social welfare programs to pay for the speculative losses of bankers and increased defense spending in support of endless American military operations. In Europe, unlike the US, the preservation of state authority is coming into question.

Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Europe, Israel, Libya, Palestine, US Military

Just over a week ago, German and Turkish media reported the following:

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned in a report that the tough austerity measures and the dire situation could escalate and even lead to a military coup, according to a report by Germany’s popular daily Bild.

According to the CIA report, ongoing street protests in crisis-hit Greece could turn into escalated violence and a rebellion and the Greek government could lose control, said Bild. The newspaper said the CIA report talks of a possible military coup if the situation becomes more serious and uncontrolled.

While by and large unreported in the US and much of Europe, there is a massive, growing protest movement against even more harsh austerity measures being imposed upon Greece by the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank, as indicated by this account of protests in Greece yesterday:

A crowd whose size is difficult to even estimate gathered in central Athens to protest against the crisis and the Memorandum tonight. The call to a pan-european call of action saw more than 100,000 (some estimates give much higher numbers) flooding Syntagma square and many central nearby avenues. In contrast to previous gatherings, police presence was much higher, with fencing erected around the parliament building and double, or triple rows of riot police around it.

The city is now building up for the General Strike of June 15th, which is also the next date of action announced at Syntagma square. Both mobilisations are aimed against the new agreement between the government and the troika (IMF/EU/ECB) which is planned to be voted at parliament on the morning of the 15th. The general assembly of Syntagma square has already called for a blocking of the parliament from the night of the 14th. In addition to the fencing installed around the parliament, a police water canon has also appeared nearby.

Similar demonstrations took place in Thessaloniki, Patras, Heraklion, Larisa, Volos and many other Greek cities. In the Cretan city of Chania, fascists bearing arms appeared in the gathering, in a failed attempt to provoke the gathered crowd.

People are protesting a new financial bailout plan that places the people of Greece at the mercy of transnational institutions, virtually eradicating any semblence of Greek sovereignty and local political participation:

Representatives of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) signaled Friday that more bailout money would be forthcoming for Greece next month, after the Greek government assured them it would implement billions of euros in cuts and privatizations.

The EC, ECB, and IMF said that the government of Prime Minister George Papandreou had agreed to sell off 50 billion euros in state assets by 2015, and that Athens had also agreed to set up an independently managed privatization agency to oversee the sale.

While the press release did not provide details, the wording implies that the privatization and sell-off of large portions of the Greek state will take place under the control of international banks and financial institutions. Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the Eurogroup forum of euro-zone finance ministers, made similar proposals last month.

The group, which concluded a four-week mission to Athens on Friday, added that the Greek government's proposal includes a significant downsizing of public sector employment, restructuring or closure of public entities, and cuts to social programs.

In a post written prior to the acceptance of the bailout terms by the Greek government, Yves Smith of naked capitalism explained why it is likely to fail, with this remarkable commentary:

Another reason this rescue is not a rescue is that one of its major elements, that of stripping Greece of assets, is unlikely to raise the €50 billion expected. The demands here are astonishing. Greek premier George Papandreou agreed to only €5 billion of asset sales a year ago; the best state owned assets are expected to fetch at best €15 billion. Trust me, if that’s all you can get from the best properties, anything else that can be cobbled together is likely to be worth at most half that in toto. So it’s not hard to foresee that the receipts from the infrastructure sales are likely to fall short by about half.

And the notion that the invading banker hoards are going to supervise tax collection is sure to mean that they will make certain that they are first in getting tax receipts. As various readers have pointed out, lower middle and middle class Greeks have taxes withheld from wages; it’s the rich and the participants in the black economy that escape. It is far fetched to think that foreign involvement will improve matters; indeed, I’d expect everyone who can to operate out of the black economy as an act of rebellion.

Greece looks to be on its way to be under the boot of bankers just as formerly free small Southern farmers were turned into debtcroppers after the US Civil War. Deflationary policies had left many with mortgage payments that were increasingly difficult to service. Many fell into crop lien peonage. Farmers were cash starved and pledged their crops to merchants who then acted in an abusive parental role, being given lists of goods needed to operate the farm and maintain the farmer’s family and doling out as they saw fit. The merchants not only applied interest to the loans, but further sold the goods to farmers at 30% or higher markups over cash prices. The system was operated, by design, so that the farmer’s crop would never pay him out of his debts (the merchant as the contracted buyer could pay whatever he felt like for the crop; the farmer could not market it to third parties). This debt servitude eventually led to rebellion in the form of the populist movement.

Of course, there is also another historical parallel, one that should not be readily dismissed given the contempt that many Greeks have for the military and the police, and that is, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Meanwhile, over at Counterpunch, Michael Hudson provides the background of this crisis, most importantly its origins as a consequence of the tax evasion policies of the 1967-1974 Greek junta and subsequent reliance on the issuance of debt for Greece by transnational financial institutions to maintain the country's infrastructure.

Interestingly, some Marxists do apparently believe that Greece may be on the verge of a revolutionary situation:

Yesterday's gathering in Athens, apart from its impressive size, had many new elements. The awkwardness and blind rage that characterized the first days of the movement have given way to enthusiasm. The masses have acquired a sense of confidence through the collective show of strength. While the early days were focused on the idea of a silent angry people, yesterday the mood had changed. The people shouted ingenious slogans against the government and the Troika, and everywhere groups of people were spontaneously formed in which everyone wanted to express an opinion on the movement and on the next steps to be taken.

At the same time, in the most advanced part of the protesters, especially in the youth, an interest to seek a political solution for the next day was evident. This explains the enormous interest in participating in the People's Assembly of Syntagma Square, which was attended by 10,000 people, patiently waiting to participate, although very few were able to speak.

From 9.30 pm onwards, the density of the protest made it impossible even to approach the site of the assembly. The predominant element in the meeting was the spontaneous opinions voiced by ordinary workers, unemployed and young people expressing the need to continue the struggle.

Many proposals were made: to besiege the parliament on the day the austerity measures are put to the vote; to fight to set up popular meetings in every neighborhood; to put into practice the decision of the People's Assembly for an indefinite general political strike; to fight the media propaganda with an organized campaign in the neighborhoods and squares. On one point all were agreed: next Sunday there will be a million people in the streets of Athens!

From here, it sounds a little hyperbolic, although we should not, as I already mentioned, dismiss it. The CIA certainly hasn't, as this scenario has prompted it to suggest the possibility of a military coup if uncontrollable unrest erupts when the Greek Parliament attempts to approve the agreement. But there is another reason why we should be fearful about the prospects for a crackdown in Greece. In Chile, the US, through the CIA, corporations like the International Telephone and Telegraph and labor unions like those affiliated with the AFL-CIO, sought to instigate a coup in Chile for economic reasons, not because of violent instability. Indeed, the US deliberately intensified pre-existing economic problems and social conflict within Chile in order to push rightists and high ranking officers within the Chilean military to forcibly remove Allende and subsequently destroy democratic institutions and the power of the working class.

The junta, lead by General Augusto Pinochet, created a dictatorship for the purpose of disempowering the populace for the benefit of capitalists, or, as liberals would say, investors, both within and without Chile. Social welfare programs for low and middle income people were slashed, while generous subsidies were provided for investors willing to purchase state assets. Unions were domesticated under legal restrictions that persist to this day. Radical protest was ruthlessly suppressed, with many leftists either killed or driven from the country. Land reform was, of course, reversed to the extent that it had been implemented at all. Chile thus became the laboratory for neoliberal economic experimentation that was thereafter implemented throughout most of the Americas.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds a lot like the increasingly severe austerity measures that the EU, the ECB and the IMF have compelled the Greek government to accept over the last year and a half. In such a situation, the restoration of workplace discipline is essential. Capitalists, or, investors, if you will, can't recover their profits if the populace insist upon protesting the measures through job actions, strikes, protests and industrial sabotage. In this instance, the bankers of Germany, and especially France, can't collect their loans, plus interest, if the workers of Greece refuse to work more hours for less pay with increased productivity. Hence, the true threat of a coup lies, not so much in the spasmodic violence associated with protests against the bailout, but, rather, in the economic necessity for strict measures to force the populace to work under conditions imposed by the government and its foreign allies. Needless to say, such measures are much more easily imposed through a military dictatorship than through an obstensibly democratic political system weakened by the economic crisis. So, the leaked release of the CIA report may actually be an act of black propaganda, designed to obscure the real reasons for the coup if it should happen.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Chile, Europe, Greece, IMF, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, Unions

Someone, perhaps it was the ubiquitous Sasha, asserted that if people from Mexico attempted to force their way across the border with the US, the US would respond with force equal to, and possibly even greater than, the force used by Israel against Palestinians on Sunday. I tend to disagree with him for several reasons, primarily because of the economic relationship between the US and Mexico as well as the social unrest that it would ignite within the US itself, particularly in states like California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But he has revealed an important aspect of the occupation that deserves more than the scant attention that it commonly receives, with the recognition of it limited to academia and international providers of security services.

Sasha has implicitly associated the occupation with broader issues of global border contral, and despite his Zionist stance, he is correct in doing so. It is an emerging narrative of the occupation that is as important as the dominant one regarding the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians for the land of Palestine. There is, in fact, a frightening symmetry between the evolution of the occupation and international methods of border control, so much so that the occupation often serves as a testing ground for policies and technologies utilized elsewhere, especially in the US. Prior to the mid-1990s, there was a time when the occupation took a somewhat more benign form in terms of the intrusiveness of social control measures and technologies, but, in the immediate aftermath of Oslo accords, Israel commenced the installation of a system of border checkpoints that has culminated with the ongoing construction of what critics have called the Apartheid Wall, as well as the militarization of daily life. The part of this process that gets ignored, possibly because it is contrary to the tendency of many around the world to hold Israel solely responsible for the abuses of the occupation, is the effort to integrate these measures into other border control situations.

One of the most obvious examples of this process was the attempted construction of a border fence, known as the Secure Border Initiative network, or SBInet, by the US along the border of the US and Mexico, cancelled last fall. Not surprisingly, the US looked to Israel in 2006 for its construction before abandoning the project:

For the SBInet project, the Boeing/Elbit consortium proposed the radical idea of 1,800 towers equipped with cameras and motion detectors stretched across the border. For possibly the first time ever, the words Israel and border are in the same sentence and it doesn't have anything to do with its own borders. The talent and expertise that Elbit Systems (NASDAQ ELST) has employed for years in protecting Israel's borders will now be put to use on US borders to keep Americans safe.

Kollsman Inc., an American-based subsidiary of Elbit, has been selected as a member of the winning consortium by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) to supply technology to identify threats, to deter and prevent crossings, and to apprehend intruders along the US borders with Canada and Mexico.

Kollsman, headquartered in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a development, manufacturing and support organization providing advanced electro-optical and avionics systems to the commercial aerospace, military and homeland security markets. The company's expertise includes enhanced vision systems, flight displays, head-up displays, thermal imaging systems, fire control systems, and advanced security and surveillance solutions.

The Secure Border Initiative is the latest attempt by the United States government to use technology to secure its borders, stop smuggling, and prevent illegal immigration. After September 11, illegal immigration is not just seen as a social problem, but also a national security issue. A unique aspect of this initiative was that Homeland Security gave the bidders total freedom to create new ideas of how to apply both new and old technology to secure the US borders.

Except that it is not really accurate to say that the US looked to Israel, as the consortium of corporations involved in the aborted construction of the fence, Boeing and Elbit, are transnational, with both companies listed on US stock exchanges. Accordingly, it is more appropriate to say that transnational corporations, many headquartered in the US and Israel, have utilized the occupation as an experimental testing ground for technologies with an anticipated global application. Given the proliferation of surveillance cameras and airborne surveillance in the United Kingdom to the extent that it is considered the most surveilled society among industrialized countries, I would not be surprised to discover that UK corporations are playing a prominent role in this effort as well. Of course, the deployment of technologies originally developed for border control for the purpose of mass surveillance shouldn't surprise anyone. Hence, the occupation, and the technologies associated with its imposition, are part of a global, transnational corporate effort to maintain the separation of the poor of the Global South from the wealthy of the Global North and monitor virtually every aspect of our daily lives. In this respect, Chicano activists in California have much in common with the Palestinians enclosed within the occupied territories, and they have supported the actions of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, as most recently expressed through the support of MECHA for the Irvine 11.

Furthermore, as you may recall, the US engaged in extemporaneous forms of occupation inspired border control within Iraq during some of the most intense periods of Iraqi resistance. Starting in late 2003, the US partitioned Iraqi cities, creating, in the words of Robert Fisk, a controlled populace. By August 2004, Toufic Haddad described US methods as synonymous with those of the occupation:

. . . the use of aggressive techniques of urban warfare with an emphasis upon special units, house to house searches, wide scale arrest campaigns (almost 14,000 Iraqis are now in prison), and torture; the erecting of an elaborate system of watchtowers, military bases, check-points, barbed wire, and trenches to monitor, control, and restrict transportation and movement; the clearing of wide swaths of land next to roads; the use of armored bulldozers to destroy the homes of suspected militants; the razing of entire fields from which militants might seek refuge; the heightened relevance of snipers and unmanned drones; and the attempted erecton of collaborator networks to extract information from the local populace about resistance activities -- both military and political.

Accordingly, an ethnic, sectarian emphasis upon the nature of the conflict in Palestine, while appealing to those seeking to organize among nationalistic Americans seeking to avoid US culpability in the actions of Israel, doesn't come close to addressing the real dimensions of the struggle.

Meanwhile, in regard to Europe, the occupation is consistent with an ideological belief in the necessity of rigorous border control to prevent the entry of people characterized as culturally dangerous. The governments of Italy and France are expressing alarm over the possibility of an influx of North Africans in the absence of Gaddafi's willingness to interdict them, but such xenophobia is not a recent development, as demonstrated by periodic statements by German politicians about the purported inability of Turkish immigrants to adopt German values, as if this matters. Several years ago, Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years in Europe interviewing Muslim immigrants, many of them imprisoned within refugee camps, and published a book about what they told him, Embracing the Infidel. In this book, he humanizes his subjects while exposing an impersonal system of social control across the European continent that restricts them to ghettoes and refugee camps. In a sense, the police methods of stopping people for their identity cards, detaining them and incarcerating them in refugee camps evokes a bygone era, one that predates the accelerated technological modernization connected to the occupation and US military operations in lesser developed countries, but it retains the cultural superiority and xenophobia at the heart of this project. Last week, the suppressed brutality of it erupted on the streets of Athens, as right wing Greek mobs attacked the undocumented.

Labels: American Empire, Europe, Germany, Greece, Immigration, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Palestine, Police, United Kingdom, US Military, Zionism