Econowrap: From America to Greece and back

Most of today’s post focuses on Greece, but there’s lots more, including really bad news for European carmakers, more bad news for America’s unemployed, and a leading Republican presidential candidate’s call for the abolition of Medicare and Social Security.

Looks like everyone’s getting screwed these days, save for the Usual Suspects.

The Greekification of America: Captive business

From The Alyona Show, word that America’s biggest prison-operating corporation has sent out a mass-mailing to cash-strapped states, offering to take over their prison systems:

The program notes:

The Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons and it might be tempting in times of budget crises. But in exchange, the company is asking for a 20 year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90% full, this all according to a copy of the letter that the Huffington Post got its hands on. Congress Matters Editor David Waldman weighs in.

More stumbling blocks thrown in Greece’s path, but. . .

First, a story from this morning, reporting on the latest outrage from Greek politicians at the newest demands from the troika.

From Bloomberg:

Greece said that Europe’s wealthier countries are “playing with fire” by toying with the idea of expelling it from the 17-nation euro area as talks over a second aid program ran into new obstacles.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos leveled the accusation after a decision slated for tonight on aid totaling 130 billion euros ($171 billion) was postponed until at least Feb. 20 and possibly until after a full-time Greek government emerges from elections later in the year.

“We are continually faced with new terms,” Venizelos told reporters in Athens today. “In the euro area, there are plenty who don’t want us anymore. There are some playing with fire, domestically and abroad. Some are playing with torches and some are playing with matches. But the risk is equally great.”

Two years after pledging to pull Greece back from the brink, European leaders are torn between pouring more aid into the struggling economy or risking an unprecedented national bankruptcy that might force the country out of the euro and prompt renewed market tumult.

Euro finance ministers started a conference call at 5 p.m. Brussels time after scrapping plans for a physical meeting due to doubts about Greece’s readiness. Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the euro panel, now targets a Greek aid decision at the previously scheduled Feb. 20 meeting.

Read the rest.

More from Deutsche Welle:

The finance minister of the Netherlands has cast doubt on whether the eurozone will release a second bailout for Greece in time for the country to avoid a default.

Fresh doubts have emerged about whether Greece will receive a second financial bailout in time for it to avoid going into default next month.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager warned on Thursday that Greece’s European partners may opt to delay payment of the funds until after parliamentary elections in April.

“Ideally, after the elections, you want to deal with rulers that you know will give their support to the package,” De Jager said in an interview with the Dutch business daily Het Financieele Dagblad.

He also said that “several EU countries, among them the Netherlands … are not at all satisfied with the promises Athens made last week.”

Read the rest.

Then came word that maybe, just maybe, more pension fund cuts could do the trick.

From Ekathemerini in Athens:

Further cuts in pensions are expected to cover part of the 325 million euro gap in the 3.3 billion euros of extra budget savings this year which the EU and IMF are demanding in exchange for a new bailout of 130 million euros, Kathimerini understands.

The Greek government and the troika – the European Union, the Central European Bank and the International Monetary Fund – reportedly agreed on a package that includes cuts in the so-called special salaries, which include public sector wages for doctors, judges, diplomatic staff and police department.

The cuts are expected to reach 10 percent and in some cases 20 percent of salaries and are set to come into effect on July 1, as opposed to September 1 as originally planned.

The measure is expected to save 90 to 100 million euros.

Read the rest.

Then a hint of what was to come

From Athens News:

Alexis Tsipras, who heads the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza), said that while his coalition has never called for Greece to leave the eurozone, political developments meant this was becoming a greater possibility.

Speaking on public broadcaster NET TV, Tsipras said that the troika would not be satisfied with written commitments from all the political party leaders in Greece to uphold the austerity agreement, regardless of the outcome of elections expected in April.

“They will also be asking the pensioners to sign a letter of remorse that they accept that their pensions will sink to 200 euros”, he said.

He warned that “A country with salaries of 400 euros cannot be a European country of Europe, but an African one. Greece is distancing itself from Europe and going closer to Libya and Egypt.”

He opined that voters will face the dilemma of “don’t vote left so that the country will be saved” if elections are held.

“The Eurogroup is turning into the Procrustes of democracy in Europe,” he said, referring to the mythological Greek figure who stretched people or cut off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed.

“[German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schaeuble is playing the same role as that played by the tanks in the Second World War.”

Read the rest.

And, presto, the deal is done?

The latest, from The Guardian:

Hopes are rising that the European Union will agree a fresh €130bn (£108bn) bailout on Monday to save Greece from defaulting on its debts after politicians in Athens said they were close to a deal with their single currency partners.

Amid attempts by Brussels to defuse the tension that has been building between Greece and Germany over the past week, it appeared that the austerity stricken southern European country had found the additional budget cuts being demanded by the rest of the eurozone. “We are almost there,” one source said.

Read the rest.

So there it is. A little more sacrifice by those least able to afford it — people on fixed incomes — and the troika has what they wanted.

At least for now.

The human impacts of the Greek disaster

The Real News Network is consistently one of the best sources around for, well, real news.

Here’s a look beneath the headlines, with host Paul Jay interviewing Greek attorney Dimitri Lascaris about the ongoing human costs of bailing out banks for their speculations:

A transcript and more are posted here.

It’s not just Greeks who are feeling the anger

Europe’s hopelessly compromised socialist-in-name-only parties are feeling some stirrings of the fire that once inspired Europe’s left.

From EurActiv:

Socialist members of the European Parliament have set up an “alternative Troika” to find solutions for Greece beyond austerity measures, with their group leader going as far as likening the current

A video interlude: Cetacean musical flights of fancy

From Walt Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, the sequence featuring Ottorino Resphigi’s Pini de Roma, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Levine in one of the most imaginative animation sequences ever created. Well worth popping up to full screen. We were simply blown away by the imagery when we first watched it as a six-year-old, though another sequence from the film gave us nightmares for months.

Chart of the day: An example for the Greeks

From the International Monetary Fund via Dean Baker’s Beat the Press, a look at what happened to Argentina when they chose default [the vertical line] over bailout:

Baker writes:

While there are reasons that a default would be more difficult in Greece’s case than Argentina’s (most importantly Argentina had its own currency), the post-default experience of Argentina suggests that it probably chose the better route.

Read the rest.

Search engine hit of the day: The naked truth

Thanks WordPress, we get a list of the search engine terms that lead folks to esnl. Usually they make some sense, but we have to admit we’re stumped by one that led at least two folks here today:

nude old dads blog

We’ll cop to three of the four terms, but not the nude part, since we do our blogging on the living room couch. But we’re bemused at how the words wound up with a hit at esnl. We did a bit of searching on Google and Bing but found no answers, perhaps because we gave up too quickly since many of the hits involved the sleazier sort of porn sites.

We’ll leave it as one of the mysteries of the blogging universe.

So if you wind up here looking for nude old blogging dads, you’ve got seventy-five percent of what you were looking for, and we’ll leave it at that.

Headline of the day: How the French do scandal

From Radio France Internationale, proof that the French do scandal the same way they do cooking, with panache:

French prison governor jailed for affair with femme fatale inmate

Kansas bomber [?] busted, ‘terrorism’ not cited

UPDATED at the end.

Yet another terrorist plot appears to have been busted, this time in Kansas.

But none of the counts use that word, “terrorist.” Could that be because the suspect appears to be a red-blooded American immigrant-hater, rather than, say, a guy who prays towards Mecca?

We’re waiting for the right wing outrage, but we suspect folks like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, and Malkin will be curiously quiet. You’ll find the reasons for our suspicions in the last paragraph of this report from John Hanna of the Associated Press, which avoids the use of the T-word:

Several homemade bombs were found Wednesday in a pickup truck parked near the Kansas Statehouse that had specialty license plates issued only to U.S. military paratroopers, and police said they arrested the owner inside an underground tunnel connecting the Capitol to an office building.

>snip<

Saleh said officers went to investigate the pickup after receiving a call from a state employee about it being parked in a restricted lot outside the Kansas Judicial Center, south of the Statehouse, without the normal state worker tag. An officer saw suspicious objects inside, including an empty gun holster, and authorities called in the Topeka Police Department’s bomb squad.

Saleh said the homemade explosives were made with household materials and designed to spray shrapnel once they were detonated. He didn’t have further details, but called them “actual explosives.”

>snip<

The truck had a specialty Florida license plate issued only to qualified U.S. military paratroopers. It also had a special forces sticker on its bumper and stickers on its back window saying, “Welcome to America. Now speak English” and “Does my American flag offend you? Call 1 800 LEAVE THE USA.” The gate of the pickup bed also had a decal from a dealership in Ocala, Fla.

Read the rest.

Mark Potok of Hatewatch adds:

The case and its possible connection to immigration recalled the arrest and eventual guilty plea of Jeffrey Harbin, a well-known neo-Nazi arrested in January 2011 near the Arizona-Mexico border. He was carrying 12 homemade grenade-like devices fitted with ball bearings, which were meant to “maximize human carnage,” as a prosecutor put it at the time. Details of Harbin’s plans were never made public.

Read the rest.

Can you imagine what kind of outrage would’ve ensured had the latter case involved, say, a Muslim?

We suspect Fox News would’ve made sure the details were made public.

UPDATE: Now the suspect is free, though an arrest apparently may be coming.

From Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times:

A day after the scare, the suspect, whom police will not identify, is free. In fact, according to Capt. Jimmie Atkinson of the Kansas Highway Patrol: “In this one, we did not actually take the suspect to jail and arrest him.”

Count that as one of the very few solid facts that’s been released thus far in a case that remains hazy.

When asked about the case Thursday morning, officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Kansas Highway Patrol and Topeka Police Department even seemed somewhat confused about who was in charge of the investigation.

Finally, by Thursday afternoon, Atkinson said: “We are going to be going forward with the charges because the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] did not want to file charges.”

What charges would be filed? Atkinson wouldn’t say. Nor would he say why the suspect was at the Capitol.

Read the rest.

BP agrofuel boss: Pushing for policy changes

Sue Ellerbusch is BP’s president of U.S. agrofuel operations, making her a very important figure when it comes to UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute, the research center built with $500 million in BP funds to devise new ways of making plants into fuel.

This is a brief video we discovered produced by the Advanced Biofuels Association.

Two things caught our attention.

First, that BP’s only current production of domestic agrofuel derived from plant cellulose yields ethanol, rather than more energy efficient fuels, and it derives from work done by scientists in San Diego, rather than Berkeley.

The second attention-grabber is the advocacy of “policy changes,” meaning rewriting of government regulations to make the political climate more amenable to the fuel companies’ bottom lines.

Vanadana Shiva: The choice before us

An interview with Vandana Shiva at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum on the contest between between the two models of development now confronting us, a corporate model based on the relentless privatization and exploitation of the world’s resources and an earth democracy based on sharing and preservation of the world we all share in common.

Deutsche Welle‘s program notes:

The Time magazine recognized Vandana Shiva as an environmental hero, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators in Asia. She has received the Alternative Nobel Prize Right Livelihood Award and is a member of the Order of the Golden Ark. We met Dr. Shiva at the 3rd Bonn Conference on International Development Policy and asked her: What can the media do to support global solidarity and sustainable development?

Quote of the day: A tale of two nations

From Ludwig Greven of Die Zeit in Hamburg via a Pressurop translation:

The latest news from a divided Europe is that for the first time, German exports have reached  €1 billion. The economic situation is bright, tax revenues are rising, unemployment is falling, [labour union] IG Metall, due to high profits in the industrial sector, is asking for a 6.5% salary increase. Germany is an island of bliss.

And now here is Greece, a country in the midst of upheaval, thrown into the abyss. The transition government has decided, under the pressure of the Troika (European Union, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund), to impose a new set of draconian austerity measures. Salaries are to be slashed by 20-30% and150,000 people will be laid off from the public sector by 2015. The economy, which is expected to shrink by at least 8% this year, is in freefall and the threat of bankruptcy has not been averted.

The second EU bailout plan, totalling €130 billion, has been nonetheless suspended. The Eurozone Finance Ministers, in fact, doubt that the government of Prime Minister Lukas Papademos is up to the task of applying the announced austerity measures – not without reason. The cuts already enacted do not work because they only make things worse. In addition, the Greeks are putting up a stiff resistance to the programme of pauperisation and decline of their country.

Is this the prospect for a united Europe? Transforming the land in which Western culture and democracy were born into a protectorate of Brussels – with no hope for improvement?  Is this a continent ever more deeply divided between the rich North and the South with its misery in which people wonder where their daily bread will come from? Meanwhile, in Germany, the ruling coalition is seriously thinking about cutting taxes.

Read the rest.

The Greek ‘bailout’ as grand theft property

From The Real News Network:

Economist Michael Hudson offers a devastating analysis of the devastation being wrought on Greece on behalf of banksters, highlighting the noxious nature of the debt and the thuggery employed by Europe’s political leaders to impose a mandate that’s certain to drive Greece deeper into misery.

As Hudson notes, today banks are doing what armies once did, invading nations and seizing assets. “This is a property grab,” he says.

Another agrofuel company drops fuelishness

The headline from Biofuels Digest: “Algaeventure Systems abandons biofuels, heads for biopharma.”

The story:

In Ohio, Marysville-based Algaeventure Systems is taking its algae biofuels plans and converting them to pharmaceutical plans after bringing on a heavy-weight researcher formerly from Pfizer to lead a funding round as its chief scientific officer.

The change has come as a result of changing markets and the ability of its technology to feed into the higher value pharmaceutical market rather than fuels.

Wow. Two companies in less less than a week abandoning the biofuel crusade for more profitable, less greener pastures.

As noted here earlier this week, UC Berkeley-spawned Amyris, which promised to fuel us up with high test derived from cellulose transformed to fuel by genetically tweaked microbes, has abandoned fuels for cosmetics.

Gee, are we sensing a trend here?

Oh, and Amyris, the company whose shares have been hitting new lows almost daily?

Well, guess what? They hit another new low today, selling for as little as $6.37 a share, before bouncing back up to $6,41 in after hours trading. That’s down from an all-time high of $33.89, and well below the initial public offering price of $16.50. Guess they need those cosmetics.

Furious Greeks respond to latest demands

By now the hapless Greeks are probably wishing they’d borrowed from Mafia loansharks. At least all the bent-nose guys spell out the consequences of default quite clearly up front: You don’t pay, we break your legs.

But with the troika, the Greeks are finding out, the fine print comes out only after the deal is done.

First, the simple version from the BBC:

Greece has made “substantial progress” in convincing eurozone nations that it should get fresh bailout funds, but there will likely be no decision until Monday, the head of the Eurogroup says.

Jean-Claude Juncker said more work was needed to strengthen surveillance of how Greece’s austerity proposals would be implemented.

Read the rest.

More details from Ekathemerini:

Greece will have to wait until Monday, when eurozone finance ministers meet, to discover if it will receive the final approval for a new bailout, although this may involve a permanent presence for the troika in Athens and the opening of an escrow account for the loans to be paid into.

The Eurogroup held a teleconference Wednesday to assess whether Greece had met all the preconditions for finance ministers to sign off on the deal, to be worth at least 130 billion euros. Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker said Greece had met the three terms it had been set, including the provision of written commitments from PASOK’s George Papandreou and New Democracy’s Antonis Samaras.

“First, we received the strong assurances provided by the leaders of the two coalition parties in Greece’s government,” he said. “Second, the troika finalized and presented its analysis on the sustainability of Greece’s public debt.

“Third, further technical work between Greece and the troika has led to the identification of the required additional consolidation measures of 325 million euros.”

In his statement, Juncker also hinted at the troika maintaining a permanent presence in Athens to “strengthen the surveillance of the program,” as well as the creation of an escrow account so priority would be given to debt servicing. Under this scheme, Greece would only receive any money to cover public spending if all debts had been paid.

Read the rest.

Note all that?

Greece can spend anything on the needs of its own people after its paid off banksters, a class of folk who have placed themselves above the needs of devastated Greeks, on whom they’ve imposed radical pay and pension cuts, while grabbing hold everything that isn’t tied down along with a lot of stuff that is.

And now they want to effectively run the government.

So it’s not surprising that even some of the politicians who worked hardest to ram through the dastardly deal are getting steamed.

From Ian Traynor and Larry Elliott of The Guardian:

Greece rounded bitterly on its EU paymasters when the finance minister and socialist leader, Evangelos Venizelos, accused the eurozone of deliberately changing the terms of a proposed €130bn (£110bn) bailout because key players wanted to kick the country out of the single currency.

The charge that some eurozone countries were seeking to engineer a Greek sovereign default and exit from the euro deepened the rancour between debtor and creditors in the dangerous standoff.”There are many in the eurozone who don’t want us any more,” Venizelos declared at a meeting with President Karolos Papoulias. “We are constantly being given new terms and conditions.”

Papoulias went even further, denouncing Germany and Greece’s north European creditors after Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said that Greece must not turn into a “bottomless pit” for eurozone bailout funds and that Europe was better prepared than when the crisis erupted two years ago to cope with a Greek sovereign default.

“Who is Mr Schäuble to ridicule Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finns?” declared the Greek head of state. “I don’t accept insults to my country by Mr Schäuble.”

Read the rest.

And they’re well aware that elections are coming in April. . .

A Greek call for international demonstrations

From Real Democracy Gr  via From the Greeks, a  call for an international day of protest Saturday in opposition to the austerity program imposed on the Greek people by the troika:

Αλληλεγγύη με τους Έλληνες!
Solidarity with the Greek people!
Solidarité avec le peuple grec!
Solidarität mit den griechischen Menschen!
Solidaridad con el pueblo griego!
Solidariedade com o povo grego!
Solidarietà con il popolo greco!
Солидарность с греческого народа!
Yunan halkı ile dayanışma!
التضامن مع الشعب اليوناني
希腊人民的声援

When one people is attacked, all people are attacked.

The 10th of February, the non elected Greece Government adopted a new hideous and destructive austerity plan, passed by the parliament (MPs voted 199-101 in favour) on the 12^th of February.

The new austerity measures impose a 22% reduction in the minimum wage, which will remain frozen for the next three years; collective bargaining is simply cut; 15000 public sector workers are laid off and 150000 jobs will be destroyed due to the non-renewal of the contract…

The people of Greece is bravely rising up against social terror policies. With the media’s deafening silence, demonstrations, as well as general strikes, become more and more frequent despite the violent repression.

The people of Greece need the international solidarity and they call for our support.
Let’s reply to their call. We are all Greek!

Their mobilization is clashing with the wall of an European and international dictatorship, the dictatorship of the financial markets and the troika: EU, ECB and IMF, who have imposed austerity measures and a non-elected government on the Greek.

The EU governments are involved in the dictatorship and they implement measures which are in the same line in the rest of the countries. Greece is being used as a laboratory before generalizing these measures. The situation is going to get even worse due to the new European Treaty project, which will impose the « golden rule » on our taxes.

We reject to sacrifice the people to the money, as do the Greek.

Let’s regain the reins of our lives.

Switch off your computer, join the mobilization!

There will be demonstrations everywhere in solidarity with the mobilization of the people of Greece, Saturday the 18^th of February.

More here.

Bad news on the Monsanto/Big Agra front

Three stories of note, one on a precedent-setting court decision in France and two on warnings sounded about the consequences of an agricultural “technology” dependent on genetically modified crops massive applications of chemicals manufactured by the same companies that peddle the seeds.

Monsanto loses herbicide poisoning case

The first news comes from France, where a court has ruled that Monsanto is liable for health afflictions caused by exposure to a now-discontinued herbicide.

From the BBC:

Paul Francois, 47, suffered from dizziness, headaches and other problems after examining a sprayer in 2004 which contained Lasso, a product now banned.

The court linked Lasso directly to the farmer’s illness.

It ordered a report on his condition, to establish the amount of compensation Monsanto would have to pay him.

Mr Francois, a cereal farmer from the Charente region in south-west France, had to stop work for a year. Medical tests found the hazardous chemical chlorobenzene in his body.

He complained that Monsanto had failed to give a warning on the Lasso label.

His lawyer, Francois Lafforgue, told Reuters news agency this was “a historic decision, in so far as it is the first time that a [pesticide] maker is found guilty of such a poisoning”.

Lasso has been banned in France since 2007. It was also withdrawn from sale earlier in Belgium, Canada, the UK and some other countries, French TF1 television reports.

Yann Fichet, head of institutional relations at Monsanto France, said: “We are disappointed by the court’s decision.”

Read the rest.

Monsanto announced Tuesday that it will appeal the ruling.

From Reuters:

“Monsanto is going to appeal this verdict. We are disappointed by the court’s decision,” Yann Fichet, head of institutional relations at Monsanto France, said.

“An in-depth examination of the case does not show in our view sufficient evidence of a causal link between the use of this herbicide and the symptoms reported by Mr Francois,” he told France Info radio.

Read the rest.

RT adds:

Monsanto’s Lasso is now considered dangerous in many EU countries. In France, it was withdrawn in 2007.

France’s health and environment safety agency ANSES is reportedly conducting a study on farming-related health issues. The results are expected next year.

The Monsanto company is a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation which is particularly famous for its genetically modified products and herbicides. It is also notable for its involvement in high-profile lawsuits, where fines and damages have run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of them were related to health damage caused by Monsanto’s products.

Read the rest.

A federal scientist sounds a warning

The parasitic base of the modern industrial agriculture — its reliance on genetically modified seeds and the toxins required so sustain them so profitable to their manufacturers — is yielding untoward consequences to ecosystems on which agriculture itself depends.

Companies tweak their GMO crops with genes from bacteria that which evolved chemical bug killers [the so-called bt strains], and in the process introduced the organic poisons into the biosp;here wherever the crops are planted.

Results have been devastating for the natural ecology, an intricate web of relationships evolved over the course of millions of years.

Considered the alarm sounded recently in Salina, Kansas, by a scientist for the U.S. Department of agriculture.

Terry Anderson reporters for Midwest Producer:

“Rather than the first line of defense, chemicals should be the last,” said Jonathan Lundgren, lead research entomologist at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Brookings, S.D.

>snip<

“Spray when it makes economic sense to do so, at the economic threshold,” he continued. “Killing every insect in a field is bad business. . .We started killing insects in agriculture whether it was a pest at all.”

>snip<

Today, Roundup Ready soybeans are planted in nearly 100 percent of soybean acres. Bt corn acres have steadily increased.

Lundgren said a study in eastern South Dakota corn fields in 2009 and 2010 showed almost no targeted pests at critical levels.

“So why are we investing so much on these corn varieties if we’re not at an economic threshold?” Lundgren asked.

He noted other Midwest studies that show planting Bt corn has driven corn borer levels so low, even those not planting Bt corn are benefiting.  Indiana and Illinois no longer study the Eastern corn borer.

“Why are we planting Bt if it’s not needed?” he said “We could plant Bt every other year or every three years.”

This year, he said he sees an entirely new age of insecticides, with seed treatments on almost everything. The latest ag census showed considerable increase in seed treatments in 2007 and he said he expects the next ag census to be much more, “whether it’s needed or not.”

He said insecticides were “hammering predators,” such as lady bugs. “There are long-term effects. . . . The natural insect community never recovers.”

Read the rest.

Another warning sounded from Penn State

Evolution is adaptation to changing environments, and when humans invent chemicals to kill weeds, natural selection kicks in, with previously marginal resistant variants filling in the gaps left by the death of the vastly more numerous

Animating the cartography of disaster

Two fascinating videos came our way recently, one spotted on the web and the other contributed by a reader.

First up, from Japan, a dramatic animation of the earthquakes of 2011. Note how comparatively few struck in California compared to other regions of the Pacific Rim of Fire:

Next up, contributed by a reader, a similar animation, this one of all the nuclear explosions set off by humans since the day of Trinity, when UC Berkeley physicist Robert watched in awe, then recited a line from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

Who to believe? Bunga Bunga or a lyin’ lawyer?

The opera buffa that is the curious case of former Italian Prime Minister and billionaire media mogul Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi and his relationship to the law is winding its way through the Italian courts, with cases underway in several venues on a variety of charges.

The latest from the BBC:

Italian prosecutors in Milan have asked for former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to be sentenced to five years in jail on bribery charges.

He is accused of paying British lawyer David Mills $600,000 (£382,000) to lie about his business interests.

But the case has run on for so long that Mr Berlusconi, 75, is unlikely to go to jail even if found guilty.

He is also on trial separately for tax fraud and alleged sex with an underage prostitute.

A case is also due to start on 15 March where Mr Berlusconi is charged with revealing confidential information over a 2005 banking scandal. In all cases he says he is innocent.

“It is certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty,” prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale told a Milan court on Wednesday. He also accused Mr Berlusconi’s defence of being entirely “based on false documents”.

Read the rest.

But there’s a problem, as the BBC reported in December. The lawyer Berlusconi’s accused of bribing says the cash didn’t come from the Bunga Bunga man himself, but from “an associate.”

Mr Mills described the letter he wrote as “a scenario that I invented in order to be presented to the Inland Revenue”.

“It’s pure imagination. It’s fiction. It’s a novel,” he added.

Mr Mills, who gave the letter to his accountant Bob Drennan in early 2004, told the court the money had actually come from his friend and associate Diego Attanasio.

“I had two major worries,” he told the court.

“The first was that I had to be able to justify to the Inland Revenue why I had registered it as a gift and therefore not taxable.

“My second concern was in relation to Diego Attanasio. I had two reasons to be worried about him as I didn’t want to cause him trouble in Italy and, secondly, because I was investing in his affairs and I didn’t wish that to be a subject of any interest either.”

Read the rest.

You’ve got to hand it to Berlusconi. Compared to him, Bill Clinton was a wimp, playing with cigars and parsing semantics.

There’s something that’s both oddly compelling and weirdly refreshing about the sheer naked corruption that hovers around Berlusconi, sometimes like a shroud and at others like one of those gilded auras in a Renaissance altarpiece.

Econowrap: Greece and the pillage idiots

It’s not all Greek to us today, but a lot is, as the bailout deal encoutners yet another round of obstacles. There’s also news from Asia, and closer to home, the threat of thousands of layoffs in the Los Angeles school system.

EU officials scramble to delay the deal

Now it looks like top brass at the European Union are a bit uneasy with the agreement they rammed down the throats of Greek legislators Sunday.

Particularly worrying is the possible outcome of April elections, where an aroused Greek electorate might well elect a government not so friendly to the bankster bailout as the one headed by their puppet prime minister, Lucas Papademos.

From Athens News:

Eurozone finance officials are examining ways of delaying parts or even all of the second bailout programme for Greece while still avoiding a disorderly default, several EU sources said on Wednesday.

Delays could possibly last until after the country holds elections expected in April, they said.

While most of the elements of the package, which will total 130bn euros, are in place, eurozone finance ministers are not satisfied that the country’s political leaders are sufficiently committed to the deal, which requires Athens to make further spending cuts and introduce deeply unpopular labour reforms.

It is also not clear that Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which currently stands at around 160 percent, will be cut to 120 percent by 2020 via the agreement, as demanded by the troika of the European Commission, IMF and European Central Bank.

“There are proposals to delay the Greek package or to split it, so that an immediate default is avoided, but not everything is committed to,” one official briefed on preparations for a eurozone finance ministers call later in the day told Reuters.

“They’ll discuss the options,” he said, adding: “There is pressure from several countries to hold off until there is a concrete commitment from Greece, which may not come until after they’ve held elections.”

Germany, Finland and the Netherlands are the countries pushing to delay the package, two other officials said, with Germany the most adamant and suggesting that final approval should only be granted after new elections are held.

Read the rest.

More from the BBC:

Some eurozone countries no longer want Greece in the bloc, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos has said.

He accused the states of “playing with fire”, as Greece scrambled to finalise an austerity plan demanded by the EU and IMF in return for a huge bailout.

Mr Venizelos promised to clarify the plan before a conference call with eurozone bosses due at 16:00 GMT.

Greece needs to convince lenders that it will make enough savings, and that its politicians will enact the changes.

Athens is hoping to get a 130bn-euro (£110bn; $170bn) bailout from the EU and IMF.

The deal also includes a provision to write off a further 100bn euros of debt owed to banks.

Read the rest.

But one recalcitrant Greek signs off

Antonis Samaras, head of the conservative New Democracy, had signaled Tuesday that he was hesitant to sign off on the deal, probably because he’s the man the press speculates will become prime minister after April’s vote.

But someone’s been applying pressure, and today he announced he’s signed a letter giving his imprimatur to the mandate.

From Ekathemerini in Athens:

The head of conservative New Democracy, Antonis Samaras, sent a letter on Wednesday to the heads of the country’s foreign creditors, saying that he was committed to the terms of a new debt deal.

Foreign creditors had demanded the written guarantees from both leaders in the coalition government as a prerequisite for releasing crucial rescue funding to ensure the country does not default in March.

Samaras wrote that his party is “committed” to the “objectives and key policies” of the country’s new loan deal with its foreign creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, adding that he would remain committed irrespective of the outcome of early elections, expected in April. “If Nea Demokratia wins the next election in Greece, we will remain committed to the program’s objectives, targets and key policies,” Samaras wrote in a letter addressed to ECB President Mario Draghi. The same letter was sent the heads of the EC and IMF.

The ND leader noted however that “policy modifications might be required to guarantee the full program’s implementation.” But he said his party would only propose “viable policy alternatives, strictly within the framework outlined by the program, so that the achievement of its objectives will not be put at risk.”

The leader of Socialist PASOK and former prime minister George Papandreou sent a similar letter on Wednesday confirming his commitment to the conditions of the debt deal.

Read the rest.

Another politician has decided to make a little sacrifice of his own, as Ekathemerini reports:

President Karolos Papoulias told Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos on Wednesday that he wants to give up his salary which stands at around 300,000 euros per year.

Papoulias informed Venizelos of his decision during talks the two men had regarding Greece’s efforts to convince foreign creditors of the country’s readiness to implement the terms of a debt deal voted through Parliament early on Monday.

The president reportedly asked Venizelos to take all the necessary action to ensure that his monthly payments are stopped.

Read the rest.

British pol says Greeks should just say no

One interesting development has been that it’s the conservative politicians who’ve expressed some of the strongest qualms about the bailout, both in Greece and in Britiain.

The latest twist from The Guardian:

Speaking of the European Parliament…the British Conservative party’s leader in the EP has called for Greece to default on its debts and leave the euro.

Martin Callanan said the next EU summit, scheduled for 1 March, should simply concentrate on preparing for the country to drop out of the eurozone.

Callanan said:

Nobody believes that the latest package will save Greece. Even if all the measures agreed on Sunday night are implemented – and that looks increasingly unlikely – then by 2020, after eight more years of grinding austerity, Greece would still be in a worse position than Italy is now …

All the energy currently being devoted to drafting and ratifying a new treaty that is irrelevant to the ongoing crisis would be better employed drafting and implementing a plan for the orderly withdrawal of Greece from the euro, including carefully prepared support for the banks that will be most affected. That is the sustainable solution – everything else is just a very expensive exercise in kicking the can down the road.

Read the rest.

The view from the Athenian street

Deutsche Welle’s Maria Rigoutsou offers some examples of what the package represents to average Greeks:

“Who gave these politicians the right to even vote on such measures?” asked one 45-year-old man who owns a small cosmetics shop in the center of Athens. He voted for the Socialists last time around, he said, because former Prime Minister Papandreou told them back then that Greece “has money.”

“They presented us with something different: How can a person live on 600 euros a month when the electricity bill costs 500 euros?”

And then there’s this, from an Athenian woman:

“We are hoping for a miracle. It would be best if we could just turn back time to before the crisis and change our ways. But that’s not possible, which is why I think we should just leave the eurozone.”

She thinks Greece should return to the Drachma. Having their old currency, she thinks, would mean that all Greeks would help one another again. Right now, the country is a “bottomless pit” and this insecurity is no longer bearable.

A 55-year-old unemployed man then chimes in: “The only thing we have left to defend is our dignity. They’ve taken everything else. Ou

Headline of the day: Not sauce for the gander

From Haaretz:

Israel’s justice minister advises rightists on how to seek pardons for Jewish terrorists

Greek and EU second thoughts delay bailout pact

Seems that some folks in Greece are having second thoughts about they brutal austerity plan they approved Sunday, especially now that even more demands are emanating from Brussels.

From the Associated Press:

A meeting of the finance chiefs of the 17 euro countries to discuss Greece’s second multibillion bailout planned for Wednesday was called off after Athens failed to deliver on several demands made by its partners in the currency union.

The last-minute cancellation of the meeting – which was expected to give the green light for a key debt-relief deal with private creditors linked to the bailout – shows the eurozone wants much tougher guarantees now from Athens before giving it an extra €130 billion ($171 billion) in rescue loans, on top of €110 billion ($145 billion) granted in 2010.

Tensions between Athens and other European capitals have hit new highs this week. While the European Union is officially still warning of the far-reaching dangers of a disorderly default by Greece, some politicians have in recent weeks downplayed the effects of such an event.

“It has appeared that further technical work between Greece and the troika is needed in a number of areas,” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg who also chairs the meetings of eurozone finance ministers.

Read the rest.

More from Helena Smith of The Guardian:

[I]n a sign of the growing distrust between Greece and its foreign lenders, political leaders were asked to commit themselves in writing to the cost-cutting reforms. Officials from Greece’s “troika” of creditors have said they fear a new government may try to renege on pledges after general elections in April when hostility to austerity is also expected to grow.

The request appeared to remain a sticking point after the conservative leader Antonis Samaras, who is tipped to be next prime minister, refused to sign. Of all of Greek political leaders, he has been the most vocal in opposing the troika’s fiscal remedies emphasizing their effect on deepening an already worse-than- expected recession.

Read the rest.

Through it all, it’s critical to remember that Greeks are being forced to see their salaries, pensions, and public services slashed not to give their own government more revenue but to ensure the flow of cash into banks in Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere.

Perhaps a few politicians are finally seeing the light.

That seems to be the case in Germany, when members of the Social Democrats are having second thoughts, as Spiegel reports:

Even the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is having an increasingly difficult time with the Greek bailout. On the one hand, the party’s members in parliament have so far gone along with Merkel’s policies. But on the other, they disagree with the focus on austerity. It was this tension that prevailed at a special session of the party’s parliamentary group on Friday.

Parliamentary group leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who wants his party to endorse the package, hoped simply to assess the group’s position on the topic, but a number of parliamentarians were more interested in starting a discussion. Many took a turn speaking, with the general drift being that pure austerity policies such as those being carried out in Greece amount to economic nonsense. Steinmeier interrupted the speakers to ask: “So, does that mean we should vote against the Greece package?”

Germany’s party leaders are at a loss. They see opinion turning against a new Greek bailout, but they’re aware at the same time that the alternative carries considerable risks: If Greece goes bankrupt, the German government stands to lose dozens of billions of euros in the worst case scenario.

Euro-zone member states, together with the IMF, have already sent over €70 billion to Athens in the form of bilateral loans. Germany has sent the largest share, at €15 billion.

German taxpayers also share liability for Greek government bonds taken on by the European Central Bank (ECB) during the financial crisis, bonds which would become largely worthless in the case of bankruptcy. The Munich-based Ifo Institute for Economic Research estimates this would cost German taxpayers alone up to €13 billion.

Read the rest.

Quote of the day: The American transition

From “’Losing’ the world: American decline in perspective,” the first of a two-part Noam Chomsky essay appearing in today’s issue of The Guardian:

From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the US economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections – the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

Read the rest.