Writer Andrew Gavin Marshall provides some context for the massive mobilization of students on Quebec in an interview with RT.
Despite a draconian new law imposing heavy fines on student protesters and their organizations, the movement remains very much alive.
While sparked by a dramatic increases in university tuition, the protests have broadened and are now focusing on issues ranging from attacks on social spending, massive defense outlays, and government corruption by organized crime.
UPDATE: For Marshall’s extended analysis of the causes of the student action, see here.
It’s a legitimate question given the attacks on the California commons that began with Proposition 13 and continue with the ongoing ravaging of the institutions built up over the generations.
Starved of cash by a powerful set of interests organized by the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Taxpayers Association, and other industry-backed lobbies, the state is looking very Grecian these days.
Jerry Brown, the Swidden governor
Back in the days we were studying anthropology in the Groves of Academe, slash and burn was the name given to the practice of primitive forest agriculture where farmers burned the existing vegetation, then planted their crops in the ash-enriched soil. Once the soil is depleted, the farmers move on to slash and burn again.
Today the practice is called Swidden,
But unlike the practitioners of old, California’s slash-and-burn governor will have no new forests to burn once this one’s consumed.
From Guy Adams of The Independent:
Taking a deep breath, California’s most powerful man strode to a lectern and unveiled the fiscal policy that he hopes will keep America’s most populous state from falling into bankruptcy.
“You name it,” he declared, “and we’ve got to cut it!”
It wasn’t the most nuanced announcement. But this is no time for subtlety. After years watching his state fall deeper and deeper into the red, Governor Jerry Brown used a gloomy Monday night press conference to unveil what aides described as the ultimate in austerity budgets.
Welfare payments, healthcare for the poor, and benefits for elderly and disabled Californians will be immediately slashed by around $8.3bn (£5.2bn), which equates to roughly 17 per cent of Mr Brown’s entire discretionary budget. And state offices, which employ roughly 200,000 people, will switch to a four-day, 38-hour work week.
The radical proposals came days after it emerged that the Golden State, which is currently suffering 11 per cent unemployment, has a projected annual deficit of $16bn, far higher than the $9bn predicted in January. Its total debt is now around $40bn, giving it the lowest credit rating of any US state in recent history and prompting fears of a Greek-style default crisis.
As with most government cuts under the austerian regime, the poor and the young will be those most hurt.
More details from Steven Harmon, Josh Richman, Sharon Noguchi, and Karen de Sá of the Oakland Tribune:
In his revised budget, Brown also proposed cuts to hospitals and nursing homes to reduce Medi-Cal costs; barring colleges and universities that can’t meet minimum performance standards from taking part in the Cal Grant program; reducing state workers’ pay by 5 percent through contract renegotiations; and using assets that used to belong to local redevelopment agencies.
K-12 schools and community colleges would be hit hardest if the tax proposal fails at the ballot, a $5.5 billion plunge that would drop their funding to $48.2 billion. In the current fiscal year, schools, which get about 40 percent of the state’s general-fund revenues, received $47 billion.
Note the perversity of the modern financial game: If you don’t impose austerity, you get downgraded. In other words, you’re only rewarded for inflicting misery. And unlike S&M games, there’s no “safe” word to temper the violence of the market.
One bond rating agency was quick to respond to Brown’s apocryphal pronouncement, reports Chris Megerian of the Los Angeles Times:
The ratings agency Standard & Poor’s warned on Tuesday that it could downgrade California’s financial outlook if lawmakers don’t pass a credible budget plan this year.
A final budget is due June 15, and lawmakers’ task has become increasingly difficult as the state’s deficit has swelled to nearly $16 billion.
“We could change the outlook to negative or lower the rating if we believe the state’s credit quality weakens through the budget process,” said a report from Standard & Poor’s.
The ratings agency had upgraded California’s financial outlook from “stable” to “positive” in February. That means California’s credit rating of A-, the lowest of any state, is poised for improvement.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal is a solid starting point, said Standard & Poor’s, but there are many political and policy hurdles left to go.
Naheed Rajwani of UCLA’s Daily Bruin reports on the impacts of Brown’s proposal of concern to students in the state’s higher education system:
Under the revised budget proposal, both the University of California and the California State University systems would each need to absorb $250 million, which is $50 million more than what was proposed earlier this year.
These cuts will not materialize if Brown’s proposed tax measure passes in November. The measure would raise the sales tax by a quarter percent and increase income taxes on the wealthy, raising an estimated $8.5 billion in extra revenue for the state.
In his proposal, Brown also revised the amount of money that can be allocated to the UC Retirement Plan, from $90 million to $52 million. That number will not be affected by the passage of the tax measure.
The California Legislature will now review the proposal and is expected to pass a final budget in mid-June.
That’s because yet another tuition hike is certain, following on a wave of increases that have sent the costs of attending UC campuses soaring to levels that ensure many enrollees will be forced to take out those odious student loans to cover the costs.
As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Nanette Asimov reported a week ago:
The University of California will need to charge students at least 6 percent more for tuition next fall – an extra $732 – to stave off more layoffs and program closures, say UC leaders who will ask the regents next week to consider raising the price in July.
“At minimum we’ll need 6 percent,” said UC’s budget czar, Patrick Lenz, noting that an increase of that size would take care of most of the $139 million shortfall expected for next year.
The problem, Lenz said, is that all of those numbers could get worse.
When the Regents met in Sacramento to discuss the tuition hike yesterday the discussion was derailed, at least for a time, when students rose to protest.
Here’s a clip of their action va the UCLA Daily Bruin:
Pat Flynn of San Diego’s U-T [formerly the Union-Tribune] reports on the outcome of the delayed discussion:
The UC regents will consider boosting tuition again, by 6 percent, at a meeting in July. If approved, it would raise the cost to $12,923 a year, nearly double what it was five years ago. That does not include the Continue reading →
With runs on banks in Greece and Roem and Italian banks under attack by the ratings agencies, the euro has plunged again and European stock markets are twitching in anxiety.
It’s beginning to look like another financial tsunami is about to strike, and the culture funds are plunging into the game, finding ways to suck out the last assets of stricken states.
We’ve saved the the real shocker for our final item, a call from Germany’s financial power for European nations to essentially surrender sovereignty to the European Commission.
A whole lot to report today, and rather than further summarize, we’ll cut straight to chase.
Fear sends euro, markets tumbling
We begin with a wrap-up of the latest developments today from Eubusiness:
Spain tumbled into recession and European stock markets and the euro fell Thursday as Greece installed a crisis government to tackle its crippling debt, EU leaders prepared for talks and analysts raised the spectre of a run on eurozone banks.
“Markets are worried about eurozone bank deposit runs and an escalating banking crisis,” London-based VTB Capital economist Neil MacKinnon told AFP.
>snip<
Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency nosedived to a four-month low at $1.2667.
“Confidence in European equities (is) quickly depleting, this time after the European Central Bank admitted it had stopped providing liquidity to some Greek banks,” noted analyst Craig Erlam at trading group Alpari.
The ECB said Wednesday that it was no longer dealing with some Greek banks via the conventional credit window, Dow Jones Newswires reported, and has restricted the banks to “emergency lending assistance” from Greece’s central bank that must be approved from month to month.
Meryn King minced few words, as The Guardian’s Larry Elliott, Jill Treanor, and Patrick Wintour reoprt:
The British government is making urgent preparations to cope with the fallout of a possible Greek exit from the single currency, after the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, warned that Europe was “tearing itself apart”.
>snip<
Reports from Athens that massive sums of money were being spirited out of the country intensified concern in London about the impact of a splintering of the eurozone on a UK economy that is stuck in double-dip recession. One estimate put the cost to the eurozone of Greece making a disorderly exit from the currency at $1tn, 5% of output.
>snip<
Officials from the Bank, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority are drawing up plans in the expectation that a Greek departure from monetary union – increasingly seen as inevitable by financial markets – could be as damaging to the global economy as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
With a second election in Greece called for 17 June, King dropped a strong hint that the Bank would take fresh steps to stimulate growth if policymakers in Europe failed to deal with the sovereign debt crisis.
“We have been through a big global financial crisis, the biggest downturn in world output since the 1930s, the biggest banking crisis in this country’s history, the biggest fiscal deficit in our peacetime history and our biggest trading partner, the euro area, is tearing itself apart without any obvious solution,” he said.
A major Spanish newspaper is reporting that savers of a Spanish bank cobbled together from the runs of a half dozen failed banks is experiencing a major run on deposits.
From Reuters:
Customers of troubled Spanish bank Bankia, nationalized last week, have taken out over 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) from their accounts over the past week, El Mundo newspaper reported on Thursday.
The newly appointed chairman, Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri, informed a board meeting that customers had pulled out funds since the bank was taken over by the government, El Mundo said, citing information from the board meeting it had seen.
The government took over Bankia, the country’s fourth largest lender, on May 9 in an attempt to dispel concerns over the bank’s ability to deal with losses related to a 2008 property crash.
Uncertainty over the final cost of Spain’s banking reform has stoked investor fears that an expensive international bail-out could be on the cards, putting the survival of the euro zone at stake.
But Spanish officials are saying there’s no bank run, as The Guardianreports.
Once again, government pronouncements must be read with an arched eyebrow, since its in the interest of government officials to downplay bad news, especially the kind that could bring the economy down.
Spain spirals deeper into debt to fund government
That’s the real meat in this story about the the soaring costs Spain is having to pay investors on the bond market.
From the BBC:
Spain has paid sharply higher rates of interest to borrow money on the international markets, as worries grow about the state of its economy.
In total, it raised 2.5bn euros ($3.2bn; £2bn) through issuing a number of different types of bonds.
On bonds due to be paid back in January 2015, it had to pay an interest rate of 4.373%, up from 2.89% in April.
On debt maturing in April 2016, Spain had to pay an interest rate of 5.106%, up from 3.374% on 15 March.
>snip<
On Wednesday, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy warned that borrowing costs could become “astronomical”.
Already staggering under the burdens of previous bailout agreements, a Greek pullout from the euro would have profound impacts on the ailing Portugese economy, so the Troika is heading for Lisbon to devise stopgap measures.
From ANSAmed:
The EU, ECB and IMF, the so-called troika, will start to develop an emergency plan to protect Portugal in case Greece leaves the euro. The news is reported by the Portuguese economic newspaper Diario on its website. Next week envoys of the troika will visit Lisbon to Continue reading →
Occupy the Farm [previously], the ongoing launched-on-Earth-Day Occupation of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract agricultural plot, continues.
While the university had wrongly claimed the action had no support from researchers who worked at the site [Miguel Altieri], the action has also enlisted some other notable faculty support [Claudia Carr, Paul Rabinow, Laura Nader, etc.]
Now consider this excerpt of a statement by Professor Jeffrey M. Romm of Cal’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, who specializes in natural resource and environmental policy. Posted at the Occupy the Farm website:
The current Gill Tract issue replicates the kind of problem that many college researchers have worked successfully to overcome, i.e. structural divides that prevent effective ecosystem management in large part by excluding those with the strongest motives for beneficial action. Faculty and students so involved cannot be expected to turn their backs on the core lessons of their careers. The mutual benefits of overcoming the divide and achieving cooperative relations between campus and community are so demonstrable and compelling that a number of faculty would not maintain their integrity if siding with the party that refuses opportunities for cooperation and adaptability.
The Gill Tract occupation creates a huge opportunity. After fifteen years of stonewall in the midst of sweeping social and ecological changes, the occupation should have come as no surprise to anyone. It does come at a time, though, when the university has become surrounded by community generated agricultural enterprise and has established its own capacity to respond in truly excellent fashion. The occupation has been conducted with utmost respect for the university, the community and the land. Equivalent responses by the university would produce a major step forward for everyone. The meaning and matter of Gill Tract extend throughout the Bay Area, with the potential for much more.
Romm’s insights are particularly noteworthy in light of his expertise, particularly as described in this excerpt from his web page:
Distribution, Growth, and Resource ‘Sustainability’: Our group studies how the dynamics of social distribution, economic growth, and ecosystems interact and respond to alternative forms of policy and organization. These studies range through farm, village, watershed, county, state, and national to global scales of analysis. The conceptual frameworks are chosen to suit the particular problem of interest, but come primarily from political science, ecology, economics and sociology. Members of the group, although each is focused on one or several of these disciplines, develop a shared capacity in the work of all members. Specific topics have included, for example: the dynamics of irrigation, groundwater and watershed regimes (India, Samoa, Philippines, United States); regional patterns of soil enhancement, conservation and decline (Philippines, Nepal); adoption of agroforestry, social forestry and community forestry at farm, village and regional levels (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, United States); forest and land use dynamics and ecological change (Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, United States); impacts of national and state policies on resource use and environmental possibilities (Vietnam, United States, India).
In short, just the sort of guy about the right use of the last urban farmland acreage left along San Francisco Bay’s urban eastern shore.
UC Berkeley’s claim that Occupy the Tract — the peaceful takeover of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract farmland in Albany — lacked support from Cal researchers took a big hit Saturday when several of them showed up for an occupation open house.
Professor Miguel Altieri spoke at an afternoon session, offering his full support for the movement which includes many of his own students.
Altieri is an agroecologist who devotes his research to finding the most effective ways to grow crops without the use of chemicals, a movement which began in its modern form with research at the site.
We counted five other Cal faculty at the site, including two who spoke briefly during the information session held on a bright, sunny day.
Altieri said UC Berkeley faculty have been heavily involved in past efforts to save the land for sustainable urban agriculture, including the 1997 drive by Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture [BACUA], which was endorsed by 45 agricultural and environmental groups including Food First, Urban Habitat Project, and Earth Island Journal.
BACUA came up with a detailed proposal for the site, which is posted online here. The university rejected it.
“We did everything the university asked us to do in developing a plan to convert the Gill Tract to a center for sustainable agriculture,” said Shyaam M. Shabaka, founder and executive director of EcoVillage Farm in nearby Richmond. “The university reneged without explanation on the day the agreement was to be finalized.”
Albany activist Michael Beer helped organize another proposal with the backing of the Albany school board to transform the tract into Village Creek Farm and Garden, a site as a site for interdisciplinary academic research, a teaching center for young people, and as a working farm to provide organic food for local consumers and restaurants.
Altieri said Occupy the Farm is part of a larger global struggle for land.
Control of the land is essential both for feeding the world sustainably and for the preservation of identities and culture.
Urban farms are critical to the struggle, he said.
“More than 30 percent of the food in the world is grown in cities,” Altieri said. He cited the case of Cuba, where urban agriculture saved the country from famine after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the supplies of oil and other critical resources.
Now Cuban urban farms produce 15 to 20 kilograms of food per square meter annually, compared to 5 kilograms in the U.S.
Altieri’s ideal would be the transformation of the site into a teaching and outreach center. His own research on the Gill Tract has been halted for the moment since the university shut off water to the site.
A look back at the BACUA plan
Fifteen years after it was proposed, it’s worth looking back at BACUA.
Writing in Earth Island Journal in 1997. Food First Executive Director Peter Rosset described the group’s vision:
BACUA believes that the explosion in urban farming taking place throughout the world is a positive development – people taking control of the resources that they need for their own livelihoods.
In this era of privatizaton, the University’s Agricultural Research Stations are casting about for a new research mission. It is becoming increasingly common throughout the world for public institutions (and universities in particular) to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to share resources and promote common survival. Such a partnership at the Gill Tract, would involve university professors, researchers and students with committed NGOs, working together in a new and rapidly expanding field. (Something similar already exists at the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program, but this program doesn’t serve an urban region anything like the Bay Area.)
We can imagine a working community farm that would provide good jobs to local youth and quality organic food to local residents. The farm would simultaneously serve as a demonstration training site for young farmers and as a research site for the University. The farm’s greenhouses could support research directed at improving urban farming technologies while the vacant buildings could become offices shared by NGOs (ranging from urban gardening, school, and community groups, to food policy and education organizations and advocacy groups) and by university professors studying the economic, agronomic, nutritional, ecological and sociological aspects of urban agriculture.
If the potential is unlimited, the alternative is appalling. The loss of this precious of urban farmland would forfeit a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create something new, something where the total would clearly be bigger than the sum of the parts.
The creation of a unique working farm/research station would be true to the legacy of the Division of Biological Control, which over the last two decades fought the long good fight against the state’s dominant agribusiness interests and the agrochemical industry.
And it’s certain to set tongues wagging, since his first interview for The World Tomorrow is with Hezbollah leader Sayyid Nasrallah:
The program resume:
Hezbollah urged the Syrian opposition to engage in dialogue with Assad’s regime, but they refused. Hezbollah leader Sayyid Nasrallah confirmed this in his first interview in 6 years, the world premiere of Julian Assange’s ‘The World Tomorrow’ on RT.
And here’s an interview of Assange by RT correspondent Laura Smith about Assange’s new Internet webcast:
Once again, RT takes the lead on perhaps the most critical First Amendment story of the Obama administration: The war on civil servants — and reporters — who dare to expose the government’s misdeeds.
Here are two segments of the latest major fail by what Barack Obama had vowed would be “the most transparent administration in history — an administration which has filed more whistleblower prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.
The John Kiriakou prosecution
First, whistleblower and former State Department attorney Jesselyn Radack, now with the Government Accountability Project, talks about the case that led ther to leave government and the current prosecution of former CIA officer John Kiriakou, the man who exposed his agency’s use of waterboarding. The Kirakou case is especially notable because journalists are featured prominently in legal papers in the prosecution under the draconian 1917 Espionage Act.
As the Associated press reported last week about Kiriakou:
A former CIA officer who expressed public doubts over the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique was indicted Thursday on charges that he leaked classified secrets to journalists, including the role of an associate who worked with him on a covert mission to track down and capture a top al-Qaida figure.
Next, RT’s Alyona Minkovski reports on government access to journalists’ email revealed in the Department of Justice filings on the Kiriakou case:
The Sibel Edmonds Case
The subject of the second interview is Stephen Kohn, attorney for former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds and author of The Whistleblower’s Handbook. He supervises the legal efforts of the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Here’s an announcement posted Wednesday on Edmonds’ case by the National Whistleblowers Center:
Today, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) revealed that the FBI required employees to sign employment contracts that are illegal under Federal law. The NWC launched the investigation in response to a nearly year long campaign by the FBI to prevent the publication of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ new book, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story.
On April 26, 2011, Ms. Edmonds followed official procedure and submitted her manuscript to the FBI for pre-publication clearance. Under the terms of her employment agreement and controlling regulations, the FBI was required to review and approve the submission within thirty (30) days. Instead of complying with the law, the FBI intentionally stalled the approval process for over 341 days and has still refused to “clear” the book for publication.
Ms. Edmonds will speak today for the first time about the FBI’s attempts to suppress her book. The interview will be aired live at 1:30pm ET on Honesty Without Fear, and the podcast will also be available for download.
The NWC is also releasing documentation confirming that the FBI required employees, including Ms. Edmonds, to sign the illegal contracts that allowed the FBI to censor issues of “public policy” it found embarrassing. According to Ms. Edmonds attorney, Stephen M. Kohn, “the controlling law strictly limits government’s ability to censor its employees. Agencies like the FBI may require pre-publication review of its employees’ writings, but may only censor classified or secret information. The government may not censor books or other writings on ‘policy’ grounds. The FBI’s employment contract with Ms. Edmonds is overreaching and illegal.”
Additional documents demonstrate that the agency acted illegally to prevent Ms. Edmonds from publishing a manuscript that might embarrass the agency.
The book in question, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, discusses Ms. Edmonds’s experience as an FBI Language Specialist who discovered and blew the whistle on serious security breaches and cover-ups at the Washington Field Office. The FBI fired Ms. Edmonds for making protected disclosures about the misconduct she observed and later invoked the “state’s secret” privilege to suppress her story.
An independent investigation by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General confirmed her allegations and the illegality of her termination. However, the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege in 2002 in order to have Ms. Edmonds’ whistleblower claims dismissed and to protect the government from embarrassment.
In recognition of her work to expose intelligence failures, Ms. Edmonds received the 2006 First Amendment Award, presented by the PEN American Center and Newman’s Own.
Stephen M. Kohn, Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center, also stated:
The FBI must stop harassing Sibel Edmonds. The law is crystal clear on the government’s ability to censor federal employees and contractors. When reviewing their writings, the government has the single ability to strike classified or secret information. The government may not censor a book based on “policy.” Here, the FBI has invented new powers for itself, violating the Constitution. Congress should investigate all employment agreements drafted by the FBI to ensure that they are legal and not designed to censor speech protected under the First Amendment.
From Emy Chrstoula, daughter of Dimitris Christoulas, who killed himself in Syntagma Square in protest over the miseries inflicted on his nation by the banksters, eurocrats, and their collaborators in the Greek government:
My father’s handwritten not left on room for misinterpretation. He has been a leftist activist throughout his life, a selfless visionary.
This specific act of his ending is a conscious political act, entirely consistent with his beliefs and actions during his lifetime. In our country, Greece, they are killing the self-evident.
For some, for ‘the stubborn children of the chimera”, in such a situation, suicide seems to be the obvious act, not as a getaway, but as an awakening scream.
For this reason, it (the suicide) takes on another meaning, the meaning of that song we first sang together, at the concert of our beloved Mikis (Theodorakis), in 1975, the song we always sang at our own celebrations and for our own dead … Go to sleep father and I am heading to my brothers and sisters with your voice.
This is the only thing you were dreaming for the youth and I think you’ve accomplished it. At the site where you left, there is a not of a youth: “The name of the dead today is Democracy. . .But it’s 11 million of us that are still alive and our name is Resistance.”
From “CANCER CAPITALISM: Humanity’s Evolution or Destruction. Regaining Social Control Over the ‘Real Economy,’” a remarkable essay by John McMurtry, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada, posted at GlobalResearch.ca.
[T]he system has run far beyond society’s control and knowledge of its workings. It destroys the life-world by its nature. Its ruling global corporate conglomerates are, in fact, lavishly subsidized and armed-force defended by states to pollute the world at every level, draw down its non-renewable resources, competitively disemploy and underpay workers across cultures, systematically shirk public tax obligations and run down public infrastructures, destroy the habitat of species, and so on. There is no mystery as to why, although no-one says it in public. Every vector of global life-system depredation is corporately driven by roaming money-profit “investors” whose rights are the sole rights recognised in trade and investment treaties, and which governments are now structured to ensure even if they produce nothing – as with the ruling big banks which governments endlessly save at the rising life costs of their peoples.
A stunning report by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Allie Bohm, posted at the ACLU’s Blog of Rights reveals the depths of contempt for the civil rights of American citizens and other now shared by many of the very people legally charged with protecting them:
Ten. That’s the number of law enforcement agencies that responded to our coordinated public records requests on cell phone location tracking and reported that they, in fact, do not track cell phones. The number of agencies queried: 383. The number that responded (so far): some 200.
If you’re living in one of the places where local law enforcement agents reported tracking cell phones, or for that matter anywhere else in the country, you might be wondering under what circumstances your law enforcement agents are getting access to cell phone location information.
Given the intimate nature of location information, the government should have to obtain a warrant based upon probable cause to track cell phones. That is what is necessary to protect Americans’ privacy, and it is also what is required under the constitution. But is that what the police do? The answer is it depends. Law enforcement agencies’ tracking policies are in a state of chaos, with different towns following different rules — or in some cases, having no rules at all.
A number of enforcement agencies across the country, in states as diverse as Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, and New Jersey, reported obtaining a probable cause warrant in order to access cell phone location information. The takeaway here? If these police departments can protect both public safety and privacy by meeting the warrant and probable cause requirements, then surely others can as well.
So what’s the others’ excuse?
Some jurisdictions were forthcoming about the fact that they don’t seek warrants to track cell phone location. Take for example, police in Lincoln, Neb., who obtain even GPS location data (which is more precise than cell tower location information) without demonstrating Continue reading →
A remarkable and inspiring story of the power of music from BBC’s Imagine.
The program notes:
The remarkable accomplishment of a great humanist, José Antonio Abreu, who dedicated his life to set up the ‘Sistema’ in 1975, an extraordinary music and social project which has been running in Venezuela in an attempt to transform the lives of the nations poorest children.
It has been using classical music to tackle the social problems of a country where 60% of the population live below the poverty line. By offering free instruments and tuition through a network of after-school centres all over the country, the Sistema has kept thousands of children away from the drugs, alcohol and gang-related violence of the streets and has led to the creation of 30 professional orchestras in a country that had only 2 before it started. Currently, 275,000 children attend the Sistemas schools and many of them play in one of the 125 youth orchestras.
At the pinnacle of the system stands the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under its music director Gustavo Dudamel who is himself a product of the Sistema and is also the musical director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
A repost to remind San Francisco Bay Area readers of an important meeting in Berkeley Thursday night:
Synthetic biology is the name of the game on which UC Berkeley is betting the future of its Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which plans to add a second new campus on the nearby Richmond shoreline which will focus on using genetic engineering to create new sources of energy for the post-petroleum world.
Sounds good, right?
As the event’s organizers explain:
The University of California, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Department of Energy plan to build a high profile, billion-dollar-plus laboratory complex in the East Bay. While public pronouncements tell us the lab will focus on ‘green’ energy research, the truth is more complicated.
A primary focus of the new lab will be synthetic biology: an extreme form of genetic engineering that creates self-replicating artificial life forms from synthesized DNA. The development of these high-risk genetic technologies is largely driven by the oil, chemical, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical industries, the military, and other federal agencies, in a rapid, high-profit commercial race. But the risks synthetic biology poses to worker safety, public health, social justice, and the environment are poorly understood, and lack adequate oversight, transparency or protections.
The gathering will be held 29 March from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way in Berkeley.and will be moderated by Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment.
Speakers include:
Nnimmo Bassey, Right Livelihood Award Winner [the Alternative Nobel Prize], Nigeria
Ignacio Chapela, PhD, Professor, Microbial Ecology, UC Berkeley; Researcher, Center for Biosafety [Norway]
Maria José Guazzelli, Center for Ecological Agriculture [Brazil]
Becky McClain, Injured Workers National Network
Jeremy Gruber, President, Council for Responsible Genetics
Steve Zeltzer, California Coalition for Workers Memorial Day
Jim Thomas, ETC Group
Jeff Conant, Global Justice Ecology Project
Dr. Henry Clark, West County Toxics Coalition
Eric Hoffman, Friends of the Earth
Here’s the poster for the event. Click on the image to enlarge,
What’s happening in Greece should concern us all, because it represent the first round of assaults on the peoples of the First World by the same forces of disaster capitalism which have repeatedly destroyed Third World Economies, then destroyed the Second World economies of the nations of the former Soviet Union and its satellites.
The same forces are at play here in the United States, though in more diffuse form, with our own government bailing out corrupt banks and saddling the citizenry with the costs of private profligacy. We’re already privatizing the commons on an unprecedented scale, demolishing the institutions created over generations to, in that memorable phrase from the Preamble of the Constitution, “promote the general welfare.”
With that preface, on with today’s latest from the hell that is Hellas.
Vignettes from a battered land
From the Greek Streets is one of our daily go-to sites, and their latest offering is a small collection of incidents that suggestion larger patterns emerging from the unfolding austerian nightmare:
‘Little’ stories like these below keep surfacing in the mainstream Greek media, while the majority of them never even make it there [London, where the blog originates. — esnl].
On Saturday, 17.03, an 81-year old woman in the island of Zakynthos sat down in the garden of her house before soaking herself with petrol and setting herself on fire. After her death, her relatives found a note explaining she did not want to become a ‘burden’ to her children.
On Monday, 19.03, at the city of Piraeus in Athens, a man drove straight into the sea with his car. According to some witnesses he shouted ante geia (‘so long’) and when he was dragged to the land he was pronounced dead.
On the same day, on Monday, a 70-year old man stormed the tax office of the Athenian suburb of Ayia Paraskeui armed with a shotgun, fired shots inside the building (without injuring anyone) and shouting, according to witnesses, ‘you have taken everything from me, you won’t be taking anything else’. He unsuccessfully tried to take some of the workers in the building hostage, and he was arrested soon thereafter.
Greeks respond creatively to crisis
But the news isn’t all grim. One notable trend is to be found in the spontaneous responses of the Greek people to the new economic landscape, where unemployment has reached record levels, salaries have been slashed, fuel prices are soaring, and desperation drives initiative.
Take, for instance, the emergence of new patterns of food distribution.
From Athens News:
More than 15-17 million kilos of potatoes from the Nevrokopi basin have been sold direct to consumers through the “Potato movement”, bypassing middlemen, local potato farmers said on Tuesday.
They stressed their determination to continue supplying consumers with discounted potatoes in the new season beginning next September.
Farmers said the unsold quantities of potatoes remaining are just three to four million kilos, which at current rates will be exhausted in roughly a week to 10 days.
Though the amounts sold direct to consumers are impressive given the short space of time involved (20-30 days), they are nevertheless dwarfed by the region’s total production, which is estimated at 100 million kilos. This was mostly sold before the Potato movement was launched, at the extremely low price of 0.11-0.12 euros per kilo, which according to farmers is about half the cost of production without calculating packaging and transport.
It’s classic win/win economics: The customers pay much less than stores charge, while the farmers get higher prices than middlemen pay.
Another response dictated by necessity is the emergence of barter as a major force in everyday transactions, leading to the rise of organization networks.
The goal of all austerity regimes is the transfer of wealth from public to private hands. Just as we noted yesterday the impending sale of Protgual’s shipyard to foreign investors, now Greece is putting up for sale its major shares in two national oil companies.
From Athens News:
The state will put stakes in two major listed companies, betting monopoly OPAP and refiner Hellenic Petroleum (Elpe), up for sale by May to boost a much-delayed privatisation plan and help cut the country’s debt, the head of the privatisation agency has said.
In an interview with Reuters, the chief executive officer of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, Costas Mitropoulos, said on Wednesday the tender for the sale of a 29 percent stake in OPAP would be launched before national elections set to take place by early May, and concluded this year.
OPAP and Hellenic Petroleum are the country’s third and fourth biggest listed firms by market value. The state holds 34 percent of OPAP and 35.5 percent of Elpe.
While we’re not gold bugs here at esnl, we don’t deny the potent psychological impact of the precious, which we first grasped on reading George Eliot’s evocative depiction of the metal’s hold on the human passions in Silas Marner way back in out antediluvian high school days.
In our report on the bailout deal, we missed on critical detail, which Rachel Donadio reported for the New York Times last month: The IMF agreement allows creditors to seize Greece’s gold reserves:
“This is the first time ever that a European and probably an O.E.C.D. state abdicates its rights of immunity over all its assets to its lenders,” said Louka Katseli, an independent member of Parliament who previously represented the Socialist Party, using the abbreviation for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. She was one of several independents who joined 43 lawmakers from the two largest parties in voting against the loan agreement.
Ms. Katseli, an economist who was labor minister in the government of George Papandreou until she left in a cabinet reshuffle last June, was also upset that Greece’s lenders will have the right to seize the gold reserves in the Bank of Greece under the terms of the new deal, and that future bonds issued will be governed by English law and in Luxembourg courts, conditions more favorable to creditors.”
Imagine what might happen if the creditors decide to go for the gold. We did, and we suspect there’d be hell to pay.
A new party rises in Greece
Just as in the United States, parties that once occupied the leftward side of the political spectrum have moved inexorably rightward. Throughout Europe nominally socialist parties advocate economic policies little different than those once advocated by Republicans in the United States forty years ago, while parties of the right have shifted ever closer to outright fascism.
In that context, its not surprising to witness the emergence of a new political party in Greece devoted to the interests of those most harmed by the austerity policies embraced by their former patrons.
The “Movement of Unemployed” plans to join the upcoming parliamentary elections, it was announced during a press conference in Thessaloniki. Party representative Gavriil Avramidis addressed the jobless in Greece but also all social classes that are affected by the economic crisis to form a joint front and help the party enter the parliament. He said also that the Movement of Unemployed that until Continue reading →
A compelling 2004 documentary about historian, writer, playwright and provocateur Howard Zinn directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller and narrated by actor Matt Damon, who knew Zinn from childhood as a neighbor and mentor.
A compelling bi of cinema featuring interviews with Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, Alice Walker, and others, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train is well worth your time. You can order a copy here.
The goal of disaster capitalism, otherwise known as “austerity” is the transfer of the commons into corporate hands.
One of the most ominous of such development is the transfer of the ultimate state power, that of coercion and violence, into the hands of folks whose primary interest is profit.
But just such a move is now underway in Britian.
From Alan Travis and Zoe Williams of The Guardian:
Private companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighbourhoods and even detaining suspects under a radical privatisation plan being put forward by two of the largest police forces in the country.
West Midlands and Surrey have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police.
The contract is the largest on police privatisation so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.
This scale dwarfs the recent £200m contract between Lincolnshire police and G4S, under which half the force’s civilian staff are to join the private security company, which will also build and run a police station for the first time.
The home secretary, Theresa May, who has imposed a 20% cut in Whitehall grants on forces, has said frontline policing can be protected by using the private sector to transform services provided to the public, but this is the first clear indication of what that will mean in practice. May said on Thursday that she hoped the “business partnership” programme would be in place next spring.
Years ago, our favorite British comedy team, Steven Fry and Hug hLaurie, anticipated just such an eventuality, and here’s their sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie:
From a lengthy Mark Binelli Rolling Stone profile on Scott Olsen, the Occupy Oakland activist who was gravely injured when he was shot in the head by a police tear gas cannister 25 October near Frank Ogawa Plaza outside city hall:
Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll see anything directly attributable to Occupy happen in the political world. It would be great if we could get money out of politics, if we could end all of our wars, if we could… These are the things we’re fighting for. But the commonality among just about everybody out there, whether they call themselves a libertarian or an anarchist or a communist, is that they want politics returned to the people. And that’s what I think will happen. We’re not going to give up until we feel like we are being properly represented.
Once the nation’s leading focus of agroecology studies, UC Berkeley has downsized its program and jumped on the biotech bandwagon, looking for corporate cash at a time when state support of the University of California system is collapsing.
With the switch from public to private sector support, studies that don’t generate fat corporate grants are of little value to campus administrators, even though the results Altieri reports offer us a reinvigorating revolution in the way we feed ourselves and shape our communities.
The corporate agricultural model depends on the ever-expanding regime of intellectual property laws and patented genetically altered plants and intensive use of similarly patented [proprietary] chemicals to keep them growing, as well as a vast, energy-and-resource hungry, and ultimately unsustainable global distribution system.
And one of the simplest yet powerful tools available to us in a time of economy uncertainty is the community garden, a model already in place in Cuba and providing a large portion of the fresh, healthy food consumed by Cuba’s urban population.
So what is agroecology?
Here’s the best description we could find, from Agroecology in Action, a website created by Altieri and his students:
Agroecology is a scientific discipline that uses ecological theory to study, design, manage and evaluate agricultural systems that are productive but also resource conserving. Agroecological research considers interactions of all important biophysical, technical and socioeconomic components of farming systems and regards these systems as the fundamental units of study, where mineral cycles, energy transformations, biological processes and socioeconomic relationships are analyzed as a whole in an interdisciplinary fashion.
Agroecology is concerned with the maintenance of a productive agriculture that sustains yields and optimizes the use of local resources while minimizing the negative environmental and socio-economic impacts of modern technologies. In industrial countries, modern agriculture with its yield maximizing high-input technologies generates environmental and health problems that often do not serve the needs of producers and consumers. In developing countries, in addition to promoting environmental degradation, modern agricultural technologies have bypassed the circumstances and socio-economic needs of large numbers of resource-poor farmers.
The contemporary challenges of agriculture have evolved from the merely technical to also include social, cultural, economic and particularly environmental concerns. Agricultural production issues cannot be considered separately from environmental issues. In this light, a new technological and development approach is needed to provide for the agricultural needs of present and future generations without depleting our natural resource base. The agroecological approach does just this because it is more sensitive to the complexities of local agriculture, and has a broad performance criteria which includes properties of ecological sustainability, food security, economic viability, resource conservation and social equity, as well as increased production.
To put agroecological technologies into practice requires technological innovations, agriculture policy changes, socio-economic changes, but mostly a deeper understanding of the complex long-term interactions among resources, people and their environment. To attain this understanding agriculture must be conceived of as an ecological system as well as a human dominated socio-economic system. A new interdisciplinary framework to integrate the biophysical sciences, ecology and other social sciences is indispensable. Agroecology provides a framework by applying ecological theory to the management of agroecosystems according to specific resource and socio-economic realities, and by providing a methodology to make the required interdisciplinary connections.
From the must-read Michael Hastings Rolling Stone interview of the WikiLeaks activist:
From the glory days of American radicalism, which was the American Revolution, I think that Madison’s view on government is still unequaled. That people determined to be in a democracy, to be their own governments, must have the power that knowledge will bring – because knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you. The question is, where has the United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson, betrayed these basic values on how you keep a democracy? I think that the U.S. military-industrial complex and the majority of politicians in Congress have betrayed those values.
As a follow to yesterday’s post on the pending Internet-killing Stop Online Privacy Act, here’s some excerpts of a letter from Christine Montgomery, president of the Online News Association, calling on members to join with others in opposing the bill:
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA. With the House Judiciary Committee set to resume debate on the bill later this month, we thought it time to weigh in. As an organization representing thousands of content creators, ONA strongly condemns infringement of intellectual property and the violation of copyright. However, we believe SOPA would do little to stem those problems and would actually cause harm to the Internet and to the American public.
Indeed, the act — and its counterpart in the Senate, the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) — would inappropriately shut down websites, disrupt the free flow of legitimate information and limit Americans from fully exercising their First Amendment rights.
That is why, consistent with ONA’s desire and mission to keep the Internet open and vibrant, we join with others to oppose SOPA and PIPA. Furthermore, we encourage our members to contact their representatives in Congress and ask that they, too, oppose these bills.
>snip<
Despite the laudable goals, the legislation is seriously flawed. As currently written, SOPA would allow the U.S. Justice Department to effectively shut down any foreign websites, including those owned by U.S. companies (e.g., ebay.fr, google.uk, and amazon.au) accused of infringing (or enabling the infringement of) copyrighted content. And the shutdown isn’t just for the alleged offending portion of the site. The entire site could be shut down.
To that end, SOPA allows the Attorney General to require U.S. Internet service providers to prevent access to an offending site, U.S. search engines to remove links to the site, payment services providers (such as Paypal, VISA and MasterCard) to cut off funds to the site, and ad networks to halt all advertising on the site.
An accusation of infringement (or enabling infringement) can also emanate from any private party — American or foreign — that obtains a court order declaring a foreign site dedicated to infringement. With such an order, payment services would have to cut off funds and ad networks would be required to halt all advertising on the site.
The best account we’ve seen to date of the ghastly cost of austerity in Greece comes from Talos, who blogs at Histologion.
Here’s the opening. We urge you to read the rest:
As the Euro crisis unfolds, and the European social model remains under attack by the mindless political armies of orthodox neoliberalism, spread across the continent in positions of power, and the bankers they represent, all is hardly well in Greece. The Greeks, having served as lab-rats for extreme-austerity, have come to realize one thing: Austerity is not a fiscal programme. It is a political project: a project of societal and financial sabotage, aiming at a radical upwards redistribution of wealth in an already very unequal country – indeed a whole continent. This is how the austeritarian disaster zone looks like from the ground:
-Back to the Caves: “Dozens of homeless people in Athens will spend the Christmas holidays in the sheltering caves of Philopappou Hill, away from the rain and the cold weather.
According to two reports conducted by the Ministry of Health and the Municipality of Athens and published by Real News, there are many new age homeless, who once were businessmen and traders, and are now penniless, lying on the streets. The shocking truth is that among those people there are families as well.”
-Homeless in Athens: Meet the new homeless. With an average age of 47, 11% of Greece’s homeless have a university degree (!) and 23.5% hold a high school diploma, while only 9.3% are illiterate. The new Greek homeless class members have laptops and iPhones, remnants of their “old” lives. “They come to us in suits with their laptops in hand. These citizens a couple of months ago had ordinary lives. They had a job, a home and car,” says Nikitas Kanakis, the head of Doctors Without Borders in Athens. Counselors from the Department of Homeless Services describe a similar situation. “We even have homeless from suburbs like Kifisia and Voula [upper class suburbs of Athens]! They come here with their laptops and expensive smart phones they once used for their work, shocked and depressed”.
-Hunger: Athens Mayor George Kaminis told the daily that the city’s homeless had increased by around 20 per cent while queues at soup kitchens organised by municipal and church organisations were up 15 per cent.”Care workers no longer meet typical homeless people, they meet a person who likely had a perfectly organised life weeks previously,” said Kaminis, who has asked for additional state funding for city welfare services.”We have noticed a dramatic increase in our mess halls over the recent period,” added Chrysostomos Symeonidis, head of the Athens archdiocese poverty fund. “We distribute over 10,000 meals on a daily basis and 250,000 meals are given out nationwide on a weekly basis,” Symeonidis said… [oh and Starvation Recipes are all the rage]
-…hunger in the schools: “Our pupils faint due to starvation. We see our pupils coming to school with holes in their shoes. They don’t even have money to buy food from the school canteen”
-Which then leads to abandoned children: ‘Propelled by poverty, 500 families had recently asked to place children in homes run by the charity SOS Children’s Villages, according to the Greek daily Kathimerini. One toddler was left at the nursery she attended with a note that read: “I will not return to get Anna. I don’t have any money, I can’t bring her up. Sorry. Her mother.”‘
-The disabled are also victims of the policies pursued: “In August, a five-year-old program providing deaf people with interpreters was suspended after the government abruptly cut its funding to less than half. Overnight, 15,000 deaf people around Greece were left without help to report a crime to the police, rent a house or go to a job interview. Funding cuts have opened up gaps across welfare services, with slashed services and longer waiting times for vulnerable groups including the blind, recovering organ-transplant patients, autistic children, and paraplegics in need of physiotherapy”
-At the same time the already decrepit health system is further eroded according to The Lancet: “Overall, the picture of health in Greece is concerning. It reminds us that, in an effort to finance debts, ordinary people are paying the ultimate price: losing access to care and preventive services, facing higher risks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and in the worst cases losing their lives. Greater attention to health and health-care access is needed to ensure that the Greek crisis does not undermine the ultimate source of the country’s wealth—its people”. Giving birth is now a luxury activity. I suppose women are expected to give birth at home by themselves – a great way to bring infant and maternal mortality to truly third world levels…
-And, desperate, people kill themselves at an unprecedented rate: “Greece’s suicide rate has reached a pan-European record high, with experts attributing the rise to the country’s economic crisis and painful austerity measures. Statistics from the Greek Ministry of Health show a 40 per cent rise in those taking their own lives between January and May this year compared with the same period in 2010″
