Really living here
Electronic Intifada - 24 Jul 2008
rr r r r rr r rr r rr r rr rr rrr rAware of the dangers now facing hikers like me, I have, of late, been careful to restrict my walks to tracks which avoid any contact with the settlements. Two recent incidents I have experienced personally I believe illustrate what routine life is now like for us Palestinians in the occupied territories. Raja Shehadeh recounts for The Electronic Intifada.

Women, non-Lebanese children get raw deal
Electronic Intifada - 24 Jul 2008
rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rBEIRUT (IRIN) – Thousands of children in Lebanon are denied full access to education, healthcare and residency because they do not have Lebanese citizenship. Lebanese women cannot pass on their nationality to their children and in the event of separation, it is the father who gains automatic custody, according to Lebanese nationality law.

The war in Afghanistan is not a noble cause
UKWatch.net - 24 Jul 2008
The most noble cause of the 21st century was how Des Browne, the defence minister, described the war in Afghanistan. This isn’t just a grotesque and insulting way to describe a war in defence of corrupt government, warlords and opium poppy production. It is part of a concerted attempt to rebrand Afghanistan as the good war, the war worth fighting and dying for, the war worth spending billions of pounds to maintain. No less than Princes William and Harry have been enlisted for this cause, with church parades, memorial services, and pictures of the coffins of dead soldiers returning home. Special reports from the troops in Afghanistan pop up on the news, all stressing the valuable and important role of the troops in helping the Afghans to fight terrorism. Ministry of Defence spin doctors are working overtime to present this war in all its patriotic glory just as the figure for British soldiers dead has shot over the 100 mark and looks set to continue going up. George Bush’s visit in June provided the opportunity for Gordon Brown to announce more troop deployment in Afghanistan, as well as increasing sanctions on Iran. This war has now been going on for nearly seven years. It was the first war George Bush launched in his “war on terror” following the 9/11 attacks. Its aim was to root out Osama Bin Laden from his mountain hideaway, overthrow the Taliban government and destroy Al Qaida. Even Bush has publicly distanced himself from his cry of “Wanted dead or alive” about Bin Laden. The reason is simple: the aim of the Afghan war was not achieved. The Taliban was defeated easily by the world’s greatest military power and its allies, but Al Qaida was not rooted out, Bin Laden was not captured and none of the promises made to the Afghan people were kept. Tony Blair announced that “we will not walk away” in the aftermath of the war. He was right. The troops remained, but little was done to help to improve the lives of the Afghan people. Ten times as much is spent on the military as on reconstruction in the country, which remains one of the poorest in the world. Much of that reconstruction is in any case military related. The Economist magazine published recently a scathing report about the US-backed Afghan government, highlighting its corruption, dependence on warlords and inability to control large parts of the country. There is a quota for the number of women in the Afghan parliament but the society remains as difficult for women as ever. Despite claims by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair in 2001 that women would be liberated by the war and the overthrow of the Taliban, most women still wear the burqa. Most of the British casualties have occurred in the past two years in Helmand province, despite claims by then defence secretary John Reid that he hoped British troops could go to Helmand and operate “without a shot being fired”. Britain and the US are intending to pour more troops into Afghanistan. In Iraq, British troops play a political, not military, role as they sit it out at Basra airport. Even the US is engaged in “secret” talks with the Iraqi government about the conditions of withdrawal, although this would involve maintaining US bases, giving US troops immunity from prosecution, controlling much of the airspace and much else. There is no such talk in Afghanistan, where a serious war is continuing and threatens to escalate, drawing in Pakistan. The Taliban is stronger than it has been since 2001 and there is widespread Afghan opposition to the foreign troops, as many civilians are caught in airstrikes or are forced to become refugees to avoid the war. We should not allow Bush and Brown to escalate the war. Its human and financial costs will only grow. We are also seeing the effects here. The vote in parliament to extend detention for terrorist suspects without charge to 42 days was one of the most shameful of recent times. The most right wing party in parliament, the DUP, were promised up to 1 billion (plus no extension of abortion rights to Northern Ireland) in order to give their nine votes to the government. Many Labour MPs who voted for the change clearly did not believe in it but thought it a good way to wrongfoot the Tories. The demonstration opposing Bush was met by restrictions, police violence and arrests. So when we said if they wage war there they will also wage it on us here, we were right. A bankrupt and unpopular government is attacking the civil liberties which have been fought for over hundreds of years. They are doing so because protest and dissent give the lie to their propaganda about the war and make it harder for them to keep enlisting teenagers to die in the killing fields of Afghanistan. That’s why we have to keep protesting.

The emperors, and their clothes
UKWatch.net - 24 Jul 2008
What a difference a year makes. The conventional wisdom at the beginning of last summer was that the economy was performing wonders. Graham Turner, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson were among a small minority of economists and commentators prepared to say the emperor had no clothes. Now everyone can see that they were right. Elliott and Atkinson’s new book, The Gods That Failed, is a sustained diatribe against those they believe have brought about the present financial crisis – the “New Olympians”. They are “a new elite of freebooting super-rich free market operatives and their colleagues in national and international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation”. This elite managed to get “control” on a “false prospectus”: “They promised economic stability – and have delivered chaos and volatility. They promised an economic order based on enterprise, thrift and personal effort – and have delivered one based on chronic indebtedness and wild speculation. They promised a ‘transparent’ future in which all costs and prices would be clearly laid out – and have delivered a world of bizarre, occult financial knowledge. They promised a greatly expanded middle class of property – and share-owning individuals – and have unleashed havoc on professional and white collar career structures.” The “New Olympian” gods are globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation, competition, financialisation, speculation, recklessness, greed, arrogance, oligarchy and excess. Yet, even now when the miracles they promised have not come to pass, “elected politicians bend over backwards to make life as pleasant as possible for them”. They get billions to pay off debts created by speculation, while everyone else is expected to compete just to keep their jobs. The diatribe will make an impact on people frightened over their jobs, rising debts and prices. Excellent chapters attack New Labour’s economic policies and their impact on people’s lives. But it is weakened by irritating cultural side-comments. The authors claim that 1968 somehow opened the door to Thatcherism, denounce the “liberal left” for its concern with “gays, women, disabled people, transgender” and accept the figures of a right wing think-tank on the growth of supposedly unnecessary public sector jobs concerned with such things. The biggest weakness is the contention that the problem is solely with finance. They write, “Before the New Olympian takeover, market capitalism proved remarkably good at providing both peace of mind and material advancement.” The Cold War weaponry that underpinned the world economy in post war decades gets barely a mention, nor does the way the long boom fell apart because of factors built into it from the mid-1970s. Instead, there is an almost conspiratorial view, focusing on a meeting of right wing free market “conspiracists” held in Switzerland in 1947. The stress on finance leads the authors to look to a middle class “New Populism” to fight for increasing regulation and breaking up the gigantic financial institution while “deregulating genuinely private businesses”. In the short term they see “hope” in a G7 meeting contemplating “measures to reign in the turbo charged financial interests”. These are feeble conclusions to draw from so damning an indictment. Graham Turner’s The Credit Crunch is a similar indictment to Elliott and Atkinson’s. But he goes deeper in locating the roots of the credit crunch. He focuses on the imbalances that have arisen because of the US and Britain importing much more than they export. Massive borrowing has been necessary to keep up consumption. These funds are borrowed from the foreign trade surpluses accrued by China, south east Asia and the oil producing states. The imbalance arises because Western firms have used globalisation and overseas production to cut wages. The result is “overinvestment – capital cannot find markets because workers cannot afford to buy all the goods that are being produced.” He tends to overstate the role of globalisation in destroying jobs and reducing wages, as against old fashioned employers’ offensives. More importantly, he does not ask why capitalists and governments are under pressure to conduct such offensives today. The answer lies in deep seated developments within the system as a whole and not just the rise of finance (which is a product of these changes, not the cause). But to begin to find real answers we have to go back to Karl Marx. Turner’s approach, by contrast, is that of a Keynesian economist who still uses the basic tools of mainstream neoclassical economics even while criticising capitalism. This leads him to believe that if only central bankers had reduced interest rates sooner they could have prevented the credit crunch developing last summer. This does not explain why the system was in such a fragile state that supposed mistakes of timing were so important. Turner’s long discussion on the Japanese crisis shows how neither Keynesian nor monetary measures were able to solve it. To me this suggests that when the system crashes, all the Keynesian horses and all the Keynesian men cannot put it together again. Again, his analysis is useful precisely because it points to a conclusion he has not yet come to and which Elliott and Atkinson are very far from – that those who accept their arguments have to seek to overthrow the system, not reform it. ______ The Gods That Failed is published by The Bodley Head. The Credit Crunch is published by Pluto.