Ellen Brown

“To some people, the European Central Bank seems like a fire department that is letting the house burn down to teach the children not to play with matches.”

So wrote Jack Ewing in the New York Times last week...

“The E.C.B. has a fire hose — its ability to print money. But the bank is refusing to train it on the euro zone’s debt crisis.

“The flames climbed higher Friday after the Italian Treasury had to pay an interest rate of 6.5 percent on a new issue of six-month bills . . . the highest interest rate Italy has had to pay to sell such debt since August 1997.

“But there is no sign the E.C.B. plans a major response, like buying large quantities of the country’s bonds to bring down its borrowing costs.”

Why not? According to the November 28th Wall Street Journal, “The ECB has long worried that buying government bonds in big enough amounts to bring down countries’ borrowing costs would make it easier for national politicians to delay the budget austerity and economic overhauls that are needed.”

As with the manufactured debt ceiling crisis in the United States, the E.C.B. is withholding relief in order to extort austerity measures from member governments—and the threat seems to be working. The same authors write:

“Euro-zone leaders are negotiating a potentially groundbreaking fiscal pact . . . [that] would make budget discipline legally binding and enforceable by European authorities. . . . European officials hope a new agreement, which would aim to shrink the excessive public debt that helped spark the crisis, would persuade the European Central Bank to undertake more drastic action to reverse the recent selloff in euro-zone debt markets.”

The Eurozone appears to be in the process of being “structurally readjusted” – the same process imposed earlier by the IMF on Third World countries. Structural demands routinely include harsh austerity measures, government cutbacks, privatization, and the disempowerment of national central banks, so that there is no national entity capable of creating and controlling the money supply on behalf of the people. The latter result has officially been achieved in the Eurozone, which is now dependent on the E.C.B. as the sole lender of last resort and printer of new euros.

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Stephen Lendman

Last February, Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship ended. Another one replaced him. Egypt's military holds absolute power.

Authoritarian dominance is unchallenged. Elections are more theater than real. Egypt's multi-round complex process complicates them further. So do logistics. Understanding what to do is daunting.

The hybrid ballot lists parties and individual candidates. Voters choose from both. Candidates represent professionals and worker/farmers. Influence peddling and fraud are rife.

Egypt's process perhaps has no parallel anywhere. Voters cast three votes, including for scores of new parties and candidates they don't recognize.

Egypt's junta deliberately designed a hard to comprehend complex system despite strong opposition from participating parties.

Individual candidates will be chosen by popular vote. Party totals may not determine representation in Parliament. Party listed candidates will get seats based on how high they're listed.

At issue is controlling the process and outcome.

Vote-counting is especially prone to fraud. One of Stalin's memorable quotes was,

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

Some results will be announced after each round. Party list ones won't come until January.

Human rights activist Hossam Bahgat complained about Egypt's allegedly first ever "free and fair election," saying "we've opted for one of the world's most complicated electoral systems."

Of course, regime supporters call it free and fair. Independent observers see it otherwise.

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redscribe

Political Islamist - Osama bin Laden and Theodore Herzl
- Jewish analogue of political Islamist?

Gilad Atzmon: The following lengthy article by Red Scribblings proves that the issues raised by The Wandering Who are at the centre of today's philosophical and ideological thinking. It is no secret that Zionist lobbies together with some Jewish anti Zionists are desperate to stop the book or its author. I believe that they would actually do themselves a big favour reading the book first.

The controversy over Gilad Atzmon and his book The Wandering Who?, which I recently reviewed on Red Scribblings, raises a lot of important questions about history and the politics of the last two centuries. I make no apology for writing about this question again because some of the issues he raises are of great importance to questions relating to war and peace, the nature of contemporary capitalism, national questions and the composition of major classes in society, particularly the capitalist class. All these questions are of central importance to anyone who wants to see capitalism superseded by socialism – they also touch intimately on questions intertwined with the causes of at least one world war in living memory, as well as other traumatic and world historic events including the currents wars and now revolutions shaking the Middle East and neighbouring regions and states. So its pretty important.

Atzmon is not a Marxist thinker, but an idiosyncratic left-wing liberal, born and raised in a racist ethnocracy. His own rejection of a racist upbringing and his privileged birthright as a Jew in a Jewish state, has generated some ferocious rhetoric and not a little incoherence and misunderstanding by friend and foe alike in some cases. But Atzmon’s writings are significant: this is also acknowledged by his enemies, usually rabid Zionists though also a few semi-Bundist socialists who on most issues are on the opposite side of the barricades to the Netan-yahoos. My point here is not to dwell on that conflict, but to acknowledge the significance of his work on ‘Jewish identity’. If it was just, as his enemies proclaim, reheated anti-semitism from the pre-WWII years, Atzmon would be unable to defend himself against a tidal wave of universal opprobrium.

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Laura Stuart

As an activist against Human Rights abuses, particularly of the sort that the Nazi style entity called Israel inflicts on Palestinians on a daily basis, I have been fortunate to be involved in some direct actions which were very effective in exposing among other things the illegal collective punishment on one and a half million Palestinians a.k.a. the Siege of Gaza. More recently I have had the privilege to attend many lectures by intellectuals on various subjects relating to zionism and it's evil ideology. A learning process which often finds me agreeing with most of what someone states as the issues facing Palestinians but perhaps not always agreeing on how each person or group sees the solution, such as was the case with the amazing Dr Norman Finkelstein lecture recently.

All protests, flotillas, convoys and lectures feature people of different religions (or none) from a broad spectrum of political backgrounds, yet amazingly there is a huge amount of solidarity across the board with everyone contributing in many different ways within their own area of expertise. The common thread holding us all together is a firm belief in Truth and Justice.

The Meir Institute report after the Mavi Marmara particularly noted, to their great consternation that Muslims (Islamists as they call politically active muslims) and people from every kind of religious and political background were able to unite against the common enemy of Zionist oppression. This is the real meaning of Solidarity.

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