Encounter With An Advanced Capitalist Economy

part I: Two Economies

The so-called American Dream overwhelmed many. It was a dream, an illusion.

It was not real, but seemed real; it was seemingly attractive and colorful, but there is no attractive color in the reality; it was seemingly accessible, but it’s a mirage in reality; it seemed attainable and achievable, but it’s unattainable and unachievable in the existing production-distribution structure. The Empire’s present crisis divulges this reality.

Crisis brings closer the realness many like to ignore. The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) has torn away the shroud that covered the unreal American dream.

Now, facts show, it was like a walk towards a mirage. Now, reality tells, it was an impossible journey. The GFC has helped understand the American reality, a reality generated by an advanced capitalist economy.

Now, many questions loom, overwhelm many minds. The questions expose the real life, the reality in the economy, the theories upholding and justifying the economy. Many elementary and primary facts are coming to light that once were ignored by many.

Readings in Macroeconomics (28th edition) tells in its “Introduction”: “It sometimes seems that the United States has not one, but two economies. The first economy exists in economics textbooks and in the minds of many elected officials. It is an economy in which no one is unemployed for long, families are rewarded with an ever-improving standard of living, and anyone who works hard can live the American Dream. In this economy, people are free and roughly equal, and each individual carefully looks after him- or herself, making voluntary choices to advance their own economic interests. Government has some limited roles in this world, but it is increasingly marginal, since the macroeconomy is a self-regulating system of wealth generation.” (Eds. Amy Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, Dollars & Sense collective, Boston)

After tracing the first economy it adverts: “The second economy is described in the writings of progressives, environmentalists, union supporters, and consumer advocates — as well as honest business writers who recognize that the real world does not always conform to textbook models. This second economy features vast disparities of income, wealth, and power. It is an economy where economic instability and downward mobility are facts of life. Jobs disappear, workers suffer long spells of unemployment, and new jobs seldom afford the same standard of living as those lost. And, periodically, market economies unravel, much like today. As for the government, it sometimes adopts policies that ameliorate the abuses of capitalism, and other times does just the opposite, but it is always an active and essential participant in economic life.” On the basis of data, Readings in Macroeconomics eloquently exposes both, the first and second economies.

Advanced capitalist economies, Kurt Dopfer, Swiss economist, noted in 1976, are one of the best institutions to learn about bourgeois political economy. The world, especially the capitalist countries encountering the present crises provide ample evidence of failure of bourgeois economic thoughts. Failure to analyze present economic crisis is the full blown capacity of the bourgeois political economic thoughts.

A fuzzy process

Distance between reality and mainstream economics is noted by John Miller, professor of economics at Wheaton College. John writes in the Readings in Macroeconomics: “When economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private research organization designated by the [US] Commerce Department as the nation’s arbiter of the business cycle, officially declare the Great Recession over, they will likely identify September 2009 as its end date and the beginning of the economic recovery. But people surely will not believe the recession is over, despite the NBER’s pronouncement, until jobs return and their economic well-being improves. And that could be quite a while.” (“When is a Recession over?”) And, has recovery really returned? A difficult question. What’s the problem in return of the cherished real recovery? Another difficult question.

According to the NBER, there were nine complete business cycles in the US economy since World War II. But “[t]he NBER’s Dating Committee, currently a group of seven economists, admits that the dating process is ‘fuzzy’. The committee has no rigid rules for determining the start or end of a business cycle. The members reach a consensus after studying a broad array of macroeconomic indicators. In short, they eyeball the data. The committee’s founders worked with 46 indicators. Today the NBER’s Business Conditions Digest lists around 1,000 measures.” (ibid.)

They, the Dating Committee, study the GDP, industrial production, employment, real income, trade, several interest rates, and personal income, the index of coincident indicators that measures employment, income, output, and sales, and similar many.

“The Great Recession shows how hard it is to date business cycles. … It takes time for the federal government to publish official GDP figures. And the committee looks for several indicators to show that a decline in activity has spread across the economy before it feels comfortable declaring a recession.” (ibid.)

And, instead of calculation, mainstream sometimes conduct survey to gather opinion, relies on perception, which is subjective. To draw conclusion, science does not rely on perception.

The way a section of scholars in poor, underdeveloped countries imagine – the advanced economies are super smart and their knowledge machine is efficient – is not the sweet fact. Their “science” is hazy or mechanism they have is weak. Encountering this bitter fact will free the scholars from inferiority complex, and help get rid of vulgar thoughts, ideas and imaginations.

The zero decade

The capitalist economy has taken away an entire decade from the life of the common persons although it has amassed unimaginable resources. “After reviewing the feeble expansion and devastating recession that followed, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman suggested that we call the first decade of this century ‘the zero decade’. Job creation for the decade was basically zero. Zero economic gains for the typical family. Zero gains for homeowners. And zero gains on the stock market, even before taking inflation into account.” (ibid.)

A number of poor economies in the South has not experienced similar zero decade. These poor economies are burdened with external debt and interest, ridden with corruption and inefficiency, weak in know how, dictated and tutored by imperial masters, and pressed by many other problems. Legislature, judiciary, democratic process, financial measures, education, and many more in these poor countries are designed and advised by the imperial masters through their organizations and employees. It’s not a strange reality. It’s the reality of the world system that feels proud with its inefficiency. Actually, a part is producing wealth while another is reeling under crisis, and the wealth is flowing to the sick part that tries to keep it strong.

Figures strikingly tell the zero-reality of the mature capitalist economy. Alejandro Reuss, economist and historian, cites real US GDP figures in 2009 and in 2006. Both were nearly the same — just under $13 trillion. “The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports figures of $12.8806 trillion … for 2009 and $12.9762 trillion for 2006. … [T]he figures for the number of workers employed and the number of work hours required to produce that output are strikingly different. In 2006, about 138.7 million workers … were employed, compared to only about 134.4 million in 2009. The total time spent at work, by all workers … was about 18 billion hours less in 2009 than in 2006.” (“Same output + Fewer Hours = Economic Crisis?”, Readings in Macroeconomics)

The figures present a cruel fact. “Producing the same quantity of output in fewer hours means that labor productivity has increased. There are several possible causes: increased intensity or pace of work (or ‘speed up’), increased worker skill, improved production methods, or greater quantity or quality of tools used. During the current crisis, multiple factors may have been involved. High unemployment itself reduces workers’ bargaining power. Employers know that there are plenty of unemployed workers who are desperate for a job. Meanwhile, workers who do have jobs are desperate to keep them. This makes it relatively easy for employers to push down wages or demand a faster pace of work. It may also be that workers’ average skill level has increased, if for no other reason than that less-skilled workers are disproportionately represented among those laid of. There may also have been innovation in production methods and technology that explain part of this productivity increase.” (ibid.) The “mystery” of prosperity and abundance of, and also luxury by, a few is buried in this process.

Real life narratives are harsher. Katherine Faherty, a Dollars & Sense intern, narrates in the Readings in Macroeconomics: “Seven months after graduating I have secured an unpaid internship and a part-time job, which puts me in the same boat as many of my classmates. … My roommate, who has a master’s degree in art history, has only been able to find an unpaid internship at an auction house plus a part-time receptionist job. Even without the part-time job, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would count her as employed because she goes to ‘work’ at the auction house every day. She is among the hordes of recent graduates holding unpaid internships that were once the sole province of college students — a viable route only for grads with family resources to fall back on. Another friend has been on a constant job search since March. She moved back into her parents’ house and returned to her old summer job as a bank teller. Then she took a job at the local mall so she could make her student-loan payments. She gets a great discount at her store, but she’s not putting her double degree in economics and psychology to use. Like almost 32% of workers under 25, she is “underemployed.” Along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time ones, underemployed workers are counted as employed. (“A dismal Time to Graduate”) Then, there comes bonuses of CEOs. Everyone now knows it. And, then, Jenny McCarthy, a single mother, posed nude for Playboy in the magazine’s July/August issue. Jenny finds: “Evan’s tuition was really expensive this year,’ she said on the Today show, referring to her 10-year-old autistic son.” (A-Line, June 25, 2012) Is it a cruel economy?

This narration is from a land famous for abundance, opportunity and dream, from a land that has accumulated wealth unimaginable in human history, from a land that teaches and sermons others on ways to prosperity. But reality exposes an advanced capitalist economy. Its age is not 70 years as was the age of the economy in the former Soviet Union. The advanced capitalist economy’s age is much more than 70 years. Then, why the old economy fails to ensure affordable and appropriate tuition for all children?

Part II: Consumption

Consumption has many faces, many interpretations and many implications.

A poor person’s consumption is completely different from a rich. The rich interpret the issue as their interest defines while a poor spends whole life simply to arrange a bare minimum with an output of failure. A section of economists try to gauge level of success of their design by counting the quantity a poor consumes and comparing it with the quantity the poor once used to consume. This section ignores the fact: capital requires consumption by the poor. The poor can’t move wheels if they don’t consume, and wheel’s movement is required by capital to generate more profit.

Ignorance, actually immaturity, about persons behind wheels encourages a section of petty sized nouveau capital in some poor countries to tell or write: It’s not capital’s business to look after the quantity or quality labor consumes. A sheer nonsensical statement! Sense of class interest discourages rascals even from issuing such statement.

Consumption by the rich is totally different from that of the poor. There is luxury, indulgence, waste, flouting, boosting, getting impregnated with newly bought identity of aristocracy and power. They are completely concerned with their consumption no matter how big carbon footprint is being made.

The US economy has different types of consumptions: of the rich, of the poor, capital induced and crisis pressed. In sum, it discloses aspects of the economy.

Jonathan Rowe, fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute and a former contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, writes: “Much consumption today is addictive […] Millions of Americans are engaged in a grim daily struggle with themselves to do less of it. They want to eat less, drink less, smoke less, gamble less, talk less on the telephone — do less buying, period. Yet economic reasoning declares as growth and progress, that which people themselves regard as a tyrannical affliction. Economists resist this reality of a divided self, because it would complicate their models beyond repair. They cling instead to an 18th century model of human psychology — the “rational” and self-interested man — which assumes those complexities away.” (“The Growth Consensus Unravels”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition) Jonathan died in March 2011. But his voice for the millions struggling for survival with minimum consumption shall echo.

There are consumptions not essential for human survival. But the advanced economy needs it for its survival. Jonathan writes: “Then too there’s the mounting expenditure that sellers foist upon people through machination and deceit. People don’t choose to pay for the corrupt campaign finance system or for bloated executive pay packages. The cost of these is hidden in the prices that we pay at the store. As I write this, the Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft has hired Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and Grover Norquist, a right-wing polemicist, as lobbyists in Washington. When I bought this computer with Windows 95, Bill Gates never asked me whether I wanted to help support a bunch of Beltway operators like these. This is compulsory consumption, not choice, and the economy is rife with it today. People don’t choose to pay some $40 billion a year in telemarketing fraud. They don’t choose to pay 32% more for prescription drugs than do people in Canada. (‘Free trade’ means that corporations are free to buy their labor and materials in other countries, but ordinary Americans aren’t equally free to do their shopping there.) For that matter, people don’t choose to spend $25 and up for inkjet printer cartridges. The manufacturers design the printers to make money on the cartridges because, as the Wall Street Journal put it, that’s ‘where the big profit margins are.’” (ibid.) The mainstream can’t deny it now.

The pattern – compelling consumers to purchase a commodity that they wouldn’t have purchased had there an opportunity – shows capital’s dictatorial power over consumers. It’s an autocratic power, more powerful than political autocracy. Actually, this dictatorial power determines power and limits of political authority. In ordinary situation, consumers can’t escape this “wish” of the seller. Only an organized initiative of aware consumers can alter the seller’s tact.

Jonathan exposes more facts as he argues:

“The economy in such cases doesn’t solve problems so much as create new problems that require more expenditure to solve. Food is supposed to sustain people, for example. But today the dis-economies of eating sustain the GDP instead. The food industry spends some $21 billion a year on advertising to entice people to eat food they don’t need. Not coincidentally there’s now a $32 billion diet and weight loss industry to help people take of the pounds that inevitably result. When that doesn’t work, which is often, there is always the vacuum pump or knife. There were some 110,000 liposuctions in the United States [in 2001]; at five pounds each that’s some 275 tons of flab up the tube. It is a grueling cycle of indulgence and repentance, binge and purge. Yet each stage of this miserable experience, viewed through the pollyanic lens of economics, becomes growth and therefore good.” (ibid.)

Further facts of the economy are there:

“Americans spend some $5 billion a year in gasoline alone while they sit in traffic and go nowhere. As the price of gas increases this growth sector will expand. Commerce deplores a vacuum, and the exasperating hours in the car have spawned a booming subeconomy of relaxation tapes, cell phones, even special bibs. Billboards have 1-800 numbers so commuters can shop while they stew. Talk radio thrives on traffic-bound commuters, which accounts for some of the contentious, get-out-of-my-face tone. The traffic also helps sustain a $130 billion a year car wreck industry; and if Gates succeeds in getting computers into cars, that sector should get a major boost.” (ibid.)

There is demand, and there is supply, and there is market, actually markets, and there is markets’ dictation, and the markets are free, free for the seller. Shall there be equilibrium? Shall there be an opportunity for buyer? There is opportunity, and there is no opportunity. Power of ownership determines the extent of opportunity. A person owning a few bucks in a pocket have opportunity and a person gripping millions or billions have opportunity. The first one has the opportunity to buy a food item and have no opportunity to buy an opportunity to buy proper medical treatment, and the second one has the opportunity to buy many commodities, opportunities, power, influence.

Then, what’s the production process if consumption is utilization of material benefits of the process? Can everyone utilize the material benefits? Many, almost uncountable, are excluded. Doesn’t this type of consumption affect production? Should this sort of consumption be discarded? Why it can’t be done? These and similar questions will lead to question the very essence of the economy.

In this market, consumers have to see, have to hear, listen, have to laugh, have to mould habit, have to buy, consume, have to be happy until a shock, a crisis, externalities create reaction that compel consumers to get away from this pattern.

The advanced capitalist economy is vibrant with more activities:

“C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General, estimates that some 70% of the nation’s medical expenses are lifestyle induced. Yet the same lifestyle that promotes disease also produces a rising GDP. …The automobile gave rise to car wash franchises, drive-in restaurants, fuzz busters, tire dumps, and so forth. Television produced an antenna industry, VCRs, soap magazines, ad infinitum. The texts present this phenomenon as the wondrous perpetual motion machine of the market — goods beget more goods. But now the machine is producing complementary ills and collateral damages instead. Suggestive of this new dynamic is a pesticide plant in Richmond, California, which is owned by a transnational corporation that also makes the breast cancer drug tamoxifen. Many researchers believe that pesticides, and the toxins created in the production of them, play a role in breast cancer. ‘It’s a pretty good deal,’ a local physician told the East Bay Express, a Bay Area weekly. ‘First you cause the cancer, then you profit from curing it.’ Both the alleged cause and cure make the GDP go up, and this syndrome has become a central dynamic of growth in the U.S. today. …The fastest-growing occupations in the country include debt collectors and prison guards. What would we do without our problems and dysfunctions? The problem is especially acute for those at the bottom of the income scale who have not shared much in the apparent prosperity. For them, a bigger piece of a bad pie might be better than none. This is the economic conundrum of our age. No one has more than pieces of an answer, but it helps to see that much growth today is really an optical illusion created by accounting tricks. The official tally ignores totally the cost side of the growth ledger—the toll of traffic upon our time and health for example.” (ibid.)

It’s not a single country-picture. In countries, rich and poor, this “amazing” picture is at hand. But the economy teaches not to minutely observe the background of the picture, not to question the economy. Lessons of economics being imparted also induce learners’ minds to ignore these facts, to isolate these facts from other aspects of the economy.

Shall these facts be mentioned while lessons will be run in class rooms? Shall students be asked to find out similar facts in their societies? Shall they be asked to find out reasons driving these practices in an economy, and the factors shaping such an economy? Even the forward-looking student activists, who unhesitatingly unfurl flags of rebellion, shall not formulate demand to redesign curriculum and syllabus so that these issues are raised and discussed in class rooms of economics, so that instructions rely on up-to-date information and problems that the Readings in Macroecnomics and similar other books identify.

People in countries are searching for alternatives. There are innovations and initiatives. They are not waiting for a section of over-active student activists in some countries, who are having no time to question curriculum and syllabus being followed in class rooms as they are busy in organizing revolution.

“Sooner or later”, Jonathan informed in the Readings in Macroecnomics, “we’ll need different ways of thinking about work and growth and how we allocate the means of life. This is where the social economy comes in, the informal exchange between neighbors and friends. There are some promising trends. One is the return to the traditional village model in housing. Structure does affect content. When houses are close together, and people can walk to stores and work, it encourages the spontaneous social interaction that nurtures real community. New local currencies, such as Time Dollars, provide a kind of lattice work upon which informal nonmarket exchange can take root and grow.” (ibid.)

Carlos Perez de Alejo, co-director of Third Coast Workers for Cooperation in Austin, Texas, informs: “In the midst of mounting economic insecurity, fueled by widespread unemployment, foreclosures and budget cuts, many people are seeking alternative models to business as usual. From community gardens to bartering networks, grassroots efforts are sprouting up across the [US].” (“Embrace the Cooperative Movement”, Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 26, 2010)

In the US, according to Carlos, more than 29,000 cooperatives are operating in nearly all sectors of the economy. There are more than 130 million members in these cooperatives. Under the shadow of the ongoing economic crisis, many people have got organized in worker cooperatives owned and controlled by the people. By providing stable jobs and higher wages worker cooperatives have an impressive track record. The movement in the US has become increasingly organized. In May 2004, members of the worker co-op community founded the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, a national membership-based organization “of and for worker cooperatives, other democratic workplaces, and the organizations that support the growth and continued development of worker cooperatives.” Membership in the Federation has grown 25% per year.

In the face of crisis and hardship people are creating their spaces. Of course, there are limitations. Possibilities of set backs are there also. Fundamental questions are yet to be identified and resolved. But it’s a part of a process. People learn in their way whatever the dominating economy dictates. These lessons encourage, energize and strengthen people’s initiatives.

Part III: The “Insignificant” trillions of dollars

One of today’s undeniable facts is women’s labor almost all over the world are underpaid and unpaid.

Now-a-days many are asking: “[Are] housewives paid [with] wages? By the government? That may seem outlandish to some, but consider the staggering amount of unpaid work carried out by women.” The International Wages for Housework Campaign, a network of women in Third World and industrialized countries, demands unwaged work that women do are to be recognized as work in official government statistics, and this work be paid. Lena Graber and John Miller discuss the issue in their “Wages for housework: the movement & the numbers”: “Producing credible numbers for the value of women’s work in the home is no easy task. Calculating how many hours women spend performing housework […] is just the first step. The hours are considerable in both developing and industrialized economies.” (Eds. Amy Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan Snyder, and Chris Sturr, Readings in Macroeconomics, 28th edition)

As example of hours spent by women in household work Lena and John refer to a set of data related to the issue. In Australia, 2 hours and 27 minutes were spent for child care per day in a household by a woman in 1997. In the UK in 2000, it was one hr. and 26 min. while in Nepal the time spent for the same purpose in 1996 was two minutes more than that of the UK. In Norway, it was 42 min. in 2000 while in Japan it was 24 min. in 1999. Time spent for food preparation was: Australia – 1 hr 29 min., Norway – 49 min., the UK – 1 hr. 8 min., Nepal – 5 hr. 30 min. Time spent for water and fuel collection in Nepal was 1 hr 10 min while in Norway it was 1 min. Time was also spent for cleaning and shopping. The total time spent was: Australia – 3 hr. 39 min., Japan – 3 hr. 34 min., Norway – 3 hr. 56 min., the UK – 4 hr. 55 min. The sources of this information were: www.abs.gov.au/ausstats; www.unescap.org/stat (Japan); www.ssb.no/tidsbruk_en (Norway); www.statistics.gov.uk/themes/social_finances/TimeUseSurvey; www.cbs.nl/isi/iass (Nepal). A number of data were not available. The data cited are not comparable between the countries referred here because of difference between the economies and time period of data gathering. However, the data provide a picture of women labor deprivation. All the economies cited here are capitalist and all but Nepal are advanced capitalist countries.

Citing the International Labor Organization Lena and John say: In 1990, women carried out two-thirds of the world’s work for 5% of the income. In 1995, the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report estimated that women’s unpaid and underpaid labor was worth $11 trillion worldwide, and $1.4 trillion in the US. The share of the advanced economy is more than one-tenth.

Paying women the wages for the household work, the economists argue, “would go a long way toward undoing these inequities and reducing women’s economic dependence on men.” The UN 4th World Conference on Women developed a Platform for Action in 1995 that called on governments to calculate the value of women’s unpaid work and include it in conventional measures of national output, for example, in GDP.

Only a handful of countries including Trinidad & Tobago and Spain have passed legislation mandating the new accounting. A number of countries including Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, the Dominican Republic, India, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Tanzania, and Venezuela have undertaken extensive surveys to determine how much time is spent on unpaid household work. (ibid.)

There are different approaches to put value to the household work: output-based evaluation, input of household production, opportunity cost based calculation, specialist-replacement method. These techniques produce quite different results.

“In Canada, a government survey documented the time men and women spent on unpaid work in 1992. Canadian women performed 65% of all unpaid work, shouldering an especially large share of household labor [….] (Men’s unpaid hours exceeded women’s only for outdoor cleaning.) […] In Great Britain […] unpaid labor hours are high for an industrialized country […], far greater relative to GDP. […W]hen valued using the opportunity cost method, unpaid work was 112% of Britain’s GDP in 1995! With the specialist-replacement method, British unpaid labor was still 56% of GDP—greater than the output of the United Kingdom’s entire manufacturing sector for the year. In Japan […] women perform over 80% of unpaid work […] The Japanese Economic Planning Agency calculated that counting unpaid work in 1996 would add between 15.2% (generalist-replacement method) and 23% (opportunity-cost method) to GDP. Even at those levels, the value of unpaid labor still equaled at least half of Japanese women’s market wages.” (ibid.)

“While estimates vary by country and evaluation method, all of these calculations make clear that recognizing the value of unpaid household labor profoundly alters our perception of economic activity and women’s contributions to production. ‘Had household production been included in the system of macro-economic accounts,’ notes Ann Chadeau, [a researcher with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] ‘governments may well have implemented quite different economic and social policies.’ For example, according to the UNDP, ‘the inescapable implication [of recognizing women’s unpaid labor] is that the fruits of society’s total labor should be shared more equally.’ For the UNDP, this would mean radically altering property and inheritance rights; access to credit; entitlement to social security benefits, tax incentives, and child care; and terms of divorce settlements. (ibid.)

The Great Financial Crisis has aggravated the situation. Burden on women has increased. It has spread outside of households. “Since the Great Recession began in December 2007,” writes Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, in the Readings in Macroeconomics, “there [in the US] has been a sharp rise in the number of married couples where a woman is left to bring home the bacon because her husband is unemployed.” The reason is “men have experienced greater job losses than women over the course of this recession, losing three out of every four jobs lost.” (“Women Breadwinners, Men Unemployed”)

In 2009, share of families having unemployed men while women held job rose sharply compared to 2007. In the first five months of 2009, 5.4% of working wives had an unemployed husband at home compared to an average of 2.4% over the first five months of 2007. In terms of number about 2 million working wives with an unemployed husband. (ibid.)

The hardship in household increases as family budget gets strained “since women typically earn only 78 cents for every dollar men earn. In the typical married-couple family where both spouses work, the wife brings home just over a third — 35.6% — of the family’s income.” (ibid.)

If the issue of unpaid household work is set aside temporarily for the sake of putting “things simply” the hard fact that comes up is of “giving” women labor less money compared to men, and asking, actually compelling, women labor to take larger burden.

A single area can be cited as example of hardship. Heather writes: “[M]ost families receive health insurance through the employers of their husbands. So when husbands lose their jobs, families are left struggling to find ways to pay for health insurance at the same time they are living on just a third of their prior income.”

The hardship increases when the family has child. Heather provides data: “Families with children have been hit especially hard hit by unemployment. Among working wives in families with a small child — under age six — at home, 5.9% have an unemployed husband. […T]here are 1 million working wives with children at home, but an unemployed husband.”

Heather moves further with hard data that provides harder aspect of life during the period: “There has also been a sharp rise in the share of families where both the husband and wife are unemployed. Between the first five months of 2007 and of 2009, the share of married-couple families with both spouses unemployed rose to 0.5% from 0.1%, meaning that one in 500 families is struggling with dual unemployment. The share of families with a child under age 18 with both parents unemployed is 0.6%, meaning that one in 165 families with children have both parents looking for work.”

These facts show the cruel face of the economy that is concerned only with profit. The hardship of women labor can be gauzed fully if necessary labor time and surplus labor time are considered. With less wage women labor has to survive, make arrangement for survival of family members, work unpaid in household. But she isn’t allowed to produce less. This is an economy that at times even cares not to wear mask of humanity.

Part IV: Productive Investment? No

Inequality and capitalism are indivisible. Today, even proponents of capitalism don’t deny it. In the US as in other capitalist countries, increasing inequality is undeniable. The Empire is now residence of deep inequality.

Joseph Stiglitz observes: “America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries – and its gap with the rest has been widening. In the “recovery” of 2009-2010, the top 1% of US income earners captured 93% of the income growth. Other inequality indicators – like wealth, health, and life expectancy – are as bad or even worse. The clear trend is one of concentration of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, and increasing poverty at the bottom. (“The Price of Inequality and the Myth of Opportunity”, Project Syndicate, June 6, 2012)

“Economic inequality”, James M. Cypher, professor of economics at California State University, Fresno, writes, “has been on the rise in the United States for 30-odd years.” (“Slicing up at the long barbeque”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition, Eds. Amy Gluckman, John Miller, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr)

The inequality gives a lot of money, unimaginable, in total trillions of dollars, to a few. At the same time questions born. Does that huge money brings in any or produces something good? Answers to the questions reveal the type of activities the advanced capitalism is carrying out. At the same time, with the ultimate output the economy can claim legitimacy or can forfeit its rationale for existence.

James provides the answer with a number of facts. “[T]he big money has not gone into productive investments in the United States. Stripping out the money pumped into the residential real estate bubble, inflation-adjusted investment in machinery, equipment, technology, and structures increased only 1.4% from 1999 through 2005 — an average of 0.23% per year. Essentially, productive investment has stagnated since the close of the dot-com boom. Instead, the money has poured into high-risk hedge funds. These are vast pools of unregulated funds that are now generating 40% to 50% of the trades in the New York Stock Exchange and account for very large portions of trading in many U.S. and foreign credit and debt markets. And where is the income from these investments going? Last fall media mogul David Geffen sold two paintings at record prices, a Jasper Johns ($80 million) and a Willem de Kooning ($63.5 million), to two of “today’s crop of hedge-fund billionaires” whose cash is making the art market “red-hot,” according to the New York Times. Other forms of conspicuous consumption have their allure as well. Boeing and Lufthansa are expecting brisk business for the newly introduced 787 airplane. The commercial version of the new Boeing jet will seat 330, but the VIP version offered by Lufthansa Technik (for a mere $240 million) will have seating for 35 or fewer, leaving room for master bedrooms, a bar, and the transport of racehorses or Rolls Royces. And if you lose your auto assembly job? It should be easy to find work as a dog walker: High-end pet care services are booming, with sales more than doubling between 2000 and 2004. Opened in 2001, Just Dogs Gourmet expects to have 45 franchises in place by the end of 2006 selling hand-decorated doggie treats. And then there is Camp Bow Wow, which offers piped-in classical music for the dogs (oops, “guests”) and a live Camper Cam for their owners. Started only three years ago, the company already has 140 franchises up and running. According to David Butler, the manager of a premiere auto dealership outside of Detroit, sales of Bentleys, at $180,000 a pop, are brisk. But not many $300,000 Rolls Royces are selling. “It’s not that they can’t afford it,” Butler told the New York Times, “it’s because of the image it would give.” Just what is the image problem in Detroit? Well, maybe it has something to do with those Delphi workers facing a 40% pay cut. Michigan’s economy is one of the hardest-hit in the nation. GM, long a symbol of U.S. manufacturing prowess, is staggering, with rumors of possible bankruptcy rife. The best union in terms of delivering the goods for the U.S. working class, the United Auto Workers, is facing an implosion. Thousands of Michigan workers at Delphi, GM, and Ford will be out on the streets very soon. (The top three domestic car makers are determined to permanently lay of three-quarters of their U.S. assembly-line workers—nearly 200,000 hourly employees. If they do, then the number of auto-workers employed by the Big Three—Ford, Chrysler, and GM—will have shrunk by a staggering 900,000 since 1978.) So, this might not be the time to buy a Rolls. But a mere $180,000 Bentley—why not? But perhaps those who decry the trend can find at least symbolic hope in the new boom in yet another luxury good. Private mausoleums, in vogue during that earlier Gilded Age, are back. For $650,000, one was recently constructed at Daytona Memorial Park in Florida—with matching $4,000 Medjool date palms for shade. Another, complete with granite patio, meditation room, and doors of hand cast bronze, went up in the same cemetery. Business is booming, apparently, with 2,000 private mausoleums sold in 2005, up from a single-year peak of 65 in the 1980s. Some cost “well into the millions,” according to one of the nation’s largest makers of cemetery monuments. Who knows: maybe the mausoleum boom portends the ultimate (dead) end for the neo-Gilded Age.” (ibid.)

What happens in a society with this type and level of consumption by this sect of persons? Krugman has an answer.

“Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. […] And I’m with Alan Greenspan, who […] has repeatedly warned that growing inequality pose a threat to “democratic society”. (Paul Krugman, “Graduates versus Oligarchs”, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006)

A sharper tone tells: “[…] America looks more and more like a class-ridden society. […] Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains […] as a practitioner of ‘class warfare’.” (Paul Krugman, “The Death of Horatio Alger”, The Nation, Jan. 5, 2004)

Destiny of this journey is not a happy place for the advanced capitalist society. Krugman asks: “Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current policies will eventually create ‘a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can’t compete.’ If he’s right – and I fear that he is – we will end up suffering not only from injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.” (ibid.) The economy is sowing seeds of class conflict as it destroys human potential.

There is poverty, there is poor along with the rich. There is debate also on identifying the poor. Ellen Frank, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, writes: “The poverty line is widely regarded as far too low for a household to survive on in most parts of the United States. For one thing, as antipoverty advocates point out, since 1955 the proportion of family budgets devoted to food has fallen from one-third to one-fifth.” (“Measures of Poverty”, Readings in Macroecnomics, 28th edition,)

There is an opposite view. “Poverty calculations also have critics on the right. Conservative critics contend that the official poverty rate overstates poverty in the United States.” (ibid.)

The fact that comes out is: Methodology is not even spared of class interest. Conservative interests like to deny existence of the poor. An ostrich policy is preferable to the interests instead of resolving the problem of poverty. And, interests make them incapable of resolving the problem. It’s an inherent limitation.

There is need to revise the poverty line. Scientific approach requires this. It will be easier to propagate conservative class interests without a proper measurement method; but that will ultimately hurt the interests although the interests with short sighted view prefer immediate profit. Jeannette Wicks-Lim, assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, writes: “Without revising the official poverty line to reflect the actual costs of families’ basic need, the key statistics we use to understand economic deprivation in the United States will not only undercount the poor, but it will do so by a larger margin every passing year.” (“Lies, Damned Lies, and Poverty Statistics”, Readings in Macroecnomics)

The poverty line controversy also reveals another fact: State of scientific knowledge in an advanced capitalist economy, signs of a moribund society.

Stiglitz describes the state of the society: “America likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity, and others view it in much the same light. But, while we can all think of examples of Americans who rose to the top on their own, what really matters are the statistics: to what extent do an individual’s life chances depend on the income and education of his or her parents?

Nowadays, these numbers show that the American dream is a myth. There is less equality of opportunity in the United States today than there is in Europe – or, indeed, in any advanced industrial country for which there are data. […] In a country where money trumps democracy, such legislation has become predictably frequent. […] Inequality leads to lower growth and less efficiency. […] The Great Recession has exacerbated inequality, with cutbacks in basic social expenditures and with high unemployment putting downward pressure on wages. […] America has become a country not “with justice for all,” but rather with favoritism for the rich and justice for those who can afford it […] America can no longer regard itself as the land of opportunity that it once was. (“The Price of Inequality …”, op. cit.)

The “story” is almost endless as it’s of a vast empire. However, the story helps understand capitalism, its present state, its limitations, and the need to have a new economy that shall not breed and increase inequality.

Human Rights: Carter Criticizes White House

Jimmy Carter, former US president, denounced the US administration for “clearly violating” 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s unprecedented! It’s neither Fidel Castro nor Hugo Chavez, neither Moscow nor Beijing, but a former US president is accusing the US president of sanctioning the “widespread abuse of human rights”. Mr. Carter has not mentioned Barak Obama, the US president, by name. However, he used the words “our government” and “the highest authorities in Washington”.

Mr. Carter made the point by referring the authorization of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists. In a New York Times op-ed article on June 25 he said the “United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.”

Drone strikes are a fact in the daily life of people of Pakistan. In Yemen, it’s a fact also. It’s apprehended that peoples in other lands can have the same experience. Interests of Naked Imperialism (title of a book by John Bellamy Foster, editor, Monthly Review,) will determine the extent of drone operation.

Citing the New America Foundation estimates ABC News said in Pakistan alone 265 drone strikes have been executed since January 2009 killing at least 1,488 persons, at least 1,343 of them considered militants. The foundation estimates are based on news reports and other sources. (“Jimmy Carter Accuses U.S. of ‘Widespread Abuse of Human Rights’”)

“Instead of making the world safer”, Mr. Jimmy Carter wrote, “America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.”

The Guantanamo Bay detention center and waterboarding issues were not skipped by Mr. Carter. He criticized the US president for keeping the detention center open, where prisoners “have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers.”

Mr. Carter blared the US government for allowing “unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications.”

He also condemned recent legislation that gives the president the power to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, although a federal judge blocked the law from taking effect for any suspects not affiliated with the September 11 terrorist attacks. Mr. Carter said: “This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.”

Mr. Carter urged “concerned citizens" to “persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership”.

Mr. Carter is keeping his hope on the moral leadership of the US. But, military-industrial complex has taken it out long ago. Moral standard is being set by the economic interests that utilize military power and manipulate diplomacy to widen and to make safe its domain of accumulation. The system has its own conscience, which is different from human conscience. The system has its own mind, which is different from human brain. The conscience, the mind, the ethics, the moral standard of the system is political, not apolitical; it’s a-human, a-personal. It’s neither a president nor a group of good-soul senators, not even generals, who determine the moral standard. Dominating interests determine the moral standards, the ethics, the targets of drone.

What to tell the mothers of the children killed by drones in Pakistan villages? What to tell the children maimed by drones in Pakistan villages? What to tell the old father, who lost his young son, probably the only earning member of the family? What moral standard can bring in peace to these mothers, to these children, to these fathers, who are poor, working people, who know nothing about geopolitics, great game in the central Asian zone, peak oil, oil pipeline, western hemisphere designed democracy and its stooges, MNC-interests? All geopolitics, all power, all interests turn incapable to bring in solace to the hearts of crying humanity in rural mud houses demolished by drones! Ringing bells of humanity are not within hearing range.

It’s not only a fact in the rugged mountain villages in Pakistan or Yemen. The question of human rights in the US was raised by the UN more than once.

It was reported that the UN envoy for freedom of expression was drafting an official communication to the US government demanding to know “why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded – sometimes violently – by local authorities.” Frank La Rue, the UN “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that “the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.” “Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension”, he said.

It was also reported that tThe UN was to conduct an investigation into the plight of the US Native Americans. A UN statement said: “This will be the first mission to the US by an independent expert designated by the UN human rights council to report on the rights of the indigenous peoples.”

Many of the US’ estimated 2.7 million Native Americans live in federally recognized tribal areas overwhelmed with unemployment, high suicide rates and other social problems.

Accusations of human rights violation in the US are now a regular diplomatic event in the Chinese capital. China raises the issue seriously. It has become a part of public diplomacy. Once, only years back, it was only a US monopoly. Now China has stepped in boldly.

But Mr. Jimmy Carter’s voice is not a part of public diplomacy. He is a dignified personality. It shows dissent within the upper echelon of the US society. And, dissent signifies state of governance, understanding, rapport, efficiency of ruling mechanism. So, Mr. Carter voice is significant.

Miners Struggle In Spain While The Rich Spoil

While the working people are struggling in Spain the rich are squandering.

Unions for coal mining workers are waging a general strike. In more than 40 coal mines in northern Spain, thousands of miners protesting austerity measures are on strike for weeks. “Austerity” will take away about 4,000 mining jobs. The miners are defending the jobs and protesting plans to cut subsidies, about two-third. Reducing of subsidies will deeply hurt the mining industry.

Charging and clashing with the striking miners for several hours the police tried to remove roadblocks of burning tyres, fired rubber bullets and tear gas and baton charged. A journalist suffered a rubber bullet injury. The strikers fought to drive back the riot police trying to break up protests.

Taking to the mountains and forests for cover the miners fired “sky rockets” and ball-bearings through pipe to push back the police. Slings, golf ball launchers and home-made device to fire potatoes were also used by the miners to defend themselves. A number of local offices of the ruling Popular Party were attacked.

In Asturias, roads and railways were blockaded in towns and cities including Bendición, Lieres and Campomanes. León experienced more powerful protests. Vehicles were diverted because of the blockade there. At Ciaño, railway line was blockaded. The strikers laid chains across the tracks. Later they lifted the blockade.

In the mines at Candín and Aller, seven miners staged a lock-in. Three of them remained entrenched underground in Aller.

The regional government has asked the conservative central government to reorder its plan for cutting down subsidies to the mining industry.

The strike is the expression of defending rights and existence in the face of capital’s onslaught on the working populace. The workers have not only stood for their jobs. They are actually defending the mining industry also.

While capital indulged in speculation with real estate and construction of housing complexes, shopping malls, etc. the workers are struggling for industry. Capital has not turned hostile to mining. It’s just trying to intensify process of appropriation: more output with less labor, and have a bigger reserve army of labor to keep labor pressed down.

Not only workers, common people in Spain are also bearing the burden that capital’s gamble in the Spanish real estate casino has “constructed”.

Citing a report by the Red Cross in Catalonia Europa Press informed: The crisis is affecting family dynamics in Spain. The burden on the elderly is heavy. Financial help from the older generation to the younger has become the only way for many to survive. One in three of the elderly has had to help younger family members. This reality is going on for the last two years. The old are helping with the money they receive from the retirement benefits. One in four elderly citizens has had to house one or more younger members who have come back to family homes. Increases in prices and expenditures have taken away 70% savings of the persons in the age group of over 65 years. Deteriorations of the welfare state, 70% of the respondents perceive, is the cause behind the crisis.

As a consequence of the crisis, the above source said, many elderly persons spend less on food, 20% of the respondents can’t afford fruit, meat and fish regularly, and about half of them can’t afford to visit a dentist or ophthalmologist. According to a concerned official, about half of them can’t afford maintaining an adequate temperature in their houses and 80% of the respondents can’t afford expenses related to leisure or spare time activities.

The elderly, the retired section of the society are not spared by capital. Tentacles of appropriation have been spread wide – among the old – although they have left factories, etc. years ago. Consumption of the old is being taxed. Retirement benefits, part of their wages, which was given for necessary labor time and for regeneration of capital, are now being taken back – being snatched away – by capital. Generations – the old, the retired persons, the young – are being appropriated. Capital has capitalized the crisis to intensify its appropriation activities.

The crisis is bringing up hard facts.

Following a proposal tabled by the opposition and passed in parliament a ban on advertising sexual services in newspapers and media websites has been lifted “because of the recession”. Legislation regulating publicity and advertising was due to be amended to formally prohibit advertisements by brothels, escort agencies or persons working as prostitutes. The plan has now been scrapped. A report in 2007 said: “Advertising for sexual services earned the press around €40 mn a year.”

Capital is not concerned with the question of others morality while earning by advertising prostitution, etc. It’s making that earning with the approval of its legislature. It has unhesitatingly unmasked the face of its legislature. Prostitution is not a moral question to capital. Rather, capital’s survival is the moral question to capital. Appropriation is not the question of capital’s morality. Capital taxes human body and soul. So the question of morality related to earning from advertisement of prostitution does not arise to capital. It’s the morality and moral standard of capital and of its ruling machines.

It would not have been possible for a backward society or a society depending on forest for its survival or a society with primitive production to profit from advertising prostitution. An advanced capitalist society that has constructed many centres of education, culture, arts, that loves to own famous art works depends on advertising of sexual services. The society has sophisticated tools for communicating and propagating its ideology to the ruled. These are also tools for imposing its ideology on the ruled.

These are not strange behaviours of capital. Rather, it’s the way capital behaves. It profits from crisis. During periods of crisis, it widens its net for appropriation, it intensifies appropriation. Labor, old, retired, advertising from sex work, every bit and all corners of society are appropriated.

“Reforming” labor market in Spain is the same program with the same purpose. Impositions of harsh austerity measures including massive health care and education budget cut, drastically slash salaries of public employees, increasing of retirement age, higher indirect tax, “rationalizing” subsidies as well as “disciplining” the autonomous regions’ finances are the conditions for Spain’s bank-bailout. Liquidation of state-owned companies and “transfer” of public employees to the private sector are also in the agenda. The lender-dictators consider the already initiated labor reform as insufficient. Capital across the Spanish border that has come forward to aid capital in Spain demands this.

But the rich and the powerful don’t refrain from indulgence.

Following criticism against semi-private trips to luxury resorts and expensive dinners paid with public funds Carlos Dívar, president of Spain’s Supreme Court and Judicial Council, will step down. The Council no longer has confidence in him.

On occasions, Dívar spent several days in resorts although his work required only a few hours. Once, his work was for a day only, but he stayed in hotel for five days. The expenses were covered by public money.

But Dívar defended his acts: There was no “legal, moral or political” irregularity, those were not “luxury hotels, only […] four-star hotels”, “quite inexpensive”.

And, the Supreme Court decided not to open a lawsuit against Dívar to investigate his trips.

The honorable president of the Supreme Court and the honorable Supreme Court has confirmed the moral standard. The judiciary joins the legislature in upholding the standard. It’s a frank, point blank and honest show.

Mainstream press reports:

Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German princess and a close friend of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, has been accused of usurping public functions. She allegedly acted as “representative” and “advisor” to the king. Charges have been brought against her.

Answers to the questions on why the German princess had appeared as “representative” of the head of state and his “strategic advisor” and “ambassador” on occasions were not provided.

Susana Cano, the mother of a young model who accused a Middle Eastern prince of rape four years ago made the complaint. The case against the prince, a friend of King Carlos and Sayn-Wittgenstein, was closed by the court and the king himself sent a letter to congratulate the prince about the court’s decision. The prince received Sayn-Wittgenstein in the capital of his kingdom on at least two occasions in the capacity of “representative for His Majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain.”

Cano’s lawyer said Sayn-Wittgenstein seemed to have exercised in a role that is reserved to the authorities and public officers, including organizing the king’s agenda during official visits, traveling in Spanish military airplanes, negotiating in the name of the king, etc.

There are reports of trip by the head of state and the German princess to sheikhdoms, where the king assisted during the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Sayn-Wittgenstein was received by the authorities together with the king and assisted in dinners with the first ladies of other heads of state invited to the event, including the presidents of Rwanda, Gabon and Chechenya.

The close friendship between Sayn-Wittgenstein and King Carlos attracted media attention since the king’s widely criticized elephant-hunting trip to Botswana. Sayn-Wittgenstein participated in the hunting game.

It’s an appropriate friendship of royalty, a friendship between a king, a prince, a princess, a friendship in a capitalist kingdom with bourgeois democracy, a friendship spread from a modern capitaldom to medieval kingdom, where a princess from another land can usurp a king’s public functions.

So, there in the “story” are many characters, incidents, processes and places: capital, its crisis, intensification and widening of appropriation of labor, young, old, retirees, revenue for press, legislative authorization for earning from advertising of prostitution as a way out of “hard pressed” profit-situation, judiciary’s nod to spending of public money for private indulgence, four-star ordinary “hotel”, Formula 1 Grand Prix, king, usurpation of royal duties by a princess, regal friendship, kingdoms, sheikhdoms, and Rwanda, Gabon, Botswana and Chechnya. Almost a capitalist democratic fairy tale! Commoners’, workers’, miners’ struggle for survival, a tiny fraction of the money the rich spoil, are on the outskirt of these dominions of capital.

The story continues.

Spain has to implement a restructuring plan for its banks as a condition of financial aid of €100bn from the EU with an interest rate between 3-4%. The plan has to be presented by the end of July to the Eurogroup and to the eurozone finance ministers. A troika of the EC, the IMF and the ECB will control the implementation work. German- and Brussels-dictations, not the Spanish state will decide the speed of the reform. Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Commission, likes centralized supervision of the banks.

Luis de Guindos, the Spanish finance minister, considers the terms “very favorable” as Ireland pays an interest rate at over 5% on its loan from the EU and the IMF. “This is a loan […] very favorable – much more favorable than the market ones”, said de Guindos. The minister happy with “favorable” terms would have turned sad if the source of interest was kept in mind. It is appropriation of labor.

And, honorable also as it has not been officially termed bailout. The Spanish prime minister is happy with the honor.

Although Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, at a recent conference of her Christian Democrats confirmed: The plan to help the Spanish banks “of course includes conditions”. Spain must continue with “its tough reforms.”

The Spanish banks, in essence, the state, has to accept more rigorous supervision by Brussels bosses.

Prime minister Rajoy’s rightist Popular Party having absolute majority in the parliament and Rubalcaba’s Socialist Party, the main opposition party, are in agreement on major issues. The central bank chief had to leave early. Actually the two ruling parties tactfully have not allowed the central bank chief to explain in the parliament the causes of nationalizing the major Spanish bank.

Political storm is gathering in Spain as indulgence and usurpation by the rich and the powerful form one part of the story. The other part, the people, the miners, the working class, their suffering and discontent with awarded austerity are other actors and factors. Recent opinion poll indicates the trend of dissatisfaction.

Euro’s political respite in Greece may turn temporary as Spanish problem is still threatening bigger interests. Whatever the outcome the Spanish people’s suffering is increasing as is their discontent. There are signs of increasing political crisis in Spain.

Murdoch’s Iraq War

“Mysteries” of the Iraq War are getting exposed: Rupert Murdoch, the media Moghul, pressed Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to hasten joining the Iraq War. Murdoch did it on behalf of the US Republicans. And, the war took over 100,000 lives.

It is not only the interests behind waging the war, but also the principles and interests bourgeois press uphold, and the secretive and conspiratorial way bourgeois democracy works, lies are fabricated, readers are informed, and mass psychology is manipulated are being divulged.

The Guardian, British newspaper and AFP, news agency, reported the facts. The news reports said:

“Rupert Murdoch took part in an ‘over-crude’ attempt by US Republicans to push Tony Blair into action before the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister’s ex-media chief claimed [Alastair Campbell…].

“Alastair Campbell said the News Corporation media baron warned Blair in a phone call of the dangers in delaying signing up to the March 19, 2003 invasion, as part of an attempt to speed up Britain joining the military campaign.”

Campbell’s assertions were made in The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, diaries from his years at Blair’s side.

The news reports said:

“Campbell suggested Murdoch made moves to help the right-wing Republican Party of then US president George W. Bush before the March 18 vote in the […] House of Commons on deploying troops to Iraq, which was passed.”

Citing Campbell the news reports said:

On March 11, 2003, Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us […]”

The reports said:

“‘Both TB [Tony Blair] and I felt it was prompted by Washington, and another example of their over-crude diplomacy. Murdoch was pushing all the Republican buttons, how the longer we waited the harder it got.’

“Campbell said Murdoch’s intervention came ‘out of the blue’.

“‘On one level (Murdoch) was trying to be supportive, saying ‘I know this is a very difficult place, my papers are going to support you on this’. Fine.
“‘But I think Tony did feel that there was something a bit crude about it. It was another very right-wing voice saying to him: ‘Look, isn’t it about time you got on with this?’”
The news reports said:

“Gordon Brown agitated so aggressively against Tony Blair – demanding a departure date soon after the 9/11 attacks – that Downing Street concluded in 2002 that the then chancellor was ‘hell-bent on TB’s destruction’.

Murdoch’s “worldwide contacts through the businesses that” he operated should not be missed while going through the news items.

However, in his witness statement to the Leveson inquiry Murdoch said: “As for the three telephone calls with the then prime minister, Tony Blair, in 2003, I cannot recall what I discussed with him now, […] or indeed even if I spoke with him at all. I understand that published reports indicate that calls were placed by him to me. What I am sure about is that I would not in any telephone call have conveyed a secret message of support for the war; the NI titles’ position on Iraq was a matter of public record before 11 March 2003.” His famous declaration: “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything.” He cited “four articles from the Sun and the News of the World which illustrated their ‘pro-war stance’ before 11 March 2003 when the main phone call took place.”

The media Moghul’s company termed the assertion that he lobbied Blair over the Iraq War on behalf of the US Republicans as “complete rubbish”. It said: “Furthermore, there isn’t even any evidence in Alastair Campbell’s diaries to support such a ridiculous claim.”

It should be mentioned that News International is News Corp.’s British newspaper arm, publishing The Times, The Sun and The Sunday Times. Blair faced a challenge getting his Labour Party lawmakers to back UK’s involvement. Many of them rebelled. (“Murdoch pushed Blair on Iraq: ex-media chief” and “Rupert Murdoch pressured Tony Blair over Iraq, says Alastair Campbell”, June 16, 2012)

Already known is the Bush – Blair 2003 Iraq memo or Manning memo, a secret memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair. The historic meeting took place on January 31, 2003 in the White House. The memo, written by David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign adviser, showed that the US had already decided on the invasion of Iraq at that point. Manning participated at the meeting.

The memo showed Bush and Blair made a secret deal to carry out the invasion regardless of whether WMD were discovered by UN inspectors. The fact contradicts statements Blair made to the British parliament that Saddam Hussein would be given a final chance to disarm.

Existence of the memo was made by Philippe Sands in his book Lawless World. The New York Times collected the memo and confirmed its authenticity.

Then, there is the Colin Powell case. While arguing for invading Iraq Powel claimed that Saddam was hiding a secret biological weapons program. Powell dramatically and confidently held up a vial he said could contain anthrax during his presentation of the Iraq case at the UN in 2003. But, later, the claim proved bogus.

Powel relied on information provided by an Iraqi defector. The defector was code-named “Curveball”. CBS News identified Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi as “Curveball”. Rafid made the false claims to German intelligence officials. The US used the claim that ultimately turned a lie. But the Empire used the false information to start the war. The UN inspectors found no evidence of a biological weapons program, which was claimed.

In interviews with The Guardian, Rafid told the way he sought asylum in Germany and wanted to see an end to Saddam’s regime. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that […]”

The “story” of falsehood and fabrication doesn’t end there.

Citing Britain’s The Independent, Thomas Ferguson, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote: The Independent news report “buries forever all claims that the US, the UK, and other governments did not have oil on their minds as they prepared to invade Iraq.” He referred to a book that drew on more than a thousand secret government documents. These show meetings between the UK government and British oil companies in the run up to the war. “These demonstrate that all the denials in London and Washington that policymakers were not concerned about oil as they invaded were as false as the famous cover story about weapons of mass destruction.” These also show that all the governments were negotiating over rights to oil long before the invasion and that they were working closely with their companies. Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force was reviewing documents on Iraqi oil well before the attack on 9/11. (“Oil-Soaked Politics: Secret U.K. Docs on Iraq”)

So, the profit issue emerges. The Iraq war brought profit to all interested: weaponeer, supplier, infrastructureer, defense contractor, mercenary companies, and a section of media and politicians.

According to MSN Money, Halliburton’s KBR, Inc. division made $17.2 bn in the desert war in the 2003-2006 period, which was one-fifth of KBR’s total revenue for the 2006 fiscal year. Halliburton was involved with construction and maintenance of military bases, oil field repairs, and infrastructure rebuilding projects in the country.
Veritas Capital Fund/DynCorp, the private equity fund, gathered $1.44 bn through its DynCorp subsidiary by imparting training to new Iraqi police forces. The company is termed by many as a ‘state within a state’.

Through repair, maintenance, etc. work in Iraqi oil fields the Washington Group International gathered $931 mn in the period 2003-2006. Through the work of munitions disposal the Environmental Chemical got $878 mn by the end of fiscal 2006. The Aegis of the UK made $430 mn. (“25 Most Vicious Iraq War Profiteers”)
And, after the Bush Blair, Murdoch, Halliburton war business where Iraq stood?

Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent quoted Mohammed Abdullah, an Iraqi in his Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: “They said they came to liberate us. Liberate us from what? They came and said they would free us. Free us from what? We have traditions, morals, and customs. We are Arabs. We’re different from the West. Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture, and they want to wipe out our culture, absolutely.”

Iraq now stands devastated, a bold sign of Naked Imperialism (title of a book by John Bellamy Foster). Parts of life in the land have been wiped out. Does imperialism have the power to restore what has been lost in Iraq? It’s incapable. Imperialism’s devastating power lacks power to create and nourish life and nature. Iraq is one of the monuments of destruction imperialism has constructed in many parts of the world.

Of Birds, Rivers And Greed

Greed leaves no place for singing birds and murmuring rivers. Maximizing accumulation is the force that drives greed. Appropriating nature and labor is the cheapest way greed finds for maximization of accumulation.

But birds sustain a living ecology. Rivers flow to the same destination: sustain life.

Birds and rivers are required also for cruel appropriators as the greedy group loves only their sustenance, and a living ecology is needed for sustenance, and birds and rivers are part of ecological system that help sustain life. But turning inconsiderate to life and ecology, to birds, rivers, air and soil is the irony of appropriation. Thus appropriators are directly in conflict with ecology.

Facts from almost all lands, from the North and the South Hemispheres reveal the trend: onslaught on ecology.

In Europe, according to a Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme survey, 36 species of farmland birds including the skylark and the meadow pipit have declined in their number: from 600 million to 300 million between 1980 and 2009. Britain is one of the worst suffering countries by losses to its farmland birds. The EU enforced farming policies are the catalysts for this catastrophe. Destroying hedgerows, wetlands and meadows has “contributed” to this bird-massacre.

What's the “holy” reason for the destruction? It's more and more; more profit.

Ittefaq , a leading Bangla Dhaka daily, reported on May 24, 2012: Industrial wastes, including effluent and smoke from 16 re-rolling mills, 49 brick kilns and other industrial units including paper pulp, fertilizer, textile, dyeing, battery, rubber, plastic factories, more than hundred in numbers, are threatening life and occupation of around three hundred-thousand dwellers in Roopganj, an almost industrial area near the Bangladesh capital city Dhaka. The residents are not feeling safe with air and water. There is noise pollution. Wastes are being drained into the Sitalakkhaa and Baaloo, two rivers running through the area.

These two incidents, part of a process, one from an advanced capitalist country and another from a peripheral country, are not isolated facts. Now-a-days media around the world carry thousands of similar news and facts that unravel relations between the type of economy and defacing of the ecology and environment. Now-a-days ecological crisis threatening all forms of life in this earth need no explanation. Even masters of this on-going ecocide – the owners of capital – don't dare to publicly deny the crisis, their sin.

About two years ago, WWF, the international organization involved in the area of ecology, said in its Living Planet report: A second planet will be required by 2030 to meet our needs as over-use of Earth's natural resources and carbon pollution have become critical. If all human being in this world used resources at the same per capita rate as the US or the UAE, four and a half planets would be needed. More than 70 countries were exhausting their freshwater sources at an alarming, unsustainable rate. About two-thirds of these countries experience water scarcity ranging from moderate to severe. In 2007, the world's 6.8 billion humans were living 50% beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability. The report highlighted the rich-poor ecological gap. In 1970-2007, an index of biodiversity showed a world decline of almost 30%. In the tropics, it was alarming: 60%.

No brain with logic will claim that the acts are isolated from the world economic system: capitalism. “From the outset,” Joe Bageant, author of the book about working class in America Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War , writes, “capitalism was always about the theft of the people's sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft – the final looting of the source of their sustenance – nature.” (“Our Plunder of Nature will End up Killing Capitalism and Our Obscene Lifestyles”, Countercurrents , July 13, 2010 )

“The main feature of capitalism is the seductive assertion that you can get something for nothing in this world.” (ibid.) Owners of this system, the capitalists, Joe continues, “hate any sort of cost.” They, he describes, “remain unimpressed by global warming, or melting polar ice caps, or Southwestern desert armadillos showing up in Canada , or hurricanes getting bigger and more numerous every year.”

These are the elites in control of the world environment in continents and countries. “Just before the economy blew out,” according to Joe, “these elites held slightly less than $80 trillion. After the blowout/bailout, their combined investment wealth was estimated at a little over $83 trillion. To give some idea, this is four years of the gross output of all the human beings on earth.”

This massive money power takes hold of political power. Owning this unimaginably monstrous money-political power system they put their footprint on ecology that is changing the planet's environment irreversibly.

This system, the masters of the system in the center, in the periphery, in between the center and the periphery, try their best to maximize profit by minimizing cost, by appropriating labor, robbing nature, grabbing everything within their reach, putting costs on public. Pollution, destruction of ecology and ruination of nature thus creep into public domain – a human concern.

Acts of the masters are turning into crime, crime against the planet, against posterity, against humanity.

The World Future Council leaders said: “These are crimes against the future … These are crimes that will not only injure future generations, but destroy any future at all for millions of people.”

The Council has called for appointing “ombudspersons for future generations”, “guardians appointed at global, national and local levels whose job would be to help safeguard environmental and social conditions by speaking up authoritatively for future generations in all areas of policy-making. This could take the shape of a parliamentary commissioner, a guardian, a trustee or an auditor, depending on how it best fits into a nation's governance structure.”

But questions are there: How far the ombudspersons can act where power structure, economy and political power is of, by and for polluters, grabbers, eco-murderers? If they can act, then, why do environment law/court/ministry/inspectors, depending on arrangement in countries, can't act? What will happen if polluters grab that proposed holy post as have happened in countries by different lobbies/interests/gangs? What's the guarantee that the proposed holy persons' observations/edicts/verdicts will be implemented? Are not there instances of trampling/violation of all basic, fundamental, moral, ethical, human, natural, principled rights/practices/conventions/laws/rules around the world, in countries?

Out of their sense of urgency the WFC leaders' suggestion sounds nice, but not functional. It's detached from reality, the socio-economic-environmental -political reality.

What's the reality?

An answer is provided by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster in their seminal analysis What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011): Capitalism is a system that must continually expand, a system that, by its very nature, will eventually come up against the reality of finite natural resources, a system geared to expansionist growth in the search for profits that will inevitably transgress planetary boundaries.

By its very nature the system stands against ecology and environment as its only concern is profit, nothing else. Standing for environment will lead to questioning the ever hungry system.

Pushing 1 billion persons down to extreme poverty, and enriching a few, whose consumption is threatening the planet is one of the major “contributions” of the system. Other than the hungry and starved, there are energy poor, electricity poor, water poor, information poor, basic rights poor, safety poor, they are the poor masses deprived of honor and dignity, and there are the food rich, energy rich, electricity rich, water rich, information rich, luxury rich, power and privilege rich, resource rich, consumption rich, the rich few controlling everything.

Imbalance and inequity at this level can't sustain environment and ecology. The first one, imbalance and inequity, is linear, ever expanding while the later one, environment and ecology, demands diversity, tolerance, consideration, accommodation. Observance related to environment turns hollow and chattering if this aspect of political economy is ignored.

One of the books edited by Farooque Chowdhury from Dhaka is the recently published The Great Financial Crisis, What Next, interviews with John Bellamy Foster .

“United” They Fall: Grexit Haunts Conflicting Eurozone

Conflicting eurozone is searching conciliation while being haunted by the specter of Grexit – Greece 's exit from the eurozone.

At the just concluded G-8 summit the conciliation effort produced an ad hoc understanding, and the witness was an isolated Angela Merkel. A deeper dividing line ran through the communiqué the summit produced.

Now, as the specter of Grexit appears larger Merkel and co. is airing a plan for a smaller divide and a stronger union. Jörg Asmussen, the former German deputy finance minister and, at present, the German board member at the European Central Bank, a Merkel-voice, has floated the idea of a federalized political and financial union within the EU: a politically integrated eurozone splitting the Union into two, with the core forming a “banking, fiscal, and political union”, temporarily abandon its expansion plans in the Balkans and Turkey, and the European parliament wielding more extensive powers.

Is it the dream of the German capital? The idea simultaneously shows aspirations and limitations of a section of capital in Europe that aspires to be all dominant but lacks the power to dominate. Materializing the plan is an almost impossible task now.

Merkel finds herself increasingly isolated, a show of disunity, while she represents a capital adamant to impose its diktat on the weak – prey to powerful capital. In the G-8 summit, Barak Obama kept a hand of friendship on the shoulder of François Hollande, the socialist French president.

In the coming formal and informal meetings in Europe , Hollande will stand closer to Mario Monti, the Italian leader. And, David Cameron will play the second fiddle, which will be, at times, insignificant, and at times, will not sound sweet to Merkel's ears.

Hollande will push the Germans to accept the idea of growth measures and eurobonds. But that's not acceptable to the Germans. Herman Van Rompuy, the European council president, appeared to lend support to the German agenda while Italy and Britain  are expected to back Hollande.

These testify Merkel's further isolation in Europe , fractures in the continent, and conflicting interests that dominating capital fails to unify.

The G-8 summit found a seemingly adamant Merkel. But Obama's choice was conciliation as he was in need of that posture. The German position carries risk of aggravating European crisis that in turn may push up the US jobless number. Obama can't afford the number ahead of his election travel. Cameron tried to act as a conciliator between contending parties. The Anglo-American alliance jointly encountered the Merkel position. She had to make a retreat.

The German leader considered that it was not the business of the G-8 to tell the EU states the way to handle their economy. But the summit communiqué iterated the right of the super-group to discuss the state of the European economy, and the German opposition was by passed. The super-group signaled: Europe is yet not a German domain.

The communiqué committed the G-8 to “take all necessary steps” to strengthen their economies. It said: “ Greece should remain in the eurozone”.

The official document declared in its opening paragraph: “Our imperative is to promote growth and jobs.” For the time being, the communiqué stands as a document of victory for Obama and Hollande. However, differences on policy issues persist.

Trans-Atlantic interests and power equation thus got reflected in the communiqué. But Grexit continues to rock the boat.

Grexit is an interesting issue! It unites, and it divides, it makes unsure, and it makes stubborn. Behind closed doors, the prime actors threat Greece to evict while publicly they assure Greek's membership in the zone. A section is scared of Grexit while another section calculates possible losses in case of the exit.

The interests differ as they are not sure of the way to deal with the issues emanating from a sick economy that is threatening the continents' economies. A weak scars a strong! The fear of chain-reaction of the Greece syndrome is now haunting eurozone politicians.

All bank-interests have united to threat the Greek voters. They are now warning Greece , and manipulating Greek politics so that pro-austerity politicians turn winner in the coming election. Their message is point blank: Voting for Syriza, the radical left coalition opposing austerity and bankers, will be a dangerous gamble.

In the task of warning the Greek voters Cameron has lent his voice to Merkel. He has issued a warning. In Chicago , he said: “We now have to send a very clear message to people in Greece : there is a choice – you can either vote to stay in the euro, with all the commitments you've made, or if you vote another way you're effectively voting to leave.”

A drama of denial and assertion preceded the Cameron-warning. It was reported that in a telephone conversation with Karolos Papoulias, the Greek president, Merkel suggested Greece hold a referendum on euro membership as part of the general election. But Merkel's spokesperson denied the report. However, the Greek interim Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos's office stated that the chancellor had presented the proposal during a telephone conversation with Papoulias. “It is true”, said a Greek government spokesperson.

Cameron and the German leader stood together. Grexit has united.

Jens Weidmann, the Bundesbank president, warned Europe 's central banks not to increase their exposure to Greece because of political uncertainty there before the elections. Is it a banker's way of bargaining or putting pressure on client?

Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said Greece had to elect a government that continued to adhere to the international bailout program. “If Greece … wants to remain in the euro then they have to accept the conditions. Otherwise it isn't possible. No responsible candidate can hide that from the electorate”, Schäuble said. Ken Clarke, the British justice secretary, has warned: Greece will face a disastrous future, and may be forced to leave the euro if it votes for “cranky extremists”. A direct instruction to voters!

More threats to the Greek voters are there. Martin Schulz, the European parliament president, said a €130bn rescue package reached with international creditors in March could not be renegotiated. “ Greece […] shouldn't self-destruct”, said the German politician. “We want Greece to remain part of our family, of the European Union,” said Jose Barroso, European Commission president. “That being said, the ultimate resolve to stay in the euro must come from Greece itself.” The EC is insisting that Greece must honor the austerity measures. Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg , said: The coming election would be Greece 's last chance. If Greece fails to form a government that respects the conditions for previously agreed to financial aid to Greece set by the EU, IMF and the ECB, “then it is over”.

Jean-Claude Trichet, the former European Central Bank president, argued that eurozone states should be able to declare fellow members bankrupt, and take over their tax and spending policy. But the idea was dismissed by economist Nouriel Roubini as “totally undermining national sovereignty”. Roubini has missed the already undermined national sovereignty in Greece and Italy . [One can now easily perceive the way poor countries in the periphery are dictated, threatened, and manipulated, the way their sense of national honor is trampled. Junior employees from countries in center ask these peripheral countries: “Do it.”]

The threats, warnings, etc. reveal the higher level of stake in Greece with about €400bn in external debts. “Officially”, a press report says, “eurozone governments say they're not talking about a Greek exit. But it's a different story behind closed doors. Finance ministers meeting in Brussels last Monday threatened to evict Greece .”

Exact Greexit-chain reaction is unknown to all. There are assumptions and fears: From market melt down to political backlash to bankruptcies to recession, and a lot will follow.

The European sovereign debt crisis has also become a banking crisis. Spain is on the brink. The country can uncork bigger problem. The crisis has been exacerbated by the revelation that the Spanish deficit is larger than previously feared, putting pressure on its sick banking sector. Merkel summoned her Spanish counterpart, proud, conservative Mariano Rajoy, to meet her.

Banks in Italy and Portugal are in “solidarity” also. All of them are facing risks. They may drag down the German banking system. Britain is heavily exposed to the crisis. The US will not be immune to the Greek disease. The US Fed is becoming increasingly concerned about the situation in Europe .

Rating agency Moody's has already downgraded 26 Italian and 16 Spanish banks. Spanish banks were sitting on €148bn of bad loans in March. The proportion of bad loans of Spanish banks has risen to an 18-year high.

Fitch has put three Cypriot banks on rating watch negative. Fitch warned that Cypriot banks remain highly sensitive to Greece-risk.

A loss of confidence in the banks will be catastrophic. Fear of a full-scale bank run is high. The consequences will be serious.

Deposits in Greek banks have already come down by almost a third. Greek savers are withdrawing euros from their bank accounts. Recently, in a single day, about €900 million was withdrawn. The Greek banks, according to an analyst with Moody's, have become “economically insolvent”.

The European Central Bank has confirmed that a number of Greek banks have now been cut off from its refinancing operations.

Wealthy individuals in crisis-hit countries are moving billions of euros to areas they consider safer. There are signs that section of French rich are moving to London .

“And now”, Paul Krugman writes, “comes the moment of truth.” (“Apocalypse Fairly Soon: The Moment Of Truth In Europe ”, The New York Times , May 18, 2012 )

Terming the euro as a “grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union” Krugman assumes: “[T]he euro as a whole would blow up. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.”

He echoes the already widely expressed fear: “[A] euro breakup would have negative ripple effects throughout the world. For the biggest costs of European policy failure would probably be political.”

Euro was one of the biggest projects of capitalism in Europe . Now, a significant portion of capitalism in Europe – the eurozone – is struggling within, with self. Its intricate inefficiency is now coming out to view of the common persons. It's not its tragedy, it's one of its attributes. It dreams to encompass all and everything but it doesn't know to control the forces it nourishes and unleashes. Contradictions it is confronting now were created by none, but itself. It has widened the extent and consequences of the contradictions, to far flung areas, crossing oceans.

In the continent, it is barbarously waging a class war not only against labor, but also against broader society, not only in a single country, but in countries, and crossing the continent, it is endangering not only poor countries, but also its class allies – the uncouth rich – in those poor countries. It's its capacity that undermines its legitimacy. It's its power, a power that can try to survive only at the cost of others, class enemies and class allies.

It is intervening in countries' political system, and it is propagating non-interference. It is dictating countries, and it is propagating democracy. It's standing on fault lines, and it's sure of its destiny.

Grexit , Spain , Italy , Portugal , and euro-disunity and euro-unity are facilitating further shifts in the continental plates.

Protests In Spain Greece France And Britain

Eurozone is in turmoil. Protests in different forms, from election verdict to marches, against bankers are razing countries in Europe while an indefinite-Greece is making euroscape scene blurred.

Bankers are uncertain with the Euro-situation as they train the continent appearing sick. There is voters rejecting bankers, there is near-unprecedented police protest questioning profit, there is politics of people standing opposed to politics of bankers. It is like a torch alighted with the Parthenon Marbles in Greece and being relayed to Britain while the bankers yet don’t know the equation of politics with debt and austerity. The Euro-financial crisis and Euro-political problems are reacting with each other.

Peoples in France and Greece have rejected austerity measures in national elections, local election in Italy has conveyed the same message, Greece is nourishing its democracy in a political deadlock, people including police in Britain have demonstrated opposing austerity measures, Indignados are marching in Spain shadowed by banking crisis, a government in the Netherlands has collapsed, financial measures in Ireland and Portugal are being questioned, French economy is ailing. This is the reality in the continent.

Each political move and whisper, peoples’ each expression in Europe is making London’s FTSE 100 index, New York’s Dow Jones Industrial Average, Germany’s blue chip DAX index, the Paris stock market, the European EuroStoxx, Asian markets, Greece’s exchange jump or dance or sleep. None of these likes the political developments in France and Greece. Uncertainty dominates the continent.

Klaas Knot, governing council member of European Central Bank, said the risk of a double dip recession had become reality in Europe. De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, in its latest semi-annual risk report on the Dutch financial sector has warned that with an unresolved eurozone crisis Europe faces a lost decade: a longer period of stagnation. Weak economic growth, lower consumer spending, inadequate investment could create the scene. Countries in the periphery are turning vulnerable with weak public finance and economic performance, and frail banking sector. The Bank of France in its latest economic forecasts has warned that the French economy is part-way through a six-month period of stagnation.

Citing a poll, Bloomberg reported that 57% of its 1,253 investors, analysts and traders assumed that at least one country will abandon the euro by year-end. However, a Reuters poll found 35 of the polled 65 economists hoped that Greece will be in the euro at the end of 2013.

But the Greek-eurozone situation is near-hopeless. Public and politics often nullify pundits.

Concern over the Greece stalemate has been expressed by the Institute of International Finance. The IIF represented Greece’s creditors in its debt deal. If Greece were to quit the euro, the IIF’s members would be hit with huge losses. French bank BNP Paribas has calculated the impact of a Greek exit on its economy: an assumed Greexit would wipe out 20% of Greek GDP, push up inflation by 40-50%, and send the country’s debt/GDP ratio jumping to over 200%. A Greexit would be bluster to the Euro banking sector.

Now, it seems, Europe’s central bankers are preparing for exit of Greece from the eurozone. German central bank chief Jens Weidmann has warned: No new aid to Greece if bailout commitments are not kept by Athens. The Irish central bank chief Patrick Honohan doesn’t consider a Greexit would be fatal to the euro. EU Economic and Monetary Commissioner Olli Rehn is confident: Europe is “more resilient” to a possible Greexit.

Greece: People against creditors

Verdict of the Greek people suffering under creditors’ command has been proclaimed in the last election: Reject the arrangement of making bankers richer.

But, the mainstream politicians, mostly rejected by the people, are united in opposing the people’s verdict: reject creditors’ conditions – austerity. Under warnings from the IMF, the German Chancellor and the European Commission these politicians are exhausting their energy to form a coalition that would toe to the creditors. The deadline is May 17. Karolos Papoulias, the Greek president, is now striving to forge a coalition so that an immediate election can be avoided. This exercise – overturn people’s verdict – is the bourgeois democratic practice. Already three bigger parties – the centre-right New Democracy, far-left bloc Syriza and socialist Pasok – have failed to form a government.

A fresh poll, almost inevitable, is expected to be held by June 17 at the latest. A second election would change the Greek political dynamic that in turn would react in bankers’ headquarters.

Creditors in no phase of human history are concerned with plight of common persons. Greece is losing 922 jobs a day. The unemployment rate rose to 21.7% in February. In terms of number, it was more than a million. In the 15-24 age group, the rate was a record high: 54%. In February 2010, it was 15.2%. This forms a mirror of bailout-austerity measures imposed by creditors, and one of the central issues shaping politics in the country.

The European Financial Stability Facility, the €700bn bailout fund, has agreed to pay out the scheduled €5.2bn to Greece. As part of the bailout deal more than half of it will effectively be returned to the European central bank and other eurozone central banks within a week. Athens also lacks cash for salaries. As first installment, €4.2bn will be delivered and the fate of the rest will actually be decided by political development in Greece, a warning to the people: behave as the creditors command, otherwise, salaries and wages will be withheld.

Creditor created panic is driving the actors in the on-going political drama in Athens. But the people have defied the EU-IMF lordship. Aleka Papariga, the Communist Party general secretary, has called for new elections “to put an end to the mockery of” forming coalitions. While reiterating her party’s position to stay out of any government that might be formed she accused Syriza of irresponsibility and of undergoing continuous mutations. She added: “Under a leftist disguise it attempts to convince the people that workers and capitalists can coexist and prosper.” Syriza avoids taking a clear stance on NATO membership and major foreign policy issues, said Aleka. Adventurism sometimes is a powerful attraction.

Coming days will intensify political turbulence in Greece that will be nervously monitored in Brussels, and in eurozone capitals.

France: Aspiration will be compromised

Compromise will be the political mantra of Francois Hollande, the new socialist avatar of France. His jubilant supporters around the Palace de la Bastille thought history was in the making as he once declared the world of finance was his “real enemy”. But the reality under capital’s command is different.

Hollande will make his promised visit to Berlin within hours of his swearing-in for talks with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. Merkel is ready to welcome the moderate socialist with “open arms”. She said Franco-German cooperation was “essential for Europe”. The French leader also perceives the reality. Bank interest will enforce a compromise. Agenda of the Berlin meeting is nothing new: the old eurozone crisis and reaffirmation of the Franco-German partnership, which will flow along the undercurrent of competition.

Hollande adhering to status quo will turn Merkel’s competitor-ally. His election promise was: renegotiate the eurozone’s fiscal pact, the Merkel-Sarkozy brainchild. But the German leader is stubborn: no re-opening of the pact. Hollande favors joint EU investment in major projects while Merkel’s choice is structural adjustments to labor markets and pensions. Hollande prefers boosting growth with more funds to the European Investment Bank. Volition of the stronger economy shall prevail.

However, bankers are going to consider the issue of growth along with their loved austerity. Voters have alerted the bankers.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy has invited EU leaders to a special summit on growth this month. It will be followed by a “growth pact” to be adopted at the EU summit in June. Merkel and Hollande will join together. It’s not only a compromise of the two leaders; it’s also a compromise with reality. It’s a lesson all bosses everywhere decline to learn; but, reality isn’t obedient to bosses’ dictates.

With the electoral promise to “change the destiny of France” Hollande now faces an ailing economy in home: faltering growth, coiling public debt, sick industries, record unemployment. The French voters rejected rightist policies. It was their protest. The French socialist’s electoral promises include creating 60,000 new jobs in education, tax those earning over €1million euros a year with a 75% rate. But he will have to encounter obstacles difficult to circumvent.

Britain: For public, not for profit

In England and Wales, police officers held one of the biggest demonstrations in recent times. Their demand: halt cuts and privatization of the service, and full industrial rights. There banners proclaimed: “Police for public, not for profit”. Their number: More than 30,000, claimed the Police Federation. Family members also joined the marchers.

Citing the participants, the British press said: There is anger as the rank and file officers face cuts to their pay, pensions and changes to their working conditions. A press report quoted one detective constable: “Our problem is we don’t have a union, so this march is the strongest action we can take. I think there are a lot of us wanting full industrial rights, and the right to strike.”

The incident is significant as it shows the way anger accumulates, fault line appears, expression gets organized, and expression denies to getting subdued. It’s a process within society. It’s not that Lenin was there, and he sent Bolshevik agitators there. Rather, there is an incident, now exposed, of “love” and betrayal – police officer infiltrating environment movement, etc. acting as falling into love with activists and continuing with following phases, provoking novice activists, then, betraying, and, then, getting exposed, then, at last, finding himself abandoned by all his loved, and, standing before a court of law. Elites and their lackeys in all lands are incapable to learn from incidents of “love” and betrayal, incapable to learn from struggle of the masses, which is not dependent on individual’s wishes.

There in Britain the emerging issues are, as one writes, mammoth wealth, the forgotten section of the society, “growing gap”, “democratic deficit”, “the cabinet stands accused of being divorced from normal people”, “fractures run deeper”, “the worsening plight of swaths of our society [flying] under the national radar”, eroding support for the homeless, victims of domestic violence, those with mental health problems, the elderly and alone, children in broken homes, “the spectre of a forgotten Britain becoming reality”. Serious questions shall emerge if one adds the way a section of media played with public mind by hacking telephones, by collaborating with powerful politicians, the way it made money and propagated its ideology. A careful scrutiny of the incident may impress upon that Lenin told very little about shameless, corrupt bourgeois press. But the revolutionary told brute facts now being confirmed by the incidents in Murdoch’s empire.

These incidents are influencing the British society, influencing the common people’s perception; but the bankers are training their might for further plundering, for further cuts.

Spain: Indignados again

Indignados are again on the march. Their slogan: “We need to take back all the wealth and redistribute it fairly”. They are in tens of thousands. Scores of cities across Spain are holding protests against politicians and bankers. It is one-year anniversary of the movement.

There is government crack down on the protest. Police is not going to tolerate encampments of the protesters. The time period for protest has already been dictated by the authority. One shouldn’t forget: It’s bourgeois democracy.

With youth unemployment at 50% in Spain the movement’s call for social justice, wealth distribution, human rights and peace is universal. Stop proposed budget cuts in health and education is one of the major demands of the Indignados. The demand has deeper root in the society. But, bankers and their political friends decline to recognize the root.

People in Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the UK are also participating in the movement.

However, the Spanish elites have their agenda. Promoting the collaboration between bankers, real estate lords and state further Bankia, the country’s fourth largest bank, has partly been nationalized. Most shares of Bankia were once sold to ordinary persons. Now, the ordinary share holders face large losses. Spain’s banks have already consumed about €16bn of public funds. Within the next few months they will hopefully consume another €50bn. It’s bankers’ boon.

It’s not a footnote: Nazis in Greece

Near-economic-disaster, common persons’ desperate condition, servitude by mainstream political leadership, sale out of democratic principles, weakness in political education, are fuelling rise of Nazis in Greek politics.

History tells capital, at times, needs help of Nazis, and capital embraces the help. At times of crisis, capital takes draconian steps. Nazis/fascists act as capital’s obedient tool to impose these steps. The Nazis create an environment of fear. They threat press as a step of muzzling down freedom of expression. At times, Nazis are taken casually, are considered tactical ally, and are appeased, only to get annihilated by the Nazis.

With 21 seats and 7% of the votes the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is now threatening journalists, demanding that journalists should stand up when its leader enters a press conference, wanting to seal Greek borders with landmines, and promising to “rid the country of their stench” – immigrant workers. The neo-Nazi leader Mihaloliakos praises Hitler while his followers use an ancient symbol resembling the swastika as its logo, learn from books on Aryan supremacy, and are linked to racist attacks on immigrants. Greek journalist Xenia Kounalaki wrote that Greeks should ignore Golden Dawn. She has been threatened: She should “watch her back”. The mayor of Nemea Vangelis Andrianakos has also received threats from the Golden Dawn.

But, all these are not the concluding parts of the incidents in the continent as capital there still occupies space for manipulation. A lot of dramas still are to be staged there as contradictions are yet to sharpen further.

Agitating Argentine Oil

Argentine hydrocarbon-initiative is now agitating capital. It is more agitating to capital-interests as it energizes a trend – national control over national resources. To these interests, it’s “Chavez model”. It seems these interests are being haunted by a Chavez-spirit. A section of mainstream is making almost similar claim.

Capital disapproves people’s rights over people’s resources. Argentina’s move related to local oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (State Petroleum Reserves, YPF), controlled by Repsol, Spanish oil and gas company, is thus creating furor among all concerned with capital.

In mid-April, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the Argentinean president, introduced a bill in congress that would give Argentina a 51% stake in YPF, the largest oil producer in the country. Cristina said the measure is aimed at recovering the nation’s sovereignty over its hydrocarbon resources, and it “is not a model of statism”. Governors of oil-producing provinces have already withdrawn about 15 oil leases, representing 18% of YPF’s crude production. They complained the company failed to keep its promises to develop them.

Declaring exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons “national public interest” in order to “guarantee economic development with social equity” Cristina’s bill says building up the country’s supply is a priority. The bill proposes that out of the YPF controlling stake taken over, 51% will be held by the central government and the rest will be distributed to the oil-producing provinces. The government will not extend its hands to the 17.09% of YPF shares traded on stock exchanges. About the 25% stake held by the private Argentine Grupo Petersen is undecided.

Legislative process for recovering of sovereignty will be completed within weeks. There is widespread public support to the initiative: referring to opinion polls the Buenos Aires daily La Nación informed 80% support. A number of opposition lawmakers supported the move. The movement for the recovery of Argentina’s energy sovereignty is also in “complete agreement”. People celebrated the move.

But people and capital-interest don’t move hand-in-hand. The EU turned furious; the European block condemned Argentina’s move; the EU parliament called for Argentina-sanctions; and one conservative member of the European Parliament questioned whether Argentina should be allowed to remain in the G-20. The European Commission warned that nationalizing YPF would be bad for investment climate in Argentina, and said the EC backs Spain, Argentina’s largest foreign investor.

Opposition also came from the usual circle. Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, and Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, strongly criticized the Argentine initiative. “It is mistake and the wrong thing to do”, Zoellick said. Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, said nationalization plan would only damage chances for investments in Argentina and hurt Repsol, in which Mexico’s state-run oil company Pemex holds a 10% stake.

Spain got confused with the US position. A State Department spokesperson explained remarks made earlier by Hillary Clinton, who said that she wanted to study the matter before commenting on it. “She spoke about the need for diverse markets, and certainly that’s one of our core beliefs: diverse energy markets,” the spokesperson said. José Manuel García-Margallo, the Spanish foreign minister, felt disappointed about the US position.

Regular expression is there. The Spanish establishment condemned the move. Soraya Saenz de Santamaria, the Spainish deputy prime minister, reaffirmed “keep looking for new measures” to put pressure on Argentina. The Spanish foreign minister said Spain would respond with “forceful measures”. But he refrained from elaborating. José Manuel Soria, the Spanish industry minister, assured “there will be more actions against Argentina”. In an interview with a conservative Spanish daily, Soria said Spain “will not be announcing the measures; it will just adopt them and keep moving.”

Spain has already decided to limit the import of Argentine biodiesel. A trade war, it seems, is being initiated by Madrid. Spanish newspapers report the EU could boycott Argentine soy and meat, two of Argentina’s biggest exports. Probably, the dream is to strangulate Buenos Aires and teach Cristina a lesson. Mosaddegh-memory is fresh in masters’ minds.

Rating agencies joined the move to warn Argentina. Standard and Poor’s, the famous rating agency with questionable past, downgraded Argentina’s economic and financial outlook to “negative”, after the YPF-initiative. Fitch warned Argentina of “diplomatic isolation” and shortages in foreign direct investment in key sectors – energy, utilities, and telecom.

As capital’s sentinel mainstream media was not silent. In an April 20 editorial The Washington Post observed “The [Argentine] president’s further lurch toward the left […]”, which it said “is bad news”. It echoed the conservative voice: remove Argentina from the G-20 and replace by Chile. (“Argentina’s president rejects stepping into the future”) It seems they are the lords of the world to do and undo everything.

There are more harsh and crude voices. Repsol Executive Chairman Antonio Brufau said the measure “will not go unpunished” and threatened to “take all legal actions within its reach.” Spanish officials predicted Argentina risks becoming “an international pariah”. In a responsible tone, Cristina reciprocated: “This president is not going to answer any threat, is not going to respond to any sharp remark. I am a head of state and not a hoodlum.”

It’s “resource nationalism”, the mainstream considers. The world business and investors smell risky situation. To a section in the mainstream, Cristina’s initiative is nothing but an attempt to cover up domestic problems.

However, the song of condemnation failed to echo in all the corners of the world. Voices of solidarity reverberated. Venezuela’s foreign ministry and the state oil company expressed support to Argentina’s move. The company expressed its willingness to help strengthen Argentina’s oil industry: “Venezuela puts all its technical, operational, legal and political experience of Petroleos de Venezuela at the disposition of the government of Argentina and its people to strengthen the state oil sector”. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, said: “It is an issue between Argentina and Spain.” Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president, expressed solidarity: “President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner … is exercising the right of the State of Argentina to defend its patrimony.” He rejected the EU’s reaction, saying the EU has acted with “arrogance, bravado and thuggery against the decision of a sovereign people and government in Argentina.” “What we can advise the EU is that they should stop their bullying, stop the threats. Look for dialogue, negotiate with the Argentinean government and look for a way out where the legitimate rights of the people of Argentina are recognized,” Ortega said. Jose Mujica, the Uruguayan president, told he respected Argentina’s decision, saying “it falls within the framework of sovereignty, whether you like it or not.” Regarding the EU’s condemnation and threat, Mujica expressed “solidarity with Argentina, in good and bad times” and lashed out at the “arrogance of wealthy Europe.” Haroldo Lima, the head of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, hailed the move as “excellent news for Latin America.” He called the decision “historic” and said “it was not against Spain... It was not against anyone. It was in favor of Argentina.” Chilean officials reacted cautiously. Chile government was studying the effects on Chilean investments in Argentina, in particular in one of Repsol’s wells. However, the Chilean opposition Socialist Party, hailed the move as sovereign action saying that as an independent nation, Argentina “has the right to decide how to exploit its natural resources for the benefit of its citizens.”

Seemingly to increase pressure on Argentina, US Senator Richard Lugar, member of the Subcommittee on Latin America, asked questions on Argentina during a congressional hearing. A report from Hillary Clinton reviewed the Argentina-IMF relation and trade “barriers”, restrictions on remitting of benefits and dividends overseas, implemented by Argentina.

Argentina is having a difficult relation with the IMF. The US considers Argentina is obliged to submit its economic statistics to be validated by the IMF, and US will support the IMF. Citing a report La Nación informed the US is “most disappointed” as Argentina having suspended such annual submission since 2006.

Once again, the battle line has been drawn. Trenches are being dug. Two interests stand opposed to each other, and a trend turns stronger providing example to peoples and ruling elites in other countries.

Argentina has a version different from that of the Repsol, Spain, EU and Co. The country’s petroleum production fell 27% between 2001 and 2011 turning the country an importer of oil. Repsol was not producing enough oil to meet the country’s needs. This year Argentina estimates to import more than $10 billion worth of gas and LNG, almost equal to the country’s trade surplus last year although it is an oil-producing country, and it was self-sufficient for over two decades. This exposes the efficiency of Repsol, and also of private capital.

“We are the only country in Latin America, and […] in practically the entire world, that doesn’t manage its own natural resources,” Cristina mentioned as a burning fact. Argentina’s proven reserves have fallen by 50% since 2001, although YPF has not posted losses because it has spent so little on reinvestment. The company more than doubled its sales since 1999, making net profits of nearly 16.5 billion dollars since then, and distributing dividends of 13.2 billion dollars. Argentina had a deficit of $3 billion last year partly due to energy imports. The center of gravity of the EU’s position is clear.

The oil company, YPF, was privatized in two stages, in 1993 and 1999, under the former president Carlos Menem. Since then the state has held less than one percent of the shares of YPF.

Buenos Aires accuses Repsol of sucking YPF’s profits out of the country instead of investing in Argentina’s future. Repsol has used its profits to fund investments in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and North Africa. If this policy continues – draining fields dry, no exploration and practically no investment – “the country will end up having no viable future, not because of a lack of resources but because of business policies,” said Cristina.

Aníbal Fernández, an Argentine Senator, said the government “will pay the real price […] of YPF and not what Repsol’s chairman wants.” Repsol chairman has a bargain tag in his bag. Argentina and Spain are now setting a price on the transaction.

Cristina said the real problem was not about foreign companies or their profitability, but the lack of investment. She cited her government’s positive relationship with foreign automotive companies. Italy’s Fiat and the US’ General Motors receive soft loans from the Argentine state to boost local production and keep workers in jobs, Cristina said.

Argentina has minimized Spain’s retaliatory decision to reduce bio-diesel imports. Argentina “is in condition to absorb” that production. “We won’t question Spain’s sovereign decision, no matter which one it takes. They are going to pay their businessmen a more expensive bio-diesel and I don’t know how that will impact their economy”, Cristina said. “We’re not going to appeal to the World Trade Organization nor are we going to complaint about the decision to block Argentine exports. We don’t act that way. We are […] very respectful of other peoples’ sovereignty”, she said. The difference between Argentina and the EU, the organization that is failing to manage its own affairs but always is delivering sermons to the Third World countries on democracy, etc., on the principle of non-interference is clear.

All interests are not happy with Cristina’s initiatives. Argentina has already issued legal warnings to banks involved in the Malvinas Islands’ oil industry. In 2008, Cristina nationalized Anses, privately run pension funds with many Spaniards’ investment. She also nationalized Aerolíneas Argentina airline, owned by a Spanish firm now bankrupt. An alliance of organizations, American Task Force Argentina, is making effort to resolve Argentina’s $132bn debt default in 2001.

The country is having resources that allure capital from other lands. Edison Investment Research, a research firm, has claimed that the Falklands stood to benefit from a $176bn tax windfall as the result of oil and gas drilling. Of the four major prospects under way, the largest, Loligo, potentially holds more than 4.7bn barrels of oil. Argentina has recently found huge unconventional oil and natural gas reserves. A few months ago, YPF announced a large oil find known as the Vaca Muerta field that Repsol officials estimated could yield four billion barrels. BP now produces 74,000 barrels of oil daily in Argentina. Its natural gas production is more than its European operations combined.

Argentina is the world’s main supplier of bio-diesel almost exclusively from soy oil, and the country produces bio-diesel “at a cheaper price than Spanish manufacturers”. Last year exports reached 1.7 million tons of which 700.000 tons, equivalent to 985 million dollars were exported to Spain. Around 120 British companies including HSBC, Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline are now operating in Argentina.

Initiatives, in many forms, within existing limitations including class equation and historical perspective, are there in Latin America. These are trying to assert sovereignty, claim fair share of resources. An emerging political stream is trying to change resource map in Latin America in favor of people. Political leadership’s acumen, its capacity to mobilize people, its management efficiency are vital questions related to managing resource. It’s a long, complicated struggle. Initiatives should not be brushed aside with rhetoric. At the same time, class composition behind initiatives should be taken into account. Bureaucracy, a bulky burden, is there. Instead of expecting a perfect set up one should find out the reality within which a leadership has to move. The leadership carries marks of history. Ignoring these factors will send one to frustration, and to adventurism.

The initiative is operating in a geopolitical reality, where Europe is struggling within, where EU’s options regarding Argentina are limited, where competition within a crisis-reality has put masters of the world in a difficult position, where masters are facing problem in their home-turf.

Argentina will be an experience useful to the countries and the movements struggling to recover people’s resources, assert sovereignty over public resources, and aspiring to challenge neo-liberalism in respective economy.