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Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Health and Fitness weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Chicken Stews, to Savor or Store Away

Chicken Cacciatore

I wanted each of these stews to feature a nutritious vegetable along with the chicken and aromatics. In this way they are truly one-dish, nutrient-dense meals. Though I suggest serving them with rice, other grains or pasta, if carbs are an issue, know that these stews are very satisfying on their own.

Martha Rose Shulman

Chicken Cacciatore With Mushrooms, Tomatoes and Wine

This version of the classic Italian dish includes lots of mushrooms, both dried and fresh; you can add kale if you want to work in some leafy greens.

Greek Chicken Stew With Cauliflower and Olives

Cinnamon adds a subtle sweetness to this stew. If salt is an issue, omit the olives; the stew will still be delicious.

Chicken Stew With Sweet Potatoes, Almonds and Apricots

Loosely based on an Algerian recipe from “Real Stew” by Clifford A. Wright, this sweetly spiced dish, with beta-carotene-rich apricots and sweet potatoes, is also evocative of recipes from the Middle East and Iran.

Chicken and Pepper Stew

This is an adaptation of a classic French bistro dish, poulet Basquaise.

Veracruzana Chicken Stew With Winter Squash

This dish is loosely based on a chicken stew from the Mexican state of Veracruz, where Spanish influences still remain strong.

On This Day In History February 19

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 19 is the 50th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 315 days remaining until the end of the year (316 in leap years).

On this day in 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country. For the next two and a half years, many of these Japanese Americans endured extremely difficult living conditions and poor treatment by their military guards.

The Order

The order authorized the Secretary of War and U.S. armed forces commanders to declare areas of the United States as military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded,” although it did not name any nationality or ethnic group. It was eventually applied to one-third of the land area of the U.S. (mostly in the West) and was used against those with “Foreign Enemy Ancestry” – Japanese.

The order led to the internment of Japanese Americans or AJAs (Americans of Japanese Ancestry); some 120,000 ethnic Japanese people were held in internment camps for the duration of the war. Of the Japanese interned, 62% were Nisei (American-born, second-generation Japanese American and therefore American citizens) or Sansei (third-generation Japanese American, also American citizens) and the rest were Issei (Japanese immigrants and resident aliens, first-generation Japanese American).

Japanese Americans were by far the most widely affected group, as all persons with Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona. As then California Attorney General Earl Warren put it, “When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field.” In Hawaii, where there were 140,000 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (constituting 37% of the population), only selected individuals of heightened perceived risk were interned.

Americans of Italian and German ancestry were also targeted by these restrictions, including internment. 11,000 people of German ancestry were interned, as were 3,000 people of Italian ancestry, along with some Jewish refugees. The Jewish refugees who were interned came from Germany, and the U.S. government didn’t differentiate between ethnic Jews and ethnic Germans (jewish was defined as religious practice). Some of the internees of European descent were interned only briefly, and others were held for several years beyond the end of the war. Like the Japanese internees, these smaller groups had American-born citizens in their numbers, especially among the children. A few members of ethnicities of other Axis countries were interned, but exact numbers are unknown.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was responsible for assisting relocated people with transport, food, shelter, and other accommodations.

Opposition

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment, not on constitutional grounds, but because he believed that the most likely spies had already been arrested by the FBI shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was also opposed to Executive Order 9066. She spoke privately many times with her husband, but was unsuccessful in convincing him not to sign it

Post World War II

Executive Order 9066 was rescinded by Gerald Ford on February 19, 1976. In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed legislation to create the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). The CWRIC was appointed to conduct an official governmental study of Executive Order 9066, related wartime orders, and their impact on Japanese Americans in the West and Alaska Natives in the Pribilof Islands.

In December 1982, the CWRIC issued its findings in Personal Justice Denied, concluding that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity. The report determined that the decision to incarcerate was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The Commission recommended legislative remedies consisting of an official Government apology and redress payments of $20,000 to each of the survivors; a public education fund was set up to help ensure that this would not happen again (Public Law 100-383).

On August 10, 1988, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, based on the CWRIC recommendations, was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. On November 21, 1989, George H.W. Bush signed an appropriation bill authorizing payments to be paid out between 1990 and 1998. In 1990, surviving internees began to receive individual redress payments and a letter of apology.

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You’re Only A Terrorist When We Say So

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. ~ Arabian Proverb

Since 9/11, one of the more interesting stories to emerge in recent years about terrorist organizations and the ubiquitous War on Terror has been the not so secret bipartisan relationship and support of American politicians and high ranking government officials with the Iranian terrorist organization, MEK, Mujahedin-e Khalq. So just what is MEK:

Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK) is the largest and most militant group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Also known as the People’s Mujahadeen Organization of Iran, MEK is led by husband and wife Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. MEK was added to the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups in 1997 and to the European Union’s terrorist list in 2002 because its attacks have often killed civilians.

MEK was founded in 1963 by a group of college-educated Iranian leftists, supporters of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and opposed to the country’s pro-Western ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The group participated in the 1979 Islamic revolution that replaced the shah with a Shiite Islamist regime led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. But MEK’s ideology, a blend of Marxism, feminism, and Islamism, put it at odds with the post-revolutionary government, and its original leadership was soon executed by the Khomeini regime. In 1981, the group was driven from its bases on the Iran-Iraq border and resettled in Paris, where it began supporting Iraq in its eight-year war against Khomeini’s Iran. In 1986, after France recognized the Iranian regime, MEK moved its headquarters to Iraq, which used MEK to harass neighboring Iran. MEK maintained its headquarters in Iraq until the American invasion in 2003 when many members surrendered their weapons.

Under US law it is a felony to provide any “material support” to a terrorist organization but this high profile group has received large fees and passionate support in recent years without the Justice Department so much as blinking. The list includes such luminaries as Republicans Michael Mukasey, Fran Townsend, Andy Card, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani and Democrats Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark. The meetings first came to light in December, 2010 when “America’s Mayor” Rudolph “9/11” Guiliani, along with former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former White House adviser Frances Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, flew to Paris to speak in support of the group. As Glenn Greenwald points out, “there are several remarkable aspects to this story”:

The first is that there are numerous Muslims inside the U.S. who have been prosecuted for providing “material support for Terrorism” for doing far less than these American politicians are publicly doing on behalf of a designated Terrorist group. [..]

Yet here we have numerous American political figures receiving substantial fees from a group which is legally designated under American law as a Terrorist organization. [..]

If we had anything even remotely approaching equal application of the law, Dean, Giuliani, Townsend and the others would be facing prosecution as Terrorist-helpers.

Glenn’s next questions are “How has this rag-tag Terrorist cult of Iranian dissidents, who are largely despised in Iran, able to fund such expensive campaigns and to keep U.S. officials on its dole?” and why. An NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem helped shed some light on this:

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders. [..]

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement. [..]

“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel.  “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information.  And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”

Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs.  In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack. [..]

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News  the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.”  All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.

As it has in the past, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined comment. Said a spokesman, “As long as we can’t see all the evidence being claimed by NBC, the Foreign Ministry won’t react to every gossip and report being published worldwide.”

For its part, the MEK pointed to a statement calling the allegations “absolutely false.”

Glenn concluded that besides the fact that those who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes, this “love affair” with MEK underscores how meaningless term “terrorism” is:

it’s just a cynical term designed to delegitimize violence and even political acts undertaken by America’s enemies while shielding from criticism the actual Terrorism undertaken by itself and its allies. The spectacle whereby a designated Terrorist group can pay top American politicians to advocate for them even as they engage in violent Terrorist acts, all while being trained, funded and aided by America’s top client state, should forever end the controversy over that glaringly obvious proposition.

MEK has been attempting to present itself as the sole legitimate opposition to the Iranian regime, going so far as to claim that they are the Green Movement or the government in exile, which the Green Movement denies and a very aggressive and organized lobby effort in Washington D.C. It has obviously found support from anti-Muslims and those politicians who would like nothing more than a war with Iran.  

Just How Crass Can Right Wing Get

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Pretty damned crass. GOP candidate Sen. Rick Santorum’s supporter Foster Friess appearing with on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell made the incredible statement that women should use an aspirin held between their knees as birth control. Ms. Mitchell was left virtually speechless.

Too bad his mother didn’t follow those directions

On This Day In History February 18

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 18 is the 49th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 316 days remaining until the end of the year (317 in leap years).

On this day in 1885, Mark Twain publishes his famous, and famously controversial, novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Considered as one of the Great American Novels, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

The work has been popular with readers since its publication and is taken as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger”, despite that the main protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is anti-racist. According to the January 20, 2011 Chase Cook/The Daily article, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn novel will be released in a new edition. Two words will be changed throughout the whole book, “injun” and “nigger” to “indian” and “slave”. The book is being changed as quoted in the article, “only to make it viable to the 21st century”.

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On This Day In History February 17

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 17 is the 48th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 317 days remaining until the end of the year (318 in leap years).

On this day in 1904,  Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly premieres at the La Scala theatre in Milan, Italy.

The young Puccini decided to dedicate his life to opera after seeing a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in 1876. In his later life, he would write some of the best-loved operas of all time: La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (left unfinished when he died in 1906). Not one of these, however, was an immediate success when it opened. La Boheme, the now-classic story of a group of poor artists living in a Paris garret, earned mixed reviews, while Tosca was downright panned by critics.

Madama Butterfly (Madame Butterfly) is an opera in three acts (originally two acts) by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Puccini based his opera in part on the short story “Madame Butterfly” (1898) by John Luther Long, which was dramatized by David Belasco. Puccini also based it on the novel Madame Chrysantheme (1887) by Pierre Loti. According to one scholar, the opera was based on events that actually occurred in Nagasaki in the early 1890s.

The original version of the opera, in two acts, had its premiere on February 17, 1904, at La Scala in Milan. It was very poorly received despite the presence of such notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe De Luca in the lead roles. This was due in large part to the late completion and inadequate time for rehearsals. Puccini revised the opera, splitting the second act into two acts and making other changes. On May 28, 1904, this version was performed in Brescia and was a huge success.

The opera is set in the city of Nagasaki. Japan’s best-known opera singer Tamaki Miura won international fame for her performances as Cio-Cio San; her statue, along with that of Puccini, can be found in Nagasaki’s Glover Garden.

Butterfly is a staple of the standard operatic repertoire for companies around the world and it is the most-performed opera in the United States, where it ranks as Number 1 in Opera America’s list of the 20 most-performed operas in North America.

Provoking A War With Iran

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

In January a young Iranian nuclear scientist was killed in a Tehran car bomb explosion, the fifth scientist to be killed since 2007. There were accusations by the Iranians that this was carried out by the Israelis with the blessings of the United States to stop Iran’s nuclear energy program. Of course there were the obligatory denials by the Israelis and the US through the State Department even though Israel had previously hinted about a covert campaign with Iran and told a parliamentary panel that 2012 would be a “critical year” for Iran in part because of “things that happen to it unnaturally”.

Robert Baer, the long-time senior CIA officer who spent 21 years working the Middle East, was on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ saying that he believes Israel is assassinating Iranian scientists in an attempt to provoke Iran to fight back and draw the US into a full-scale war. Baer has made this argument before considering Israel’s “track record of assassinations, from the Palestinian perpetrators of the Munich Olympic attack of 1972, to the killing of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room in early 2010″:

“If you look at the choice of target it really could only be Israel,” says Robert Baer, a former CIA agent in the Middle East, currently working on a book on assassination called The Perfect Kill. “If it was an internal group, like the MeK (Mujahedin-e-Khalq) it would be security official or policeman who had been torturing their guys. If you look at the motivation, it must be Israel.”

However, Baer adds that it is quite likely that Israel is acting in tandem with an Iranian dissident organisation. “To do this in the middle of the day, with a limpet charge and then getaway, you need a lot of people on the ground,” he says. ” You need an extensive network of the kind only someone like MeK can provide.”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has labeled this, not murder, but terrorism

   Part of the problem here is the pretense that Terrorism has some sort of fixed, definitive meaning. It does not. As Professor Remi Brulin has so exhaustively documented, the meaning of the term has constantly morphed depending upon the momentary interests of those nations (usually the U.S. and Israel) most aggressively wielding it. It’s a term of political propaganda, impoverished of any objective meaning, and thus susceptible to limitless manipulation. Even the formal definition incorporated into U.S. law is incredibly vague; one could debate forever without resolution whether targeted killings of scientists fall within its scope, and that’s by design. The less fixed the term is, the more flexibility there is in deciding what acts of violence are and are not included in its scope.

   But to really see what’s going on here, let’s look at how a very recent, very similar assassination plot was discussed. That occurred in October when the U.S. accused Iran’s Quds Forces of recruiting a failed used car salesman in Texas to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Let’s put to side the intrinsic ridiculousness of the accusation and assume it to be true […] when that plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador was “revealed,” virtually every last media outlet – and government official – branded it “Terrorism.” It was just reflexively described that way. And I never heard anyone – anywhere – object to the use of that term on the ground that targeted assassinations aren’t Terrorism, or on any other ground.

There is quite a bit of evidence to support this. The New York Times reported that there is more truth to the plot to draw Iran into a war than not:

   The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.

   The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization […]

   “I often get asked when Israel might attack Iran,” Mr. (Patrick, director of the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Clawson said. “I say, ‘Two years ago.’ ”

   Mr. Clawson said the covert campaign was far preferable to overt airstrikes by Israel or the United States on suspected Iranian nuclear sites. “Sabotage and assassination is the way to go, if you can do it,” he said. “It doesn’t provoke a nationalist reaction in Iran, which could strengthen the regime. And it allows Iran to climb down if it decides the cost of pursuing a nuclear weapon is too high.”

Now flash forward to recent events with the attempt to kill Israeli embassy personnel in New Delhi and Tbilisi, Georgia. The Israelis were quick to accuse Iran without any evidence that there was any Iranian involvement and, of course the US media was quick to parrot the accusations as retaliation:

The rare coordinated attempts on the lives of Israeli diplomatic representatives came a month after the latest assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and were set against an escalating war of words between Israel and Iran over a possible Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The attempted attacks also coincided with the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leader of Hezbollah, a militant Shiite Lebanese group backed by Iran.

India has stated that they have no evidence that Iran was involved but they have their own motivations, as does Russia, to protect Iran. Both India and Russia are ignoring the international sanctions to get Iran back to the table for discussion of their nuclear program. But. as Glenn Greenwald noted in his article about media the push to a war with Iran the media failed to mention

….the glaring irony that the mode of attack in India is virtually identical to the one used to kill numerous Iranian scientists (“a magnetic bomb was slapped onto {the} car by a passing motorcyclist”). One thing is crystal clear, as macgupta put it in the comment section: “In any case, no matter who the perpetrators are, these attacks are a sign that we are moving closer to a war with Iran.

The Guardian has analysis of why Iran seems an unlikely culprit for the attacks on Israeli diplomats:

Tehran has good relations with Thailand, India and Georgia. Why would it endanger that by planting bombs there?

Let’s assume that sections of the military and security apparatus in Iran are responsible for the string of bombings in Georgia, Thailand and India. What would be the motive? The argument that Iran is retaliating for the murder of five civilian nuclear scientists in Iran is not plausible. If Iran wanted to target Israeli interests, it has other means at its disposal. It is hard to imagine that the Iranian government would send Iranian operatives to friendly countries, completely equipped with Iranian money and passports – making the case against them as obvious as possible.

If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are as professional, highly trained and politically savvy as we have been told repeatedly by Israeli politicians themselves, if they have successfully trained and equipped the cadres of Hezbollah and other movements with paramilitary wings in the region, then why would they launch such a clumsy and self-defeating operation?

And why India, Georgia and Thailand, three countries that Iran has had cordial relations with during a period when Iran is facing increasing sanctions spearheaded by the United States? A few days ago, India agreed a rupee-based oil and gas deal with Iran and resisted US pressures to join the western boycott of the Iranian energy sector. As a net importer of 12% of Iranian oil, India’s total trade with Iran amounted to $13.67bn in 2010-2011. What would be the motive for damaging relations with one of Iran’s major trading partners and regional heavyweights?

In December of 2010, Greenwald appeared on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough to why Iran is not a threat to the US or Israel. His argument still holds true.

Is this another run up to another unnecessary war in the Middle East? If it looks like a duck …….

Only Men Allowed to Speak on Birth Control Access

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

House of Representative Democratic women walked out of House oversight hearing on access to birth control when the Republican majority’s refused to allow minority female witnesses at a hearing on the Administration’s birth control access rules. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) left accusing Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) of manipulating committee rules to block female witnesses from testifying.

In a letter yesterday, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) sent a letter (pdf) to Issa yesterday objecting to the lack of minority witnesses and those who supported President Obama’s compromise:

   When my staff inquired about requesting minority witnesses for this hearing, we were informed that you would allow only one. Based on your decision, we requested as our minority witness a third-year Georgetown University Law Center student named Sandra Fluke. I believed it was critical to have at least one woman at the witness table who could discuss the repercussions that denying coverage for contraceptives has on women across this country.

   In response, your staff relayed that you had decided as follows:

   “As the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience, he believes that Ms. Fluke is not an appropriate witness.”

   It is inconceivable to me that you believe tomorrow’s hearing has no bearing on the reproductive rights of women. This Committee commits a massive injustice by trying to pretend that the views of millions of women across this country are meaningless, worthless, or irrelevant to this debate.

Only one witness who supported the compromise, Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State was invited to testify. The other eleven witnesses over the two days of testimony would be all male religious leaders or professors, including a Catholic bishop. Issa argued that “the hearing is not about reproductive rights and contraception but instead about the Administration’s actions as they relate to freedom of religion and conscience.”

I agree this is about the 1st Amendment but it has nothing to do with religious freedom, it has to do with establishing religious doctrine as government policy.

Greece: The Continued Slide Towards Default

Cross posted fromThe Stars Hollow Gazette

It is almost inevitable that Greece will default but in the interim the Eurozone leaders are determined to force more austerity on the country in order to protect the hedge funds profits at the expense of the Greek people. Is America headed down this same road?

Freedom Rider: Greece: Your Money or Your Life

By Margaret Kimberly, editor and senior columnist at the Black Agenda Report

Greece is at the epicenter of an horrific assault on working people and on their democracy. As a result of corruption at the top of the Greek government and world wide finance capital, that nation is teetering on the brink of insolvency. The rescue cooked up by the same people who created the problem is in fact anything but.

The so-called bail out is a plan to destroy the last vestiges of the welfare state and the expectations of humanity that they can have any hope of being treated fairly in capitalist countries. The European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission have descended like vultures, making it crystal clear where their interests lie. [..]

Beginning in 2008, Americans got a dose of some of the same medicine. We were told that our economy would implode if we didn’t give our money to bail out the very same banks which created the crisis. Four years and trillions of dollars later, we are still in a recession, unemployment remains high, ordinary people have lost their assets and our president and Congress bicker over how much they can cut government spending and ruin our lives even more.

The Greeks are ahead of the curve. At least they stood up and protested. Hopefully more people around the world will be like them instead of like passive Americans. Hopefully Americans will stop being passive before they end up like people in Greece.

The Greek Experiment

Michael Hudson: Greek crisis used to find out how far finance can drive down wages and privatize.”

Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

Transcript:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

In Greece, the financial elites of Europe have gotten agreement from the Greek government to another round of what some people are calling savage austerity measures, for example, lowering the minimum wage by 22 percent, a new round of privatizations, and cuts to pensions and many other social programs. This is, I guess, an example of banks and a banking technocrat that now leads the Greek government directly intervening, calling government policy. So what does this tell us here in the U.S., Canada, and other countries that are watching this?

Now joining us to discuss all of this: Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street financial analyst, a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he writes at Michael-Hudson.com. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROF., UMKC: Thank you very much.

JAY: So, Michael, what should we be learning from what’s going on in Greece?

HUDSON: Well, we should be learning what the European bankers are learning, and that is what is the result of a great experiment that’s going on. For the last five years in Latvia, they’ve-the neoliberals have lowered wages by about 30 percent. The basic premise of today’s model builders are: you don’t know how far you can lower wages and pensions until people begin to press back. Well, in Latvia they still haven’t begun to press back when they’ve lowered for 30 percent. Now they’re moving towards Greece on the way to Spain and Portugal and Italy, and they’re trying to figure out how much can we lower wages, how much can we drain an economy until there is pressure to come back.

And the right wing, who’ve essentially appointed, as you pointed out, a bank lobbyist, which is called a technocrat, in charge of Greece, is: let’s try the experiment to just see how much we can squeeze out-because they’ve realized that the left in Europe is completely fragmented. They don’t have a defense available, they don’t have a body of concepts available to say, wait a minute, this is crazy. When you’re lowering wages, you’re actually shrinking an economy. When you’re cutting the budget deficit, you’re reducing the amount of money that comes into the economy to promote demand. So in effect what Europe is doing is bleeding economies, very much like a medieval doctor would bleed blood on the ground, since this is going to make economies more productive.

Well, the only response that the Greek people have, not simply the left, but the right and the Greek people, is, look, if you think you’re going to increase the surplus, increase taxes by lowering our wages and cutting our pensions and cutting our health care, we’re going to do what the Egyptians are doing and what the Arab Spring is doing. We’re going to tear the economy apart, and there won’t be anything for you. And the PASOK, the socialist party that inaugurated this whole austerity program, now has an 8 percent approval rating in Greece. That’s even lower than Mr. Obama has for cutting wages here.

So what the Greeks are saying: look, when the premier said that they were going to have a referendum for whether we want to cut back the wages to pay the bankers, the first thing Angela Merkel said was, you can’t have a referendum. We’re going to suspend democracy, we’re going to impose a dictator on you, and we’re going to tell you what to do.

Well, under modern international law, if there’s no democratic commitment to pay, then the debt taken on is null and void. Well, the European common market, the European Union, has had its lawyers say, okay, we’re going to get the agreement of congress. Well, the Greek people can say, look, you can come down with bags of money and you can buy all the parliament members that you want to approve the deal, but as soon as there is an election, we’re going to throw them out, and they’re not acting on our behalf, and-.

JAY: Yeah, but it’s not clear by polling that the next election would actually elect a government that wouldn’t go along with this. Most of the parties that seem capable of winning elections in Greece have signed on to this deal. But can I go back to something earlier you said? Is not one of the big objectives here-’cause it’s hard to understand the logic of driving Greece into a decade of depression if you actually want any revenue that’s going to pay some of these debts back, which means, is not the real objective here not more about privatization, that if you can create so much chaos and dependency on the Greek government, on the European financial elites, they’re going to sell everything off? And apparently they’re talking now about selling airports and shipping-seaports, like, a whole ‘nother level of privatizations.

HUDSON: Not only that, but also the water systems, the sewer systems, real estate, the islands. You’re right. They think that if they can create a crisis, it becomes a grab bag area. And bankers and people who have a plan usually do much better in a crisis or a grab bag than people who don’t have a plan. So this indeed seems to be it. Finance today achieves what military invasion used to do in times past. So the new mode of warfare is financial, not military. It’s much cheaper and it’s much safer for the country doing the attack.

So you’re quite right: privatization is a big role. And that’s why yesterday the European Union said, wait a minute, we’re not even going to give you the money to pay us, namely, for us to pay our own banks that have bought your bonds, unless you spell out exactly what you’re going to privatize and commit to it now. And this is a sticking point. In the past, the Greeks have made promises, and thank heavens they haven’t privatized, because once they begin to sell things off, then there’s going to be a real squeeze and even more of an opposition. So you’re right. This is a property grab.

JAY: Yeah. We were joking off-camera. I was saying it’s amazing how the Europeans make Obama’s budget look good. And as critical as you and I and many people we’ve interviewed on The Real News have been critical of Obama, there actually does seem to be some kind of different approach between Wall Street (and, certainly, the sections of Wall Street that helped elect President Obama) and the Europeans. You can hear interviews with Wall Street representatives who actually say, no, you do have to have short-term stimulus before you have these kinds of austerity measures; you can’t force the world into a global depression. You hear that kind of language out of New York and out of President Obama, where the Europeans seem so committed to this severe austerity.

HUDSON: There are two reasons for that. Number one, from the very beginning, from the last century, America has already had in the private sector what was in the public domain in Europe. Europe had its power companies, electric and gas systems in the public domain. America privatized them, but as regulated public utilities. The public utilities were allowed-were regulated as to how much bond and equity they could get, what their rate of return would be. Europe has no body of law to regulate the prices or rent extraction the public utilities can charge, because they’d always had these in the public domain, just like Russia had no and the Soviet Union had no system like this. So the objective of privatizing in Europe, first of all, there’s much more property and public assets to grab in Europe than there were in the United States, and secondly, there is no regulatory body in Europe, because of the fact that in the past, power and sewer and water and public utilities were supplied either at cost or at subsidized rates to make the economy more competitive.

So the idea in Europe is not only that you cut wages by 30 percent, but you’re now going to raise the price of what you just mentioned, the access to water, sewers, transportation, everything else. You’re going to raise the price to put the real squeeze on wages. And the result in Greece will probably be the same as it was in Iceland, Latvia, and other countries. There’s going to be a large emigration of working-age labor. And the result will, of course, be to make the economy much less competitive.

And in this morning’s newspaper, when it turned out that Greece’s GDP fell at 7 percent annual rate, not the 5 percent expected, as usual the newspaper said, to everyone’s surprise, the situation is worse than projected. Well, of course it wasn’t really to our surprise, because we know that when you’re strangling an economy, of course it can’t cope very well. And they’re strangling the Greeks economy. And they’re using it, I think, as a laboratory experiment to say, what’s going to happen when we really just squeeze labor and squeeze labor? It’s like trying to feed a horse less and less and see whether it’s really going to be more efficient until it keels over dead.

JAY: And I guess it’s always-the way large-scale unemployment is always a good threat against the employed within a country, the more you can beat up Greece and Spain, Portugal, the more you can threaten the working class of France and Germany, where I guess the big targets eventually will be.

HUDSON: Well, if that happens, there’s going to be a renewed nationalism that’s going to cut the common market apart, and you’re going to have, all of a sudden, a realization that when Europe united, the whole idea of it’s united was so that it would never go to war again, military war. But now that it’s united under neoliberal bank rules, they think, wait a minute, we’re uniting and we are going to war. But it’s a class war. It’s an economic war. And this isn’t what we wanted. If the idea of uniting in Europe is for a class war under rules where we’re guaranteed to lose, then we’re saying no to Europe, just as the Icelanders have voted not to join Europe, just as other countries that had planned to join Europe, all the way to Turkey at the other end, are saying, wait a minute, if that’s the Europe that’s coming, an oligarchic Europe whose program is austerity and shrinkage, why on earth would we want to join?

JAY: Thanks for joining us, Michael.

HUDSON: Thank you very much.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

Greece is being forced out of eurozone, Venizelos claims

by Ian Traynor in Brussels and Larry Elliott of The Guardain UK

Greek finance minister says troika is shifting terms of €130bn bailout deal as part of move to force country out of eurozone

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

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

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

Venizelos claimed the crucial debt swap with the banks – which technically requires three weeks to organise – will be announced on Monday provided the eurogroup signs off on the bailout.

The accord has to be in force well before 20 March when Greece is due to redeem €14.5bn of debt or face default.

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