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FOCUS: The Disappearing Entitlements Crisis |
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Monday, 03 August 2015 12:15 |
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Krugman writes: "A few years back elite policy discourse in the United States was totally dominated by the supposed entitlements crisis. Serious people all assured each other that history's greatest menace was the threat posed by the unstoppable growth of Medicaremedicaidandsocialsecurity, which could only be tamed by dismantling the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, while of course cutting top marginal tax rates."
Paul Krugman. (photo: New York Times)
The Disappearing Entitlements Crisis
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
03 August 15
 few years back elite policy discourse in the United States was totally dominated by the supposed entitlements crisis. Serious people all assured each other that history’s greatest menace was the threat posed by the unstoppable growth of Medicaremedicaidandsocialsecurity, which could only be tamed by dismantling the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, while of course cutting top marginal tax rates.
A few of us argued, however, not just that it was foolish to worry about long-run budget issues in a time of depression and zero interest rates, but that the long run fiscal problems weren’t really that intractable. I used to say that all we needed were death panels and sales taxes — that if we got serious about cost control on health care, the rise in entitlement spending due to an aging population would shrink to a level that could be covered by moderate increases in revenue, meaning that no fundamental dismantling of the welfare state was necessary.
Sure enough, health spending began moderating after the passage of the ACA — and as Bruce Webb points out, if you believe the reports of the Social Security and Medicare trustees, we’re basically already there.
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FOCUS: US Government Celebrates its Arming of the Egyptian Regime With a YouTube Video |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 03 August 2015 10:45 |
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Greenwald writes: "The Egyptian regime run by the despotic General Abdelfattah al-Sisi is one of the world's most brutal and repressive. Despite that repression - or, more accurately, because of it - the Obama administration has lavished the regime with aid, money and weapons, just as the U.S. government did for decades in order to prop up Hosni Mubarak."
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: PBS)
US Government Celebrates Its Arming of the Egyptian Regime With a YouTube Video
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
03 August 15
 he Egyptian regime run by the despotic General Abdelfattah al-Sisi is one of the world’s most brutal and repressive. Last year, Human Rights Watch documented that that Egyptian “security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.” Just two months ago, the group warned that the abuses have “escalated,” and that Sisi, “governing by decree in the absence of an elected parliament, ha[s] provided near total impunity for security force abuses and issued a raft of laws that severely curtailed civil and political rights, effectively erasing the human rights gains of the 2011 uprising that ousted the longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.”
Despite that repression — or, more accurately, because of it — the Obama administration has lavished the regime with aid, money and weapons, just as the U.S. government did for decades in order to prop up Hosni Mubarak. When Sisi took power in a coup, not only did the U.S. government support him but it praised him for restoring “democracy.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly sent arms and money to the regime as its abuses became more severe. As the New York Times delicately put it yesterday, “American officials . . . signaled that they would not let their concerns with human rights stand in the way of increased security cooperation with Egypt.”
None of that is new: A staple of U.S. foreign policy has long been to support heinous regimes as long as they carry out U.S. dictates, all in order to keep domestic populations in check and prevent their views and beliefs (which are often averse to the U.S.) from having any effect on the actions of their own government. Just today, the American and Egyptian governments jointly issued a lengthy statement on a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry which it said was “based on the shared belief that it is necessary to deepen the Egypt-U.S. bilateral relationship to advance our shared interest after almost four decades of close partnership and cooperation.” While Kerry suggested in the meeting that severe repression may not be strategically shrewd, the official statement did not even reference, let alone condemn, the regime’s human rights abuses: credit for not pretending to care, I suppose.
[The U.S. media pretended to be on the side of Tahir Square democracy protesters despite decades of support from the American Government for Mubarak. Recall that in 2009 Hillary Clinton pronounced: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” A WikiLeaks cable, anticipating the first meeting between Obama and Mubarak in 2009, emphasized that “the Administration wants to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership” and that “the Egyptians want the visit to demonstrate that Egypt remains America’s ‘indispensible [sic] Arab ally.’” The cable noted that “[intelligence] Chief Omar Soliman and Interior Minister al-Adly keep the domestic beasts at bay, and Mubarak is not one to lose sleep over their tactics.”]
The Leader of the Free World’s long and clear history of lavishing the world’s most repressive regimes with money and weapons is usually carried out with a bit of stealth, so that its inspiring, self-flattering rhetoric about Supporting Freedom and Democracy – used to justify invasions and other forms of imperial domination – will be credible to its domestic media and population (even if to nobody else in the world). But this week, the U.S. Government not only proudly touted its sending of weapons to the Cairo regime, but published a video celebrating it.
The official Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Friday actually posted this:
The Arabic part of the tweet reads “Long Live Egypt”; as the NYT noted yesterday, that is “repeating a phrase that is known here primarily as the slogan from the presidential campaign of” Gen. Sisi.
It’s creepy enough that worship of military weaponry is now centrally integrated into America’s most sacred collective religious ritual: sporting events. But to strut around with videos boasting of this display of force by a tyrannical regime over its own people – courtesy of the U.S. Government – is just wretched.
Not only the U.S. but also its closest western allies are supplying Sisi with weapons. Just last week, the UK “quietly resumed multimillion-pound arms deals with” that government, including “arms sales to Egypt’s autocratic regime worth 48.8 million pounds ($76.3 million),” while in February “French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian visited Egyptian capital Cairo . . . to ink a deal for the sale of military hardware worth up to $6 billion.” These are the very same countries, of course, which endlessly claim to find human rights violations to be so deeply disturbing (when carried out by the governments that don’t obey them) that they have to fight wars to end them.
Still, explicitly celebrating videos of a tyrant parading his U.S.-supplied military might over the citizens whom he’s oppressing: that has to be a new low. It doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of the typical U.S. strategy of pretending to pressure its tyrannical allies to improve on the human rights front. Something like this is so extreme, so blatant, that it might even run the risk of having U.S. journalists who constantly believe that the U.S. government is opposed to repression and autocracy (in the context of non-compliant countries such as Iran, Russia, Libya, China and Venezuela) to ponder for a second or two whether that’s actually true or whether it’s pure propaganda.
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Death Takes Small Bites |
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Monday, 03 August 2015 08:32 |
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Brand writes: "Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain in their recent documentaries, Amy and Montage Of Heck, are crowned as underworld deities in the 'they died too young' panoply."
Russell Brand. (photo: Guardian UK)
Death Takes Small Bites
By Russell Brand, Russell Brand's Blog
03 August 15
my Winehouse and Kurt Cobain in their recent documentaries, Amy and Montage Of Heck, are crowned as underworld deities in the “they died too young” panoply.
It is eerie and gruesome that advances in home video technology facilitated the mundane chronicling of lives that had yet to become remarkable. We see infant Kurt incubated in perfect incompetence, a petulant toddler under a cherub’s bob ready to smash a Fisher Price amp with his “My First Guitar”. We see Amy untainted by fame and self-consciousness alchemically bending “Happy Birthday” into some chanteuse’s prayer and think “Fate has great things in store for thee…”
We get to see our heroes raw, pre-glamour, prior to the glistening lacquer of half-truths and stories already told. We see them ordinary and gifted. We know that they are set to embark on a journey that will follow to the letter the Faustian pathway to the gloomy tomb through a sewer of glitter.
Their stories, immediately identifiable, not just through memory but through something deeper than that, are beyond cliché, though that’s how we first receive them, they belong to myth. The mortal, touched by greatness or divinity escapes the drudgery and soars until the greatness that propelled them somehow devours them.
In the short film Death Takes Small Bites Emily Cripps tells the story of her brother Jamie who like Kurt Cobain was a talented musician and a brilliant artist. He was also, like Kurt Cobain, socially conscientious, mentally fragile and addicted to drugs. Unlike Kurt Cobain he didn’t become the voice of his generation, when he died at 24 years old the waves of misery were not so far reaching but what I felt when watching the film was that Jamie’s death has a lot to teach us about why so many young people feel alienated, lost and unhappy.
We live in an unaddressed mist of assumed meritocracy, part of the star spangled legacy of the American Dream from which we are only just awakening, that fame and fortune are justly delivered and individual endeavour will rightly be rewarded. I remember though from my own slow crawl through bedsits and Open Mics that all over the western world there are unacknowledged armies living in gifted irrelevance, their big break never coming and their big breakdown just around the corner.
Part of my own conflict has been the need to be acknowledged by a system that I abhor, the unwillingness to relinquish a dream that has weighed me down. I have been diligently drilled to believe that self-esteem can be purchased or outsourced and it’s taken until my middle years to recognise that joy and peace come only from within.
Looking at Emily’s film about her big brother I am struck both by his ordinariness and specialness. A bright, brilliant boy, captured on home film, friends tell tales of kindness and compassion and when I later meet Emily in the Cornish convenience store in which she works she tells me he was torn apart by social injustice, by the bleak condition of our time.
You know what I’m referring to, you’re feeling it too, our TTIP times, our clamp down on union times, our cut benefits times, our poverty porn times, our times of ignored austerity marches, loathed immigrants, unpunished financial crimes, housing crises, more Tory peers, four more dreadful years, peadophile MPs, scripted reality TV, foreign wars on spurious claims, far-right rise – Muslims blamed. What affect do you imagine this is having on people coming of age now? Raised in an aquarium of unfairness and hate?
In his book Late Capitalism Mark Fisher points to the epidemic rise of mental illness and addiction as an indictment of our sociopathic time, a time defined by selfishness and greed, inculcated cruelty and institutionalised self-centredness. That mental illness on this scale can no longer be diagnosed as occurring in individual brains but is a shared sickness in our cultural mind. Our system is literally driving us crazy.
We have come to tolerate the low hum of shared insanity. Like a fridge that’s never quiet. David Cameron’s victory speech a perfectly laid stool of untruths. Syriza crushed in Greece by Germanic financial might. Jeremy Corbyn slammed. Obama grey and damned. These stories are the wallpaper of our time and everywhere the young and young at heart can feel it and know there’s nothing they can do, so they write songs and do drugs and turn within or rage without or self harm. Make a down payment on a slow suicide.
Once in a while a dirty Seattle Icarus will light up the sky or a Camden angel will cry out and we all attend because they momentarily, maybe even inadvertently, articulate our impotent longing and then they’re gone. Or maybe it’s your brother that’s become a cypher for this discontent or your cousin or a girl with scars on her arm, some goth kid down your street that never meets your eye. Or did you already lose someone too, like Jamie or all the kids too clever and gentle for this time?
We’re told that everybody’s special but not everybody’s specialness can be mined and sold. My hope is that the wound we collectively feel may be our salvation. That we share this pain and that will be our redemption. For every crash and burn story there is an anonymous army suffering in silent faith knowing that true glory comes not from feted individuals but belongs to us all and although the dark is frightening it means the dawn is near.
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Greek Stock Market Bloodbath as Exchange Reopens |
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Monday, 03 August 2015 08:29 |
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Gatopoulos writes: "Greece's stock market plunged over 22 percent as it reopened Monday after a five-week closure, giving investors their first opportunity since late June to react to the country's latest economic crisis."
A man walks with his dog past a mural at a central neighborhood in Athens, Greece, on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2015. (photo: Yorgos Karahalls/AP)
Greek Stock Market Bloodbath as Exchange Reopens
By Derek Gatopoulos, Associated Press
03 August 15
 reece’s stock market plunged over 22 percent as it reopened Monday after a five-week closure, giving investors their first opportunity since late June to react to the country’s latest economic crisis.
Bank shares suffered most, hitting or nearing the daily trading limit of a 30 percent loss.
“There’s a sense of panic,” said Evangelos Sioutis, financial analyst and head of equities at Guardian Trust. He noted some traders are selling stock merely to raise cash because there is so little liquidity in the Greek economy.
“There are no buyers,” he said. “The outlook is not clear.”
Markets in the rest of the world, however, were largely unaffected, a sign that investors outside Greece have now largely cut off ties with the country after years of crisis there.
Greece’s stock market and banks were closed on June 29, when the government put limits on money withdrawals and transfers to keep a run on the banks from bringing down the financial system. People were panicking over the prospect that the country could fall out of the euro after its talks creditors broke down.
Greece has since then resumed talks with creditors and reopened its banks. Strict limits on cash withdrawals remain, however.
Two surveys published Monday illustrate the extent of the damage wreaked on the Greek economy in July by the bank closures, money controls and general uncertainty over the country’s future.
Financial information company Markit said its gauge of manufacturing activity in Greece plummeted during the month to 30.2 points, its lowest ever reading, despite improvements across the rest of the 19-country eurozone.
“Manufacturing output collapsed in July as the debt crisis came to a head,” Markit economist Phil Smith said.
“Factories faced a record drop in new orders and were often unable to acquire the inputs they needed, particularly from abroad, as bank closures and capital restrictions badly hampered normal business activity.”
Meanwhile, a monthly survey of business and consumer confidence, the Economic Sentiment Indicator, fell for a fifth consecutive month in July to its worst level since October 2012.
“The negative development is the result of the sharp deterioration in business expectations in all areas, but also a recent and significant decline in consumer confidence,” said the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, or IOBE, which conducts the survey.
Greece is currently in intense negotiations with bailout lenders to negotiate the terms of a massive new rescue package in the next two weeks.
The country needs to complete the talks and get more loans before Aug. 20, when it has to repay more than 3 billion euros to the European Central Bank.
Deputy Finance Minister Dimitris Mardas did not comment on reports that Athens could seek a short-term loan to tide it over in case the talks have to be extended.
“The (negotiation) timetable is truly pressing ... We are preparing for what has been agreed upon, correcting any gaps that may appear,” Mardas told private Skai television.
Negotiators from the European Union and International Monetary Fund are seeking faster cuts in early retirement plans set out by the government, and stricter conditions for a tax arrears payment program.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is facing opposition to the new bailout from within his left-wing Syriza party that could force him to call an early election in the fall.
Syriza dissenters are openly calling for a return to the drachma, but failed last week to force an emergency party conference before the bailout negotiations are completed.
“The government has to choose between a humiliating agreement to sign a third bailout, or abandon the agreements reached in Brussels and seek alternatives for a positive course out of this crisis,” former welfare minister and prominent dissenter Dimitris Stratoulis said over the weekend.
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ocumentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has released two courageous films in the last three years. They're courageous not only because they take on the genocide of more than one million Indonesians in 1965 and 1966, a grisly subject that has been swept under the rug for 50 years, but also because the filmmaker dares to believe that anyone would care about the death of a bunch of "communists" halfway around the world before many of us were even born.
