Greek government's 'democracy' is the real problem child

'The violence that spread over the past months is undermining democratic institutions." Miltiadis Papaioannou, Minister of Justice, Greece

Three guesses - this is such blatant Newspeak that you should only need one - as to whose violence the minister is referring to in this pathetic justification for a newly proposed law to more deeply monitor - and ultimately restrict - activists' internet use. According to Reuters, the law would prohibit bloggers' anonymity and even though it's not clear to me how, exactly, they can be certain of success (e.g. is Tycho Sierra a real or anonymous blogger? how would Greek government cyber spies determine that?) i say let them go ahead and try. The backlash is sure to be infintely more entertaining than watching them pull these ideas out of their debt-plagued asses. Mr. Papaioannou isn't fooling anyone with this claim about public unrest; the broad consensus i've encountered among Greeks is that if anyone is undermining democracy, it's the corrupt politicians and their business associates at the top of the financial food chain.

The EU is already at odds with Athens about proposals to its online gambling laws. Interesting, isn't it, how market liberalization is embraced at the same time that liberalism in speech is condemned? As one gaming commentor (i'll leave him as 'anonymous') wrote over a year ago, "these guys must really in trouble. they go from a total ban on electronic games to considering legalizing internet gambling in just 8 years. wow." Having now lost control of the debt to the point where their beautiful coastlines, islands and other natural resources are being sold off to private international 'developers', who better to blame for losing control of the streets than the anti-democratic hoards demanding to be heard? In all likelihood, the Ministers would say they can be heard, but only after being fingerprinted, DNA-swiped and digitally ID-ed. (Again, what does that actually mean: is the state going to assign people IP addresses? Here's an idea: let's make everyone pay for an IP license!) All i can say is that if this law does go into effect, i'll go to Gamble Greece Online (or wherever) immediately to bet in favor of more violent chaos, since that seems to be where the Greek government's competence ultimately lies. Democracy? Ain't nothin' but a word these daze - on all the Mediterranean shores.

Backpedaling in Budapest

The afternoon i arrived here, waiting for the crosstown bus to leave Keleti station, an old man oozing alcohol pheromones saw my suitcase and decided to flush out my nationality (while making pathetic attempts at slobbery hand kissing). We began with a brief exchange in Russian (unusual for an East European), then Italian, French, Deutsch - he just couldn't figure me out. He admitted not knowing any Spanish so i suggested in Hungarian that he sit down and talk with his (also quite inebriated) friend instead, which completely caught him off guard - he literally stumbled backwards and fell into a seat.

'Ah, so you are Hungarian!'

No.

'But only Hungarians know Hungarian.'

Wrong again (but thanks for the compliment on my pronunciation). 'Nem magyar vagyok.'

The bus started to move and since by then he was resigned to the fact that i wasn't going to allow any kind of welcome back foreign harlot smooching, he finally left me alone, burrowing into his friend and their dark green bottle of booze. i turned my attention to keeping my bag upright as the trolleybus rattled down Budapest's cobblestone streets and experienced a moment of light epiphany: no matter how much Hungarian i speak (that i know this language at all always seems a hilarious miracle), no matter how much time i spend here (6+ years seems like a relatively long time, for me), the truth is that i will never overcome those three simple words: Nem magyar vagyok. I'm not hungarian. How totally strange it is to have thought i was 'coming home' for a brief respite and immediately realize that home is the one thing this city - country - could never possibly be for me. Enter through the Fortress Europe Gate and epiphanies abound. Yesterday an Israeli told me, 'You don't come from an ethnic country, you'll never understand the world they way the rest of us do.'

The concept of backpedaling: if you're in motion, you'll keep going forward but without gaining any momentum. If you're at a standstill, the arm muscles have to work harder than the legs in order to keep the bike from falling over; you remain upright, but it can feel like a helluva lot of effort compared to just putting your feet on the ground until whomever you're with catches up and you're ready to move on. Figuratively, backpedaling is all about retracing words/ideas back to some point where you can diverge from the direction they first took and try another road of reason. i passed a guy on the street wearing a t-shirt that showed the borders of Hungary in 1914 with '100% Our Nation' written underneath - obviously an extreme, poorly reasoned form of backpedaling since it would involve taking control of 1/3 of poverty striken Romania and what currency conscious, sane Hungarian would possibly sanction that? The point here is that while it is possible to gain momentum when the backtracking involves a recast of historical time, in most cases this only happens in the realm of fanaticism - nationalist, religious, pick your poison - and leads to human behavior we'd all rather not dwell on. Better to not move at all than to push people forward by shoving them backward into a chimerical past.

Since i left last December, the government here has be engaged in a fair amount of historical backpedaling, changing place names everywhere i look. Moskva tér has been renamed after Széll Kalman, a man of mysterious origins since nobody i've asked has a clue about who he is, though they're all sure he at least wasn't a fascist (yes, one has to ask such things). Baross tér is now the 32nd ter, though again nobody's sure what event in '32 this is meant to commemorate and one friend couldn't even say for certain which century is being invoked. The new Ronnie the Raygun statue was placed in the shadow of the Soviet soldiers memorial, 1945 (a big of Bitburg backpedaling?), but the sad truth is that as political art, it really doesn't work without Iron Maiden Maggie standing by his side. There's also a newly unveiled memorial to victims of the Roma Holocaust, which is a good thing to remind Hungarians and others of, except that it's located in a place where very few people are actually going to see it. Oh well, it's the honest revisionism that really counts, right?

As it is with countries, so too is this usually the case with individual life histories. 'Starting over' only works by remembering which door got you into your personal hell the first time around. To come to Budapest and not get lost in the maze of what's workable for everyone else compared to what's workable for me remains a palpable challenge. If ever i've felt like a trapped little rat, a tightly leashed slave, it's been at intervals during the period i lived in this city of - ahem -

beautiful bridges. People can end up in places they never even knew existed for all sorts of reasons, some manage to carve out a place for themselves and others decide it's better to move on while they still can. Evidently i needed a solid dose of Greek sunlight (figuratively more than literally) to finally shake me free of all those shackles, escape my personal labyrinth of pointless existence: do not get comfortable, do not imagine you belong here. One thing that has become profoundly clear about my own story - especially after a few days here - is that i will probably never be as connected to any geographic location as i am to a somewhat specific array of chronological ones, mostly accessible vis a vis enduring friendships across many time zones and the explorations of different times/eras i've so often shared with these friends, from the Nevada Nuclear Test Site to the ash-covered streets of Pompeii, floating in the Dead Sea, drinking palm oil wine in a lantern-lit Lamu shack. Six months ago, i would have described this as a ridiculous, meaningless life; now i can (almost) comfortably say that it's just my life, for better or worse.

Channeling Tyche, Goddess of Fortune, it's easy at this moment to evanescently embrace the solitude that living on an island in the Danube affords, to standstill for a bit and catch my proverbial breath, electronic thumping of a saturday night in storybook party town wafting through the air as unintrusive as the currents swirling beneath the river's reflective surface. Budapest is, surely, a great city for any traveller to land in, particularly during the summer when the music industry goes utterly beserk and sidewalk cafes fill every bit of exterior pavement. i'll be starting off next week with Prince and ending it with Cheikh Lo -a heavy dose of momentum seems appropriate given that i've then got to get myself all the way to Ulaanbataar (GMT+11?? Facebook is definitely going to give me a hard time about that). We were listening to Gil Scott-Heron earlier today, who says that 'home is what's inside you' (or something like that) which, if true, is a great stress-reducer for someone like myself. Welcome to Planet Earth: wherever you go - forward, backward, inward, outward - there you are, along with the rest of us, pedaling along on the road to tomorrow.

Dumbledore going to Baku?

These recent statements by Azerbaijan's Minister of Culture and Tourism have me wondering if the government there is cooking up some kind of Hogwart's magic to prepare the country for Eurovision 2012. Baku is a shell city, and i mean vast tracts of multi-story stone and cement building frames which changed not a bit in the six months i was just living there. It boggles the mind to hear an official claim they are going to be fully prepared for the kind of foreign onslaught Eurovision is sure to bring. Everyone in Baku get your wands ready, because meeting the Minister's goals is going to require one massive wave of transformative power!

One of the more cynical Azeri businessmen i know suggested that the first thing they'll need to do is create a special 'Eurovision visa', because as things now stand, getting a tourist visa for Azerbaijan is both expensive and unpredictable. They'll collect your money, but there's no guarantee you'll actually get the visa. This is going to be especially true for young EU budget travellers, who will have to negotiate via the internet in Azeri to find tourist companies who can provide them with invitations. There are no buses to and from the airport, nothing even remotely like a European hostel to accommodate those who prefer Teva's or other non-heeled footwear, no bus maps and no tourist information centers. But hey, don't worry, be happy! If you do get a visa and find an affordable place to stay, you'll have a great time in Baku. People are friendly and poroskis are cheap. Just remember to be careful if you blog about your experiences: censors rule the day and Eurovision may be a welcome spectacle, but Eurosensibility has the potential to get you deported. Maybe bring a broomstick along, just in case.

Taxi to the Port Side

Nobody likes a pissed off, angry taxi driver, let alone an entire fleet of them, except for - evidently - the euro-prostrate Greek government. For the past several days, the taxi drivers of Thessaly have been enforcing a strike while futilely communicating their demands to members of parliament, PASOK and whichever Ministry governs them (Culture and Tourism? Transportation? Malfeasance?). Where do reasonable people go when the leftist party they once supported has completely violated its principles and consequently, their trust? They go further portside - figuratively and literally - which was exactly what i found them doing in the city of Volos on day three of their strike.

A spirited march of approximately 150 men and women made its way through the city's main financial /shopping district to the port facility, where a lively debate ensued regarding whether or not to blockade cars from getting onto the next ferry. In spite of a very meager police presence, easily subverted, in the end the blockade did not take place. However, patience was wearing thin and it seems the pro-blockade contigent has been growing every day. If the government does not deal with this sector of transportation workers soon, we shouldn't be surprised to see them blocking not only the ferries in Volos, but in other Greek ports as well. It was clear from the honking of horns and general public approval towards the marchers that while the government may not be on their side, the people certainly are. Everyone cheered when bottles of water were tossed at the local PASOK headquarters.

What decisions, aka austerity measures, are these drivers contesting? The government has already put them at a disadvantage compared to their peers throughout the European Union (EU), because EU regulations place a limit of 2 drivers per 1000 inhabitants, whereas in Greece the government currently allows 3. Now the austerity faux planners are further sticking it to the drivers with a plan to completely deregulate the taxi industry so that debt prioritization can liberally run its course. According to a Volos driver named Konstantinos, anyone who wants to call their vehicle a taxi will now be able to do so, which means competition for fares is going to dramatically increase while rates (per km) will naturally decrease. Arthuro and his fellow driver, Kristos, both from Larissa (Thessaly's capital) believe that mafioso-like operatives will come in, buy a fleet of 200 cars and put the 'real drivers' out of business. They said the drivers had come from four different cities and represented about 50.000 people (the number of family members who depend on taxis to keep them fed and clothed). Arthuro just bought his taxi last year and like everyone i've met in Greece this month, is distressed about not being able to pay off the accrued debt if the new (non)regulations go into effect.

Once they reached the port, it was interesting to watch the megaphone change hands as the debate about whether to carry out the blockade unfolded; there were clearly several diverse, equally passionate opinions being expressed. Given the potential havoc that would ensue if a blockade had occurred and the fact that these were local people addressing the current crisis in an organized way, it was surprising to me that there were no media in attendance - nope, not a one, except ostensibly yours truly ("Gentleman, today I am your media coverage!") which is a pretty sad situation, given the fact i'm working without internet backup and hence couldn't even get this posted until 3 days after the fact. When i asked them WHY there were no media present, they rightfully accused the media of only being interested in Athens, because that's where the sex & violence rating requirements can be met. A friend later told me he had seen a TV report the previous night on two drivers attacking a third, who thought he could get away with earning a fare or two, which would seem to support the drivers' claim regarding lack of media interest in a peaceful march. They could have thrown molotovs at PASOK to get some attention (certainly the police response would've merited at least one tv camera?) but these were frappe-drinking guys and gals looking for respect, not vengence. The relevant Minister and local MPs have alternated between giving them a total run-around on negotiations and outright lying about their intentions. Fed up, they insist they are not going to take it anymore. If you want to follow their next moves, here's a website for Eurotaxi Larissa (Greek and English pages). As it stands today, "We ask sincerely apologize to our passengers that we will not be able to meet the transport needs, due to the strike."

Advantageous in covering a demonstration of taxi drivers is that most of them speak at least some English, so it wasn't very hard to find people able to explain what was happening. However, willingness to do so was a different matter, as many refused to say anything to me beyond expressing their disdain for America. One could easily thank neo-liberal extraordinaire Hilary Clinton for that, but her recent appearance in Athens to hold Papandreou's hand (or threaten him?) was little more than icing on a heavily corrupted cake in which America represents one thick central layer. Many think the ultimate problem they're dealing with is economic globalization and no country is more responsible for THAT than the United States.

At any rate, the answer i continuously received regarding the content of the various statements being made on the issue of whether to hold a blockade was, "in Greece you are seeing real democracy". Period.... but also parenthetically, since democracy (theoretically) includes an investiture of decision-making power and in Greece today, those invested with this power are in no way, shape or form the people marching in the streets - more like those hiding from the marchers. Hilary Clinton and company should do us all a favor and stop railing about democracy because in fact, what we're seeing here is banktocracy - the new legacy that American, IMF and EU finance barons are spreading up and down the Aegean. When Chinese companies own every taxi and ferry serving these ports, i suppose we'll see which side of the political spectrum this legacy really falls on: port or starboard? sink or swim?

Declaration from Thessaloniki's resistance camp

Hopefully in the very near future i'll have time to write a longer piece about the Indignados resistance camp in Thessaloniki - for now, i'm doing as promised and publishing English and Spanish versions of their most recent declaration. The activists have a website of their own which is mostly in Greek, but you can find some English, Spanish and German translations there as well.

Words cannot properly convey the level outrage i've encountered about the level of police violence in Athens. i'm waiting to receive some video links to post here - most of the street media is being done by Greeks, in Greek, so while there's a ton of it on youtube, it's also hard to navigate if one doesn't speak the language and is short on time. The worst and most shocking stories have been about the repeated gasing of people inside the metro stations, evidently with expired gas canisters, so who knows what chemicals the good citizens of Athens have been exposed to? Teargas cocktails are definitely not for the meek or asthmatic! Horrific, truly. i've not seen any of the Terminator films, but everyone seems to think in order to fully appreciate what's going on here now, it would be a good idea if i did.

i've also been told that MPs are being stalked, hounded and pelted with the odd tomato , egg, etc. wherever they go: from the time they step out of their door to the point where they're able to escape public access to their persons. People are cynical to the extreme at this point and Greece is definitely going to see a huge brain drain in the coming months because professionals and recent university graduates see no future for themselves in this country, at least in the short- and medium-term. i spoke with one young woman who has one more year of university left and she's committed to staying here to resist the government and its repressive measures, but without a large collective pooling of resources, it's hard to say how long encampments and organizers are going to survive the economics of full-time resistance... more thoughts on this point at a later date.

Anyway, that's a little insight into the situation as seen from the White Tower (Lefkos Pyrgos) of Thessaloniki. Here's the declaration; if it's too difficult to read in blogspot size, try clicking on it to get a large image. And if you're reading this in Thessaloniki or any other town in Greece, please stop going to Starbucks for your afternoon frappes. This company is exemplary of the larger economic theft in the country and you would do much better supporting you local kafe owner whose business has nothing to do with maximizing stockholder returns. If the argument is that they alone offer fair trade coffee, then it's time to change that situation and i'm betting that given the current anti-corporate sentiment throughout Greece, this wouldn't be an impossible thing to accomplish.

Impressions of Thrace, where my life suddenly became Greece in a microcosm

In a rare occurrence of travel daring (or maybe just circumstance), i've actually got a fun story to tell about the day i entered Greece. However, blogging on the road has been riddled with problems, on top of which i didn't come here to spend all day or night on a computer. So: have written out the full title of this post-in-progress in the hope you'll be enticed enough to come back in a couple days to read it. As consolation, i did manage to get a selection of photos up on Picasso. Finding interesting ways to chronicle a travel experience continues to be a great challenge for someone with my limited imagination - look forward to any comments/ideas you may have regarding this set.

Resurrecting Santa Ana

This is too distorted to pass comment on. ABC [US] continues to excel in what corporate media does best, which is telling Americans their problems are inevitably caused by someone else - in this case, Mexico.

Mexico's border with California — the birthplace of the 649-mile-long border fence being built by the USA— resembles a demilitarized zone.

In highly populated areas south of San Diego, U.S. Border Patrol vehicles patrol dirt roads between 18-foot-high fences. Cameras monitor hard-to-reach valleys, and drivers must idle through Border Patrol checkpoints that sit 4,000 feet above sea level along Interstate 8 in the Jacumba Mountains.

Did Mexico erect a fence on the border? No. Is La Migra patrolling on Mexican soil? No. Yet ABC clearly implies that the North Korean-like conditions on America's southern frontier are Mexico's doing and not its own. This is just bogus reporting. It would be like the Jerusalem Post writing a story with the headline 'Palestinian security barrier prevents Israelis from seeing the sunrise'. Come on folks, if you think the fence and associated controls are so essential, why shy away from the fact that they are all happening on California's border with Mexico? In fact, that would even intensify the message that American's are suffering at the hands of Mexican drug lords, etc. If ABC really wanted to rile people up, they should have called this piece 'Remember the Alamo', because there's nothing an embattled, embittered population likes better than the resurrection of an old evil in order the justify the promotion of a new one.

A story like too many others (not really mine to tell yet tell it i must)

They came in the night and left in the light. Alas, the symbology does not assure a luminous ending. If that were the case, love that runs deepest would never hurt and families in flight would glide effortlessly towards aeries of refuge. Not so in Fortress Europe and not so in Afghanistan, the two opposing corners of the framework within which this snapshot of a much longer and endlessly replicating story occurs. No moral is intended except (perhaps) that some human messes are impossible to clean up or even contain, when that happens hold onto who you've got and hope that everyone comes out of the abyss without having forgotten how to breathe. Or maybe the lesson is simpler: be thankful you are not one of the millions of refugees in the world today.

As alluded to, this family's story began in Afghanistan and i can't even begin to imagine the chapters lived between the day they departed their village and the evening they appeared on the sidewalk beneath my balcony window in Alexandroupoli. i watched them drift across the square, about ten people: 3 men, one petite young woman and several children ranging from a few months to a few years in age. To be honest, i wondered at first if they were Roma because of all the kids, but there was a fretfulness about them that struck me as decidedly non-Roma, a sense of vulnerability that came from the clinging to each other, the constant swinging around of heads as though making sure they hadn't been followed. There was one small suitcase., secured with rope. When they had all regrouped on the sidewalk, a contentious discussion ensued, clearly about where to go next since there was a lot of directional pointing and the voices grew louder, more frenzied. Their language had a bit of that birdlike melodiousness i've come to associate with South Asia; they might have been speaking Urdu, Tamil or Bengali. i watched their debate for a couple of minutes, then left the balcony to do other things.

About 15 minutes later, i walked out of my room and there they all were in the pension, two men seated and talking with the proprietress, one pacing around with a cigarette, the wide-eyed children (one holding the baby) watching the adults, their backs pressed against the hexagonal corners of the room as if they were trying to be invisible or to steel themselves in case of suddenly being instructed RUN. The woman emerged from the toilet, obviously surprised by my presence and the sudden eye contact. She touched hand to heart (a typically Muslim reflex), looked down and flitted to where the children were. She was wearing normal European street cloths, a sheer floral scarf wrapped round the neck and tossed over the head, but her eyes were what ultimately answered the question of origin for me - those shimmering blue, thousand year old eyes that could only have come from the Baluchi-Afghani-Waziristan part of the world.

One of the men was speaking Greek with the pension owner, who was becoming somewhat agitated in a distressful sort of way. Finally she announced 'OK, OK, OK' and started urging mother and brood into the bathroom. The Greek speaker spoke with the pacer, who then spoke to the woman and then the men went downstairs. When i came out of the WC, there were sounds of splashing and lilted, childish screams. As the proprietress later told me, evidently the kids were unfamiliar with running water and reacted to the shower head with a little terror. But she had insisted they at least wash their feet and a couple emerged with wet hair, so she was more successful in getting them cleaned up than she'd at first anticipated. The last i saw of them was very early the next morning. The men were conferring again with the owner, the woman and children filed out of a room and quickly down the stairs, eyes cast downward - again that aura of desired invisibility. One of the men looked up at me and i offered a 'Salaam Aleikum,' he returned the greeting with a nod, but that was all. Too much worry, no risking a change in focus. Whatever they were doing next, it was not going to be easy.

Afterwards, here's what i learned about them. The father was a doctor who spoke some English and wanted to take the family to Germany, where someone from his village lived and had assured him he could find work. They came from Afghanistan, travelling without passports. The father claimed he had a lot of money (somewhere) but that it had also been very expensive to get as far as Greece. The Greek speaker with them was also from their village and had evidently brought them across the Turkish border, where they were given documents by Greek immigration officials that allowed them to stay 30 days. They were headed next to Athens, but the father didn't foresee being able to pay for the whole family to fly north (would they even be allowed on a plane?) so in all likelihood, the next balcony window they'd be standing under is probably in Piraeus, or some other port town where they might find a boat to take them - where? Through Gibralter and up to the Baltic Sea, dropping them in northern Germany? The mind boggles at how this was all going to be managed: how to decide who to trust, how much to pay, what living/stowaway conditions would be acceptable. Thousands are doing do this and how it will end for them... all i've got is a big bold chain of ????

According to the Greeks i was out with last night here in Thessaloniki, there is a lot of tension between these northern European countries and Greece because when the refugees are stopped, this is where Germany, France, et al. send them back to. In general, it's fair to say that people are generous mostly - or only - when they can afford to be; we all know that right now, Greece can afford little more than tear gas and well-catered debt and privatization negotiations. According to UNHCR's 2010 data, the largest number of refugees worldwide are coming from Afghanistan (1.6 million) and although rates of refugee return have been decreasing globally, the number of statistically stateless persons has been doing the opposite. Afghans whose refugee claims are being recognized was at 53% last year, which means that roughly 800,000 were either refused status or still waiting for a decision at the time the data was collected. Obviously this is an enormous topic which, if i'm actually going to post this story tonight, i can't afford to investigate too deeply at the moment. One thing i will add is that in Thrace, northern Greece, people of all stripes expressed a great deal more concern about illegal immigrants, refugees and sex trafficking than they did the economic crisis, which struck me as quite telling. Here's a video report on Daily Motion that tells other Afghan stories in the context of the Greek refugee crisis and includes interviews with immigration lawyers.

It's a harsh, sad tale of displacement, suffering and bureaucracy. We can read it as either one epic story or millions of short, seemingly inconsequential ones. Sometimes one can only see the forest by starting with individual trees and sometimes the forest is simply too dense to see anything. The story i've told here - the snapshot, as it were - reflects little more than this fact and as i've said, it's not even my story to tell. People travel for many different reasons; typically, reporting on other people's hardships is not one of them. i could just as readily have written about the woes of an Aegean fisherman i met, and maybe at some point i will. It really comes down to who the writer decides s/he wants to make visible, even if making total sense of that person(s) and/or their situation is untenable. The following afternoon, i noticed this new graffiti on the train station and ultimately, it is responsible for my decision to write about this family. No matter how common their story may be, to ignore it altogether would seem to subvert my own intentions for being here. Greece may be a 'timeless' place, but as a traveler, i can only see it in the time that i have. Day or night, looking for the light.

Travel in the 21st Century

The extent that digital technologies are shaping - or at least infiltrating - my travel experience has totally caught me off-guard. The advance online hotel and ticket booking systems have been standard protocol for a while, and it certainly eased things to know where i was going to keep my stuff, sleep and shower the first few days of this trip, enabling me to fully focus on reawakening my traveller's mojo (what's left of it). What i'm talking about is the ubiquitous presence of wifi and myriad hand-held devices everyone is now using to moderate interactions and design their daily itineraries. Truly, a new age is dawning (has dawned!). Feigning impartiality, i can only say that while i miss the physical immediacy of a handwritten journal, sweat-stained paper maps, that simplicity if you will of old school travelling, the options for enhancing personal communication and sharing information now are just fantastic - maybe even a little fantastical.

i had a small taste of the digital traveler's syndrome a couple years ago in Amsterdam, where i met some friends from the states who initiated their daily 'down time' by firing up notepads and kindles to write facebook updates and keep abreast of events as reported in the NY Times. There were also more immediate practical uses, like checking movie times and restaurant locales. Since i was with Americans, it felt very much like a catch up session on where Silicon Valley and Seattle software designers were taking people who can afford to indulge in their newest toys; Amsterdam of course always cutting edge.

Then i get to Turkey and discover this is all much more internationalized than i'd suspected and that i am much farther behind the technology curve than i'm comfortable admitting. Some examples. Sitting on the wall along Istanbul's Marmara shoreline to watch the sunset, i was joined by a guy hawking picture books for tourists who took it upon himself to instruct me on where all the great Istanbul area beaches are located. Initially, he used the age old method of pointing to towns on the other side of the water, but that was all just too indistinct, so out came the Samsung and in less than a minute, we're squinting at Google maps and he's detailing which buses will take me to which plots of sandy beach. The following day on the bus to Cannakale, i sat next to a young woman who spoke as much English as i do Turkish, so to subvert the language barrier she pulls out her phone, logs into Google and brings up Zargan, an online Turkish-English translator.... away we go, no word or phrase off limits.

i’ve just spent 6 days in Turkey and these are thing things i learned how to say:

Thanks

Thank you very much (formal version)

rudimentary counting, especially currency denominations (not so hard because of similarities to Azeri)

milk (for coffee)

no sugar (ditto)

stuffed mussels

garlic

wind turbine

wine

smile (imperative form, for picture taking)

population/inhabitants

young male camel (don’t even try to guess)

seafront

Inevitably there were other words figured out in the context of specific interactions, but i couldn’t say now what they were and anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that with so many people carrying around Bluetooth and most cities now full of wifi networks, i didn’t need a large working vocabulary to discuss anything - from water sources at Troy to the best temperature for storing Turkish delight. Of course all of those conversations were grammatical nightmares, but since i don’t really speak Turkish and the people keying words into Zargan didn’t actually speak English, who noticed (or cared about) the grammatical inadequacies? One significant impact of this technological (r)evolution is that people seem more intent on conveying ideas or bits of information which more deeply reflect who they are, how or what they think. Another tourist at Troy used his phone to bring up the word ‘accompany’ when suggesting we go to the bat cave together. He was a bit creepy so i had to decline, but at least i got a different message than ‘invite’ or ‘take’ would have implied.

As far as the young male camel goes, this is probably my favorite technotale to relate. On a ferry crossing the Dardenelle Straights one evening, an extended family sat down around me and i had to ask about the hat one of the boys was wearing. His name is Bura (our young ship of the desert), he spoke a little English but his dad spoke quite a bit and turned out to be a professional soldier, stationed way out in Anatolia to guard the border with Iran. i didn’t recognize the name of the town, but Bura happened to have his little GPS device in tow – ‘I LOVE GPS’ he tells me – and with myself and even more awestruck mother-in-law looking over his shoulder, in about 30 seconds dad had zeroed in on where his guard post is located (within about 10 km). FYI that’s him on the left, aptly attired for messing with the minds of his Iranian counterparts.

As i’ve frequently admitted, i am a total technoweenie when it comes to things like synchronization, proxy servers and the like. i’ve little doubt these stories create the impression that i also live in a time bubble, utterly naïve/out of touch with 21^st century technology. Closer to reality is that i’m just a person living in a constant state of working poverty and why self-inflict depression by window shopping electronic devices i’ll never be able to afford? More importantly, do i really need these things to manage my life in any way? Well, the answer is apparently ‘yes and no’.

Online mobility today has become what business cards were in the ‘80s and ‘90s: a form of legitimization, of ascertaining and securing one’s PRESENCE. The number of Facebook users may be slacking in the US, but in this part of the world, talk with anyone 40 and under for any length of time and they will inevitably want to know if they can find you and ‘friend’ you, maybe even skype you. Some do, some don’t, but the main thing i’m finding on this trip is that ‘Are you connected?’ has replaced ‘What do you do?’ in most casual introductory cross-cultural conversations.

This seems overall like a positive development although, like any other communicative and technological opportunity, it all depends on what one does with it. With digital dictionaries, maps and other such applications, people have a tool through which to moderate interactions they might otherwise forego due to shyness, lack of communicative/language ability and so on. Also a good thing so long as we don’t lose perspective on who is ultimately responsible for successful communication, i.e. ourselves.

An old friend of mine and cyber scholar is in Egypt now to learn about how these technological platforms are influencing the politics of activists and others in that country; it will be interesting to get his assessments on how they (the platforms) are helping and hindering substantive socio-political change there. i may be naïve about many of the technologies or how easy it is now to access them, but i want to think i’m smart enough to know the difference between political tools and political movement. Caveat emptor: we are not what we tweet. i look forward to being further impressed by it all making my way around anarchist-ridden Greece. Old habits die hard, i still use a Lonely Planet, but it’s great experiencing what this century is bring to travel and perhaps by my next trip, i’ll have shaped up into a modern digitized woman. There’s gotta be a grant somewhere for that, right? Better start googling. Good thing this city provides free wifi :-)

On The Road, 'cuz i'm an american and this is my independence day goddammit!

Before i say anything directly relevant to this post's title, i first want to thank my lurking yet diverse, international readership for taking the time to read however much you have of these pages since i started writing again this spring. Recently someone in Kenya found the blog, which set my little swahili meter all aflutter (Habari gani, rafiki?). Can't imagine how s/he ended up here, such is the nature of gratuitous search engines... In general i have a hard time wrapping my brain around the immensity and intensity of our global-in-scope digitized communication networks and often feel like Kobo Abe's character in The Box Man, looking out looking in seeing not being seen. Nowhere close to being a real journalist, the only thing i have to offer is a view of the world based on how i, personally, perceive and experience it. It's honestly amazing that people i've never met, in countries i've never been to, find what i share here even the slightest bit worth their/your time - again, thanks a lot whomever you are, making me always want to do better at whatever it is, exactly, that i'm doing in this space.

Today is the 4th of July, it's 6:00 the sun is rising over the Caspian Sea and i am about to go on the road for while, starting in Istanbul and then to some as yet undetermined place(s) on the Balkan peninsula. Towards the end of August, i'll be writing from Mongolia (yet another peculiar locale for an aging renegade american anarchist). Choosing this date of departure was my attempt to tap into the karmic American freedom thing, enjoying my independence after being ruled over for the past 6 months by a readily arrogant & tyrannical, conventionally paranoid Brit, someone who apparently believes that empire is part of his national genetic heritage. It's been a long, long time since i've been able to venture out into new, unknown territory without a set plan, open (within reason) to total spontaneity. A real trip, a little taste of freedom for freedom's sake. Obviously this means a bunch of travelogue is in store, but since every hostel and hotel in Europe advertises free wifi these days, i expect to stay more or less abreast of Qadhafi's European conquest, unrelenting zionist mayhem in the Med, bursting pipelines, sinking reactors, etc etc etc whatever my friends on facebook tell me by acclaim is important at any given moment (4 people posting the same story moves alert status to red).

Otherwise re my blog, i've been putting together a couple slide shows to add here (the Picasso interface is time consuming + likes to freeze my computer), have started checking/updating all the links and streamlining the tags because they've gotten out of control to the point of meaninglessness. If you, dear reader, happen to have your own blog or other type of website, i'm more than happy to put up a link to it here.

So, that's all for now. Farewell Azerbaijan: the ridiculous high heels, relentless honking of horns and my oh-so-patient neighborhood merchants, still unsure what language i speak except that it's definitely not theirs. Onward to the new Ottomans and the old school Greeks! Instead of telling people i'm an English teacher, now i can say i'm not a taxpayer (for a while, anyway). If that strategy backfires, i'll say that i'm a blogger and if that comes across as opportunistic and self-aggrandizing, there's always the ultimate fallback: human. Have independence, will travel.

Nothing like slavery to make your currency stronger

i'd say this has been a hellish week for me (thus little time to do more than pour out some drafts :-0() but compared to what's going down with the Athenians?? Clearly my own travails seem unworthy of the name. It was wonderful to see my old friend Lisa Fithian on the streets of Athens sporting a Gaza flotilla tee, speaking to folks in Syntagma Square about evil IMF and the conspiracy that's not really a conspiracy, just troika (US-EU-Israel) politics as usual.

Have been following the strikes on ContraInfo, apparently a derivative of IMC-Athens; they were running a live stream and have an excellent photo montage of the demonstrations. As far as more mainstream reporting goes, this report/interview on RT is particularly on the mark - embedded here to increase the chances you'll watch it. Notice how he sections off 'anarchist and provocatuers,' an understated reminder of how the state's demonstration propoganda works. Two statements are particularly worth quoting: 'They [the government] seem to be completely indifferent to this reality [situation's volatility]', and 'We’ve seen this before…. the IMF has come in and plundered the nation for corporate consolidation.' In essence, they are turning the populace into debt slaves for big banks and investors. If Papandreou loses control of the country, what are these invisible euro-moghuls going to do next, send in NATO? Blackwater (Xe)? i'd be willing to bet money that there are Greeks who would rather pack the Parthenon with C4 than see it become the private property of some unnamed Kuwaiti oil baron.... and that would be absolutely tragic, since robber barons come and go but there will only ever be one, irreplaceable Parthenon.

This morning i was thinking about how, when i studied development economics in the late 1970s and early 80s, it was all about GDP and GNP, infrastructure carrying capacity and reducing underemployment, comparing Five Year Plans, e.g. in India, to free market development, and yes, debt ratios as well, but not in the way they are formulated now. Apparently i took too long to blink and missed the reordering of key indicators for successful economic policy. Nowadays, the important things are investor confidence, currency stability, healthy bond markets and [non]restrictions on the privatization of national wealth. What has changed about us that has changed our societal values so drastically, that we now believe multinational bank liquidity is paramount to the majority of people earning a decent wage and having a decent life? Especially since it's clear that we're not really talking about the banks so much as the bankERS - do we need that class of super rich to set the standards for what living a good life means? Are people who mostly produce print-outs better role models than people who produce the actual paper those derivative models are printed on? It's ironic, indeed, that in the same breath the state-media propoganda machine wants us to drool over the luxuries of royalty, they also want to make us believe that austerity is the responsible way to go. Slaves with dreams... i suppose that's where the term spartan comes from?

Viva Grafitti!

One thing i haven't liked much about Baku is the near total absence of graffiti; what little exists are website addresses and an occasional love note, 'Ershad + Sevinc forever' scrawled inside an imbalanced heart. One night some rebellious types managed to ‘decorate’ a couple walls in the upscale shopping district with ‘Fuck Aliyev’ (in English), other not-so-random words like SOCIALISM and FREEDOM – trying to photograph this the next morning as it was being quickly painted over, i got into a verbal tussle with a fur-hatted policeman, ended with me shouting ‘Freedom!?’ at him as i finally put the camera away. (That’s what living in a media dictatorship means: people aren’t supposed to know these things happen, might give them IDEAS.) After much hiking about town, i did eventually find some decent graffiti covering the walls of a crumbling, semi-underground Soviet-era theatre. Dark place, out of public view, guess the thought police decided to let this site slip under their radar.

Yes, i'm well aware governments and many individuals (especially business owners) consider it a form of vandalism and yes, i understand that, but... cities with too many blank walls are simply begging for flash commentary or premeditated (sketched or stenciled) designs - for COLOR at the very least. Compare the typical Baku graffiti site to this very non-gray work in Bangalore:

San Francisco, where i’m from, is among other things renown as a city of exquisite public murals, going back to the 1930s when the US government put artists to work painting them (government sponsoring rank and file artists – what a concept!) The line between mural painting and the finer, e.g. Banksy, graffiti seems to exist only in its sanctity. Outdoor murals like the great works by Diego Rivera are understood to be sanctioned, permanent paintings (themselves often the targets of spray paint freestylers), whereas graffiti is impermanent, artists fully aware that what they lay down may not be visible for very long. How many layers of graffiti once covered the Berlin Wall? How many layers have accumulated on urban underground/metro trains? Ultimately, what makes graffiti graffiti is its illegality. Having participated in many late night SF stencil brigades, i guarantee that the this certainly makes it FUN – though in fact, it’s not illegal everywhere.

Graffiti and murals are also no-admission-ticket-required public domain art. As Banksy said, “I don’t think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it.” I’ve put together a small slideshow of some graffiti and mural work i’ve seen over the past few years and sure to be added to when i get to Thessaloniki :-) Nothing extraordinary really, but nice to see what’s out there in difference locales. Also found a good link illustrating the difference styles used by modern graffiti artists. Enjoy! Then go out and make some of your own :-)

For Pedants and Freedom Fighters Alike

Snagging this off Jadaliyya. A lot of people were interested in the other kinetic typography link i posted, this one acutely relevant to what's happening NOW in Syria. After everything i've seen in Palestine, watched from afar in Lebanon, really wondering what Hezbollah is going to do. Come down on the side of the madness shown at the end of this clip... or point their rockets eastward and tell Assad to BACK OFF?



Day later addendum: perspectives on Syrian intifada from the Lebanese left.

Alice Walker: The new face of terrorism

In the history of client states, nothing comes close to the US' bended knee for Israel. The US State Department (Foreign Ministry) is now threatening to prosecute US citizens on behalf of Israel. WOW i am actually speechless. Here's part of the statement from DoS as reported by Reuters:

"We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration."

Are we talking American Taliban here? Benedict Arnold? Luis Posada Cariles? No, we're talking about Alice Walker. Here's an extended interview she did with Electronic Intifada and a video clip in which she discusses her motivation for getting so involved in this effort. This is the same Alice Walker whose writing Michelle Obama publicly quotes, who was honored last year by the Congressional Black Causus and (talk about short memory syndrome) was herself selected by the Change We Can Believe In campaign to introduce then-candidate Obama at a large rally in San Francisco. Ah, how far the mighty have fallen and yes, Barak, i'm referring to you.

As a rule, i refrain from actually quoting racist, right wing speech because i just don't want to further empower those who use it. However, have to make an exception here and offer up this bit from an essay in ultra-AIPAC zionist publication Commentary Magazine (06/03/2011).

Whatever negative attention Israel receives, the main thing is to maintain the blockade, as it is what makes it difficult for Hamas to arm itself though the recent opening of the border between Egypt and Gaza may render the whole point moot. Nevertheless, there will always be haters of Israel, who will provide no shortage of useful-idiots like Walker to help further the aims of genocidal terrorist movements. That in itself is no small reason for the existence of the Jewish state: to provide the Jewish people with the necessary means of self-defense in the face of ineradicable hatred.

Drawing upon deep trends in Zionist thinking, there is some truth to this dismissal. Mao famously said that power comes from the end of a gun. The fate of the Zionist project has also long been and largely will be determined by the ability of Israel’s citizens to defend themselves physically.

Not going to waste my energy unravelling such absurd propaganda; i'm sure the contortion of reality comes through without translation. The AIPAC-ites are now calling these ships (which are already en route to Gaza) the Alice Walker Flotilla, so we can expect plenty more invective against her in the coming days. On the bright side, if they have to resort to calling someone as thoughtful as her a 'useful idiot' and quote Chairman Mao to justify their extreme and all-pervasive militarism, either we accept that the Israelis will one day rule over all of us, or celebrate the inevitable historical reality that their days as arrogant aggressors are definitely numbered. The great zionist project long ago surpassed the extent of sacrifice and destruction to which any radical movement should be entitled. It has evolved into the Sick Man of the Middle East - we all know how well that turned out.

It's All There

Old habits die hard. i'm still on the Multikulti Amnesty International-Hungary mailing list and yesterday received this: Two Protests! Against Reagan Statue & for Iranian Democracy! Ah, the irony of it all, n'est-ce pas? Evidently the de-republicanized nationalist government now wants to look out the windows of parliament and see Ronald Reagan, standing tall, gazing out over the Danube over an inscription that reads There's nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse. As Molly Ivins put it: 'This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency." Such are the iconic values of the current Hungarian government.

On the topic of nationalist cajones, tomorrow is Army Day in Azerbaijan and Baku has been awash in camoflaged-clad men all week, setting up for the big display, apparently to be a classic 'we will protect ourselves against all forms of aggression' parade (in lieu of other parade themes seen throughout the world this month). It will be interesting to see who from the US government is in attendance, since they've just concluded talks on the 'importance of ensuring security of energy infrastructure in the Caspian Sea and ... the readiness to continue joint efforts to prevent the threats to it.' Considering that no progress was made in this week's Russian-sponsored summit to come up with a peace process for Nagorno-Karabakh, i suppose some Azeris may want reassurance that their military is ready and willing to prevent further national tragedy. Some here believe that if Azerbaijan is forced to go to war again with Armenia, Turkey will have to fight alongside them - or maybe for them - but right now, the Turks are busy doing this, and have more pressing, internal issues to worry about.

Personally, i'm with Ronald Reagan when it comes to wasteful government spending, though there's a bit of divergence in what we each would delete from the national budget. In that spirit, the hope that the entire Caspian region may one day evolve into a conflict-free zone, i give you this from the late great John Lennon. 'All we are saying' blahblahblah but you know, if we don't at least think it, we can be relatively certain it will never come to pass. Happy Nuclear Abolition Day!

Confidence in what, exactly?

Papandreou got what he was after, a vote of support strong enough to keep him securely in power for a while longer. Nice headline in Der Spiegel though, and Al-Jazeera reports:

'The mood in financial markets was calm after the confidence vote, especially when compared to the firestorm last week when Papandreou's government was teetering on the brink following violent protests against the new austerity measures.'

Good news - i will stop worrying about my own miniscule bank account succumbing to death by euro collapse. Whew! Thank you Mr. Sarkozy! Congratulations Frau Merkel! Unfortunately, this puts me at odds with a large number of Greeks, who probably share the sentiments of this engineering student: "It is completely unfair that the money of the poor is used to save the banks." Fairness? What's that got to do with banking and investor confidence? These ungrateful people should retire to their libraries and spend their copious free time (afforded them by strikes and unemployment) reciting Socrates to each other. 'Could I climb to the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim, "Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and take so little care of your children to whom one day you must relinquish it all?"'

Dismantling the Bil'in Wall

Further proof that the Palestinian Authority has become a meaningless insitution in the struggle for freedom. While children are being openly abducted by Shin Bet, the faux 'unity government' suits in Ramallah sink deeper into the abyss of their own self-effacing flattery. The Bil'in Popular Committee is the only group in the West Bank to have achieved substantive success - however imperfect - in getting the Israeli "security barrier" moved back from illegally confiscated territory. The news today is good and reflects the power of sustained civil disobedience as the last resort.

On Tuesday morning this week, army bulldozers began work to dismantle the Wall in Bil'in. As early as 2007, after two years of weekly protests in the village and following a petition filed by the residents, Israeli high court declared the path of the Barrier illegal. The court ruled that the route was not devised according to security standards, but rather for the purpose of settlement expansion. Despite the high court's ruling four more years of struggle had to elapse for the army to begin dismantlement. During these years two people were killed in the course of the weekly protests and many others injured.

Granted, it was ultimately an Israeli court that caused this to happen, but that's actually the point of civil disobedience campaigns: get the courts involved and hope that somehow legality will transect morality. The only time i recall the PA leadership showing up in Bil'in was the Friday following the initial court ruling; a convoy of tinted glass mercedes joined by the requisite PR enablers, there to extend plattitudes to 'the resistance' and then zoom back to Ramallah, DC, Riyadh or wherever to play more charades with their Israel and American handlers. One word, two syllables. Second syllable rhymes with 'nap'.

The Bil'in Committee essentially created the first Palestinian flash mob, gathering every Friday to engage in creative nonviolent direct action. They never sanctioned the used of weaponry against those building the wall or guarding it, which among other things made it possible for them to work in strong coalition with Israeli anarchists against the wall and for a sustained stream of internationals to participate. Other villages have followed their lead, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that Bil'in inspired them to reconnect with those dormant, First Intifada civil resistance roots.

In any event, i think it's fair to conclude these are the folks who are making the untelevized revolution happen and i congratulate them on today's achievement. Must feel great to see Israeli bulldozers used on something other than a generations-old family home. Yet Bil'in has not been totally vindicated: 435 acres of village land still remain on the Israeli side of the barrier, appropriated by a settlement there. No rest for the weary, no need for those ineffectual politicos.

Things i would put my energy into if i didn't have to work for a living

Surfing on a sunny afternoon, came across the Borgen Project and this nice project they are involved in in South Sudan: hippo water rollers. Brilliant, really. i would've loved one of these when i was living in my Wadi Arabia mountaintop cave, but of course i was able to leave that mountain whenever i chose to, and return to a world of hot running water and luxurious tub suds. Any chance these little 'hippos' are made from recycled plastics?

What motivates people to find a way to do this kind of stuff in far-flung places they may never actually visit? A hungarian friend asked once why i cared so much about environmental justice and human rights, but all i could think of was to ask why she didn't care. Reminded me of my 'formative years' growing up in a small New England town, people constantly admonitioning me for being 'too political' and then laughing when our force-to-be-reckoned-with history teacher would stare me down after questioning the rectitude of zionism. Some of us are simply born with this condition? i mean, who knows where the motivation comes from? Sometimes i think if i were a better, smarter person, i would've figured out a way to make lots of money so i could spend the rest of my life doing this kind of work and not worry about affording to get my teeth cleaned. Bargain with the devil and never know where you'll end up. Could've been the proverbial 'there', but at least 'here' i'm still steering clear of mall town.

Groovy video from Borgen for all you hipsters -

World Refugee Conundrums

A day late on this unless you want to be picky about time zones... it's still the night of the 20th where i'm situated, and in the sad saga of Azerbaijan vs. Armenia vs. Nagorno-Karabakh vs. ineffective third party negotiators, it's sort of always world refugee day. i still haven't been able to figure out what UNHCR's involvement in the Nogorno-Karabakh refugee situation is - possibly nil - but i'm not going to get into that now for various reasons.

i was surpised to read in this article from the UN News Center that "Pakistan, Iran, and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.07 million, and 1.005 million respectively." America's and Israel's big terrorist bulldogs are also more willing than any other country to take in the people being displaced by, uh, yeah, American-Israeli aggression. Of course, Syria at this point is also generating an onslaught of refugees into Turkey (10,000 have reportedly crossed the border, another 10,000 are within fleeing distance on the Syrian side) and who can say how many of these people were already refugees who have now been displaced a second time? a third? Babylon redux for any Palestinians and Iraqis among them. At this point, we have to hope Bashir Assad gets a grip on his humanity (i know it's there somewhere in his opthalmologist's bag of tricks) before Turkey pushes back and 20,000+ refugees get caught in the crossfire.

World Refugee Day: an opportunity to look at photographic exhibitions of people forcibly displaced by violence and lament man's inhumanity to man, to read about those displaced by economic meltdowns or natural catastrophes and lament the unbridled power of disaster capitalists to profit from that misery. At this point in our planetary history, we can't keep expecting people to park themselves somewhere else, because there are no more empty spaces available. Sadly, the trend in European countries and many of their former colonies, e.g. Australia, the US, Canada, to (1) prevent more 'aliens' from entering, and (2) push out as many immigrants as possible, would indicate that SHARING is not high on the collective list of moral imperatives these days.


i firmly believe people have an innate right to live and slave away wherever our ambitions, daring and/or needs take us. Likewise, refugees' Right of Return should never be comprised in the interests of political expediency or profit margins. How we're supposed to balance those two often conflicting values is something i certainly don't have the answer for. i'm not even sure where exactly i belong, but hopefully the universe can still cough up the patience to let me figure that out in my waning years (a small house on an Andalucian hillside, not far from the sea sounds just about right). The questions Peter Eszterhazy (in an entirely different context) posed about space really resonated with me, but when we talk about refugees, they suddenly seem to create a serious conundrum. World Refugee Day. World Refuge Day. World Free Space Day. The potential overlap i sense between these concepts still eludes absolute clarity, but i'm sure it's there if we can just find the yellow brick road.

EL futuro es espacio,

espacio color de tierra,
color de nube,
color de agua, de aire,
espacio negro para muchos sueños,
espacio blanco para toda la nieve,
para toda la música.

Atrás quedó el amor desesperado
que no tenía sitio para un beso,
hay lugar para todos en el bosque,
en la calle, en la casa,
hay sitio subterráneo y submarino,
qué placer es hallar por fin,
subiendo
un planeta vacío,
grandes estrellas claras como el vodka
tan transparentes y deshabitadas,
y allí llegar con el primer teléfono
para que hablen más tarde tantos hombres
de sus enfermedades.

Lo importante es apenas divisarse,
gritar desde una dura cordillera
y ver en la otra punta
los pies de una mujer recién llegada.

Adelante, salgamos
del río sofocante
en que con otros peces navegamos
desde el alba a la noche migratoria
y ahora en este espacio descubierto
volemos a la pura soledad.

PABLO NERUDA

The Gaza Flotilla II

Organizers in Istanbul, Dublin and undoubtedly dozens of other places are preparing to launch the next major flotilla intended to break the Israeli siege of Gaza. I had to laugh to myself when after watching this succinct statement by Dr. Fintan Lane of Irish Ship to Gaza, 'up next' on the youtube screen came 'The power of Israeli naval forces'. Always eager to be well-informed about Israeli naval power, imagine my disappointment to get this: an error has occurred for which there is no solution please try again later. A clever anonymous sabotage message or just karmic payback?

Though i don't normally like the bleeding heart 'poor people of Gaza' videos, this one from the Flotilla resonated strongly. i couldn't help but be reminded of the day i left the West Bank in 2007, headed for the airport in Tel Aviv. A trip which should have taken a little over an hour ended up taking over3, but that wasn't unusual and not exactly the issue. We could not find a way out, even my university's normally super cool driver was showing signs of panic. Soldiers at two wall crossings wouldn't let us pass (NB: i was in an Israeli registered taxi); soldiers at checkpoints inside the West Bank wouldn't let us through.... i have to say that for a final send-off (i'd been working there for 2 years), the psychological impact was powerful: Want to live with our enemies? Fine. Stay there. No one gets out of the cage.

Whether this next flotilla will make it in remains to be seen. i certainly wish them safe passage and serenity of spirit once the Israelis nab them, which is sure to happen. Even if they are allowed to sail into Gaza City, the IDF is never going to let those boats sail back out. All those flotilla folks will find themselves stuck in one cage or another - a small detention cell in Haifa or the big cell that is Gaza.

John Sayles interview

Just want to encourage anyone interested in film and its social relevance to check out this interview with John Sayles, who has been my favorite american filmmaker ever since Matewan came out in the early 1980s.... up through Lone Star and Silver City (i looked for Sarah Palin's review of that one but nowhere to be found, though it's gotta be somewhere on her anti-american DVD shelf). Amy Goodman rightfully spent an entire show talking with him about his work, past and present, and he offers many valuable insights into culture and history. Definitely worth the watch!

Pop! goes the weasel

Coming up with a title for what is mostly going to be a series of quotes from other articles on the Greek financial crisis, what i could recall from a children's rhyme came into my head:

A penny for a spool of thread,
A penny for a needle.
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.

Not wanting to be totally off the free association wall, i looked into the original meaning and found this: 'Pop was slang for "pawn". Weasel is derived from "weasel and stoat" meaning coat. It was traditional for even poor people to own a suit, which they wore as their "Sunday Best". When times were hard they would pawn their suit, or coat, on a Monday and claim it back before Sunday. Hence the term "Pop goes the Weasel".' Trekking down to the pawn shop to exchange one necessary possession (a coat) for another (let's say, bread) doesn't seem too far afield from what their government is now instructing the Greek people to do: hand our economy over to European bankers and when they've sorted out their own mess, they'll give it back. Is that stretching things too far into simplistic fantasy land? Unfortunately, i think not.

Here come the quoted excerpts. First, Michael Hudson, author of Super Imperialism, writing in April 2011 about Iceland's financial meltdown:

The reality was an enormous banking fraud, an orgy of insider dealing as bank managers lent the money to themselves, leaving an empty shell – and then saying that this was all how “free markets” operate. Running into debt was commended as the way to get rich.

The eruption started in Greece. One legacy of the colonels’ regime [ruling junta 1967-1974] was tax evasion by the rich. This led to budget deficits, and Wall Street banks helped the government conceal its public debt in “free enterprise” junk accounting. German and French creditors then made a fortune jacking up the interest rate that Greece had to pay for its increasing credit risk.

Next, from an article yesterday in the EU Observer that puts the German and French credit picture into sharper focus:

Germany's exposure to Greek debt, at 26.3 billion in government bonds and 10 billion in private loans, including to banks, is a little over half that of that of France, and has argued that private creditors bear more of the burden of resolving the solution.

France, for it part, is owed €19 billion in government bonds and a full €42.1 billion in private loans. Three of its biggest banks this week saw their credit rating placed on review for a downgrade by Moody's as a result of this exposure.

The ECB [European Central Bank], for its part, is exposed to the tune of €40 billion in government bonds and €110 billion to Greek banks.

As i wrote yesterday, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between what's going on here and what went on in the US when subprime lending excesses collided with totally unregulated derivatives markets. As Henry Paulson, then-US Treasury Secretary, wrote at the time, ''[T]he purpose of the financial rescue legislation was to stabilize our financial system and to strengthen it. It is not a panacea for all our economic difficulties." In other words, save the bankers' asses and hope the little people will find ways to sort out their little individual problems, like holding onto their homes, jobs and life insurance policies. One can't help but ask, 'Who are the real cowards in this equation?'

Writing in Al-Jazeera about public response to the current situation - 'Grassroot Politics Flourish in Greek Turmoil' - Hara Kouki and Antonia Vradis (presumably both Greek) report:

For the people gathered in Syntagma, the intense political manoeuvring in the corridors of parliament seems to matter little. Theirs is a mass mobilisation that draws a distinction between representational and grassroots politics. Political parties seem unlikely to come to a halt over developments in the upper echelons of power. For them, the Memorandum is not just a sum of persons or abhorrent policies, but a system of power that has misruled the country for 30 years, bringing it to the edge of collapse. It is a system of beliefs, values, expectations and political roles and identities that cannot be abolished simply by replacing the head or members of the government.

At the roots of society, people are looking for substantive structural change, not bailouts and rollovers which, by meager threads, keep the current order of business (barely) afloat. Sounds like Buenos Aires. Sounds like modern day Carthage, Tahrir Square, Pearl Square. Sounds like Wisconsin.

Politicians and corporate media pundits never seem to hesitate when it comes to telling working people that they need to tighten those belts, make sacrifices for the greater good, while they and their banking buddies jet around from one 5-star conference center to another. If these bankers are so worried about going broke, what are they hanging out in Davos for? Papandreou's political nemesis and newly appointed Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, is quoted as saying "I am leaving defence today to go to the real war." Might i suggest that his first battle be dragging the PM to a local pawn shop and forcing him to trade in some of his non-essential trinkets, maybe a tailored 'Sunday best' or two (or three, four)? Toss in the Rolex, too... unlike bailouts, revolution is a timeless affair.