Against IMF domination, Bernie Sanders stood up for Greece

Against IMF domination, Bernie Sanders stood up for Greece Dear Friend, Greeks will be voting in a referendum Sunday on whether to accept even more austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund – austerity demands that even the IMF admits won’t solve the Greek economic crisis. More than anything, Greece needs debt relief and economic growth, which the IMF plan won’t allow.    It’s important for Americans who care about what the IMF is doing to Greece to know who in Congress is standing up for Greece against IMF austerity.    Keith Ellison. Raul Grijalva. Jan Schakowsky. Alan Grayson. John Lewis. Rosa DeLauro. Jerrold Nadler. John Conyers. Hank Johnson.      But most of all, Bernie Sanders, who not only signed the Congressional letter, but made his own statement to the press “blasting” the IMF, as the Huffington Post reported.     For this day on which we celebrate our independence from foreign domination, I wrote a piece celebrating Bernie Sanders’ leadership against what IMF is doing to Greece. Can you help spread the news by reading and sharing my piece?    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/bernie-sanders-will-end-the-imfs-economic-violence-in-greece-and-africa_b_7723284.html    Thanks for all you do to help make U.S. foreign policy more just, Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy Robert Naiman RSS Feed  GET UPDATES FROM ROBERT NAIMAN Like 335 Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Mr. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at Huffington Post. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East. You can contact him here. Bernie Sanders Will End the IMF's Economic Violence in Greece and Africa Posted: 07/03/2015 3:43 pm EDT Updated: 07/03/2015 4:59 pm EDT Many people want to know more about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' foreign policy agenda. Yes, they say, we like what Sanders is saying about reducing extreme inequality, about reducing the political power of the billionaire class. But what about U.S. foreign policy? Yes, they say, Bernie voted no on the Iraq war; yes, they acknowledge, Sanders supports the Iran deal. But we're spending more than half of our federal income tax dollars on the Pentagon's empire, money we should be spending on rebuilding our nation's domestic infrastructure. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr. King said. What's Bernie going to do about that? I'm all for pushing Bernie to talk more about downsizing the Pentagon to be an institution focused on actually defending the United States, as opposed to running around the world overthrowing other people's governments -- a Pentagon that "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," as President John Quincy Adams put it. But we should also take advantage of the new opportunity that now presents itself; it's not only with bombs that U.S. foreign policy kills and injures innocent civilians. We should recognize and publicize the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who is talking about what the IMF is doing to Greece, the only presidential candidate who has a track record of opposing the IMF, the only presidential candidate who, if elected, is likely to do anything to end the economic violence of the IMF. In his historic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Jesse Jackson often invoked the theme of "economic violence": Economic violence is the critical issue of our day. When plants close on workers without notice, and leave them without jobs or training for new jobs -- that's economic violence. When three to five million Americans are on the streets and homeless -- that's economic violence. When merger maniacs make windfall profits and top management is given excessive bonuses, golden parachutes to aid a soft landing, while workers are asked to take a wage cut, a benefit cut and a job loss, a crash landing -- that's economic violence. When our children are victimized with poor health care, poor education, poor housing, poor diets and more -- that's economic violence against our children. Jesse Jackson was talking about U.S. domestic policy. But others have used the idea to talk about the IMF: Hundreds of campaigners are marching in Prague as the main policy-making body of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) begins a meeting to discuss debt relief. They want the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, to cancel altogether debts owed to them by the poorest countries. The protesters are staging a "funeral" procession through Czech capital to highlight their view that 7 million children a year die because of the debt crisis. Jubliee 2000, which is organising the march, says it will be totally non-violent and that it is committed to peaceful protest. "We condemn violence, both the violence which ends in broken windows, and the violence that kills 19,000 children a day," the group's UK director Ann Pettifor told the BBC. The IMF is not "over there." The IMF is headquartered in Washington, physically, politically and financially. A progressive economist once reported that he was at a seminar at the IMF, where a senior IMF official was indignant that people were saying that IMF is unaccountable. The IMF official demanded to know: why do people always accuse us of being unaccountable? We never do anything without checking with the U.S. Treasury Department! Until now, unfortunately, Congressional Democrats have been largely content to let Treasury to run the show at the IMF without the input of real Democrats. The IMF is now doing to Greece what the IMF has been doing to Africa since the 1980s and what the IMF did to South America until the progressive governments there kicked the IMF out. The IMF is a member of the "troika" of official creditors that have been making extreme austerity demands on the Greek government and are nowopenly demanding "regime change" in Greece before there can be any deal that ends the crisis in Greece that the troika has imposed. (Some people complain that we shouldn't blame the IMF for what is being done to Greece; they say that some other institution or actor is more responsible. These people want us to play "accountability whack-a-mole" with the institutions. We need to hold the institutions "jointly and severally liable"; and the IMF is the bad actor in the troika for whom Americans have the most responsibility.) Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who is speaking out about this. In Congress, it's the progressive Democrats - including Sanders - who are speaking out about this. U.S. support for the IMF is more politically fragile than many people realize. Many Congressional Republicans hate the IMF, in significant measure because they see the IMF as a Democrat-supported taxpayer-financed slush fund to bail out big private banks when their international bets go bad (which assessment is quite correct.) Without the support of Congressional Democrats, the IMF is dead meat in Washington. Whenever the IMF wants more money from Washington, there's a campaign to trick low-information Democrats into believing that the IMF is "foreign aid," so that Democrats will support it. When more Democrats own the fact that the IMF agenda is the NAFTA-WTO-TPP agenda with a European internationalist smiley face mask pasted on, the IMF will be on a fast train to the dustbin of history. And this is not necessarily a remote prospect - the fact that this is the fundamental identity of the IMF is well known among labor activists, for example. AFL-CIO chief economist William Spriggs recently wrote: In the U.S. we must take the side of Greece in this fight. It is in our interest, as the immediate problem of the instability this is causing is a rising dollar that will hurt U.S. exports and jobs. And, we can never be sure of the interrelated nature of financial collapses since so much of the banking sector remains in the shadows; with global derivatives trading at values greater than global output. More importantly, we must also revolt against this economic order. It is the same order that saved JP Morgan Chase, but let Detroit and now Puerto Rico fail. It is the same religion that would sacrifice the earnings of American students with rising student debt and de-invest in public higher education. It is the same religion that would sacrifice American jobs and labor standards and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must see these as the same struggle to restore sanity and purpose to role of government and its servant, the economy. This is why supporters of the IMF should be very afraid that Bernie Sanders andprogressive Democrats are denouncing what the IMF is doing to Greece. You can add your voice here. Follow Robert Naiman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/naiman MORE: Bernie SandersIMFGreeceJesse JacksonAfl Cio

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ROBERT REICH GREETS AMERICA

Robert Reich via Facebook.com

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Logistics and Lizards Disrupt Chevron’s Project Off Australia

Logistics and Lizards Disrupt Chevron’s Project Off Australia

Jul 4th, 2015 

by John Donovan. 

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Chevron agreed to share the cost with Exxon Mobil, Shell and three Japanese power companies, Osaka Gas, Tokyo Gas and Chubu Electric Power. “This is probably the last of the megaprojects for theoil companies for a while…”

By A. ODYSSEUS PATRICK: JULY 3, 2015

SYDNEY, Australia — Getting anything toChevron’s gas-processing plant on Barrow Island is a bit of a trick.

Some supplies travel 15 hours from Perth to a supply base for shipping. En route, trucks cannot stop under trees, to avoid picking up bugs and bird droppings. When people and cargo finally make it to the island, an army of 300 enforces a quarantine: Every Velcro strap on clothing and bags is checked for seed pods, boots are scrubbed free of dirt and pants with cuffs never even make it ashore.

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Posted in: Australia, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Gas, New York Times, Oil, Oil Prices, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Shell Project Delays, Shell Project Overruns.
Tagged: Chevron · ExxonMobil · Gas · Gorgon · Royal Dutch Shell Plc · Shell

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Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont

shared from By SARAH LYALL  JULY 3, 2015 Bernie Sanders held his son during a meeting in 1971 with colleagues from The Vermont Freeman in Burlington, Vt.CreditFrank Kochman BURLINGTON, Vt. — When he came to Vermont in the late 1960s to help plan the upending of the old social order, the future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought with him the belief that the United States was starkly divided into two groups: the establishment and the revolutionaries. He was a revolutionary. “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death,” in fact, was the title of an article he wrote for The Vermont Freeman, an alternative, authority-challenging newspaper published for a few years back then. The piece began with an apocalyptically alarmist account of the unbearable horror of having an office job in New York City, of being among “the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown for the 9-5,” sentenced to endless days of “moron work, monotonous work.” “The years come and go,” Mr. Sanders wrote, in all apparent seriousness. “Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” Chalk some of this up to being young and unemployed. Mr. Sanders, now 73, has had a steady, nonrevolutionary job for quite some time now. His current workplace, the United States Senate, is not exactly known for its thrill-a-minute dynamism. But through his long evolution from outraged outsider to mainstream man in a suit, Mr. Sanders has remained true to his original message: sympathy for the downtrodden, the impoverished and the disenfranchised in the face of the rich and the powerful. Back then, he was part of a crowd of like-minded young people who converged on Burlington at a time when America seemed to be rewriting its history on the spot. Students, hippies, labor organizers, trust fund kids, urban escapees, impoverished anti-Vietnam War campaigners and environmentalists yearning to be closer to the land — they came because they believed that change was coming and that they had found the right place for a revolution. Mr. Sanders was barely 30, full of restless energy, with wild curly hair, a brash Brooklyn manner and a mind fizzing with plans to remake the world. Short on money but long on ideas, he found employment where he could, supporting himself through odd jobs like carpentry work. “Freelance journalist” has always been on the list of things he did before he began running for statewide office, futilely, as a Liberty Union Party candidate in the 1970s. But the description is a bit of a stretch. A look through his journalistic output, such as it was, reveals that he had perhaps a dozen articles published — interviews, essays, state-of-the-nation diatribes — most in The Freeman. Mementos from Senator Bernie Sanders’s career, part of the author Greg Guma’s collection.CreditIan Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times They provide a useful insight into the formative thinking of the man who would go on to become Burlington’s first socialist mayor, then a senator and now a presidential candidate who is drawing crowds in the thousands with his unapologetic leftist message. The writings also reflect the particular mood in this one little spot in Vermont in an era of extraordinary turmoil in America, when the social fabric seemed in danger of ripping apart over issues like the Vietnam War, race and poverty. Among Mr. Sanders’s efforts was a 1972 essay on sexual politics, “Man — and Woman,” which drew unflattering attention recently after Mother Jones magazine included it in an article about him. Its opening passage, which deals with men’s sexual fantasies, is meant to be satirically provocative but comes across as crassly sexist. (Mr. Sanders’ underlying point, expressed less feverishly farther down in the article, is that men and women should rethink how they deal with one another.) Another essay mocked what Mr. Sanders felt to be the soul-destroying nature of conventional education. “If children of 5 are not taught to obey orders, sit still for 7 hours a day, respect their teacher, and raise their hands when they have to go to the bathroom, how will they learn (after 17 more years of education) to become the respectful clerks, technicians and soldiers who keep our society free, our economy strong, and such inspiring men as Richard Nixon and Deane Davis in political office,” Mr. Sanders wrote, referring to the president and the Vermont governor at the time. People in Mr. Sanders’s circle back then remember visiting the future senator at his small apartment in Burlington. “It was subsistence living,” said Greg Guma, the author of “The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution.” Mr. Guma knew the young Mr. Sanders as a kitchen-table fulminator and political organizer, not as a writer. At their first meeting, he recalled, Mr. Sanders “kind of berated me” when Mr. Guma asked who he was. “He said he was unimportant and it was all about the movement, and then it kind of escalated. ‘If you don’t support the movement, I don’t want your vote,’ ” Mr. Guma said. “Obviously he’s become more adept at cultivating voters.” Mr. Sanders’s articles in The Freeman were consistent with the newspaper’s ethos. The paper, which had humble production values and cost $10 for a year’s subscription in 1971, was founded in 1969 by Roger L. Albright, a former minister, as a place for like-minded leftists to opine in outraged tones about the issues of the day. Often, apparently, they did it for free. “Pay? You’ve got to be kidding — I don’t recall ever getting paid,” said Marvin Fishman, now 77, who wrote about prison issues for the paper. (He had spent a year in prison on a marijuana charge.) “We were broke, they were broke, everybody was broke,” said Frank Kochman, who was recruited for the paper when Mr. Albright rescued his stranded Volkswagen bug from a snowbank, and who was its general manager and co-publisher from 1971 to 1973. “If we had a little money, we’d try to pay something. ”Mr. Sanders contributed only sporadically. He interviewed a “labor agitator” and an old-time farmer, and he wrote some articles about health, including one in which he cited studies claiming that cancer could be caused by psychological factors such as unresolved hostility toward one’s mother, a tendency to bury aggression beneath a “facade of pleasantness” and having too few orgasms. “Sexual adjustment seemed to be very poor in those with cancer of the cervix,” he wrote, quoting a study in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine. One article, to observe the 10th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, argued that despite its many failings, Cuba had made great progress in health care and education. “The American press and mass media have been stepping up their usual distorted and inaccurate reporting,” he wrote. In “Reflections on a Dying Society,” he declared that the United States was virtually going to hell in a handcart. Its food was laden with chemicals; its environment was being ruined; the threat of nuclear annihilation or “death by poison gas” was increasing; people were suffering from malaise and “psychosomatic disease”; citizens were being coerced and duped by the government and the advertising industry; and the economy was based on “useless” goods “designed to break down or used for the slaughter of people.” “The general social situation, to say the least,” he wrote, “does not look good.” Greg Guma, who wrote “The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution,” about Senator Bernie Sanders. CreditIan Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times Later in the 1970s, Mr. Sanders took a steady job with a Liberty Union colleague making filmstrips about important events in American history, many from the colonial period, and selling them door to door to schools. (He also made a half-hour film about his hero, Eugene V. Debs, the labor organizer who ran unsuccessfully for president five times.) They worked on a shoestring out of Mr. Sanders’s house, said the colleague, Ron MacNeil. “I think our motivation was that we were interested in American history,” Mr. MacNeil said. But that was after Mr. Sanders had run, and lost, various statewide races as a Liberty Union candidate. By 1972, when he ran as the party’s candidate for senator and governor (he lost both races by very wide margins), he had begun publishing The Movement, an occasional newsletter. He put together the whole thing himself, said Doris Lake, another early Liberty Union candidate, and focused on the issues that were consuming him. One edition included a letter Ms. Lake had written to her supervisor, and had shown to Mr. Sanders, complaining about working conditions in the eyeglass-lens factory where she worked the night shift, Ms. Lake said. But for Mr. Sanders, everything was about ideas to make the world better, both in real life and in The Movement. “I believe there was a lot of editorializing on philosophy,” Ms. Lake said. “At the time, we were thinking that the important thing in politics was to educate people, to get them to understand what was happening in the world, rather than to get elected.” Follow The New York Times Politics and Washington on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter. A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Outsider Went Mainstream, But Message Changed Little. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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