Day: January 7, 2010

By Uri Avnery

Something odd, almost bizarre, is going on in Egypt these days.

About 1400 activists from all over the world gathered there on their way to the Gaza Strip. On the anniversary of the “Cast Lead” War, they intended to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the ongoing blockade, which makes the life of 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip intolerable.

At the same time, protest demonstrations were to take place in many countries. In Tel-Aviv, too, a big protest was planned. The “monitoring committee” of the Arab citizens of Israel was to organize an event on the Gaza border.

When the international activists arrived in Egypt, a surprise awaited them. The Egyptian government forbade their trip to Gaza. Their buses were held up at the outskirts of Cairo and turned back. Individual protesters who succeeded in reaching the Sinai in regular buses were taken off them. The Egyptian security forces conducted a regular hunt for the activists.

The angry activists besieged their embassies in Cairo. On the street in front of the French embassy, a tent camp sprang up which was soon surrounded by the Egyptian police. American protesters gathered in front of their embassy and demanded to see the ambassador. Several protesters who are over 70 years old started a hunger strike. Everywhere, the protesters were held up by Egyptian elite units in full riot gear, while red water cannon trucks were lurking in the background. Protesters who tried to assemble in Cairo’s central Tahrir (liberation) Square were mishandled.

In the end, after a meeting with the wife of the president, a typical Egyptian solution was found: one hundred activists were allowed to reach Gaza. The rest remained in Cairo, bewildered and frustrated.

WHILE THE demonstrators were cooling their heels in the Egyptian capital and trying to find ways to vent their anger, Binyamin Netanyahu was received in the president’s palace in the heart of the city. His hosts went to great lengths to laud and celebrate his contribution to peace, especially the “freeze” of settlement activity in the West Bank, a phony gesture that does not include East Jerusalem.

Hosni Mubarak and Netanyahu have met in the past – but not in Cairo. The Egyptian president always insisted that the meetings take place in Sharm-al-Sheikh, as far from the Egyptian population centers as possible. The invitation to Cairo was, therefore, a significant token of increasingly close relations.

As a special gift for Netanyahu, Mubarak agreed to allow hundreds of Israelis to come to Egypt and pray at the grave of Rabbi Yaakov Abu-Hatzeira, who died and was buried in the Egyptian town of Damanhur 130 years ago, on his way from Morocco to the Holy Land.

There is something symbolic about this: the blocking of the pro-Palestinian protesters on their way to Gaza at the same time as the invitation of Israelis to Damanhur.

ONE MAY well wonder about the Egyptian participation in the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The blockade started long before the Gaza War and has turned the Strip into what has been described as “the biggest prison on earth”. The blockade applies to everything except essential medicines and the most basic foodstuffs. US senator John Kerry, former candidate for the presidency, was shocked to hear that the blockade included pasta – the Israeli army in its wisdom has designated noodles as a luxury. The blockade is all-embracing – from building materials to school children’s copy books. Except for the most extreme humanitarian cases, nobody can pass from the Gaza Strip to Israel or the West Bank, nor the other way round.

But Israel controls only three sides of the Strip. The Northern and Eastern borders are blocked by the Israeli army, the Western border by the Israeli navy. The fourth border, the Southern one, is controlled by Egypt. Therefore, the entire blockade would be ineffective without Egyptian participation.

Ostensibly, this does not make sense. Egypt considers itself as the leader of the Arab world. It is the most populous Arab country, situated at the center of the Arab world. Fifty years ago the president of Egypt, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, was the idol of all the Arabs, especially of the Palestinians. How can Egypt collaborate with the “Zionist enemy”, as Egyptians called Israel then, in bringing 1.5 million brother Arabs to their knees?

Until recently, the Egyptian government had been sticking to a solution that exemplifies the 6000-year old Egyptian political acumen. It participated in the blockade but closed its eyes to the hundreds of tunnels dug under the Egyptian-Gaza border, through which the daily supplies for the population were flowing (for exorbitant prices, and with high profits for Egyptian merchants), together with the stream of arms. People also passed through them – from Hamas activists to brides.

This is about to change. Egypt has started building an iron wall – literally – along the full length of the Gaza border, consisting of steel pillars thrust deep into the ground, in order to block all tunnels. That will finally choke the inhabitants.

When the most extreme Zionist, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote 80 years ago about erecting an “Iron Wall” against the Palestinians, he did not dream of Arabs doing just that.

WHY DO they do it?

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By Melissa Britz

A major American financial services company, TIAA-CREF, has divested from four Asian energy companies doing business with the Sudanese government due to concerns about human rights violations in the country.

The move comes after failed talks with the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) of Delhi, an Indian public sector enterprise, and three Chinese companies, PetroChina Co Ltd, CNPC Hong Kong and Sinopec, about their Sudanese operations, according to a TIAA-CREF statement issued in New York on Monday.

“Our decision to sell shares in these companies culminated a three-year effort to encourage them to end their ties to Sudan or attempt to end suffering there,” said Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., TIAA-CREF’s chief executive.

However, TIAFF-CREF is retaining investments in a Malaysian government-owned company, PETRONAS. Ferguson said the company “has acknowledged our concerns and engaged in dialogue about how it might address them.”

American activists have campaigned in recent years for a number of major U.S. investment companies to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. The Save Darfur Coalition alleges that up to 70 percent of the country’s oil revenue is channeled to the military forces responsible for human rights violations in Darfur.

Conflict in Darfur led to the International Criminal Court (ICC) charging Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashi with war crimes and crimes against humanity in March 2009. According to the ICC’s website “this is the first ever warrant of arrest ever issued for a sitting Head of State by the ICC.”

An ICC statement attributes the charges to “crimes (that) were allegedly committed during a five-year counter-insurgency campaign by the Government of Sudan against the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and other armed groups opposing the Government of Sudan in Darfur.”

TIAA-CREF features on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 top U.S. public- and privately-held corporations and specialises in providing financial services to non-profit organisations such as hospitals and universities.

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By R. Taggart Murphy

Introduction

Out in the academic cemetery to which avatars of market fundamentalism thought they had consigned their intellectual and political opponents, one can hear today the unmistakable scrape of coffin lids opening. And climbing out of their graves are the bodies of those who contend that the reductionist assumptions of neo-classical/ rational choice orthodoxy are not simply inadequate but flawed in the most fundamental sense.

The reason may seem obvious: the financial catastrophe of last year and the failure of so many established thinkers to see it coming. But there is more dogging the luminaries of mainstream finance and economics than the simple inability to have read the tea leaves properly – to their blindness, for example, in the face of the rise in U.S. housing prices to the point they no longer bore any relation to the earnings streams of much of the American population or to the fantastic assumptions about default rates built into the business models of too many Wall Street houses. To be sure, a few non-mainstream analysts did get these things right before the fact — Nouriel Roubini, for example, or Michael Lewis. But it was in the way the crisis took the entire policy establishment by surprise that we see signs of broader, systemic conceptual failure. Policy makers in Washington, London, Frankfurt and Basel were, after all, advised by intellectuals and analysts privy to the most supposedly up-to-date thinking about markets, about finance, about economic reality. That they could get things so very, very wrong points to deliberate, self-induced myopia over the complexity of and interrelationships among economic and political realities – a myopia that surely contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

So the world suddenly seems more receptive to those who contend that economic life is not all about interchangeably autonomous “actors” maximizing their utility, but that institutions matter, that culture matters, that history and place matter – and above all that power matters. Signs of this are everywhere. Frightened politicians have been reaching for the old Keynesian tool chest in their efforts to stave off economic meltdown. John Kenneth Galbraith with his notions of the “notoriously short memories of financial markets” and the overweening pricing power of large corporations is acquiring a new patina of respectability. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Anthony Trollope’s novels are being dusted off for offering better insight into the rapacious behavior of Wall Street than back issues of the Journal of Finance. And here and there in “respectable” publications, one even encounters the visage of Karl Marx: intellectual grandfather of the suspect discipline of sociology, proponent of dialectical materialism and the class struggle, and prophet of the demise of a capitalism hoisted on the petard of its own contradictions.

Veblen (left) and Marx

Thus for writers and analysts on the left, the recent economic events hold out the tantalizing promise of an end to the marginalization they have endured since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But for all their understandable schadenfreude at the sudden advent of an era in which it is scarcely possible to keep a straight face while uttering the words “efficient markets hypothesis” – not to mention “Washington Consensus” – does Marxist scholarship actually have anything to say that illuminates our present predicament? It is one thing to invoke Keynesian fears of liquidity traps at a time when it is obvious that waves of credit creation by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan are barely moving the real economy of production and trade. Or to concede that regulators had become captives of those they were charged with regulating and that all the complex, formula-driven instruments that were supposed to diversify risk had done exactly the opposite. Or even to acknowledge that financial markets are more akin to herds of cattle driven alternately by greed and fear than the smoothly humming, risk-distribution machines of modern finance theory; that they can and regularly will overshoot with catastrophic consequences for the real economy – and that governments need proactive and deliberately intrusive oversight to head that off.

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