Happy birthday Lydia

Happy birthday Lydia, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

She's now 11. Or 12 as they sometimes calculate it in Greek. I can still remember the first time I picked her up in my arms, terrified that I would break her or drop through fright.

Blair must be arrested by John Pilger

Tony Blair's mug-shot, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

"Having helped destroy other nations far away, our former prime minister — “peace envoy” to the Middle East — is now free to profit from the useful contacts he made while working as a “servant of the people.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes; Blair's, which have earned him a £4.6m advance, will appear next month.

Now consider the Proceeds of Crime Act. Blair conspired in and executed an unprovoked war of aggression against a defenceless country, of a kind the Nuremberg judges in 1946 described as the "paramount war crime". This has caused, according to scholarly studies, the deaths of more than a million people, a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.”"

Click here for the rest of the New Stateman article

The Greek economic crisis's 600lb gorilla in the room

IMF - What "Internal Devaluation" really means for Greece., originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

I'm sure than you have that old medical joke, "the operation was a success but the the patient died" a thousand times but I can't help but recall it when I see on the state - run ET1 and NET news bulletins reports of how quietly optimistic the IMF/EU/ECB are about the progress Athens has been making in implementing the economic reforms needed before they approve the latest installment of the bailout package.

However, nowhere in the constant round of self - congratulation and back slapping are you going to hear anything about the issue that is most worrying to Greeks, namely unemployment. Currently, the official figure is 570,000 or 11.7% however, behind these numbers hide some truely horrifying facts. In some areas such as the Attiki region and Ionian islands the number of those looking for work has risen by up 50% in just one year. According to the latest OECD predictions unemployment is set to reach nearly 15% in 2014 whilst the Greek Trade Union Conference or GSEE (ΓΣΕΕ) is talking about a million jobless by next year out of a total labour force of 5 million.

Even this figure may be an underestimate since unemployment figures only include those signing on, which does not include many of those who have been unemployed more than one year who are considered to be "economically inactive" rather than unemployed or simply do not bother signing on as their benefits have run out. Nor are those working in the black economy (tourism and construction and even education are rife with employers who refuse to pay contributions) without national insurance who cannot claim unemployment benefit.

No provision has been made by the government for the tremendous social disruption likely to be caused by having one in five or even one in four of the work force unemployed, a number which is going to be higher if you happen to be a woman, disabled, under 25 or over 50. No mention was made of unemployment in the joint European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF upbeat press announcement concerning Greece's latest installment of the bailout package.

It's hard to consider any economic plan which produces joblessness on a scale not seen since the Great Depression as a success, yet that is exactly what the Greek government representatives and their supporters in much of the media are trying to do. There seems little awareness of the degree of social dislocation unemployment of such a scale is bound to produce. instead we are feed a steady diet of statistics and projections which are based on economic modela which do not take into account the conditions on the ground nor the fact that many official economic indicators are little more than educated guesses, the product of a state apparatus that does not even know how many people it employs.

On the other hand whilst hundreds of thousands of pensioners face cuts in their incomes to get permssion to borrow 9 billion euros the Greek government has found 25 billion to give to banks in order to improve their credit worthiness, which in addition to the 26 billion given in 2008 amounts to 15% of GDP or nearly four times the amount Greece spends on education per annum

NB the picture is NOT real but a piece of photoshopped fun. Just a reminder for those who had their sense of humour removed instead of tonsils when young.

Fighting the IMF

Papandreou's perfect storm gains strength

Reading some of the foreign media accounts you could be forgiven for thinking that the Greece's embattled prime minister, Giorgos Papandreou has weathered the worst of the storm caused by his attempts to bring in the country's ballooning public debt under control. The mass public protests that rocked Athens and other Greek cities throughout May have stopped, the truck drivers' unions have called off their strike and the PASOK government is rapidly pushing through the changes being demanded by the IMF/EU/ECB troika in return for the next installment of its bailout package.

However, such apparent signs of calm are deceiving, especially if you happen to know anything about how politics in Greece work. Unlike many other countries political conflicts rarely take place during the country's broiling summer when people prefer the beach or countryside to sweating it out in the cities. The drop off in anti-government protests owes more to soaring temperatures than any acceptance on the part of Greeks to the constant round of wage cuts and tax rises.

Come September the beaches will grow quiet as people return from their holidays to deal with the new economic realities being imposed. According to local media reports the troika is demanding still more cuts in public services and is unhappy with government revenue promises which despite two increases in VAT have failed to live up to expectations. Asa result Athens is in the process of raising yet more income from higher VAT surcharges on a raft of items and is drafting more tax increases for the New Year.

In addition tens of thousands of public employees in ailing state owned rail network and the public power provider face prospect of losing their jobs as privatisation becomes more and more likely and across the whole civil service new salary structures are likely to see yet more cuts in public sector pay in the very near future.

Local authority employees are also faced with the prospect of not being paid as more and more town and local councils struggle to service their own massive debt payments which in some cases amount to more 60% of revenue raised.

Given the fact that unemployment is at a ten year high is hardly surprising that consumer confidence is lower than at any point in decade so further adding to the private sector's severe contraction as thousands of small businesses close down, further adding yet more people to the jobless figures.

As the summer ends and autumn begins Greeks have very little to cheer about and this will be reflected in what will be an inevitable wave of strikes and social unrest over the coming months with public sector unions joining trucker, taxi drivers, lawyers and many others as they fight to oppose legislation which will directly affect their livelihoods.

The fact that the two major parties have yet to resolve long running finance and influence peddling scandals just serves to reinforce the impression amongst many that those in power have lost legitimacy and cannot be trusted to run the country properly. Despite Papandreou's claims that he was unaware of how dire the country's public finances really were few believe his claims and feel that his PASOK party is also responsible for letting Greece drift into economic chaos during its two decade stint in power.

With local authority elections looming both the conservative New Democracy and left of centre PASOK parties are at the nadir of their popularity, a point that is likely to rock both organisations which rely as much on the ability to get members elected to public office as ideology to keep supporters in line. With an electorate so negative and a poll debacle imminent its very had to see how Papandreou can keep his party from demanding that IMF/EU/ECB economic reforms be challenged or at least revised to stop what might be the begining of the end for the current political set up.

With so many storm clouds gathering on the horizon Giorgos Papandreou must be wondering if his predecessor, the now reviled Konstantinos Karamanlis had, in fact proffered him a poisoned chalice rather than the reins of power

Laughing all the way to the bank

Laughing all the way to the bank, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

I took this picture of Giorgos Papandreou just after a PASOK campaign rally in Thessaloniki last year during the Greek parliamentary elections.

Instead of adoring party supporters the next time he appears in the city in September he will most probably be acompanied by 5 - 10,000 extra police officers to ensure that he and members of his cabinet are not attacked by the very people who voted for him just one year ago.

IMF Chaos and poverty world tour T-shirt

IMF Chaos and poverty world tour T-shirt, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious"

Oscar Wilde

Welcome to the Afghan War Diaries

Welcome to Afghanistan, originally uploaded by Teacher Dude's BBQ.

At long last the Afghan War Diaries has brought to the attention of those countries that have forces stationed in Afghanistan what exactly are the real consequences of waging a nine year war. We no longer have the fig leaf of ignorance to hide the fact that we who live and vote in these nations also are culpable in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the majority of whom were guilty of nothing more than being poor and powerless.

For years we have all placidly sat by and lapped up the white washed "news", neatly sanitised for our own protection that has come out of Afghanistan. Murderous attacks on unarmed villagers have regularly been mutated into glorious battles between the forces of democracy and supporters of a barbarous ideology whose way of life threatens us all.

It's hard not to see the echo of high imperial thinking in such rhetoric, especially when it comes from the UK press whose ancestors were quite happy to forgive any "mistakes" by the guardians of Empire, safe in the knowledge that The gift of Civilisation to the heathen was worth the sacrifice of lives in the long run.

On the other side of the Atlantic the US media has been not just willing but positively enthusiastic about "supporting out troops" in their war on darkness, happy to burnish the military's view that the best way to save the people of Afghanistan is slaughter them in ever larger numbers. The lessons of Vietnam have been condemned the dustbin of history, seemingly no more relevent to today's world than the speeches of Cicero or buggy cabs.

For years publications such as Time have been running stories on how US soldiers have run mission after mission to thwart insurgents and win the hearts and minds of locals who wish to live in peace. The message being that any group that opposes such goals has to, be definition be either fanatical or evil, preferably both. So stories of widespread abuse of human rights, summary executions, death squads and thousands of deaths "by mistake" cannot be made part of the media landscape, they make no sense and so contradict the perceived consensus that they are either ignored or downgraded in importance.

One has has just to look at these two magazine covers to understand how little has changed in the way the majority of the US mainstream media deals with conflicts that involve their own soldiers. Despite a gulf of nearly four decades the media has learnt little and once again is more than willing to acquiesce in any act of moral appeasement in the name of patrotism and access.

Life magazine Vietnam 1967

Time magazine Afghanistan 2004