Why the US needs Electric Cars: Saudi Arabia threatens Pivot away from US

by Juan Cole

Informed Comment
10/23/2013

The royal family of Saudi Arabiaa, an absolute monarchy with no constitution and no elected legislature, is in a snit about US foreign policy. King Abdullah doesn’t like even the mild American criticism of the Sunni Bahrain monarchy’s brutal crackdown on the majority Shiite community in that country. He is furious that President Obama went with the Russian plan to sequester Syria’s chemical weapons rather than bombing Damascus. He is petrified of a breakthrough in American and Iranian relations that might permit Iran to keep its nuclear enrichment program and allow Tehran to retain a nuclear breakout capacity, which would deter any outside overthrow of the Iranian regime. Those are the stated discontents leaked by Saudi uber-hawk Bandar Bin Sultan.

Behind the scenes, another Saudi concern is that the US likes democracy too much. Washington ultimately backed the Arab upheavals that led to the fall of presidents for life in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Saudi Arabia hated this outbreak of popular politics and parliamentary competition. It connived with Egypt’s generals to roll back gains in Egypt in favor of more authoritarian rule. It has just cut off Yemen because the post-Saleh situation there isn’t developing its way. Only in Syria do the Saudis want regime change, and there it is because they want to weaken Iran and depose a Shiite ruling clique in favor of a fundamentalist Sunni one.

The Saudi royal family is looking for a different model of politics in the world, one where absolute monarchy and hard line Wahhabi fundamentalism wouldn’t look out of place. America is not it. They have been toying in Riyadh with a pivot to China. An unelected Communist Party that has taken the capitalist road and desperately needs Saudi petroleum has started to look good to the king. Beijing would make no annoying demands to open up Saudi politics. And if a Riyadh-Beijing axis could be established, Iran’s favored position with the Chinese might be cut back. Saudi Arabia is after all a much bigger oil producer and much less problematic as a trading partner.

Why should the US care if Saudi Arabia wants to abandon its special relationship with America? Oil.

The world produces about 90 million barrels of petroleum a day. Saudi Arabia produces about ten percent of that amount. And, it exports most of what it produces (unlike the US, which produces a similar amount but uses it all and half again as much). While there are small differences in the spot price of oil in various world markets, on the whole and by and large, petroleum is a single global market. Imagine several people in a hot tub filled with oil. If someone allows the oil to drain, the level will go down for everyone. Tub attendants with small canisters of oil could not refill it fast enough to stop the level from going down rapidly. But someone with a lot of oil who could dump it into the tub expeditiously could keep the level high. That someone is the Saudis. Because they are such a large exporter, they are a swing producer and have great influence on pricing.

The United States uses roughly 18.7 million barrels of oil a day, mainly for transportation. It now produces 12 million barrels a day of oil, ethanol and liquid hydrocarbons. That means it has to import a whopping 6.7 million barrels a day of oil this year. While US production has surged in recent years because of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), it is very far from being self-sufficient in fuel, and there is little early prospect of it being a net exporter of oil. Many fracked fields are thought to be shallow and might run out pretty quickly, and the enormous water use and environmental damage involved in the process has caused many countries, including France, to ban it. It would be foolish to bet the future of the United States on this flash in a pan. Not to mention that burning oil causes global warming and threatens to destabilize our climate and submerge cities like Miami.

Moreover, since oil is a single world market, it doesn’t really matter for security or economics solely that the US produces a lot of it. It also doesn’t matter that America gets relatively little oil directly from the Middle East any more. What matters is the world price, which is determined by global supply and demand. Note that when the US was only producing 8 million barrels a day of oil and other fuel liquids, a few years ago, the price of a barrel of oil was $33. Now it is around $100. Despite the surge in US production, the price is at a historic high, because China, India and other Asian countries are rapidly increasing their demand as they turn to having automobiles rather than riding bicycles. If there were another major supply interruption, the US would be as vulnerable today as in the 1970s– we would feel the shortages and higher prices just as would our allies, whom we would want to protect. Using petroleum as a fuel source, even if you produce a lot of it yourself, makes you dependent on other countries in myriad ways.

So if the Saudis were to start doing proprietary deals with China, locking in a 30 year supply at a particular price range, and if world demand went up (as it will) markedly, the US could end up being like the player in a game of musical chairs, who ends up without a chair. Despite its large domestic production, it still needs millions of barrels a day of imports. If the US economy starts roaring again, the need for imports would likely increase.

US energy security cannot be secured by fracking, which is polluting, dirty, and contributes to climate change (itself a challenge to American security), quite apart from its present inability actually to supply our fuel needs.

If the US wants to avoid being hostage to Saudi pique, and wants to avoid losing the game of musical chairs while China sits pretty, it needs to move quickly to electric cars fueled by solar panels and wind.

Most people don’t drive long distances every day. Even now, there is no reason for every middle class American who wants a new car not to get a Chevy Volt. The car is not expensive for what it is (it is a high-end sedan), and is positively cheap if you put solar panels on your roof and run it off the sun. Many other car makers are also introducing plug-in hybrids. We don’t have to deal with the Saudis and we don’t need dirty hydrocarbons or destructive fracking. Everyone with a Chevy Volt should proudly put an American flag bumper sticker on it. There is no more patriotic car on the road today.

With regard to global warming, at the moment, if you run your electric car for more than three years and if your electricity mix is no more than 40% coal, you would be carbon neutral in the fourth year. This takes into account carbon used to construct the car. Silly articles about electric cars that tell you how green they are by how much coal your utility uses in your state or country don’t take account of individual consumers’ ability to put solar panels on their homes. Likewise, how much carbon is used to build the car will change as factories themselves come to be fueled by wind and solar (something already happening in e.g. California). Another reason to buy a volt is to encourage Chevrolet to do more research and development and invest in EVs more, to ensure better batteries and to ease the transition in the next decade. The batteries are being eyed after the car’s natural life as a way to store solar energy for utilities, in which case its carbon footprint will go way down.

But with regard to national security, you’d be fuel-independent, i.e. Saudi-independent, from the moment you drove it off the lot.

Two big reasons to go rapidly to electric vehicles and solar and wind and wave power.

Source: 
http://www.juancole.com/2013/10/electric-arabia-threatens.html

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NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users 

• Top-secret documents detail repeated efforts to crack Tor 
• US-funded tool relied upon by dissidents and activists • Core security of network remains intact but NSA has some success attacking users' computers 
• Bruce Schneier: the NSA's attacks must be made public 
• Attacking Tor: the technical details 
• 'Peeling back the layers with Egotistical Giraffe' – document 
• 'Tor Stinks' presentation – full document 
• Tor: 'The king of high-secure, low-latency anonymity' 

By James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn Greenwald 
The Guardian 
October 4, 201

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency's current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets' computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled 'Tor Stinks', states: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor "the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity".

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users' internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls "relays" or "nodes", to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

It is relied upon by journalists, activists and campaigners in the US and Europe as well as in China, Iran and Syria, to maintain the privacy of their communications and avoid reprisals from government. 

To this end, it receives around 60% of its funding from the US government, primarily the State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA.

Despite Tor's importance to dissidents and human rights organizations, however, the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have devoted considerable efforts to attacking the service, which law enforcement agencies say is also used by people engaged in terrorism, the trade of child abuse images, and on line drug dealing.

Privacy and human rights groups have been concerned about the security of Tor following revelations in the Guardian, New York Times and  ProPublica about widespread NSA efforts to undermine privacy and security software. A report by Brazilian newspaper Globo also contained hints that the agencies had capabilities against the network.

While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale on line surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps.

One such technique is based on trying to spot patterns in the signals entering and leaving the Tor network, to try to de-anonymise its users. The effort was based on a long-discussed theoretical weakness of the network: that if one agency controlled a large number of the "exits" from the Tor network, they could identify a large amount of the traffic passing through it.

The proof-of-concept attack demonstrated in the documents would rely on the NSA's cable-tapping operation, and the agency secretly operating computers, or 'nodes', in the Tor system. However, one presentation stated that the success of this technique was "negligible" because the NSA has "access to very few nodes" and that it is "difficult to combine meaningfully with passive Sigint".

While the documents confirm the NSA does indeed operate and collect traffic from some nodes in the Tor network, they contain no detail as to how many, and there are no indications that the proposed de-anonymization technique was ever implemented.

Other efforts mounted by the agencies include attempting to direct traffic toward NSA-operated servers, or attacking other software used by Tor users. 

One presentation, titled 'Tor: Overview of Existing Techniques', also refers to making efforts to "shape", or influence, the future development of Tor, in conjunction with GCHQ.

Another effort involves measuring the timings of messages going in and out of the network to try to identify users. A third attempts to degrade or disrupt the Tor service, forcing users to abandon the anonymity protection.

Such efforts to target or undermine Tor are likely to raise legal and policy concerns for the intelligence agencies.

Foremost among those concerns is whether the NSA has acted, deliberately or inadvertently, against internet users in the US when attacking Tor. One of the functions of the anonymity service is to hide the country of all of its users, meaning any attack could be hitting members of Tor's substantial US user base.

Several attacks result in implanting malicious code on the computer of Tor users who visit particular websites. The agencies say they are targeting terrorists or organized criminals visiting particular discussion boards, but these attacks could also hit journalists, researchers, or those who accidentally stumble upon a targeted site.

The efforts could also raise concerns in the State Department and other US government agencies that provide funding to increase Tor's security – as part of the Obama administration's internet freedom agenda to help citizens of repressive regimes – circumvent online restrictions.

Material published online for a discussion event held by the State Department, for example, described the importance of tools such as Tor.

"The technologies of internet repression, monitoring and control continue to advance and spread as the tools that oppressive governments use to restrict internet access and to track citizen online activities grow more sophisticated. Sophisticated, secure, and scalable technologies are needed to continue to advance internet freedom."

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency whose mission is to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy" through networks such as Voice of America, also supported Tor's development until October 2012 to ensure that people in countries such as Iran and China could access BBG content. Tor continues to receive federal funds through Radio Free Asia, which is funded by a federal grant from BBG.

The governments of both these countries have attempted to curtail Tor's use: China has tried on multiple occasions to block Tor entirely, while one of the motives behind Iranian efforts to create a "national internet" entirely under government control was to prevent circumvention of those controls.

The NSA's own documents acknowledge the service's wide use in countries where the internet is routinely surveilled or censored. One presentation notes that among uses of Tor for "general privacy" and "non-attribution", it can be used for "circumvention of nation state internet policies" – and is used by "dissidents" in "Iran, China, etc".

Yet GCHQ documents show a disparaging attitude towards Tor users. One presentation acknowledges Tor was "created by the US government" and is "now maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)", a US freedom of expression group. In reality, Tor is maintained by an independent foundation, though has in the past received funding from the EFF.

The presentation continues by noting that "EFF will tell you there are many pseudo-legitimate uses for Tor", but says "we're interested as bad people use Tor". Another presentation remarks: "Very naughty people use Tor".

The technique developed by the NSA to attack Tor users through vulnerable software on their computers has the codename EgotisticalGiraffe, the documents show. It involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs, designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. Among these is a version of the Firefox web browser.

The trick, detailed in a top-secret presentation titled 'Peeling back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe', identified website visitors who were using the protective software and only executed its attack – which took advantage of vulnerabilities in an older version of Firefox – against those people. Under this approach, the NSA does not attack the Tor system directly. Rather, targets are identified as Tor users and then the NSA attacks their browsers.

According to the documents provided by Snowden, the particular vulnerabilities used in this type of attack were inadvertently fixed by Mozilla Corporation in Firefox 17, released in November 2012 – a fix the NSA had not circumvented by January 2013 when the documents were written.

The older exploits would, however, still be usable against many Tor users who had not kept their software up to date.

A similar but less complex exploit against the Tor network was revealed by security researchers in July this year. Details of the exploit, including its purpose and which servers it passed on victims' details to, led to speculation it had been built by the FBI or another US agency.

At the time, the FBI refused to comment on whether it was behind the attack, but subsequently admitted in a hearing in an Irish court that it had operated the malware to target an alleged host of images of child abuse – though the attack did also hit numerous unconnected services on the Tor network.

Roger Dingledine, the president of the Tor project, said the NSA's efforts serve as a reminder that using Tor on its own is not sufficient to guarantee anonymity against intelligence agencies – but showed it was also a great aid in combating mass surveillance.

"The good news is that they went for a browser exploit, meaning there's no indication they can break the Tor protocol or do traffic analysis on the Tor network," Dingledine said. "Infecting the laptop, phone, or desktop is still the easiest way to learn about the human behind the keyboard.

"Tor still helps here: you can target individuals with browser exploits, but if you attack too many users, somebody's going to notice. So even if the NSA aims to surveil everyone, everywhere, they have to be a lot more selective about which Tor users they spy on."

But he added: "Just using Tor isn't enough to keep you safe in all cases. Browser exploits, large-scale surveillance, and general user security are all challenging topics for the average internet user. These attacks make it clear that we, the broader internet community, need to keep working on better security for browsers and other internet-facing applications."

The Guardian asked the NSA how it justified attacking a service funded by the US government, how it ensured that its attacks did not interfere with the secure browsing of law-abiding US users such as activists and journalists, and whether the agency was involved in the decision to fund Tor or efforts to "shape" its development.

The agency did not directly address those questions, instead providing a statement.

It read: "In carrying out its signals intelligence mission, NSA collects only those communications that it is authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence purposes, regardless of the technical means used by those targets or the means by which they may attempt to conceal their communications. NSA has unmatched technical capabilities to accomplish its lawful mission.
 
"As such, it should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets' use of technologies to hide their communications. Throughout history, nations have used various methods to protect their secrets, and today terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others use technology to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that."

• This article was amended on 4 October after the Broadcasting Board of Governors pointed out that its support of Tor ended in October 2012.

• Bruce Schneier is an unpaid member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's board of directors. He has not been involved in any discussions on funding.

Source:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption 

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New Zealand dismisses major Internet companies’ disputes with new spying law

RT.com
October 14, 2013

The New Zealand government has rejected a plea from four of the internet’s largest companies to be excluded from broad requirements within the country’s new electronic spying law.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo wrote earlier this month to Communications Minister Amy Adams to voice their trepidations about demands they must comply with in the Telecommunications Interception Capability and Security Bill, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The bill demands the companies and other network operators must allow New Zealand spy agencies a certain path to monitor user communications. The law’s provisions require the head of national intelligence agencies to have interception capabilities of “over the top” providers like the four companies that offer services openly online.

These interception abilities "would present serious legal conflicts for companies headquartered in other countries,” the four wrote to Adams.

In addition, the companies said the surveillance models in the new legislation, a companion to the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) Act, were inconsistent with those of the other four countries in the “Five Eyes” spying network - Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

The companies said the eavesdropping capabilities of the new legislation are redundant given current international law allows New Zealand access to the information it wants. They encouraged New Zealand to consider an “alternative approach” to the new law, by engaging US counterparts for information and by setting up a “single point of contact” for information requests of overseas companies.

Minister Adams responded saying “a proper administrative process” was in place for the overseas companies that would ease the burden of interception and ensure legal conflicts between New Zealand and their home countries would be addressed.

She went on to say the bill would not put onerous legal burdens on the companies and that the alternate path the companies suggested would not suffice “to achieve the objectives of the bill.”

Though Adams did announce the removal of Clause 39 in the legislation, which allows the government to block an overseas-based company from offering services in New Zealand should they not comply with the bill’s interception demands in a way that imperils national security.

Source:
http://rt.com/news/new-zealand-internet-spying-194/A
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The Golden Dawn Murder Case
Larry Summers and the New Fascism

By Greg Palast for Truthout
Monday, 7 October 2013
On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece.

Larry Summers has an air-tight alibi.  But I don't believe it.

Larry didn’t hold the knife:  The confessed killer is some twisted member of Golden Dawn, a political party made up of skin-head freaks, anti-immigrant fear-mongers, anti-Muslim/ anti-Semitic/ anti-Albanian sociopaths and ultra-patriot fruitcakes.  Think of it as the Tea Party goes Greek.

Following Fyssas’ killing, other groups of dangerous psychopathic misfits, namely the European Union and Greece’s governing coalition, moved to ban Golden Dawn.

Over the weekend, Greece’s rulers arrested six members of Parliament who belong to Golden Dawn.  Apparently, Greece’s political leaders prefer democracy as defined by Egypt’s General Sisi to the precepts of Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson.

To my friends on the Greek Left:  It’s sickening to watch you cheer the arrest of Golden Dawn parliamentarians. Mark my words:  You are next.

Listen up:

My investigation reveals that behind the banning of Golden Dawn, besides the usual European distaste for democracy, is something far more sinister:  the ruling parties are distracting the public from their own involvement in the crime.

The rise in violence and hate-crimes is no surprise. The official unemployment rate in Greece is 28%, and over 60% among young men.  No wonder desperate youths are wrapping batons in Greek flags and beating immigrants: When people are pressed to the wall, they hunt for their tormentors –– and too often find their fellow victims to blame.

Economic devastation breeds fascism.  In the 1930s, the hungry and angry sought relief in hyper-patriotism, racism and pogroms.  In the 1980s Reagan Recession in the USA, when factories shut down in the Midwest, the hopeless unemployed joined right-wing skinhead cults and went on a killing rampage –– beginning with the murder of Jewish journalist Alan Berg and ending with the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

Vultures Over Athens
 
Golden Dawn is a symptom of the nation's illness, not its cause.  Unfortunately, the Brown-shirts go after easy targets –– Pakistanis, Gypsies, Africans, whoever is different and easy to whack.  It's a lot easier to stab a hip-hop rapper than it is to go after a hedge-fund shark.

The real culprits behind the suffering are well camouflaged.  So let me name some:  In Greece, we begin with billionaires Kenneth Dart and Paul “The Vulture” Singer.

Dart and Singer bought up Greek government bonds for pennies on the dollar.  While the holders of 97% of Greek bonds agreed to accept a loss of 75% of their value, Dart and Singer demanded several hundred percent more than they paid.  Then Dart and Singer threatened the dead-broke Greek government. If Greece did not pay this ransom, Dart and Singer would declare Greek bonds in default.  Every bank in Europe holding these government debts as reserve funds would face technical bankruptcy; the value of government bonds worldwide would implode in value and the entire hemisphere would face a new financial collapse.

It was financial terrorism, and the Greek government gave in.  It paid the full ransom demanded.  Dart grabbed over half a billion dollars ($513 million) from the Greek treasury –– and only the gods know how much Singer has pocketed.

How was this vulture food paid for?  With “austerity” — tightening a belt that’s already not much bigger than its buckle.  To pay Singer and Dart, the Greek government announced it would fire 15,000 workers.

What’s sick is that the ruling coalition (or misruling coalition) does not say this is to cover the payoffs to the vultures.  Rather, the government says it is the just punishment Greeks deserve for their "laziness and greed."  The victims’ punishment is called, “austerity.”
 
The Austerity Fairy Tale
 
My children often ask me, “Daddy, where does ‘austerity’ come from?”  And I tell them:

  Once upon a time, there was a good fairy named John Maynard Keynes. He wanted to stop depressions, financial crises and suffering, so he conceived of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.  He said, When a nation’s foreign exchange earnings drop (say, if the price of oil rises or Greek tourism falls because its currency is over-valued), the countries taking the poor nations’ money, rich countries like Germany and the USA, would lend it back via the IMF. 
 
  By this rule, the rich lending to the poor, the world prospered and lived happily ever after … until the 1980s, when a wicked witch, known as the Iron Lady, and America’s gaga grandpa, Reagan of the Rich, insisted that the IMF and the World Bank beat poor nations with a stick called, “structural adjustment.” 
 
  Nations facing destitution because of higher oil costs, currency imbalance or predatory interest rate demands were “structurally adjusted.”  Structural adjustment is a cruel and debilitating potion of mass firings of public employees, cheap sell-offs of national assets and deregulation of corporate profiteering.  This ripping the wings off the better angels of government is called, “austerity.”
 
  The good fairy Keynes had warned about this evil potion, this snake oil called “austerity.”  Cutting government spending during a recession, he said, will only make things worse.  
 
  And that’s what happened:  In every single case, the “adjusted” nations’ economies were devastated. 

Structural adjustment reached its cruel apotheosis in the early 1990s under the guidance of the World Bank’s Chief Economist, one Larry Summers.

But then, in 1997, Summers’ post was taken by Prof. Joseph Stiglitz.

In 2001, I met Stiglitz whom I’d heard was quietly expressing grave doubts about austerity and structural adjustment à la Summers.  He agreed to go public.  Over several hours of discussion, which I recorded for BBC TV, Stiglitz charged that IMF-imposed austerity was “ a little like the Middle Ages, when the patient died they would say well, we stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.”

Stiglitz detailed for me the ill effects of the “structural adjustment” demands, including “free” trade, which he likened to the Opium Wars; bank deregulation, which he found ludicrously dangerous; privatization, which Stiglitz called “briberization”; and budget-cutting austerity.

The budget cuts and free-market nostrums, Stiglitz told me, were as cruel as they were stupid.  And he said of those who profited off these IMF diktats, “They don’t care if people live or die.”

Stiglitz went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for his skepticism of Markets über Alles.

So how, a decade after austerity, briberization and all their cruelties exposed and discredited, did Greece (and Spain and Portugal and too many others) end up under austerity’s bloody grip?

To begin with, in 2000, Larry Summers, as US Treasury Secretary, successfully demanded the World Bank fire Stiglitz and purged the Bank and IMF of austerity apostasy.

Why?  Austerity may fail the public, but it’s damn profitable for those on the inside.

All you need is a riot and a few dead bodies.

The IMF Riots
 
Among Stiglitz’ stunning revelations to me was his description of “the IMF riot.”  I showed him confidential World Bank and IMF plans for the nation of Ecuador. These included what seemed to be a warning to that nation’s finance minister that austerity could lead to violence in the streets, “social unrest” — which the World Bank recommended be crushed with “resolve”. In Ecuador, “resolve” meant tanks.

Did the IMF really write the riots into the plans?
Yes, Stiglitz said, matter-of-factly. “We had a name for it ‘The IMF Riot’”.

When a nation is “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole caldron blows up”.

And that’s what we’re seeing in Greece.  It began in May 2010, when some sick, misguided berserker set fire to a bank in Athens and killed four bank employees.  The killings did the trick:  the Left’s protests against insane austerity and banker gangsterism came to a halt.

Still, people could see that the austerity medicine was making Greece ill. So, they put their hopes in a new party, Syriza, which, from nowhere, became the second highest vote-getter in Greece by promising to oppose austerity.  Once in office, the faux-Left Syriza completely sold out its positions.

That leaves Golden Dawn, although diseased by racism and violently bent, it is the only one of Greece’s top four parties to stand firm against rabid austerity and the economy being chained like a beaten dog to Germany’s currency.

In 2010, the bank burning was used to discredit protests by the Left.  Today, once again, the Greek government, dancing on its hind legs, begging for a biscuit from German bankers, has used a murder as an excuse to outlaw the only major party dissenting from the austerity suicide pact.

I wish I could say that the reason Golden Dawn is being banned is because of the violent bend of its racist followers.  But that’s just not what’s going on here.

Dimitris Kazakis, the leader of Greece’s true progressive party, the United People’s Front (EPAM), has spoken out against Golden Dawn’s racist violence — and the greater danger of the bogus charges created to arrest members of Parliament.  He scolds Greeks, reminding them that this is how the military dictatorship seized power in 1967.

So, who are the real Fascists?

Fascism, as defined since the days of Il Duce, is the official combine of government and corporate big business.  

By that definition, Golden Dawn is the only non-Fascist party among Greece’s top four.  And that is why Golden Dawn has been targeted for elimination.

I hope my fellow progressives will excuse me for not applauding.

Source:
 http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19213-the-golden-dawn-murder-case-larry-summers-and-the-new-fascism
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