China's Tianhe-2 retakes fastest supercomputer crown

 

A China-based supercomputer has leapfrogged rivals to be named the world's most powerful system.

Tianhe-2, developed by the government-run National University of Defence Technology, topped the latest list of the fastest 500 supercomputers, by a team of international researchers.

They said the news was a "surprise" since the system had not been expected to be ready until 2015.

China last held the top rank between November 2010 and June 2011.
According to the list, the US has the world's second and third fastest supercomputers, Titan and Sequoia, while Japan's K computer drops to fourth spot.

Fastest supercomputers

1. Tianhe-2 (China)
2. Titan (US)
3. Sequoia (US)
4. K computer (Japan)
5. Mira (US)
6. Stampede (US)
7. Juqueen (Germany)
8. Vulcan (US)
9. SuperMuc (Germany)
10. Tianhe-1A (China)

The latest version of the twice-yearly list - which is overseen by Hans Meuer, professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim - was published to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany.

Unique features
 
According to the Linpack benchmark, Tianhe-2 - meaning Milky Way-2 - operates at 33.86 petaflop/sec, the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

The benchmark measures real-world performance - but in theory the machine can boost that to a "peak performance" of 54.9 petaflop/sec.

The project was sponsored by the Chinese government's 863 High Technology Programme - an effort to make the country's hi-tech industries more competitive and less dependent on overseas rivals.

It has said it intends to install the equipment at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, based in the country's south-eastern Guandong province, where it will be offered as a "research and education" resource to southern China.

The machine uses a total of 3.12 million processor cores, using Intel's Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips to carry out its calculations. 

However, the University of Tennessee's Jack Dongarra - a member of the Top 500 list team who visited the project in May - noted that many of its features were developed in China and are unique. These include:

• A custom-built interconnection network, which routes data across the system
• The inclusion of 4,096 Galaxy FT-1500 CPUs (central processing units) designed by the university - these have been installed to handle specific weather-forecasting and national-defence applications and are not included in the headline performance figures
• The use of the Kylin operating system - this Linux-based OS is named after a mythical beast known as the "Chinese unicorn", and was designed by the university to be a high-security option for users in government, defence, energy, aerospace and other critical industries

 

 

On paper the Tianhe-2's performance is nearly double that of the next computer on the list.
Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, clocks 17.59 petaflop/sec of performance, according to the Linpack benchmark, and a theoretical peak of 27.11 petaflop/sec.

Mr Dongarra noted that the US government is not expected to acquire another supercomputer until 2015.

Japan's Fujitsu-built K computer - which displaced China's Tianhe-1 as the world's fastest supercomputer - now comes in fourth on the Top 500 list with a Linpack benchmark performance of 10.51 petaflop/sec.

According to the survey's editors, China now accounts for 66 of the list's fastest computers, which is actually a fall from six months ago when it had 72 in the list.
The US dominates the survey with 252 systems, Japan has 30, the UK has 29, France has 23 and Germany has 19. 

Source: BBC News [accessed 17/6/2013]

Smashing the Spinning Plates

Supporters of the Syriza party wave flags at a rally outside a university building following an expected second place in the general election on June 17, in Athens. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

June 29, 2012

How long can the Eurocrats in Brussels keep the dinnerware in motion?

BY Slavoj Žižek

 

The outcome of the June 17 Greek election—a narrow victory for the conservative New Democracy over the leftist Syriza party, and the prompt formation of a “pro-European” coalition government—predictably unleashed a gigantic sigh of relief all over Europe. The catastrophe was averted, European unity had prevailed, etc. But, in fact, a great opportunity was missed, a unique chance for Europe to finally confront the depth of its economic and political deadlock. The sigh of relief effectively meant: We avoided the awakening. We can continue to dream.

CNN’s Richard Quest recently offered a metaphor for this dream when he compared the European officials to:

[T]he proverbial “plate spinners” from the circus. Those talented artists who balance spinning plates on sticks, ever increasing the number of sticks, rushing from one to the other, giving them a tug and pull to keep them moving, always aware that if they are too slow or too fast, one of the plates will crash to the ground. That is exactly what we have in Europe today. Only the artists are European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso et al, while the plates are Greece, Spanish banks, Italian deficits, eurobonds and German chancellor Angela Merkel. … Daily it seems there are more plates spinning, and the antics of the spinners become more frantic as they rush from one to the other, ever proclaiming that the act is coming to a close. Unfortunately that is not the case. The plate spinning is likely to continue for some time to come.

Spinning plates is effectively what the Brussels Eurocrats are doing: endlessly postponing the critical reckoning by way of adding new plates and thus making the balance more and more fragile. Syriza was accused of promoting leftist fictions—but it is the austerity plan imposed by Brussels that is a fiction. In a strange gesture of collective make-believe, everyone knows that the Greek state cannot ever repay its debt, and everyone ignores the obvious nonsense of the financial projections on which the plans are based.

So why does Brussels impose these plans? What matters in contemporary capitalism is that agents act upon their putative beliefs about future prospects, regardless of whether they really believe in those prospects. And, as we also all know, the true aim of these rescue measures is not to save Greece, but to save the European banks.

There is a wonderfully dialectical joke in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic comedy Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this single coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk.

Greece is in the same predicament: The situation is difficult, and Greeks will get some kind of austerity—but will they get that austerity without cream or without milk? It is here that the European establishment is cheating. It is acting as if Greeks will get the coffee of austerity without cream (that the fruits of their hardship will not profit only European banks but also themselves), but they are effectively offering Greeks coffee without milk (only the banks, and not the Greeks, will profit from this hardship).

To illustrate the mistake of enacting austerity measures as the main strategy to combat the crisis, Paul Krugman often compares them to the medieval cure of blood-letting. That’s a nice metaphor that should be radicalized even further. The European financial doctors, who are themselves not sure about how the medicine works, are using the Greeks as test rabbits and letting their blood, not the blood of their own countries. There is no blood-letting for the great German and French banks—on the contrary, they are getting continuous and enormous transfusions.

Syriza is not a group of dangerous “extremists.” Rather, it is bringing pragmatic common sense to clear the mess created by others. It is those who impose austerity measures who are dangerous dreamers, who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. Syriza supporters are not dreamers—they are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, they are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

Syriza is a radical Left movement that stepped out of the comfortable position of marginal resistance and courageously signaled their readiness to take power. This is why, according to some, the Greeks should be penalized—or, as Bill Frezza recently wrote in Forbes, under the headline, “Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism”: “What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? … Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.” The old story of Haiti after 1804 repeats itself here: Greece should be exemplarily punished to block once and for all any temptation for a radical Left solution to the crisis.

Some have argued Syriza lacks the proper experience to govern, and this should be admitted: Yes, they lack the experience in how to bankrupt a country, in how to cheat and to steal. This brings us to the absurdity of the European establishment’s politics: They preach the dogma of paying taxes—and against Greece’s institutional corruption—and put all their hopes on the coalition of the two parties that institutionalized that corruption in the first place. The New Democracy victory was the result of a brutal campaign full of lies and scare-mongering—the politics of fear at its purest, drawing a picture of Greece with hunger, chaos and police state terror in the case of the Syriza victory.

The EU pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures fits perfectly with what psychoanalysis calls superego. Superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a sadistic agent that bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw clearly, the more we obey its demands, the guiltier we feel. Imagine a vicious teacher who imposes on his pupils impossible tasks, and then takes pleasure in jeering when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what is so terribly wrong with the EU demands: their austerity policies don’t even give Greece a chance—its failure is part of the game.

There is an (apocryphal, for sure) anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the middle of WWI: the Germans sent the message “Here, on our part of the front, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic,” to which the Austrians replied, “Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.” This is the true difference between Syriza and others. For the others, the situation is catastrophic but not serious; they want to continue with business as usual. For Syriza, the situation is serious but not catastrophic, since courage and hope should replace fear. 

Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.

Source: <http://www.inthesetimes.com> [accessed 19/7/2012]

Iran, Russia, China, Syria to Stage Biggest Joint Wargames in Middle-East

Iranian media outlets reported on Tuesday that Iran, Russia, China and Syria are to conduct joint military exercises in Syria next month.

The semi-official Fars News outlet, which has ties to the Iranian government, cited "certain unofficial sources" in its report but did not say what those sources were.

The report appears to have originated on Arabic language Syrian media outlet ShamLife, which said the war-games were scheduled in less than a month's time.

Also on Tuesday, the BBC reported that the UK had stopped a cargo vessel off the western coast of Scotland allegedly transporting Russian-made refurbished attack helicopters to Syria. British marine insurer the Standard Club canceled cover to the MV Alaed's owners after UK security services warned that the company would breach EU sanctions if it insured a ship carrying arms to Syria, according to the UK's Daily Telegraph.

The unconfirmed reports of joint wargames could just be part of the pyrotechnics of an escalating diplomatic row between the US and Russia over the Syrian violence.

A new form of European union

By Martin Wolf

Here is the biggest question about the eurozone: can we envisage a set of reforms that are not only politically feasible and economically workable, but would let it prosper, as it is. If so, what might they be?

We already know that, as designed, the eurozone did not meet this test. Hence all the improvisation of today. The original design created huge imbalances. When the flow of finance dried up, these delivered a wave of financial and fiscal crises and a legacy of unaffordable debt. Furthermore, the forces driving those imbalances generated divergences in competitiveness. These also need to be redressed, as quickly as possible.

In response, the eurozone has developed a strategy based on fiscal austerity and structural reform. In addition, the European System of Central Banks, as lender of last resort, and the International Monetary Fund and eurozone governments, via the temporary European Financial Stability Fund and, soon, the permanent European Stability Mechanism provide indirect financing for fragile economies and sovereigns. The $100bn proposed rescue of Spanish banks is the latest example of this strategy at work. It is unlikely to be the last.

Will the strategy work? Probably not. As Mark Cliffe and his team at ING note, in a report entitled Roads to Survival, a good way to think about the challenge is in terms of the external and internal imbalances bequeathed by the incontinent cross-border lending prior to the crisis.

If external deficits are to be reduced, domestic demand must shrink. If done too swiftly, this would raise unemployment, possibly enormously (see chart). In the long run, high unemployment, aided by market-oriented reforms, should drive down nominal wages. But this could take many years. Meanwhile, persistently weak economies mean a growing mountain of bad private debt, high fiscal deficits, rising public debt, high interest rates and extremely fragile financial systems.

 

This strategy, then, looks neither politically feasible nor economically workable. Now consider alternatives. A federal union, with a federal government that finances spending throughout the union, is certainly economically workable. We have many examples: the US, Canada, Australia, Switzerland. But we can safely say that, whatever the position may be a century from now, the eurozone is very far from able to share such a government.

A less ambitious – but still ambitious – alternative would be a transfer union, by which I mean a system of permanent transfers from richer to poorer member countries, as is normal within countries. This is surely politically infeasible. Above all, it is neither necessary nor desirable from the economic point of view. It is unnecessary for poorer countries to run sustained current account deficits, provided wages remain in line with productivity (as ceased to be the case for several members during the pre-crisis boom). It is undesirable for countries to receive large and sustained net transfers, because that tends to entrench backwardness.

If the current policies seem unlikely to work and either a federal or a transfer union is ruled out on grounds of political or economic infeasibility, what is left? I suggest the combination of two ideas: “insurance union” and “adjustment union”. By an insurance union, I mean one that provides temporary and targeted support for countries hit by big shocks. By an adjustment union, I mean one that ensures symmetrical adjustment to changes in circumstances, including, changes in financing. Both are necessary and, together, they should be sufficient to ensure a workable union in the long run. These notions would have been unnecessary if original members had been far more similar: the minimal union would then have worked. But that is not what now exists. If the eurozone is to sustain its current membership, it needs a combination of insurance and adjustment.

Before the birth of the euro, some economists thought that members might use fiscal policy to cushion country-specific shocks. We now know this does not work, even if (as was true for Ireland and Spain), the victim began with a healthy public finances. Really large capital inflows and asset price bubbles overwhelm fiscal policy. For this reason, members cannot self-insure against severe shocks. Insurance must be provided collectively, on the principle that everybody benefits from the survival of the union. The insurance must support the financial system and (if possible) fiscal solvency in a crisis. But if it is to be insurance, not an open-ended hand-out, conditions must be imposed. Designing insurance that stabilises financial systems and sovereign finances in a crisis is tricky, but not impossible. Clearly, support needs to be larger and more automatic than now, without being open-ended.

More important even than such insurance is adjustment. Members need a chance of returning to health within a reasonable time period provided they adopt sensible policies. If members – particularly large members – are to adjust, they will need complementary adjustments elsewhere. More precisely, the necessary return to external and internal balance in crisis-hit countries cannot be achieved without higher spending and inflation in the core. The European Central Bank is astonishingly complacent in failing to react to yet another recession.

Unless one imagines that the world economy could now cope with a big shift by the eurozone as a whole towards surplus, the rebalancing must occur largely inside the eurozone. If this adjustment is blocked by weak demand and very low inflation in core countries, the vulnerable countries will be locked into semi-permanent slumps. That way lies close to guaranteed failure.

Is it possible for the eurozone to make the needed reforms in the near future? I do not know. The time may now be too short and the irritation too great. But, conceptually, it seems clear what is needed: a swift and effective move towards an insurance and adjustment union. That is neither a federal union nor a transfer union. It is a way of making it possible for countries that remain largely sovereign to share a single currency. I do not know whether even this is economically and politically feasible. But if not that, what? And if not now, when?

Source: The Financial Times [accessed 13/6/2012]

The Accidental Empire

08/06/2012 By George Soros

It is now clear that the main cause of the euro crisis is the member states’ surrender of their right to print money to the European Central Bank. They did not understand just what that surrender entailed – and neither did the European authorities.

When the euro was introduced, regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital, and the ECB discounted all eurozone government bonds on equal terms. Commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate weaker countries’ bonds to earn a few extra basis points, which caused interest rates to converge across the eurozone. Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, undertook structural reforms and became more competitive. Other countries enjoyed housing and consumption booms on the back of cheap credit, making them less competitive.

Then came the crash of 2008. Governments had to bail out their banks. Some of them found themselves in the position of a developing country that had become heavily indebted in a currency that it did not control. Reflecting the divergence in economic performance, Europe became divided into creditor and debtor countries.

When financial markets discovered that supposedly riskless government bonds might be forced into default, they raised risk premiums dramatically. This rendered potentially insolvent commercial banks, whose balance sheets were loaded with such bonds, giving rise to Europe’s twin sovereign-debt and banking crisis.

The eurozone is now replicating how the global financial system dealt with such crises in 1982 and again in 1997. In both cases, the international authorities inflicted hardship on the periphery in order to protect the center; now Germany is unknowingly playing the same role.

The details differ, but the idea is the same: creditors are shifting the entire burden of adjustment onto debtors, while the “center” avoids its own responsibility for the imbalances. Interestingly, the terms “center” and “periphery” have crept into usage almost unnoticed. Yet, in the euro crisis, the center’s responsibility is even greater than it was in 1982 or 1997: it designed a flawed currency system and failed to correct the defects. In the 1980’s, Latin America suffered a lost decade; a similar fate now awaits Europe.

At the onset of the crisis, a breakup of the euro was inconceivable: the assets and liabilities denominated in a common currency were so intermingled that a breakup would have led to an uncontrollable meltdown. But, as the crisis has progressed, the financial system has become increasingly reordered along national lines. This trend has gathered momentum in recent months. The ECB’s long-term refinancing operation enabled Spanish and Italian banks to buy their own countries’ bonds and earn a large spread. Simultaneously, banks gave preference to shedding assets outside their national borders, and risk managers try to match assets and liabilities at home, rather than within the eurozone as a whole.

If this continued for a few years, a euro breakup would become possible without a meltdown, but it would leave the creditor countries with large claims against debtor countries, which would be difficult to collect. In addition to intergovernmental transfers and guarantees, the Bundesbank’s claims against peripheral countries’ central banks within the Target2 clearing system totaled €644 billion ($804 billion) on April 30, and the amount is growing exponentially, owing to capital flight.

So the crisis keeps growing. Tensions in financial markets have hit new highs. Most telling is that Britain, which retained control of its currency, enjoys the lowest yields in its history, while the risk premium on Spanish bonds is at a new high.

The real economy of the eurozone is declining, while Germany is booming. This means that the divergence is widening. The political and social dynamics are also working toward disintegration. Public opinion, as expressed in recent election results, is increasingly opposed to austerity, and this trend is likely to continue until the policy is reversed. Something has to give.

In my judgment, the authorities have a three-month window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse current trends. That would require some extraordinary policy measures to return conditions closer to normal, and they must conform to existing treaties, which could then be revised in a calmer atmosphere to prevent recurrence of imbalances.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to identify some extraordinary measures that would meet these tough requirements. They would have to tackle the banking and the sovereign-debt problems simultaneously, without neglecting to reduce divergences in competitiveness.

The eurozone needs a banking union: a European deposit-insurance scheme in order to stem capital flight, a European source for financing bank recapitalization, and eurozone-wide supervision and regulation. The heavily indebted countries need relief on their financing costs. There are various ways to provide it, but they all require Germany’s active support.

That is where the blockage is. German authorities are working feverishly to come up with a set of proposals in time for the European Union summit at the end of June, but all signs suggest that they will offer only the minimum on which the various parties can agree – implying, once again, only temporary relief.

But we are at an inflection point. The Greek crisis is liable to come to a climax in the fall, even if the election produces a government that is willing to abide by Greece’s current agreement with its creditors. By that time, the German economy will also be weakening, so that Chancellor Angela Merkel will find it even more difficult than today to persuade the German public to accept additional European responsibilities.

Barring an accident like the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, Germany is likely to do enough to hold the euro together, but the EU will become something very different from the open society that once fired people’s imagination. The division between debtor and creditor countries will become permanent, with Germany dominating and the periphery becoming a depressed hinterland.

This will inevitably arouse suspicion about Germany’s role in Europe – but any comparison with Germany’s past is quite inappropriate. The current situation is due not to a deliberate plan, but to the lack of one. It is a tragedy of policy errors. Germany is a well-functioning democracy with an overwhelming majority for an open society. When the German people become aware of the consequences – one hopes not too late – they will want to correct the defects in the euro’s design.

It is clear what is needed: a European fiscal authority that is able and willing to reduce the debt burden of the periphery, as well as a banking union. Debt relief could take various forms other than Eurobonds, and would be conditional on debtors abiding by the fiscal compact. Withdrawing all or part of the relief in case of nonperformance would be a powerful protection against moral hazard. It is up to Germany to live up to the leadership responsibilities thrust upon it by its own success.

Source: Project Syndicate [accessed 9/6/2012]

Rundle: Greece is now the cutting edge of the world

Wednesday, 16 May 2012 / by Guy Rundle

“Everything’s fine out the window … oh no, look, I can see society collapsing,” said Paul, a French-Greek journalist working in Athens. Out his window is Ermou, the wide shopping street that leads down to Syntagma Square. I’d phoned him to see what was going on, and to check the “Greece in turmoil” line that has become de rigeur in the official coverage of the crisis.

Paul didn’t need much of an invitation to take the piss out of that line. What has happened in the development of the Greek-European crisis — and the inter-connected coverage of it — has been extraordinary, but also indicative of the topsy-turvy world of capitalism, finance, and its relation to everyday life. It is a lesson worth following closely, because Greece is a harbinger of what will happen not merely in Europe, but across the world over the next decade as the vast global superbubble of neoliberalism slowly deflates.

Six months ago, Greece really was starting to fray — due to the determination of the two major parties, PASOK and New Democracy, to impose the austerity measures of the EU “memorandum” no matter how stupid or self-defeating — and the deep frustration of the public at the impasse between the political system and popular feeling.

But then, after six months of “technocratic” rule (really, EU satrapy), an election was held, and lo and behold, the hold of the major parties was broken, and new forces — Syriza, a leftist outfit, and Independent Greeks, a right-wing nationalist breakaway — managed to break through, gaining about 50 and 30 seats respectively. The vote may have scattered across several parties but the result was clear — 60% of votes went to parties that rejected the terms of the memorandum. At the same time, 80% of Greeks want to stay in the euro and the EU. They reject the old parties, but they also reject the notion that the only way to square away the debt is needless pain enacted for largely ceremonial purposes.

So, in other words, the people’s desires have entirely transformed the structure of Greek politics. Or, as it might otherwise be called, democracy. For surely, if democracy means anything, it means the capacity of a vote to up-end everything. In any real democracy, the party structure should collapse and recombine every 25-30 years or so. Large parties are, after all, coalitions of temporarily united values and interests. When the circumstances change, so should they.

That is what has happened in Greece. Rather than the shell-game of finance capitalism dictating the terms, people have made a fairly clear statement of what they want — the social-political has come to the centre of society, as it should. What the morons who constitute the ranks of financial journalism call “chaos” is really the exact opposite — it is politics, people expressing their will in a non-violent form, and then trying to negotiate an arrangement between differing manifestations of ideas and interests.

Chaos, by contrast, can be seen on the screen on every finance trader across the Western world, where stocks, shares, currencies move according to no rational basis, driven by the echo chamber of rumour. The idea that the business of everyday life should be governed by these processes rather than by the rational activity of production for use, indicates the nihilism at the heart of the market, its alliance with dead matter — numbers, money, power — rather than life.

The Greeks have rebelled against this. It looks like their rebellion will continue — with the failure of the latest attempts to form a coalition government the country is going back to the polls. Syriza, the left coalition that had taken 5% of the vote in the last election, and 17% in this, is now polling in the mid-twenties.

Such a result — if it occurred in the new elections, to take place in mid-June — would give Syriza the 50-seat bonus still in place. That would give them about 120 seats out of 300. Presuming that Democratic Left retained 10 seats or so — they would lose some seats back to Syriza — then there would be extreme pressure on Independent Greeks — the right-wing breakaway party — to support Syriza in their shared belief, a rejection of the austerity measures contained in the second memorandum.

That would deliver a government expressing the popular sentiment — in Europe but rejecting the memorandum. That is the scenario — a rational democratic one — that finance journalists call “the nightmare”. It is, but not in the manner they suggest. The truth is, that if Syriza forms government while rejecting the memorandum, but refuses to unilaterally leave the euro, then it is really Europe’s problem, not Greece’s. The usual groupthink that has everyone writing articles as to how Greece will leave the euro next week, etc, fails to take account of the fact that there is no easy way to expel a country from the eurozone. The onus is on the EU to do the expelling.

So everything from here on is uncharted. The technocratic Greek government — which remains in place — paid off an €5 billion-plus bond issue that came due today — but interest is due on hundreds of billions of euros of debt in the next month — much of it euro-debt — and the country has less than a billion euros in foreign reserves. So the EU would have to decisively refuse to underwrite the next series of payments — which would simply go from one euro account to another — in order to force the crisis.

The sensible solution would be the one proposed by new French President Francois Hollande — that bad Greek debt be swapped for eurobonds, and that the private debt take an 80-90% haircut, and that a rational 10-20 year paydown of what debt remains be negotiated without strangling the Greek economy — which would then shrink the economy further, and make it impossible for the country to repay its debts. It is utterly irrational, but so too is neoliberalism — it is the equivalent of the Incas believing that only human sacrifice would keep the sun rising, and that the advance of the conquistadors meant that they should redouble their efforts of tearing hearts out of chests on the top of ziggurats, rather than responding to the immediate threat in a rational and direct manner.

Every number quoted by the finance journalists — the hundreds of billions of euros owed, the terms coming due — are all bullshit. All that is due is the interest payments, and most of those are ludicrously inflated by the shell-game that got Greece into this mess in the first place — the sudden downrating of Greek debt by ratings agencies part-owned by the very banks that would profit from a hike in interest rates in the first place. Most finance journalists are simply unthinking propagandists of a system they have neither the intelligence nor the desire to examine.

Greece is now the cutting edge of the world. And Syriza is the most advanced political expression around. The party that the finance journalists call “strident” and lump in with the Nazi freak-show of Golden Dawn, is in reality an expression of the rationality within modernity — the idea that complex systems such as finance capital should be tools of humanity, rather than vice versa. People who think that the world can be covered by noting the movements of the FTSE, the Dow and the Kak better get used to what is happening in Greece, because it will soon be happening elsewhere.

Of course, with a month before the new elections, it is always possible that the voters in Greece will return to a mainstream pro-memorandum party, guided by fear. Should that occur, the relationship between the polity and the people will be sundered afresh, and everything up to civil war will have happened. Should Syriza triumph, then history will have happened, and Europe, the markets and their trailing sycophants in the financial press will have to adjust. Look away from the screen and out the window, and you might see the world.

Source:  http://www.crikey.com.au/ [accessed 18/05/2012]

May Day

Noam Chomsky, Reader Supported News

29 April 12

eople seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called "Law Day" -- a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement's organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

If you're a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They're not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves. People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that there are limits to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won't, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is necessary, steps to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to be a form of self-defense, they're not going to take part in them, at least they shouldn't.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and judicial punishment.

Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a "law day" as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society.

---

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.