Global News Journal

from Jeremy Gaunt:

Greeks on the street

Greeks smashing windows and setting fire to shops and banks in a fury of opposition to yet more austerity is gripping.  But it is hardly unique. A few years ago there were similar scenes for weeks after police shot a 15-year old schoolboy.  And back when I lived there, U.S. President Bill Clinton was treated to a similar welcome -- mainly because of his military assault on Serbia (a fellow Christian Orthodox nation) during the Kosovo conflict.

There are doubtless degrees. The latest level of destruction was the worst since widespread riots in 2008 -- and austerity being imposed on Greeks is very painful. But it is worth noting that there are two underlying elements than make such uprisings more common in Greece than elsewhere.

The first is a division in Greek society that goes back to at least the end of the second world war. The civil war that followed the end of the German occupation was brutal and split the country between those wanting western free market democracy and those favouring Soviet-style communism. This carried though into the 1967-74 junta.

The second element is the role of outsiders on Greek history. The Civil War brought in western intervention and the junta got U.S. support -- to the deep-seated bitterness of those on the other side. Going back further -- and Greeks have long historic memories -- there are Persians, crusaders, Nazi Germans and the particularly hated Ottomans trying to make Greeks be something other than Greek. Here is a feature on it.

Add to that mix the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank, the Brussels-based European Commission, derisive artilces in British and German tabloids and a drumbeat of tough talk from Berlin.

This is what happens when Greeks get their backs up about foreigners telling them what to do.

Can export bans be challenged at the WTO?

Russia’s ban on grain exports as a heat wave parches crops in the world’s third biggest wheat exporter has raised questions whether such export curbs break World Trade Organization rules. Russia is not a member of the WTO, and it remains to be seen how its new grain policy will affect its 17-year-old bid to join. But other grain exporters, such as Ukraine, which is also considering export curbs, are part of the global trade referee.

WTO rules are quite clear that members cannot interfere with imports and exports in a way that disrupts trade or discriminates against other members. But in practice most WTO rules aim to stop countries blocking imports – shutting out competitor’s goods to give their own domestic producers an unfair advantage.

Is Malaysia’s net clampdown at odds with knowledge economy?

The opposition wants to cut the sale of alcohol in a state that it rules and now the government wants to restrict Internet access .

Malaysia is a multicultural country of 27 million people in Southeast Asia. It has a majority Muslim population that of course is not allowed to drink by religion. Yet clearly some do as shown by the sentencing to caning for a young woman handed down recently

(Photo: Prime Minister Najib Razak leaving the National Mosque as he prepared to mark his first 100 days in office in July. Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad)

Proposals by the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party, which wants an Islamic state, could effectively end the sale of alcohol in the country’s richest state, Selangor, which is next to the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Its rules would penalise not only Muslims that consumed alcohol, but also for example Muslim shop assistants in say Tesco’s who could be fined if they sold alcohol.

This is coming from a country whose most celebrated film maker, PJ Ramlee, made movies featuring alcohol, smoking and night clubs as well as cross-racial relationships and whose first premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Muslim of course and a member of one of Malaysia’s royal families, was fond of  whisky. 

And the Internet? If you want to find out anything in Malaysia, you need to read the net. The country’s newspapers, largely owned by the political parties that have run this country for 51 years and which need to be licensed annually, feed their readers a steady diet of pro-government propaganda.

Asian Contagion Redux

    The Indonesian rupiah has lost more than a fifth of its value against the dollar so far this year and on Friday hit its weakest point since August 1998. Authorities swooped in to take over an insolvent Bank Century, the first such takeover since the Asian financial crisis a decade ago.

   Are things in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy really that dire to prompt comparisons with the chaotic events of a decade ago? Today’s financial crisis is draining liquidity from many banks across the world, including in Indonesia.  And as was the case a decade ago, domestic capital is swarming hot on the heels of foreign capital in fleeing Indonesia.

    It is the kind of vicious circle that characterised the”Asian Contagion” crisis of 1997/98. Currencies depreciate. Foreign investors liquidate their portfolios and swarm to the exits. Creditors call in loans, plunging institutions into insolvency. More people take their money and run, further undermining institutions and weakeninging the currency … And so it goes.

    Ten years ago, I was covering South Korea’s fraught journey into near national bankruptcy. (More echoes of the Asian Contagion crisis: The South Korean won hit lows not seen in a decade on Friday and analysts forecast the economy will shrink next year for the first time since 1997). 

    My brother and sister-in-law were in Jakarta, where the financial crisis had morphed into a populist movement aimed at overturning the autocratic regime of the late president Suharto. I had lived in Indonesia in the 1980s and I could hardly believe what was happening in Suharto’s Indonesia.  Food riots swept across Indonesia as the rupiah halved in value in the second half of 1997 — and then halved again in January alone. Panic-buying stripped supermarkets and other stores of their wares.  ”An army of perfectly coiffed Indonesian matrons stormed the supermarkets this week and bought out all the rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil,” my sister-in-law Cynthia Mackie wrote in her diary in mid-January 1998. “The foreigners smelled the panic and got very excited at the idea of their dollars being four times as strong as in July.”

    Suharto was sworn-in for a seventh five-year term after his Golkar party won an incredulous 70 percent of the vote in yet another rigged election of his New Order period.  For years, Indonesians had accepted limits on their political freedoms in exchange for prosperity and growth. Now they had neither. They turned their rage on ethnic Chinese, who though comprising just 5 percent of the population controlled well over half of the domestic economy.