Three Issues: France, Eygpt And China

April 28, 2012

That Sarkozy scum is done. This will hopefully mark the end of the lunatic austerity diktat Merkel and Sarkosy have imposed on Europe.

Nicolas Sarkozy ‘received £42 million from Muammar Gaddafi for 2007 election’

At the time Mr Sarkozy was France’s interior minister with well-documented ambitions to succeed Jacques Chirac. Political financing laws ban candidates from receiving cash payments above €7,500 (£6,300) but Mediapart claims that €50 million mentioned in the memo were laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland.

…

The Wahhabis join the Zionists: Saudi recalls ambassador, shuts embassy in Egypt

Demonstrations outside the Saudi embassy in Cairo had grown in recent days over the arrest of Ahmed El-Gezawi upon his arrival at Jeddah airport on April 17.

Saudi Arabia’s official SPA news agency quoted an unidentified source as saying the protests were unjustified and that attempts had been made to storm the embassy, threatening the safety of its employees.

A few month ago: Israel evacuates ambassador to Egypt after embassy attack

The incident was the second major eruption of violence at the embassy since five Egyptian border guards were killed last month during an Israeli operation against gunmen. That incident prompted Egypt briefly to threaten to withdraw its envoy.

…

Some U.S. agency seems to have facilitated the flight of Chinese “self-taught lawyer” (an impossibility in any historic justice system) and activist to the U.S. embassy in Beijing. This a few days before Clinton and Geithner are expected to visit China. The guy has long been promoted and likely financed by the U.S. government’s National Endowment of Democracy, the main organization for regime change programs.

This plot will not achieve its simple minded purpose of shaming the Chinese government. It is likely to increase Chines animosity against the U.S. hegemonic ambitions and the Chinese cooperation with Russia and other resistance forces.

The U.S. has lost the art of Grand Strategy. The Obama years will mark the end of a few years of oversized ambitions and undersized intellectual capacities of achieving them.

Posted by b on April 28, 2012 at 19:26 UTC | Permalink

Comments

I sort of suspected some NED-like operation with the Chinese bloke. Maybe it’s to try and distract attention from Bradley Manning (and countless others). The USA can’t stop making itself look ever more ridiculous.

Posted by: JohnE | Apr 28 2012 20:06 utc | 1

– On Sarkozy, he does seem to be done. Latest polling out Friday showed Hollande 55%, Sarkozy 45%. Also Marine Le Pen seems to think if Sarkozy falls his UMP party will crumble and Front National will become the de-facto right wing party. She still hasn’t backed Sarkozy and over 30% of her supporters say they will not vote for Sarkozy.
Also makes me happy when I see Hollande say stuff like this:

My true adversary does not have a name, a face, or a party. He never puts forth his candidacy, but nevertheless he governs. My true adversary is the world of finance.

That sounds like some fighting talk. Also if that doesnt end the Sarkozy-Merkel alliance, hopefully the Social Democrats and Die Linke will in 2013, they must be looking at Sarkozy’s downfall as a sign of the mood.
Good Analysis of French Election: http://www.leninology.com/2012/04/jean-luc-melenchon-left-front-and.html
– On Iraq, I’m going to make a prediction. Maliki will be out in under 6 months. After ending the civil war and expelling the US forces it seems he has outlived his usefulness. Apparently the Iranians are sick of cleaning up his messes, Muqtada Al Sadr and his supporters are plotting against him, Barzani and the Kurds want rid of him, and after the major Sunni parties called him a “dictator” he is now refusing to let any of them into the Presidential palace for meetings. Two articles on the topic:
1) Maliki visits Tehran, Desperate for Support: http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/maliki-tehran-desperate-search-support
2) Iraq’s Sadr visits Kurdistan to mediate crisis: http://news.yahoo.com/iraqs-sadr-makes-historic-kurdistan-visit-140715932.html
Thing about Maliki is that he was always a thug. Good to have on your side in a war but in peacetime he became a liability. Goes back to his days as a thug for the Dawa party in Syria.

Posted by: Colm O’ Toole | Apr 28 2012 20:43 utc | 2

i largely agree with noirette, as i often do – but i am not as optimistic as either noirette or b
i know the polling has stayed more or less static 10 points between s & h but the climate here feels very very volatile & sarkozy seems quite mad, one of his ex multi millionaire backers pinault has said sarkozy reminds him of hitler in the bunker in 45, it seems allies are leaving him in droves, left rigÌt & centre
i am wondering too – tho i don’t doubt the basic facts with the gaddaffi financing – whether this is not a trap not unlike the one bush used with the faux records of his ‘national service’
i presume, & presume always that tÌe situation is a great deal darker than it seems & it is very dark here. this last week has been like living under petain – the kind of language being used is so regressive, tÌe language of tÌe lost but i Ìave always seen wisdom in mao’s dicton that a wounded beast is a more dangerous
the long war with china is happening on many fronts
& it seems the saudis & the israelis are embracing each other in happy mutual infantilism – that is clearly psychopathologique

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Apr 28 2012 22:00 utc | 3

‘b’ linked to a report alleging Sarkozy received millions in money from Gadhafi. It is supported by weak and unverified evidence. Sarkozy and his organization say it’s a falsehood, and they point out there are no bank transactions to prove it. I say that ‘b’ and everybody on this board should ignore stories like that until after they are supported by strong evidence. I myself presume the story is a falsehood. If for some reason you’re not willing to make the same presumption, I argue you should still stay away from the story and say nothing about it until after the available evidence is of a much higher quality and public prosecutors have gotten involved.
While I didn’t myself like that scurrilous Sarkozy story from ‘b’, I did like the one about Chinese dissidents. Here’s something from a few months ago that you might have seen before because it was widely reported at the time:

China’s President Hu Jin-tao said in China on 2 jan 2012: “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration…. We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant, and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond.” (Source)

We don’t have grounds to expect an anti-Establishment uprising in China (an “Arab Spring” type or “Tianamen Square” type or any other type). But you can be very confident that if China did have an anti-Establishment uprising at any time in the future, no matter what the character of the uprising might be, no matter whether the dissidents were low-life benighted twerps who were incapable of creating anything more than social disintegration (as the dissidents are in Syria today), the Western public opinion would be arrogantly cheering for the uprising, and the Western news media’s reporting would be biased likewise.
@ Colm O’Toole: I’m going to predict that your prediction about Maliki will be wrong, because I don’t see any replacement, or any process for creating a replacement. I see neither a replacement for the Maliki political coalition nor a replacement for Maliki the person within the coalition, and I feel Maliki has still got clout and popularity with the general Iraqi public. We’ll see who’s prediction is right in six months.

Posted by: Parviziyi | Apr 29 2012 0:18 utc | 4

This is a nice post, b, especially the part about Sarko.
If they manage to drag him into the dock, and convict him, it might breathe new life into Peter Sarstead’s old hit (for Sarko and his cute little trophy bride).
Where do you go to (My Lovely),
When you’re alone in your bed?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 29 2012 6:37 utc | 5

That Khadafi contributed to the Sark’s campaign (just a slush fund really) has been suspected or stated as fact for a long time.
The claims (iirc) came first of all from Lybia itself, the K clan, I think the first public mention was by one of the sons, he was talking about perfidy, as in the article linked by b. This has all been brewing for many years and would most likely have gone down the rabbit hole were it not that the Sark is now a public loser.
The French – Sark’s party – were motivated by commercial interests, the K clan by respectability, partnership, favorable trade, international position, recognition.
All came to pass as hoped, K became a respectable person, Sark was Prez, the stage was set, after the goodwill payment (if it took place), for some deals.
The honeymoon between K and Sark, when K pitched his tent in Paris, was based on F commercial interests, the arms trade first of all, and, after a first meeting, on the personal level, a great liking and admiration on the part of K for Cecilia, then first lady.
K promised to buy … x y and z for abcd, the details are unknown, and the sums etc. quoted in the press escape me now, any quote would be iffy in any case.
Next, K reneged on his promise, did not move forward with any deals. Most likely because trouble was brewing on various fronts for him. Sarkozy was raging furious and turned against him.
——-
that is the story as i see it, take it as a tale.
——-
Cecilia, btw, did contribute greatly to, or even personally engineered, the freeing the Bulgarian nurses, and the Swiss hostages. Then she got a ..divorce.

Posted by: Noirette | Apr 29 2012 12:52 utc | 6

“That Sarkozy scum is done. This will hopefully mark the end of the lunatic austerity diktat Merkel and Sarkosy have imposed on Europe.”
Oh, that it were true b. Can parts of the world actually be coming to their senses? Let’s hope so. Or is it a case of..meet the new boss, same as the old boss? This move towards austerity,(for the workers only) needs to be derailed.

Posted by: ben | Apr 29 2012 13:48 utc | 7

“Nicolas Sarkozy ‘received £42 million from Muammar Gaddafi for 2007 election'”
This explain enough why France wants Gaddafi to be killed.

Posted by: Blinded1 | Apr 29 2012 13:53 utc | 8

Here’s Al Jazeera’s version of the story based on info collected by French investigative blog Mediapart.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/04/201242814462322719.html
The go-to line is 2/3rds of the way through the section headed
Dark episode.
It connects a public disclosure by Gaddafi, in March 2011, with France’s sudden hostility toward him. We know that Sarko is an unprincipled narcissist for sale to the highest bidder. It’ll be deliciously ironic WHEN he is convicted and becomes a victim of the same kind of plot he perpetrated so gleefully on Gaddafi.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 29 2012 15:21 utc | 9

actually, there’s around zero chance it’ill change significantly something austerity-wise, since Hollande is a sort of French Tony Blair. Of course we all still want that Sarkozy scum to lose and brought to justice if possible, but that’s about it, after a few months, we’ll enter the greek-spanish-etc course to doom.

Posted by: rototo | Apr 29 2012 16:06 utc | 10

The Chinese dissident;A blind guy climbs a wall,and then smells? where the US embassy is located?
Ron Paul,save US!

Posted by: dahoit | Apr 29 2012 16:46 utc | 11

That Hollande is another Blairite is very true. But even Blair, if elected today, would be bound to reverse the current lunatic course of austerity in the EU.
Politicians understand that there is a massive and deepening anger at the abandonment not only of the poor but of all but the very richest. What is about to happen across Europe will make 68 look very pale indeed.
It will be interesting to watch the Referendum campaign in Ireland, if only because the Nationalist currents of Sinn Fein and the socialist independents are being forced together, again, to fight for the poorest and most vulnerable. It is often forgotten that 1916 in Dublin heralded the revolutionary wave which began in 1917. The rollback of the neo-liberals in Europe could begin with Ireland’s rejection of the Merkozy economic suicide pact.

Posted by: bevin | Apr 29 2012 17:33 utc | 12

#8, yep.
b, your last link is fuddled. prefaced w/moa’s.

Posted by: annie | Apr 30 2012 5:04 utc | 13

what i meant was, that was why Sarkozy wanted him killed. not france pre se. i wouldn’t accuse the average person french of that.

Posted by: annie | Apr 30 2012 5:06 utc | 14

ned sponsored [with gringos tax monies ] christian fundies’
war on china’s one child policy
http://tinyurl.com/7nya5h7

Posted by: denk | Apr 30 2012 5:42 utc | 15

Gr8!!! First Russia’s presidential election was fraudulent with “100s” of thousands on the street, now in China a human rights dissiddent is holed up in US embassy. When is Russia and China going to get back at USA for meddling in their interal affairs via socalled foundations, HR organisations, etc????
They did the same thing in Egypt only to get caught and expelled, are doing the same thing in Syria via AVAAZ et al.
b, can you do a post on the various foundations like NED, organisations and groups who are funded by US interest groups working for regime change in politically sensitive countries of great concern to US foriegn pokicy????
Anywat what are peoples views re: the stationing of F22 figthers in UAE, and US support for UAE in its claim of the Iranian islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs???

Posted by: Irshad | Apr 30 2012 10:20 utc | 16

@ Irshad | Apr 30, 2012 6:20:41 AM | 16.
If you’re curious about NED and similar billionaire-funded US trouble-making outfits, take a look at What’s Left (gowans wordpress) archive.
A year or so ago he published several critiques of Regime Change outfits, plots, and cranks like Peter Ackerman and others. He keeps his critiques short and sweet and sticks to what ever point he’s making without dashing off at a tangent the way Jeffery Goldberg does when he’s got nothing to say – which is most of the time.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 30 2012 17:05 utc | 17

It seems that Hollande’s “growth policies” is nothing more than even more government spending. Further increasing the French government debt trajectory. What happens when private investors are no longer willing to finance that debt as has happened with Greece, Portugal, Ireland and likely soon with Spain? No worries – Draghi’s ECB is there to fund that debt growth with more money printing! The absurdity of the circular logic notwithstanding – Spanish banks “borrow” from the ECB under the LTRO program and then lend to the Spanish government which then turns around and guarantees the debt of the Spanish bank.
Hollande’s other idea that German taxpayers should finance the debts of France and Spain and Italy through eurobonds with no restraint on the debt growth of the euro periphery assumes that the German taxpayer is quite happy to hand over part of their paycheck so that the French can live beyond their means.
Japan tried the neo-keynesian government spending and central bank money printing scheme over the past 2 decades after their real estate and private sector debt bubble burst. What do they have to show for it other than a mountain of government debt and a bloated central bank balance sheet. Their economy in nominal terms has not grown much at all over the past decade while the savings rate of Japanese citizens have collapsed. A miniscule 2% increase in the interest rate would mean that all the current receipts of the Japanese government would go to pay debt service of the government.
Common sense that savings from living within our means leads to capital formation that can lead to investment in productive assets that leads to growth has been absent. Instead we have more and more belief in can-kicking as well as fantasy and faith-based theories!

Posted by: ab initio | Apr 30 2012 19:04 utc | 18

what are the chances Libya’s ex-Minister Shukri Ghanem ending up dead (same link in the OT thread) in Danube river on the 29th had anything to do with the allegations of gadaffi’s ‘donation’? he was prime minister from 2003 to march of 2006 and the alleged donation took place in 06. chances are he might have known about it. then he became the oil minister.

Posted by: annie | Apr 30 2012 21:03 utc | 19

The idionomics used by right wing governments in the “great depression”, before the birth of modern social democracy, demonstrated for once and for all the destructive spiral that cutting back spending during a period of economic restraint induces.
Carnage wreaked by these vicious policies is generational and permanent. When young citizens entering the workforce are unable to find employment for a prolonged period they become so divorced from the surrounding society that any rehabilitation is both unaffordably expensive and generally inefficacious.
Those are the real costs of prolonged ‘austerity’ aka “let the people starve”. The cost is much higher than any debt incurred by an economy that engages in judicious pump priming.
I have no great affection for Hollande, not because he plans on reflating the french economy, but because he probably has no intention of doing any such thing in the short term. Despite his current affectation of being a caring French citizen, there is nothing in his past to suggest he is anything other than a self-interested careerist who chose the ‘Socialist in name but not in inclination’ Party because its more egalitarian attitude towards self interested careerist pols, made it a safer bet for a keen young man of uncertain background, than a membership of the Gaullists would.
If elected Hollande will listen to the economic and political elites in France; all of whom will tell him the time is not yet quite right for a reflation.
The entire purpose of the ubiquitous if frenzied claims that “austerity is the only way ahead” is to carve a large enough chunk out of the bottom end of the ‘monied and propertied’ class (who are sometimes known as the working poor although in their lifetime most have managed to acquire a tenuous grasp on property ownership in the belief that this will make their children’s lives more secure than their own has been) to achieve two major goals for the elites.
The first is to depress the market prices of assets sufficiently to enable the elites to take back a major chunk of the property that lower & middle, middle class citizens about this planet obtained during the latter half of the 20th century. That first goal will make the second goal easy, that is to create such a climate of insecurity among citizens of so-called western democracies that they won’t trouble the elites with expensive and (in the minds of the elites) trivial agitations, about issues such as healthcare for the hoi-polloi, safe working environments for all, pollution & global warming.
The horrors of the great depression combined with the prolonged conflict which bracketed it, caused popular abhorrence towards austerity in times of stagnation or negative growth, to be so etched on western citizens’ consciousness that the elites had to wait until those who had suffered through the Great Depression to die out before they could attempt this outrageous attack on humanity again.

Posted by: Debs is dead | May 1 2012 4:29 utc | 20

Hollande will be a pause, a return to Mitterand – Chirac, a holding up ones head after the lunatic (literally) Sarkozy. Sark destroyed and replaced with nothing, burnt the ground. Police and schools….Judiciary….etc…
Hollande thus may provide a ‘breather’, – he will not be successful, or not in the measure that the F right now hope for. The damage Sark did will be very hard to reverse – not because it is mysterious or not understood, but because it will cost too much, and the pol landscape has changed. Going back to the past (e.g Mitterand) is not possible, the world has changed too much.
Economically, he finds himself exactly in the same spot as Sark, and with the same strategies at hand, no doubt he is more Krugman than Friedman, and will re-inflate as he can, and redistribute more or better. (Btw, i have read several articles that say the ‘market’ and ‘banksters‘ are pleased with Hollande and his stability- the Sark was looking too crazy..)
Realistically, though, what can he do about unemployment? Lets say it is 10% in F, and that that is bearable with the unemployment run with proper compensation, distributed all over, run with a turn-over policy (i.e. most everyone gets to be unemployed once for 3 – 6 months in their career.)
But youth unemployment is 25% (or near as dammit), and in the banlieues or among the disadvantaged it is 50%. DIDS makes the same point…
Mitterand and Chirac and even Sark have tried to fix this problem and gotten nowhere. The ‘economic crisis’ has made matters worse, and more visible. Solutions just don’t seem to be possible in the F system; those that can be proposed and enforced (e.g. 35 hour week, extra ed in the banlieues, taxing the rich more) are ineffective and Hollande is not going to invent anything different or new, turn the system on its head.

Posted by: Noirette | May 1 2012 14:55 utc | 21

The Saudis and the Zionists: King discusses key issues with Lieberman

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah held wide-ranging talks with US Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, here at Al-Yamamah Palace yesterday.
The talks between King Abdullah and the visiting US senator focused “on key bilateral and regional issues” with a keen desire to strengthen ties and forge common positions to deal with new challenges facing the region and the world at large.
…
The audience with the king was attended by Prince Saud Al-Faisal, minister of foreign affairs; Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, chief of General Intelligence; Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, minister of state, member of the Cabinet and commander of the National Guard; Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, deputy minister of foreign affairs; Adel Al-Jubeir, Saudi ambassador to the United States; and senior US officials.
The source said Lieberman, who will wrap up his visit to Riyadh today, also met with Prince Salman, minister of defense yesterday. During the meeting, they reviewed bilateral relations and cooperation between the two countries besides exchanging information about regional issues. Lieberman has suggested that Saudi Arabia and Qatar arm Syrian rebels in a bid to stop the bloodbath in Syria.
Lieberman said in a statement a few days ago: “It is time for the Obama administration to acknowledge what is obvious and indisputable in Syria: the Annan plan has failed.”
…

Posted by: b | May 1 2012 17:40 utc | 22

I would forget about Mediapart as a serious source for news
http://www.acrimed.org/article1327.html
Panama : le lourd passé d’Edwy Plenel
Mais, alors que la « série » touche à sa fin, le 24e volet, publié le 27 août 1991, s’intitule « Scandale à Panama ». Un scoop. Plenel raconte que quelques années plus tôt, le Panama du général Noriega aurait financé le Parti socialiste français, en particulier pour pourvoir aux dépenses des élections de 1988. Des lettres sont produites, à en-tête de l’ambassade de France à Panama, datées de 1987 (l’épisode est retracé par Bernard Poulet dans Le Pouvoir du Monde, ed. La Découverte, 2003).
Dans les heures qui suivent la parution du Monde, le PS dément. Panique à la rédaction en chef du Monde [1]. Plenel est aux abonnés absents (on est en août, il est rentré depuis plusieurs semaines), et la direction du Monde dépêche deux limiers pour tenter de « rattraper le coup ». Le 30 août, le journal publie leur papier, très long. Fouillé. …

Posted by: somebody | May 1 2012 17:51 utc | 23

b @ 22
Thanks, that is actually horrible. Lieberman might be the one who can pull off a sabotage of the Annan peace plan.

Posted by: Alexander | May 1 2012 19:45 utc | 24

The way Dominique Strauzs-Kahn was set up in the hotel in New York and the murders in Toulouse both smelled of being black ops to promote the re-election of Sarkozy to me. The first eliminated Sarkozy’s most dangerous opponent, and the second was supposed to rally the country around Sarko. Fortunately, the second effort — if that’s what it was — seems to have flopped.

Posted by: lysias | May 1 2012 23:21 utc | 25

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