But I have some pretty words, some strong words, that I’m just dying to see in the stark black of computer print on white, so you’ll have to bear with me. Or just pass this little diatribe on by.

But whatever you do, don’t try to say I’m just jealous of the name Andy Carvin has had made for himself. I’m not the least bit jealous of him. Arwa Damon, maybe. Or Harry Fear even. But Andy Carvin? Hardly.

Why do I have so much vitriol for a man I’ve never met? It’s easy really. It’s because he’s a pretender, a fake. He’s Walter Mitty with a boring job at National Public Radio that has nothing to do with journalism. But he retreated to a life on Twitter and became a fake superhero.

He even wrote a book, Distant Witness, and that’s as good a reason as any for my dislike. The title, not the writing of the book. He called it that because he believes he witnessed the Arab spring from his desk in Washington. He didn’t, any more than I did from my desk in Atlanta.

What he did was stay up till all hours retweeting all the tweets he could find out of the various Arab spring protests, adding his own indignation and outrage at what he “witnessed.” Of course, not all that much of what he retweeted was true, but Carvin thinks it best to throw it out there and let the “crowd” settle it.

Doesn’t work that way. Whenever somebody starts retweeting everything, then the real journalists have to work that much harder to find out what’s real and what’s not. As some of my relatives would say, “If you throw enough shit at the barn door, some of it’s gonna stick.” But most of it’s gonna leave a big pile of shit on the ground, and either way, somebody’s gonna have to clean the whole mess up.

That somebody will never be Andy Carvin, because that would get in the way of his being a hero to the poor downtrodden activists fighting for freedom in Arab countries and elsewhere. Honestly, I cannot understand why NPR, normally a bastion of decent journalism, allows it.

It’s why so many people have such a hard time trusting what’s found on the Interwebs. How could you blame em? If somebody who’s supposed to be the be-all-and-end-all of the Arab spring is tossing everything out there — even if he’s adding a cute little “is this true?” on the end — it’s just gonna confuse the matter. Especially when he adds his own unsupported speculation. Then he’s no better than any other “citizen journalist” out there with a viewpoint.

Ah, but what do I know. I haven’t even been a journalist for a quarter century (next year I will reach that milestone). And my current job is to separate the wheat from the chaff that pretenders like Andy Carvin throw out there. My colleagues and I painstakingly go through all those tweets, all those videos, all those Facebook posts to figure out what’s real and what isn’t, what is the truth and what might be even a well-intentioned lie.

Carvin finally got to go to Egypt, to Cairo. He went down to Tahrir, but when the tear gas came out, he retreated to the safety of his hotel room to check his Twitter stream, where, he said, he understood what was going on much better.

Maybe.

I’ve never been to Cairo, to Benghazi, to Aleppo, to Gaza. I’m pretty sure, though, if I ever were, I wouldn’t be there to meet my Twitter friends. I’d be there to report, because that’s what I do. And if that meant walking into a cloud of tear gas, then give me a wet rag and get out of my way.

Looking at videos from Syria is painful, but it’s necessary. It’s our job to verify them, to know that they were shot where the uploader says they were shot and that they show what the uploader says they show. That means seeing bodies, destroyed homes, lost children, everything, in detail, gory detail. We don’t watch them once and pass them on. We watch them trying to glean everything we can out of them so that we can say with authority if it’s real. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it is hard on every level imaginable.

I’m not a witness to the horrors in Syria, though. I’m a curator, a documentarian. A fact-checker. I’m not superhero, or even a not-so-superhero. I’m just doing a journalist doing a job with a slew of pretty nifty technological tools that help me do that job with more confidence than before. I don’t have to be there, but there’s a lot I miss by being here.

But it’s a good job and I’m proud of it, proud of my colleagues, one of whom once used Google maps to plot where in a particular Syrian city a video of an explosion might have been shot based on the speed of sound and line of site. It was a thing to behold. That’s verification.

It’s easy to fake things on the internet. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube — they can all be gamed. It takes hard, precise work to make sense of it all, to get at the real story. Any less is a disservice to readers, viewers, other journalists and especially the story.

As I read more about the student movement in Quebec, known as the “Maple Spring” or the “Casserole Revolution,” it brings to mind the final scene from Possessing the Secret of Joy, by one of my favorite authors, Alice Walker. In that scene, the main character — Tashi, a minor character from The Color Purple — discovers a truth. From Wall Street to Wisconsin, and Cairo to Quebec, people the world over are realizing that same truth every day.

Today, that truth is echoed in the chants, protests and placards of protesters in the streets of Montreal. It’s the same truth Walker spelled out in huge block letters near the end of her novel: RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY.

It started simply enough, as a provincial story familiar enough to resonate around the world. In February, the Quebec government announced a 75% tuition hike at universities in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province. The tuition hike is due to cuts in education supplements, which Quebec’s government says are necessary to tackle its budget deficit. Students responded by boycotting classes, blocking bridges, and holding smaller protests in what quickly became the longest strike in the province’s history.

When the Quebec government responded with draconian legislation, banning gathering of more than 50 without a permit, and threatening student unions and associations with heavy fines, the movement only grew. On March 22nd, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 students from all over Quebec marched in the streets of Montreal, in what organizers called the “largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The government’s response also had the effect of causing the movement to transcend both the issue of tuition and the borders of Quebec itself. In truth, the issue has always been about more than tuition. As one student protesting the austerity-driven tuition hike, “It will be the middle class that pays for this.” The Fight Tuition Increases website, created in response to government’s decision to increase tuition fees, explains the cost to students and the whole of Quebec society.

The $1,625 tuition increase has nothing to do with the quality of teaching or the value of a university degree. In fact, this fee hike (the largest in Quebecs history) will force students to take on more debt, second jobs, or even drop out of school. The Charest governments proposal directly compromises equality of access to the benefits of a university degree for individual students and hurts Quebec society as a whole.

While tuition fees would still be significantly lower than in other Canadian provinces, and in the U.S., the Quebec government will increase tuitions by 143% by 2017, since the 2007 “defreeze” on tuition fees. The increase will have the effect of making higher education less accessible.

The students of the Quebec movement understand their protest is bigger than tuition increases. The Fight Tuition Increase website notes that sacrifice is anything but “shared” in Quebec.

In 2007, the Canadian government transferred more than $700 million in additional federal funding to the Quebec government. The Charest government could have invested this money in education, which would have far exceeded the $325 million currently collected by tuition fee increases. Instead, the richest individuals and corporations got a tax cut and students were left with nothing.

As Linda McQuaig writes in the Toronto Star, “The Quebec students, more attuned to the outside world, have figured out thatthis self-denial has more to do with dogma than with some new reality allegedly necessitated by the global economy.”

As it continues to grow, the Quebec student movement holds some lessons for the home of phenomena like the Occupy Movement and the Wisconsin movement that recently forced a historic gubernatorial recall elections. Here are six lessons from the Maple Spring.

1. Remember what you already know. Martin Lukacs writes in The Guardian that the Occupy Movement was a “game-changer” that inspire the Quebec student unions with its “spirit of direct democracy,” and gave students “a fresh language with which to understand the 1%’s attempt to pass the buck to students.” That spirit of “direct democracy,” the results of the Wisconsin recall notwithstanding, has resulted in “a progressive movement that is deeper and broader than before.” That “fresh language” changed the focus of our national discourse from “shared sacrifice” to inequality and economic justice.

Digby points out progressives are going to have to remember both, if we’re to be the change we seek, and that the country so desperately needs.

However, if you still believe that progressive principles can be successfully applied to democratic government, then supporting progressive candidates for congress is one way to do that. It’s less glamorous than the ecstatic “Camp Obama” experience of 2008 and it’s long term project that goes forward in fits and starts and features plenty of disappointment — but it can result, over time, in changing the way government works.

But we need progressive political leaders to do that, leaders who are not beholden to the big money interests or to the Party establishment apparatus, who are committed to liberal principles and are smart enough to work the levers of state power for the benefit of the people. The four Blue America candidates who are on the ballot tomorrow are among those leaders.

I’m all for doing whatever it takes to save the country. Social movements are necessary and I hope that everyone is thinking about how they can participate. Local involvement is also important, whether in politics or some other form of community work. Education and persuasion on a personal and public level must be among our priorities as well. But you can’t leave the national government solely in the hands of the plutocrats and the authoritarians. We have to at least try to influence the state. It simply holds too much power over all of our lives and the lives of people all over the planet.

2. It doesn’t happen overnight. At Waging Nonviolence, Zoltán Glöck and Manissa McCleave Maharawal write that what seems like a movement sprung up overnight was actually a long time in the works. The tuition increase have been on the table since 2010, and student unions across Quebec spent two years working to build the movement that has spilled into the streets of Montreal, and brought the government to the bargaining table, at least for a time. The unions have provided students a way to “organize politically, granting them both legitimacy and power.” They made possible the “longer-term mobilizing strategies” and campaigns that built support for the strike.

Progressives need to emulate that the movement-building that led to the Quebec movement. Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in the Washington Post.

And in the last 15 months, Wisconsin’s progressives have shown us that the battle against bankrolled austerity can be bravely waged by an army of dedicated people committed to protecting working families. They’ve reminded us that good organizing is our only chance to withstand the blitzkrieg of corporate funded advertising and better yet, leave a lasting mark. Their movement, with thousands of new Wisconsin activists mobilized, energized and educated, can be permanent and it can keep growing.

3. Sustained resistance is effective. Biola Jeje and Isabelle Nastasia, at Alternet, write that “occupation of physical spaces” will continue to be essential to the success of student movements. This, they say, is one lesson of the Occupy movement. Yet, it’s one that conjures up memories of the coordinated eviction of Occupy encampments in several cities, followed by questions about the movement’s viability without a space to “occupy.”

Perhaps occupation is better employed as a tactic, within a larger strategy of sustained resistance. Chris Hedges sees the Quebec movement as an example of the kind of sustained resistance that progressive should  engage in here at home, in solidarity with the Quebec movement, and similar movements around the world. Hedges cites the crackdown on Occupy movement as a sign of its success, because “the corporate state understood and feared its potential to spark a popular rebellion.” That fear is reflected in the Quebec government’s response to the “Maple Spring.”

Sustained resistance is already underway. Though ignored by the media, the Occupy movement has been busy spinning off an Occupy Our Homes movement focused on helping people keep their homes, rallying agains NATO, reviving May Dayand restoring its message. In Wisconsin, progressive forced Governor Scott Walker into a recall election he barely survived.

4. Realize that social conditions are not inevitable. The contrast between Quebec students and American students is stark, in more ways than one. The Fight Tuition Increases makes it clear that the Quebec students’ protest against tuition increases is also resistance against the inevitable, insidious result of those increases: increased student debt.

The tuition increases represent a “massive burden for middle class students,” 75% of whom remain excluded from financial aid. Their choices are: more work, more debt, or no college education. The tuition hikes mean a nearly impossible burden for low-income students. The running debt clock of the Canadian Federation of Students puts the total amount of Canadian students’ loan debt at $14.5 billion, most of which falls on low-income students.

That’s why Quebec students painted Montreal red. The squares of red felt pinned to jackets and backpacks, taped to shoes and baby carriages are symbolic of both the crushing debt carried by Canadian students, and Quebec students resistance against tuition increases that will yoke them with even more debt. The red squares originated from the Quebecois phrase, “squarely in debt,” which is where more and more middle class students will find themselves if the tuition increases go forward.

Perhaps being “squarely in debt” with graduation loomin, repayments coming due, and a dismal job market on the horizon would make students easier to control, or at least less likely to resist. Jeje and Natasia suggest that’s why no similar student movement has occurred in the U.S. Despite a few rallies here and there, American students have largely accepted the inevitability of increased tuition and the burden of increased debt.

Thus, the first and most necessary “occupation” is internal.

Given how profoundly US students have been cut off from channels of power at universities, the road before us may be long. But if we hope to achieve our goals, we first must realize, collectively, that the social conditions we face as students are not inevitable. We cant just erect tents in the middle of our campuses and expect the world to change around us. We need to take control of our own minds, as well as take space. Only then will we breathe new life into our educational system.

Or, to borrow a line from Funadelik, “Free your mind… and your ass will follow.”

5. Remember the consequences of enduring political paralysis. I can’t put it any better than Chris Hedges.

If these mass protests fail, opposition will inevitably take a frightening turn. The longer we endure political paralysis, the longer the formal mechanisms of power fail to respond, the more the extremists on the left and the right, those who venerate violence and are intolerant of ideological deviations, will be empowered. Under the steady breakdown of globalization, the political environment has become a mound of tinder waiting for a light.

… Those of us who care about a civil society, and who abhor violence, should begin to replicate what is happening in Quebec. There is not much time left. The volcano is about to erupt. I know what it looks and feels like. Yet there is a maddening futility in naming what is happening. The noise and cant of the crowd, the seduction of ideologies of hate and violence, the blindness of those who foolishly continue to place their faith in a dead political process, the sea of propaganda that confuses and entertains, the apathy of the good and the industry and dedication of the bad, conspire to drown out reason and civility. Instinct replaces thought. Toughness replaces empathy. Authenticity replaces rationality. And the dictates of individual conscience are surrendered to the herd.

There still is time to act. There still are mass movements to join. If the street protests in Quebec, the most important resistance movement in the industrialized world, spread to all of Canada and reach the United States, there remains the possibility of hope.

6. Resistance is the secret of joy. We already know this, of course. We’ve seen it. We’ve felt it in the streets of Madison, WI, at Zuccotti Park, and Occupy encampments in other cities.

Young Americans, joined by everyone from airline pilots to labor unions and U.S. Marines (about as far from “hippies” as one could imagine) have occupied Wall Street for weeks now, because they know who “broke” the economy. Americans are occupying Washington, D.C., because they know who “broke” the economy, who allowed it to happen, and who still hasn’t done much of anything about it. We have been living with the consequences of “sins” not our own, because our government failed to protect us from the sins of others. Namely, Wall Street.

Americans are occupying their own cities all over the country, because we  know in a crisis this big, the scene of the crime is in our own cities, our neighborhoods, and sometimes even in our own living rooms; because we have friends or family who are getting laid off because of local/state budget cuts thatstate/local jobs cuts that are slowing down what passes as a recovery; because we are or have children who are graduating off a cliff into a jobless recovery and an economy with no place for them; because foreclosures have left our neighborhoods struggling with blight; because the future we dreamed up for our children is in peril.

For all these reasons and more, Americans are taking to the streets. There’s a line that runs from the Wisconsin protests, connecting them. Instead of hardening our hearts against each other, the economic crisis has “sharpened our instincts for empathy” and, as President Obama said in his Tucson speech, caused us to “remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.” We have not used it as an opportunity to turn on each other. Instead, a sense of shared struggles empowers us to demand accountability and justice.

We are seeing it again in the streets of Montreal.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As this movement goes on, and grows by leaps and bounds, it is increasingly clear that it is not a movement of anger, of rage or of hate. It is a movement of love, of community and of hope. People who would be alone in their houses watching TV take to the streets and march with neighbors they never knew they had. Back when we had real communities, they were driven by the coming together of neighbors each night. Instead of watching TV, we met in the street, we exchanged details of our day and we made plans for our future. Just as the “casseroles” cause us to do now.

Perhaps the most lasting effect of this movement will be to build stronger, more connected communities. Every day that it goes on, more of us meet in the street, build relationships and talk about what kind of a society we want.

This is what Charest is afraid of. This is what keeps the powerful awake at night. If we talk, if we exchange ideas and debate the future of our society, we will want to change it. And nothing terrifies the powerful more than a change to the system which gives them their power.

The most honest reason which can be given for why people are in the street is the simplest. We do not see ourselves reflected in our government. But we see ourselves, our concerns, our hope, our love and our aspirations, reflected in every smiling face we see on the street. For the first time in a long time we are having a real conversation about what kind of society we want. We’re having it with each other, every night when we meet in the streets. And slowly, but surely, we are realizing that we have the power to make our dreams a reality.

Resistance is the secret of joy.

Activists in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, we marveled, were using Facebook and other social media tools to link and share and grow their movement. In a Facebook electronic age, anything suddenly seemed possible. A new world beckoned. A new world gloriously liberated from greed and corruption.

How’s that new world coming, over a year later? That depends where you look.

Over in Egypt, voters are going to the polls this week to start a two-round presidential election contest, the first presidential balloting since Tahrir Square first captured the world’s political imagination.

Egypt’s eventual future still remains hazy. But the nation’s struggle for economic justice and democracy has kept moving forward over the last year. Egyptians are continuing to break new political ground, most particularly on the bold notion of a “maximum wage,” the idea that democracy and social decency both demand a limit on the income any one person can grab in a year.

The demand for a maximum wage in Egypt first surfaced in the militant labor protests that paved the way for last year’s uprising in Tahrir Square. This maximum wage demand has now gone mainstream. In the current presidential race, almost all the prime contenders are endorsing a “maximum wage” ethic.

The candidates, to be sure, do differ on the “maximum wage” specifics.

Aboul Fotouh, a liberal Islamist candidate, wants a maximum wage applied only to the public sector, and the Egyptian parliament is now putting the finishing touches on legislation that would do just that. The pending bill would set a public sector maximum at 35 times a public enterprise’s lowest wage, with an absolute income cap at the equivalent of just under $100,000 a year.

This public sector maximum would have a broad economic impact. In Egypt, the public sector covers nearly a quarter of the entire economy, not just government agencies but huge swatches of commercial and banking activity as well.

Activists from the Egyptian labor movement are calling for an even broader maximum wage. They’re urging a maximum applied to the entire economy, public and private sector alike, and former Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa, the presidential front-runner, appears to be backing that position.

In Egypt, the presidential campaigning suggests, a new world that pushes back against greed does still beckon.

On the other hand, here in the United States, the movers and shakers behind the Facebook phenomenon that meant so much for the initial Arab spring are shoving Americans in an entirely different direction.

These Facebook kingpins haven’t been challenging greed. They’ve been feting it, via an elaborately orchestrated initial public offering last week on Wall Street that dangled out to America’s investing class juicy new fantasies of over-the-top speculative windfalls.

In the days leading up to last week’s Facebook IPO, investors buzzed with that old “irrational exuberance” of the 1990s dot-com bubble. Stocks typically trade at $14 of share price value for every $1 of profit. Facebook went to market asking over $100 for every $1 of profit.

And the market went along, in the process kindling get-rich fever and, on Friday, minting instant billionaires within Facebook’s inner circle.

One of those instant billionaires — Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin — took his money and ran. Saverin renouncedhis U.S. citizenship before the IPO. His move may enable him to avoid as much as $700 million in federal taxes.

The rest of the Facebook insider crew is staying put, at least for the moment, and doing its tax avoiding from the comfort of home.

Facebook’s top dog, Mark Zuckerberg, announced before Friday’s IPO that he would be exercising half the 120 million stock options he awarded himself in 2005. That decision cleared him a personal payday Friday around $2.3 billion.

The Facebook shares that Zuckerberg is still holding give him a net worth over $19 billion, and the 28-year-old seems to have no intention of sharing much of his new wealth with Uncle Sam.

The Wall Street Journal earlier this month detailed the tax code loophole — the “grantor-retained annuity trust” — that Zuckerberg and his fellow Facebook execs are likely using “to avoid at least $200 million of estate and gift taxes.”

Facebook is avoiding enormously more than this $200 million at the enterprise level, thanks to the U.S. tax code’s incredibly generous treatment of stock options. Facebook’s exploitation of this option loophole, Citizens for Tax Justice calculates, will cost the federal and state governments about $6.4 billion.

How does this option loophole operate? Say Facebook hands out to execs a million options each to buy Facebook shares at $1 a share. These lucky option recipients later “exercise” their options and buy those shares at that $1 — and then turn around and sell them at $38, the Facebook going rate last Friday.

These option recipients will have to pay income tax on their $37-per-share profit. But Facebook — as an enterprise — can deduct that $37 off its corporate income tax. This deduction, of course, will fatten Facebook’s bottom line and pump up even further the value of the shares Facebook’s execs are holding.

The pushback against all this Facebook greed grabbing?

In Washington last week, two U.S. senators — Chuck Schumer from New York and Bob Casey from Pennsylvania — did propose legislation that would subject future wealthy citizenship renouncers like Eduardo Saverin to a 30 percent capital gains tax rate. But even the bill’s supporters acknowledge that this legislation has no chance whatsoever of passage in the current Congress.

Legislation from Michigan senator Carl Levin that would strike down the much more significant stock option loophole faces an equally steep path to passage. New York’s Working Families Party, among other groups, is helping drive an effort to boost the Levin legislation.

Meanwhile, Fox Business News reported Friday that execs and investors who’ve “scored famously” from Facebook’s Wall Street debut have multi-million dollar mansions and $100,000 Porsches “flying off local shelves” in Silicon Valley.

America’s rich certainly do have cause to celebrate. But few people elsewhere in the world figure to be celebrating with them. For directions to a new world, they’ll be better off looking toward Cairo.

Despair

He was a retired pharmacist, who left behind a wife and daughter when he died. That one man, whose name no one outside of his family and friends had reason to know, could spark attacks on police and yet another round of protests in Greece speaks to how many Greeks identified with his plight. Perhaps only the location Dimitris Christoulas chose for his final act, and his decision to leave behind a final message set him apart from countless anonymous Greeks for whom austerity yielded nothing but despair.

Despair was not Christoulas’s first response to austerity. First, he got mad. According to friends, Christoulas joined in protests against the government’s austerity policies. He joined a citizens’ movement against austerity, called “Den Plirono — which translates to “I won’t pay.” Yet, Christoulas did pay. The reality life under unyielding austerity took the fight out of him, and he gave up. Christoulas went out with a bang and one last gesture of outrage at Greece’s government. But ultimately he decided that life under austerity was not worth living.

The letter found on Christoulas makes is clear how he came to despair living under austerity.

Dimitris Christoulas, the man who took his own life using a pistol on Syntagma Square, in central Athens, on Wednesday morning, left a suicide note, state media has reported.

“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945″ the note said.

Christoulas’s reference to the “Tsolakoglou government” was a not-so thinly veiled slap at Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, comparing him to Georgio Tsolakoglou — first prime minister of Greece’s collaborationist government, during Germany’s WW II occupation of Greece. No doubt Papademos — an economist who was appointed prime minister in November, after democratically elected prime minister George Papandreous was shown the door for having the temerity tohis intention to hold a referendum on the terms of the proposed Eurozone bailout. Papandreous was brought to heel and quickly scrapped the referendum.

But it would not do to have a prime minister with the temerity to suggest that Greeks have any say in their economic fate. SoGreece, the cradle of democracy, was deprived of a vote. The appointment of a new prime minister, more amendable to the concerns of Greece’s creditors and the providers of its bailout. (Germany, ironically enough, called the shots again.) In less than two weeks, Papandreous was gone, Papademos was in, and eventually the Greeks got austerity policies that satisfied the banks, but meant lower pensions, reduced wages and increased taxes for middle- and working-class Greeks.

Austerity has left Greece with a shrunken economy. Bringing down Greece’s deficit comes at a cost mostly absorbed by middle- and working-class Greeks, in the form of a fifth year of recession, and an unemployment rate of 21% — more than double what it was two years ago. For young people, between the ages of 15 and 24, the unemployment rate is now now 51%.

Imagine for a moment, then, what Greece’s austerity policies and their consequences did to the lives of ordinary Greeks inside of two years. Christoulas wrote of “young people with no future,” and his words are echoes by Mary Nassi, a 20-year-old architecture student in Athens. Her friend Chryssanthi Mourti hints that it’s not only Greece’s young people who see no future.

“You’ve heard it before, but young people do not see a future,” says Mary Nassi, who’s 20 years old and studying architecture at the University of Athens. “It’s so depressing and disappointing.” She was also at Syntagma on Wednesday evening with her friend, Chryssanthi Mourti, also 20 and an architecture student. Mourti’s parents lost their jobs several months ago. “My family has no income,” she said. “Nothing.”

Austerity has brought another change to Greece. Prior to 2007, suicides among Greeks under 65 fell sharply. In face, Greece had the lowest rate of suicides. Not surprising since suicide is so deeply stigmatized in Greece that the Greek Orthodox Church rejects the bodies of suicides for burial.

The economic downturn reversed that trend, as suicides among people under 65 increased between 2007 and 2009. The increase coincided with a 35% increase in suicides across the EU, with the sharpest increases in Greece, Ireland and Latvia — three countries in which people live under severe austerity policies. Of the three, Greece leads the pack with the fastest rising suicide rate in the EU — a 20% increase from 2007 to 2009.

Austerity has added its impact to the that of the economic crisis, to overcome the cultural stigma against suicide. Greece’s suicide rate has increased 40% since 2009. Perhaps what made Dimitris Christoulas different from so many others was that he chose to meet his end, not in some quiet room, but practically on the doorstep of Greece’s government.

American Style

America is not Greece. Progressives have said it over and over again, in response to conservatives and deficit hawks who warn that America will end up like Greece (and soon!) if we don’t take up the yoke of austerity that’s been foisted upon Greek citizens. While Americans have yet to experience the kind of soul-crushing austerity people are forced to live with in countries like Greece and Ireland. Instead, we’ve had what Paul Krugman called “passive austerity,” as the stimulus faded to its end, Republicans in Congress obstructed even the most modest attempts to stimulate the economy and/or raise revenue, and cash-starved state and local governments were forced into painful budget cuts.

That’s not to say there’s no chance of Greek-style austerity in our future. This, after all, is an election year. Republicans could make significant gains in 2012. Perhaps enough to have a shot at passing the kinds of austerity policies they’ve only dreamed of for the last four years. Right now, their hatchet is poised to make deep cuts in vital programs that serve low-income and working-class families.

Yesterday, the House Agriculture Committee approved $33 billion in cuts to food stamp benefits over the next ten years, in order to avoid defense cuts that even the Pentagon supports. They were just getting started. Those cuts are just part of a whole pack of cuts that would also cut social service programs and transform them into block grants to states, and reduce child tax credit refunds for working class parents. The only things stopping them is the Democratic majority in the Senate, and the Democrat in the White House. For now.

But even without the Ryan budget becoming the real budget, American does resemble Greece in some disturbing ways. No one yet knows how many suicides are associated with the current recession. Statistics lag about three years. Studies suggest a clear connection between unemployment and suicide. The unemployed commit suicide at a rate that’s two or three times the national average. Long periods of unemployment increase the likelihood of suicide. There’s also a clear correlation between economic difficulties and suicide among young and middle-age adults.

We’ll have to wait for national statistics specific to this recession, but looking at other numbers indicates a trend that, with the right stimulus, could rival Greece’s increase in suicides. Take the available stats for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, for example.

The suicide prevention hotlines also show signs of stress. In Jan. 2007, as the recession started, there were 13,423 calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a nationwide toll-free hotline. A year later, there were 39,467. In Aug. 2009, the call volume peaked at 57,625. Last year, the government granted the group an extra $1 million to increase programs in places with high unemployment rates.

State and local statistics are another potential indicator. Nevada, one of the states hardest it by the recession, has always had a higher suicide rate than the rest of the country, but the recession has made it worse, especially in counties where unemployment has hovered at 14% for years, and underwater homeowners still wait for relief.

“Political Murder”

Among the Greek citizens to have taken to the streets to protest austerity in honor of his memory, many have no doubt seen their loved ones bearing the brunt of the government’s austerity policies fall into despair and ultimately lose hope, even as they themselves continue to struggle. It’s no wonder that so many of them have called Dimitris Christoulas death a “political murder,” rather than a suicide.

After all, you need not have you finger on the trigger to cause a man’s death. All you have to do is kill his hope for the future, and wait for him to do the rest.

It was an incredibly well-acted film dealing with a broken marriage that weaves trouble through the lives of ordinary people. It is about class divisions, family relationships, the power of religion and hope in every heart for a better life.

Only this film is Iranian. Set in Tehran, Westerners got a rare glimpse into the living rooms of Iranians dealing with the same kinds of problems we find at home, save the far-reaching tentacles of the Islamic regime.

Iranians stayed up late to watch the Oscars on illegal satellite feeds, enormously proud of the first Iranian film to win an Oscar (best foreign language film).

The timing could not have been better, I thought, as director Asghar Farhadi held up his golden statue. ”At a time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics,” he said.

I read this morning that even Israelis were flocking to see “A Separation.” Iranians are their arch-enemies and bellicose talk of late has led to speculation that Israel may launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran to stop its nuclear progress.

But ultimately, Israelis saw in the movie Iranians who were just like themselves. That spoke volumes for the universality of “A Separation.” People everywhere ultimately cope with the same problems — the ones that make us not American or Israeli or Iranian, but the ones that make us human.

“A Separation” is not always easy to watch. It was especially hard for me to look at the scenes of a man stricken with Alzheimer’s. I could see my own Baba.

But if you have not seen this movie, go soon to a theater near you. Ayatollahs and nuclear bombs aside, Iran has delivered a rare gem.

“A Separation” supplies no answers and is subtitled: “The Truth Divides.” But Iran is a country that remains largely unknown to Americans. Farhadi’s film, I believe, takes a few of the veils off.

This post appears courtesy of Evil Reporter Chick.

In 1861 Abraham Lincoln looked at Benjamin Franklin’s statement from 1776 — “we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly all hang separately” — and pronounced it still operative. The European powers were in the process of divvying up most of the world between them. The United States had vast resources but also comprised a vast area that was sparsely populated.

The example of India would have especially been on Lincoln’s mind. The British Empire had just assumed direct control over India in 1858 in the wake of a rebellion against the East India Company and had never had a significant number of soldiers on the ground. Instead the British had conquered India via a divide-and-conquer strategy where the various princedoms were pitted against each other and the majority of “British” troops were actually Indian troops under the command of British commanders. Britain had, in effect, conquered India almost for free, using primarily Indians to do the job. All of which was possible because India had not been a unified country at the time that the British arrived on the scene and thus the various nation-states that comprised India were easily set against each other and the loser often enough preferred giving up their sovereignty to the British rather than accepting subjugation by their hated rival across the river.

What would happen to the United States if the South were allowed to go its own way? Lincoln saw the former United States breaking up into dozens of smaller nations if this were allowed to happen, because both the rump USA and the CSA had their own divisions within their ranks — Texas, for example, had once been an independent nation and had enough differences with the rest of the CSA that even during the war it effectively operated as an independent country. Utah, for another example, would have happily seceded and become the nation of Deseret if allowed to do so, the Utah territory had its own unique religion and culture that were in some respect alien to that of the USA. And what then? Well … the British were to the north. The French were to the south, setting up Emperor Maximilian as their proxy in Mexico. One or the other was sure to try the India strategy against a fragmented United States. And the chances of it being successful were far too great for a patriotic citizen of the United States to countenance.

Thus the American Civil War, on the surface a war to subjugate the South, but on a larger level a war to prevent the United States from undergoing the fate of India — forcibly de-industrialized, looted, used solely for its resources, with any independence of any rump states being only nominal. But that was 1861. What about today? What would happen if the USA spun apart into multiple nations today?

First, there are no longer any colonial powers. Colonialism died with the collapse of the French empire in the aftermath of WW2, as first Indochina then North Africa escaped their grasp, or if you wish to be pedantic, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though the Soviets weren’t particularly a colonial power (their rule over eastern Europe was more about creating a buffer zone against a renewal of Western militarism, i.e. creating more defensive depth, than about conquest). Secondly, globalism means that economies can continue to be integrated even if the nations that comprise the economies retain their independence. In short, there is little chance of conquest being an issue.

The bigger problem would be dealing with current federal programs like Social Security. Even that could be dealt with — when Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech Republica and Slovakia, they simply divided the assets of the state pension funds by population. This probably was unfair to the Czechs, who were generally more affluent than the Slovaks and thus probably had contributed a larger percentage of the funds, but they felt it was well worth it to get rid of their backwards rednecks to the east. The military would also be an issue. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union shows how that can be done too.

In short, what was once an unthinkable idea is quite thinkable today, if you’re thinking outside the box. The USA today is one nation united only out of habit, not any real reason, and the various regions don’t seem to like each other a whole lot. Why not just let regions secede? As a Californian, a resident of a state that sends far more to the Feds than we’ll ever get back, it seems almost a no-brainer.

This post appears courtesy of Badtux the Snarky Penguin.

So why don’t they do that? Three words: 1) Medicine. 2) Fuel. 3) Food.

Greece is not self-sufficient in any of those. Greece doesn’t have overseas assets like Iceland had when Iceland defaulted that can be used to import these items. And they certainly aren’t going to be able to buy any of this from the EuroZone, since they just kicked the Eurozone into a new Great Depression due to the collapse of all the banks that are invested in Greek debt.

The only other alternative is to leave the Eurozone but go hat in hand to the IMF for a bailout, where the IMF funds the imports of medicine, fuel and food. Thing is, the IMF isn’t going to do any such thing unless Greece has a government willing to make the hard choices. Pretty much every asset that Greece has needs to be repurposed towards bringing in sufficient foreign currency to pay for the medicine, fuel and food that Greece needs to survive, which isn’t going to leave a lot for the Greek people.

So what’s the end game? Well, the German proposal — lots of dead Greeks due to starvation, exposure and lack of medicine — isn’t going to pass political muster. The Greeks might as well default at that point since default is going to have the same result. IMF bailout isn’t going to happen until the current government collapses and a new government is in place, and given that the Greek police are out of tear gas (and lack the cash to buy more) this might be sooner rather than later unless they resort to live bullets, in which case game over, there will be government officials hanging from street lamp posts shortly thereafter.

What it looks like to me is going to be the messy default scenario, where a revolutionary government ends up taking office and imposes a hard-core socialist reallocation of the nation’s assets to bring in the foreign exchange needed to keep the country from freezing and starving to death. Eurozone or non-Eurozone? 50-50 chance, my guess though is non-Eurozone.

How many Greeks will die for Germany before all of this goes through? I suspect fairly few — low tens of thousands — because the government is already teetering on the edge of irrelevancy and collapse so this farce cannot go on for much longer. And then? Well, we’ll see. They’ll either create a new model for how to handle an economy in a time of depression, or they’ll become Somalia North. Either way, Greeks are in for some interesting times.

The answer is that the situation in Syria is not a situation of “regime bad, protesters good” like in Egypt. Ethnic and religious minorities make up approximately 1/4th of the Syrian population and make up probably 90% of the core Army units and security units being used to put down the rebellion by the Sunni majority. What we are seeing, in essence, is a civil war between the Sunni majority and a collection of ethnic minorities — the most important of which is the Alawi sect to which President Assad and most of his top staff belong.

So why is this important? It’s important because the Alawi in particular were horrifically discriminated against by the Sunni the last time the Sunni ran the country, forced to run to the hills to live as brigands and outlaws in parts of Syria that the Sunni didn’t want, treated worse than blacks during Jim Crow in the United States with lynchings and with any property they managed to accumulate that was desirable taken from them via legal or illegal means, with multiple attempts at forced conversions of Alawi and so on and so forth. This was also the behavior of the Sunni majority against the *other* minorities in Syria — the Christians, the Druze, and so forth. And these minorities are concerned that if the Sunni majority takes over power again due to this pro-democracy movement, the result will be genocide of their ethnic minorities — over three million people dead.

In other words, do not expect the Syrian regime to simply roll over and die. Because they are literally fighting for their lives, in their own eyes, because if the Sunni majority was brutal to them *before* the minorities managed to seize power in Syria… well. They can’t be expecting the Sunni majority to treat them better *after* their brutal dictatorship over the Sunni, right?

This post appears courtesy of Badtux the Snarky Penguin.

So what’s the retort of the Austerians? Well, their retort is to lie – to say that despite huge budget cuts, their retort is to claim that there is no austerity in Europe because the unemployed are receiving unemployment insurance. At which point it’s, WTF? Are the unemployed supposed to simply drop dead in the streets from starvation and exposure?

The Hayekian response seems to be, “yes”. Or, rather, the actual argument of Cafe Hayek is that the unemployed workers are voluntarily unemployed, they’d have jobs if they only lowered their wages to the point where their value to employers exceeded their wages. I.e., the Great Vacation explanation for the New Great Depression, same one they use for the Old Great Depression. This of course ignores two points: a) that there is a bottom to wages imposed by survival (i.e., people will not voluntarily accept wages that are insufficient to provide basic food, shelter, and clothing), a point explicated further on Angry Bear where it’s pointed out that when machines replaced horses for many tasks, the result was mass slaughter of horses whose feeding costs now exceeded their economic worth (i.e., Hayekians want humans whose feeding costs now exceed their economic worth to be slaughtered? Soylent Hayek?) and b) employers won’t hire additional employees at any cost above $0 if there is no demand for their product, because employers are in business to make money, which means having as few people on payroll as possible to meet current demand, which means the only way they’ll hire *at any wage above $0* is if demand increases.

But of course these unpleasant realities don’t happen in the bubble universe that Hayekians live in, where basic biological needs don’t exist and employers are charities. Of course, in *our* universe, neither of those statements are true…