This evening's music features boogie woogie piano player Cripple" Clarence Lofton.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Greece on sale 40% off. #Merkel can get more. [#ikea #grexit #EuroSummit #agreement #Schaublexit #Tsipras] pic.twitter.com/4gQkol6u0G

— Andrea F. Cecchin (@AndreaFCecchin) July 13, 2015

'We Have Agreekment': Grexit Likely Avoided as Greece Surrenders to Another Bailout

Greece appeared to reach a deal with its European creditors on Monday, pledging stringent austerity to avoid an exit — or "Grexit" — from the euro and the global financial chaos that could have followed.

"One can say that we have 'agreekment'," European Council President Donald Tusk said in a statement, following negotiations that lasted 17 hours, continuing through Sunday night.

"There are strict conditions to be met," Tusk continued. "The approval of several national parliaments, including the Greek parliament, is now needed for negotiations on an ESM [European Stability Mechanism] program to formally begin. ...

The new deal calls for Greeks, already reeling from harsh measures and economic decline, to cut back even further in exchange for more loans without which its financial system would likely collapse. The agreement, which still needs approval from Greece's parliament, will be the country's third bailout in five years.

Anticipating Greek reaction: Betrayal bedlam or bow to the boss?

Greece crisis talks: the July weekend that saved the euro but broke the EU?

For all the leaders involved, the past two days in Brussels will be hailed as the 48 hours that saved the euro. For many others from the Balkans to the Baltic, the brutal power plays pitting European leaders one against the other will signal instead the great damage being done to the single currency. And if historians are ever required to write the obituaries for Europe’s monetary union, they are likely to conclude that a weekend in July 2015 was the point when the serious illness afflicting the euro turned terminal. ...

Everyone had to claim victory. But they all may end up losers. Alexis Tsipras, the radical Greek prime minister only six months in office, predictably claimed he had secured his central aim, a programme of debt reduction. He has not. Yet. He obtained a promise of discussion in the future on debt relief measures. And Tsipras had to forfeit much of his government’s economic and fiscal sovereignty, the biggest such surrender ever in the EU, in order to keep Greece from collapse and obtain up to €86bn (£61bn) over three years.

The other key protagonist, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, argued that the agreement meant “the advantages outweighed the disadvantages” and that her main aim had been achieved. “The fundamental principles [of the eurozone] have been upheld.”

But her achievement is already being questioned at home and will run into big problems in the Bundestag. Her reputation has suffered, there is disquiet on her backbenches, trouble in her grand coalition with the Social Democrats, and acute wariness in the rest of the eurozone about crossing the German chancellor.

Der Spiegel called the German terms for saving Greece “a catalogue of horrors”. Paul De Grauwe, a prominent Belgian economist, described the weekend that “saved” the euro as the opening days of a new era: the “template of future governance of the eurozone being written in Brussels: submit to German rule or leave.”

Are they going to act all shocked and innocent if Greeks vote for neo-nazis next time around? #ThisIsACoup

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) July 13, 2015

Greece bailout agreement: the key points

Up to €50bn (£35bn) worth of Greek assets will be transferred to a new fund, which will contribute to the recapitalisation of Greek banks. The fund will be based in Athens, not Luxembourg as the Germans had originally demanded. ...

Talks will begin immediately on bridging finance to avert the collapse of Greece’s banking system and help cover its debt repayments this summer. Greece must repay more than €7bn to the ECB in July and August, before any bailout cash can be handed over.

Greece has been promised discussions on restructuring its debts. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Eurogroup was ready to consider extending the maturity on Greek loans. There is now no need for a Plan B, she added.

The Greek parliament must approve the deal before the German bundestag votes. It must also start passing legislation straight away to implement the agreed measures. ...

Tsipras pledged to implement radical reforms to ensure that the Greek oligarchy finally makes a fair contribution.

Is Greece's New Debt Deal Worse Than Plan Rejected By Referendum?

Krugman: Killing the European Project

Suppose you consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.

Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.

Can anything pull Europe back from the brink? Word is that Mario Draghi is trying to reintroduce some sanity, that Hollande is finally showing a bit of the pushback against German morality-play economics that he so signally failed to supply in the past. But much of the damage has already been done. Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?

One thing the Greeks have achieved is showing the world how the IMF/ECB have no respect for democracy. #ThisIsACoup pic.twitter.com/Vm0lhweloj

— Groot 66 (@Groot66) July 13, 2015

German-Led Eurogroup Launching Coup Against Greek Government

The world's rich nations assumed that what institutions like the IMF did in the South wouldn't hit the North. Capital, however, marched on. And on Sunday night, it marched into Athens with an offer to Greece that would end the idea that capitalism and democracy can survive together there. Reads the offer, provided by a source close to the talks , from the European financial elite, which call themselves the institutions: "The [Greek] government needs to consult and agree with the institutions on all draft legislation in relevant areas with adequate time before submitting it for public consultation or to Parliament." It would be a government in name only. Not only would the Greek people be forced to accept the kind of deal they rejected overwhelmingly at the polls just a week earlier, but they'd be blocked from implementing any future policies Germany disapproved of.

"The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism," Fukuyama wrote. But, instead, the absence of a viable alternative emboldened capital: with the threat of socialism gone, there is less need for either half of what's known in Europe as social democracy. In a previous interview with HuffPost, French economist Thomas Piketty highlighted the interaction. "The existence of a counter model was one of the reasons that a number of reforms or policies were accepted," he said, arguing that people in capitalist countries fared better thanks to the threat of communism. "In France, it's very striking to see that in 1920, the political majorities adopted steeply progressive taxation. Exactly the same people refused the income tax in 1914 with a 2 percent tax rate. And in between, the Bolshevik revolution made them feel, after all, that progressive taxation is not so dangerous as revolution."

During negotiations over the future of Greece, the Greek Syriza government repeatedly offered such progressive taxation as a way of achieving some of the budget surpluses the institutions were demanding. The offer was rejected, however, with the institutions arguing that higher taxes on the rich might slow growth. With no fear of revolution, the interest in progressive taxation is gone. ...

The United States has done precious little to support Greece or the principle of democracy in Europe. The Soviet Union may be gone, but the U.S. reluctance to intervene comes largely from the desire to keep Germany as a strong ally while the U.S. wages a proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine.

If European history is any guide, the too-clever calculations and the petty vindictiveness will backfire in a bad way.

Todo nuestro apoyo al pueblo griego y a su gobierno frente a los mafiosos #ThisIsACoup

— Pablo Iglesias (@Pablo_Iglesias_) July 12, 2015

Translation: "All our support to the Greek people and government against the mobsters"

The euro ‘family’ has shown it is capable of real cruelty

What kind of family, we might ask, does this to one of its own members? Even Der Spiegel online described the conditions that have been outlined as “a catalogue of cruelties”, but perhaps we should now put it another way, given Jean-Claude Juncker has denied that the Greek people have been humiliated. Juncker instead says that this deal is a typical “European” compromise. Yes, we see. ...

The eurozone and Gemany want regime change in Greece, or at least to split Syriza. Alexis Tsipras has fought tooth and nail for something resembling the debt restructuring that even the International Monetary Fund acknowledges is needed. The incompetence of a succession of Greek governments and tax evasion within Greece is not in doubt. But the creditors of the euro family knew this as they upped their loans, and must now delude themselves that everything they have done has been for the best. It hasn’t, and now that same family will go in and asset-strip in broad daylight a country that can no longer afford basic medicines. In three days Greece is supposed to push through heaps of legislation on privatisation, tax and pensions so it can be even poorer. ...

The euro family has been exposed as a loan-sharking conglomerate that cares nothing for democracy. This family is abusive. This “bailout”, which will be sold as being a cruel-to-be-kind deal is nothing of the sort. It is simply being cruel to be cruel.

Yet another deal

So, a deal has been agreed on by Tsirpas. It includes 50 billion in collateral to be managed by a fund controlled by Juncker.

We’ll see if the Greek parliament will pass it.

I have yet to see a single indication that Syriza ever made the necessary moves to allow for an orderly Grexit, though the EU has. They went into this fight relying on the good will of, yes, their enemies. (That they did not realize they were negotiating with their enemies was their first mistake.)

This is yet another step necessary for the end of the neo-liberal era. A tragedy, cruel beyond any justification, but that’s rather the point. Westerners, not just the rest of the world, need to understand who they are ruled by, and that no one is immune to their cruelty. ...

I’ll keep covering Greece as necessary, but the topic is beginning to become tedious. Horrible people doing horrible things to incompetent fools who refuse to resist, but simply lie there taking kick after kick to the nads while saying “but we love you, we want to be one of you, do anything to us so we can prove our devotion.”

I no longer have much preference for how this turns out. It is clear that while Grexit would be preferable in principle, that Tsipras and Syriza could not so much as manage a lemonade stand, let alone handle something as difficult as leaving the Euro under hostile fire and then rebuilding prosperity with Europe opposing them every step.

Chris Hedges: We Are All Greeks Now

The poor and the working class in the United States know what it is to be Greek. They know underemployment and unemployment. They know life without a pension. They know existence on a few dollars a day. They know gas and electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills. They know the crippling weight of debt. They know being sick and unable to afford medical care. They know the state seizing their meager assets, a process known in the United States as “civil asset forfeiture,” which has permitted American police agencies to confiscate more than $3 billion in cash and property. They know the profound despair and abandonment that come when schools, libraries, neighborhood health clinics, day care services, roads, bridges, public buildings and assistance programs are neglected or closed. They know the financial elites’ hijacking of democratic institutions to impose widespread misery in the name of austerity. They, like the Greeks, know what it is to be abandoned.

The Greeks and the U.S. working poor endure the same deprivations because they are being assaulted by the same system—corporate capitalism. There are no internal constraints on corporate capitalism. And the few external constraints that existed have been removed. Corporate capitalism, manipulating the world’s most powerful financial institutions, including the Eurogroup, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, does what it is designed to do: It turns everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse. In the extraction process, labor unions are broken, regulatory agencies are gutted, laws are written by corporate lobbyists to legalize fraud and empower global monopolies, and public utilities are privatized. Secret trade agreements—which even elected officials who view the documents are not allowed to speak about—empower corporate oligarchs to amass even greater power and accrue even greater profits at the expense of workers. To swell its profits, corporate capitalism plunders, represses and drives into bankruptcy individuals, cities, states and governments. It ultimately demolishes the structures and markets that make capitalism possible. But this is of little consolation for those who endure its evil. By the time it slays itself it will have left untold human misery in its wake.

The Greek government kneels before the bankers of Europe begging for mercy because it knows that if it leaves the eurozone, the international banking system will do to Greece what it did to the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973 in Chile; it will, as Richard Nixon promised to do in Chile, “make the economy scream.” The bankers will destroy Greece. If this means the Greeks can no longer get medicine—Greece owes European drug makers 1 billion euros—so be it. If this means food shortages—Greece imports thousands of tons of food from Europe a year—so be it. If this means oil and gas shortages—Greece imports 99 percent of its oil and gas—so be it. The bankers will carry out economic warfare until the current Greek government is ousted and corporate political puppets are back in control. ...

The corporate dismantling of civil society is nearly complete in Greece. It is far advanced in the United States. We, like the Greeks, are undergoing a political war waged by the world’s oligarchs. No one elected them. They ignore public opinion. And, as in Greece, if a government defies the international banking community it is targeted for execution. The banks do not play by the rules of democracy.

Psychologists Collaborated with CIA & Pentagon on Post-9/11 Torture Program, May Face Ethics Charges

Psychologist accused of enabling US torture backed by former FBI chief

A prominent psychologist ousted from the leadership of the the US’s largest professional psychological association for his alleged role in enabling and covering up torture has enlisted a former FBI director to fight back.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Louis J Freeh, Bill Clinton’s FBI director, rejected an independent report begrudgingly embraced by the American Psychological Association (APA) as a politicized smear job. ...

Former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, who spearheaded the 542-page investigation, found that Behnke was an instrumental figure in more than a decade’s worth of institutional enablement by the APA of torture conducted by the CIA and US military.

Hoffman concluded that Behnke, along with others, concealed close ties to colleagues in the military in order to maneuver the APA into softening its traditional rejections of torture – thereby enabling psychologists to participate – and suppressing internal dissent.

The APA disclosed on Friday that it parted ways with Behnke, its ethics director for 15 years, on 8 July in an apparent firing.

Judge Orders Pentagon to Get Guantanamo Force-Feeding Videos Ready for Release

Pentagon video editors are on the clock now that a federal judge has ordered that several hours of “disturbing” force-feeding videos from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay are to be redacted and prepared for public release before the end of next month.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued the ruling on Friday, ordering the government to complete the redaction process that she initially ordered more than 10 months ago.

She set an August 31 deadline to prepare eight of the 32 tapes for release.

Kessler also ordered the government to redact an additional two compilation tapes before the end of September: one tape created by the government and one by attorneys representing Abu Wa’el Dhiab - a former Guantanamo detainee whose legal struggle has served as the catalyst for the pending disclosures.

“The only thing consistent about the Government’s position has been its constant plea for more time,” Kessler wrote in her order, adding that the “Government has failed, after having managed to stall for nine months by filing a truly frivolous Appeal with the Court of Appeals, to use the additional time it has already received.”

All parties are to return to the court in the middle of October to review the tapes, upon which, Judge Kessler instructed that “there will be no extensions of time (emphasis hers).”