Hi I sent this morning’s ‘The Mother of all No-brainers, not as advocacy, but so that we/you can see and understand the views of many important, traditionally conservative Republicans. Brooks is that, and writes a regular column for the NY Times.
Below, are views I more fully share. -Ed
http://mondediplo.com/2011/07/01europe
‘Don’t be ashamed to ask for the moon: we need it’
Europe ’s wakeup call
by Serge Halimi
Le Monde Diplomatique: July 1, 2011
The economic, and democratic, crisis in
The answer to the first two questions is clear, once we forget the propaganda about the “public interest”, Europe’s “shared values” and being “all in this together”. The policies are rational and on the whole are achieving their objective. But that objective is not to end the economic and financial crisis but to reap its rich rewards. The crisis means that hundreds of thousands of civil service jobs can be cut (in Greece, nine out of ten civil servants will not be replaced on retirement), salaries and paid leave reduced, tranches of the economy sold off for the benefit of private interests, labour laws questioned, indirect taxes (the most regressive) increased, the cost of public services raised, reimbursement of health care charges reduced. The crisis is heaven-sent for neoliberals, who would have had to fight long and hard for any of these measures, and now get them all. Why should they want to see the end of a tunnel that is a fast track to paradise?
The Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC)’s directors went to
The decisions will not be hard for everyone, following a course that is already familiar: “Pay rates for new workers in unregulated sectors have fallen by about 25% in recent years. This shows the labour market is responding to an economic and unemployment crisis” (1). The lever of sovereign debt enables the European Union and International Monetary Fund to impose the Irish employers’ dream order on
The same view seems to apply elsewhere. On 11 June, an Economist editorial observed that “Reform-minded Greeks see the crisis as an opportunity to set their country right. They quietly praise foreigners for turning the screws on their politicians” (2). The same issue analysed the EU and IMF austerity plan for
Catering only to rentiers
Portuguese democracy is just 30 years old. Its young leaders were showered with carnations by crowds grateful for the end of a long dictatorship and colonial wars in
US economist Paul Krugman explains: “Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers – those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.” Krugman says creditor interests naturally prevail because “this is the class that makes big campaign contributions, it’s the class that has personal access to policy makers, many of whom go to work for these people when they exit government through the revolving door” (4). During the EU discussion on funding Greek recovery, Austrian finance minister Maria Fekter initially suggested: “You can’t leave the profits with the banks and make the taxpayers shoulder the losses” (5). This was short-lived.
To understand the “complex” mechanisms underlying the sovereign debt crisis, you need to know about constant innovations in financial engineering: futures, CDs (credit default swaps) etc. This level of sophistication reserves analysis for select experts who generally profit from their knowledge. They pocket the proceeds while the economically illiterate pay, as a tribute they owe to fate, or to an aspect of the modern world that is beyond them.
Let’s try the simple political explanation instead. Long ago, European kings borrowed from the Doge of Venice or Florentine merchants or Genoese bankers. They were under no obligation to repay these loans and sometimes neglected to do so, a neat way of settling public debt. Many years later, the young Soviet regime announced that it would not be held accountable for money the tsars had borrowed and squandered, so generations of French savers suddenly found they had worthless Russian loans in their attics.
But there were more subtle ways of getting out of debt. In the
Why did savers allow themselves to be cheated? They had no choice. Capital controls and the nationalisation of the banks meant that they had to lend to the state, and that is how it got its funds. Wealthy individuals did not have the option to invest on spec in Brazilian stock index-linked to changes in the price of soybeans over the next three years. There was a flight of capital, suitcases of gold ingots leaving
Up to the 1980s, index-linked wage rises (sliding scales) protected most workers against the consequences of inflation, and controls on free movement of capital had forced investors to put up with negative real interest rates. After the Reagan/Thatcher years, the opposite applied.
The system has no pity
Sliding wage scales disappeared almost everywhere: in
Apparently this is not enough. The troika (European Commission, ECB and IMF) has decided to improve the mechanisms designed to favour capital at the expense of labour, by adding coercion, blackmail and ultimatum. States bled by their over-generous efforts to rescue the banks, and begging for loans to balance their monthly accounts, are told to choose between a market-led clean-up and bankruptcy. A swathe of Europe, where the dictatorships of António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco and the Greek colonels ended, has been reduced to the rank of a protectorate run by Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington, the main aim being to defend the financial sector.
These states still have their own governments, but only to ensure that orders are carried out and to endure abuse from the people who know the system will never take pity on them, however poor they are. According to Le Figaro, “Most Greeks see the international supervision of the budget as a new form of dictatorship, like the old days when the colonels were in charge, between 1967 and 1974” (9). The European ideal will not gain from being associated with a bailiff who seizes islands, beaches, national companies and public services and sells them to private investors. Since 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles, everyone knows that such public humiliation can unleash destructive nationalism – and all the more so as provocations increase. The next ECB governor, Mario Draghi, who – like his predecessor – will issue strict orders in
But indignation is powerless without some understanding of the mechanisms that caused it. We know the alternatives – reject the monetarist, deflationist policies that deepen the crisis, cancel part of the debt if not all of it, take over the banks, get finance under control, reverse globalisation and recover the hundreds of billions of euros the state has lost by tax cuts that favour the wealthy (?70bn in France in the past ten years, more than $1 trillion in the US, especially for the top 1% of income earners). And knowledge of these alternatives has been shared by people who know at least as much about economics as Trichet, but do not serve the same interests.
This is not a technical and financial debate but a political and social battle. Of course, the economic liberals will claim that what progressives demand is impossible. But what have they achieved, apart from creating a situation that is unbearable? Perhaps it is time to remember how Jean-Paul Sartre summed up Paul Nizan’s advice to people who bottle up their aggression: “Do not be ashamed to ask for the moon: we need it” (12).
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