Monday, September 26, 2011
This is what austerity looks like
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Roubini on the crisis and Marx - WSJ
WSJ: (~4:00) So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future. That sounds awful. What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?[1]
Roubini: Businesses are not doing anything. They're not actually helping. All this risk made them more nervous. There's a value in waiting. They claim they're doing cutbacks because there's excess capacity and not adding workers because there's not enough final demand, but there's a paradox, a Catch-22. If you're not hiring workers, there's not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we've actually had a worsening because we've had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.
Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process.
He then goes on to say many startling things (well for the WSJ readership I imagine) like:
Calling [the UK rioters] just criminals is ignoring the fact that these are poor & desperate people, and poor and desparate people whether in Egypt or the UK tend to riot, and eventually this inequality together with no jons and no income and no growth in the economy can lead to indstability in any country...
And generally the man sounds like a dangerous radical. The end of days. Surely.
[1] [transcript via MeFi]
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Greek crisis, #imfgr @eurotrib
If it seems that I'm not posting enough here lately, it's because I've been mostly doing that on the European Tribune, where some of the last remnants of various threads of the European Left blog together as neoliberal doom is already upon us. I'm posting the links here (diaries and major comments together with related stuff I have posted on this blog) for completeness sake, since I realized that they are forming a corpus of commentaries on the Greek Crisis and its reality, that might conceivably be considered useful, by someone, somewhere, somehow (posts/diaries in bold):
- 10.12.09(comment): Doom and gloom: The way it looks from the ground (in thread "Potential Greek default - how doomed is the euro?")
- 10.02.10 (comment): Pigs on parade + pig irony
- 27.04.10 (comment) Re: Resisting the Neoliberal Empire? (in thread: Resisting the Neoliberal Empire?)
- 06.05.10 (comment) Re: Getting ugly in Greece (1) and Re: Getting ugly in Greece (2 - the 5/5 demo) (in thread: Getting ugly in Greece)
- 14.05.10: Some sort of semi-coherent collage of notes on the Greek situation (1)
- 25.05.10 Some somewhat more coherent notes on the Greek crisis: debunking IMF propaganda (2)
- 29.06.10 (comment) Re: Is this it? (In thread: Is this it?)
- 02.11.10 (comment) Re: Europe
- 08.11.10 Greece: The unlocal elections
- 15.11.10 (comment) Re: Europe
- 19.11.10 (expanded comment): A comment on the alleged lack of productivity of Greek workers
- 25.11.10 (comment) Re: The Banksters (In thread: Relief)
- 26.11.10 Vampire policy makers of the IMF (and the ECB)
- 26.11.10 (comment) Re: The word from the Serious People (In thread: The word from the Serious People)
- 15.12.10 Greek general strike today: anger and violence
- 19.12.10 The Greek Economy on a Crucifix: IMF lies and misrepresents yet again
- 02.02.11 (comment): Re: Merkel's New (Old) Two-Speed Europe (In thread: Merkel's New (Old) Two-Speed Europe)
- 04.02.11 (comment): Re: Irish pushback strategy - we get mail (In thread: Irish pushback strategy - we get mail)
- 18.02.11 High Drama: Greece under the "troika"
- 04.04.11 Jake's Greek LTE, questions and discussion
- 14.04.11 (comment) Re: Why 2013 (In thread: Three months that will test the Eurozone)
- 19.04.11 (comment) On the Greek black economy (In thread: What's Happening in the Black Economy?)
- 06.05.11 The revelations of Strauss Kahn
- 11.05.11 (comment) Athens Strike / Demo
- 14.05.11 Kristallnacht in Athens
- 17.05.11 (comment) Re:Europe (about state sector participation etc)
- 18.05.11 Merkel's racist lies
- 20.05.11 (comments) Re: LQD: "Tahrir Virus" comes to Europe, Re: No One Expects the Spanish Revolution? (In thread: No One Expects the Spanish Revolution?
)
- 25.05.11 (comment) Re: Europe (on the indignants 1st day)
- 25.05.11 (comment) Re: Did Greeks wake up? Tina, Tara and other girls (In thread: Did Greeks wake up? Tina, Tara and other girls)
- 25.05.11 Here be dragons: Lies, horror populi and subversion amidst hope and chaos - reposted at Eurotrib and then reposted at Daily Kos as "Greece Shock Therapy update - WSJ lies debunked"
- 30.05.11 The Greek Colony
- 05.06.11 (comment) The Greek crisis explained on TV
- 15.06.11 Greece: if austerity doesn't work... Try more austerity!
- 29.06.11 Flash brief from the #greekrevolution
- 12.07.11 Greece: No other plan but plunder
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Here be dragons: Lies, horror populi and subversion amidst hope and chaos
The WSJ readership of course, needs this potent injection of fear-mongering anyway, as the plebes in the US are rapidly becoming unruly themselves, faced with shouldering the costs of the banker bailout and this cautionary tale form the exotic Near East, complete with leftist dragons, is perfectly timed for domestic use.
As I said, if this was published in a Greek newspaper, in Greek, it would offer a hilarious peek at the paranoia that the crisis has bread among the country's upper classes, and would not merit a response significantly different from "you should go out more often". Since it is published in English, in a paper as broadly read among ruling elites as the WSJ, and might skew the perception of what is actually happening in Greece, it requires debunking, especially as I have seen the article being referred to on the www as some sort of authoritative picture of Greek "anarchy", since its publication. In the process it will provide an opportunity to relate the true story of the budding, if still incoherent, mass resistance to the ECB/IMF fiscal stormtroopers and their caretaker government in this peripheral ECB province I'm writing from, but also the truly darker side of collapsing neighbourhoods, mindless violence and general despair that is emerging from the deep cracks that the prolonged ECB/IMF induced depression has carved on the already decrepit social body. This panoramic view of civil discontent and societal unrest that answering Michas' article must include, and the true dangers lurking as the crisis deepens will be the major theme of this post, along with a discussion of things that have happened after the publication of this article: it has been a month thick with events.
I don't think there is a country in the world were the population can (or should) be expected to passively accept its own impoverishment and the annihilation of lives and prospects. Society is still paralyzed from the Shock Therapy the German Bankers and their local overseers have imposed and are still, to an extent, under the spell of the neoliberal mantra: There Is No Alternative. There are movements however on the ground, local and nation-wide that resist this destruction, stemming both from a sense of injustice and a practical inability to pay for much more than basic necessities. These movements are widely accepted and approved of by the Greek population. However, for Michas to admit to large scale societal desperation, rage and depression would be to accept that there are valid reasons for this anger. But that would by ideologically problematic for a large part of the neoliberal right that he represents and, anyway, it would stand in the way of red-baiting which is the object of this article. Thus Michas proceeds to a string of accusations against the left that are blatantly outrageous and viciously false. They are the kind of accusations an authoritarian government levels against dissident groups. It is highly unlikely that Michas is so secluded and deluded that he doesn't know this already, so this is IMHO inexcusable disinformation.
Michas starts his description of the Evil Greek Left with an impressive piece of disinformation:
First if all let's start with this fact: The "militant activists" of these parties are responsible for zero (0) acts of real physical violence against anyone. They have "harassed" no citizens that I'm aware of, unless "harass citizens" means "demonstrate against politicians" perhaps, they have not destroyed public property as far as I'm aware of, and they have certainly not taken over any villages, at least since the Greek Civil War in the 1940s.
The Communist Party is an ossified relic of a sovietophilic old-school stalinist party, whose intransigence and militancy in workers' movements as well as its historic role in the Greek resistance have guaranteed it a permanent place in parliament - and which is growing stronger by the day as the protest party par excellence. Its actions include the usual old-school labor actions, i.e. ship-workers and sailors blocking ports. The party has no loose canons and has a horror of things getting out of control. No police officers worry about attending a KKE demonstration. Ever.
Those evil commies then, have activists who apparently "direct physical attacks primarily at politicians and journalists who support open societies and market economies". Now, the three "attacks" Michas mentions have indeed happened (as have many more like them); in fact politicians and establishment figures are currently feeling rather unsafe walking around in public without heavy escort. But that isn't because they are "for open societies and market economies" but rather because they are part of a corrupt and/or incompetent political two-party system that has thrown Greece into an unsustainable debt maelstorm, through cronyism, clientilism and theft. This opinion about the two governing parties is shared by a vast majority of the population - 93% of Greeks feel that corrupt politicians should go to jail. According to last year's Transparency International survey, Greeks were the people who ranked their political parties with the highest marks for corruption in the world. A recent poll shows that 40% of the population are for (and 56% against) violent heckling of governing politicians. As the Greek economy collapses even the "official" narrative for the crisis makes people who are facing destitution rather angry.
Even so, the conservative politician mentioned was most certainly not attacked by organized leftist activists (of any kind). Kostis Hatzidakis, MP and former transport minister, not involved in any personal scandals, was attacked by a couple of elderly men during a huge union demonstration, one carrying an umbrella which he used against the former minister, as other protesters from the crowd protected the MP.
No one credible has, to my knowledge, seriously suggested that the attackers were members of any party. Their photos and the relevant video has travelled around the Greek web and the media many times. Were the perpetrators members of any left party, the MS media, quick to indulge in all sort of wild accusations against those "irresponsible leftists" would no-doubt have unearthed it. They haven't.
The same is true for both other cases (and there are many more instances of public, intense disapproval, voiced all over Greece and abroad wherever government members appear in public, on a daily basis by now, most of which have nothing to do with physical violence). In one case Michas mentions, we know for a fact that the person that threw yogurt (yogurt! how deadly can you get?) against the Vice-Premier was a voter of the far-right LAOS party, (and we know this because he gave an interview in a Greek newspaper). He was acting as a citizen of Keratea, a town whose inhabitants have immersed themselves in an insurgency against the creation of a landfill next to their homes. The town was a rather conservative - if anything - electoral municipality. This is the only instance of anything that might be legitimately called an insurrection in Greece, and it is very local in its scope. Theodoros Pangalos, the Vice Premier, elected from that particular electoral periphery, had spoken against the locals and for Law and Order, as is par for the course. Again, since local politicians of all colours and stripes have expressed their sympathies with the locals, and the whole town was behind the demonstrations, the claim that the locals were "supported by anarchist 'freedom fighters'” is ridiculous - not to mention in contradiction with the claim that the village was taken over by leftist activists. Keratea is a case study in state intimidation since from day one the government chose to use sticks - not carrots: the police have shown incredible ferocity against the inhabitants of Keratea, including Gaza-style home invasions and violence against the elderly, on orders to support tooth and claw a project that the citizens of Keratea insist is a contract awarded to politically connected construction companies. This is not the first time in Greece or in Europe, where locals have found being forced to live next to a toxic landfill violently unpalatable. Only previously, no one would have thought it necessary to invoke a conspiracy of anarchostalinists to explain it away. As for Pangalos, who has distinguished himself in heaping scorn against Greek citizens, a recent poll has shown that a full 79% of those questioned agreed with the deprecation and the jeers directed against him. By the way: it seems that these protests might yet have borne fruit... with all that this fact might have to teach us.
Similarly, the "Won't pay" movement, far from being some sort of bloodthirsty extremist group (in fact they are completely non-violent) is a citizens' initiative, mostly, but not solely, from areas where the government has set up toll booths that force the inhabitants of towns to pay in order to be able to leave their towns. At the same time, the toll fee prices had been hiked originally, exactly as general nominal income is steeply declining and inflation is charging on at 4-5%. Frequent commuters find it too much of a drain for their precarious finances to pay extra for driving to and from work, on incomplete roads constructed by the "national" contractors whose contracts are generally believed to be the product of their owners' political "entanglement". The Left certainly supported these movements but hardly initiated them. The movements had managed to win a promise of across the board reduction on toll fees (which it seems now the government has no intention of carrying out). They have also opened up with their actions, both on the road and in the courts, a new area of public inquiry, regarding the enormous costs that Greek roads seem to have incurred, as part of the corrupt relationships between some construction companies' owners and government cadres from both ruling parties...And it's far more than the voters of the Left who are furious with the toll prices: 66% of the public consider that the Minister of Infrastructure is a tool for the contractors. 52% suppport the "Won't pay" activists (vs 33% against). These people are not ideologues of any sort of "hard left" Michas is terrified of. They are people at the edge of bankruptcy and disaster. Even the regional chambers of commerce for Pieria and Thessaloniki are participating actively in these protests. So much for wild-eyed radicals...A similar story pertains to the metro/bus ticket boycott: fares went up by 40% this January, meeting a determined resistance from many commuters who have refused to pay these price hikes. In both cases the government legislated draconian measures to break these movements, and it is rumored that the toll companies are paying police officers and police departments to be present at the toll stations and force payment on anyone who denies payment, while they have tried to scare ticket dodgers with heavy penalties and fines - and even jail for a 1,4 Euro ticket!
Then there is the Marfin Bank incident last May, where, in one of the largest union rallies ever in Athens, a group of hooded "anarchists" threw molotov cocktails inside a bank, a mind-bogglingly criminal act that resulted in the death of three bank employees, who were trapped inside. This was a depraved act, no doubt about it, but the fire-bombers, who were possibly not aware of the fact that there were people inside the shuttered bank, were a small group (3-4 people strong) acting around the main demo, with no connection to Michas' "hard left" at all. Michas' claim, that activists of the main parliamentary leftist parties go after "people who refuse to participate in strikes and demonstrations" stating that: "In May 2010 three employees of the private bank Marfin suffocated to death when a hard-left mob fire-bombed their offices during a riot" is slanderous and dishonest.
The immigrant hunger strike was the most obvious example of the "respectable" part of the political spectrum seeming to have decided that, in the face of mass popular delegitimization of the political system, the proper response is to move ever rightwards on social issues. This is some sort of a collective "Sarkozy strategy", which ignores, among other things, how this is currently playing out in France. The marriage of neoliberal economics with extreme conservative, nationalist and xenophobic currents, seems to be a viable vehicle for preserving elite privilege. This has the effect of further strengthening an already empowered extreme right: the Nazi party (not a metaphor - the actual Nazi party) is polling at 1,5% according to a recent poll, ten times its historical size, and the original xenophobic extreme right-wingers at LAOS have also shown signs of a significant rise in the polls. Since Michas' article, the Nazis and the mainstream apologists for xenophobia who have fanned the flames of the racism that feeds them, have gone on an anti-immigrant rampage, a pogrom of real and horrific criminal violence, illustrating where the danger of blind and mindless destruction and societal dissolution come from and where criminal intent really is indiscernible from the effects of a programmatically antidemocratic platform. These events happened a month after Michas' aricle in the WSJ, and the trend was visible well before then. Strangely Michas' libertarianism was blind to this actual rather than invented rise of political violence.
What is even more worrying is the fact that these pogroms happened under the indifferent eye of the police, and they were then only peripherally highlighted and lightly condemned by mainstream media. What is more: as the Minister of Public Protection mumbled a few words about dissolving the nuclei of neonazi sympathizers in the police force, "serious" newspapers, the conservative and far-right opposition, members of his own "socialist" party and pundits of every sort, actually protested against "starting witch hunts" in the police force and "hurting an already diminished morale". Thus it is plainly clear that the toleration of the far right is a reasoned choice for sections of the Greek elite.
This will not be the first time the Greek liberal right and center and the elites that run them, will have allied themselves with the extreme right: During the civil war in Greece the "traditional" parties allied themselves with Nazi collaborators, black-marketeers and goons, and proceeded to impose a national security state that, with varying ferocity, continued until 1974, after attempts at democratization were quashed by royalist parliamentary coups and then the brutal military junta of 1967-74. Thus it is truly ironic for Michas to dangle the spectre of an imaginary authoritarian left: in Greece it is the liberal and not too liberal center and conservative parties that have a history of violence, using the extreme right as their "muscle". The parties Michas slanders and their ideological forebears, have been fighting for more not less democracy in Greece over the last 60 years. Kim Il Sung would feel much more comfortable with the government's LAOS allies than he would with the independent (to say the least) minded members of the components of SYRIZA's coalition. much less of course an anarchist of any sort...
This collapse has created hopelessness, anger and violence. Criminal violence, racist and nazi violence, police violence and anarchist / protest violence. The events of the past weeks I have described elsewhere, but a day after the brutal and murderous police attack against peaceful demonstrators - a practice so entrenched and widespread that it suggests a permanent strategy of intimidation in order to "discourage" participation - a gang of anarchists attacked a central police station with molotov cocktails, running through a street market full of people. In the ensuing mess, three bystanders were burned by the fire bombs and one was until yesterday in serious condition, fighting for his life in a hospital...
So this explains somewhat the results that Public Issue, a polling company, published, of a survey that reported that:
- 62% of Greeks think that the memorandum with the troika has harmed the country and the same percentage is against it (13% it benefited the country - 15 support it),
- 16% think that there is no alternative (69% think there are alternatives).
- 77% do not trust the Prime Minister to manage the economy (22% trust him).
- 75% have a negative view of the IMF (69% last year), and 74% of DSK (49% last year).
- 69% believe that the IMF must leave Greece now (up 4% from 6 months ago).
- Only 52% have a negative view of the ECB (vs 33% positive) and 61% of Trichet. 59% have a positive view of the EU (up three points from 6 months ago).
- 53% want to bargain and default on at least a part of the public debt. 17% want to default completely and unilaterally.
- 33% think that the country needs a revolution and 56% deep changes.
- Greeks support strikes (74 - 20) and protests & marches (69 - 25) and are marginally not supportive of electoral abstention (45 - 54) and public deprecation and jeering of politicians (43 - 54)...
- 78% vs 21, believe that a social explosion is impending...
- 29% feel mainly angry, 18% dissapointed, 15% anxious, 11% shamed, 8% sadness and 13% all of the above.
Interestingly 48% believes that the stage is set for a successful far right party to emerge, versus 27% for a far left.
Thus contrary to Michas' assertions this is not about a leftist coup d' etat: The natives are restless and unhappy because of the, probably unprecedented during peacetime, drop of living standards they are suffering, with large swathes of the population being pushed to extremes of poverty that were unimaginable a few years ago, at the same time as prices rise, with incredibly high inflation due to a continuous barrage of indirect taxes and the backbone of state services and companies is being privatized in a gigantic sell out: Schools are being shut down, hospitals are in jeopardy (while corruption in and around them is still rife), as per yesterday the electric utility, the healthiest bank in the country, the state gambling and betting monopolies (very profitable), the power company (again profitable), petroleum, water services etc - are on sale, a true sell out that will happen at fire-sale prices (the depression has driven the Athens stock market at an all time low, it will be interesting in a morbid way to see how low will the sell out prices go). The sad thing about the left in these circumstances is not that it does to much. But that it is still doing too little to stop the asset stripping and the destruction of a whole generation of Greeks. If only they were as dangerous as Michas claims!
Yet this work of political fiction Michas has concocted must serve a purpose. I fear it is one of creating alibis. "If you see us rolling out the tanks, rescinding a few articles of the constitution, or if you see demonstrators being trampled, beaten like it's Mubarak's Tahrir Square, Manama, or Baniya, Syria", signals Michas to US and global elites, "it's OK": It's only communists and "anarchostalinists" who are being punished for their love of Kim Il Sung. Everybody else just loves being reduced to poverty and insecurity.
P.S: And so it was until the #spanishrevolution. There are as we speak twenty or more facebook groups planning #greekrevolution gatherings around the country, today 25/5/11. Let's see how succesful and how nonviolent these turn out to be. Unlike the #spanishrevolution however, everybody expects the #greekrevolution right now...
Austerity? What austerity?
Michas begins by lamenting the demise of "the rule of law" in Greece and chiding the government for its inability to "to maintain order and implement its own legislation". While the debt crisis is briefly mentioned, Michas avoids pointing to a rather crucial piece of background info: the developments he "describes" (and misrepresents) are happening as Greece is plunged into the deepest recession in living memory, as unemployment is skyrocketing along with part-time and uninsured jobs, as even nominal wages are collapsing, as a quarter of small businesses have either gone bankrupt or are preparing to do so, as indirect taxes soar and inflation persists. But all this does not impress Michas:"Many argue that Greece’s disintegration is the unavoidable consequence of the government’s attempt to enforce economic austerity. This seems doubtful".Now why it seems doubtful to Takis Michas, he won't say. It certainly doesn't seem doubtful to the vast majority of people in the country, as the percentage of Greeks expecting social conflict in the next few months as a result of government policies reached 84% three months ago [poll links in Greek, I'm afraid], while when asked to describe their feelings towards these policies in another poll, 35,5% mentioned "anger", 33% "disappointment", and 21% "fear". Pollsters warn that the Greek political system has "passed the point of no return", and is facing a drastic overhaul...
I don't think there is a country in the world were the population can (or should) be expected to passively accept its own impoverishment and the annihilation of lives and prospects. Society is still paralyzed from the Shock Therapy the German Bankers and their local overseers have imposed and are still, to an extent, under the spell of the neoliberal mantra: There Is No Alternative. There are movements however on the ground, local and nation-wide that resist this destruction, stemming both from a sense of injustice and a practical inability to pay for much more than basic necessities. These movements are widely accepted and approved of by the Greek population. However, for Michas to admit to large scale societal desperation, rage and depression would be to accept that there are valid reasons for this anger. But that would by ideologically problematic for a large part of the neoliberal right that he represents and, anyway, it would stand in the way of red-baiting which is the object of this article. Thus Michas proceeds to a string of accusations against the left that are blatantly outrageous and viciously false. They are the kind of accusations an authoritarian government levels against dissident groups. It is highly unlikely that Michas is so secluded and deluded that he doesn't know this already, so this is IMHO inexcusable disinformation.
All protest is lawlessness?
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| SYRIZA members harass pro-market politician |
The country is at the mercy of militant activists, who are mostly inspired by various factions of Greece’s hard left. The heaviest hitters are Greece’s Communist Party and the anarcho-Stalinist Coalition of the Radical Left, which is comprised of the Ecosocialists of Greece, the “Roza” Radical Left Group and the Internationalist Workers’ Left, to name a few. Their followers, with total impunity, have taken to harassing citizens and destroying public property, even taking over whole villages.
First if all let's start with this fact: The "militant activists" of these parties are responsible for zero (0) acts of real physical violence against anyone. They have "harassed" no citizens that I'm aware of, unless "harass citizens" means "demonstrate against politicians" perhaps, they have not destroyed public property as far as I'm aware of, and they have certainly not taken over any villages, at least since the Greek Civil War in the 1940s.
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| Beware of Stalinists bearing flags |
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| Rabid SYRIZA Members armed with deadly pickets |
The description of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SY.RIZ.A in Greek) again is, well, somewhat idiosyncratic. It is indeed a coalition, a block of left and green parties from left social-democracy to post-maoist groups. The three parties Michas chooses to enumerate are however not quite representative of the alliance. It is like saying that "the Italian peninsula is comprised among others of the Vatican and San Marino". The missing elephant, the core political and parliamentary entity around which the alliance was built, is the Coalition of the Left and Ecology (even the similar name sort of gives the deal away) a member of the Party of the European Left (along with Die Linke, Bloco, Sinn Fein, PCF etc.). Interestingly, despite Michas' claims regarding their dastardly final objectives, this party participated in two Greek governments in the late 80s early 90s (along with the Communists - with the Conservatives first and then in a emergency government): there were no gulags built. Kim Il Sung does not seem to feature among the guiding lights of either party... About "Anarchostalinism" I can only say that it is a term that has no proper place outside satire, so I'll leave it at that.
Those evil commies then, have activists who apparently "direct physical attacks primarily at politicians and journalists who support open societies and market economies". Now, the three "attacks" Michas mentions have indeed happened (as have many more like them); in fact politicians and establishment figures are currently feeling rather unsafe walking around in public without heavy escort. But that isn't because they are "for open societies and market economies" but rather because they are part of a corrupt and/or incompetent political two-party system that has thrown Greece into an unsustainable debt maelstorm, through cronyism, clientilism and theft. This opinion about the two governing parties is shared by a vast majority of the population - 93% of Greeks feel that corrupt politicians should go to jail. According to last year's Transparency International survey, Greeks were the people who ranked their political parties with the highest marks for corruption in the world. A recent poll shows that 40% of the population are for (and 56% against) violent heckling of governing politicians. As the Greek economy collapses even the "official" narrative for the crisis makes people who are facing destitution rather angry.
Even so, the conservative politician mentioned was most certainly not attacked by organized leftist activists (of any kind). Kostis Hatzidakis, MP and former transport minister, not involved in any personal scandals, was attacked by a couple of elderly men during a huge union demonstration, one carrying an umbrella which he used against the former minister, as other protesters from the crowd protected the MP.
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| Hadzidakis attacked |
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| Keratea burning |
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| Raw terror at the toll booths |
Then there is the Marfin Bank incident last May, where, in one of the largest union rallies ever in Athens, a group of hooded "anarchists" threw molotov cocktails inside a bank, a mind-bogglingly criminal act that resulted in the death of three bank employees, who were trapped inside. This was a depraved act, no doubt about it, but the fire-bombers, who were possibly not aware of the fact that there were people inside the shuttered bank, were a small group (3-4 people strong) acting around the main demo, with no connection to Michas' "hard left" at all. Michas' claim, that activists of the main parliamentary leftist parties go after "people who refuse to participate in strikes and demonstrations" stating that: "In May 2010 three employees of the private bank Marfin suffocated to death when a hard-left mob fire-bombed their offices during a riot" is slanderous and dishonest.
The ghost of Greek liberals past
This tale of nefarious leftists firebombing villages and occupying banks or whatever, is of course par for the course for the socialist government and its supporters in the media as well as the ultra-right wing LAOS party.This is not the only policy area where the "serious" parties converge: This January the government, the conservative opposition and the extreme right were trying to outdo each other in anti-immigrant, xenophobic and racist rhetoric when 300 (mainly North African) "illegal" workers went on a hunger strike to demand that they have the opportunity to employ themselves legally. Seeing this as a rare opportunity to gain popular points, the government rode the xenophobic horse almost until the end when, faced with the prospect of dozens of dead hunger strikers, as one after the other were fading in critical condition in Greek hospitals, they accepted some sort of deal - which after the hunger strike was over they made sure to reinterpret. The compliant government-dependent media moguls and their TV stations went on what can only be described as a week of inciting racist hatred: the intensity of rhetoric was at KKK levels and it was truly scary to realize that one was witnessing what amounted to a immigrant hate-fest in the most mainstream of Greek TV news shows. This was unfolding in an already ominous context of sky-rocketing unemployment and Dublin II, an EU treaty on migration which guarantees that Greece is and will remain a massive EU immigrant detention camp for the forseeable future, with a desperate, unemployed and hopeless detainee population that is now dying to get out of the country on top of dying to get in... The Democratic Alliance, the party which Mr. Michas writes as a representative of in the WSJ article, was a very vocal part of that broad coalition of xenophobia. Note that as an independent journalist Michas showed a libertarian bend, and it is doubly astonishing to read such calls to authoritarianism by him especially...The immigrant hunger strike was the most obvious example of the "respectable" part of the political spectrum seeming to have decided that, in the face of mass popular delegitimization of the political system, the proper response is to move ever rightwards on social issues. This is some sort of a collective "Sarkozy strategy", which ignores, among other things, how this is currently playing out in France. The marriage of neoliberal economics with extreme conservative, nationalist and xenophobic currents, seems to be a viable vehicle for preserving elite privilege. This has the effect of further strengthening an already empowered extreme right: the Nazi party (not a metaphor - the actual Nazi party) is polling at 1,5% according to a recent poll, ten times its historical size, and the original xenophobic extreme right-wingers at LAOS have also shown signs of a significant rise in the polls. Since Michas' article, the Nazis and the mainstream apologists for xenophobia who have fanned the flames of the racism that feeds them, have gone on an anti-immigrant rampage, a pogrom of real and horrific criminal violence, illustrating where the danger of blind and mindless destruction and societal dissolution come from and where criminal intent really is indiscernible from the effects of a programmatically antidemocratic platform. These events happened a month after Michas' aricle in the WSJ, and the trend was visible well before then. Strangely Michas' libertarianism was blind to this actual rather than invented rise of political violence.
What is even more worrying is the fact that these pogroms happened under the indifferent eye of the police, and they were then only peripherally highlighted and lightly condemned by mainstream media. What is more: as the Minister of Public Protection mumbled a few words about dissolving the nuclei of neonazi sympathizers in the police force, "serious" newspapers, the conservative and far-right opposition, members of his own "socialist" party and pundits of every sort, actually protested against "starting witch hunts" in the police force and "hurting an already diminished morale". Thus it is plainly clear that the toleration of the far right is a reasoned choice for sections of the Greek elite.
This will not be the first time the Greek liberal right and center and the elites that run them, will have allied themselves with the extreme right: During the civil war in Greece the "traditional" parties allied themselves with Nazi collaborators, black-marketeers and goons, and proceeded to impose a national security state that, with varying ferocity, continued until 1974, after attempts at democratization were quashed by royalist parliamentary coups and then the brutal military junta of 1967-74. Thus it is truly ironic for Michas to dangle the spectre of an imaginary authoritarian left: in Greece it is the liberal and not too liberal center and conservative parties that have a history of violence, using the extreme right as their "muscle". The parties Michas slanders and their ideological forebears, have been fighting for more not less democracy in Greece over the last 60 years. Kim Il Sung would feel much more comfortable with the government's LAOS allies than he would with the independent (to say the least) minded members of the components of SYRIZA's coalition. much less of course an anarchist of any sort...
Societal Tensions
There are other things happening in Greek society, as well, other ways in which the current increasingly desperate situation expresses itself. Suicide rates have shot up in 2010, and continue unabated in 2011, a quarter of shops in downtown Athens are now empty, people are leaving Athens in panic to become farmers, organized crime is booming, while unemployment almost reached 16% this February, homelessness has become a visible issue, soup kitchens almost cannot serve all the needy...This collapse has created hopelessness, anger and violence. Criminal violence, racist and nazi violence, police violence and anarchist / protest violence. The events of the past weeks I have described elsewhere, but a day after the brutal and murderous police attack against peaceful demonstrators - a practice so entrenched and widespread that it suggests a permanent strategy of intimidation in order to "discourage" participation - a gang of anarchists attacked a central police station with molotov cocktails, running through a street market full of people. In the ensuing mess, three bystanders were burned by the fire bombs and one was until yesterday in serious condition, fighting for his life in a hospital...
So this explains somewhat the results that Public Issue, a polling company, published, of a survey that reported that:
- 62% of Greeks think that the memorandum with the troika has harmed the country and the same percentage is against it (13% it benefited the country - 15 support it),
- 16% think that there is no alternative (69% think there are alternatives).
- 77% do not trust the Prime Minister to manage the economy (22% trust him).
- 75% have a negative view of the IMF (69% last year), and 74% of DSK (49% last year).
- 69% believe that the IMF must leave Greece now (up 4% from 6 months ago).
- Only 52% have a negative view of the ECB (vs 33% positive) and 61% of Trichet. 59% have a positive view of the EU (up three points from 6 months ago).
- 53% want to bargain and default on at least a part of the public debt. 17% want to default completely and unilaterally.
- 33% think that the country needs a revolution and 56% deep changes.
- Greeks support strikes (74 - 20) and protests & marches (69 - 25) and are marginally not supportive of electoral abstention (45 - 54) and public deprecation and jeering of politicians (43 - 54)...
- 78% vs 21, believe that a social explosion is impending...
- 29% feel mainly angry, 18% dissapointed, 15% anxious, 11% shamed, 8% sadness and 13% all of the above.
Interestingly 48% believes that the stage is set for a successful far right party to emerge, versus 27% for a far left.
Thus contrary to Michas' assertions this is not about a leftist coup d' etat: The natives are restless and unhappy because of the, probably unprecedented during peacetime, drop of living standards they are suffering, with large swathes of the population being pushed to extremes of poverty that were unimaginable a few years ago, at the same time as prices rise, with incredibly high inflation due to a continuous barrage of indirect taxes and the backbone of state services and companies is being privatized in a gigantic sell out: Schools are being shut down, hospitals are in jeopardy (while corruption in and around them is still rife), as per yesterday the electric utility, the healthiest bank in the country, the state gambling and betting monopolies (very profitable), the power company (again profitable), petroleum, water services etc - are on sale, a true sell out that will happen at fire-sale prices (the depression has driven the Athens stock market at an all time low, it will be interesting in a morbid way to see how low will the sell out prices go). The sad thing about the left in these circumstances is not that it does to much. But that it is still doing too little to stop the asset stripping and the destruction of a whole generation of Greeks. If only they were as dangerous as Michas claims!
Yet this work of political fiction Michas has concocted must serve a purpose. I fear it is one of creating alibis. "If you see us rolling out the tanks, rescinding a few articles of the constitution, or if you see demonstrators being trampled, beaten like it's Mubarak's Tahrir Square, Manama, or Baniya, Syria", signals Michas to US and global elites, "it's OK": It's only communists and "anarchostalinists" who are being punished for their love of Kim Il Sung. Everybody else just loves being reduced to poverty and insecurity.
P.S: And so it was until the #spanishrevolution. There are as we speak twenty or more facebook groups planning #greekrevolution gatherings around the country, today 25/5/11. Let's see how succesful and how nonviolent these turn out to be. Unlike the #spanishrevolution however, everybody expects the #greekrevolution right now...
Monday, March 14, 2011
In other news...
European austerity and other madness:
- Portugal: Precarious generation on the march:
- Angela Merkel's Grab for Power
- Spiralling into the Moussaka (Which I should give more space to, since it pretty much spells out how doomed we are over here, as I have been pointing out in most of my latest posts, but I'm posting here for reference puroposes):
Class War in the USA
- A table is worth 1000 words
- Financial dismantling of the American middle class in 8 charts
- 100.000 protesters in Wisconsin against the law that quashes union rights
- From American Dream to American Nightmare
- U.S. job gains concentrated in low-wage industries (A model for future "recoveries" elsewhere?)
- 25 graphics showing upward redistribution of income and wealth in USA since 1979
China
- China reports largest trade deficit in 7 years
- China's Coal Reserves "Will Make it New Middle East", Says Energy Chief
- Portugal: Precarious generation on the march:
The Precarious Generation Manifesto- France: 10% unempoyment
We, unemployed, “five hundred-eurists” and other underpaid workers, disguised slaves,those who are underemployment or on fixed term contracts, self employed, casual workers, trainees, scholarship holders, working students, students, mothers, fathers and young people of Portugal.
We, who have up to now been complacent about the conditions imposed upon us, stand here, today, to contribute to a qualitative change in our country. We stand here, today, because we can no longer accept the situation that we have been dragged into. We stand here, today, because every day, we strive hard to be deemed worthy of a dignified future, with stability and safety in all areas of our lives.
We protest so that those responsible for our uncertain situation – politicians, employers, and ourselves – act together towards a rapid change in this reality that has become unsustainable.
Otherwise:
a) The present is betrayed because we are not given the chance to show our potential, thus blocking the improvement of the country’s social and economic conditions. The aspirations of a whole generation, which cannot prosper, are wasted.
b) The past is insulted, because previous generations have worked hard for our rights, our access to education, our security, labour rights and our freedom. Decades of effort, investment and dedication, risk being compromised.
c) The future is morgaged , and we foresee it without quality education for all and no fair retirement pensions for those who have worked their whole lives. The resources and skills that could put the country back on track of economic tsuccess will be wasted.
We are the highest-qualified generation in the history of our country. So do not let us down with the prospect of exhaustion, frustration or lack of future perspectives. We do believe we have all the resources and tools to provide a bright future for our country and ourselves.
This is not a protest against other generations. Quite simply, we are not, nor do we want to, wait passively for problems to sort themselves out. We protest because we want a solution, and we want to be part of it.
- Angela Merkel's Grab for Power
- Spiralling into the Moussaka (Which I should give more space to, since it pretty much spells out how doomed we are over here, as I have been pointing out in most of my latest posts, but I'm posting here for reference puroposes):
But that is not the worst of it. As I explained in my recent post on Europe's continuing mess, Greece was always going to be in trouble as soon as there was an economic downturn in Europe because they are trapped between the domestic policies of Germany and the inflexibility of the monetary system they signed up to when they joined the Euro. The austerity package is failing, but it is only failing to fix the symptoms. Without currency deflation the only possible outcome is lower wages for the Greeks, which will inevitably lead to default on loans, the exact thing the Germans and French are attempting to stop happening.- Call for a European Conference against Austerity, Cuts and Privatisation and in Defence of the Welfare State:
However I have to ask exactly what the EU are hoping to achieve. Let us for a minute pretend that the Austerity package does work without the collapse of the Euro banks and the Greeks accept the fact that they need to move onto a lower pay structure. Once the debt is cleared away Greece will suddenly appear as modern stable well educated economy with a low wage base that is extremely attractive to international companies. Under these conditions they may even become a net exporter into Europe.
Does anyone think that this will be acceptable to the French or the Germans ?
We... call for a European Conference against Austerity, to take place in London provisionally on Saturday 1st October, with delegations and representatives from trade-unions, social movements and progressive organisations across Europe- The creaking European austerity machine
Class War in the USA
- A table is worth 1000 words
- Financial dismantling of the American middle class in 8 charts
- 100.000 protesters in Wisconsin against the law that quashes union rights
- From American Dream to American Nightmare
- U.S. job gains concentrated in low-wage industries (A model for future "recoveries" elsewhere?)
- 25 graphics showing upward redistribution of income and wealth in USA since 1979
The World as a System
- Immanuel Wallerstein: Structural Crisis in the World-System: Where Do We Go from Here?
- The great World Liquid Fuel Supply gap
- Polar ice loss quickens, raising seas
- P.Patnaik: The World food crisis:
- The great World Liquid Fuel Supply gap
- Polar ice loss quickens, raising seas
- P.Patnaik: The World food crisis:
Per capita foodgrain absorption, taking direct and indirect absorption together, has declined in India since the beginning of "liberalisation", first gently and of late precipitously, so much so that the level in 2008 itself was lower than in any year after 1953. In China too, there was a sharp decline in per capita total absorption of foodgrains between 1996 and 2003. It improved thereafter but even by 2005 had not reached the 1996 level; it could not have jumped suddenly in 2008. Since the population growth in both these countries has come down substantially, even their absolute absorption in 2008 could not have been much higher than in say the mid-nineties...
... An argument is often advanced that to overcome the world food shortage, agriculture everywhere should be opened up for corporate capital. Even if we assume for argument's sake that such a move will augment food output, it will only compound world hunger by imposing a massive squeeze on the purchasing power of the peasants and agricultural labourers who will get uprooted to make way for corporate agriculture. There is no escape therefore from the fact that overcoming the world food crisis requires a revamping of peasant agriculture, through land reforms, through State support, through protection from encroachment by corporate and MNC capital, and through State-funded transfers and welfare expenditures for improving the quality of rural life. The point is: will neo-liberalism allow it?
Fears of sectarian uprisings in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have set off the first serious wave of investor flight from the Gulf- Lenin's Tomb on Libya: Libya and Transnational Solidarity and The Revival of Imperialist Ideology
China
- China reports largest trade deficit in 7 years
- China's Coal Reserves "Will Make it New Middle East", Says Energy Chief
Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday said China had set a lower than usual economic growth target and pledged to contain soaring prices as concern over runaway growth mounts.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
High Drama: Greece under the IMF - the series
A couple of weeks ago a rather obscure dairy company, Neogal, based in the town of Drama, near the Greek-Bulgarian border, received a phone call from a representative of the troika (Greece's ruling authority, comprised of representatives of the IMF, the ECB and the EU Comission) - others say that they actually visited the town, but that's probably not true. They wanted to ask a few questions regarding the wage deal it had agreed with its workers.
A month earlier Neogal was the first company to announce that it would take advantage of the special company contracts mandated by the troika, a blunt instrument of destruction of Greece's supposedly stringent, but in practice rather laxly enforced, labor laws, and cut wages 9% beyond the collectively bargained levels. In return it promised not to cut back on any jobs. This was the neoliberal programme to further depress Greece's laughably low (private sector) wages was all about...
Anyway back to Drama: Neogal soon found out that the uproar against its wage decrease in the broader area of Northern Greece and the negative publicity it was receiving, was bad for business, so they went back on that agreement, especially after the Labour Inspectors [in Greek] noticed that they were a profit-making company with an improving balance sheet. Despite the fact that it could unilaterally impose it's "agreement" with the terrified workers (based as it was in an area where unemployment is over 30%), they decided to keep wages at current levels (which is a wage-cut anyway since inflation thanks to our IMF overlords is running at 5% annually - possibly more on a bare necessity budget) and promised to not fire anyone for the next two years, anyway.
This worried the IMF/ECB inspectors, whose main duty here seems to be overseeing the impoverishment of as great a slice of the population as possible, so they went calling to find if this was a result of any government pressure. It turns out that it wasn't, the Greek government was not subverting the troika's carefully planned disaster. All was well - no, not well, because those damn wages wouldn't free-fall fast enough. Apparently the troika members (known as "i troikani" - "troikans" - in Greece) had some other aces up their sleeves: It seems that they first demanded cutting across the board what amounts to 2/14 of Greek private sector salaries (Greek annual salaries are paid in 15 installments - one extra during Christmas and 50% of a salary on Easter and before summer leave). These they called "bonuses" when they demanded their elimination in the public sector, but really are part and parcel of already meager annual wages. This would have been a mandated wage cut in the private sector across the board. So much for state intervention in the economy.
We haven't escaped that danger yet. However it seems that the government has managed to appease the troikans: They are planning instead to abolish what little is left of collective bargaining (shreds of bargaining on a company level mainly) after their latest attack last autumn, and are aiming for generalized individual labor agreements, fewer and cheaper layoff remunerations (2d round), and diminished overtime pay. These measures they hope, will have the same effect...
Boldness
The Commissioner [Olli Rehn] said Greece, Sweden and Latvia were examples of countries that have managed to promote bold reforms without consideration of any political costs.
Lets see what the reforms they're praising actually mean for the populace and what it is that makes them "bold". Here are some of the results that their implementation has inflicted over a very brief period of time:
- Recently, the Greek Statistical Authority (NSA) published its unemployment data for November 2010: Unemployment reached 13,9%, the highest I think I ever remember it at, up from 10,6 in November 09, and from 13,4 in October 2010. Youth unemployment in the country has reached 35,6%. At this pace, unemployment might reach 15% in 2011.
- Yesterday the NSA also published some more data:
Greece's economy slumped more than expected last year and will stay in recession for a third straight year in 2011 with economists seeing little hope for a strong recovery even after that.
The 230 billion euro economy shrank at an annual 6.6 percent pace in the last quarter of 2010, as the austerity-induced recession deepened from a revised 5.7 percent decline in the previous quarter, data showed on Tuesday.
Flash Eurostat estimates showed the downturn in economic activity for the whole of 2010 was 4.52 percent, worse than the government's forecast decline of 4.2 percent, as it struggled to cut deficits and tackle debt
The IMF's forecast in May was at 4% and the government's forecast in June was for an under 4% contraction (the low 3% range being hyped up by various banks' economic analysts).
This had the, expected, result of pumping up the spreads (again):
The Greek/German 10-year bond yield spread widened by 26 bps to 860 bps as the outright Greek yield climbed to 11.93 percent.
The Reuters report includes the following assessment regarding Greek economy prospects:
"We expect the economy to bottom out in the second half of 2011 but after that we do not see a strong recovery taking hold, rather stagnation with growth rates around zero," said Christian Melzer, euro zone analyst at DekaBank.
"The growth figures are miserable, the situation in the real economy is bad -- 2011 and 2012 are going to be difficult years for the Greek economy," he added
This should be seen in the context of the IMF's original forecast (which the Greek government subscribed to) which stated:
Real GDP growth is expected to contract sharply in 2010–11 and recover thereafter. Growth is expected to follow a V-shaped pattern: the frontloaded fiscal contraction in 2010–11 will suppress domestic demand in the short run; but from 2012 onward, confidence effects, regained market access, and comprehensive structural reforms are expected to lead to a growth recovery. Unemployment is projected to peak at nearly 15 percent by 2012
Note that the 15% unemployment mark seems likely to be reached a year earlier than the IMF said it would and that the Unions' analysts expect that number to reach above or near 20% in a year at most.
The Governor of the Bank of Greece (Greece's Central Bank) expects contraction in 2011 at -3%. This is down from last May's government forecast of 2,6% and is already considered by many to be very optimistic.
- 188.000 jobs were lost during 2010 [in Greek] while one in four Greek businesses (225.000) are in the red, at the brink ready to shut down. Most shopping areas around Athens are full of shops vacant, closing or empty of customers
- A quarter of those that do work in the private sector, work uninsured. Thus no benefits, unemployment or otherwise, no pensionable work years, no health coverage. This, in the context of the depression and the undercutting of the economic capabilities of the Greek family which has served as a societal safety net in hard times so far, is slowly creating a new underclass...
- Unrelated to the troika, but indicative of the unfairness of the austerity policies it is imposing through the "Socialist" government, is a story in Spiegel that made the rounds in the Greek press, apparently claiming that the total of (mostly untaxed and unreported) deposits of Greek nationals in Swiss banks reach 600 billion Euros, or 2,5 times the country's GDP. The number might be a bit high, but this is only Switzerland we're talking about. There are estimates floating around stating that total deposits of Greeks in banks around the world (tax and banking havens mostly) might be close to 1 trillion Euros. I note that a 10% tax on the 600 billion would solve most of the country's fiscal problems at a stroke - and we can't have that now, can we...
Sell, sell, sell
This was the situation, until a couple of days ago, when the troika gave a press conference at the end of its latest inspection round, their "Third Review Mission to Greece". In it they suggested, or announced depending on who you ask, that Greece should raise 50 billion euros over the next 5 years by selling assets it owns, including land. Mr. Tomsen of the IMF was also kind enough to inform the Greek public that some of the groups protesting the IMF-inspired "rationalization" measures are doing this only to protect their privileges. In fact he was quite prime-ministerial.
This provoked an angry reaction from the Greek government, it's first ever against the trio. They sounded upset:
Government spokesman Giorgos Petalotis told reporters early Saturday that the comments were unacceptable and amounted to interference into Greece's domestic affairs...
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou also issued a statement Saturday saying he has expressed his dismay about the comments in a phone call with IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Spokesman Petalotis said Saturday that while Greece is in need, it also has its limits. He said the Greek government only takes orders from the people of Greece and that no state land would be sold.
One would deduce from this fierce reaction, that was met with ostensible contrition by the triadic overlords themselves, that the Greek government was absolutely not willing to give up a shred of its sacred territory to the fiendish imperial scum who finally made one demand too many.
Well. No:
There is no divergence of views between the Greek government and the European Union/International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank (“Troika”) regarding the essence of an agreement, which includes a EUR50bn privatization program.In fact:
Greece's harsh criticism of the EU and the IMF over its comments on the need for privatization is unlikely to affect Athens' austerity plans as it was mostly aimed at placating a sensitive domestic audience.
Government officials said on Saturday that the EU and IMF had interfered unacceptably in domestic affairs by announcing a high privatization target for Greece and criticising strikes after its review of progress on the country's 110 billion euro bailout deal.
Greece lashes out at EU/IMF but will stick to reform
Selling public assets is a sensitive issue in Greece, especially for the ruling Socialists. No privatisations have been completed in the party's 16 months in office.
But Athens' harsh comments appear to have been mostly a response to a media outcry and to some ruling socialists being caught out by EU, IMF and ECB officials -- dubbed the 'troika' -- telling a news conference on Friday that Greece should target 50 billion euros in privatisations over the 2011-15 period.
"I don't think this showed any difference on substance between the troika and the government," said Yannis Stournaras, head of the Athens-based Foundation of Economic Research.
"It was a communication error," Stournaras said.
"Perhaps the government did not expect the troika to come out and specify things in detail before parliament, or at least the ministerial council, have been informed."
Indeed, the government admitted in a note circulated shortly after the IMF/EU news conference that it had agreed to the higher target, which became the focus of the week-end uproar.
And then the government went on to claim that the 50 billion sale was its own idea after all, but they were not willing to sell land, actually, but "utilize" it somehow, unless of course the parliament authorized a sale, yet the details pertaining to this miraculous utilization have not been leaked yet. But anyhow they're not going to give up the majority share in DEI, the public power utility. Or water services. Nor sell coastlines.
Now the total value of privatizations over the past 12 years in Greece was around 10 billion Euros. The total value of Greek government land and building assets might be around 300 billion (no one knows for sure yet) but that is assuming someone is willing to buy at nominal values, which is unlikely. Thus, raising 50 billion Euros in 5 years is not feasible really, despite the Greek government's claims, without the intervention of fairies and benevolent deities, unless we are talking about fairly extensive asset stripping. Yet even if a government managed to pawn everything, and indeed raise against all expectations 50 billion in 5 years, this - given the size of the national debt - will barely equal the amount paid as interest alone by the national government to its lenders between 2011 and 2013. Since this will be a one-off payment, it won't go very far.
So what we saw was theater. And rather poorly acted theater at that. The only explanation for such a spectacular plunge into empty rhetoric, is that the Papandreou government is preparing for elections, since it knows that it cannot carry out this agenda of wholesale plunder and misery by itself much longer. Already cabinet members refrain from appearing in any unpoliced public space for fear of their safety. There seems to be a general acceptance of the idea that only a grand coalition ("socialists" and conservatives) might be able to keep up with the increasingly painful measures needed to satisfy the troika's need for blood. In the meantime, Greece is sheepishly supporting Ms. Merkel's plans in the summit and has shown no interest in resisting even the most wildly irrational of the policy choices that are being rammed down people's throats, as the mantra "we are all to blame" plays increasingly unconvincing in the background.
Yet as unions have failed up to now to demonstrate convincing muscle (here the president of the Greek Confederation of Labor is portrayed as "missing"), society is far from calm, its temperature reaching feverish heights, as demonstrated in actions of political disobedience and outright clashes and in the increasing frequency of strikes and labor actions against employers and government policies. At the same time the socialist government is reverting to a law and order agenda flirting with the far-right and xenophobia, while controlling or being in cahoots with practically all of the mainstream media (owned by government contractors and other IMF beneficiaries). Thus the cocktail of personal despair, anger, misinformation, racism and futurelesness, is ominous. In my next post, I'll discuss the faces of public anger, fight-back, despair and moral morbidity that the IMF/ECB/EC is presiding over...
Cross posted at the European Tribune
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The blimp... Cpt. Beefheart: genius
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010
The blimp
Master master
This is recorded thru uh flies ear
'n you have t' have uh flies eye t' see it
It's the thing that's gonna make Captain Beefheart
And his magic band fat
Frank it's the big hit
It's the blimp
It's the blimp Frank
It's the blimp
When I see you floatin' down the gutter
I'll give you uh bottle uh wine
Put me on the white hook
Back in the fat rack
Shad rack ee shack
The sumptin' hoop the sumptin' hoop
The blimp the blimp
The drazy hoops the drazy hoops
They're camp they're camp
Tits tits the blimp the blimp
The mother ship the mother ship
The brothers hid under their hood
From the blimp the blimp
Children stop yer nursin' unless yer renderin' fun
The mother ship the mother ship
The mother ship's the one
The blimp the blimp
The tapes uh trip it's uh trailin' tail
It's traipse'n along behind the blimp the blimp
The nose has uh crimp
The nose is the blimp the blimp
It blows the air the snoot isn't fair
Look up in the sky there's uh dirigible there
The drazy hoops whir
You can see them just as they were
All the people stir
'n the girls knees trembles
'n run 'n wave their hands
'n run their hands over the blimp the blimp
Daughter don't yuh dare
Oh momma who cares
It's the blimp it's the blimp.
Plus something more "conventional":
Electricity:
The blimp
Master master
This is recorded thru uh flies ear
'n you have t' have uh flies eye t' see it
It's the thing that's gonna make Captain Beefheart
And his magic band fat
Frank it's the big hit
It's the blimp
It's the blimp Frank
It's the blimp
When I see you floatin' down the gutter
I'll give you uh bottle uh wine
Put me on the white hook
Back in the fat rack
Shad rack ee shack
The sumptin' hoop the sumptin' hoop
The blimp the blimp
The drazy hoops the drazy hoops
They're camp they're camp
Tits tits the blimp the blimp
The mother ship the mother ship
The brothers hid under their hood
From the blimp the blimp
Children stop yer nursin' unless yer renderin' fun
The mother ship the mother ship
The mother ship's the one
The blimp the blimp
The tapes uh trip it's uh trailin' tail
It's traipse'n along behind the blimp the blimp
The nose has uh crimp
The nose is the blimp the blimp
It blows the air the snoot isn't fair
Look up in the sky there's uh dirigible there
The drazy hoops whir
You can see them just as they were
All the people stir
'n the girls knees trembles
'n run 'n wave their hands
'n run their hands over the blimp the blimp
Daughter don't yuh dare
Oh momma who cares
It's the blimp it's the blimp.
Plus something more "conventional":
Electricity:
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Greek Economy on a Crucifix: IMF lies and misrepresents yet again
This much I have learned from watching the output of various IMF mouthpieces on Greece these past months: Even high level spokespersons lie, are ignorant of and misrepresent the facts, even easily available facts, ideoleptically making the case for the disaster they are imposing not on actual shortcomings or economic problems but, rather, on what the IMF would expect these measures to be in order to implement its (highly ideological and scantily backed by any sort of empirical evidence anyway) shock therapy on the country. This is a "therapy" that was imposed at the behest of the ECB and the Central Wankers in the process (and I'm not sure yet if it was a conscious decision or just massive ineptitude) of creating a Peripheral "Latin" Europe: the EU as a relatively wealthy (but more unequal) core, surrounded by pauperized banana cheap-service republics destroyed by policies that can only be described as "a Versailles treaty without the war".
The other thing that I've learned from our IMF experience, is that the docility of Greek Media Magnates / Public Contractors and their petty little shops towards our new Overlords and our post-quisling government that is assisting them in the most slavish manner, knows no bounds. Only the dissident media actually take the trouble of pointing out these sorts of inconsistencies. But this is a different issue, for a different post... Let us return to the IMF's latest communique...
I will eschew commenting on all of the BS that Thomsen spouts in his latest interview on IMF Survey magazine. I will specifically focus on one of his statements that is so obviously and transparently bogus (and repeated in every IMF communication), that in an ideal world it would automatically disqualify him and the organization he represents from managing having anything to do with the Greek economy:
Already we have seen unilateral action by employers who have no or few profitability problems, reducing their workers salaries by arbitrary amounts. And these “firm-level” wage agreements that the IMF and the WB has had two decades worth of experience imposing on Latin American countries, have been a failure everywhere, as has been this idea that labor flexibility will bring more and better employment. In 2001 the Multinational Monitor noted that:
Meanwhile in 2004 Eckhard Hein & Thorsten Schulten noted in “Unemployment, wages and collective bargaining in the European Union”:
I should add that Greece already had a very flexible job market: between unreported and semi-reported labor, pseudo-apprenticeships and "illegal" immigrant labor, as well as the high proportion of the self-employed in Greece, well over 80% of the workforce had no employee payroll taxes, no job security, no benefits - nothing. Greece's was probably the most flexible job market in the EU, unofficially "liberalized" up till now. And this did not have much of a beneficial effect on anything...
@Eurotrib:...Debunking IMF propaganda
While in a recent post here a few days ago I mentioned:
To make things even clearer, here's a chart that shows the profit per employee in the EU market economy in 2005
[source EU KLEMS, shown here]:
The 2006 numbers for Greece are even higher (~44k, >51k in the banking sector) and these sorts of numbers were typical for the past decade up to the crisis.
Greek wages in the private sector were underperforming compared to profits during the same period. The loss of competitiveness has an insignificant labor cost component, a huge inflation component and a large profit component. Yet wage earners are asked to accept massive cuts de facto, and a general return to the 1950s in terms of worker rights and protections...
I wonder if there is somewhere *one* instance of an IMF bureaucrat daring to give an interview against a team of journalists / economists playing hardball and not acting as de facto cheerleaders for the neoliberal voodoo remedies they are peddling?
The other thing that I've learned from our IMF experience, is that the docility of Greek Media Magnates / Public Contractors and their petty little shops towards our new Overlords and our post-quisling government that is assisting them in the most slavish manner, knows no bounds. Only the dissident media actually take the trouble of pointing out these sorts of inconsistencies. But this is a different issue, for a different post... Let us return to the IMF's latest communique...
I will eschew commenting on all of the BS that Thomsen spouts in his latest interview on IMF Survey magazine. I will specifically focus on one of his statements that is so obviously and transparently bogus (and repeated in every IMF communication), that in an ideal world it would automatically disqualify him and the organization he represents from managing having anything to do with the Greek economy:
IMF Survey online: Why is legislation to allow firm-level wage agreements so important? Will this lead to massive wage cuts?
Thomsen: The way the Greek labor market was operating contributed to a disproportionate increase in wages over the last decade and a loss of competitiveness. So wages need to be brought more in line with productivity. Over the medium term, wage developments in Greece will be governed by productivity improvements. A more open and dynamic labor market will offer more and better employment opportunities as the business environment improves, investment increases, and the economy expands.
False premises
The IMF, an organization that has been promoting such sociopathic policies around the world for a third of a century now at least, have indeed forced pretty much a complete dismantling of the collective bargaining system in Greece, in order to make it much more like those of the third world countries that were, until recently, their main victims. This is a deregulation so drastic that, in the real world, it is expected to diminish wages in the private sector by 20% - nominal wages that is, in a country which has been running up a 6% inflation rate this year on top of chronic high prices, and thus combines Swiss prices with Portugese (going on Bulgarian) wages. On top of this, in a previous obscenity the IMF/ECB demanded that lay-off compensation be drastically reduced. On top of all of this, Greek unemployment is at 12,4% this month – the highest in decades, but in reality what people actually call un- or under- employed are close to 20 to 25%.Already we have seen unilateral action by employers who have no or few profitability problems, reducing their workers salaries by arbitrary amounts. And these “firm-level” wage agreements that the IMF and the WB has had two decades worth of experience imposing on Latin American countries, have been a failure everywhere, as has been this idea that labor flexibility will bring more and better employment. In 2001 the Multinational Monitor noted that:
The theory behind labor flexibility is that, if labor is treated as a commodity like any other, with companies able to hire and fire workers just as they might a piece of machinery, then markets will function efficiently. Efficient functioning markets will then facilitate economic growth.
Critics say the theory does not hold up. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz described the problem to Multinational Monitor: “As part of the doctrine of liberalization, the Washington Consensus said, ‘make labor markets more flexible.’ That greater flexibility was supposed to lead to lower unemployment. A side effect that people didn’t want to talk about was that it would lead to lower wages. But the lower wages would generate more investment, more demand for labor. So there would be two beneficial effects: the unemployment rate would go down and job creation would go up because wages were lower.”
“The evidence in Latin America is not supportive of those conclusions,” Stiglitz told Multinational Monitor. “Wage flexibility has not been associated with lower unemployment. Nor has there been more job creation in general.” Where “labor market flexibility was designed to move people from low productivity jobs to high productivity jobs,” according to Stiglitz, “too often it moved people from low productivity jobs to unemployment, which is even lower productivity.”
Meanwhile in 2004 Eckhard Hein & Thorsten Schulten noted in “Unemployment, wages and collective bargaining in the European Union”:
Analysing the developments in the EU during the last four decades, no strictly inverse relationship between real wage growth and unemployment can be found. On the contrary, persistently high unemployment has had strong adverse effects on nominal wage growth and on the labour income share. Weakened labour union bargaining power and changing collective bargaining strategies have contributed to this result. It is therefore concluded that the current EU economic and employment policies aiming at further wage restraint, wage differentiation and decentralisation of collective bargaining are deeply misguided and have to be replaced by an alternative wage policy in Europe as part of a growth and employment oriented coordination of macro-economic policies
I should add that Greece already had a very flexible job market: between unreported and semi-reported labor, pseudo-apprenticeships and "illegal" immigrant labor, as well as the high proportion of the self-employed in Greece, well over 80% of the workforce had no employee payroll taxes, no job security, no benefits - nothing. Greece's was probably the most flexible job market in the EU, unofficially "liberalized" up till now. And this did not have much of a beneficial effect on anything...
A disproportionate increase in wages?
The first lie is included in the first line of text: the "disproportionate increase in wages over the last decade" is patent nonsense, Greek wages were very much in line with productivity and in purchasing power terms were pretty much stagnant for most of the past decade. I have discussed this in previous posts so I'll just copy & paste here the relevant parts:@Eurotrib:...Debunking IMF propaganda
It is far from obvious how the IMF measures competitiveness, the FAQ section is not referenced at all, and it's not clear how this quantification arises or what does it mean. Erik Jones, writing in Euro Intelligence, was already debunking part of the competitiveness mythology, as pertains to labor costs, in March:
...What matters in terms of a head-to-head competition is how Greece and Germany compare in the cost of labor per unit of output and not the real compensation of employees. Moreover, we should look at their performance across the European marketplace as a whole. By that measure, if we set the year 2000 equal to 100, then by 2009 Greece was at 98 while Germany was at 95. Germany is still doing better than Greece, but only by a little and both have improved against the rest of Europe.Furthermore the "since Euro adoption" part is misleading. Greek productivity was surging until 2007, after that year, influenced of course by the global crisis, and affected by real fiscal imbalances (about which more later) productivity (and competitiveness, however defined) fell faster than the Dow Jones average after a computer glitch, but that was surely not a uniquely Greek phenomenon.
...Using national accounts data for relative real unit labor costs in manufacturing, Greece goes from 100 in the year 2000 to 87 in 2008. Over the same period, Germany goes from 100 to 90. It is hard to see how Germany comes off better in the comparison.
...Even if Greece is not suffering in terms of manufacturing, the high real incomes that Greek employers are doling out must surely be hitting the bottom line in the service sector, shouldn't they? Again, that's hard to see in the data. Total compensation per employee was 53.8 percent in Greece and 57 per cent in Germany...
In fact Greece was receiving praise by the IMF itself for its improved competitiveness, singled out as the most successful economy in Southern Europe.
Source: IMF
While in a recent post here a few days ago I mentioned:
Let's kill the meme that somehow in Greece workers were benefiting from unreasonable pay-hikes this past decade:
Here we are: real wages have been growing faster than productivity perhaps between 2007-2009 in Greece. Before they were not:
Based on real wage increases during 2007 (3.9%), pay increases in Greece were the highest of the countries of the EU15. Prior to the 2007 increase, there had been four years during which the average annual increase in Greece was around 3%. These big increases, by international standards, in the average real wage in Greece were fully offset by increases in labour productivity, leaving unit labour costs stable in real terms at 2000 levels.
In the private sector during the 2000-2007 period, there was a cumulative decrease of 1.2% in real unit labour costs. Average real wages increased more slowly than average labour productivity, which left companies with leeway to benefit from higher labour productivity. The effect of this development was that at the end of 2007 real wages in the private sector had increased by 27% over the 2000-2007 period, while productivity increased by 36.5%. Thus, there was a benefit to companies of around 7% in unit labour costs in real terms.
For the year 2007, Greece was in second to last place as regards the level of gross wages in € (net wages plus employee contributions). In Greece, average monthly earnings in 2006 amounted to €1,668 for full-time employees, compared to an average of €2,366 in the other countries of the EU15...
... Whereas monthly labour costs in Greece were 83% of the comparable mean costs in the EU15 (in purchasing power parities), labour productivity in Greece stood at 91% of the European average.
In recent years unit labour cost in Greece has become the lowest in the EU15. This development relates to the fact that in Greece labour productivity increased substantially in 1996-2004 and increased in the range of 1.7%-2.7% a year during the four years from 2005 to 2008.
To make things even clearer, here's a chart that shows the profit per employee in the EU market economy in 2005
[source EU KLEMS, shown here]:
The 2006 numbers for Greece are even higher (~44k, >51k in the banking sector) and these sorts of numbers were typical for the past decade up to the crisis.
Greek wages in the private sector were underperforming compared to profits during the same period. The loss of competitiveness has an insignificant labor cost component, a huge inflation component and a large profit component. Yet wage earners are asked to accept massive cuts de facto, and a general return to the 1950s in terms of worker rights and protections...
Over the medium term
...Over the medium term wages will not follow productivity. Or perhaps they will, if more and more young and skilled younger workers leave the country for abroad, leaving manual and semi-skilled labor to man the sweatshops of a new euromaquilladora economy that seems to be the only visible goal of this exercise in thirdworldization. Over the medium term, farmers' markets garbage heaps will be turned increasingly more into senior-citizen mosh pits, as pauperized pensioners fight over pieces of half-rotten tomatoes. Others, less spritely grampas and granmas, will be heading for their neighbourhood garbage cans - and it ain't just the elderly. One in five children under 17 were in poverty last year, there is no telling what the numbers will be this year...Reforms
Finally, about those reforms that the IMF will be imposing and are supposed to take us out of the slump and into the promised land of growth, sometime, somehow... Where exactly have they been succesful in doing so Mr. Thomsen? What about the Greek government selling off pretty much everything under public control today - including public parks and water companies it seems? Where was that a success? And in doing what?I wonder if there is somewhere *one* instance of an IMF bureaucrat daring to give an interview against a team of journalists / economists playing hardball and not acting as de facto cheerleaders for the neoliberal voodoo remedies they are peddling?
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Greek general strike today: anger and violence
Riots erupt as anger colors the 7th general strike this year in Greece:
The strike comes at the heels of a new law that dismantles the system of collective bargaining in the Greek private sector, and sets up a large number of Greek public companies for privatization. Working people are expected to lose around 20-30% of their (already contracting) nominal wage, with an inflation rate that is expected to reach close to 6% this year. Last night the "socialists", losing (and expelling from the party) one more MP, voted by themselves the new measures (mandated by the ECB and the IMF as part of the deal that will allow Greece to receive the 3d installment of the "stabilization" package).
There were close to 100.000 protesters I reckon that took part in the Athens demo from early morning to late afternoon, and tens of thousands more in other major Greek cities... The mood of the crowd and society at large is murderous. A Conservative MP and former development minister Costis Hadjidakis was near-lynched by a group of demonstrators as he left the Parliament building amidst the demo:
While clashes with the police were extensive (and we still don't know how many were hospitalized)
You can follow some of the on the spot coverage and the discussion it generates at twitter at the hashtag gstrike...
The strike comes at the heels of a new law that dismantles the system of collective bargaining in the Greek private sector, and sets up a large number of Greek public companies for privatization. Working people are expected to lose around 20-30% of their (already contracting) nominal wage, with an inflation rate that is expected to reach close to 6% this year. Last night the "socialists", losing (and expelling from the party) one more MP, voted by themselves the new measures (mandated by the ECB and the IMF as part of the deal that will allow Greece to receive the 3d installment of the "stabilization" package).
There were close to 100.000 protesters I reckon that took part in the Athens demo from early morning to late afternoon, and tens of thousands more in other major Greek cities... The mood of the crowd and society at large is murderous. A Conservative MP and former development minister Costis Hadjidakis was near-lynched by a group of demonstrators as he left the Parliament building amidst the demo:
While clashes with the police were extensive (and we still don't know how many were hospitalized)
You can follow some of the on the spot coverage and the discussion it generates at twitter at the hashtag gstrike...
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