7 Points for Greek Resistance

By Alan Gilbert.

An exchange with Uwe Meixner on the European Council’s strangling of ordinary Greeks

“And yet the German government did just this [made things even worse than what he named the toxic demands themselves] when finance minister Schaeuble threatened Greek exit from the euro, thus unashamedly revealing itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian. The German government thereby made for the first time a manifest claim for German hegemony in Europe – this, at any rate, is how things are perceived in the rest of Europe, and this perception defines the reality that counts. I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century – and by “better” I mean a Germany characterised by greater political sensitivity and a post-national mentality.” – Juergen Habermas, interview, The Guardian, July 16, 2015.

Uwe Meixner, a philosophy professor at Augsburg, has complained that my commentary on Greece resistance was one-sided and in fact, mistaken. Perhaps he tries too hard to take up the other side. But note that whether real people are suffering horribly and unnecessarily is a starting point of any decent analysis. That 60 per cent of young people are unemployed or that old people rummage through trash for food, that under the disciplinary tutelage of the Eurozone Greek GDP has declined 25% and is pretty well now in free fall, and that Germany and others hold out no hope but something worse, does not register. Being so caught up morally in defending Germany’s honor as lender and Greek “dishonor” as a borrower misses this cardinal point.

Second, Uwe substitutes anger at the Greek government and very corrupt elite for thinking about ordinary people. He fails to respond to – or understand – the fundamental Keynsian point that cutting government spending on the poor further depresses an economy. I will restate the point: in a depression, if there is a public works program, i.e. for green energy or to maintain the jobs of public school teachers as in the Obama stimulus, ordinary people are employed. They tend to spend money locally or at least domestically with a multiplier effect in terms of employing others (those who work at stores, who make and serve food, who work at gas stations, fix cars or drive buses, etc.). This multiplier effect is the opposite of rewarding banks (for instance, Goldman Sachs, a leading predator in the crisis over Greece) and many others in the .0001. A tax cut for ordinary people will also stimulate the economy or, more indirectly, a currency devaluation as in Iceland which makes a country’s products cheaper, augments exports, and furthers employment.

Third, Uwe also fails to understand that the economic arrangements of the Eurozone, in particular, depriving national governments of any ability to print money or depreciate a currency to provide a lift in a frozen economy and abridging even the ability to spend money to put poor people to work in a depression means a deeper depression. And the Eureaucrats thumbing their nose at the suffering of ordinary Greeks, spitting in the face of a referendum which voted no on their terms because most people are hurting too badly, and “waterboarding” the leader of Syriza at their grim meeting as one official desceribed – what Paul Krugman described as going “from punitive to vindictive” – pretty well does in Europe as a healthy, cooperative arrangement in which the sacrifice of national sovereignty does not mean something extreme – and extremely bad – for most people, especially working/poor people.

Worse yet, there is a credibility question. European membership is not subject to a vote in most cases (is not democratic, though it has some large benefits to citizens). But with a spectacle like this, is its future promising?

Fourth, the International Monetary Fund is infamous for its stringent, anti-decent or anti-common good insistence on cutting the budget deficits of less developed countries by forcing “austerity,” that is, cutting social programs of benefit to ordinary people. IMF economists in specious “value free” language refer to education of children or health care as “particular” interests, but they are, in fact, universal, human rights- or democracy- or common good-serving interests, and IMF policy is, generally speaking, a form of imperial tyranny).

It has not been, any more than Europe, a group responsive to or intelligent about the core points of Keynsian economics underlined above. Yet in this case, even the IMF has warned – rightly – that Europe’s conditions are too severe and will lead to a debt twice the (declining) national output! One really has to go far – and the European Union did – to produce so bizarre an “ally” for ordinary Greeks…

Fifth, Uwe emphasizes what is awful about inflation – and certainly Germany in the early 20s, as I said in a previous post, is a cardinal, frightening example. German fear of a repetition is reasonable. But the analogy between individual debt and national debt, particularly because governments or central banks can print money and devalue currency does not hold (when it does not result in too much inflation). Worse yet, this prejudice prevents governments – or the EU in Brussels – doing what it can to reactivate an economy, and makes things worse and worse.

Sixth, the United States is a federal system which, despite all its comparative weaknesses as a welfare state – “big government” in the US is for war – i.e. the Republicans, Rand Paul and company excepted – are the leading pro-war, big government party…) still taxes Connecticut to pay modest benefits for the unemployed or ensure bank deposits in Mississippi. A large union which has no central government to take care of crises – mostly for the poor in one part – and no provision to help people, when others, too, will face crises (immediately in Spain, Portugal, Italy and soon perhaps France), is not well thought out – as the shocking example of “civilized” Europe preying, unmercifully, on the Greek` people illustrates (if these are Christians, what are anti-Christians…).

Seventh, Uwe is angry at me because I joined the phrase racism to the phrase austerity in describing finance minister Schauble’s effort to drive the Greeks out of the Eurozone. I doubt that either Schauble or Merkel is personally a racist (yesterday Merkel insensitively told a Palestinian high school student that people like her had to leave Europe but when she cried, tried unsurprisingly not successfully to comfort her…).

But the anger here is that other people are not disciplined like Germans and that Greeks are “lazy” (so lazy that many elderly hunt in garbage cans for food…). This is the line of all the advocates of austerity – European bankers, Merkel, Schauble, Paul Ryan – whose arguments are based, for instance, on the Rogoff-Reinhart fraud that a 90% ratio of debt to GDP infallibly results in an economy’s collapse – see the remarkable discoveries of Thomas Herndon, the first year graduate student at U.Mass.Amherst, about “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.). The argument stigmatizes, as Romney put it, “the 47% parasites,” or in Jeb Bush’s words, “Americans need to work harder” (no one works longer hours than ordinary Americans; Europeans through class war and wars have mercifully long vacations).

Now the Bushes and Romney born with a silver spoon in their mouths classically project on the poor their own laziness (and, sadly, though they have a choice about it, worthlessness as human beings). They look at others and see themselves, the greater their passion and meanness, the clearer, in psychological terms, the projection…

Internationally, there is an ideology among rich people that the poor must be forced to work harder (in case anyone thought Scrooge was outdated in 21st century capitalism…). And of course, Rand Paul, inheriting the racism of Ron Paul, and many of his followers offer the same idiom.

The ideology that Germans are victims of others and that the “lazy” Greeks are making it by “sponging off” European generosity is another example. It is unbecoming of those most powerful in Europe and particularly the elite to be so on about the fiscal and alleged moral Schuld of others. And “laziness” – that’s what the owners used to say about slaves. It is blaming the victims. It is as classically racist as you can get.

As I warned in the first post, destroy Syriza and you will probably get Golden Dawn. Many Germans wish to prevent the inflation which was instrumental in the rise of fascism – and are, counterproductively, imposing on Greece and will, in the upshot of this, do so elsewhere in Europe, a depression which will further the fanatic Right (Hollande’s austerity, the opposite of a determined program to help the 6 million Algerian immigrants and other French workers, has already bred conditions very likely furthering the ascension of “National” Front…). That that terrible consequence is unintended by most of the supporters of this cruel, vindictive and counterproductive policy, is sad.

Germans have commendably put up holocaust memorials – there is nothing like this in terms of lynching in the American South as Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative has rightly emphasized. Germany has many intelligent, common good-sustaining welfare programs – no student debt for university training, compared to the vast post-1990 mortgages on the future of students – a sabotaging of democratic education by the banks – in the United States. Many Germans are anti-racist. I hope that these understandings, which go far in some respects, will finally be turned, before it is too late, to the ideology which has possessed its leaders…