![\"Greece_2296452b\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Greece_2296452b.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Alan Gilbert.<\/p>\n
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The election of Syriza was a great sign of hope for the Greek people and ordinary people everywhere. The European\/American bankers are enforcing an austerity program in Greece, producing shocking youth unemployment – 65% – and driving many to suicide. Gnawing at Syriza, they seek at this moment to steal pensions.<\/p>\n
The banks have long made “Social Democrats” their tools, as for example Hollande in France…Driving people to despair, they have created preconditions for the triumph of the extreme right.<\/p>\n
Paul Krugman<\/a>, an economist who writes intelligently (almost alone) in the commercial press, puts it forcefully in the New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n “It has been obvious for some time that the creation of the euro was a terrible mistake. Europe never had the preconditions for a successful single currency \u2014 above all, the kind of fiscal and banking union that, for example, ensures that when a housing bubble in Florida bursts, Washington automatically protects seniors against any threat to their medical care or their bank deposits.” <\/p>\n The bureaucrats of the EU, pressed on by Germany and the IMF, are not technocrats, but cruel, anti-democratic fools…The Syriza government, having buckled to EU pressure, has nonetheless refused to accept even more austerity and preconditions which try to force it from power. So there is, among poor people in Greece, a run on the banks, and a forced limit of a 60 euros ($67) per person withdrawal. And Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called for a referendum, an appeal to democracy against the banks\/EU (the corruption of the European \u201cCommunity” and its leaders in opposing democracy, toward Syriza originally and towards this referendum, is unspeakable\u2026)<\/p>\n There is a lot of media talk about the absence of “trust” between the EU and Syriza. What the EU has imposed on ordinary Greeks, as Joseph Stiglitz, another fine economist, also points out below, is a horror. For the Syriza leadership had worked with the EU, even accepting existing austerity, but trying to limit further abridgment of a common good at home. <\/p>\n The grotesque cynicism\/racism of Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister as well as the German commercial press toward Greece, reported in a Times<\/em>‘ column by Alexander Sorkin yesterday, is startling:<\/p>\n “To Mr. Geithner’s dismay, however, Mr. Sch\u00c3\u00a4uble took the conversation in a different direction. ‘He told me there were many in Europe who still thought kicking the Greeks out of the eurozone was a plausible \u2014 even desirable \u2014 strategy,’ Mr. Geithner later recounted in his memoir, \u201cStress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.” ‘The idea was that with Greece out, Germany would be more likely to provide the financial support the eurozone needed because the German people would no longer perceive aid to Europe as a bailout for the Greeks,’ he says in the memoir.<\/p>\n ‘At the same time, a Grexit would be traumatic enough that it would help scare the rest of Europe into giving up more sovereignty to a stronger banking and fiscal union,’ Mr. Geithner wrote. ‘The argument was that letting Greece burn would make it easier to build a stronger Europe [sic…] with a more credible firewall.'” See Andrew Ross Sorkin “The Hard Line on Greece'” here<\/a>.<\/p>\n The EU\/bankers are happy to drive Greece from the euro rather than do something a) intelligent, b) non-predatory, c) humane. If this policy is Europe, Europe will die (the Right will come to power pretty shortly…) Given the power of banks over democracy and to harm ordinary people, GREXIT – Greece leaving the European Union – looks better for the Greek people by the hour.<\/p>\n The Greeks could heal their economy as Iceland did…But the irrational general economic terms of the European Union – no tolerance for any country to pursue an independent fiscal or monetary policy to get out of economic crisis – is destroying the benefits of cooperation (mainly: heading off predatory nationalisms, ability to seek education throughout the Union, easy travel, acceptance of migration internally to a considerable extent, European funding of preservation of art, for example the New Acropolis Museum and the like).<\/p>\n The European Union has, from the first, harmed workers and does not tolerate democracy about entrance or to oppose strangling austerity. As Stiglitz puts it,<\/p>\n “…concern for popular legitimacy is incompatible with the politics of the eurozone, which was never a very democratic project. Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.”<\/p>\n After the Euro was adopted, I was visiting in Toledo, Spain on a Sunday with my family. There was a march of 4,000 workers, in solidarity with 75,000 in Madrid. Prices had tripled; wages had not gone up… Before the current crisis, as Krugman rightly says below, the financial situation of Greece in terms of debt was no worse than the UK, for long periods. What the bankers have imposed is an unnecessary crisis stealing from the livelihood \u2013 subsistence \u2013 of ordinary people. <\/p>\n Austerity is, in Europe and the United States, a way to cut or privatize common good-serving public programs, while shifting money to the now transnational\/offshore\/”citizens” only of their bank accounts, the .0001%. Since Keynes, economists have known that a stimulus like Obama’s (only bigger; his was 2\/3 the needed size) can get money to employ poor people on publicly useful jobs (green jobs; teaching and the like). They spend the money domestically, with a multiplier effect – other locals are employed in sales of food, laundry, gas stations and the like – that begins to get an economy out of depression.<\/p>\n As Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at U Mass Amherst (previously at Evergreen State) showed, the famous Rogoff-Reinhart claim that every government with a debt ratio of 90% to Gross Domestic Product needs austerity is not only false, but fraudulent (these are “illustrious” Harvard professors, Rogoff a former Vice-President of the International Monetary Fund). This is also Congressman Paul Ryan’s theme song ( Ryan – the “brains” of the Republican and much of the “Democratic” outfit, speaks, only “for the money’s sake.”<\/p>\n Krugman had pointed out the obvious flaw in the Rogoff-Reinhart thesis: if a nation goes into a depression, its output will sink relative to its debt (“correlation is not causation,” to put in cliche terms). But the only way to get it out of a depression is Keynsian programs of stimulus or tax cuts to ordinary people (along perhaps with monetary easing or devaluation of currency – a stimulus to exports and, hence, employment as in Iceland).<\/p>\n Instead, Romney or Jaime Dimon or Robert Rubin or the many other hedge fund, Wall Street clowns of both parties often spend their “tax-relief” abroad (Romney would not even release his taxes as Presidential candidate, even though his father – George Romney – had made this a cardinal point of this in his campaign; that is because Mitt often pays no taxes at all, and at most, much less, on his $250 million \u201cincome” from stock \u2013 a tax rate for one year’s returns of 13.9% – than his garderner or cook\u2026. When the rich buy an elevator for a fancy car at their fifth house in Aruba, no multiplier effect will occur in the United States. Similarly, when Goldman-Sachs which took its “bailout money,” spent it in China, reaped a profit, and paid it back, there was no stimulus to the American economy at all…<\/p>\n Herndon, a beginning graduate student in economics demanded to look at the Rogoff-Reinhart tables – they had not shared them in their famous conference paper for the IMF, being widely publicized for saying what the bankers\/big money\/kept politicians wanted to hear…They had made a statistical error and had incomplete data. The fraud Herndon revealed just underlines Krugman’s argument (after the repeated failures of austerity, that argument ought to have been enough, but there is gale-force money behind impoverishment of ordinary people in the U.S. and more strikingly in Europe, especially Greece. <\/p>\n What is happening in Greece is already happening in Spain and Italy and France – and signs point the same way in the United States, particularly for young blacks, chicanos and poor whites. Despite a wave of well funded, belligerent rightwing economics typified by Rogoff-Reinhard \u2013 in this central and influential policy claim, these claims are as toxic as the \u201cresearch” that nicotine really doesn’t harm you or that burning coal is unconnected to global warming – this fact is well known to most (honorable, literate) economists. It is the decisive scientific point of Keynsianism (after working for Roosevelt, Richard V. Gilbert, my father, wrote about this after World War II, in Seymour Harris ed, Saving American Capitalism<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n But Krugman has now recognized, even in the Times<\/em>, that Michael Kalecki, the Polish Marxist\/Keynsian theorist of economic cycles, was right in a lecture in 1942. He said there – and Krugman did not believe him until the bizarre elite response to the 2008 collapse – that the rich will oppose any programs that benefit the working classes, and will starve them to death for fear of their seeking higher wages and better conditions.<\/p>\n Social Democracy is thus not possible under capitalism, even though it would save it economically (did save it for a period after World War II; today, this is the history of Papandreou and the austerity “socialists” in Greece, Hollande in France \u2013 cutting government programs that help the poor, becoming isolated from and even detested among their own original supporters, and as an accompaniment\/result, furthering racism and Golden Dawn, Marine Le Pen and other \u2013 literally \u2013 fascists).<\/p>\n Krugman has long remarked that the costs of this policy are to throw away millions of people \u2013 the long term unemployed in the US who are eligible for no further insurance \u2013 and far greater numbers in Europe. Greek youth unemployment is 60% (austerity has forced a 25% decline in GDP). <\/p>\n A foolish New York Times<\/em> editorial yesterday here<\/a> does not describe the impoverishment already forced on the people of Greece by “troika” austerity – see here. One cannot look at the harms has been imposed on the Greek people – and the failure time after time of false EU\/banker “predictions” that extreme cuts for the poor will lead to economic boom – and not be horrified.<\/p>\n So the Times<\/em> turns its eyes away. Krugman says, below, startled I think as for a long time so mainstream and serious an economist, that he would vote no on Greece accepting the bankers’ terms. So would Stiglitz hoping for the revival of democracy. Krugman rightly (and rather kindly) refers to the phony “technocrats” of Europe as “fantasists.” Real democracy, consulting the people from below, is the nightmare of the EU\/bankers…<\/p>\n May the Greek people again stand up! We all have a common interest in standing up to the Banks and the Koch brothers\/Adelsons, et al (and the mainstream parties, including, sadly. Obama in so far as they represent them). To survive, let alone flourish, we need to be democratic internationalists\u2026For an action to be taken now, see here.<\/p>\n For the Greek people carry our fate, too. We should stand with them.<\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong> Krugman has now recognized, even in the Times<\/em>, that Michael Kalecki, the Polish Marxist\/Keynsian theorist of economic cycles, was right in a lecture in 1942. He said there – and Krugman did not believe him until the bizarre elite response to the 2008 collapse – that the rich will oppose any programs that benefit the working classes, and will starve them to death for fear of their seeking higher wages and better conditions.<\/p>\n Alan Gilbert<\/strong> on the Greek Crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/alangilbert.jpg\")
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\nAlan Gilbert<\/a> is John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx’s Politics:Communists and Citizens<\/a><\/em> (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality<\/a><\/em> (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy<\/a><\/em> (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence<\/a><\/em> (Chicago March, 2012). His blog Democratic Individuality<\/a> is a rich mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"Greece_2296452b\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Greece_2296452b-420x179.jpg\")
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