Crisis? What Crisis?

That new Greek government seems kinda fascist

Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, fascists
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Mark Ames shows were certain of Greece’s new ministers are coming from:

See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.

With all the propaganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “austerity” government being staffed by non-ideological “technocrats,” it may come as a surprise that fascists are now considered “technocrats” to the mainstream media and Western banking interests. Then again, history shows that fascists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the austerity medicine.

Because the elected Greek government could not be trusted enough to act against it’s population’s interests, the EU has now installed a new “technocratic” government with added fascists. Poetic, really. As Ames also shows, the Greek military meanwhile is bought off with new toys: tanks and warships beause austerity doesn’t mean having to stop buying unnecessary weaponry.

the Greek revolution will not be televised

Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, Life under Capitalism
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Paul Mason is in Athens, doing some great reporting on the Greek crisis:

And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it’s not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as “representatives of big capital”, “Zionists”, “scum and police informers” etc. But to get this reaction from almost every demographic – from balaclava kids to pensioners – should be a warning sign to the policymaking elite. The “mainstream” – whether it’s the media, politicians or business people – is beginning to seem illegitimate to large numbers of people.

As one old bloke put it to me, when I said: “Don’t you want us to report what’s happening to you?” – “No.”

He was quite calm and rational as he waved his hand in my face: “It’s too late for that.”

Jamie wonders if /when the counter revolution comes. The Colonels’ dictatorship was not that long ago after all.

Criminal bankers hardly prosecuted in the US — quelle surprise

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism
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The New York Times has a big article up on the lack of prosecutions coming out of the financial crisis

“This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,” said William K. Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the federal government’s director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis. “But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.”

Largely because an evil conspiracy wasn’t needed, when everybody in government and the regulatory agencies was already convinced prosecuting financial fraud was a Bad Idea because it would frighten the Market, that oh so convenient impersonal historical force which cannot be reasoned with, only appeased. Doesn’t help that much of Obama’s financial people are poachers turned gameskeepers. The whole strategy for dealing with the economic crisis seems to have been to pump money into the very banks who caused it, bail out Wall Street and dump the costs on Main Street, then use the crisis to e.g. bump off social security because it’s now unaffordable.

The real surprise in this is how little real public anger there has been; no bankers have been dangling from trees or gotten their overpriced houses torched — only Fred the Shred’s windows were thrown in.

The Downward Spiral: EU want to restrict wages across Europe

Crisis? What Crisis?, Europe, Life under Capitalism
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Dutch public news broadcaster has gotten its hands on a joint draft proposal (PDF) by EU bigwigs Herman van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso on how to strengthen the EU economies in the wake of the bankers’ crisis (they don’t call it that). As The Wall Street Journal sees it their proposals “soften” the stricter German ones that had been put forward a few weeks earlier. For those of us not belonging to their target audience however these proposals, if enacted, will mean further restrictions on our ability to organise ourselves, earn a decent wage for a decent day’s work.

For example, there should be a “review of the wage setting arrangements to enhance decentralization in the bargaining process” and member states should “ensure wage restraint in the public sector”, not to mention “further opening of sheltered sectors by measures taken at national level to identify and remove unjustified restrictions on professional services as quotas and closed shops” and “overhaul of commercial legal systems to reduce red tape”, more “labor market reforms”, “tax reforms” and finally, “aligning the retirement age with life expectancy” and “reducing early retirement schemes” should also be priorities for member states.

In short, we should have less room to organise ourselves to negotiate the price of our labour, if you work for the government or in a public organisation you can expect even less sympathy from the EU than from your own government, less protection against (unfair) competition, less legal oversight of business, less protection against being fired, more money for fat cats and less for us and finally the chance to work until we die as retirement ages keep creeping up.

Welcome to the downward spiral. Not mentioned: tackling the obscene bonuses and salaries the economic wreckers we laughingly call bankers still “earn”.

Who took your money

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism
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Lenny looks at the Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report and sees how the richest people in the world took more of our money thanks to the economic crisis:

The total liquid wealth of the rich in 2009, at $39 trillion, was actually more than two-thirds of world GDP in the same year, almost triple the GDP of the US, and nearly ten times that of China. Another way of looking at it is that the increase in liquid assets from 2008 to 2009 held by the rich was about $6.5 trillion, more than 10% of total GDP in 2009. This was in a year in which world GDP actually shrank by 0.8%.

The distinction between “economic and market drivers of wealth” is very important, and very telling. Most of the new wealth held by the rich was, as you can see, not produced by economic growth, but by stock market capitalisation. In other words, market relations, sustained by state intervention, facilitated the transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich at a time when most of the world’s economy was such that the direct exploitation of labour could not sustain high profit rates. That’s what the bail-outs did; it’s what they were intended to do. Another intended consequence is that there were not only more high net worth individuals, 10 million of them globally (0.014% of the world’s population), but the ‘ultras’ did far better at increasing their share of liquid assets than mere millionaires – thus wealth became even more concentrated than it had been, among a mere 36,300 people, or 0.0005% of the population. The corollary of this has been, and will continue to be, a general decline in the living standards of the working class in most of the advanced capitalist economies: at the same time as the wealth of the richest grew, global unemployment rose by 14.4%.