Crisis? What Crisis?

A Glimpse Of Britain’s Future

creative direct action, Crisis? What Crisis?, liberalism, Life under Capitalism, UK elections
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Syntagma Square filled with strikers

Will UK voters, like the Greeks, be storming Parliament this time next year?

Scuffles between public sector workers and Greek MAT riot police units broke out in Syntagma Square, outside the Greek parliament, on May 5 2010, the BBC World Service reported from Athens.

As hardcore elements wearing motorcycle helmets and gas masks took over the front lines of the demonstration, the riot escalated. Petrol bombs, tear gas, explosions and plumes of thick black smoke were visible around the square as protesters clashed with authorities.

The demonstration, which was peaceful at the beginning, gradually became more heated as protesters attempted to charge up the stairs toward the parliament building itself.

As a general strike started to paralyse Athens, following the austerity measures, German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the future of the euro zone was at stake if a 110 billion euro bail-out rescue package from the European Union and International Monetary Fund for Greece failed to go through.

Not one of the three major parties in tomorrow’s UK General Election has come clean about exactly how they plan to reduce the UK’s own 167 billion budget deficit, but if UK voters really want to know, they can just look at the austerity plan imposed on Greece.

Understandably those affected – ie not the rich but the average Vassili or Eleni – are not happy:

Angry Greeks ‘carrying the can’ for politicians

Like the sting of police tear gas, popular anger hangs heavy in the air as protesters take to the streets of Athens, for the third time in less than a week.

Some Europeans have been surprised by the extent of Greeks’ anger over government cuts in wages, pensions and increases in VAT – all measures needed to get the Greek economy back from the brink of default.

The measures are a condition for the huge bailout agreed by the IMF and EU, amounting to loans to Greece worth 110bn euros (£95bn; $146bn).

Why are Greek people so angry? From the outside, it looks like a spendthrift country getting what it deserves in painful cuts to public spending.

At street level, however, the anger stems from a sense of injustice. Many feel that the average citizen is now paying the price for corruption and government spending that they did not benefit from.

I’m feeling more and more angry every day, because those who got us into this mess are not held responsible
Thrasyvo Paxinos
Teacher

A civil servant in the finance ministry spoke on condition of anonymity. “Greek people are willing to contribute and make sacrifices. The vast majority of people do want to contribute to ease the economic problems of our country,” he said.

“But first of all they want to stop political corruption. So if we see the people responsible for this being brought to justice, we are really willing to pay and make sacrifices.”

“In the past I’ve seen government offices or committees being set up which don’t actually do anything. They are designed only to give important political supporters a wage. In the ministry we’ve highlighted these and said ‘Really, don’t do this! We can’t afford it!’ But no one listens.”

“Also we knew for years in the ministry about the wrong figures being shown to the world about our GDP and our debt. We protested to our seniors but again no one would listen. We are very unhappy about it – taking to the streets is really our only option.”

At least the Greeks have the courage to fight back against a neoliberal austerity plan meant oonly to protect the integrity of the Euro to the benefit of EU founder members like Germany and France.

I’ve a feeling that when Greek-style austerity hits Britain, (and it will – how else are Labour, the Tories or LibDems to fund their spending plans?) all the British will do is moan about it and turn back to Sky Plus for comfort.

(Note: sorry about the on the hoof editing, my preview function is screwed)

Kill 2 Birds With One Stone – Plug The Oil Leak With Bankers

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy, Life under Capitalism
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Dress them in explosive-packed suicide belts, fly them to the Gulf, load them all onto submersibles and BOOM!

Oil leak plugged, bankers dead, multiple problems solved. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. My only regret would be over the destruction of perfectly good submersibles.

But it’s cruel, you say? Not if this email, currently circulating around Wall St. according to the FT’s Alphaville blog, reflects the actual thinking of bankers:

“We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”

You just know the bastards have been making millions hedging against BP during the past few disastrous days, so blowing bankers to kingdom come 1600m below sea level isn’t cruel enough, if you ask me.

Links For A Dull, Rainy Sunday

Capitalism, Corruption, Crisis? What Crisis?, Democratic (in)action, Kittens!, Life under Capitalism, Merkins..., Natural World
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‘Nomnomnomnom’ goes the kitteh:

They could have turned off the Gulf oil leak like a tap. But they chose not to, and Obama was a wimp.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the well lacked a remote-control shut-off switch that is required by Brazil and Norway, two other major oil-producing nations. The switch, a back-up measure to shut off oil flow, would allow a crew to remotely shut off the well even if a rig was damaged or sunken. BP said it couldn’t explain why its primary shut-off measures did not work.

U.S. regulators considered requiring the mechanism several years ago. They decided against the measure when drilling companies protested, saying the cost was too high, the device was only questionably effective, and that primary shut-off measures were enough to control an oil spill. A 2001 industry report argued against the shut-off device:

“Significant doubts remain in regard to the ability of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency back-up control system during an actual well flowing incident.”

However, a spokeswoman for Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority said the switches have “been seen as the most successful and effective option” in North Sea usage. Several oil producers, including Royal Dutch Shell, sometimes use the switch even when it is not required by country regulations.

(via Digby)

, cute baby badger alert. Talk to the paw… ’cause the ear isn’t there.

If you read nothing else on US politics today, readPapers, Please: Asserting White Supremacy Since 1492, a fantastic post from Jesus General on the naziesque ID laws passed by Arizona and the non-reaction of the allegedly libertarian teabaggers:

Even more noteworthy about all this is the reaction from the Tea Baggers — or perhaps I should say the lack of reaction from the Tea Baggers. We’ve sat through months of Tea Bagger complaints about government overreach and the threats to our liberty from government intrusions into our lives. In every case, there’s been little to no empirical evidence that their complaints were based on any reality.

The most generous perspective on those complaints is that the Tea Baggers bought into lies from Republican leaders who sought to increase their profile through fear mongering. A less generous perspective would be that they generally knew they were complaining about nonsense but did it anyway because it made them feel better because they didn’t have to admit openly that their real complaint was that a black man was in the White House.

So what are we to make about the overall lack of response to the Arizona “Papers, Please” law? Here is a genuine example of government overreach. Here is a genuine example of the government trying to infringe upon people’s individual liberties. Why aren’t the Tea Baggers protesting this? Why don’t large numbers of Tea Baggers go to the state capitol in Arizona with guns and threatening signs? Where are all the “Don’t Tread on Me” banners?

I don’t think that there is a “most generous” interpretation this time. It’s not plausible that the Tea Baggers are unaware of the law and it’s not plausible that they are unaware of how it will impact people’s lives. It seems to me that the only realistic interpretation is that they don’t care how the Arizona law will impact people because it won’t impact them or people like them — i.e., white people. Tea Baggers aren’t stupid and know just as well as the rest of us that white people won’t be stopped and asked for their papers like brown people will. More….

Worst. Election. Ever.

Crisis? What Crisis?, Dutch politics, UK elections
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Change the names and number of parties and what Lenny says about the UK elections goes as well for the Dutch one a month later:

The 2010 general election will result in a victory for the nasty party, whoever wins. All three major parties, having supported the mammoth bank bailouts, stand for the deepest cuts in the public sector for over 50 years, far outstripping anything accomplished by Thatcher. Outdoing Thatcher in the cuts stakes is, in case the point passed you by, as nasty as can be. The chancellors’ debate – which, underscoring the poverty of alternatives, was won by the drab former Shell economist Vincent Cable – reinforced this quite starkly. There is only a difference of emphasis and timing between the parties, and these differences all sound eminently reasonable and plausible within the terms of the discussion – but they are largely technocratic differences with policy flavours attached.

All parties accept the reality that “we” need to drastically cut expenditure to pay for the bankers’ crisis. All parties accept we can’t really raise taxes on rich people high enough to do so, nor expect the banks to repay us, so it will be the workers who’ll have to pay, one way or another. All that’s left is quibbling about what to cut and how we are going to pay it.

How to prevent new financial crisises

Crisis? What Crisis?
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This:

At this point to wring the excesses out of the system and to stop the systemic incentives to keep blowing bubbles is going to require doing something to make it so it doesn’t pay. There are two parts to any solution. The first and simplest way is to put a very progressive tax on all income no matter how or where earned that probably comes in at over 95% of all income over, say, $500,000 or a million at the most. Suddenly, needing to actually keep the companies sound, and knowing that in 7 years when the loans go bad, they’ll still be there taking the heat for it, will tend to concentrate the mind not on “can I make enough money to be in a yacht in 3 years” but into “does this deal make sense over the longrun”.

What I’m wondering however is, leaving aside the question of whether there even now is the political will for such a move anywhere, if it is actually possible to tame the financial and banking sector when it’s the driving force in our current economies. The long social-democratic consensus of the twentieth century was made possible because the interests of both industry and workers were served by it, but industry is much less important now. A lot of the economic growth of the past two-three decades was driven by financial services; if these are restricted where will this growth come from and how will our growth addicted politicians and capitalists respond?