Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Europe Page 15 of 16

I think the oligarchs are overplaying their hand

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On July 2, 2011

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In particular the Greek “bailout” was a mistake.  A horribly punitive measure, with virtually the entire “Socialist” party voting for it, it wasn’t a bailout of Greece, but a bailout of investors.  As part of the response, the Greek ministry of finance was set alight.

The oligarchs, by making peaceful revolution impossible, have, as Kennedy pointed out, made violent revolution inevitable.  Since democratically elected representatives are more concerned with doing the will of the rich, rather than the public, and since there is no party willing to do the will of the population (or even live up to their own principles, a socialist party voting for an investor bailout is not socialist), my expectation is that during the next bailout (and another one will be needed), that what representatives will be killed, to get through to them the message that no matter what the rich are offering, or threatening, there is a price for voting against the interests of the majority of the population.

Oh, and I notice that the prosecutors admitted the case against Strauss-Kahn was falling apart after his successor as IMF president was appointed and the Greek bailout passed.  Immediately after, even though the prosecutors knew it was weak before then.

Word is he was opposed to the Greek bailout, by the way.

What a remarkable coincidence.

They may have just elected him President of France.

Looting Greece while the Greeks Riot

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On May 17, 2011

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So, apparently EU finance ministers are encouraging Greece to speed up privatization.  Which is to say, let themselves be looted faster, and transfer public goods into private hands at firesale prices.  Meanwhile, the Greeks themselves continue to riot in all the wrong places.  Folks, if you’re going to riot, go riot where the politicians and bankers are.  March on their mansions, and have your fights with the cops there. As long as it’s you fighting the cops someplace else, they don’t care.  Your master class, who refuse to pay their taxes or to tax each other, will not get serious about anything else other than paying themselves and their foreign friends by looting your country until something more important than money is on the line.

In governmental terms, yes, Greece should restructure.  Roll it all over into 100 year bonds at 1%, and refloat your own currency.  If investors don’t like that, tell them they can have that or nothing.  Slap on capital controls and let everyone know that you will hunt to the ends of the earth any of your rich who try and take capital out of the country.  Start actually taxing the rich.  If they can’t take it, they can leave, without their capital.

Off to London

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On March 7, 2011

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for a week, in a couple weeks. This will be the first time I’ve visited England, since, oh, about 1978.  What I remember about that trip: Southampton row houses, a nice open air book market, and Trafalgar square.

So, for those of you who have been to London more recently, or lived (or live) there, thoughts and recommendations?

European leaders draft a “competitiveness” treaty meant to lower wages and cut pensions

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On February 27, 2011

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No, I’m not kidding. It includes:

  • a debt brake which will stop countries from deficit spending beyond a target;
  • automatic monitoring which can force pension cuts;
  • a requirement to monitor wages and productivity and to then lower wages if they rise “too quickly”

Every one of these are anti-worker.  The last is a modern version of the bankers obsessions in the 80s and 90s – wage push inflation, which was the idea that inflation is primarily caused by wages rising faster than inflation, so when they do, you must strangle them.  This was a stupid idea at the time, it is even stupider now, when the main inflation problems are commodity price (energy, food, others) driven, and exacerbated far more by huge pools of liquid money at the top than by ordinary citizens having pensions and good wages.

But ultimately the choice is simple: you either tax the top at very high progressive rates or you take it out of everyone else.  Since the rich have more control over the political apparatus than the middle and working classes, they chose to strangle everyone else, rather than themselves.

It’s them, or you.  They’ve chosen you.

You don’t always get what you vote for

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On February 18, 2011

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but you sure don’t get what you don’t vote for.

Fianna Fáil, the party in power for 20 of the past 23 years, faces a drubbing in Ireland’s general election on February 25, with Fine Gael, the other centre-right party, appearing to pick up support rather than the left-of-centre Labour party or more radical alternatives.

Guess the Irish are like Americans, they need to suffer a lot more before they get the point.  Of course, to be fair, the left parties didn’t provide a clear different option, either, so eh, they don’t deserve to win.

Meanwhile a friend just emailed me about Wisconsin.  I’m happy people are protesting, but the governor said, long before he was elected, that he intended to break public sector unions.  He’s just doing what he said he would do.  If you didn’t want it, why did you vote for it?

The Governor has a mandate.  Wisconsin voters gave it to him.

Ireland: With left wing parties like these, who needs right wing parties?

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On January 24, 2011

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Betrayal is ash in the mouth:

This followed successful negotiations this evening in Dublin between Ireland‘s finance minister Brian Lenihan and the finance spokespersons of the opposition parties to pass the finance bill by Saturday.

They agreed to a timetable to pass the crucial finance bill that will implement harsh austerity measures outlined in last December’s budget

It is also interesting to note that any party which had opposed it and run in the next election with a promise to either repeal it or put it to a referendum would have had a good shot at winning, but it appears none have chosen to do that.

Betrayal.

And worse than betrayal, the politicians are such lapdogs of monied interests, so desirous of keeping their access to imported luxury goods and being treated nicely by European elities, that they won’t even seize the opportunity to be powerful, to win an election.  This is similar to what we have seen in Washington, where the checks and balances the Founders believed would keep everything on an even keel have failed because politicians are more interested in money and their post-electoral careers, more concerned with being buddies with the rich, than they are with protecting or advancing their own power.

With a left like this, who needs the right?

As I’ve said before, this entire generation in power, “left” or right, must be swept from power.  As a group they are either faithless or gutless, always willing to stand down or sell out, never willing to fight for the people they claim to serve.

Hope!

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On November 13, 2010

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No,  I’m not being sarcastic.  I still have little hope for the US, but I am very heartened by what is happening in Europe.  The French actions and now the British students rioting.  It is, ironically, even more hopeful that the British government wants to try a student for attempted murder for throwing a fire extinguisher off the roof.  Next, they’ll be hanging people for stealing chickens.  The massive overreaction and the clear double standard, given the war criminals who ran the British government, none of whom have been prosecuted, is the sort of thing which indicates a loss of legitimacy, a loss of legitimacy which often leads to revolution: peaceful or otherwise.

At this point, my best guess is that when push comes to shove in Europe, the left will actually win in most nations.  They aren’t wimps, they are willing to fight, they are willing to clash hard with the cops and they are willing to directly attack the interests of the ruling class.  Unlike in the US, where the people willing to risk violence are right wingers, in Europe more are on the left wing side.

The economic collapse of the Eurozone, as multiple nations are forced to beggar themselves to bail out bankers and the rich, is similar to what is happening in the US, what is different is that the people in multiple nations are fighting back.  I’m hoping the Irish wake up and tell the Eurocrats to go fuck themselves, that the deal of joining the Euro was “we give up a lot of autonomy for a lot of prosperity” but that if they aren’t getting the prosperity, they want the autonomy back.  Multiple nations should sincerely threaten to go off the Euro. At this point they are getting economically crushed by being on it and forced to pay off banker’s losses, without the advantages of having their own currency. Right now they are going to take the economic hit they would take by going off the Euro, so they might as well do it.

Odds that the Euro doesn’t exist in 10 years are now, in my opinion, more than 50%.  It is not serving the peripheral nations interests, they are being offered a standard of living roughly equivalent to the 50s.  (My Eurocrat friends (you know who you are) will tell me this is unthinkable, and won’t happen.  We’ll see.)

The pendulum, in Europe, is swinging away from the right.  That’s good news.

So, HOPE!

(Oh, as an aside, who cares whether this sort of thing increases or decreases public opinion?  Public opinion is irrelevant, all that matters is the costs for the elites who make decisions.)

What would Turkey’s NATO allies do in the case of a Turkish/Israeli throwdown?

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On June 1, 2010

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The general assumption has been that if push comes to shove between Israel and Turkey, that NATO allies will not support Turkey, and that the US will supply Israel, but not supply Turkey.

I wonder if those two things are both true.

It’s interesting to note that Britain, normally a staunch Israeli ally, in response to the attack on the aid flotilla in international waters called for an end to the Gaza blockade.  As with both Turkey and Israel’s actions, one imagines this may be driven by domestic political concerns.  To put it simply, Britain has a lot more Muslim citizens than Jewish ones, and England’s Jewish residents tend to be liberal and unlikely to become radicalized and blow things up.  Electorally, helping Palestinians may be a winner.

In the US, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are generally considered amongst America’s strongest lobbies.  But it’s worth putting in perspective—when George Bush senior tackled AIPAC, he crushed them.  The vast majority of likely Democratic voters aren’t that sympathetic to Israel.  And to mess with Israel, all Obama has to do is stop protecting it at the UN, which is completely under his control, and not preferentially ship supplies to Israel in the case of a crisis, something which is also 100% inside the executive’s purview.

Obama has been snippy with the Israelis in the past, as when new settlements were announced during vice-President Biden’s visit.  While it’s hard to read Obama, I think it’s clear that he hasn’t appreciated the way Israel has taken the US’s support for granted.

And hey, changing the conversation from the BP oil spill can only be good.

I also don’t think it’s clear that Israel can use its nukes on Turkey without any other nuclear power threatening retaliation.  Glassing a major metropolis is not something likely to make Britain, the US or France happy.  In the US the idea of using nukes seems to occasion something of a yawn, but in the rest of the world it is the ultimate taboo.

Likewise, I’m not entirely sure that if Israel attacks Turkey’s military vessels in support of what may soon be considered an illegal blockade of Gaza, that other NATO nations won’t back Turkey up if it responds with a naval blockade of its own.  In particular, I’m not sure that the new British government comes in on Israel’s side, nor am I sure France does.  And either of those nations is more than capable of slapping Israel around if Israel gets too big for its britches.

Israel’s been pissing off its friends for a long time now.  This particular attack seems to have been done for domestic political reasons, and was a deliberate flouting of international law, a slap in the face “you won’t do anything about this, we can do whatever we want.”

Works, until it doesn’t.  I don’t know if Israel has crossed the line, but I think it may have.  For Britain, in particular, to come out with a statement calling for the end of the Gaza blockade is not a small thing.

All of which is a long way of saying, I’m not so sure the US, and particularly Britain, will automatically support Israel in any confrontation with Turkey.

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