Published at 07:57 on 15 July 2015
I mean, even the IMF (hardly a radical-left source) is saying the austerity the Greek ruling party is pushing for is too much and Greece needs more debt relief. So much for the “radical left” Syriza party.
I guess there’s another lession about Establishment politics corrupting everything it touches here. Even “anti-Establishment” parties really can’t be trusted to accomplish much if the ever get power. The seats corrupt whomever happens to sit in them.
Published at 05:48 on 10 July 2015
Because the austerity is continuing, odds are the depression there will continue, and so will a lack of ability of Greece to repay. Though the beginning of the process of writing off those bad loans is encouraging, the can has merely been kicked a few more years down the road.
And I’m outta here to for a few days to do botanical surveys in the Okanogan Highlands. It’s a part of the state I haven’t seen in about twenty years.
Published at 09:27 on 2 July 2015
Some basic points:
- Yes, there was irresponsible borrowing and spending on the part of past Greek governments, which ran up a huge deficit which caused the current crisis.
- It takes two to tango: Irresponsible borrowing is not possible without irresponsible lending. Part of the responsibility of lending money is doing the due diligence necessary to minimize the chance of lending it to a party who won’t be able to pay it back.
- Greeks has suffered greatly for their past government’s role in creating the current crisis. There’s an actual depression going on there. The unemployment rate is 25%, and public sector services like health care are collapsing.
- The capitalist class is suffering very little for their role in creating the current crisis.
- If the Euro didn’t exist, currency devaluation would have stopped this crisis from getting to the current point. There still would have been unpleasant repercussions from the significant devaluation of the drachma, but they would have been less severe and more equitably shared between the Greeks and the banks.
- Therefore the existence the Eurozone is responsible for turning a merely unpleasant crisis into a severe one.
- If Greece stays in the Eurozone, there will be further unpleasant consequences. Austerity and the associated austerity-created depression will continue.
- If Greece exits the Eurozone it will also cause further unpleasant consequences. Greeks will lose a big chunk of their wealth as Euro assets get converted into devalued drachma ones. But, the devalued drachma will make Greek exports and vacations cheap for foreigners, which will stimulate the Greek economy and end the depression. The humiliating status quo of having Greece’s domestic policy dictated from abroad by the “troika” will end.
Therefore it’s best for Greece to exit the Eurozone. Ditto for Spain, for basically the same reasons.
The Eurozone was a mistake. It created a tightly unified currency without a tightly unified governance structure, which spanned a region with significant cultural and economic differences. Such a thing was pretty much fated to collapse. Let it shrink to the point where it only contains the most affluent and developed European countries. Or let it gradually disappear entirely; the choice is up to the Europeans.
As difficult as the process is, it’s better to let it begin now than to dig the hole deeper and make the inevitable more difficult in the future.
Published at 23:00 on 19 June 2015
This is interesting. The normal state of affairs, of course, is for even nominally “radical leftist” governments to cave to the demands of the capitalist class. But the Greek government — so far, at least — has refused to simply cave.
At this point it’s brinksmanship. I would expect at least a few more “temporary” loans to be made before any final outcome happens. And the “final” outcome might not be so final; it may well just kick the can six months down the road. A real final outcome may well be years off.
Published at 20:29 on 11 June 2015
Things like this.
I’ve noticed the hypocrisy before, and how “family values” seems only defined in a rightward direction by politicians. Even Democrats typically concede that issue to the other side. So it’s refreshing to see a candidate talk about what ought to be obvious.
Mind you, the chances of Sanders actually winning are slim to none. And if he wins, Congress will still be controlled by the same Establishment politicians (of both parties) that it currently is, and his agenda will basically go nowhere.
There’s also the missing piece of mass radical pressure from below, something that has accomplished other periods when reformist politics “worked”. Because it never really worked by itself — reformism only works when the likely alternative for the ruling class is to lose everything.
No, the advantages of the Sanders candidacy are precisely moments like these, where the overall political dialogue is brought back in a more rational direction.
Published at 12:49 on 10 June 2015
Despite how Tacoma has had a successful, municipally-owned cable TV and Internet utility for years, Seattle’s idea on doing anything vaguely similar is a big no-can-do. It’s basically the same attitude that made Seattle about forty years late to the game when it comes to building a rail mass transit system.
Of course, any time a billionaire wants pet projects for that entire neighborhood which he owns, or a taxpayer-funded sports stadium for his team, the City of Seattle sits ready and eager to bark on command. Same if it’s a freeway project, even if it uses a risky, unproven technology and it’s a road which would normally be the state government’s responsibility, anyhow.
Because, well, priorities. Duh.
This is another one of those days where I get to feel smug and satisfied about living outside the Seattle City Limits.
Published at 07:35 on 3 May 2015
NPR just aired a piece on Saudi Arabia which goes beyond the territory of mere brown-nosing and might more properly be described as brown-tounging. It once again replicates the tradition of the Establishment media approving of tyranny so long as the tyranny happens to be pro-US-empire.
It was a discussion of the succession to the Saudi throne. First, they spoke in approving tones of how the first in line to the throne has extensive experience in the Ministry of the Interior. Imagine if Cuba announced such a successor; stories would be chock full of the ominous implications such a move held for the future of more openness in society (and rightly so). But not here. Instead, there’s praise for the Ministry of the Interior’s work on fighting terrorism.
And then they discuss how “popular” the second-in-line to the throne is, citing as evidence how billboards have popped up all over Riyadh with his image on them. Well, whoop-de-doo. There’s billboards all over Pyongyang with Kim Jong-Un’s image on them. Does this in any way prove he’s immensely popular with those whom he rules?
Keep all this in mind if Hillary Clinton wins the election and starts to amp up efforts to undermine the tottering government in Venezuela, and NPR fawns in approval because the government there is “authoritarian”. Which, of course, it is, but it is also far less repressive than the absolute monarchy they aired an approving story of today.
Published at 15:11 on 19 March 2015
Every so often an Establishment politician says something so staggeringly moronic that it’s crystal clear to me that, as much as I might differ from the stereotype of what a radical is, I am a radical and not a liberal.
And this is one of those times.
I mean, really now. In a class society where the tiny elite dominates political discourse via campaign contributions and mass media control, where the real political struggle is for candidates to pander to the elite and compete with each other to raise money to spend, the problem is supposed to be, get this, that there’s not a law forcing people to vote?
Yeah, right.
So the political system isn’t as thoroughly a rotten joke in Australia, which has mandatory voting. So what? Australia also has a history of far better level of class consciousness than the USA. It’s part of the legacy of being a penal colony, where the throwaways of Britain’s emerging capitalist economy were discarded to.
That, and not any petty exercise in authoritarianism for those who abstain from voting, is the salient difference.
One might as well point to the fact that the deck chairs on the Titanic were all jumbled together at the lower end of a listing deck as evidence that the problem with that ship lay in its arrangement of deck chairs, and not any iceberg damage below the water line. After all, ships whose deck chairs remain more neatly arranged don’t list and sink. QED, baby.
Published at 09:47 on 10 March 2015
In this story.
Before I go on, let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Yes, the human rights situation in Venezuela sucks (and I’ve not been shy about admitting it here). The government is getting increasingly authoritarian there, and anytime opposition leaders are routinely jailed it’s outright creepy.
But, Venezuela is hardly the only place where the human rights situation sucks. Let’s compare two other petro-states.
First, Malaysia. It’s probably the closest situation to Venezuela of the two I’m comparing, because like Venezuela it’s (in theory) a democracy. It’s also a place where opposition leaders get jailed (and sometimes tortured). Venezuela has been dominated by the Chávistas since 1999. Malaysia has been dominated by its ruling coalition (without interruption) since 1957.
Second, Saudi Arabia. Here there’s not even the pretense of democracy. It’s a flat-out absolute monarchy. Remember all the hand-wringing about the evils of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and how they were thoughtlessly demolishing their country’s historic legacy and had a tyrannical “Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue” enforcing the strictest possible interpretation of Islamic law with an iron fist? Well, Saudi Arabia has both those attributes: Exhibit A and Exhibit B.
And please, cut the crap about Venezuela being a security risk to the USA. What’s happening there isn’t nice, but it’s also internal nastiness and not an external security threat. It bears pointing out that this is in distinct contrast to Saudi Arabia, which has proven itself to be a breeding ground for terrorists.
It’s not a surprise Venezuela is coming up again in US Establishment politics. First, the regime there is looking increasingly shaky. Second, there’s presently an oil glut (which is in fact a big part of why the regime is losing its popularity). That means that if worse comes to worst, the ruling class won’t be provoking a big oil shortage if the US loses access to Venezuela’s oil as the spat escalates. In fact, I’m sort of surprised that it’s taken this long for the ruling class to bring the issue up again.
But please, get real. The issue isn’t human rights (as much as the US ruling elite might assert it is). It’s merely that someone other than who the ruling elite desires is in power there. Just look at what’s happened in Honduras since the US ruling class installed a regime there if you have any doubts about that.
Published at 08:52 on 3 March 2015
A for-profit prison with a long history of complaints for inhumane conditions has been shut down after the inmates organized an uprising and rendered it uninhabitable. Links to the Establishment media’s coverage of the event can be found here (NYT) and here (NPR).
I chose the words in my opening sentence very carefully, particularly the “organized an uprising” part. It is a common trope on the radical Left to label any outbreak of unrest an “uprising” or “insurrection”. This is a mistake. There is a big difference between an uprising and a mere riot, even though both typically appear same in the eyes of the law. A riot is spontaneous, chaotic, and unplanned; an uprising is planned and much more organized (though still plenty chaotic by its very nature). The Rodney King riots, for example, fell short of the criteria to be considered uprisings. That one might wish something were so does not make it so.
But it’s not that hard to read between the lines about what happened in Willacy County last month and see that it was not a spontaneous and unplanned outburst. In the NPR link above, even the spokesman for the now-shuttered facility spills the beans about how it was organized and planned in advance in his attempt to downplay the story. And it didn’t simply spring out of nowhere: as I said in my opening sentence, there was a long, sorry history of poor conditions at that prison.
And what were the results of the uprising? Not murder and mayhem like what happened at Santa Fe decades ago (an actual prison riot). There were only a handful of injuries (pretty much inevitable in such a situation) when it was all over. The damage was mostly confined to the inanimate structure of the facility itself. Moreover, the damage was severe enough to cause the facility to be closed indefinitely for repairs; apparently the prisoners had decided to plan and focus their efforts in that direction, and not let themselves be distracted by petty retributions against guards or disputes between rival groups of prisoners.
The outcome was the shuttering of a facility that had persisted in operating despite repeated attempts by Nice Liberals to work within the system and reform it. All in all, it appears to be a most inspiring example of direct action.
