Radical Austerity’s Brutal Lies: How Krugman and Chomsky Saw Through Dehumanizing Neoliberal Spin[
http://www.alternet.org/radical-austeri ... 039203&t=9 ]
Some saw through the ruse.
By Patrick Smith / Salon July 11, 2015
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QUOTE: "In the space of six months I have surrendered a lot of illusions—the illusions of an American, for I long (and naively) looked to Europe to evince some alternative to America’s military-centered assertion of its ambitions. It does, but the distinction is merely one of means, not ends: In the Greek case, Europe wanted regime change in Athens and probably still does. It prefers to do with bond debt what Washington likes to do with bombs".- - - - -
The referendum in Greece refuting the European Union’s unbending insistence on radical austerity as the medicine Greeks must continue to swallow is simply not to be missed for its multiple layers of significance. To put the core take-home first, we are all Greeks as they stand against the neoliberal orthodoxy. Their battle is perfectly of a piece with one that needs to be called by its name and waged in our great country.
The Greek crisis has given us an altogether exposing moment, to put the point another way. It is universal in all that it lays bare about the world’s political economy as it has come to be over the last, say, four decades.
Three understandings—recognitions, maybe—were immediately plain as the polling results came in Sunday evening. The Tsipras government, left social democratic in its thinking, won a triumphant 61 percent of the electorate’s support in its stand against the E.U.’s utterly irrational desire to impose more human suffering in the name of market principles. And the magnitude of the victory underscored the truths Greece just gave us:
• Greeks voted courage over fear. They insisted that there is a value higher than market value—this value being the commonweal, the well-being of a society and the people who comprise it. They asked, Does the polity serve the market, or does the market serve the polity? This is one of the essential questions of our time, however rarely it gets asked. Posing it is a very large deed in itself, a favor to all others, and the Greeks’ reply is larger still, of course.
• The European Union, with roots in the too-distant idealism of the early postwar years, has just destroyed any claim it had to stand among humanity’s higher aspirations. The E.U. will remain, obviously, but effectively in form only—a collection of powerful but hollow institutions that inspire little loyalty. Its nakedly corrupt use of power against Greek democracy devastates what may have remained of its original ambition. For now at least, there is no reason to do anything other than oppose it in the name of the very thing it was supposed to stand for: human freedom.
• “What’s going on with the austerity is really class war,” Noam Chomsky said in an interview with the estimable Amy Goodman on this site a few days ago. [
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/05/noam_ch ... r_partner/ ] It is time we got used to this term, which requires that we discredit our densely layered mythologies to the effect that class conflict occurs
elsewhere but never in our Providential land. Greeks ’r’ Us: In what they have just done we must see what must be done in America if this nation is to avoid letting the neoliberal order subvert it altogether.
Alexis Tsipras’ last speech on the eve of the referendum is a remarkable document. [
https://mydesiringmachines.wordpress.co ... d-courage/ ] Unless you speak Greek, you have to read it in an English translation of the French translation, but it comes over clearly nonetheless. (And isn’t it interesting that the French would translate it but no one in the Anglo-American world would bother?)
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How to explain what the E.U. has just done? For months one has had to ask, Why does Europe insist on intensifying the very policies that measurably worsened Greece’s predicament, turning disaster into calamity?
There are a few answers.
One, the E.U. and Germany are ducking responsibility. So long as they insist on more austerity they do not have to acknowledge the strategy’s failure. As Paul Krugman has pointed out repeatedly in his New York Times columns, Greece has done nearly everything demanded in the two previous bailout plans only to find its circumstances worsened. Let Greeks suffer in the cause of our political reputations: This is in essence the position. Disgraceful, of course.
Two, the power of ideological belief and the out-of-hand rejection of all imaginative thinking both derive from the reality Chomsky named: Austerity and the neoliberal orthodoxy it manifests are at bottom forms of class war. When we recognize this, the mystery starts to evaporate.
Failed policies, malnourished Greeks, widespread homelessness, shuttered schools and hospitals—none of it counts as more than collateral damage in the campaign to turn Greece into a low-wage, low-cost, deregulated park wherein global corporations can do more or less what they like.
Third, it is time to put the E.U. in the file with all other supra-national institutions developed in the post-1945 period. The three I have in mind are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. Anyone who does not recognize these as instruments deployed in the West’s campaign to roll the neoliberal order across the globe like linoleum needs to look more objectively at events.
Back in the early 1970s, Shirley Hazzard, the Australian-cum-British-cum-American writer, published a scathing account of the U.N. called “Defeat of an Ideal,” and the title tells you the sad tale this book recounts. An institution founded on hope and aspiration ends up a gross betrayal of its own purpose—not least, in the U.N.’s case, because Washington insisted on waging the Cold War in its corridors.
Hazzard concluded that the U.N. should be dissolved so that the community of nations could begin again and retrieve the original principles written into the charter. I am not quite there yet with the E.U. Tsipras is right to try to keep his country in the eurozone, but I doubt he is looking for fraternal harmony.
I doubt he has any illusions, either, as to the long-term prospects of an enduring accommodation between a social democratic populace and a set of neoliberal institutions answerable to no electorate. Tsipras needs a deal to spare 11 million Greeks more suffering and chaos, full stop. I do not think we should look for more to come of this.
In the space of six months I have surrendered a lot of illusions—the illusions of an American, for I long (and naively) looked to Europe to evince some alternative to America’s military-centered assertion of its ambitions. It does, but the distinction is merely one of means, not ends: In the Greek case, Europe wanted regime change in Athens and probably still does. It prefers to do with bond debt what Washington likes to do with bombs.
Parenthetically, think about the Ukraine crisis in this light. The same very modest distinction applies. Washington and the Europeans continue to bicker about method—how to yank Ukraine westward, violently or otherwise—but no more.
The dream is over. What can I say?
Just one final point, actually.
The term “class war” is powerfully provocative in the American context. You do not use it unless you are willing to put up your dukes, for the myth of America as a middle-class nation with no contesting endowed and deprived extremes is a wide plank in the platform of our claim to exceptionalism. How many times have you heard the trusty, “We’re all in this together”—articulated most frequently when it is perilously obvious that we are not?
We Americans would do very well, then, to reflect on the Greeks’ predicaments for what we may learn about our own. In yet one more context, unless we overcome the exceptionalist narrative we stand little chance of understanding who we are, what is being done to us, and what we must do.
Last Sunday, Greeks told the rest of us they are perfectly clear on all three points. Are they not to be envied in this respect, even amid their sufferings and struggles.
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Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington
Quarterly, and other publications.