Debt is the Hidden Issue in The European Elections
The Undebted World
The citizens of the European Union are called to vote this week for the European Parliament. It is not a real parliament, and it lacks prospects for becoming one, since all important decisions are taken by the unelected heads of the European Commission and the European Central Bank, dubbed “the worst-run Central Bank in the world”.
These elections capture however the general mood of exasperation with current policies. Conservative and extreme Right parties will rise, reflecting widespread scepticism as to the economic course of the EU and its lack of benefits for the common people. The mainstream Left unfortunately neglects these issues, and it will pay the price.
The conservatives generally blame the weak and scapegoat the refugees, the immigrants, the women, and the poor, while promising to save the middle class from the onslaught of big capital. They create false hopes of easy reform, and they never denounce the exploitation inherent in today’s system. History shows however that small owners manage to resist financial stranglehold only when they make common cause with workers and the poor, and they are not afraid to fight.
The economy looks ever more frail. In all, the Eurozone’s nominal GDP stagnates, shrinking 12% in its six largest economies in 2008-2017. The European Union remains indifferent to the peoples’ needs, while it caters for every whim of the corporations. Even so, Quantitative Easing and other crony capitalist schemes promoted by the ECB, such as the Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs) or the new Targeted Long-term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO-III) cannot save the day.
Donald Trump declares bluntly “I don’t care about Europe”, showing that US considers our continent as little more than a collection of vassal states. In all countries inequality rises, corporations rule, and oligarchs impose their will. Liberal France exhibits an abhorrent authoritarianism against the Yellow Vests. Italy chases the refugees and the Roma. Workers’ rights and incomes are eroded everywhere, with women workers hit particularly hard. Even in successful countries, such as Germany, real wages remain below their 1990 level.
Exploitation today is often effected through debt. Public and private debt are crucial mechanisms for the ongoing transfer of wealth and power from the poor to the rich, from the weak to the strong, from the many to the few. Public discussion so far neglects this issue, even though financial expropriation’s explosive potential is well known to insiders and to the mainstream parties.
Public debt in today’s European Union totals 13 trillion euro, reaching 80% of its GDP. This average masks huge variations between the European periphery and the core. For example, Greece owes 335 billion euro or 181% of its GDP, Italy 2.3 trillion (132%), and Portugal 225 billion (122%). On the other hand German public debt at 2 trillion is 61% of the GDP, and tax haven Luxemburg’s 12 billion is only 21%.
Public debt is a political choice, not a law of nature. In today’s Europe it is used to subsidise corporations, not the vanishing social state. Instead of covering their needs by taxing the rich, states beg them for loans, get gleefully indebted to them, and promptly pay huge interest to them. Falling further down into the debt trap, states transfer huge resources from the periphery to the centre, and from poor to rich. This gigantic public debt entails the destruction of democratic institutions, turning citizens into debt peons, and stealing our children’s lives.
In 2010 the Troika appointed itself as saviour of Greece from its excessive debt, which then stood at 109%. The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed draconian austerity and the liquidation of public property. The Greeks’ sacrifices did not save them, but led to destitution and debt slavery. Parliamentary government became an empty form and a far Right criminal organisation, modelled on Hitler’s Nazis, surged. No European or national institution took responsibility for the debacle. But the peoples of Europe took heed.
The rest of Europe is but one debt crisis away from the fate of Greece. And the global financial bubble is guaranteed to bring this crisis forward, sooner rather than later.
Fiscal pressure leads to revolts or even cataclysmic change – it ushered to the French, the Russian, and the Chinese revolutions. But the debt crisis is not insoluble in itself. States have always the sovereign right to abolish debt, as Iceland did recently. This does not hurt the economy, but gives it a boost. It simply means that the rich will not foreclose for themselves bigger and bigger parts of future production.
We call on all European citizens, within or without the European Union, to check parties’ policies on debt. Parties lacking a clear policy on this issue either do not recognise its seriousness or simply side with the financial oligarchy.
The only responsible way to vote is to support parties promoting debt justice. This includes the abolition of odious public debt, and the resolution of non commercial private debt in favour of the many and poor debtors, instead of the few and rich creditors.
The UndebtedWorld Collective is an activist group based in Athens and Thessaloniki, with members all around the Balkans. We participate in the global fight for economic justice, and first of all for the abolition of the huge and growing economic inequality caused by debt in our part of the world. A French translation of this article is available here.
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The rulers of ancient Mesopotamia instituted an official debt jubilee every few years. They did this because otherwise the bulk of the population would be reduced to slavery and debt peonage, lorded over by the equivalent of today’s billionaires. The only problem with that, from their point of view, was that there would be nobody left to defend and fight for the state. The only people with a stake in society would be the billionaire class. That is the system we have today.
Erm, no. Eurozone debt to GDP is actually reducing over the past 4-5 years or so. In 2018 the ratio was 85%
Compare that to the USA, which has been increasing, and in 2018 stood at a whopping 105%
Per person, the Eurozone debt is around $33,000 whereas the US debt is double at $63,000.
The primary political and economic attacks against the EU are, as far as I am concerned, by the neocons and those wanting break apart the EU; divide and conquer has always been their game plan. Anyone else doing the same is ignorant, or a sheep, or mischievous.
Sources of my data –
EUrozone: https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/government-debt-to-gdp
USA: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp
The Eurozone figure is very similar to the UK by the way.
Japan’s is at 253%
Knocking the EU at every opportunity is getting boring.
JULIAN ASSANGE JUST CHARGED UNDER THE ESPIONAGE ACT.
17 ADDITIONAL CHARGES.
apparently there are images in this article — can’t see ’em.
Very shrewd and comprehensive summary of the situation we now find ourselves in, in a short article. Cameron more than doubled the national debt in the 5 years 2010-2015, from £750-1,600 billion, to bail out his looting kleptocratic chums in the City. (Of course Blair/ Brown would have done exactly the same.) Since then, it has risen apace to over $3,500 billion, £2,700 billion at current exchange rates. This is partly a function of the sinking pound, which lost a third of its value, $1.86 to 1.24, the result of QE bail outs and protracted negative interest rates (and nothing to do with Brexit, which will provide a convenient all purpose scapegoat for some time to come.) This is dwarfed by the Yew Ess Ayy. You can look at the US National Debt Clock adding well over $10,000 a second, but this is only part of the story. The Ben… Read more »
Most voters are ordinary people. Ordinary people have more or less average Stanford-Binet ‘Intelligence’ Quotients (which is pretty much what average means, in this case in the formal ‘reasoning’ department that BigB would classify as Cartesian bullshit) and have all the time available to apply it that decades of contrary, concentrated capitalist effort have left them–which, in their collective struggle to survive in the barely modest circumstances that socialist progress got them even before the Great Reversal of the 1970s and 80s onwards, was sweet fuck all and is now considerably less than that. So far, in talking to those people–ordinary, average voters–the quick, emotional hits of the right (and sometimes idiot left) wing populists about something their audience already knows via the school of hard knocks, but for which they do not have the time or energy left to express ‘formally’ (or, increasingly, even the barely half decent, prior… Read more »
Well said. Although I note you do enjoy words at a level most don’t. And you appear to enjoy that, too.
By way of gentle disagreement, the massive gaps left by the so-called education system do permit a certain freedom of exploration, at least in potential. The Orthodox isn’t quite what it used to be.
Profound change is a slow process, until it isn’t.
Helen Keller’s disability would have put her in the hands of caring people, and through that contact her ability to understand and empathise would have developed exponentially.
As for the self serving I hold out little hope.
I agree with your point on language Rob. The only chance for Truth to shine is through ‘street talk’
That ‘map’ of the EU with it’s accompanying Debt to GDP ratio shows that the countries with lowest D to GDP ratio’s are the (dreaded) Socialist Countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark…..and Russia(which is not a member of the EU), has a debt to GDP ratio of 11.8, Estonia 9.3. Even Iceland has a relatively low 47.4(maybe because they jailed the Bankers?) UK, 90.4%, and Germany 65.7″
Italy 131.2 and Greece 180??
One has to ask, what is the point of the EU? Who Benefits?(and one also has to ask, NATO, supposedly a European Defence Pact, has become America’s attack dog)…….
It may be a good idea to go back to basics, and rid the world of the EU.
What is the point of The EU?
− POSITIVE MONEY. 18 July 2015. Money Creation is a lucrative business for banks. “The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it”. ….John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975), p. 15. Laurence James Howell • 4 years ago Hi, The whole thrust of your approach is based on the fact that the applicant receives a “loan” This is a fallacy and not easily understood. New currency is created for the new applicant by the exchange of credit, the applicant via the Application Booklet which in reality is a prommissory note and it is this PM that has value via your signature and represents your future credit. You make a donation of the PM to the arranging bank of your future credit and the bank dip into… Read more »
From ancient times debt has periodically been cancelled by the rulers of the time. Usually unrepayable debt taken on from foreigners to finance the ascension of the rulers. Estates and wealth also regularly was taken from the ruling classes by the next generation of rulers. It was ever thus, when wealth was real. Since the bankers have taken control of wealth through their token money, who now can visit upon them the ancient restorative? The serpent must bite its tail or there is no balance. Greece (recent) debt of few hundred billion is not a lot, Apple Inc has more in reserves! It could have been cancelled and the faulty lenders should have taken their haircut. The equally dishonest debt ladening of the third world should have been cancelled. Just a decade or so ago there was a worldwide movement to have the G8 -20 deem that. There was a… Read more »
“… and forgive them their debts …” by Michael Hudson is required reading on this topic. It should also be pointed out here that money is (almost) always created as debt, out of nothing (ex nihilo). To create money otherwise is to ‘print money’ – a big nono. When created as debt, there is of course compound interest to pay back (see exponential growth and doubling time where e.g., 5% growth = 14 year doubling time). Thus, more money is always owed than is created, as a feature of the system. This, in turn, requires perpetual economic growth: no economic growth = increasingly visible and top-heavy debt burden. One way of correcting this repeating bubble is war and destruction (favoured by our lords and masters), another is debt jubilee (found repugnant by our lords and masters). Another would be to redesign the money system to not require perpetual economic growth… Read more »
Money (or shared value) isn’t made out of nothing – but out of contractual agreement – knowingly or unmindfully entered and accepted. I sense that contractual ‘law’ is the primary instrument of the psyop – or politics (relational organisation) by deceit. The idea of creation at the level of form is of negative and positive ‘charge’ that, if brought together, cancels to One – not to zero. But in terms of the ‘power to do things’ wholeness or ‘One’ is seen as loss of power and loss of self, and rather than operate FROM wholeness, we have ‘all the King’s horses and all the King’s men’ engaged in power struggle against feared Threat,that protects and extends fragmentation rather than align in healing it. Fragmentation is the nature of our consciousness and society and identity or worldview in polarised reaction rather than aligning in unified purpose, or wholeness, knowingly accepted and… Read more »
I agree with almost all of that, and the continuation at your blog.
It’s funny, there’s quite a number of people trying to communicate what you share in your reply here (and there) with the intention of using language to cut through the limitations of language towards something far less illusory, far more honest and authentic. The problem is how odd it all sounds, even alienating. Perhaps the point is not illusion and truth as polarities, but ever more courageous and open experiencing. It is that opening up in courage that I think of as evolution … at least in terms of the character of its vector.
I persist in developing or growing abilities by using them – within a consciously accepted purpose of communication – regardless that the capacity to ‘read’ or ‘understand’ is often a MIS-reading and MIS-understanding that comes back at the ‘messenger’ without often even reading the message. How then we respond is critical. I feel to trust that this is as it currently needs to be. The developing of new ‘structures and forms of value’ is by living them and appreciating the giving and receiving as a true feedback towards growing in willingness for communication. The current structuring of thought is manipulative and corrupted – as the attempt to impact, or change others. This is from an ‘impacted’ sense of self-division that re-aligns to the power of its ‘new condition’ – to learn to see and survive in a world of alienated subjection. Power struggle and identity conflict as normal. Relationship is… Read more »
Yes, the negative, the fearful, the defensive and cynical cannot last. Cascading self-destruction of fear-based processes is built in, inescapable. But that is no call to passivity. I think the reason for this self-destructive property is partly due to the more robust, caring and pleasurable experience of approaching reality with love and openness, which is active, conscious, deliberate. The seemingly ‘not understanding’ or ‘alienated’ are free to extend communication instead of grievance if they so choose and ask with regard to where they felt the moment of the LOSS of connection. Of course, but effective communication is determined by how well we attune to the other party’s state of being. “One way to see our times is as a crash course in awakening.” I think our entire ‘physical’ reality/universe is for learning how to awaken, or grow/mature towards love, that sort of thing. We are at a very interesting bifurcation… Read more »
“Death and taxes, Rodney” becomes debt and entropy. Erm, the entire global economy is debt – more or less …and debt funding is primarily cannibalising the remaining productivity. So it has been for the last ten years – the ‘lost decade’ – of ‘dead cat bouncing’ and declining world markets. Fictitious GDP and the magic stock markets keep rising; everything else keeps falling. Stagnant wages have been in decline since the 70s: about the same length of time that militant, never before seen, levels of global inequality have set in. These are symptoms of the capitalist death throes: chain stoking since 07 and the collapse of Bear Stearns. The article says vote for tax justice. Sound advice: only where do I do that? What we cannot seem to grasp is that globalisation is an integrated trans-national economy. There is a clue in the name and the tautology of the premise.… Read more »
Exactly! For me, the core challenge in beginning to want to end this lunacy is teaching ourselves – in various groupings of various sizes but across the planet – new, healthier, more sustainable ideas about what wealth is. We all know it’s not really money and all that stuff, but we’ve got to find a way of discussing how to create what sorts of wealth through what sorts of institutional change. It’s surprisingly hard to put this simply and quickly. The mad greed that is driving us dangerously close to extinction emerges from our unexamined sense of wealth as capital, as privately owned stuff, as money riches, etc. Our desires are continually manipulated in that direction, we are constantly cajoled to imagine only within its boundaries. And the costs of obeying the endless propaganda are societal atomisation, hopelessness, emptiness, despair, cynicism, etc. To change direction towards health (the real wealth)… Read more »
Buddhist economics: as if people and the planet mattered – that is a dialogue I have been waiting for since I read Schumacher …way back when God was a boy. Unfortunately, we can think progressively: but the international capital markets control governments, financial services, private equity, and commodity markets from offshore. Enact anything to tighten capital controls, or impose re-regulation, close tax loopholes; etc – and watch your currency disappear offshore as capital flight; to be replaced by hyperinflation and vulture capitalists picking over the bones of your putative progressive economy. You can call it ‘deglobalisation’; ‘anti-imperial’; or ‘post-neoliberal’. Only, it won’t be. It does not matter who is in charge: Corbyn, May, or Gove …it will be neo-neoliberalism! All the while we are bound to exchange information in conventions of duality: we will never truly understand why. Neoliberal capitalism is the endocolonisation of consciousness: something we discussed before. We… Read more »
“…if we haven’t precipitated any number of cascading failures leading to any number of potential Apocalypses…”
We have. The house is already empty. Only the lights remain on until the decaying restraints on our massive rervoirs of mindlessly accumulated energy cut off and bury the last incontroverable evidence of ‘intelligent’ life on earth.
Information exchange, or communication, requires sender and receiver, which is a duality of sorts. Then, beneath that, some manner of subject-object split for there to be distinctions/differences to communicate in the first place. Information is discernible difference. Wanting to have that gone is wanting the end of information, which is wanting the end of experience. A step too far for me. So, for me anyway, the irreducibility of dualism as a function of experience beyond a formless and unchanging “I AM” is a logical requirement for richer sets of experience. I prefer, notionally – I’m hardly in a position to choose! –, richer sets of experience. However, that duality is necessarily part of a netted whole. And that’s a Buddhist perspective, I believe. Something like: One is only possible through diversity, and vice versa. I like that. They still want the valorisable living standards. Yes, but with a horrible emptiness… Read more »
Your first paragraph wades us into a philosophical nightmare of communication, which we just about wade out of. The dualism is between two nodes in a netted whole: not two separate entities. The difference is between material and efficient causality (transmission of force on mass) and formal causality (transmission of information). This can best be addressed with reference to the ‘Two Truths’ doctrine – of conventional and ultimate reality. Duality cannot be negated: because it has no ultimate reality. It is a human abstract construction – conventionally applied. There is nothing wrong with this per se: only that the dualist convention has replaced the ultimate reality as real. This is vikalpa: imagination. The only thin that will be nihilated are the aspects of our conceptual taken-as-real constructions that are essentially destroying the world. Experience, entropy, etc cannot be nihilated. They are liberated from the conceptual tyranny that has brought us… Read more »
That answer has cleared up a few things I wasn’t sure about in your perspective. Thank you. I think our views are very closely aligned. “Life IS communication.” Bingo. But also interpretation, as there is no communication without interpretation, even within self.
Re. interpretation: My first para (mis)used the term “dualism” as an insoluble thing but in a good way; not as an unbridgable split but a necessary element of interpretation/translation. At least, that’s how I meant it. Certainly not as a nightmarish trap. For me, creativity and diversity emerge from interpretation. Kind of. Sounds vaguely, poetically valid to some degree…
The other day I found myself typing this: “There will be no revolution but it will be televised.”
“Poetically valid” is what we need to establish. I made the same points to Crank the other day. The idea that language is an objective reality in itself – re: the analytical ‘correspondence theory of truth’ – is, in itself, slow genocidal. That might sound extreme: but language patterns our behaviour. If we think that everything we can rationalise is already verified as true and real …oh dear! And, clearly we do. Economic theory is validated by extremist ‘mathiness’, and taken as a ‘science’. A science Keen and Hudson, inter alia, have debunked. But every government in the world operates on NCE: long after it has been exposed as pseudo (which was in Chile, before even Reagan and Thatcher). The big blackhole we have in our dualisation of reality is us. Language IS Being …language qua Being. Language is also a metonym for mind. We have neither an individuated mind,… Read more »
“To be human is to exist in language.” I think that’s Fritjof Capra. Consciousness/being is in part the creation of symbols for experience that can be shared/communicated. How those symbols develop into systems that structure perception (languages) must be reflective of where we’re at in terms of the quality of our consciousness. Of course that unpacks into seemingly endless amounts of detail, but I think as a general observation it is calming to some degree to think of it as a natural process. If we let it calm us, anyway. We are the quality we have earned. On the other hand, there is the habituated rut of ossified orthodoxy: “The only thing that gives me despair is just how bad does it have to get before we realise that?” The deeper the bifurcation point, the stiffer the ossification. “Systems prepare their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification,” said R… Read more »
I am not an ‘anything’-ist – but I have and can know giving and receiving as one – regardless the forms it takes. I Am That I Am does not relate specifically to a body or form – but to a quality of Self-aware be-ing. The realm of experiencing self-differentiation is not inherently or implicitly form or body-defined. But that is a realm of pure experience our mind is predicated against – in order to sustain a physically identified personality construct. There are those who ‘cross the veil’ and do not want to ‘come back’ from such a knowing Light. The recognition of truth is not really by an illusory mind, or in a world of illusion, or a result of the any illusion of doing. ‘It takes One to know One’ – but as the embrace of all that is true in our mind and our world, we unfold… Read more »
Schumacher and Erich Fromm.
‘To Have or to Be’ is one of the most important books ever written.
A book is nothing without a reader – who is nothing without the willingness and wherewithal to understand it and let him-herself be changed by living from what is revealed by the book in the reader. When the student is ready, the Teacher appears – or when there is willingness to know, the unfoldment of the answer within the active desire occurs. A chance meeting, remark or book appears. To such a one the book is alive. To others it is words. The spirit of the living is not reached by application of the dead letter – but if there is also a desire to heal or to know, then dead letters will not completely block answer – though old habits of thinking and seeing may co-opt and subvert it as part of the curriculum of those who try to possess the answer for themselves. In form (material sense), having… Read more »
Just as the Internet (of computing devices) operates a mess of protocols that have been brought to operate AS IF ONE THING, so our ‘mind’ has been acquired or inherited to serve a world that SEEMS self evident – but is an insanely complex self-dissociation. Only those who are releasing allegiance and investment in an insanely complex self-dissociation, are free to notice or become aware of what truly stands Obvious when the mind is released of conflicted activity. That which truly SUSTAINS is already given – or indeed Giving its its nature. But seeking to sustain an insanely complex self-dissociation is marching to a different drum. We are the capacity to recognise and extend or share value. But we can also give value to the unworthy and lose our own sense of worth by persisting in doing so. A profound sense of self-LACK drives a false set of needs –… Read more »
Absolutely!
I don’t think you are being critical at all. It’s just that we use a different lexis and method. My efforts are aimed at describing, with as much brevity as I can muster, logical flaws in the madness that (hopefully) act as doorways to the sorts of things you attempt to communicate. I also try not to prescribe. The only path I know of towards a healthier, more loving, less fearful way of being is via free will. The process cannot be forced.
Well said and indeed to the point! The forced is the false.(Even if we learn to pass off as if natural). I did not take much advantage of an ‘education’ as a lad but in later life recognizing the value of words when redeemed to serve an original and felt meaning – have naturally grown in the learning. I had to look up ‘lexis’ – and of course have added to my ‘lexicon’. For better and for worse. Free will! Or release and be released. Many or perhaps all have experience of pain or indeed trauma around freedom of being and learned ‘not to go there’ or let it move them EXCEPT under special conditions in which case freedom becomes associated with conditional ‘love’. Being truly moved is thus inhibited and associated with hates and fears. (And being forced with control and security). That there is a Movement of ‘Awaking’… Read more »
“The mind analyses, the heart knows,” is one way of putting it. And our culture is lost in the endless labyrinths of mind.
Love is unconditional, or it isn’t love. Growing into the state of love, or becoming love, requires courage, persistence and determination, as well as letting go – which, again, takes courage. But the process is not mind-based, it’s more of a heart thing, at the level of being itself, so not by analyzing or thinking yourself there. Mind is definitely helpful though, a wonderful tool and revealing of deeper processes, but does get in the way with its chatter and worry. You know this of course, I just wanted to echo your insights – which are echoes of others’ insights back through the ages – in my lexis 😉 by way of agreement.
Yes – The heart is the formless knowing – that also knows when it has been accepted by the mind instead of denied by any of its labyrinthine diversionary evasions.
Letting love abide or become in us calls out the belief we are unworthy or unsafe to love – or both.
The French cœur is heart.
When madness rises in the the land there is need to realign in true desire – which always unifies. The minds ‘wants’ are legion and always divide and conflict. If we KNOW we are using ‘as if’ or dealing with a Model or imaged forms of reality – then we are not mistaking it FOR Reality and investing in the identity it gives us.
Well met.
“…chain stoking since 07 and the collapse of Bear Stearns.”
Full marks for noting the first lightly publicized indications (deprecated) of the underlying rot instead of falling for the subsequent, official-narrative-preferred, diversionary crap about 08 and the Great Lehman Recession (which was the reconstructed ass-saving date). The fuckers knew all about it a full year before they told you about it, all the better to positi0n themselves for reaping the hedge-returned gains rather than positi0n yourselves for the better (c.f. the look on G.W. Bush’s face when Andrew Card ‘first informed’ (sick) him that Osama bin Laden had successfully flown s0me commercial jets into the Twin Towers).
And there’s the debt we owe our children.
Their future.
We’ve stolen it.
To give AS you have received is the nature of a true and balanced account. To take what is not yours and give what is not due is to dissonance yourself and feel fear, hate and guilt that then compels a sense of conflicted attempts at atoning in self-denial or sacrifice – and demanding it of others – and holding them to it. The imposition of a hated past upon the present – extending into the future – IS the sacrifice of a true Presence in and of which a true and balanced account can be received – but not ‘gotten’ or taken by loveless intent. Release others – including your children – from YOUR judgement – and learn to receive OF them what we forget BY judging. I responded to your post as to a psyop. Or as a propaganda for guilted debt-slavery upon which to run collective self-denial.… Read more »
The real problem are the beneficiaries of the fiat or printed money. The beginning of the debts for the others. Never mentioned! No problem when it is the state (SOE), but for the other countries, who are they?
Earlier than that. The hereditary holders of the intellectual property known as fractional reserve banking
Readers should bear in mind that this is only PUBLIC debt. When private debt – i.e., household, student, corporate and financial debt – are added and for good measure, unfunded future liabilities are factored in, total debt balloons to about three to five times public debt. In the US for example (sovereign) debt to GDP is 105%, but total debt adds up to approx 330% of GDP. The uncomfortable fact is that since the 2008 blowout debt has been rising faster than growth, pretty much everywhere. A sort of Keynesianism in reverse. Anyone familiar with the history of economic thought can easily spot the problem: the theory of Diminishing Returns (Ricardo), the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the problem of transforming surplus value into profit (Marx) and the decline in the Marginal Efficiency of Capital (Keynes). All of which tendencies are intrinsic to the system. Unfortunately… Read more »
“Unfortunately modern economic theory doesn’t bother with these venerable sages and thinks it knows better.”
Correction: for “modern economic theory” read “modern manythings theory”. If it were only economic theory we still wouldn’t have enough of a workable paddle to get us out of this shit creek.
‘Parties lacking a clear policy on this issue either do not recognise its seriousness or simply side with the financial oligarchy.’ – major parties DO recognise it, but keep schtum, presumably for 2 main reasons. [1] because they will be rewarded with a seat on the board either during or after their political career. [2] they feel hopeless because the economic dynamic is embedded too deeply and for too long. Meanwhile, attempts by citizens to counter this fundemental injustice are met with state violence (see yellow vests). The corporate media play their part by overblowing the significance of internal or external threats, or by constant distraction such as endless articles about Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage rather than exposing the way in which a corrupt economic system is at the heart of most of the real damage (driving wars and exploitation in its many guises). The average Guardian reader is… Read more »
All in all, a very sound and sensible article … until we come to this: The conservatives generally blame the weak and scapegoat the refugees, the immigrants, the women, and the poor, while promising to save the middle class from the onslaught of big capital. How do we square such a criticism with the following: The economy looks ever more frail. In all, the Eurozone’s nominal GDP stagnates, shrinking 12% in its six largest economies in 2008-2017 … Even in successful countries, such as Germany, real wages remain below their 1990 level. Given the fact that wages are falling while rents are simultaneously rising, it follows that Europe has more than enough people for now. Though it may be true that some parties are demagoguing the situation for nefarious purposes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a legitimate issue. The refusal to see anything wrong with unlimited immigration is, in fact,… Read more »
And what of the USA?