Category: Class Warfare Page 19 of 36

We have more empty homes than homeless people.

We have more food than necessary to feed everyone in the world.

This is not an era of actual scarcity. It is an era of artificial scarcity.

We either already have, or we have the ability to create, a surplus of every necessity that is needed.

This includes housing, food, and clothing. We still have enough water, globally, if we are wiling to be smart about how we use it, and where there are geographical problems regarding access, the problem of access is easily solved. In general, we need to be a bit flexible in how we grow our food; we need to stop draining aquifers and help those farms that over-use aquifer water to grow crops that use less water, or help those farmers find other livelihoods.

Early research shows that intensive urban agriculture creates between three to ten times the food that traditional agriculture does.

We are also short of security. This is another artificial shortage, though it’s harder to fix. Most countries that have been destroyed recently were destroyed in large part because of outside intervention, whether from Western, Eastern, or Jihadi influence. We are in a cycle of blowback after blowback, with the first step being to stop doing things that will cause devastation.

Education is unequally spread throughout the world, but this is another problem which is solveable: We have the books, which cost cents to reproduce, the telecom networks are almost everywhere, and we can train the teachers. If we wanted to spend more money on teachers and less on finance, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Again, most of this “scarcity” is artificial. It is imposed through a money system where a few people have the right to create money, and everyone else has to access it from them. That money is nothing, more or less in this context, than permission to use society’s resources, whether it’s people’s labor or the results of that labor.

The only real restrictions on our ability to supply what people need are overuse of sinks (like carbon) and overuse of resources, whether renewable or non-renewable, but we either have the necessary technology to move away from that overuse, or we have scientists and engineers who would love to create it for us, but who can’t get the resources/money they need to do so.

But much of this is low hanging fruit; we already have enough food and housing and far more textile capacity than we need.

Dividing up the world as we do between countries is a huge problem in which our resources are wasted where they aren’t needed, while others go without. Colonial powers have drawn ineffective and nonsensical borders, as is the case with most of Africa and the Middle East.

By centralizing the production of various resources (and that includes both ideological and intellectual resources) in a few areas and to a few people, we have pooled necessities in places they aren’t needed and denied them to other people.

These are social problems, with social solutions. The idea that technology will “fix” them is somewhat (though not entirely misguided.) We already have the material means to care for everyone, we do not. This cannot be laid directly at the feet of technology–we have had this capacity for at least a century or so.

Oh, and the shortage of spare time for so many; with the shortage of work for others? Complete social construction. We are doing too much of the wrong kinds of work, and too little of the right kinds of work, and those choices are also social.

In the end, scarcity of the goods humans need most is almost always, in the modern world, artificial: It’s a social choice.

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Look, Trump’s Policies Are Nativist Populism

By Ian Welsh

On August 31, 2015

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He supports Social Security.

He wants universal healthcare (something better than Obamacare, which is not universal healthcare).

He believes in a bilateral trade policy rather than “free trade.”

Now Trump wants to increase taxes on the rich, including getting rid of the carried interest exemption, which would hammer hedge fund managers and so on, whom Trump is correct about: They build nothing—in fact, they are a drain on the economy, straight and simple.

This is married to a nasty, anti-immigrant side, of course, and to some equally nasty social positions. However, on economics Trump is proposing some stuff that any progressive should want, and which has been anathema to the Republican party since Reagan. (In 2000, Trump was for some stuff, like eliminating capital gains taxes, a position with which everyone should agree.)

Moreover, he is winning with these proposals, showing that right wing economic populism is still powerful: It was simply not being represented by the Republican party (or the Democratic party, for that matter).

Trump, Sanders, and Corbyn are all showing what is actually possible, if you dare to propose it. Positions which have polled with majorities for decades are not death to politicians. Who knew?

Corbyn and Trump, in particular, have been vilified and ridiculed by the Press, yet both are winning their respective elections. Ten years ago, such vilification worked. A candidate could propose those policies showing well in the polls, yet still lose the primaries.

Today, this doesn’t work, because people have had it; they know that just because a politician is favored by the press does not mean that politician will help them, and, in fact, will most likely make their lives worse. They know this because the politicians to whom the press and the establishment have granted their approval, for over 40 years, have (with only a few hiccups) have made their lives worse.

Meanwhile, if trend lines continue, Sanders will take the Democratic nomination (though, of course, trend lines may not continue).

This is a realignment moment: People are no longer willing to put up with politics (and economics) as usual. All three men, if they win, will have mandates. They have been running honestly on what the press and establishment consider “radical” policies (the population does not agree, and never has. Americans, in particular, said they were right wing and consistently polled as wanting rich people taxed, along with various other populist policies).

Expect the vilification to continue, and if Sanders continues to make ground, expect the press to turn from largely ignoring him, to attacking him.

Looks like Brits and Americans may finally, after about 30 years, have a chance to vote again for something other than Tweedledee or Tweedledum.

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US Corruption vs. World Corruption

By Ian Welsh

On July 31, 2015

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One of the most hilarious things to me is Americans whacking other countries for being corrupt. Russia is a favorite target, but the US abuses virtually every non-Western country for “corruption.”

I’ve pointed out before that this is absurd. There is no more corrupt country in the world than the US. The bank bailouts were pure corruption, performed even though a supermajority of the population was against them, even though the banks had broken the law systematically, and even though the banks were bankrupt due to decisions they knew were corrupt, illegal, and (yes), stupid.

The US election system is flagrantly corrupt, with billions of dollars of direct and indirect donations from the rich. You buy supper with a candidate for thousands of dollars a plate. You buy White House access with much larger donations. Third party PACs spend hundreds of millions.

The bribery in the US is legal. Legal. That does not mean it is not bribery. That does not mean it is not corruption. This system was arranged by the monied classes to ensure that politicians owe them and do not harm them, and that they continue to pass laws and take actions which help them.

The regulatory class is completely owned. There is a revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury and Federal Reserve, for example, and Wall Street pays far better. When senior officials leave, they get jobs from those whom they regulated, or give speeches for six figures a pop. Politicians are treated the same, receiving lobbying jobs worth six to seven figures, board positions, and so on.

This is all legal, but it is corruption.

Jimmy Carter recently said this, with respect to Citizen’s United:

an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery

But don’t be deceived, Citizen’s United was just the final capstone: The US was already a completely corrupt, bought, and owned regulatory state before Citizen’s United. Citizen’s United just made it much easier.

I repeat, in absolute terms, there is no more corrupt country in the world than the US. In relative terms? Who knows, but the US being corrupt matters more than corruption in any other country. (Though China is coming on strong.) US financial law is essentially extra-territorial: The US is capable of crippling other countries’ economies almost entirely with simple Treasury orders. The US has the world’s largest military and regularly intervenes in other countries with air strikes, assassinations, and general terror.

What is unique about America is not its corruption, many countries are corrupt, it is the sheer hypocrisy the pretense that America is not corrupt, because Americans have made their corruption legal.

Corruption is the inevitable consequence of concentrated wealth. It always occurs when you have great inequality, it cannot be avoided.

You want corruption back to reasonable levels? You want it illegal again? Take the oligarchs’ wealth away from them and break the great monopolistic and oligopolistic companies or bridle them with uncorrupted regulators who will crawl up their backside and tax the hell out of them.

Nothing else works (and the second solution works for a while). Nothing else has ever worked. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

You want you country back, and your children and yourselves to have a future?

It’s you or them. So far Americans keep choosing them.

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Where Greece Should Go from Here

By Ian Welsh

On July 7, 2015

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Ok. Enough.

I’ve been walking people through what’s happening, what it means, etc. in Greece now for a while, with an able assist from Mandos and commenters.

Let’s cut the crap. Merkel has come back and said that Germany will not allow debt reduction and insists on austerity—and harsh austerity, worse than the last offer. She is backed by most EU members and the European Central Bank, which has put the screws into Greece so hard that imports are piling up on docks because Greece can’t pay for them.

ENOUGH.

Syriza needs to get its act together. The Euro is a stupid idea, and it always was. It cannot work absent central fiscal policy (aka, national governments reduced to de-facto provinces). It does not allow governments the ability to devalue their currency when they need to increase exports, to print money, and so on.

It cannot work. It never could, as designed. It was always a stupid idea. (And yes, I opposed it from the beginning.)

Oh, it could be fudged. They could forgive Greece’s debt (but then would have been expected to forgive a bunch of other countries some of their debt), and money could be funneled to Greece in various ways and so on. But that can’t be done because of neo-liberal doctrine, which insists that debts are sacred and that creditors must never lose money, which is ludicrous and a direct violation of how capitalism works. People who make bad loans MUST lose their money. Without that, it isn’t capitalism and the virtues of capitalism don’t work.

This is not in question. This distribution of money to people who know how to make a profit and not lose it (and thus make “Productive” use of it), is about three-quarters of the pragmatic argument for capitalism.

Austerity is beyond stupid: In order to fix the economy, you reduce gross expenditures and expect that tax incomes will increase faster than deficits and the economy will grow as a result. It is so dribblingly inane on its own merits that anyone who believes it either hasn’t spent three seconds thinking, is an ideologue incapable of thought, or is on the take, expecting that the benefits of austerity will flow to them.

The Euro is moronic as implemented. Austerity does not do what it is sold to do. And neoliberalism does only one thing more effectively than other forms of capitalism (those which actually work): It transfers money to the rich faster.

Syriza needs to leave the Euro. They are not going to get a good deal, or even a mediocre deal from Europe. They will be better off leaving the Euro. If they do so, they should simply repudiate all debts.

Yes, all of them. Once they leave the Euro, Europe and the neoliberal order will go all out to crush them. It does not matter what they do, they will be target number one.

They should then cut a deal with Russia for oil and a pipeline, and align solidly with Russia and China, asking for aid from those two countries.

They should cease any attempts to stop refugees from flooding out of Greece into the rest of Europe. Heck, put them on buses and ship them to the border.

They should nationalize the distribution of food grown in Greece. Greece grows enough food; just start delivering it to every household. Saddam did this effectively, Greece can too.

That takes care of oil and food (Greece has plenty of refinery capacity).

Medicine is the next issue; Greece will have to arrange to get the meds it needs through Russia and China.

There are other details, but mainly Greece should do everything it can short of leaving the EU (not the Euro, the EU) or going to war to make Europe’s life miserable. Why? Because then they have something to negotiate with.

There are those who will say this escalating, blah, blah, blah.

Yes, it is. The path of capitulation, down which even Syriza was plodding (the deals they were willing to sign were terrible and would have kept Greece in depression for the foreseeable future) did not work. It is time for Greeks take their own future in their hands and be bold.

“Europe” doesn’t want them. Fuck Europe. A Europe which has turned its back on the foremost modern Greek virtue, Democracy, is not a Europe worth bothering with. Greece and the Greeks should regard themselves as what is left of the true Europe (along with Iceland), sneer down their noses at the barbarian Eurpeans and embrace and trust themselves.

Why? Well, because frankly, they don’t have anyone else.

The current world order is breaking up anyway. Russia, China, and various other nations hate how it is run, and they are moving to destroy the credit/banking gridlock which is the real power of the West. Yes, it would be nice if Greece didn’t have to be one of the first into the breach. But, at this point, every other option is worse.

As for the European leaders insisting on this course of events, and they are insisting, they will be seen as those who destroyed the Euro. Their treatment of Greece is a clear lesson to everyone else in Europe that the Euro does not and cannot work. The moment a country gets into serious trouble (and that time will always come), Europe is not flexible enough to do what needs to be done. The current pols, who are complicit in the crimes of austerity and neoliberalism cannot run against Europe, but they will be replaced, in time, by those who will.

Greece’s situation has been a completely unnecessary mistake and a crime. The amount of money involved is trivial. Simply following basic, capitalist ideology (lenders lose their money if they lend to people who can’t repay) would have solved the situation five years ago. If they’d behaved like slightly decent and competent technocrats, they could have easily solved the crisis and bailed out private investors in any number of ways, while still allowing the Euro and mild austerity to continue.

The leaders of Europe are idiots, as well as being ethical monsters who have impoverished and killed many for an ideology whose sole purpose is to make a small proportion of the population very, very, very rich. This will be seen as the moment when those leaders broke the Euro. Combine this with the US abusing its stranglehold on the financial transfer system to starve countries out, and stupidity like Iraq, and they’ve hastened an end to the American/Western hegemonic period–decades earlier than smart, human policies would have achieved.

A finance system exists, socially, only to direct money to where it is needed to create more social good. It has no purpose otherwise. It is not an end in itself. Money that is not a useful commodity (a.k.a. food) is not a store of value and never was. It is a fiction used to allow feedback in the system and to act as a distribution mechanism for goods and services based on perceived social utility (a.k.a. people who have more money are assumed to have more social utility).

A society which understands NONE of these points will vastly mis-allocate its productive resources, as, currently, ours is doing. That mis-allocation will, in time, lead to collapse or another disaster (in the much larger picture here, much of the world is now in both a pre-revolutionary state and a pre-war state, though most people won’t believe either until they’re dying).

I have spent my entire life watching these people burn down the house to generate heat and call themselves geniuses. Neoliberalism “works” because it bribes just enough people to maintain enough of a constituency, while piling money into the hands of a very few people who will do anything to keep it going because that’s how they became filthy rich, and virtually any system which cared about the common good would take their money and power away from them.

Neoliberalism works only in the sense that it creates the circumstances for its own continuation. But it is a locust ideology: It cannot last long in historical terms and it will not. That doesn’t mean it will be replaced by something better, the world has often seen centuries to millenia go by with most of the world ruled by nobles, kings, and despots and the majority of populations peasants, serfs, and slaves.

But, be clear: It will end. Be clear: Greece, whether they buckle or fight, is making its end come closer. And be clear: That end will almost certainly result in hundreds of millions to billions of death in war, revolution, famine, and so on.

None of this was necessary. But some people wanted to be really, really rich and many other people were willing to make corrupt deals that cut out most of society from any gains. Most of those people will be dead before the shit hits the fan in any way that would effect them, safe in their core nations. But not all will be dead.

I hope that Juncker, Merkel, and Draghi, among others, live very long lives. Sincerely. I hope they live to be a hundred, with their minds sharp. I hope this devoutly.

Meanwhile, all the stupid options having been exhausted, having a mandate from the population, and with the EU saying “lie down after taking your cup off so we can gather in a circle around you and kick you,” let us hope Syriza does what needs to be done. (They might also wish to just reinstate Varoufakis as Finance Minister. There is no deal to be had, and they’re going to need a competent technocrat to do what needs to be done.)

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Consequences of the Greek OXI (No) Vote

By Ian Welsh

On July 5, 2015

Comments

A few points:

This isn’t about soaking bankers. Bankers, with some exceptions, were paid off during the “bailouts.” Right now it is taxpayers who are on the hook. If you wanted this done right (lenders take their losses), it had to be done in 2010.
The immediate question is if ECB will restore “lender of last resort” services. If it doesn’t (a shocking failure in a central bank), then Greece will be forced to issue its own currency. This may mean, initially, bills denominated as equal to Euros. They won’t sell on the market for equal to Euros, though.
Many Greeks who voted “no” seem to think that the vote was a way of giving Syriza a better hand in negotiation (this is what Tsipras said, so it isn’t an irrational belief.) We’ll see whether or not the Troika and the EU are willing to re-start negotiations. If they aren’t, I wonder if Greeks will blame them or Tsipras.
The IMF has called for debt reduction and admitted they got it all wrong. How much that matters, I’m uncertain, but it does give space for a deal. Such a deal would still involve some austerity measures, just not as many or as harsh.

In the short to medium term, this referendum matters more to Greece than Europe. Unless the monetary authorities are completely incompetent, they should be able to contain the shocks. Greece’s economy is small; the amount of debt involved is, actually, small as well.

One should not discount the possibility that the ECB and “Institutions” are incompetent and will screw it up, mind you. Their behaviour thus far hasn’t just been cruel, it has been stunningly stupid from a clean, technocratic POV. Mandos’s article about “How EUians see this” was important, but also necessary to understand that the actual austerity policies followed were delusional if the ECB (or anyone else) thought they would lead to a sustainable debt load for Greece. They could not and did not.

It’s rarely clear in such situations if the people making decisions believe their own propaganda: Did they think it was sustainable and wouldn’t lead to a crisis like this? Did they know it would lead to a crisis and think the Greeks would sit still and take it (not completely unreasonable, actually, given how much pain people have accepted from plutocratic policies in the past).

I don’t know, but I think it’s the winner’s curse: Neoliberalism (and austerity is part of the neoliberal project), has been winning for so long that those who came of age and rose to power during it (essentially all our central bankers, technocrats, and politicians) cannot imagine it would ever lose. The look of incredulity is that of the three hundred pound bully when a 90 pound weakling doesn’t buckle. (Again, this doesn’t mean that the technocrats don’t also think they’re doing the right thing morally.)

If I were them, and by that I mean “not me in their position, but actually them,” I would crush Greece flat and make an example of it. If Greece comes out of this like Iceland, with a healthy economy in three years, then other populist movements (left or right) will receive proof that their policies can work. Democracy, as opposed to technocratic rule, will gain legitimacy, and so on.

This is not a prediction; as Machiavelli observed hundreds of years ago, [people] are generally destroyed because they are unable to be either wholly good or wholly bad. Doing the right thing from day one would have been an excellent policy. Having done the wrong thing, these decision makers’ futures are intertwined with it: They will not keep their positions if Europe turns genuinely populist. Worse, that populism will almost inevitably turn against their masters, the oligarchs.

This is unacceptable. To oligarchs, Europe is one of the few places actually worth living. Yes there are a few American cities, maybe you might want a vacation home in one of the nice Australian or Canadian cities; but that’s about it. Tokyo’s great, but you don’t speak Japanese. Dubai, despite its beauty and being created exactly for oligarchs is too soulless and boring even for oligarchs. Russia or China, well, China’s polluted, and if Putin or the Chinese Communist party says jump you do it, or you get dead or in jail. Oligarchs don’t rule Russia or China, though they hope to in the future.

This is also a significant moment geopolitically. Putin said that he won’t help Greece monetarily as long as it is in the EMU (uses the Euro.) That’s as good as saying he’s open to helping them if they aren’t. Greece is geographically important, can be used as a pipeline route (or terminus), and could offer Russia a warm water port. There are deals to be made. It’s for this reason that the US Treasury secretary keeps telling the Europeans to cut the debt and make a deal; the US doesn’t give a damn about Greek suffering, but it does care if Greece swings towards Russia.

So the game continues, and it is actually important. Greece is a small country, but it’s not a country whose population is smaller than most cities, like Iceland. Its success or failure at standing up to austerity, neoliberalism and technocratic EUian ideology could make a large difference in whether other, even larger countries, decide to do so. And by “other, even larger countries,” we mean essentially the entire south of the EU: Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Ireland might consider it. Finland should consider it and after a few more years of pain in the Euro straitjacket, may well do so.

These countries subsidize the north, and especially Germany, by keeping the Euro cheaper than it would otherwise be (let alone the value of a reborn German Mark). If they go, Germany’s economy is suddenly going to look a lot less efficient and sell a lot less goods (but, wait, isn’t every advantage the Germans have because they are good people?).

Interesting times, my friends. This is power politics, with huge amounts of real power and massive amounts of money in play– not today, but as consequences of what happens today. The fate of Greece matters, not so much in itself (except to Greeks and kind-hearted souls) but for what it will mean for Europe, NATO, Russia, and every country in Europe. It could be one of the dominoes which leads to the end of the neoliberal era.

You’re watching history: While remaining sympathetic to those being ground to pulp by its wheels (or in between your own screams while caught in said wheels), let me suggest that you enjoy the view.

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Greece and the Emperor’s New Clothes

By Ian Welsh

On June 25, 2015

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We are all familiar with the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, yes? The emperor is sold “clothes” which are imaginary, wanders around naked, and everyone pretends he’s clothed until a child points out he’s naked?

Commenter MFI pointed out yesterday that Oliver Blanchard, the chief IMF economist, had made the following assumptions about Greece in July of last year:

1. The Greek economy would grow by three percent both this year and every other year until 2020.
2. Inflation would average between one percent and two percent a year both this year and every other year until 2020.
3. The Greek government would run a primary budget surplus of four percent a year.

As MFI points out, at best, these assumptions are delusional. Greece is in forced austerity; they aren’t going to make these targets.

Edward Harrison has been on the same beat:

…the IMF revised down its estimate for Greece’s 2014 gross domestic product by some 22 percent in the space of 18 months.

And:

Greek GDP forecasts collated by Edward Harrison

As Edward and MFI note, these are damning.

But they are of a piece with estimates of the effects of austerity. Austerity is a reduction in demand. Reduction in demand leads to economic activity being lower than it would be otherwise. Governments who spend less money buy less stuff, this is indisputable. Then, everybody has less money and almost certainly buys less stuff as a result, thus reducing the size of the economy.

Meanwhile, money has been given to rich people and corporations who, mostly, have not spent it and when they have spent it, they’ve spent it on luxury goods.

Austerity cannot help but reduce GDP. This is what it is designed to do.

But it is sold as a way to make economies better. You cannot, as a government or quasi-governmental agency (like a central bank or the IMF), admit that austerity will make the economy worse and many of the people in an economy to which it is applied worse off.

The question, then, is the old one. “Evil, or stupid?” Is Blanchard, for example, such an ideologue that he believes the assumptions which allow him to forecast a better economy under austerity? Are the other economists who have made similar forecasts similarly stupid? I mean, assuming moderate stupidity (normal), they might have believed it in 2008 or even 2010, but we’ve seen the effects of austerity since the financial crisis, and that’s going on seven years.

These people are either very stupid or are doing what they feel they must to keep their jobs and their membership in a very lucrative club. If they were to say, “No, these policies don’t work,” would they keep their jobs?

It’s not that we don’t know austerity doesn’t work, if by “work” you mean “improve the economy more than not being in austerity would,” we do. It’s only ever worked in theory by making very dubious assumptions, and it has never worked in practice.

So, at this point, if you believe austerity works, you’re either an extraordinarily blind ideologue, or you’re crooked, on the payroll, and know what you’re doing.

Austerity is the policy that the IMF, most central authorities, and all neo-liberal parties (which means almost all parties in power in the EU) believe in. It is a policy which works: It puts public assets up for sale which would not be otherwise, so that rich, private investors can buy them up. Combined with “unconventional monetary policy” (the two are Siamese twins), it makes sure that the rich get richer, corporations are flush with cash they do not use to hire workers, and that everyone who isn’t rich, or part of the close retainer class, loses.

You really, really don’t want to fall out of that close retainer class. They are paid very well (Lagarde receives a six hundred thousand per annum salary, entirely tax free), they are treated well, and their future job prospects are secure, as are those of their families.

The Emperor, in other words, is bloody well wearing clothes. If you want to remain the chief economist of the IMF, you had best remember that.

Austerity does what it was meant to do. I predicted its course in 2009, as did many others, and it has performed exactly as expected.

It is working: Its advocates are its beneficiaries. The people who enforce it are benefiting as well and there is a sufficient constituency, both at the elite level and the common level, to keep it going (remember, Cameron was re-elected in the UK, and Labour got many votes when its essential promise was “slightly kinder austerity”). A few countries (Germany, for example) are winning under this policy regime.

So austerity will continue. It is a successful policy which does what it is supposed to do and which has a constituency sufficient for its continuation. It must be sold by lies, to be sure, and many of those who sell those lies probably believe them, because they personally benefit from pushing austerity and people prefer to believe that they are honest and working for good.

Others, I am certain, know it is being sold with lies. Who falls into which camp? Who knows? The end affect is the same.

The Emperor has no clothes and beatings will continue until morale improves.

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The Lesson of Greece Is that Europe Is Run by Functional Sociopaths or Psychopaths

By Ian Welsh

On June 24, 2015

Comments

Syriza has made an offer which includes pension cuts and VAT tax increases, and “institutions” have refused to accept it, saying that (among other things) parametric measures aren’t acceptable (though they accepted them from Spain and Ireland). They will now counter-offer.

By “among other things” they mean:

Labour laws, collective bargaining, pension reform, public sector wages, opening up closed professions, investment as well as value-added tax and corporation tax.

You do not believe, in any case, that any of these things will be good for ordinary Greeks, do you?

Total Greek Debt is about 330 billion Euros. 246 billion of that is “bailout funds,” of which over 90 percent went to private banks. As I (and many others) noted back in 2010, Greece should have defaulted then. This “problem,” such as it is, is now almost entirely the creation of attempts to bail out private lenders who should have done their due diligence, and who deserved to lose their money.

I note that the ECB is doing 1.1 trillion of “unconventional monetary policy,” about a third of which is Greek debt–mostly debt they piled up after 2010. A hundred billion of that, piled into 100 year bonds at 1 percent interest would about deal with the problem; Greece could handle the remaining debt.

A hundred billion, in today’s world, is really not that much money.

But the issue has never been Greek debt, per se, the issue has always been making it clear that no one can default and get away with it, let alone leave the Euro. Greece has been used to make an example, and when they elected a government with a mandate to negotiate an end to austerity they had to be taught an extra lesson for thinking that democracy trumped the right of debtors to run the government of those who owe them money and can’t pay it back.

(This is not remotely an exaggeration, as the terms of the deals made include the Government having to run new policies past “institutions”).

Greeks do not want to leave the Euro. They cannot devalue their currency, which is what they need to do, without leaving the Euro. They do not, apparently, even want to default and stay in the Euro.

In other words, Syriza has no bargaining position based on a popular mandate. Its mandate was “end austerity, but do it without being able to make any credible threats.”

Based on its public mandate, Syriza has no BATNA–Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In essence, they must take anything that Europe offers.

Or Syriza can turn to the public and say, “there is no deal to be had.” But “institutions” never give them the time necessary to, say, run a referendum to get a mandate.

Greeks want to stay in the Euro, as commenter Mandos has often pointed out, because the Greek government is terribly run. They’d like to be run by the German government. The problem is, the Germans aren’t offering the government Germans get, they’re offering austerity run by the Greek government.

If Greeks want a good government, they’re going to have to create it themselves. The first stage requires giving a government a mandate allowing them to do what reason and reality both dictate must be done: seriously threaten to default and/or leave the Euro, and follow through with the threats if a good deal isn’t forthcoming.

Absent this, Syriza’s only choices are to buckle, or to do something for which they don’t have a mandate. Of course, sometimes doing the right thing goes against the wishes of the majority of the population–and these are big steps, so it is hard to blame the Greeks for being squeamish. And in hard electoral terms, if Syriza did the right thing, the economy would need to improve before the next election or they’d be out.

But, also in hard electoral terms, they may as well, because if they don’t, they’re going to lose the next election anyway. The Greeks voted them in to end austerity; they will have failed, and the Greeks will most likely try someone else.

Good luck to Greece, the Greeks, and Syriza. They’re going to need it. But luck tends to come to those who are thinking straight about the reality of their lives, and the Greeks aren’t.

As for the “institutions,” let this be your daily reminder that our leaders are functional sociopaths, at best, but act more like psychopaths. Austerity has meant immense suffering, but it is more important to them to bail out their rich donors and friends and help make them richer and more powerful, than it is to make tens to hundreds of millions of lives (far beyond Greece) less miserable.

Psychopaths.

When you’re trying to predict how European elites will operate, assume that they are sociopaths on a good day, psychopaths on any other day. The pain and suffering of those whom they do not personally know is not real to them, and they do not care how bad life is for anyone who doesn’t make their lives, personally, better.

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Humans to Go Extinct in Three, Two—

By Ian Welsh

On June 23, 2015

Comments

So, a very conservative study on the rate of species going extinct has come up with the following:

One hundred and fourteen times faster than the normal background rate.

“If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover, and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” lead author Gerardo Ceballos of the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico said…

Cheerful.

This is the point where a sane species would be in a controlled panic.

Which brings us to Laudato Si. The obvious issue with Luadato Si is Pope Francis sticking to current church doctrine against birth control. It is incontrovertible that every person has a carrying load for the planet.

But Francis makes a great number of good points, starting with the fact that we are vastly wasteful. It is not that we have necessarily surpassed the Earth’s carrying capacity in theory (only in fact). Half the food in America, for example, is wasted. Suburbs are vastly wasteful. Lawns are idiocy. Most of our buildings use far more energy than they need to. Improved agricultural methods can produce up to ten times as much produce on the same amount of land, for less water. Urban indoor agriculture using LEDs is showing great promise. Centralized manufacturing, which requires concentrated power which cannot yet be provided by renewables could be decentralized even with out current tech, and within fifteen years or so we could radically decentralize it.

And so on. There are more good ideas than one could possibly list. These ideas would allow us to support our current population on much less land and allow the environment to renew itself. We could massively reduce carbon output at the same time, stop overfishing the seas, and everyone would still be fed, have a place to live, and so on. Yes, most suburbs would be a thing of the past, but the question of “suburbs” vs. “human survival” shouldn’t be a hard one.

All of this would probably not be enough.

Yeah, sorry.

We’ve left it too late. The issue is the carbon and other hothouse gases already in the environment. They are so high that we will see release of methane from the arctic, both land and sea. This has already begun. It will continue. Even entirely stopping carbon tomorrow (which is impossible) likely wouldn’t be enough. Cutting carbon by half would definitely not be enough.

We needed to be acting back in the 1980s when climate change science first became overwhelmingly likely to be true.

We didn’t. An alien species studying our extinction, should it come to that, will only be able to conclude we did it to ourselves.

What I’m seeing is that we are on the wrong side of a self-reinforcing cycle.

We’re going to need geo-engineering. It’s messy and we’ll probably screw it up, but we don’t have much choice left.

Because there is a chance that even doing everything right, we’ll still go extinct (especially if we bork the oxygen cycle, a non-zero possibility), we need to be crashing biospheres. We’ve never made biospheres work before; we cannot create artificial environments cut off from the world which work. We need to.

That understanding will be very useful in any scenario–from cleanup of major, but not catastrophic, environmental damage, to triage on a crashing ecosystem, to saving a breeding population in a world which no longer supports humans.

A sane humanity, who self-governed in ways that made sense, and which was concerned with the welfare of their children, would have headed off most of this. A not-completely-insane humanity who had failed to take action before would now be making this the highest world priority.

We are doing neither.

Instead, our best and brightest are figuring out the best possible ways to serve ads, creating the most impressive mass-surveillance system the world has ever seen, and playing leveraged financial games which are resulting in austerity for much of the world. Destroying the human resources which we should be using to save ourselves (and so many other species, who have done nothing to “deserve” their extinction).

One can argue, and many will, that this is entirely the fault of our rulers. Maybe, maybe not, but it won’t matter when we’re all dead, and I’m not seeing widespread revolts because of mismanagement. And hey, if worse comes to worst, and enclaves are set up to save a small breeding population, remember, it’s the “leaders” who did most of the damage who will get into them.

You won’t. Your children won’t. You live or die with saving the Earth.

Probably you die.

But, then, most people probably figure they’ll die before the environmental collapse gets them. If they’re at least middle-aged, they’ll probably win that bet.

Their kids won’t. Too bad for them. Loved them enough to do everything except save their lives from a completely predictable threat.

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