Aditya Chakrabortty has an excellent piece in the Guardian today. About how it is the bankers who decide how much misery is to be “imposed on the Greeks” but that’s only a start of course. For all the protestations and screams of despair from the likes of Mario Monti and Nicolas Sarkozy, to name but two, that “we will not become another Greece!” heaven forbid, that is precisely what will happen.
Greece is neither a unique case nor the exception. Greece is the face of things to come all over Europe. Unless we have a revolution in politics and political and economic thinking and practice. It might sound like a big ‘unless’, but it is inescapably so.
Lord Wolfson (sponsoring a prestigious prize for economists on a plan for how to break up the Euro) is quoted as having said: “The Eurocrisis is like a runaway train. The longer you wait, the more painful it is when you have to jump off.” And this is not only true of the Eurocrisis but of the global crisis too I would say.
The whole story is that the banks and financial sector who created this crisis in the first place have decided that they’ll be damned if they are going to pay for it! So who is? the people of course. Who else? But the people do not have the resources to do so. Too bad! Let them eat cake (right Mme Lagarde?). As long as we save ourselves and our nice little earners.
And to their eternal credit, the so called political ‘leaders’ of Europe at any rate, are following this prescription and ruining their own economies on order to save, what? The banks? Well yes of course! I mean how can you have a functioning capitalist system without the banks?
By nationalising them perhaps? By regulating them? By bringing back the system that kept them in check throughout the age of prosperity and welfare states? And none of these suggestions implies we want to do away with capitalism. On the contrary, these would be the only way to preserve it.
So it has been set in motion and has begun taking effect. The peoples of Europe, beginning with the people of Greece, will be utterly impoverished and reduced to a kind of serf status. The Greek economy has already been ruined and the rest of Europe is already in this austerity induced recession which will lead not only countries like Italy and France, but perhaps also the Netherlands, to be ‘the next Greece.’
So when the life blood of these economies has been totally sucked out of them (as has already happened in Greece) to the benefit of the banks… Yes? Well, the banks will have won! The people will have been utterly screwed and the banks will be strong and dictating everything (as they are now). It is perhaps not by chance that the ‘technocrat’ Prime Minister appointed for Greece is a central banker, nor that he has negotiated a deal fully favourable for the banks but which constitutes the last nail in the Greek coffin. (With Prime Ministers like that, who needs external enemies?)
However, what is the banking and financial sector? If the real economy has been devastated in order to save it, how will it function from there on? When you need to suck up all the wells and sources of water to keep you going in your fight for survival, it should come as no surprise that once you have achieved your victory, which you could not have done without consuming all available resources of water, there is no more water left. So what are you going to survive on then?
That will be the Banks’ greatest Pyrrhic victory. UNLESS!