Euro Voters Reject Austerity

Voters in Greece, France and even in local elections in Germany rejected enforced austerity in recent polls. French voters narrowly elected the Socialist Francois Hollande on a platform demanding renegotiation of austerity measures demanded by the European Union. Taxes are already high in France so he’ll have his work cut out for him raising taxes enough to make a difference. At least if he can put people to work the country won’t dive deeper into debt and deficit.

In Greece the two main pro-austerity parties, who between themselves have governed the country for the last 40 years, together received less than 32% of the vote. The anti’s however, divided between the far left and right, will probably not be able to agree amongst each other to form a government so new elections are likely soon. But that means they won’t be eligible for additional bailout money and will likely default, though since they’ve already forced creditors to take substantial haircuts, to all intents and purposes they’re already in default. It’s no more than a pretense to think otherwise.

If they knuckle under and accept IMF and ECB austerity - the leftist candidate called those international bodies loan sharks - there’ll be 5 to 10 years of economic pain. If they default, they’re basically facing the same 5 to 10 years of wrenching changes and economic dislocations, but at least their pain won’t be for the benefit of the banksters and 1%.

The one percent’s mania for austerity for everybody but themselves is diving economies ever deeper into recession. If people aren’t working they aren’t paying taxes but are requiring government help for survival. Cutting is the wrong thing to do when a country is in recession, however, if a country runs big deficits in good times there’s no leeway for additional spending during downturns. As mentioned previously, the half of Keynesianism that governments have conveniently overlooked is the need to build surpluses during boom times. It’s too easy to prop up economies and make everything look good by spending money you don’t have. It’s too easy to think you can rely on growth or inflation or something to come along in the future to make the debt easy to manage, because as we are seeing it doesn’t always work that way.

 In any case, almost everybody is missing the point. Last year greenhouse gas emissions grew faster than ever before. Just imagine what would’ve happened if many parts of the world were not in recession and there was no effort whatever to curb emissions. Those record emissions might’ve been doubled. So while my heart goes out to those developed world people in America and Europe who are jobless and suffering, I have to say to those same people, Thank you for being poor and not being able to consume.

What’s needed is a new paradigm where slackers are tolerated if not appreciated and those who live simply by choice are honored; where growth is reserved strictly for non-material plane efforts: knowledge, intellect, beauty and spirituality. The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is promoting a Gross Happiness Index in place of Gross National Product which includes everything that is bad for us as well as good… every time an auto accident causes personal or property damage, it gets added to GNP. You want to help the economy? Get cancer.

We have to retrench. If somebody really doesn’t want to work (and so much of what’s classified as work today is so demeaning and undesirable, who can blame them) why not give them the minimum for survival and thank them for not consuming. Nixon had the right idea with his guaranteed annual income, which, if I remember correctly was pegged at $4000 per year. With a little casual work on the side, that’d be enough (in today’s dollars) to live a simple but decent life. We also need to take France’s lead and shorten the work week along with encouraging deflation to make life cheaper. It’s already happened in the housing market. It’s now much more possible for an average person with a job to afford a home.

Shortening the work week has the added great advantage of tremendously reducing rush hour traffic. Some people would work shorter hours five days a week, others would work a day less. Either way, all transportation systems would have much lighter burdens. Now most people are forced by the eight hour day to come and go at the same time. Shortening the work week would also give people the time to get involved in society and community, not to mention family, self -improvement and pleasure.

The way to deflate the economy is to tax the rich, really tax them, tax the shit out of them. Nothing good comes from the wealthy having too much money. If they have less money to throw around, prices would be forced down. This is especially true in places like New York which are magnets for vast wealth. If people can no longer afford sky high prices for purchasing or renting housing, then their prices will go down, and all real estate prices will follow, benefiting everybody (but the landed wealthy) in the long run.

The current system is top heavy. BBC interviewed a bankster asshole a while back who kept repeating how important the financial community was to the UK and predicting doom and disaster if a small stock transaction tax were imposed. He conveniently ignored the hundreds of billions of dollars the banksters cost the people in bailouts. A majority of people in a UK survey working for the banks said they were there strictly for the money and that they didn’t think they deserved to earn as much as they did. With so many people in finance earning upwards of half million a year, they’ve turned once middle class London neighborhoods into enclaves where only the upper classes can afford to live and by extension have raised the cost of housing for everybody in the city.

The other major change that needs to happen to save the world is to tax advertising, exempting only small businesses. I’m convinced that marketing is the root of all evil, not money. Money, after all, can do good things, while the sole purpose of marketing is to convince people to buy things they might not need or are possibly bad for them. Even if what they are encouraged to purchase through adverts isn’t necessarily bad, the act of consuming is going to consume our planet and people need to be encouraged to hold back, to not indulge, to buy only what they really need. The present path is not sustainable, let alone healthy.

Admittedly I’m way out of synch with prevailing philosophy (it’s not the first time). The idea of applauding slackers and promoting deflation and reduction in place of growth is about as likely in the present political climate as encouraging pedophilia and welcoming pollution-caused cancers, nonetheless that’s where the world needs to go. That it can’t possibly go that way is a sad commentary on the state of our only planet and its inevitable downward slide into catastrophe.  

Bush Nightmare Almost Over

Though his misunderestimated legacy will live on to haunt the American polity for a painfully long time and we’ll no longer find grim humor in his stupendous ineptitude and mendacity, his Reign of Error is thankfully nearly over.

Our man Obama has triumphed. The popular vote was closer than I expected but the electoral vote was so lopsided no amount of Repug voter suppression or thievery could’ve changed the outcome.

And history was made with America electing its first multi-racial president. I phrased it that way since in fact, he’s not really black anymore than he’s white. Being any part black is considered a taint, which goes to show how far there still is to go regarding race. If you contrast American blacks with Africans, it’s clear that the vast majority of African-Americans have a good deal of white, or other races, mixed in.

As someone who picketed Woolworth’s in 1960 because of its segregated southern lunch counters, to see a person of color in the White House is breathtaking. Maybe it should now be painted a nice shade of tan and called the Off White House.

Interestingly, in Thailand, which is about 15% Chinese, people of mixed heritage refer to themselves as Chinese as a matter of preference.

At any rate, our man of the moment will have his work cut out for him. His biggest challenge will be to keep people from losing their faith when things don’t magically turn around overnight. FDR brought hope to America, not to mention make-work jobs and food on the table, but the economy remained in the doldrums for years.

A president with heart can keep people going through extremely difficult times, hopefully transformational times, but will not be able to resurrect the endless growth paradigm. No amount of fiscal stimulus, whether in tax cuts, infrastructure investment or corporate welfare, is going to bring back the old free wheeling economy. (By the time it might be theoretically possible again, four or five years down the line, the world will be entering resource scarcity mode.)

Nor should it. Starting back in the 1950’s and ‘60’s when mechanization of industry – then called automation – was allowing businesses to increase production with fewer workers, there was talk of people working less and having more time for family, community, life. That did not sit well with the business community since it meant workers would also have less income and reduced ability to consume.

Instead of a more social world where people worked less and had more time for leisure, working hours lengthened to the point where Americans recently were working 200 more hours per year than back in the ‘70’s. This movement came partly as a result of trickle down economic policy. As mentioned recently, putting a lot of money in the hands of the wealthy results in the bidding up of prices for many necessities, especially housing. As costs rise, average Joe’s are forced to work more to get by. In the midst of all the recent booms, large numbers of people were forced to work more than one job just to survive and most families had to have multiple wage earners.

Of course, it wasn’t just survival; we also entered consumption mode, later to intensify into hyper-consumption. Much of the extra work went for four dollar lattes, 60 inch TV’s and the many other accouterments of the ‘good life’. If you didn’t have the ready cash for all those good things, you could always borrow it on your credit card (at very high interest rates). With the people at the top having so much surplus money to ‘invest’, they made it easy for people to get into debt.

Rather than engaging in frantic and futile efforts to resuscitate the old economy - and engendering huge amounts of new debt in the process - we need to create a new economy. We will need to spend heavily to insure that necessities are provided for - homes to live in, food to eat - but well-being needs to replace consumption as the primary goal. To that end, the work week needs to be shortened to spread scarce jobs, as well as provide the leisure time that Americans have been so sorely lacking. Europeans, in contrast, are guaranteed four weeks paid vacation per year with many countries mandating more.

That change would be impossible without universal health care that is provided outside the current employer-based system. The current system encourages the opposite - fewer employees working increased hours. With the government taking health care costs out of the equation, people and jobs would both be more flexible. Americans could go on about working to live rather than living to work.

Of course, I’m being unbelievably, unrealistically utopian. Have you ever heard a Dem, let alone a Repug, speak of building a stable, sustainable, light-on-the-earth economy? Of shrinking the economic sphere so people could work less and enjoy life more? Unthinkable. Yet, it’s the only way that makes sense.

One of the greatest times of my life came when I had the least money. I did the authentic hippie commune thing back in the early ‘70’s. At one point I calculated that 35 of us were living on about $600 per month, in total. We had no electricity or flush toilets, very limited piped water, all cooking and heating was from wood we had gathered. We bought 50 lb. sacks of rice, kerosene by the barrel for our lamps: We lived simply.

Yet it was also one of the healthiest, happiest, easiest and most enriching times of my life. We never went hungry, though often didn’t have all the variety we would’ve wanted. Meanwhile, our diet was probably a lot healthier than one we would’ve preferred: you know, brown rice and veggies most of the time.

We had no electricity for stereos or TV’s so we had to make our own music. We conversed, meditated, communed with nature to fill our time. I was apprehensive about living without modern conveniences before going to live there. The realization of how unimportant those things are was almost instantaneous upon arrival.

We lived in a beautiful spot. It wasn’t special compared to a lot of places, but we did have forests, gardens, clean fresh air, a mountain view, a swimming hole with clear, clean mountain water for those hot summer days; really, all one could ask for.

We had work to do - but not jobs, except for occasional off site work like fire fighting and brush clearing - and lots of leisure time. It took very little actual work to keep the community going, no more than 10 or 15 hours per week per adult.

I’m not saying everyone should go primitive as we did. Only that living on a lot less doesn’t necessarily mean living less. Truly, no amount of money could’ve bought a healthier, more enlightened lifestyle.

Our goal needs to be well-being, not to get the economy back on track. Growth is not what we want unless it’s intellectual, social, spiritual. The more money spent trying to prime the old economy for a renewed growth cycle, the harder and longer the transition will be to the new way of life.