The new form of warfare

An interesting look on how Europe wages wars today.

Language is adopting itself to reflect the economic and political transformation (surrender?) now underway. Central bank “independence” is euphemized as the “hallmark of democracy,” not the victory of oligarchy. The task of such rhetoric is to divert attention from the fact that the financial sector aims not to “free” markets, but to centralize control in the hands of financial managers. Their logic is to subject economies to austerity and even depression, sell off public land and enterprises, and reduce living standards in the face of a sharply increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid. The idea is to slash government employment, lowering public-sector salaries to lead private sector wages downward, while cutting back social services.

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Third World countries from the 1960s through 1990s were told to devalue in order to reduce labor’s purchasing power and hence imports of food, fuel and other consumer goods. But Eurozone members are locked into the euro. This leaves only the option of “internal devaluation” – lowering wage rates as an alternative to scaling back payments to creditors atop Europe’s economic pyramid.

So “saving the euro” is a euphemism for governments saving the financial class – and with it a debt dynamic that is nearing its end regardless of what they do. The aim is for euro-debts to Germany, the Netherlands, France and financial institutions (now joined by vulture funds) to preserve their value. (No haircuts for them). The price is to be paid by labor and industry.

Government authority is to lose most of all. Just as the public domain is to be carved up and sold to pay creditors, economic policy is being taken out of the hands of democratically elected representatives and placed in the hands of the ECB, European Commission and IMF. The latter is playing “good cop” for the time being, to the ECB’s “bad cop.” But all financial institutions are willing to see Spain’s unemployment rate rise to 20%, much as in the Baltics, with nearly twice as high an unemployment rate among recent school graduates. As William Nassau Senior is reported to have said when told that a million Irishmen had died in the potato famine: “It is not enough!”

How much austerity is “enough” – for more than the short run? “Helping Greece remain solvent” means, in practice, helping it avoid taxing wealth (“too rich to pay” is the new corollary to “too big to fail”) and roll back wages while obliging labor to pay more in taxes while the government (“taxpayers,” a.k.a. workers) sells off public land and enterprises to bail out foreign banks and bondholders while slashing its social spending, industrial subsidies and infrastructure investment.

One Greek friend in my age bracket has said that his private pension (from a computing company) was slashed by the government. And when his son went to collect his own unemployment check, it was cut in half on the ground that his parents allegedly had the money to support them. The price of the house they bought a few years ago has plunged. They tell me that they are no more eager to remain part of the Eurozone than the Icelandic voters showed themselves last month.

The strikes continue. Anger is rising. When incoming IMF head Christine Lagarde was French trade minister, she suggested that: “France had to revamp its labor code. Labor unions and fellow ministers balked, and Ms. Lagarde backtracked, saying she had expressed a personal opinion.” This opinion is about to become official policy – from the IMF that was acting as “good cop” to the ECB’s “bad cop.”

I suppose that all that really is needed is for people to understand just what dynamics are at work that make these attempts to pay in vain. Creditors know that the game is up. All they can do is take as much as they can, as long as they can, pay themselves bonuses that are “free” from recapture by public prosecutors, and run to their offshore banking centers.

*This article is an excerpt from Prof. Hudson’s upcoming book, “Debts that Can’t be Paid, Won’t Be,” to be published later this year.
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