Democracy.
--A 2,500 year-old word without a settled definition. The word is oddly autological, in that democracy is admirable partly for a stubborn unwillingness to declare matters once and for all settled. (Franklin said, “Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”)
But now, the country that introduced rule by the people, the demos, is threatened with the surrender of its own democracy. Its creditors are essentially demanding the country be arrested and tossed into debtors’ prison.
The plan suggests Greece relinquish sovereignty to a “budget commissioner,” a commissar with sole authority sole authority to make financial decisions and amend or cancel contracts--including collective bargaining agreements.
Under the plan, Athens would only be allowed to spend on the normal functioning of its government after servicing its debt.
Its debt to the bankers. Not to its people.
Local officials, still nominally in place, would be but cardboard caricatures of representative government. Every governmental interest or action would be secondary to the whims and desires of the bankers. Generally accepted guarantees of democracy—equality before the law, equal access to legislative processes, rights and liberties protected by a constitution—would be likewise Potemkin ideals.
Ironically, the proposal for this financial Obersturmbannführer comes from Germany, a country with some historical experience with a system of
state and large corporate interests working hand-in-hand to promote corporate interests [and opposed to] political liberty, except to the extent it is trivial or unthreatening.
Yet it is a much more powerful group than the Germans who are really pushing this.
We're talking about a group owing no allegiance to the puny sovereignty of nations, to petty rival forms of government. A group dedicated rather to the single burning principle of advantage.
Financiers.
And their reach is grown so great as to throw the interests of nations—much less those of persons—into shadow.
Greece is not alone. Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, not to mention Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio—all face the prospect of financial dictators. Many more states still are nominally run as democracies but are wholly subservient to financial men behind the curtain.
Greece’s troubles are Greece’s own fault, of course. (Just like underwater mortgagees’ troubles are their own fault.) They took out crappy loans.
But as with all transactions, there were two parties. The lenders who were the other parties now wish to be held blameless. They claim not to have known—not to have been ABLE to know—that the loans were potentially shaky.
They’re also betting we won’t recall when asset prices were skyrocketing and banks’ trading desks, gorging on fat commissions, were pushing loans like corner smack dealers. They’re betting we will buy their line that the whole debt mess was the fault of borrowers, that playing no part whatsoever in it was their own practice of
printing trillions of dollars out of thin air by selling off worthless mortgages for huge profits and/or making millions of synthetic copies of those same worthless mortgage assets,
then playing both ends against the middle.
(At least one of them, whose initials were Goldman Sachs, even created bogus instruments to inflate the apparent amount of Greece’s assets so as to masquerade them as triple-A good-as-gold no-risk borrowers, then
putting together a born-to-lose portfolio of toxic mortgage bonds and…dumping them on a pair of European banks, who in turn had no idea that [Goldman] was betting against them.)
These financiers would now like it very much if the risk for the risky loans they carry on the credit side of their books could be shifted entirely to the debit side of the borrowers’ ledgers.
They also would like Greece to serve as a warning to other wobbly states not to screw with financiers. Marshall Auerback terms this “Anschluss economics.” Like Mafia finance: nice economy you got there. Pity if you were not to play ball and anything should happen to it.
This imposed dictatorship is punishment for being feckless enough to buy the bullshit the banks sold.
It feels good to do this, punishing the feckless, and that’s how the banks are selling it. As the ethically responsible thing to do. It is the ethical equivalent of truthiness; it feels moral, though its effects can be proved to be entirely pernicious.
It is another illustration of how states no longer call their own shots, but are answerable to the desires, needs, and demands of finance.
Governments undertake wars on finance’s behalf. They prosecute crimes selectively, to finance’s advantage.
States who cannot afford to do so but fear doing otherwise underwrite financial risk for entities supposedly subject to them. Preferential treatment and tax breaks are desperately and obsequiously extended to Financial Maharajas who have openly declared all political boundaries and considerations null and void.
Apple can thus celebrate the “misfits, rebels, and troublemakers”
and place its factories where misfits, rebels, and troublemakers are cowed, silenced, and made profitably obedient.
Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron, finding human rights inconvenient to the bottom line, can enlist governments only too happy to buy a few more years by favoring the corporations’ profits over their own peoples’ freedoms.
These enormous entities work to retain the illusion of local sovereignty in order to continue to rely on national military forces’ help in keeping the money safely moving.
Your pension fund bankrolls financiers’ play at the roulette table. When they win, they win. And when they lose, you lose, not them. The privatization of gain and socialization of loss is a worldwide fait accompli.
To put it impolitely but simply, the little guy is well and truly fucked.
Yet there is hope.
Three centuries ago, the British government, faced with the enormous power and reach of trading monopolies, decided the tail must not wag the dog. They determined that
the importance of the national concerns now involved meant that the Company had to submit to increasingly close supervision by the British state and to periodical inquiries by parliament.
Though not altogether successful, their efforts at bringing corporate power to government heel established a template we should revisit.
Corporations of a certain size should automatically become state entities.
Organizations with the gravitational pull to shape the world are too large to be run according to expedience and advantage. They must be brought under systematic control, not left to wander, madly trampling whatever luckless thing happens to find itself in their way.
Any institution of a size that can effectively write history should be bound to longer and broader interests, not to the shorter, ephemeral considerations of individual gain.
Barring some mechanism to rein in these hurricanes of shortsighted individual advantage, things like full employment, investment in the future, or public stewardship of the environment or our common wealth can never occur. Those goals have too long a maturity and too broad a scope for quarterly-driven Finance to contemplate.
If Finance is allowed to blot away government and infrastructure and culture, we can forget domestic tranquility, justice, the general welfare, or the blessings of liberty. Only some longer, slower force--like government--possesses the deliberate strength to work at the deeper and slower level these aims demand.
When governments bow to finance, the result is the functional equivalent of heroin: an intoxication that is temporary, expensive, and ultimately lethal.
It is in our hands whether we allow that to be our future.