Producing more but earning less around the world

We are working more and earning less. Productivity is up, but paychecks don’t keep pace. Average wages have been stagnant for four decades as the one percent has enjoyed spectacular gains in wealth.

The disproportion between increases in worker productivity and wages is perhaps most pronounced in the United States and Germany, but is common among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. This upward flow of income has long-term implications because the mass of wealth concentrated into few hands has led to an increase in destabilizing financial speculation — there are not enough opportunities for productive investment and consumer spending erodes because working people have less to spend.

In turn, reduced spending means there is little or no incentive for capitalists to invest, leading them to plow more money into speculation and to move production to newer low-wage havens because their profit margins are squeezed. Round and round the world has gone as the global economic crisis has persisted for half a decade with no end in sight.

The U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and is the model that its powerful capitalists work to export around the world; moreover, the massive U.S. trade deficit means the U.S. is to some extent propping up the world economy. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly high in the U.S. (even if lower than in the European Union). The U.S. economy simply isn’t creating jobs fast enough — that is the conclusion of a February 1 report issued by the Economic Policy Institute. The report, written by Heidi Shierholz, says:

“The U.S. labor market started 2013 with fewer jobs than it had 7 years ago in January 2006, even though the potential workforce has since grown by more than 8 million. The jobs deficit is so large that at January’s growth rate, it would take until 2021 to return to the pre-recession unemployment rate.”

Apologists for austerity as the “solution” to economic downturn often claim that the problem is a mismatch between the skills of job seekers and the skills needed by businesses. It is true that unemployment is lower among more educated people and higher among lesser educated people, but the rate of the increase in unemployment since the economic crisis began has been similar among all groups; in fact it is slightly higher among those with some college or a college degree than those with high school or less.

Among workers age 25 or older who are not high school graduates unemployment has risen 1.7 times since 2007, the Economic Policy Institute reports, while for college graduates it has risen 1.9 times. Among all workers, the rate of long-term unemployed has more than doubled during the past six years. The report says:

“The fact that we still have large numbers of long-term unemployed is unsurprising given that the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings has been 3-to-1 or greater since September 2008.”

Job growth lags behind GDP growth

The economies of the advanced capitalist countries simply aren’t growing fast enough to generate jobs. Because of competitive pressures that lead to layoffs, plant shutterings and moves to locations with much lower wages, and the increasing sophistication of computers and machinery, capitalist economies only increase employment during periods of robust growth, when demand requires more production. Unemployment ordinarily decreases only when an economy grows at least three percent annually.

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, authors of the book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, summarized this conundrum:

“Capitalism is a system that constantly generates a reserve of unemployed workers. Full employment is a rarity that occurs only at very high rates of growth, which are correspondingly dangerous to ecological sustainability. As Christina Romer, former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tells us, ‘We need 2.5 percent growth just to keep the unemployment rate where it is. … If you want to get it down quickly, you need substantially stronger growth than that.’ … [I]t is clear that if the GDP growth rate isn’t substantially greater than the increase in the working population, people lose jobs.” [pages 56-58]

As competition for jobs steadily becomes more acute, the dynamics of capitalism dictate that wages will be buffeted by strong downward pressures. Over the long term, not only the past few years, that has happened. A study published in the Spring 2012 edition of the International Productivity Monitor demonstrates the extraordinary mismatch between productivity gains and wages. The authors, Lawrence Mishel and Kar-Fai Gee, write:

“During the 1973 to 2011 period, the real median hourly wage in the United States increased 4.0 percent, yet labour productivity rose 80.4 percent. If the real median hourly wage had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, it would have been $27.87 in 2011 (2011 dollars), considerably more than the actual $16.07 (2011 dollars).” [page 31]

Almost every penny of the income generated by that extra work went into the pockets of high-level executives and financiers, not to the workers whose sweat produced it.

Around the world, workers see little of the gains

Workers in other advanced capitalist countries did not fare quite as badly, but the general pattern is there.

In Canada, for instance, labor productivity increased 37.4 percent for the period 1980 to 2005, while the median wage of full-time workers rose a total of 1.3 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to a Fall 2008 report in the International Productivity Monitor. The authors of this report, Andrew Sharpe, Jean-François Arsenault and Peter Harrison, provided caveats as to the direct comparability of productivity and wage statistics, but find the mismatch to be real as labor’s share of Canadian gross domestic product has shrunk. The authors note that, in Canada, almost all income gains have gone to the top one percent. They write:

“If median real earnings had grown at the same rate as labour productivity, the median Canadian full-time full-year worker would have earned $56,826 in 2005, considerably more than the actual $41,401 (2005 dollars).” [page 16]

Wage erosion is also at work in Europe. Making a few calculations from International Labour Organization statistics on labor productivity and wages, provided for individual countries, I found that average real wages in Germany declined 0.5 percent per year for the period of 2000 to 2008 while German labor productivity increased 1.3 percent per year. (This was the only period for which I could find statistics for both categories.)

The prosperity of German manufacturers is built on the backs of German workers, who have absorbed a decade of pay cuts. Because the International Labour Organization uses average, rather than median, figures, the disparities are likely made to appear smaller than they might be because the wealthiest are increasing their share of income faster than anybody else, distorting the average. (“Average” is the halfway point between highest and lowest; an average will rise if the highest has risen while all others are stagnant. “Median” is the number representing someone at the 50th percentile, or the middle number if everybody was arranged in order, and thus is more representative.)

Using the ILO statistics, French workers’ average wages kept pace with productivity growth for the period 2000 to 2008 while Spanish workers lagged, earning 0.5 percent more in wages per year while productivity increased 0.9 percent per year. Income inequality has increased in France since the mid-1990s, an indication that growth in pay for the highest earners likely masks declines for most workers and therefore could account for the statistical stability in the French wage/productivity ratio.

By contrast, in Britain, a Resolution Foundation paper found a differential between productivity and wage gains, although smaller than that of the United States, but also that British workers did not lose as much ground as did French, German, Italian and Japanese workers. That conclusion is based on a finding that the share of gross domestic product going to wages in those countries has steeply declined since the mid-1970s.

What we have is a structural problem, not a problem confined to a particular country, caused by a government nor solvable by adopting a specific monetary policy. Nor is personal greed the underlying cause, regardless of the personal qualities of individual capitalists.

Intensified competition over private profits, and that “markets” should determine social outcomes, inexorably leads to a consolidation in which industries are dominated by a handful of giant corporations, and those corporations gain decisive power over governments and relentlessly reduce overhead (especially wages and benefits) in a scramble for survival. More inequality means less pay for employees, reducing demand and weakening economies, which leads to more unemployment and less leverage for employees in wage negotiations as corporations use any means necessary to maintain their profit margins.

That a new boom or bubble might occur in the future does not alter the overall picture; such a development would only be a temporary blip. If it is the structure that is the problem, then only a different structure can be the solution.

The high cost of private profit in health care

By Pete Dolack

The United States spends huge amounts of money on health care. But it is only in comparison to other countries that the magnitude of health care spending becomes clear. Because the U.S. health care system is designed for private profit rather than public health, the U.S. spends an extra $1.15 trillion per year beyond what it would otherwise.

If that total astounds you, you are not alone. When I first began making calculations to determine excess spending in health care, the figures were so large that I had difficultly believing them and performed the calculations over again. The result was the same.

The excess spending on health care is not only growing, it is growing much faster than the rate of inflation, in concert with overall health care spending. For instance, the annual average of excess spending for the period of 1990 to 2000 was $685 billion. For the period of 2001 to 2010, the annual average ballooned to $1.15 trillion.

And despite all that extra spending, U.S. residents have poor health results in many key indicators, in comparison to the world’s other advanced capitalist countries. Still more amazing, 51 million people in the U.S. are without health insurance, while all other peer countries have universal care. This is the system that millions of U.S. citizens believe is the best in the world thanks to the world’s most developed public relations and misinformation industries.

The rest of the world is quite in disagreement, to the point that even the harsh austerity-minded Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, has repeatedly had to deny (whether or not sincerely I will leave to others) any intention to emulate the U.S. system as he attempts to impose changes on the country’s National Health Service.

Let’s do a bit of digging under the surface of numbers. First off, an explanation of where the $1.15 trillion in annual excess spending comes from. I calculated the number by first obtaining total health care spending per capita* of the three largest economies within the European Union (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) and of Canada, the neighbor of the United States. I then averaged the numbers for the years 2001 to 2010 (the latest for which full statistics are available) as compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the club of the world’s advanced capitalist countries and the largest developing countries.

The composite average of Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. for 2001 to 2010 is US$3,479 per capita per year. That number is less than half of the U.S., which had by far the world’s highest health care spending at $7,325 per capita per year. The differential was then multiplied by 300 million, the approximate U.S. population during the past decade. If you prefer a different measure, the U.S. spent 17.4 percent of its 2009 gross domestic product on health care expenditures, again the world’s largest by a wide margin. The average of the 34 countries of the OECD is 9.6 percent.

And if that is not enough, here is one more astounding comparison: Not only are out-of-pocket expenses by U.S. health care consumers higher than in any of the four comparison countries (no surprise there) but per capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in any of the four comparison countries. Those four have varying versions of what U.S. right-wing ideologues venomously denounce as “socialized medicine” — health care systems either run or closely regulated and supervised by a federal government paid for through taxation — and yet each government nonetheless spends less than does the U.S. government on a per capita basis.

Despite the massive transfer of money to private insurance companies by employers and employees, on a per-capita basis government health care spending by itself in the U.S. is higher than total health care spending in Canada.**

The authors of the paper “Why is health spending in the United States so high?” (a supplement to an OECD statistical report) attempted to draw conclusions from a mass of data on health care expenditures:

“It does not have many physicians relative to its population; it does not have a lot of doctor consultations; it does not have a lot of hospital beds, or hospitals stays, when compared with other countries, and when people go to hospital, they do not stay for long. All these data on health care activities suggest that U.S. health spending should be low compared with other countries.”

The reason that spending is anything but low is because of the high prices extracted throughout the system. The costs of a range of medical procedures or surgeries are much higher in the U.S. than elsewhere, as are pharmaceutical prices. The authors write:

“Overall, the evidence suggests that prices for health services and goods are substantially higher in the United States than elsewhere. This is an important cause of higher health spending in the United States.”

The OECD is an organization that is representative of the world’s most powerful capitalist countries, so the report does not inquire into underlying causes or in any way challenge the economic system that leads to such results; it merely reports facts and figures. Those facts and figures, however, give us a useful starting point. The wasteful spending on health care are subsidies for pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital-chain operators, insurance companies, managed-care companies and medical-products manufacturers. Money flows to those corporate entities directly from your pocket and indirectly from you via government spending.

Each U.S. citizen’s annual share of wasteful, excess spending on health care — excess spending that goes into the coffers of some of the country’s largest corporations among the many industry profiteers — amounts to $3,846. Business leaders, their lavishly funded think tanks and pressure groups, and the public-office officials who represent them continually assert that private enterprise is always more efficient. It would seem that the efficiency lies in extracting money and wealth.

Noting that “high administrative costs and lower quality have also characterized for-profit HMOs” (health maintenance organizations funded by insurance premiums that supervise health care), a Journal of the Canadian Medical Association article provides the following figures for the percentage of revenue that is diverted to overhead:**

• For-profit HMOs: 19 percent
• Non-profit plans: 13 percent
• U.S. Medicare program: 3 percent
• Canadian Medicare: 1 percent

In contrast to the rhetoric so often employed, government is far more efficient at delivering health care than the private sector. (This is also true in retirement plans, where the U.S. Social Security program’s overhead is much lower than mutual-fund managers or other financial-industry enterprises.) An important reason is that the government does not skim off massive amounts of money for bloated executive pay nor does it need to generate large profits to enrich financiers.

Such large expenditures also flow from a lack of competition. Few people in the U.S. have a choice of insurance provider, which is dictated by their employer, and insurance companies and HMOs frequently limit choice of doctors, and often deny coverage so as to maximize profits. A company that has stock traded on exchanges is legally required to maximize profits above any other consideration; it is no different because health care happens to be the product. A few summers ago, I found myself in a debate with a Canadian woman who was critical of her country’s health care system. I acknowledged that Canadian health care is not perfect, but then gave the example of a friend who had recently died in his 50s of a heart attack because his insurer decreed that he did not require medication for his weak heart and he could not afford it on his own. Does that happen in Canada?, I asked. She replied with silence.

As in any other mature industry, most market share has consolidated into a few hands, a condition that is known as an “oligarchy.” Although competition in younger or more fractured industries does result in price reductions, when an industry is reduced to a small number of dominant corporations, price competition is usually a casualty. Health care constitutes several industries — insurance, pharmaceuticals, hospitals and medical equipment, among others — and each adds to the cost. Giant pots of government money are involved, always a lucrative source of private enrichment. And insurers have people over a barrel because health insurance comes through their employer, who make deals with a single insurer, take it or leave it.

Health care provision also has unique attributes that further inflate costs. In “The high costs of for-profit care,” by Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein (the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association article quoted above), the authors write:

“Why do for-profit firms that offer inferior products at inflated prices survive in the market? Several prerequisites for the competitive free market described in textbooks are absent in health care. First, it is absurd to think that frail elderly and seriously ill patients, who consume most health care, can act as informed consumers (i.e., comparison-shop, reduce demand when suppliers raise prices or accurately appraise quality). …

“Second, the “product” of health care is notoriously difficult to evaluate, even for sophisticated buyers like government. … By labeling minor chest discomfort “angina” rather than “chest pain,” a U.S. hospital can garner both higher Medicare payments and a factitiously improved track record for angina treatment. It is easier and more profitable to exploit such loopholes than to improve efficiency or quality.

“Even for honest firms, the careful selection of lucrative patients and services is the key to success, whereas meeting community needs often threatens profitability. … [For-profit] hospitals duplicate services available at nearby not-for-profit general hospitals, but the newcomers avoid money-losing programs such as geriatric care and emergency departments (a common entry point for uninsured patients). The profits accrue to the investors, the losses to the not-for-profit hospitals, and the total costs to society rise through the unnecessary duplication of expensive facilities.”

In the spirit of comparison-shopping, here is a brief examination of the five countries under discussion, the United States and the four comparison countries.

• German health care system: Everybody is covered. Workers pay eight percent of their gross income into a “sickness fund,” a nonprofit insurance company; employers pay the same amount. These contributions account for almost all money in the system. Workers choose among 240 sickness funds. There are no deductibles. Everything, including drugs, is free for children younger than eighteen. The government regulates all insurance companies closely.
• French health care system: Everybody is covered. Workers pay 21 percent of their income into a combined retirement and national health care system; employers pay about half that amount. Payroll and income taxes largely fund health care. There are no waiting lists for elective surgery or to see a specialist. Doctors’ fees are negotiated with medical unions, while hospital fees are regulated. Patients with one of 30 long-term and expensive illnesses pay nothing for care.
• British health care system: Everybody is covered. The National Health Service is funded by income taxes, employs physicians and nurses, and owns most of the hospitals and clinics. The service also pays directly for all health care expenses, with prescriptions and dentistry being the two exceptions. There are sometimes long waiting lists, which are commonly attributed to there being no restrictions on services, particularly hospitalization.
• Canadian health care system: Everybody is covered. The federal government sets standards; provincial and territorial governments administer the system. Medically necessary hospital, physician and diagnostic services are free, although most dental care and prescription drugs are not covered. Services are primarily through private providers. Long waiting times for specialists are a problem, with reduced government payments cited as an underlying cause.
• U.S. health care system: 51 million are not covered. Coverage is through an employer (of which the employee pays a portion), or through own purchase of private insurance, but most can’t afford to do so. Insurance companies frequently dictate what, or if, services will be provided. Coverage generally requires out-of-pocket expenses and includes a “deductible” before payments begin. Patient bankruptcies due to inability to pay bills are common.

Another weakness of the U.S. health care system is that is based on the concept of a “family wage” instead of a “social wage.” That is both cause and effect — unlike other countries where health care is a right, in the U.S. health care is a privilege, and the large disparities in the ability to obtain it reflects the canyon-like inequality there and also aggravates social inequities. Not only because health care is tied to an employer, giving a boss more power over employees, but because a family’s health care coverage is tied to the person who has the job that provides it — usually the man in a traditional family. But it could be any one person in a non-traditional family or within a gay or lesbian household.

Feminist pioneer and theorist Kathie Sarachild of the influential group Redstockings, in a July 4 interview on the Joy of Resistance: Multi-cultural Feminist Radio program, summarized this concept. She said:

“The family wage is another way of saying this old idea that men should support the family. [U.S.] society is built on the idea that men should get higher pay than women because men would support the family and women would stay home and take care of the children. … Even though there were always women who worked, they received less pay than men did because of this family-wage concept. …

“A lot of [the European social wage] came out of socialist and communist theory. … The labor movement and the feminist movement in [Europe] have been able to win a social-wage system, which pays to raise the next generation [through universal health care and paid leave when a child is born instead of being dependent on an employer to pay a ‘family wage’ to the man].”

Nationalized health care becomes part of a basket of social benefits, including more vacation time, life-long education and elder care that liberates working people from dependence on an employer. A shorter work week would also bring benefits, Ms. Sarachild said:

“If the work week were shorter … there would be more jobs. There’d be less unemployment because the work week is shorter so there are more paid jobs. There would be more time at home for the father and mother to be with the child. …. [With the introduction of a] social wage, the unfair family wage would not be necessary. … [Women] are not as dependent on the man, and both of you are not so dependent on the employer.”

The lower wages of women in the “family wage” system boost corporate profits on the backs of women, Joy of Resistance host Fran Luck points out, and many women are forced to stay in bad relationships because they would lose their health care.

For men and women, the price of private profit is enormously high: 22,000 people die and 700,000 go bankrupt per year as a result of inadequate, or no, health insurance in the United States.*** The U.S. ranks among the bottom five of the 34 OECD countries in per capita doctor consultations, hospital beds and average length of stay in hospitals,**** and is well below average in life expectancy and infant mortality. The country’s people pay more than $1.15 trillion per year on top of what they should pay to swell corporate profits and executive and Wall Street wallets — in return, we receive worse coverage. That is the price of capitalism.

* OCED figures. Spending per capita in U.S. dollars adjusted to create purchasing power parity.
** Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, “The high costs of for-profit care,” Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, June 8, 2004, pages 1814, 1815.
*** T.R. Reid, “No Country For Sick Men,” Newsweek, Sept. 21, 2009, pages 43-44.
**** “Why is health spending in the United States so high?,” OECD report, page 5.

NAFTA and European Union: Different sides of the Atlantic but same function

By Pete Dolack

The logic of the multi-national euro currency is tighter economic integration and loss of popular sovereignty. Unless the eurozone breaks up and its users return to their own national currencies, pressure will be built by the “markets” for further centralization and harmonization of rules. In plain English, tightened control by big capitalists.

The eurozone, functionally, is much the same as the North American Free Trade Agreement across the Atlantic. NAFTA makes corporate profiteering paramount by eroding the ability of the governments within it to enforce regulations; places decision-making in the hands of unaccountable and undemocratic arbitration boards convened by either the commercial arm of the United Nations or the World Bank; and elevates the interests of large corporations and financiers above all other human considerations.

(There are the occasional conspiracy-mongers who claim that NAFTA is a precursor to the dismantling of the United States in favor of some “North American republic” and that the dollar will be eliminated in favor of a regional currency, but besides the fact that these feverish Right-wing conspiracies are laughable on their face they completely ignore the fact that U.S. capitalism needs U.S. military might, that the world capitalist system needs a center with the requisite financial and military clout to act as the enforcer, that the U.S. relies on the dominance of its national currency to be able to run budget and trade deficits, and that the nationalistic U.S. public would rise up, in arms if necessary, against any such idea.)

The key NAFTA provision is Chapter 11, which codifies “equal treatment” in accordance with international law and enables corporations to sue over any regulation or other government act that violates “investor rights,” which means any regulation or act that might prevent the corporation from earning the maximum possible profit. Thus we have had the spectacle of a corporate parcel-delivery service suing Canada in attempt to have the Canadian postal system dismantled and chemical companies suing because a chemical they produce has been banned because it is poisoning water supplies.

The idea that safe drinking water is considered a trifle next to the maximization of profits, sadly, is not a mordant joke. Any company that has its shares traded on stock exchanges is legally required to maximize its profits for shareholders, to the exclusion of all else — under capitalism, safe drinking water is unimportant. (Except, of course, for the bottled-water companies that drain acquirers to supply their products.)

Although Canada, which has the most stringent regulations of the three NAFTA countries, has won five decisions before the arbitration boards, three of them were on technicalities in which the merits of the cases were not ruled upon. Only twice has the Canadian government won a clean victory in the dozens of cases brought against it. Just this week, The Globe and Mail newspaper of Toronto reported that Exxon Mobil Corp. won a Chapter 11 arbitration case against the province of Newfoundland and Labrador because Exxon and a partner company were required to conduct research before commencing projects.

A U.S. watchdog group, Public Citizen, summed up the rules of NAFTA and other trade treaties in this succinct fashion:

“This ‘investor-state’ enforcement mechanism elevates private firms and investors to the same status as sovereign governments, effectively privatizing the right to enforce public treaties’ expansive new investor rights. There is no such private enforcement for labor rights or environmental standards. … The [free-trade] pacts provide firms a way to attack other countries’ domestic public interest laws and skirt their court systems.”

If readers in Canada, the U.S. or Mexico have no recollection of voting on any of this, there is good reason.

Similarly, the financiers who dominate European Union policy are not subject to any democratic accounting, either. And under the rubric of not allowing a perfectly good crisis to go to waste, the ongoing eurozone crisis is being used as leverage to install an ever harsher régime. Doing so is completely logical within the imperial construct of the European Union, which is a supra-national institution to impose corporate domination on a reluctant population. National governments are not insulated from popular opinion, but a supra-national structure can impose dictates on those governments, which can then tell citizens that is has “no choice” but to adhere to them so that the country can remain “part of Europe.”

Concomitantly, European capitalists desire the ability to challenge the United States for economic supremacy, but cannot do so without the combined clout of a united continent. This wish underlies the anti-democratic push to steadily tighten the E.U., including mandatory national budget benchmarks that require cutting social safety nets and policies that are designed to break down solidarity among wage earners across borders by imposing harsher competition through imposed austerity. The E.U., in its current capitalist form, is a logical step for business leaders who desire greater commercial power on a global basis: It creates a “free trade” zone complete with suppression of social accountability while giving muscle to a currency that has the potential of challenging the U.S. dollar as the world’s pre-eminent currency.

A difficulty for E.U. business elites is that nationalism tends to act as a disorganizing force within the E.U., whereas nationalism is a potent unifying force in China and the United States. But nationalism, as always, has its uses: Instead of uniting on their common interests across borders, all too many Europeans are attacking one another on a national basis. Nationalism, ordinarily an easily manipulated ethos used to provide a unifying glue within countries that are otherwise consciously atomized by capitalist pressures and individualist propaganda, becomes a divide-and-conquer tool par excellence in a supra-national context. And so we have the dispiriting spectacle of venomous attacks on “lazy Greeks,” “arrogant Germans” and the rest of the assortment of tired clichés.

Nationalism is fine for working people, but an impediment for business elites who are increasingly bold in calling for economic policy to be directed by Brussels. In the past week, an assortment of E.U. officials, joined by national leaders elected and unelected, said the E.U. must be bound together more tightly. Arrogant and hypocritical as they may be, these officials are simply enunciating the logic of E.U. capitalism. The most prominent tangible form of these calls are for the issuance of “euro bonds” — government bonds to finance debt issued by the European Central Bank in place of bonds issued by individual national governments.

The new French government has endorsed the issuance of “euro bonds,” adding to the momentum. The proximate cause of pleas for the creating of “euro bonds” is that too many eurozone governments can’t afford to borrow at the high interests rates demanded by financiers and the rich who buy bonds (in lieu of paying taxes, which would end the need for bonds in such large amounts). The price of pooling together the risk of all E.U. governments by issuing such bonds is much closer economic integration. And what that means is financiers controlling policy to an even greater degree than they already do.

Financiers, that is, as an international interest group; not German bankers or Germany as a country. The corporate news media continues to cover the ongoing crisis and its slow-motion developments as a contest of wills between Germans (or Chancellor Angela Merkel) and the Southern rim of the E.U. with France as a buffer in between. But, as I have previously written, it is German industrialists, not German working people, who are the beneficiaries of German government policy.

Germany has become reliant on exports as German workers have absorbed a decade of wage cuts, leaving domestic demand inadequate to soak up German production or to pick up the slack when export markets soften. German exports have become more competitive on the backs of German employees, making it more difficult for other eurozone countries to remain competitive because, by not having their own currency that they can devalue, they can’t use that route to give their exports a boost. Thus, German industrialists have prospered through the widespread adoption of the euro, which has “locked in” their competitive advantages.

German, French and other bankers earned fat bonuses because the euro also made it easier for them to make loans to the Southern rim, which also enabled those countries to buy more German products. In turn, deficits mount and production is shuttered in countries such as Greece (where the shipping industry, the rich and even many private-sector middle class people don’t pay taxes), and the price for more loans is more harsh austerity.

But the money doesn’t go to the Greek budget, it goes right back to the banks. The 130 billion euro bailout of Greece is used almost exclusively to service the interest on Greece’s debt — not even to pay down the principal! The so-called “troika” — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — wire Greece the money, which is almost immediately sent right back. Most of the small amount that is retained by the Greek government is used to bail out Greek banks. The price for this? An unemployment rate of 22 percent and rising, pay cuts of 40 percent for those still employed and large numbers of small businesses closing.

The troika went so far as to demand that the Greek government change its constitution to ensure that banks are paid back before there is any spending on social programs. That is a taste of what will be experienced across Europe if more power is concentrated in the hands of unelected and unaccountable officials at the European level. A de facto financier dictatorship, although one to benefit big industrialists as well as financiers, because financiers are dependent on big industrialists to generate the profits that are poured into speculation (nor is there a neat separation between the two). For working people across Europe, the program can be summed up in two words: permanent austerity.

And not even German workers, who have acquiesced to their unions agreeing to a decade of wage cuts in exchange for job security, will be immune. German workers’ living standards are slowly eroding, and when German exports slow or decline because buyers in other advanced capitalist countries buy fewer of their their products because of austerity and buyers in developing countries like China buy less because they can no longer sustain the pace of investment in infrastructure and industrial capacity, austerity will hit Germans. The route to German industrialists maintaining their profits under these future conditions will be either deeper cuts to wages, an end to job security, export of production to places with much lower wages or a combination of these.

The alternative to harmonizing economy policy among the eurozone countries (harmonizing with the tightest policy among them) is for the eurozone to break up, and countries to resume using their own currencies and setting their own policies, which would at least be subject to elections, and provide space for policies other than neoliberal austerity.

It is no surprise, then, that centralizing economic policy is the preferred route for European business elites. The arguments among them are over details — Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that the harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. None of the eurozone’s national leaders are in any sense reducible to “puppets,” but their perceived national interests are distorted by whatever consensus their capitalists arrive at, which in turn are determined by larger market forces. Big industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become dependent on them.

Similarly, “markets” seek regulatory harmonization within NAFTA countries at the level of the weakest regulations. Governments must respond because capitalists can move production at will, leaving everyone else at their mercy.

Such is the logic of “markets,” which are not the disembodied forces of nature so often portrayed but are simply the interests of the most powerful capitalist elites. It is futile to expect anything different from their system.

European monetary fables tell a story, but for whom?

By Pete Dolack

Fables have long been used to tell stories and impart “moral” lessons. Not limited to bedtime stories, fables are a common device to propagate “lessons” that powerful interests wish to suffuse through a society. A favorite fable nowadays is that of the virtuous Germans and the lazy Greeks. Punishment – excuse me, “structural adjustment” — is the natural denouement of this oft-told fable.

In reality, this mythology has about as much to do with reality as the big bad wolf blowing down grandmother’s house.

Greek workers actually work many more hours than do Germans, and earn less. The “secret” to Germany’s economic dominance within the European Union is cuts to German wages. Germany has undercut other countries that use the euro as their currency by suppressing wages, a process that took form under a Social Democratic government.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (an intergovernmental club of the world’s advanced capitalist countries), Greeks worked, on average, 42.3 hours per week on their main job and 2,109 hours for the year 2010. Germans worked, on average, 35.7 hours per week on their main job and 1,419 hours for the year 2010.

To put those figures in further perspective, Greeks worked more hours than any other people in the European Union; only South Koreans worked more among the world’s advanced capitalist countries.

So much for “lazy” Greeks. Moreover, the average annual wage of a Greek worker is 73 percent that of the German average, despite the cliché of the pampered, overpaid Greek trotted out at every opportunity.

Nonetheless, it was written above that it was suppression of German wages that is a major underlying cause of European economic imbalance, although the already low and falling-further wages in Greece are leading to a collapse of domestic demand there. European Central Bank policy is to target inflation at two percent per year. But, according to the International Labour Office, German wage increases since 2001 have averaged half of one percent per year, consistently below the German inflation rate. To put it another way, the ILO has calculated that German productivity has remained virtually unchanged in relation to the productivity of all countries that use the euro, while German wages have declined by more than ten percent relative to the composite wages of all other euro-zone countries.

In other words, the prosperity of German manufacturers has come at the price of a decade of wage cuts (adjusted for inflation) suffered by German workers. Sound familiar? Reduced income leads to reduced consumption, so exports account for a steadily rising portion of German gross domestic product. In relative terms, it becomes more difficult for other European Union countries to compete with German products, particularly in other countries using the euro, because German manufacturers increasingly can undercut them. Manufacturing capacity elsewhere is shuttered, reinforcing German dominance and increasing unemployment in the countries on the receiving end of the exports.

A British economist, Engelbert Stockhammer, in a paper published last year, described this phenomenon bluntly:

“Germany has pursued a policy of aggressive wage restraint resulting in large current account surpluses. German gains in competitiveness (since the introduction of the Euro) have not been founded on superior technological performance, but on more effective wage suppression. … Simply put, German wage suppression rather than fiscal profligacy is at root of the crisis of the Euro system. … Europe needs a set of economic institutions and policy rules that addresses such imbalances and their underlying mechanisms.”

The imbalances within the European Union, the economic crisis caused by financial bubbles and reckless financial speculation, the ever increasing ability of capitalist elites to impose their preferred policies on governments, the increasing ability of financial speculators to maintain a stranglehold on capitalist economies and the pervasive ideology of neoliberalism to the near total exclusion of alternatives has led to the precipice. The punishing austerity being imposed on Greece had previously been reserved for countries in the developing world or outside the capitalist core; now these immense social forces are attempting to crush an advanced capitalist country.

The particular constellation of forces that have led Greece to its present position originate in Brussels as well as in Berlin. At the European level, there is a conscious project at work. The European Union is, at bottom, an attempt by European capitalists to remold their societies to be more like the United States, with its extreme disparities in wealth and privilege. An impediment to such a goal is that people across Europe have the habit of asserting themselves, not only to defend their social gains but sometimes to push forward. There was a general strike in Denmark in 1998, as an example, in which one of the key demands was for a sixth week of paid vacation. (We in the United States ought to let that one sink in.)

European capitalists also desire the ability to challenge the United States for economic supremacy, but cannot do so without the combined clout of a united continent. This wish underlies the anti-democratic push to steadily tighten the European Union, including mandatory national budget benchmarks that require cutting social safety nets and policies that are designed to break down solidarity among wage earners and different regions by imposing harsher competition through imposed austerity. These rules are designed by central bankers to benefit European big business. Europe’s capitalists and central bankers are no less shy about adopting neoliberal ideology than their counterparts elsewhere, but are reliant on a supranational project to override national governments that must contend with popular resistance.

Thus, economic downturns and stagnation are always portrayed as the fault of working people refusing to be more “flexible” or earning too much money or “selfishly” expecting to retain hard-won benefits.

The European Union, in its current capitalist form, is a logical step for business leaders who desire greater commercial power on a global basis: It creates a “free trade” zone without social accountability while giving muscle to a currency that has the potential of challenging the U.S. dollar as the world’s pre-eminent currency. The weakness of the supranational form is that it collides head-on with nationalism, which acts as a disorganizing force within the E.U., whereas in countries like the U.S. and China nationalism is a potent unifying force.

An irony here is that it is precisely nationalism that German capitalists and their corporate media outlets wield to maintain the policies that have worked out so well for them. The German newspaper Bild — the equivalent of a Murdoch tabloid — is fond of screaming headlines such as “Now they want more!” in response to further loans to Greece. Never mind that the Greek government is merely a pass-through; the loans are going straight to the banks, bond traders and hedge funds that hold Greek debt, and it is Greek workers, not German workers, who will be paying the price. A terrible price it is: During 2011, Greek public- and private-sector salaries were cut by one-third and pensions reduced, while many employees and pensioners have ceased being paid at all. This month (February 2012), the Greek parliament, literally on the orders of the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, voted to cut the minimum wage a further 20 percent, unilaterally end job security and begin to lay off 150,000 government workers.

Recall late last year, when former Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou dared to suggest a popular referendum on the then latest round of austerity. The Guardian reported that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel “summoned” the Greek prime minster to a meeting to inform him there would no referendum. A remarkable word. “Summoned” is what a government does when it calls in an ambassador to issue a complaint. Heads of sovereign states are not “summoned.” One imagines that French and German bankers and bond traders were proud that day.

By no means, however, are German capitalists dependent on Merkel’s Christian Democrats remaining in power. It was none other than the Social Democratic Party — a party that righteously proclaims itself the party of working people — that codified austerity on those same working people. Back in 2003, Gerhard Schröder, then the Social Democratic chancellor, pushed through his “Agenda 2010” legislation. Schröder said, “We must not get trapped in defending our past achievements, but instead must work to our future.” Since those “past achievements” included old-fashioned concepts such as good wages and pensions, Schröder said, “The core challenges before us are accepting the reality of globalization, the ‘digitalization’ of our economy and an aging society.” Classic Right-wing code words. “Accepting” this “reality,” Agenda 2010 cut business taxes while reducing unemployment pay and pensions.

German unions represent workers across industries, and contracts are negotiated industrywide so that one company can’t play off its employees against those working for a competitor. Despite this advantage, unions allowed wages to decline in exchange for job security as German industry became stronger. Unemployment has been dropping — at least Germans received the promised job security — but their purchasing power is slowly declining, reinforcing the trend toward Germany becoming overly dependent on exports. More than half of Germany’s exports go to European Union countries.

Meanwhile, in Greece, the main Right-wing party, New Democracy, went on an arms buying spree when last in power a few years ago, unneeded military hardware paid for with loans. And the rich in Greece don’t pay taxes, in a country with one of Europe’s biggest economic disparities. Government workers are being demonized as the biggest problem in Greece, but it is precisely government workers who can’t evade paying taxes — their employer makes sure of that.

How does Greece get out of its vicious circle? Ultimately, there is no Greek solution, only a European or global solution. International solidarity and working people in all countries acting in concert to defend themselves and working toward a better world than the unsustainable scramble of all against all we currently live in are the routes out of economic crisis.

In terms of immediate steps, Greece is not without a defense against the downward spiral of austerity. Comparisons are being made with Argentina, which defaulted on its debt that was too big to pay and allowed the foreign-exchange market to drastically devalue its currency. There is much talk of Greece defaulting, but that is only one half of the “Argentina” option — Greece simultaneously would have to drop the euro and re-adopt its old currency, the drachma.

Argentine’s fascistic military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 laid waste to the country’s economy, and a civilian president, Carlos Menem, imposed an austerity program in the early 1990s in conjunction with selling off state enterprises at below-market prices. As a result, Argentina’s foreign debt grew to unmanageable proportions. When neoliberalism had reached its logical conclusion there — economic collapse — working people set up barter clubs and in some cases took over factories that had been shut down, restarting production and converting them into cooperatives. A new president, Néstor Kirchner, suspended debt payments after taking office, eventually paying only 30 percent of the odious debt after negotiations.

One of the reasons why the Argentine economy collapsed was because the country’s rulers had insisted on maintaining the value of the Argentine peso even with the U.S. dollar, and wouldn’t allow its currency to decline in value. Greece uses the euro and therefore can’t devalue. Without a currency devaluation, internal cuts are the remaining option to meet market demands. When Argentina defaulted and allowed its peso to float freely, the peso’s value fell drastically. As a result, Argentina’s exports became attractively cheap and because imports became expensive, a stimulus to internal production was created. Within a year, Argentina’s unemployment rate fell by two-thirds and it had achieved budget and trade surpluses.

If Greece did return to the drachma, the currency’s value would be pummeled by foreign-exchange markets, making Greek products and tourism a value. Because imports would become very expensive, there would be no choice but to increase domestic production. There would also be uncertainty: Greece doesn’t have the same material resources as Argentina does nor does it have export industries as strong, so it is impossible to say that Greece would rebound as fast as Argentina did a decade ago. Taking the “Argentina option” would be a gamble and would have to be accompanied by capital controls and the nationalization of banks.

Dropping the euro would not be free of additional pain in the short term (especially because the cost of imports would rise) and a Greece with its own currency would not have the same measure of independence that Argentina possessed. Moreover, such moves would not touch the underlying instabilities of the global capitalist system nor would it in any way lessen the requirement of international solidarity to find a global solution to a global crisis. But could anything be as bad as the steady diet of austerity, punishment and humiliation Greeks are now enduring?