Greece’s depression is IMF’s idea of ‘progress’

The International Monetary Fund congratulated itself last week for the splendid job it is doing in Greece, declaring the country “is making progress in overcoming deep-seated problems.” With an unemployment rate of 27.2 percent, an economy that has shrunk by at least 20 percent and children going hungry, one has to shudder at the thought of what a lack of success might look like.

Temple of Zeus photo by Andreas Trepte (www.photo-natur.de)

The depression in Greece is the logical conclusion of austerity, but while Greece is the first in Europe to arrive it is not alone — the composite eurozone unemployment rate reached a record 12.1 percent in March. The eurozone unemployment rate rose to 24 percent for men and women below the age of 25; the European Union-wide rate is nearly as high.

The IMF’s solution? Eliminate more jobs. In its latest report on Greece, issued on May 3 following its latest inspection visit, the IMF graciously mentioned that Greece’s wealthy don’t pay taxes:

“Very little progress has been made in tackling Greece’s notorious tax evasion. The rich and self-employed are simply not paying their fair share, which has forced an excessive reliance on across-the-board expenditure cuts and higher taxes on those earning a salary or a pension.”

But the IMF report quickly followed up by grumbling that:

“[T]he over-staffed public sector has been spared, because of a taboo against dismissals.”

Perhaps you will not fall off your chair in shock, but it is the latter of these two concerns that gets the attention when the IMF gave its verdict on what it expects the Greek government to do:

“A strong recovery will need to be built primarily on deepening structural reforms. … The government’s welcome public commitment to improving the business environment and accelerating privatization now needs to be matched with results.”

Diktats masquerading as democracy

Those bland-sounding words take on deeper meaning when we examine the “structural reforms” already imposed on Greece by the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, the “troika” that dictates Greek policy. In February 2012, for instance, the Greek government agreed to reduce the already low minimum wage by more than 20 percent, to freeze all public-sector wages until the unemployment rate falls below 10 percent and to deep cuts in pensions.

The Greek minimum wage is €751 per month (equivalent to US$990 or £636). How well could you live on such a sum?

Overall, wages have fallen 40 percent and health care spending has been cut 25 percent. Meanwhile, most of the money released by the troika goes straight back to lenders, not for internal relief. As a result of this austerity, it is no surprise that retail sales in Greece have declined by 30 percent over the past three years and an estimated 150,000 small businesses have closed. Poverty has become so widespread that an estimated 10 percent of Greek’s children go to school hungry.

All this in a country where its biggest and wealthiest industry, shipping, pays no taxes — its tax-free status guaranteed in the constitution. Greece’s wealthy pay little or no taxes, stashing their cash outside the country. Government employees are the people who can’t evade paying their taxes — yet they are the ones scapegoated for economic troubles. (A common pattern in many countries.)

The IMF made no mention of its own role in bringing about this depression in the May 3 report, instead blaming a “lack of confidence” for Greece’s struggles:

“Looking over the period 2010–2012, the much deeper than expected recession was overwhelmingly due to a progressive loss of confidence. … With fiscal adjustment set to remain a drag on GDP growth for several years to come, the key challenge is to generate the improvement in confidence needed for a recovery in investment to begin to more than offset this drag. This cannot happen unless Greece can secure broad domestic support for the program and the political stability that would come with this.”

Yes, if only Greeks would believe that hunger is a sign of progress, everything would be better! In lieu of a sudden spasm of optimism, generating “broad support” for bleeding the country dry to pay back financiers who made reckless gambles might be difficult.

Ideology masquerading as economics

Although it might be tempting to note that doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is unreasonable, reasonableness is besides the point here: Austerity programs are designed with ideology in mind, not with economics based on the real world. One clue to this is that “structural re-adjustment” programs invariably demand sell-offs of public assets — holding fire sales of state enterprises means private capital can scoop them up at very low prices, and profit nicely from doing so at public expense.

The neoliberal concept is that people exist to serve markets rather than markets existing to serve people. Entire countries have been harnessed to the dictates of “markets.” This has long been the pattern imposed by the North on the South through institutions like the IMF; now the stronger countries of the North are imposing it on their weaker neighbors. Taxpayers in those stronger countries are on the hook, also, as some of their taxes go toward the bailout funds, for which bailed-out countries are merely a conduit to pass the money to financiers, often from their own country. Much of the money Europeans lent to Greece was used to bail out German and French speculators.

The race to the bottom, of which austerity programs and the continual shifting of production to locations with ever lower wages constitute crucial components, represents an intensification of market dominance over human life. It is also a result of a scramble to maintain profits, which have been under continual pressure from the economic crisis.

But neoliberalism is not the product of a cabal “hijacking” economies or governments; it is the natural progression of a system that insists “markets” should be the arbiter of all human problems and the model for social relations and institutions. Capitalist markets are not neutral abstractions perched loftily above the Earth; they are the aggregate interests of the wealthiest industrialists and financiers as expressed through the corporations and other institutions they control.

“Markets” dictate that school children faint at their desk due to hunger while billionaires grab ever more. We can do better than this.

Austerity or Keynesianism: Can’t we do better than this?

Austerity. Keynesianism. Voting for the Center-Right. Voting for the Center-Left. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Five years of the economic crisis has yet to shake the stubborn idea that, if only the right policy were implemented, prosperity would be here again. And so this week’s two turns of the electoral wheel — agreement on a “grand coalition” government in Italy and the return to power in Iceland of the two parties that presided over that country’s collapse — demonstrate that traveling in a circle leads you to where you just were.

(Photo by Jim Champion)

The outgoing Icelandic government earned a reputation for “standing up” to banks and the International Monetary Fund, and refusing to saddle its citizenry with the massive debts of Iceland’s swollen banks. At first glance, it seems curious that Icelanders would vote out such a government and return to office the same government coalition that presided over the country’s meltdown. But a closer look reveals a much different story. So different, in fact, that the IMF praised the outgoing Social Democrat/Left Green coalition government of Jóhanna Sigurđardóttir. Here is an excerpt from an IMF report on November 19, 2012:

“Directors commended the progress made in fiscal consolidation, noting that it is broadly on track.”

That doesn’t mean that Iceland’s dose of austerity is coming to an end. The IMF report goes on to say:

“While welcoming the recent monetary tightening bias, Directors viewed the policy stance as still accommodative. They agreed that further monetary tightening is needed to bring inflation back to target and to normalize monetary conditions in advance of capital account liberalization.”

Iceland’s banks are too big to fail

Iceland didn’t tell the IMF, or the world’s bankers, to take a hike. Iceland, until recently, was unlikely to be at the center of any financial controversy — a country of 300,000 people with an economy traditionally based on fishing. Somewhere along the way, it was decided to convert the Icelandic economy into one based on financial speculation, with the result that the country’s banking sector grew to nine times the size of its gross domestic product. Iceland’s banks offered interest rates well above that of other countries, drawing in foreign depositors (much like Cyprus). Big pots of money led to the irresistible temptation to speculate, with bank-officer compensation tied to the volume of loans made. The usual result followed.

Not that regulators, or parliament, were zealous in checking the financial sector. An official report by an Icelandic parliament committee states:

“It appears that both the parliament and the government lacked both the power and the courage to set reasonable limits to the financial system. All the energy seems to have been directed at keeping the financial system going. It had grown so large, that it was impossible to risk that even one part of it would collapse.”

Iceland took over its three big banks, but quickly sold two of them to creditors, who in turn sold most of their interests to foreign hedge funds. The Icelandic government did agree to all conditions demanded by foreign creditors, the IMF and the British government, but had to somewhat back off only because the package was voted down in a national referendum. So it’s not accurate to say that the outgoing government stood up to anybody. As the Icelandic blog Studio Tendra pungently put it:

“Iceland didn’t bail out the collapsed banks, but that wasn’t for the want of trying. … [T]he Icelandic government tried everything it could to save the banks, including asking for insane loans to pay off the banks’ debts. … So the true story is that Iceland tried and tried and tried and tried as hard as we could to save the creditors. The only reason why we didn’t is that the Icelandic government, then and now, is completely incompetent.”

The outgoing Icelandic government did follow two Keynesian prescriptions in imposing capital controls and currency devaluation, but these did not do much to ameliorate the pain — Iceland can’t detach itself form global capitalism.

For the years 2009 and 2010, Iceland’s gross domestic product declined more than ten percent and its household consumption fell nearly 23 percent. Recovery has since been at a snail’s pace. Making matter worse, Icelandic personal debt is mostly pegged to the country’s inflation rate. As Iceland continues to suffer from inflation, the amount a debtor owes grows as his or her wages decrease. (Wages since 2008 have lagged the consumer price index, according to IMF statistics.)

The suicide mission of Italy’s “Left”

So much for the “Icelandic miracle.” Icelanders have yet to question the economic system that brought them misery, instead opting to swap one set of mainstream parties for another set. That has been the pattern in advanced capital countries. Italy is not yet an exception, although the dramatic rise of the Five Star Movement — sort of an electoral Occupy movement — as a third force in the Italian parliament may be the start of a pushback. Or it could be a brief protest vote without lasting effect. For now, however, Italy’s Center-Left standard-bearer, the Democratic Party, has apparently chosen to complete its suicide mission by forming a “grand coalition” with the main Right party, the wildly misnamed People of Freedom Party.

Italy’s post-war political parties may have collapsed two decades ago, but the same personalities and the same policies and the same interests nonetheless continue to dominate the political sphere. The Democratic Party is the main remnant of the Communist Party of Italy, and is also is a receptacle for the late Christian Democratic Party, a centrist formation that once dominated Italian politics. The new Democratic prime minister hails has roots in the Christian Democrats, but is the nephew of an important aide to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s morbid combination of Rupert Murdoch, George W. Bush and the U.S. right-wing corporate “populist” Ross Perot.

Mr. Berlusconi is one of Italy’s richest persons, owns most of Italy’s mass media and is continually mired in multiple legal entanglements; he dealt with the last of these by forming his own political party, the recently renamed People of Freedom, which catapulted him into the prime ministership. “Freedom of Capital” Party or “Silvio’s Get Out of Jail Card” Party would be more accurate, but nonetheless Italians voted this personal vehicle into office three times.

Italy’s Democratic Party is as eager to implement austerity as the Italian Right — voting for it changes nothing. Italy’s outgoing “technocratic” prime minster, Mario Monti — appointed without the tiresome pretense of elections — and the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, both enjoy Democratic Party support, and the new finance minister has worked closely with Mr. Draghi.

The main potential fracturing point in the grand coalition is personality, which might make for interesting reading but is nothing more than a diversion from a serious discussion of alternatives.

The Five Star Movement’s leader, Beppe Grillo, now the main opposition in the Italian parliament, characteristically didn’t mince words in his blog this week:

“In the last few decades many sides have admitted that this political class lacks credibility, this same class that for the umpteenth time is asking for your vote of confidence. It’s as though this governing team had come down from the moon, as though they are not the ones directly responsible or jointly responsible for what has happened up until now.”

Alternating parties but the same austerity

There’s nothing unique about Italy here. With the exception of Greece, where Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) missed winning the last Greek election by two percentage points, voters in all advanced capitalist countries have been content to alternate the main capitalist parties in office while beginning to voice displeasure through social movements and in polls. One important reason is that the dominant alternatives to the Right — Socialist, Social Democrat, Labour, Democratic & etc. — offer no alternatives to the Right; at best they offer “austerity lite.”

Various reasons, each with some measure of validity, can be assigned as the cause: dependence on corporate money, corruption, domination of the mass media by the Right, philosophical and economic myopia, cowardliness. Although these factors form a significant portion of the answer to the puzzle, an underlying cause has to be found in the exhaustion of social democracy in Europe and liberalism (as the term is used there) in North America. These political formations are trapped by their fervent wishes to stabilize an unstable capitalist system.

They wish to discover the magic reforms that will make it all work again. They do have criticisms, even if they are afraid of saying them too loud, but are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in neoliberalism and austerity, no matter what nice speeches they may make.

The Right, on the other hand, loudly advocates policies that are anathema to the working people who form the overwhelming majority but have the mass media, an array of institutions and the money to saturate society with their preferred policies. But, perhaps most importantly, they have something they believe in strongly — people who are animated by an ideal, however perverted, are motivated to push for it with all their energy.

In contrast, those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that the so-called reformers are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what it to be done.

The reformers can call themselves Socialist, Social Democrat, Labour, Democratic or Liberal, but the label makes no difference. The are dancing to the same tune as their legislative rivals. All dancers will back reforms when there is concentrated public pressure; when the pressure subsides, the reforms are taken back and austerity attacks are relentlessly pushed forward. Major reforms in the United States came in the 1930s and in Europe following World War II thanks to rulers’ fears of being swept away; when the movements responsible for forcing these major reforms became content with reform, the rollback began.

Keynesian reforms would be better than austerity, but would be no more permanent than those of last century; moreover, Keynesianism keeps the capitalists in the saddle, allows them to regain their confidence and gives them the breathing space necessary for them to methodically take back the reforms.

The working peoples of the world’s advanced capitalist countries are living through a structural crisis of capitalism, not simply a rather nasty downturn similar to the repeated recessions of the past. Reforms, not even those on the scale of the mid-20th century, are a panacea. The solution is to be found not on a ballot but rather in organized mass action working for a more humane system not content to settle for reforms that will be taken away. If not today, when?

Mirror images and ideological straitjackets on the path from Solidarity to sellout

For much of the 20th century, there was a curious mirror effect between orthodox Soviet and Chicago School ideologies — both saw the other as the only other possible economic system. Although both time and the ongoing global crisis of capitalism has begun to chip away at such a ridiculous binary, to a maddening degree this ideological straitjacket continues to assert itself. A straitjacket that does not spontaneously materialize but is crafted for the maintenance of power.

The effects of this mirrored duality are still very much with us, and are a crucial factor in the path the countries of the former Soviet bloc have traveled. The usages of this ideological construct are obvious enough in the capitalist world, distilled into “there is no alternative” by the just departed Margaret Thatcher. Less obvious were the usages further East; perhaps the nearest equivalent of the prime minister’s “TINA” is Leonid Brezhnev’s declaration of the Soviet system as “irreversible.”

When the general secretary’s formulation began unraveling in the late 1980s, what was a Soviet bloc economist to do? For many, the answer was to pick up a copy of a book by Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, and jump through the looking glass. And when their new mirror seductively told them to apply shock treatment to their own countries, they did — the mirror told them there was no alternative.

There is always an alternative, Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik reminds us in his book From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland.* Professor Kowalik, drawing on his decades of experience as a reform socialist often on the outs with the communist authorities for his willingness to challenge orthodoxy, his work as an adviser with the Solidarity trade union and his personal knowledge of the key players, reminds us that Poland — and, by implication, the Soviet bloc as a whole — had an opportunity to create a different economy, one built on cooperatives and democratic participation in the economy.

Such an outcome was widely desired by Poles, and the outlines of such a system emerged in the “Round Table” negotiations held between Poland’s communist authorities and representatives of opposition groups, led by Solidarity, from February to April 1989. Economic democracy was already an established concept, embodied in the “Self-Governing Republic” program of Solidarity, adopted at its first national congress in 1981. In it, Solidarity, which consciously identified itself as a labor union and a broad social movement, declared:

“In the organization of the economy, the basic unit will be a collectively managed social enterprise, represented by a workers’ council and led by a director who shall be appointed with the council’s help and subject to recall by the council. The social enterprise shall … [work] in the interests of society and the enterprise itself.  … The reform must socialize planning so that the central plan reflects the aspirations of society and is freely accepted by it. Public debates are therefore indispensable. It should be possible to bring forward plans of every kind, including those drafted by social or civil organizations. Access to comprehensive economic information is therefore absolutely essential.”

Solidarity’s program forgotten, but the looking glass not on agenda

Although Solidarity’s original program was tossed aside, the Round Table negotiators envisioned significant changes without any “leap” into a capitalist market. The two sides did not have serious disagreements, ultimately agreeing in principal, on the political side, on pluralism, freedom of speech and freely elected local governments. On the economic side, there was agreement on facilitating employee ownership, for employee control of state-owned enterprises and a uniform policy toward enterprises, regardless of ownership form. Summarizing the agreement in Solidarity to Sellout, Professor Kowalik wrote:

“Of primary importance here are the provisions concerning protection of labor and employment, written out in ten settled upon and two contentious points. All these detailed settlements distinctly show that the participants of the agreement had no such thought in mind as a ‘leap’ into a market economy.” [page 60]

Yet a particularly harsh brand of capitalism was instituted; “Thatcherism” or “Reaganism” in the parlance of then and “neoliberalism” in today’s vernacular. Professor Kowalik cites several factors leading to the imposition of shock therapy in contradiction to popular opinion, negotiated agreements and pre-existing platforms:

• The centralization of Solidarity while underground during the period of martial law during the 1980s converted it into a top-down organization with a severe cut in membership and an isolated leadership that drifted to the Right.
• The grabbing of state property by the nomenklatura (the bureaucracy managing enterprises and overseeing that management from within the government) for themselves.
• A blurring of Catholicism with socialism, particularly on the part of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who would become the first non-communist prime minister, but also by other influential people.
• The adoption of undiluted neoliberal ideology by the Polish economists who would become the architects of economic policy by becoming ministers and government advisers.

One of the agreements arising out of the Round Table was that one-third of the seats to the Polish parliament (the Sejm) would be contested later that year (1989) in June. Solidarity won all but one of the contested seats — so sweeping was the rout that Solidarity became the effective government even though the communists still held a parliamentary majority. Mr. Mazowiecki became prime minister when the next government was formed three months after the election. Solidarity activists dominated the new government, although communists retained some portfolios, including the Interior and Defense ministries.

Critically, however, the new finance minister/deputy prime minister was Leszek Balcerowicz, a proponent of neoliberalism who was distant from Solidarity’s struggles and whose writings were of an abstract nature; “his interests were limited to pure theory,” according to Professor Kowalik. Prime Minister Mazowiecki’s leading economic adviser was Stanisław Gomułka, who converted to neoliberal ideology while at the London School of Economics. And Western advisers beat a path to Warsaw as they did to other Soviet bloc capitals; Jeffrey Sachs, who oversaw shock therapy in multiple countries, perhaps was the most prominent. The International Monetary Fund was also on the scene.

Abstract theorizing instead of examination of concrete reality

Other economists who had imbibed starry-eyed ideas of how market forces would shortly create paradise played roles as well; but the finance minister’s role was so important that Poland’s shock therapy became known as the “Balcerowicz Plan.” Professor Kowalik wrote of his obfuscating tendencies:

“Balcerowicz made great efforts to compromise — like the term ‘social interest’ — the adjective ‘social.’ … Such a standpoint was bound to lead him to extreme individualism, a negation of the role of the state as a general social institution, with only the interest of the authorities being important. Balcerowicz does not write this outright, but his reasoning resembles a lot the well-known view of Margaret Thatcher, that there is no such thing as society (and thus it does not exist). He rejects the very notion of social justice and often simply avoids this subject. … Balcerowicz’s knowledge, of course, remained theoretical, abstract, and distant from real economic policies.” [pages 112-114]

Such an approach and outlook dovetails with orthodox capitalist economics, as distilled through the wellspring of neoliberalism, Chicago School economics: highly abstract, built on mathematics and based on airy concepts such as “perfect competition” rather than on the real world. Firms and individuals are not seen as part of a social structure; factors such as wealth and property are taken as given. Production is alleged to be independent of all social factors, the employees who do the work of production are in their jobs due to personal choice, and wages are based only on individual achievement independent of race, gender and other differences.

Such is the underlying rationale for neoliberalism, which seeks to make “market forces” — the aggregate interests of the wealthiest industrialists and financiers as expressed through the power of the corporations they control — the sole arbiter of outcomes in all social spheres. Neoliberalism, as Henry Giroux recently put it, “construes profit-making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational belief in the market to solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations.”

New laws accelerate grabbing of state property already in progress

Privatization, however, was already under way by the time the Round Table negotiators hammered out their agreement. A 1987 law enabled the creation of private businesses with the assets of state enterprises and a January 1989 law stipulated outright that state assets could be transferred to private individuals for conducting economic activity. Such transfers were not necessarily done with full value paid, and private firms were given preferential treatment. Professor Kowalik wrote in Solidarity to Sellout:

“[T]he players of the nomenklatura offshoot of privatization consisted of managers of various rank, government and party functionaries associated with them, along with their families. The process, commonly called ‘enfranchisement of the nomenklatura,’ deserves attention because it was then that the phenomenon of corrupt privatization, or arranged clientelistic privatization, developed. …

“The state sector shortly became a cash machine, which was made easier by the authorities through relevant legal regulations. … These laws sanctioned the plunder of the state sector earlier begun by its own managers. The state sector was highly taxed to maintain the entire state infrastructure and doomed to hopeless competition with the nearly tax-free private firms that were also paying infinitesimal customs duties.” [pages 204-205]

The pace was accelerated when the parliament, in late December 1989, hurriedly passed nearly unanimously a series of bills implementing the Balcerowicz Plan, with the plan going into effect on January 1, 1990. Noting the later contrition of the parliament speaker, who said Finance Minister Balcerowicz and Professor Sachs “plainly tricked us,” Professor Kowalik summed up the vote this way:

“Advantage was simply taken of the immense trust that the people had in the first non-communist government. There could be no serious debate, because without a general document presenting a synthesis of the systemic contents of eleven laws and the simultaneously ratified budget, such a discussion was not possible. The parliamentarians acted under the pressure of a race with time, imposed on them by the executive authorities.” [page 133]

One scheme for privatization was the creation of “National Investment Funds” — state companies disposed in this program were to be 15 percent owned by employees, 25 percent by the state treasury and 60 percent by the funds, with the public allowed to buy shares in the funds. Only a minority of privatized enterprises were disposed of this way (more were simply sold to foreign buyers), but the funds were a failure, Solidarity to Sellout reports, because inflation and a declining stock market caused the shares to steadily lose value; moreover, most of the public shares wound up in foreign hands.

What capital remained in Polish hands also became concentrated as, similar to the pattern in Russia, the nomenklatura-turned-privatizers were soon dwarfed by a new class of oligarchs.

Actual cooperatives faced consistent hostility from the government, which saw coops as a temporary “transition” to what it termed “real” privatization. Pre-existing cooperatives were simply  “administratively eliminated,” new coops had barriers placed in front of them and foreign capital, which soon controlled Polish banking, was also hostile. At the same time, state farms were immediately thrown into competition with subsidized Western European agricultural with all domestic subsidies removed at a stroke, devastating Polish farmers. This was in contrast to the buildup of Western European agriculture after World War II, which was nurtured through protective measures.

Results of shock therapy differ widely from promises

The results of the Balcerowicz Plan were devastating, in contrast to promises of a short-lived downturn followed by rapid growth and transition to Poland becoming a “normal” European country, a concept dangled by Western advisers skillfully playing on Polish antipathy toward Russia:

• A 50 percent drop in real wages and a 30 percent drop in industrial output in the first month of the Balcerowicz Plan.
• From 1996 to 2005, the percentage of Poles whose income was so low as to be insufficient for biological survival tripled to 12 percent even though the national income rose by one-third.
• Wage inequality became the highest in the European Union.
• The number of Poles living below the official poverty level ballooned to 58 percent by 2003; the statistics bureau then stopped publishing this figure.
• Before entry into the European Union, the average unemployment rate was 16 percent, topping 20 percent during the early 2000s, more than a decade after the imposition of shock therapy; the rate declined after E.U. ascension due to a stream of emigration.

Having told this story in a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless compelling style, Solidarity to Sellout ends, surprisingly, on an unimaginative note by championing the Scandinavian model of capitalism, seeing Sweden as the model for Poland to emulate. In part, the conclusion follows from Professor Kowalik’s acknowledgment that a lack of organized anger and the sellout by trade unions has allowed the Polish Right to flourish, and a tacit understanding that creating a cooperative economy is drastically more difficult in a privatized economy than it would have been when enterprises were in state hands. He writes:

“[I]t was enough for the trade unions to become involved in support of anti-employee systemic changes and the shock operation. That is why rebuilding he strength of the trade unions in Poland is going to be an extremely difficult task.” [page 298]

Professor Kowalik calls the Scandinavian countries “centers of economic excellence,” contrasting them to Poland’s “role of subcontractor.” The former model by any reasonable measure is superior to neoliberalism, but the professor has perhaps not fully considered that Poland, and the rest of the Soviet bloc, were destined by the dynamics of capitalism to become a source of cheap labor, akin to Latin America’s relationship to the United States. Nor are the more powerful capitalist countries likely to acquiesce to a subcontractor becoming a serious competitor.

Having become completely entangled in the global capitalist system, Poland can only transcend to a better system as part of an international bloc; it can’t be an island unto itself. Given the structural crisis of global capitalism, the aim will have to be higher than simply emulating Sweden, where capitalist pressures are not unknown and the European Union methodically imposes downward pressure.

But regardless of one’s opinion of the conclusion, Solidarity to Sellout provides an outstanding analysis of the capitalist restoration of Poland on neoliberal grounds, as could only be written by an economist with an intimate understanding of Poland, economics, the Solidarity movement and the key individuals in the process. Professor Kowalik’s book is well worth pursing by anybody interested in understanding the post-Soviet path of Central Europe, or, more generally, the dynamics of neoliberalism.

* Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012]

Social security cuts: Work until you drop

A social movement to preserve Social Security has never been as urgent as it is today. Tempting as it might be to send a dictionary to the White House explaining the difference between “compromise” and “capitulation,” we should not be overly generous — Barack Obama’s intention to gut Social Security is not so much a pre-emptive capitulation as it is yet another demonstration of his adherence to neoliberal ideology.

By now, such a demonstration should not be necessary. Remember that one of the president’s first appointments was Lawrence Summers, who once wrote a memo while chief economist at the World Bank advocating industries creating toxic waste be transferred to Africa because the continent is “vastly UNDER-polluted” (emphasis in original). Professor Summers’ appointment in 2008 as President Obama’s leading economic adviser after his career of promoting Reaganite, neoliberal policies, including leading the Clinton administration’s deregulation of banking and scrapping of regulations for derivative contracts, set the tone for what was to come.

Let us not fall out of our chairs — neoliberal austerity is a bipartisan policy. Voters alternate between their dominant parties in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, yet the train stays in motion. Fans of the movie Avatar likely remember an early scene in which Sigourney Weaver’s character mocks the macho, militaristic approach of the Marines who intend to unilaterally take the mineral “unobtainium” from the Pandora natives by bulldozing their homes and forest. Her intention was to negotiate with the natives and have them agree to give up their homes and forest.

Note that there was no difference in the goal of the Marines, exemplar of the conservative approach, and that of the would-be negotiator, representative of the supposedly more enlightened approach. I remember thinking to myself while watching Avatar that Ms. Weaver’s character represented the Democratic Party wing of neoliberalism. Indeed, Democrats and their “left-of-center” counterparts among the world’s advanced capitalist countries — even parties in Europe that call themselves “socialist” — routinely implement ever more harsh policies that punish working people to further enrich the wealthy.

So we have something here bigger than Barack Obama and whatever character flaws he might be perceived as possessing. Republicans want to privatize Social Security — the ultimate dream of Wall Street and good for industrialists, too, as retirements become a quaint relic of the past. More people are forced to remain in the job market longer; more competition for jobs means lower wages and more profits. President Obama simply wants to phase this in more slowly.

Photo by A. Blackman, England

Specifically, President Obama is unilaterally offering Republicans the first step in the gutting of Social Security — reducing benefits. His method to do this is to change the formula for calculating cost-of-living increases from the standard Consumer Price Index to a different methodology known as the “Chained Consumer Price Index,” under which the rate of inflation is lower.

In the standard CPI, the basket of goods used to calculate inflation does not change. In the “Chained CPI,” items that rise in price are substituted with a cheaper product under the theory that consumers will switch to lower-priced alternatives. That may sometimes be so, but such actions do not alter the fact that the desired product is more expensive and thus represents the true extent of inflation. Nor does it account for the fact that many high-cost expenses, such as rent and electricity, don’t have readily available alternatives.

If they want inflation to be less, they shall make it so

This substitution of the standard CPI for the “Chained CPI” is a long-standing demand of Right-wing ideologues, and President Obama has offered it to them on a silver platter. The New York Times, the first to report of the proposed Social Security cuts (and which, uncharacteristically, called the cuts cuts instead of using a euphemism), anonymously quoted Obama administration officials who intimated that this was part of an elaborate plan to force Republicans in Congress to agree to modest tax increases. The Times quoted an official as claiming:

“That means … that the things like [Chained] C.P.I. that Republican leaders have pushed hard for will only be accepted if Congressional Republicans are willing to do more on revenues.”

But the president’s offer contains far more cuts for working people and retirees than attempts to make corporations and the wealth pay taxes at a slightly more reasonable level. The Times reported:

“He will propose more than $600 billion in new revenues — his last offer had called for $1.2 trillion in taxes — mostly by limiting to 28 percent the deductions that individuals in higher tax brackets can claim. Congress has ignored that idea in past years. Deficits would be reduced another $930 billion through 2023 as a result of spending cuts and other cost-saving changes to domestic programs. … Mr. Obama’s proposed spending reductions include about $400 billion from health programs and $200 billion from other areas, including farm subsidies, federal employee retirement programs, the Postal Service and the unemployment compensation system.”

That sounds like a whole lot of new austerity. Austerity hasn’t been working out so well in Europe, where, for instance, eurozone unemployment is at 12 percent and rising. That, sadly, is not the point. The ongoing economic crisis is an opportunity for corporate executives and financiers to push through what they’ve always wanted anyway. An oft-quoted summation of this thinking was offered several years ago by Stephen Moore of the far right Club for Growth and the Cato Institute: “Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”

Both groups are dedicated to cutting taxes for corporations and putting an end to any social safety net. The Club for Growth founder is connected to groups like the Heritage Foundation and to Tea Party impresario Dick Armey, while the Cato Institute recently experienced a power struggle in which the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, ousted the leadership for being insufficiently severe. Cato sent six alumni to the Bush II/Cheney administration, four of whom served on the latter’s Orwellian named “Commission to Strengthen Social Security.”

A better slogan than ‘work until you drop’

Because “work until you drop” is not an effective slogan to rally people to your side, Wall Street financiers and those opposed to social safety nets float scare stories that Social Security will soon run out of money, and you’d do better putting all your money in the stock market. Neither is true. Let’s start with the second of these two mythologies. In 2005, I researched the historical performance of the U.S. stock market for an article published in Z Magazine and found that the gains are small, when adjusted for inflation, and the gains only materialize when bubbles are near their peak.

As bubbles peak about once every 35 years, it is difficult to time these just right. When adjusted for inflation, the Dow Jones Industrial Average — the ultimate index of stock-market health and which has its components continually adjusted so as to replace low-performing stocks with high-performing ones — was below its 1929 peak as late as 1991. Here are some long-term results:

• The Dow peaked at 995 in February 1965. Adjusted for inflation, that was 42 percent more than it was worth at its previous bubble peak in 1929, not so impressive when it took 36 years to get there.
• The ensuring crash bottomed out in December 1974. At this point, the Dow, adjusted for inflation, was worth only half of what it was worth in 1929 and little more than one-third of its 1965 peak.
• The most recent crash bottomed out in March 2009, at which point the Dow was three percent below its 1965 peak, adjusted for inflation.
• Yesterday’s Dow closing of 14,673, when adjusted for inflation, is almost precisely double that of its 1965 peak, but a 100 percent gain over 48 years isn’t terribly dazzling.

And with the price/earnings, or P/E, ratio, of the S&P 500 Index now at 18.35, stocks are again over-valued when measured historically. The ratio’s average, calculated back to 1872, is 14. Five times in history this ratio, which is a company’s yearly profit divided by one share, has surpassed 20; each time was followed by a crash.

The biggest canard, however, is how financial chicken littles frame their case. The claim that Social Security will run out of money in perhaps three decades is based on predicting a low rate of future stock-market gains while the claim that privatizing Social Security will produce more money is based on predicting a rate of future stock-market gains double that of the former rate.

There are examples of privatizing social security systems, and the results have been a bonanza for financiers and disastrous for retirees. In Chile, where the privatization was done at the end of a gun barrel during the Pinochet dictatorship, a worker who retired in 2005 received less than half of what he or she would have received had he or she been able to stay in the old system. The six companies that administer the private plans, not coincidentally, constitute one of Chile’s most profitable industries.

It took tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of arrests, torture sessions, “disappearances” and exiles to implement Milton Friedman’s Chicago School shock therapy in Chile. Nowadays, such levels of violence are not necessary as elected governments implement neoliberalism in a series of measured doses, and four decades of incessant propaganda has acculturated the peoples of the world to the ahistorical idea that “there is no alternative.” Violence nonetheless remains the system’s handmaiden, as the coordinated crushing of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the tolerated rise of fascist groups like Golden Dawn in Greece demonstrate.

There is an alternative — ceasing to placing your hopes in parties that disagree only over the best method to implement neoliberalism, whether the one’s candidate sneers at “government-dependent” voters or the other’s candidate makes speeches vowing to tackle inequality while acting to make it worse. Change comes social movements, not from elections.

Republicans, corporate interests intentionally destroying Post Office

Privatization is a polite word for corporate self-interest. When calls for privatization arise, it is always useful to see who’s interest is being served.

Take the United States Postal Service. The Republican Party is doing its best to destroy a national institution that provides hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs. (The Democratic Party is doing nothing, perhaps waiting for a signal from its corporate benefactors.) Merely reading “unionized” in front of “jobs” leads to the conclusion that ideology is behind this latest attack on working people, and surely a Right-wing desire to eliminate large unions and drive down wages further is a significant motivation.

Not the sole motivation, however. Privatizing the Postal Service would mean big new business for delivery services and companies that supply postal products. Advocates of privatization recently sought to inject more wind into their sails with the release of a study by a “think tank” with the bland-sounding name of National Academy of Public Administration. The “study” has yet to published in full, but its four authors, described as “postal industry thought leaders,” have published their conclusion — a call for a near total privatization.

Just who are these four “postal industry thought leaders”? With one exception, they are people who have a vested interest in privatization. Surprise! Here they are:

• Ed Gleiman, a former member of the Postal Rate Commission, has since become a lobbyist for the Direct Marketing Association, a group representing large mailers.
• John Nolan, a deputy postmaster general during the Bush II/Cheney administration, is currently a board member for Streamlite, a business-to-consumer lightweight package delivery service. He is also a senior advisor to The Western Union Co., another corporation that stands to benefit from dismantling the Postal Service.
• Edward Hudgins is a director of the Atlas Society (“Atlas” as in Ayn Rand) and previously worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. The latter two organizations are manically dedicated to destroying all protections for employees, while the phantasmagorical absurdity of Ayn Rand’s novels bear as much relation to reality as an elephant that flies.
• George Gould, a former political director for the National Association of Letter Carriers union, doesn’t appear to have an ideological axe to grind as do the other three “leaders” and perhaps is guilty of nothing more than absorbing neoliberal ideology. Critics of the NALC say that the union has failed to fight for its membership, and Mr. Gould’s participation in this “study” might provide those critics additional fuel.

Direct funding by a corporation that stands to benefit

To round out the picture, the major funder of the postal privatization “study” is Pitney Bowes Inc., which stands to directly benefit. Greg Bell, executive vice president of the American Postal Workers Union, writes:

“Pitney Bowes, the company that is funding the review, stands to be a major beneficiary. The company is widely known as a provider of mailing equipment, but it is also a major mail ‘pre-sorter.’ The company takes advantage of generous pre-sort discounts offered by the Postal Service to provide outsourced services to high-volume mailers. In 2011, Pitney Bowes operated 41 mail processing facilities and generated $5.3 billion in revenue. Pitney Bowes would certainly snatch up a major portion of USPS revenue if it were given the chance.”

FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., the two largest U.S. private delivery services, also stand to benefit from the destruction of the Postal Service. FedEx is one of the heaviest spenders on political donations and lobbying, and employs several dozen lobbyists who formerly worked in government, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. UPS is also a heavy spender on donations and lobbying, while employing its own team of lobbyists who formerly worked in government.

The National Academy of Public Administration “study” advocates a bizarre “hybrid” scheme in which all postal activities will be privatized, except for the “final mile” — a Postal Service worker would deliver mail and packages to mailboxes and other final destinations. The paper states:

“In the ‘final mile’ package strategy, private sector consolidators compete to pickup, process, and transport hundreds of millions of packages. Shippers pay the consolidators to prepare and transport the mail for ‘last mile’ delivery by USPS letter carriers. The consolidators pay USPS a delivery charge. Upstream competition among private sector providers promotes efficiencies that lead to better service and lower overall prices.”

Private oligopolies are not known for lowering prices, however, and the paper’s assertion that regulation counter excesses is refuted by the many industries in which regulation is toothless, and in which agency chiefs routinely cycle back to their primary roles as corporate executives. We need only look at vastly inflated pharmaceutical prices, runaway financial legerdemain and a lack of resolve in food safety to know that private delivery companies will easily evade any serious scrutiny, piling up profits while cutting jobs, wages and benefits. The only certainty is that large numbers of jobs will be lost.

Who can fund 75 years of pensions in 10 years?

A government institution painted as financially troubled is easier to be targeted for corporate plunder than one on firm footing, so, voilà, congressional Republicans cooked up a devastating scheme. A congressional bill signed into law in 2006 requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its pension costs for the next 75 years in only 10 years. This is unheard of; certainly no private business would or could do such a thing. This preposterous requirement — why do I keep seeing sneering villains twisting their mustaches like in those movies of a century ago? — has saddled the Postal Service with a $16 billion deficit.

Hoping to maintain corporate momentum, a leading congressional Republican, Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has pushed a bill that would allow an oversight committee to modify union contracts. Representative Issa’s bill, if passed, would allow unilateral cuts to previously bargained wages.

The National Association of Letter Carriers, however, has already approved wage cuts. The latest contract increases the number of “temporary” mail carriers who have inferior wages and benefits, setting a up a two-tier system in which newer workers have lower pay, not fundamentally different than the new two-tier pay systems at General Motors — taxpayers loaned the money to GM to keep it afloat, and the reward is more austerity. These deals in turn serve to depress wages elsewhere by setting lower standards.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of Postal Service jobs have already been eliminated. A statement issued by Detroit Workers’ Voice, analyzing the attacks on postal unions, says:

“Postal workers are being run over time after time, and the strategy of the leadership of the postal unions has proved completely ineffective in stopping this. Yes, the union leaders sometimes have snappy criticisms against management. But they collaborate with management. Thus, when new contracts with management help the USPS decimate the workforce, the main union officials hide the setbacks or justify them. Insofar as there is struggle against the USPS bosses, it is within strict limits. Organizing the rank and file for struggles within the postal facilities is avoided. Public actions of any kind are rare. Militant action that would really press management is off limits.”

Postal Service unions, of course, are hardly unique in their timidity. Fightbacks are possible, as the Chicago teachers’ union demonstrated last year. The Chicago teachers spent months preparing parents and the city as a whole for a possible strike as neoliberal Mayor Rahm Emanuel sought to break the union and replace public schools accountable to the public with private, non-union charter schools under corporate control.

There were critics who complained that the teachers didn’t win many advances and ended the strike too quickly, but it is more realistic to analyze the strike in a fuller context — given the totality of the circumstances, the Chicago teachers won as much as they could have and would have begun to jeopardize the massive public support behind them, an indispensable force as the city’s other unions did nothing to help.

No union, no matter how militant, can win substantial gains without a movement that mobilizes sustained support from those unionized, non-unionized and unemployed — a movement that acts on the understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all. Unions aren’t making efforts to create that support, instead at most narrowly attempting to slightly slow down the defeats to their specific memberships. The structural causes of our present-day world of austerity are far larger than any union federation nor are they contained with any single geographical unit. The entire history of capitalism has led us to today’s world.

An injury to one, or to one group of employees, truly is an injury to all. Enormous power is concentrated into the hands of financiers and industrialists, and there are no limits to the injuries they and the politicians who serve them intend to inflict. Putting our heads in the sand and hoping it’s the other person who gets it only delays the injury to one’s self and makes it worse when they come for you.

Cyprus pensioners told to pay for crisis. Who will pay tomorrow?

Either bankers are so confident of their power that they increasingly can’t be bothered to disguise it, or we have to stretch the definition of “democracy” so far that the word loses any sense of meaning. This week’s news that the newly elected government of Cyprus was ordered to make its savings depositors pay for a bailout of Russian oligarchs and real estate speculators is stunning even by the standards of the global economic slump.

None of the previous eurozone bailouts had gone so far as to directly confiscate the savings of ordinary depositors. Not even in Ireland, where former Prime Minister Brian Cowen had huffed and puffed that Ireland would not surrender its sovereignty — which he demonstrated by insisting that Ireland’s ultra-low corporate tax rate not be touched. It wasn’t. European bankers had no issue with that, granting him that one concession while imposing cuts to wages, lowering the minimum wage, drastically raising water rates, raising university tuition and reducing health care services.

The intensity of Ireland’s austerity derives from the decision by the former prime minister to cover all potential losses by Ireland’s major banks, no matter how reckless their speculative lending had become. In other words, the Irish government paid off the bad loans made by its bankers and guaranteed speculators in the banks’ bonds would suffer no losses, and passed the bill onto its citizens. This represented an extraordinary warping of the idea that bank deposits, up to a certain level, are guaranteed. Other countries have had various versions of this austerity imposed on them. But now the European Union and its bankers are attempting austerity from a different angle: Partial confiscation of all savings, even if “guaranteed.”

No, that doesn’t mean that the normal austerity terms aren’t being imposed by the European Central Bank, the eurozone’s finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund. For weeks, rumors had circulated that, this time, that there would be a sharing of the cost of a bailout as Cyprus inched closer to a bailout. In the ordinary sense of this concept, that would mean that bondholders and the banks themselves would shoulder some of the burden. Not surprisingly, there had been pushback against this idea with financiers complaining that making them take responsibility for their own speculation would be disruptive to financial markets.

Finance ministers want pensioners to pay for crisis

Plan B was is to make working people and pensioners who have their life savings in banks and had nothing whatsoever to do with the latest eurozone crisis instead shoulder the burden. The Cypriot government was told point-blank to confiscate a portion of depositors’ savings or all money would be cut off, which would cause an immediate collapse of its two primary banks. No matter that deposits up to €100,000 are guaranteed. To avoid a bank run, Cypriot banks are closed for at least three days so that Cypriot parliamentarians can be hectored by eurozone finance ministers to do their duty.

The Cypriot parliament said no in its March 19 vote, but “no” votes in other countries have been reversed under pressure, so this drama has not yet run its course.

Cyprus needs €17 billion to bail out its banks, but European Union and International Monetary Fund officials are loaning only €10 billion, insisting that the remainder come from a deposit tax and other internal measures, including privatizing utilities. And why do Cypriot banks need all this money? Because they over-extended themselves on loans to real estate developers and others, the same story as in so many other countries. They also absorbed losses when Greek government bonds they owned were devalued in the wake of Greece’s ongoing crisis. An added complication is that about 40 percent of Cyprus’ total deposits are by foreigners, mostly Russians, causing extra challenges.

Cypriot banks are widely seen as money-laundering havens for Russian oligarchs, and a straight bailout of the banks would appear to many eyes as a bailout of money launderers. That in itself would not look good. In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces re-election later this year and, given repeated assertions by German right-wingers that Germany is bailing out slothful Mediterraneans, is loath to leave herself exposed to more such charges.

Imposing a “deposit tax” only on deposits greater than the government guarantee would be one way out of this political dilemma, but that would leave Russia angry. Not only does Russian President Vladimir Putin seek to protect his country’s oligarchs, but Russia has previously granted Cyprus a loan on which the Cypriot government hopes to re-negotiate easier terms. As it is, Russia strongly protested the proposed confiscation that would have affected everyone.

The Cypriot government is caught between multiple rocks and hard places — subordinate to Germany, the northern European Union countries that ally with Germany on financial issues, Russia, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It is also subordinate to financial markets, a nice term that really means international financiers and speculators. Countries far bigger than Cyprus are subordinate to financial markets, and even large countries like Germany are not independent of market forces.

Cypriot banks hold assets estimated at eight times the country’s gross domestic product — Cyprus, like Ireland and Iceland, which had similarly bloated banks, can’t sustain a financial sector swollen to such a dangerous size. Cypriot banks offered interest rates far above rates found elsewhere, which attracted foreign depositors but also signaled significant risk. Banks that do not ask questions of people who deposit huge sums of money are not closely regulated. The downside of that risk has materialized, but rather than impose the cost, financiers and the government ministers who represent them prefer to say “never mind” to the deposit insurance counted on by working people and pensioners banking their life savings.

A crisis of financial domination, not national characteristics

The social risk here, in a broader sense, is that the Cypriot crisis will be seen through nationalist lenses. To accuse “slothful Mediterraneans” or “arrogant Germans” is to be blind to the larger structural forces at work, which pay no attention to national borders. Financiers last year imposed new unelected governments on Greece and Italy so that their preferred policies be carried out. If they can topple one government, they can topple other governments; the pious declarations that Cyprus’ confiscation of savers would be a unique event that won’t be repeated rings hollow given those precedents.

Austerity comes in many forms and no country’s workers are exempt — the German manufacturing “miracle” in fact has a down-to-earth cause — a decade of wage cuts for German workers. Germany is ever more dependent on exports as its domestic ability to consume slowly declines due to the steady drop of wage cuts. When those export markets begin to dry up, German workers will not be able to pick up the slack and German manufacturers and financiers will impose stronger austerity on German workers to buoy profits.

For now, German workers are relatively privileged, a difference exploited to foster divisions. Austerity has been much harsher in the eurozone’s Mediterranean countries and Ireland. Thus far, we have seen only the beginnings of any political fightback, in the form of strong electoral showings by Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the 5 Star Movement in Italy. For the most part, Europeans have continued to alternate among their local dominant parties.

Frequent massive demonstrations demonstrate widespread anger — that is important, as the route to reversing austerity and the system that imposes it lies in mass action. It is a healthy sign of cross-border solidarity that demonstrators in front of the Cypriot parliament carried signs saying (in Italian and Spanish) “today me, tomorrow you.”

But anger without organization ultimately dissipates like steam released from an engine. Such organization has to translate, in part, to challenging political power, which in turn is intimately linked (and subordinate) to economic power. Austerity does not fall out of the sky; it is an expression of power to benefit those in power. Capitalists, including financiers, can remove governments and confiscate savings. What’s next? The return of debtors’ prisons? Mandatory unpaid labor to boost profits? Those might sound far-fetched, but unchecked power has a way of moving toward limitless power. Organizing to reverse this is simply self-defense.

Millions without enough food and billionaires with more

Two reports were issued in recent days that make for a jarring, albeit not surprising, juxtaposition. One, the Forbes magazine annual list of the world’s richest people, was met with widespread breathless reporting. The other, a comprehensive survey of the large numbers of people who don’t have enough to eat in the United States, passed almost without a trace.

Because it merits far more attention than it received, let’s start with the second report. Issued by the Food Research and Action Center, the report “Food Hardship in America 2012” found that 18.2 percent of people living in the U.S. have insufficient access to food, based on the number of respondents who answered yes to the question: “Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

That is close to one in five. Or, to put it another way, 57 million people in the United States — the richest country on Earth — face going hungry. In 20 states, representing all regions of the country, more than one in five do not have enough to eat. In a further irony, the U.S. metropolitan area with the highest level of reported hunger is Bakersfield, California, where 26.7 percent did not have enough to eat at some point in 2012. Bakersfield is located in California’s Central Valley, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions.

The Food Research and Action Center also reports that more than 70 percent of people surveyed believed that the federal government should spend more money to alleviate hunger and 75 percent disagreed with congressional plans to cut food-assistance programs, already considered by experts as too small to provide adequate nutrition. These results are in strong contrast to the dominant narrative that cuts to social spending are widely desired.

One of the many corporate-media outlets that consistently cheerlead for more austerity is Forbes. The self-proclaimed “capitalist tool” proudly announced that 1,426 billionaires stride our planet, collectively accumulating net worths totaling US$5.4 trillion — $800 billion more than a year earlier.

To put that $5.4 trillion figure in perspective, there are exactly two countries in the world — the U.S. and China — that have a larger gross domestic product. The two largest economies in the European Union, Germany and France (according to World Bank statistics), have a combined GDP of US$5.5 trillion — barely more than the assets of the world’s 1,426 billionaires.

Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu again tops the list of the world’s richest people, with $73 billion to call his own. And once again, the Walton family, airs to the Wal-Mart fortune, are well represented — four separate Waltons are among the top 17, worth a combined $107 billion. That fortune is built on a ruthless system of sweatshops in the countries with the lowest labor costs and weakest enforcement of labor laws, and a relentless exploitation of its workforce. Wal-Mart is notorious for handing new employees forms to apply for food stamps because its pay is too low for survival.

The unemployment rate in the European Union is currently at 11.9 percent and a disastrous 23.6 percent for people age 25 and younger. Inequality in incomes is on the rise in countries around the world. Stock markets are flirting with record highs, reflecting the financial industry’s giddiness that employees have ever lesser leverage to counter their deteriorating pay and work conditions. Employee wages have been stagnant for more than three decades despite large increases in productivity.

Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

How could we have become so disconnected from the reality of our lives that we can celebrate the totality of all this as the greatest feat of humanity and a monument to efficiency?