The SYRIZA Experience

SUBHEAD: Entering the ominous battlefield of the 21st century, the left will either be relevant or it will be obsolete.

By Andreas Karitzis on 17 march 2106 for Open Democracy -
(https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/andreas-karitzis/syriza-experience-lessons-and-adaptations-0)


Image above: During the sovereign debt crisis European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker leads Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras by the hand to his unhappy ending. From original article.

The impact of the strategic defeat of last year is still very strongly shaping various reactions within the Greek left. Some people seem content with superficial explanations of what happened and return to habitual ways of thinking and acting; others sense the strategic depth of the defeat and turn inwards to disappointment and demoralization.

Still others are trying to learn from the “SYRIZA experience” in order to make themselves more useful to people in the future. All of us sense the dangers lurking in front of us but we are far from having a common and feasible strategy.

In a situation like this, political priorities change and ‘novel’ tasks emerge. For example, people far beyond those affiliated with the traditional left are scattered and in disarray, but also full of energy, determination and skills. What should they do?

Another urgent task is how to transmit the 'SYRIZA experience' abroad, facilitating the left in other countries in the fight against neoliberalism and increased hostility of the elites. ‘Novel’ tasks require a different mentality and operational qualities from the ones we used to deploy through traditional political action.

But first we need: (i) a thorough understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the 'SYRIZA experience', and (ii) an open, bold and innovative process of arriving at the new conditions of doing politics. These are some preliminary thoughts in this direction.

The failure

SYRIZA failed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation in Greece. One could argue that SYRIZA also betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism. It chose to remain in power, thereby ‘normalizing’ the coup we witnessed last summer and accepting neoliberal coordinates that shape governmentality today in Europe.

SYRIZA's choice deprived the people of a crucial ‘tool’ in this fight by its painful defeat: the political representation of non-compliance with financial despotism. SYRIZA eliminated the chance of a ‘tactical withdrawal’, a collective process of reassembling our forces that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites - and forming a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future.

The experience of the SYRIZA government in the months after the agreement, shows that there is no middle ground between financial despotism and democracy and dignity; if you try to reach such middle ground, you are quickly converted into an organic component of the biopolitical machine aimed at dehumanizing our societies. Arguing that the implementation of the agreement is the only way out of the present situation is just a reformulation of the neoliberal core-argument that There Is No Alternative; no strategy for continuing the fightback against financial despotism.

However, there is a danger of underestimating the brutal strategic defeat that we all suffered in 2015, hiding from ourselves the extent of our current impotence as regards any serious challenge to financial despotism. We must dare to perform an extensive reassessment of our methodology and tools if we want to be relevant in these new conditions.

And to do so, we should not preoccupy ourselves with the self-evident negative nature of SYRIZA's choice and comfort ourselves that this is the source of our  problems. The choice SYRIZA made is – among other things – a symptom of the deeper, structural weaknesses of the left.

Today in Greece a ‘Left government’ is implementing austerity, leftwing people are confused and ‘The Left’ is turning into a pro-memorandum political force in people's minds. Nationalists and fascists have remained the only "natural hosts" of popular rage and resentment, the expected emotional outcomes of the burial of hope we witnessed last summer. Greeks are sensing that the future of their society is severely compromised.

The majority of Greeks have been sentenced to misery and despair through the imposition of newer harder austerity measures without any real hope for the future. If we add to the economic and social disaster that austerity is inflicting on us the huge waves of refugees that are entering Greece - especially the complex and contradictory ways in which their drama impacts on the abused psychic economy of the Greek population - and add also the fear of increased geopolitical instability in the region, then it seems certain that prosperity, stability and peace has left Greece for the identifiable future.

These are exactly the suffocating conditions that prevail in a society before it explodes – due to a random incident – deepening even further the decline, and plunging existential depths. It is like we are walking on thin ice from now on in Greece. In moments like this we have to remain calm and think clearly if we want to arrive at what is needed to adapt and to be effective.

The sad case of Europe

The neoliberal EU and Eurozone has transferred a bundle of important policies and powers that once appeared to belong to the nation state out of the reach of the people. At the same time, a vast array of neoliberal regulations and norms govern the function of the state. In the EU and Eurozone today, the elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power. In the case of Greece, democratically electing a government is like electing a junior partner in a wider government in which the lenders are the major partners.

The junior partner is not allowed to intervene and disturb decisions on such crucial economic and social issues as fiscal policy, banks, privatizations, pensions etc. If it does intervene and demand a say on these issues, then the people who appoint it are going to suffer the consequences.

The elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a society will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run or not.

That's what happened to Greece; that's the core argument of the president of Portugal behind his initial decision to appoint a pro-austerity minority government: ‘I am preventing unnecessary pain.’ Pain that will be caused by the naivety and dangerous ignorance of the people and political powers that still insist on people's right to have access to crucial decisions, while at the same time they do not have the power to shape these decisions.

It is evident today that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. The left must embrace the crude reality: in Europe a new kind of despotism is emerging fast.

The time lag of the left

In western societies, the left, but not only the left, of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of a post-war institutional configuration. We assumed that the elites were committed to accepting the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government.

If they did not like the policies that it promoted, they had to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that this policy is neither desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected.

But was this ever truly the case even for western societies after the Great War? This is surely a debatable issue. However, it is sufficient to assume that this was at least the dominant conception of political functioning that shaped the methodology and strategy of political agency over the last decades, even if it does not correspond fully to reality.

According to this conception, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, so that people without considerable economic power nevertheless have access to crucial decisions. Of course, the quality and the range of the access was a constant issue of class struggle.

The elites were obliged to fight according to the rules (or at least to appear to do so) and at the same time they were working deliberately to diffuse a kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In recent decades (not accidentally after the fall of the Soviet Union) they made decisive steps towards diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today the elites feel confident enough to openly defy democracy. Democracy is no longer a sine qua non.

Based on the premise that the framework in which politics is being performed hasn't changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government. We all know the results of such a strategy now. The real outcome was totally different. There was virtually no change of policy.

Prepare for landing

A strategy that wishes to be relevant to the new conditions must take on the duty of acquiring the necessary power to run basic social functions.

Mo matter how difficult or strange this may sound in light of the traditional ways of doing politics, it is the only way to acquire the necessary power to defy the elites' control over our societies.

Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc. that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history, we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach that we are bound to progress our collective intelligence in this regard if we put our minds to it.

Of course we are talking about elements that are not developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may indeed have been nurtured in liberal or apolitical contexts often functionally connected to the standard economic orthodoxy. However, the support of their further development, their gradual absorption in an alternative, coherent paradigm governed by a different logic and values, and finally their functional articulation in alternative patterns of performing the basic functions of our societies is just a short description of the duty of any left that wishes to take up a clear, systematic and strategically broadbased orientation.    

Based on people's capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. We can do this by ‘extracting’ the embodied capacities of the people and putting them into use for the liberation of society.

For those who are frankly skeptical of the possibility of laying the groundwork for such a process, let's see the potential in the stark case of Greece.

SYRIZA at its peak had approximately 35,000 members, the various solidarity networks included thousands of people and from experience we know that plenty of people were available to help SYRIZA with their expertise if there had been suitable processes to “extract” their embodied capacities in an efficient way (which was not the case).

Furthermore, massive unemployment provides us with huge numbers of people who would be willing to participate in networks of a different nature as long as we can build and expand processes of this kind in a systematic way. So, it is possible to pursue such a path as long as we apply the proper methodological and organizational principles in our way of doing politics.

In the worst case scenario, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more empowered to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people could mobilize positively, creatively and massively, even decisively to reclaim their autonomy.

Redesign the 'operating system' of the left

We know that the popular power once inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make the elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. More of the same won’t do it. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it's not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground. And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power (NESP).

We must modify the balance between representing people's beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people's actions. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a toxic anti-democratic European political environment designed to be intolerant to people's needs, we must contribute heavily to the formation of a strong 'backbone' for resilient and dynamic networks of social economy and co-operative productive activities, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, democratically functioning digital communities, community control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining the degree of autonomy necessary to defy the control of elites over the basic functions of our society.

It is not only in Greece that there is a growing exclusion of people from having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life’. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way – one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people's capacities.

First, this would allow people who are being excluded today to survive.
Second, this could begin a transition towards a better and more mature society.

And last but not least, there are no empty spaces in history, so if we do not do this, the nationalists and the fascists – with their own militarized ways of performing these basic functions – may step in to conclude the decline.

Shifting the battlefield

Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and have moved to new unclassified ways of organizing and acting. They develop new kinds of institutions (a Greek example http://www.corallia.org/en/) compatible with the emerging environment of fast flows of information, digital frameworks of action and production etc.

They also explore new methods and models; for example, “open innovation” models have emerged in the last few years to enable the R&D departments of big multinational companies to cope with the current distributed nature of knowledge and expertise that exceeds past means of control and usurpation of human intellectual creativity and innovation.

We have to create new popular power if we want to bring about substantial change or make ourselves resilient instead of just handling the remaining, seriously depleted if not already exhausted popular power inscribed in the traditional institutions.

The question is what does it look like to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing traditional democratic functioning – to restore it by newly transforming it? In other words, what are the modifications needed in our political practice for the constitution and expansion of NESPs?

What about political representation?

The function of political representation is a fundamental one in complex societies. It's the function that political parties mostly perform and that shapes everyday thinking regarding what ‘politics’ is about. The task here is not to revive neglected aspects of politics - like building popular power - or to reinvent collective and individual qualities; the aim is to explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to upgrade significantly the political leverage of the people.

Of course, building popular power will also invigorate and possibly transform the institutional framework, giving substantial meaning back to political representation. But, the expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes it could generate at various levels of the social configuration must be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We need to evaluate and explore concepts like the “commons”. Advancing a project to shape political representation as “commons” could give us valuable insights into new ways of performing vital functions that transcend the traditional, institutional framework of representative democracy.

Democratising the state?

The left talks too much about the democratic transformation of the state. In practice, the driving concept is the restoration of state functions as they were before the neoliberal transformation. But the expansion of a network of economic and social power under people's control could unlock our imagination towards more advanced and better targeted reforms of state institutions. In theory this is an old idea: the transformation of the state is a complementary move to the self-organized collectivities of the people outside it, driven by these forms of self-governance.

These modifications may be classified in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. From my experience, the very same people who energetically claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient, when they actually do politics, reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are insufficient or inadequate.

There are ingrained norms in terms of methodological guidelines that decisively shape the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. In the same vein, we believe in and fight for the promotion of the logic of cooperation and democracy against the logic of competition, but in practice our organizations suffer severely in terms of cooperation and democracy on the operational/organizational level.

We need to recognize these blind spots and set up a process of identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from expertise in management, leadership, organizational complexity and network systems theory etc. – in order to operationally upgrade our forces.

Furthermore, our actions and initiatives are not properly connected up, but fragmented and isolated, destined to face the same difficulties again and again. We need to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how and information, transferring best practices, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way.

Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and large corporations in general, in comparison to others: they have a vast social network and powerful databases that gives them the necessary tools to plan and pursue their goals while their smaller competitors seem in disarray in a global environment of rapid changes. We need these qualities if we want to be really useful today.

Actually, this is exactly what our opponents did consistently and persistently during the last decades: they were designing and implementing reforms in various levels of state institutions based on the methods, the criteria and the functioning of their own “social agents”, namely the corporations and their own understanding of the nature of public space, namely the market. This is exactly the “mechanics” of transformation that various intellectuals and leaders of the left described in detail a long time ago. Perhaps, by shifting our priorities we will be able to revive old but useful ideas that have been forgotten in practice.

Mind the gap

The “SYRIZA experience” will be worthless if we do not resist the temptation to replace one mistake with another. The failure of SYRIZA - the failure of focusing solely on traditional electoral politics to radically change the dominant neoliberal framework - creates favorable conditions for notions like “self-referential alternativism” and “vanguard isolationism” to emerge and preoccupy the minds and hearts of those who are willing to continue fighting.

But choices like these just repeat what SYRIZA did, justifying fully the threat of our opponents: either you will be marginal or you will become like us! The existential threats and crucial questions regarding their future that our societies face today have nothing to do with a strategy of building “arcs” that aim to safeguard the “Left” or any other identity.

Entering the ominous battlefield of the twenty-first century, the left will either be relevant and useful for the defense of human societies, or it will be obsolete.








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Greece blew up the debt Death Star

SUBHEAD: The Greek Elites and kleptocrats are terrified of the discipline that leaving the euro will impose.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 1 February 2015 for of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/greece-just-blew-up-empires-death-star.html)


Image above: Death Star destroyed. From (http://reachingutopia.com/white-house-denies-petition-to-construct-death-star/big-death-star/).

The Greek Elites and kleptocrats are terrified of the discipline that leaving the euro will impose, but the general public should welcome the transition to an economy and society that has been freed from the shackles of Imperial debt and the kleptocracy that has bled the nation dry.

Although the financial media is blathering about negotiations and gamesmanship, the truth is Greece just blew up the Empire's Death Star of debt. There's nothing left to negotiate except the official admission that the Imperial Death Star of debt, the most fearsome threat in the galaxy, has been blown to smithereens.

There are three fundamental points that need to be emphasized, mostly because they've been lost in handwringing, fearmongering and the ceaseless chatter of propaganda shills.

ONE:
Impaired debt and defaults result from imprudent underwriting and lender incompetence/ greed. Since when did it become accepted policy to reward imprudent lending, incompetence and greed?

Classical Capitalism is very clear on what should happen to lenders who ignored risk management; they get destroyed. As imprudently issued loans default, the losses pile up and the lender become insolvent. At that point, Capitalism kicks in and the management is fired, the stock goes to zero, the lender's assets are auctioned off and the creditors are issued whatever remains after wages, taxes, accounts payable, etc. are paid.

There's nothing complicated about it: Capitalism requires the discipline of losses being taken by those responsible, the firing of incompetents and the destruction of imprudent lenders.

Yet somehow the dominant narrative has reversed this essential core of Capitalism into blaming the borrower for the losses.

Look, if someone offers to loan me a billion dollars with no collateral and no assessment of the risks that I might not be able to pay the interest or principal, then who's the fool? The idiot who wants to give me $1 billion without any risk assessment, or the borrower who takes the "free money" being offered?

Yes, no one should borrow money that they can't pay back, blah blah blah, but the primary fiduciary responsibility is on the lender to not offer loans to marginal borrowers and those at high risk of defaulting on their debts.

Yet the official line on debt is "the lenders are blameless, the borrowers are at fault and should pay." The borrowers were imprudent to take on debt they couldn't service, but it is the lenders who made the bad loans who are ultimately are at fault and who should suck all the losses.

Let's set aside the propaganda for a moment and get real: anyone with the slightest knowledge of Greek finances and the power structure of the Greek economy/society knew it was insanely risky to loan Greece billions of euros. No one can deny this, yet somehow the lenders deserve to be paid for their avarice, stupidity, incompetence and total disregard for the standards of prudent lending? No, they deserve to be destroyed--closed down and their assets auctioned off.

TWO:
Greece will not be wiped out by leaving the euro currency--it will be freed to rebuilt itself with prudent fiscal management and policies that reward investment and penalize risky borrowing, speculation and corruption.

Here's the thing about Greece issuing its own fiat currency--it will force fiscal discipline in a way that the euro did not and could not. This is why the Greek Status Quo is quivering with fear--the gravy train of irresponsibility enabled by the euro is ending, and they are terrified of living within their means and having to face the discipline that the market will impose on the Greek fiat currency.

If there's one thing Greece needs more than anything, it's the discipline and the rewards of the market. Any nation that issues its own fiat currency has a choice: it can exercise fiscal prudence and enforce policies that reward entrepreneurism, prudent lending, savings, wise investments, fair taxation, etc., or it can try to prop up its bloated, corrupt kleptocracy by printing rivers of fiat money.

If it chooses the Dark Side and prints money in excess, it will soon drive the value of that currency to near-zero. The kleptocracy that hoped to benefit from money-printing is impoverished or forced to move their capital elsewhere.

In other words, Greece returning to being responsible for its own currency is a good thing. The new currency will be valued cheaply relative to other currencies at first, and this is also a good thing, as imports will be unaffordable for all but the wealthy (kiss BMW sales in Greece good-bye) and everything produced in Greece becomes a bargain globally.

This will attract capital seeking places where it can make a profit and is treated fairly, and it will enable Greece to rebuild its export sector and boost its substantial tourist trade.

The promise that marginal borrowers would be transformed into sterling-credit borrowers by adopting the euro was always a fantasy--and a painfully visible fantasy at that. Anyone with their eyes even partially open could see that the vast differences in productivity, credit, risk and culture between the eurozone nations made the euro unworkable from the start.

It was equally visible that the eurozone's inept policies and loose lending standards would obscure these fundamental differences until the damage would be too great to hide--which is exactly what transpired.

THREE:
The hundreds of billions of euros in so-called bailouts did not help Greece--all they did was bail out imprudent lenders and Euroland Elites. Virtually none of these vast sums helped the Greek nation or its people; what little did stay in Greece flowed to the kleptocrats that continued to rule Greece.

The harsh reality of misrule and corruption was recently spelled out in Misrule of the Few: How the Oligarchs Ruined Greece:

"Greece has failed to address (rising wealth/income inequality) because the country’s elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Since the early 1990s, a handful of wealthy families -- an oligarchy in all but name -- has dominated Greek politics.

These elites have preserved their positions through control of the media and through old-fashioned favoritism, sharing the spoils of power with the country’s politicians. Greek legislators, in turn, have held on to power by rewarding a small number of professional associations and public-sector unions that support the status quo. Even as European lenders have put the country’s finances under a microscope, this arrangement has held."

Greece just blew up the Death Star of debt, and now the threat has been lifted from other debtor nations suffering from the yoke of Imperial misrule. The Greek Elites and kleptocrats are terrified of the discipline that leaving the euro will impose, but the general public should welcome the transition to an economy and society that has been freed from the shackles of Imperial debt and the kleptocracy that has bled the nation dry.
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Finding hope among the ruins

SUBHEAD: Greece is finding new ways to exchange goods and skills that are good for the many rather than the few.

By Lia Zorzou on 17 may 2013 for Transition Free Press -
(http://transitionfreepress.org/2013/05/17/world-news-finding-hope-among-the-ruins/)


Image above: Ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, Greece. From (http://golden-rule.org/2012/07/24/greece-in-great-depression-says-prime-minister/sounion_035/).

During the next few weeks we will be featuring key articles from the second issue of Transition Free Press. We start today with the news pages and a frontline report from Athens by Lia Zorzou. Our news pages cover the bigger frame in which the Transition movement sits and its grassroots solutions to the challenges we face, in the fields of energy and economics in particular. 

This issue’s front page, for example, looks at fracking for gas and oil and the coal industry, with insights from Transitioners in the Appalachian mountains. As global carbon emissions rose this week to 400ppm and austerity imposed by banks beggars nations from Spain to Egypt, here is Lia’s story about finding hope among the ruins in Greece:


While austerity measures are now an everyday reality for most Greeks, for an increasing number of people resourcefulness, problem solving and action have replaced anger and frustration. Two years ago people were walking the streets of Athens with long faces and eyes full of despair.

Today many are giving their time to help and support others in need, but most importantly to help themselves: to talk, to laugh, to feel useful and to live differently, focusing on what is most needed to make them happy instead of being seduced by corporations and advertisers who create desires rather than fulfilling needs.

There are many initiatives in Greece where you can now buy food directly from the producers at fair prices. You can use local currencies to exchange food or services. Park spaces that were unused and sites that were abandoned have been transformed into useful play areas and gardens. Roof and balcony vegetable gardens are appearing on blocks of flats.

Initiatives that support homeless people and others that offer food regularly to the most needy have flourished. People are giving space in their own houses to help people and families in need. For example, a group called There Is Love, which helps families in need, has been operating in the Moschato area of Athens since 2003, but, according to the organisation’s president, Eleni Manolaki: “We’ve done far more work in the last two years because there is so much need now.

“In 2012 we helped a number of single parent families that lost their homes and all their possessions to find clothes, food and a place to live,” she added. “Residents of the Moschato area offered their empty flats which were renovated with the help of volunteers and the support of the local council. The bills of these houses are being paid by our members.”

Mrs Manolaki acknowledges that this can not be done for all, or for a long time, but she’s happy that it has saved some families for now: “By changing these people’s lives for the better you gain more caring people; the people who have been helped in the past are the ones that come back to support the others that need help now.”

The Metropolitan Community Clinic in the Hellinikon district of Athens provides free medical assistance to the unemployed and those who have no social security or very little income. Seven pharmacists, 40 doctors and 150 volunteers have, over the last 10 months, taken care of more than 1,500 citizens in need.

The clinic is supported by volunteers from the Sotiria state hospital. But the work of the clinic doesn’t stop with the provision of care. Staff assess each case and will provide support to patients who have ended up ill due to a lack of medical care and who want to take legal action against the government. Clinic staff also seek to publicise the true current situation of the Greek health service so the world can understand how the austerity measures are affecting human life. Georgios Vihas, the chief cardiologist of the clinic, is also keen to stress that:

“This clinic offers a way to deal with the health care problem at the current moment in Greece, but we are not by any means trying to replace a much needed national health service.”

New thinking is flourishing everywhere. Theodosis Boudisimo runs a not-for-profit organisation called ‘i.d.e.a.’, which uses volunteers to help anyone with an idea turn it into reality. “Corruption was a major defect of the Greek government and public sector,” says Theodosis, “so we set up i.d.e.a to be as clean as possible.”

There are different code numbers to match each activity and different bank accounts to differentiate between the daily expenses of the organisation and the expenses of each activity; everything is publicly available for anyone who wishes to check. Regular actions by i.d.e.a. include: food handouts to the homeless every Friday and Sunday in the centre of Athens; clothing giveaways every second Saturday; and food support direct to the homes of families whose situation is particularly desperate.

Meanwhile, Transition Moschato Town is developing a reskilling service for the unemployed and for those who want to learn a new skill. The long term aim is to create a skills exchange or time bank.

At first glance all these groups seem to be offering temporary assistance rather than long-term transformation. As the crisis and the effects of it touch more and more people, the groups will need to find mechanisms to stay alive and working.

At the same time, Greeks who previously were not strong at volunteering are now offering their time to support others. A new culture of volunteering is emerging in Greece which has already transformed our communities and which will hopefully transform the economy as well by finding new ways to exchange goods and skills that are good for the many rather than the few.

• Lia Zorzou is an environmentalist and acadmic whose work includes flood river management and renewable energy projects. Lia is also a founder member of Transition Town Moschato in Athens and is working to promote Transition in Greece.

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21st Century Untouchables

SUBHEAD: In Europe a caste of Untouchables is being formed made up of unemployed southern young. More will follow.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 6 May 2013 for the Automatic Earth -
(http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/the-untouchables-of-the-21st-century.html)


Image above: There are an estimated 170 million Dalits or ‘Untouchables’ in India, despite the fact that the country’s constitution prohibits the formalised discrimination inherent in India’s traditional caste system.From (http://jonathanfryer.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/being-untouchable/).

Throughout history and throughout the world, there have been classes of untouchables. Best known perhaps (other than Elliott Ness and Wall Street bankers) are the caste that goes by the name in South Asia, a.k.a. the Dalits, but there are/were also for instance the Cagots in France, the Burakumin in Japan, and the Roma and Jewish populations in medieval Europe though the Middle East. In the US, one could include the black and native populations. Wikipedia has this definition:

Untouchability is the social-religious practice of ostracizing a minority group by segregating them from the mainstream by social custom or legal mandate. The excluded group could be one that did not accept the norms of the excluding group and historically included foreigners, house workers, nomadic tribes, law-breakers and criminals and those suffering from a contagious disease. This exclusion was a method of punishing law-breakers and also protected traditional societies against contagion from strangers and the infected.

The origin of the phenomenon may have started simply as a way to exclude criminals and diseased people from a community, but obviously that's not where it led.

Untouchability typically means none to limited access to public resources, schools, churches, temples, and having to live outside of established communities and villages. Often - but not always - there was a connection with certain occupations, especially those seen as impure, such as handling the dead (this could include executioners), and dealing with human and animal waste. In parts of Europe, dealing with money was seen as impure, from a religious point of view, which drove a lot of Jews into the field, since they were banned form most other occupations.

I could write a lot more on the interesting though often cruel and barbaric history of untouchability in a wide definition of the word, but I want to focus on what started to make me think of it, modern unemployment numbers in the western world. That is to say, we are now on the verge of casting a huge group of people, essentially our own neighbors, outside of our communities. They are no longer allowed to participate in what makes our societies tick.

This is true for people of all ages (see: Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed), but it's an absolute "disaster that got tired of waiting to happen" among young people.


Youth unemployment in Greece is at about 60%, in Spain at 55.9%. Then Portugal and Italy at 38.3% and 38.4%, Ireland at 30.3%. Add a bunch of eastern European nations and you have the obvious suspects. Among the others, though, some truly stand out.

How about Finland at 19.8%? That's an AAA country, EU core. Same story, only worse, for France: 26.5%. Sweden, supposedly doing so well without the euro: 25.1%. Belgium at 22.3%, the UK 20.7%.

They make the US look sort of OK at 16.2%, or at least they serve to somewhat hide how ugly that number really is. In comparison, the EU "hard core" gets no higher than Holland at 10.5%.

Of course there are people who will argue that some of the youth included are in school, not looking for jobs. But given such notions as A) governments' propensities to present rose-colored numbers and B) the numbers of kids enrolled in schools only to not be counted as jobless, I would be wary of overemphasizing the argument.

The numbers, let's focus on Europe for now, are certain to only get worse. How do we know? Easy as pie. It's a matter of political principle. All those unemployed young people are nobody's priority but their own. They simply don't have the political might yet to swing policy decisions in their favor.

That is still with the generations of their parents and grandparents, who will vote against anyone trying to cut their wages and benefits. Who will even demand, and receive, government help in dealing with the losses on the homes they bought at irresponsibly elevated prices; they'll claim the government should have warned them.

Losses on homes is one thing the young need not worry about: purchasing a house is way out of reach for them, and for most will remain so for the rest of their lives. The lack of - conventional - political might threatens to doom the young to a life of subservient survival. What might they have will have to come from unconventional methods to change matters. For now, the situation is locked, even as it's sinking fast. What happened in Portugal over the past month is a "great" example of how Europe deals with its issues.

You may remember that in early April, Portugal's highest court declared a set of austerity measures included in the government’s 2013 budget illegal, saying they couldn't single out public workers for salary and benefits cuts. Then, before you could think: democracy works!, the EU/ECB/IMF troika paid an an "unscheduled" visit to Lisbon. The result? Portugal fires another 30,000 public workers. That's right, if you can't cut their benefits, you just fire them.

Of course this is merely the latest in a long line of troika induced measures. 50,000 public sector jobs were already lost in the past two years , and 205,000 jobs disappeared overall in 2012 alone, and 500,000 since 2008.

What do these numbers mean? Here's a helpful little exercise: The US is 30 times the size of Portugal. So to put them in an American perspective, it's like 900,000 public workers are fired in one fell swoop, after 1,5 million lost their jobs in the two years prior, in an economy that lost 6.15 million jobs overall in just the last year(!), and 15 million since 2008.

Not that the troika is done just yet:

Still, an I.M.F. report issued in January concluded that "Portugal’s education system remained overstaffed and relatively inefficient by international standards." It suggested "making the education system more flexible and limiting the state’s role as a supplier of education services" by eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. 15,000 public school teachers lost their jobs in the past two years.

That's right, their words, not mine: making the education system more flexible [..] by eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. Again, that would compare to firing between 1.5 and 1.8 million American teachers.

Can Portugal afford to lose all these teachers? Maybe not: about 63% of Portugal’s adult population has not completed high school. Plus, recently graduated teachers can forget about ever getting a job. And so 60,000 young and educated Portuguese emigrate every year. I don't know about you, but to me it's starting to feel like a scorched earth policy.

The European Commission, meanwhile, not only has no answer to these problems, it doesn't even have any intention of doing anything about them. Quite the opposite. The EC wants to continue with the "reforms" it has forced upon PIGSIC countries (can I buy a K?), and we all know what that means: jobs must be cut. Which in turn means that unemployment will rise. Even if they don't say it in so many words. In order to create jobs, you need to cut them first.

From the Telegraph:

[Olli Rehn, the EU's economic and monetary affairs commissioner], had no good news for Europe's growing ranks of unemployed and admitted that "mitigating" against unemployment was all that could be done under the present austerity policy that rules out public-led investment to boost jobs.

He also warned that growth across the EU would return too slowly to reduce unemployment in the short term as European economies remain dependent on exports to offset the impact of the recession and lack of investment caused by the financial and sovereign debt crisis.

"We are living through a very difficult process of adjustment and it is having an unfortunate toll on employment," he said.

"We need consistent consolidation of public finances and structural reforms to boost growth. We need to reform labour market policy to fight youth unemployment. We have to use all possible ways and means to turn the trend in the European economy and mitigate effects of current protracted recession."

And from Bloomberg:

"High unemployment points to the need for continuing the course in structural reforms," said Marco Buti, head of the commission’s economics department. "The reduction in fiscal deficits is making headway in a differentiated way."

That last bit is just meaningless weirdspeak, if you ask me. "The reduction in fiscal deficits is making headway in a differentiated way." Maybe he simply means to say that the people may be screwed, but the banks are fine.

What I do understand is that his words again come down to: "High unemployment points to the need for job cuts". And that remains a strange point of view, especially when seen from the eyes of the unemployed.

So is there any good news? Perhaps that depends on your point of view as well. For instance, I read this in the Telegraph:

"Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro," [French finance minister Pierre Moscovici] told French TV. "We're seeing the end of austerity dogma. It's a victory of the French point of view."

First of all, that "victory" looks about as Pyrrhic as can be. Several EU nations get more time to cut their deficit to the mandated 3% maximum, but that's just because they're even more broke broker brokest than anyone was ready to admit last time around. And the EU did another round of adjusting predictions downward, a move that's devoid of any meaning if you repeat it every single time. There was also another round of "but next year we'll see the return of growth", but really, who listens anymore?

As for the "French point of view", the people hate President Hollande so much after less than a year in office they long back for the good old days of Sarkozy. France is so screwed, but no-one has the guts to say it out loud.

Oh, right, and the EU was proven wrong in Italy. That must have hurt, even if they didn't say so. The return to power of Silvio Berlusconi caused yields on Italian 10 year bonds to plummet. Ergo: they should have left the midget mummy in place, so the markets spoke.

On the whole though, there is just one conclusion left for southern Europe, and I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Countries like Greece and Portugal and Italy need to get out of the Eurozone as quickly as they can. They badly need to regain of their own monetary policy. They must be able to devalue their currencies vis a vis Germany and Holland and the US.

Moreover, if they don't leave, they will be swept up (and under) in the wave of bad data that will come out of the EU core. That will start a much bigger squeeze of the periphery than the one we've seen so far. It'll be like being trapped underneath a badly wounded behemoth, not something you should volunteer for.

The Eurozone (and probably the EU as a whole and as a mechanism) has nothing left to offer its poorer members but a world of pain. But it's up to the people themselves to make sure they get out in time. And all the countries still have europhiles in power. Italy got close, but it's already back to the days of old with the same old president and a new PM from the same old school. And if leaving half your children with the prospects of being condemned into meaningless lives, of being ostracized as modern day untouchables, is not enough to wake you up and say No Mas, you really need to wonder what is.

Brussels is not going to create jobs for Europe's young people, they're instead going to cut more jobs, they say so themselves. What they intend to do is squeeze the politically relevant - older - part of the population, but only so far. They don't want them to revolt. That leaves only the young to be squeezed more.

Brussels incessantly produces positive looking economic growth numbers, and then incessantly adjusts them downward. They do this because it puts people to sleep. It works. People actually believe that things will get better, that their economies will start growing again and it'll all be fine.

People who are in power will do almost anything to hold on to it. That includes politicians, bankers, corporate executives. We can all identify those groups, and we love to rage against them. But political power in our societies is also defined by age. In that the young have very little of it, and the older have a death grip. That can work, and has worked, as long as - economical - trend lines are positive. It no longer does, however, when these lines break.

Then you don't have one society anymore, but several, starting with older haves and younger have nots. And of course everyone's parents have more than they do, but until now there was the prospect of going out and getting as much as or more than, one's parents have (a better life for my children). That prospect is now gone. But people are slow to realize and accept that. They'd rather believe otherwise, and there are scores of politicians and media willing to keep that faith alive. After all, their own livelihoods depend on it.

Unfortunately for our children, our believing it just about literally means we throw them away with the bathwater. And that can of course only spell trouble down the road. Unless we create all those millions of jobs for them.

But we're not even trying: our politicians are busy only keeping us from blowing our gaskets over budget cuts and tax raises; they don't care about our children, because they're not the ones voting them in power. This is not a road to nowhere, it's a road to surefire mayhem. There will inevitable come a point where the younger generation we now leave out to dry gains the voting power and asks: What have you done for me lately? And then, what will be the answer?

But the reality is that in Europe too, "Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed". And there are millions of long-term unemployed. Who will never have a real job. Which means that you will arrive at a point where this is no longer a problem solvable within current paradigms. So maybe we need to change those.

Our definition of work has slowly slid from doing something that is useful to yourself, your family and the society you live in, to doing something, a job, that will allow you to buy as big a car and home as possible, and consume as many products as you can whether you need them or not, in order to keep the economy growing.

This change in definition has gone largely unnoticed until now, but in light of the levels of - youth - unemployment we see in ever more places, maybe we should take another look at what it means.

Maybe countries like Italy and Greece and Portugal would do better at this point in time to get out of the rat race posing as a force for the good that is the EU. Maybe they have to get back to basics, to making sure they can independently feed themselves, build shelter, and get clean water to everyone.

Maybe competing with Germany and Holland for a scarce musical chair is not the way to go; looking at those unemployment numbers, one might easily come to entertain that idea.

 And feeding and clothing oneself is not exactly a bad thing to begin with. Our ancestors did, that's why we're here. Maybe it's the best chance they have to engage their young people: in (re)building their societies.

And even if things in the global economy do improve somewhere down the line, what exactly would they risk losing?

Better be quick though: the EU has one of its numerous edicts coming out soon that bans people who grow their own food in their gardens, in small plots and allotments, from using their own seeds. They must instead by law buy their seeds from vendors "ordained" by Brussels (yeah, there's Monsanto again...).

Any one of these countries can tell Brussels to go take a hike, and they'll pay back the debt over 50 years in a currency of their own choosing. But they're not doing it. Not so far. Coincidentally, in the graph above, if you look at Iceland, you'll notice they're doing about the best of the lot, with fast falling jobless numbers. Iceland didn't have to leave a monetary union, granted, but still.

They can either cling to our faith in a recovery that's been promised for years while everything has only gotten progressively worse, or they can do something about it. And that will soon be true for all of us.

We're just still living in a theater of illusion grace to the fact that we have collectively decided to keep our debts hidden under the carpet, which today no longer works in southern Europe, and tomorrow will grind Germany, Japan and the US to a halt.

If we go there in blind faith, the future - however brutal it may be - still belongs to the young, and guess who will become the untouchables?

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Debt, Growth & Austerity

SUBHEAD: Study indicates influential Reinhart-Rogoff pro-austerity research is riddled with errors.

By Mark Gongloff on 16 april 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-austerity-research-errors_n_3094015.html)


Image above: Reinhart (r) and Rogoff at Reinhart's Washington DC home. From (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html).

Influential research by U.S. economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, touted by policymakers pushing government austerity in the United States and Europe, is riddled with errors, a bombshell new academic study claims.

The findings may not have much impact on the debate over government debt, and it probably won't cause those who have spent the past several decades panicking over government debt to stop their panicking. But it seriously erodes the intellectual underpinnings of the pro-austerity argument -- and makes the damage done by austerity in Europe and the U.S. in recent years all the more poignant.

"This is a mistake that has had enormous consequences," wrote Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "If facts mattered in economic policy debates, this should be the cause for a major reassessment of the deficit reduction policies being pursued in the United States and elsewhere."

The new paper, by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, set out to reconstruct the findings of an influential 2010 paper by Reinhart and Rogoff, called "Growth In A Time Of Debt." Reinhart and Rogoff, of the University of Maryland and Harvard, respectively, claimed that economic growth slowed fairly dramatically for countries whose public debt crossed a threshold of 90 percent of gross domestic product.

The problem is that other economists have been unable to recreate Reinhart and Rogoff's findings. Herndon, Ash and Pollin now say they were able to do so -- but only by leaving out big, important pieces of data.

Using the same spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff used for their research, Herndon, Ash and Pollin found that "Growth In A Time Of Debt" was built around a handful of significant errors. Correcting for those errors changes the findings dramatically: Average GDP growth for high-debt countries jumps from negative 0.1 percent to 2.2 percent.

The most important error appears to be a failure to include years of data that showed Australia, Canada and New Zealand enjoying high economic growth and high debt at the same time. Including all the years of data boosts New Zealand's average economic growth rate under high debt to 2.58 percent, from negative 7.6 percent. Given the small amount of data used in Reinhart and Rogoff's study, this has a huge impact on the overall findings.


Another error seems to be a simple failure to use an Excel spreadsheet correctly, as highlighted by economist Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute's Next New Deal blog. In building a formula to calculate average economic growth rates, Reinhart and Rogoff appeared to leave off several lines of data in their spreadsheet.

"We literally just received this draft comment, and will review it in due course," Reinhart and Rogoff wrote in a long and detailed emailed statement Tuesday afternoon. "Nevertheless, the weight of the evidence to date -- including this latest comment -- seems entirely consistent with our original interpretation of the data." (Read the whole statement here.)

Update: At about 2:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Reinhart and Rogoff emailed a fuller statement defending their work, the full text of which you can read here. They admit to the spreadsheet error, but defend their weighting of data and say they have corrected for some of their omissions in subsequent work. They stand by the gist of their conclusion, that higher debt is associated with lower growth.

Even before the errors cited in the new study came to light, many economists doubted Reinhart and Rogoff's conclusion that high debt causes low growth, given the glaring chicken-and-egg problem at the heart of the research. Did these countries have slow growth because they had high debt, or did they have high debt because they had slow growth?

(Reinhart and Rogoff noted in their Tuesday statement that they have been careful not to claim that high debt causes slow growth, but rather that it has an "association" with slow growth.)

Beyond that, Baker notes, there were lots of other reasons to question Reinhart and Rogoff, including the fact that their gloomy conclusions about debt relied heavily on slow U.S. economic growth immediately after World War II. At the time, the U.S. was deep in war debt and dismantling its war machine. That relatively brief state of affairs was quickly followed by arguably the greatest economic boom in history.

Despite these questions, Reinhart and Rogoff's 90-percent threshold has been discussed ad nauseum in the press and used frequently to justify austerity measures in the U.S. and Europe, as detailed by Quartz's Tim Fernholz. The 2012 version of the pro-austerity budget plan of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) cites Reinhart and Rogoff by name, and specifically refers to the 90-percent threshold.

Washington's constant state of panic over government debt and budget deficits has contributed to severe cutbacks in government spending that have slowed economic growth and helped keep unemployment high. The situation has been even worse in Europe, particularly in troubled nations like Greece, where austerity has been enforced as a bailout condition, only to result in slower growth and higher debt burdens.

Still, that evidence has been in sight all along, yet the pro-austerity crowd has kept up its drumbeat of deficit panic. This new research probably won't change that.

"There are other threshold papers out there," The Economist's Ryan Avent tweeted. "And people hate to change their minds."
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Roman Commons

SUBHEAD: When people become squatters in public buildings, it is a pretty good sign that the market/state is failing.

By David Bollier on 20 February 2013 for Bollier.org -
(http://bollier.org/blog/occupations-rome-defend-rights-commoners)


Image above: Hugging in the occupied Tatro Valle in Rome. From (http://www.dazeddigital.com/satellitevoices/rome/culture/2209/occupy-teatro-valles-permanenze-valerio-vigliar).

When people deliberately break the law to become squatters or take possession of public buildings, it is a pretty good sign that the market/state is failing to meet the public’s basic needs. This is the general scenario in many parts of Rome, reports Donatella Della Ratta of Al Jazeera, as various citizens’ movements take over theaters, public buildings and apartment buildings. Squatting and illegal occupation are rampant.

Much of the turmoil has resulted from budget cutbacks and the resulting failure of government to uphold its constitutional duty to provide adequate housing and meet other public needs. Shady speculators then swarm into the picture to snap up buildings that the government is selling at rock-bottom prices in order to raise money.

What’s a victimized public to do? Defy the law and occupy what is theirs. In Rome, former employees of the Teatro Valle, a grand public theater and former opera house, have taken over the premises since June 2011. (Here is Della Ratta's November 2011 account of the Teatro Valle occupation.) This act of defiance has now sparked many similar citizen takeovers around the city. In one of the more notable occupations, citizens took over a government building used for motor vehicle registrations and drivers’ licensure. As Della Ratta reports:

“Scup (Sport e Cultura Popolare) as the place has been renamed, was occupied, cleaned up and brought back to life by a mixed group of young activists, sport instructors and some residents of the neighborhood. They were outraged by the lack of public spaces for leisure and sport activities in an area that has become more and more gentrified while rental prices have soared.”

A young activist, Carlo, explained: “Occupying is an expression of public outrage.”

The city government acknowledges that there are now hundreds of housing occupations and occupations of closed-up buildings. Many are being converted into community centers for cultural activities or recreation for young people:

The oldest [occupations], with a clear militant orientation, have existed for decades.  While some of them have been living under a permanent threat of being cleared by the police, others have been legalized and are paying a rent to the municipality, albeit within a scheme of controlled prices.  Some others are just tolerated by the local authorities – whether right or left-wing oriented – in a sort of “live and let live” philosophy.

But new occupations, such as Scup or Cinema Palazzo, wish neither to be institutionalized nor just to survive by being ignored or forgotten by the local government.

They firmly denounce the lack of social services in town, at the same time claiming for their legitimate rights, as citizens and taxpayers, to get health assistance, child care, and infrastructure for leisure at affordable prices.

Valeria and Chiara, among the students who are occupying Cinema Palazzo, explain that “occupied places do not aim at offering services to the citizenry, but at showing them how knowledge can be built in a cooperative way.

This attempt at creating spaces for peer-production distinguishes all the newly occupied places, aiming at establishing open workshops where people can experiment with different ways of doing politics together.

It is a new attitude towards pro-active citizenship – in sharp contrast with the idea that political representation, obtained through the voting process, can alone defend citizens’ rights.  This idea, in the past years, has resulted in emptying politics of any participatory meaning and turning Italian youth away from it.

But now, many seem to have realized that pro-active citizenship is the only way to hold politicians accountable and directly claim their citizen rights.”

Direct citizen action to challenge speculators, absentee landlords and government privatization of the common wealth! This is a remarkable new stage in the evolution of protest. More: citizens are coming to realize that they don't just need to stop privatization. They need to enter into commoning. They need active, ongoing self-governance beyond representative government.

The latest occupation in Rome involves Cinema America, a movie theater. The building was scheduled to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments and a three-story parking structure. Now the theater has become an inter-generational hangout and the place where neighborhood assemblies are held. The occupation has even won support from a broad coalition of architects, actors and intellectuals who defend the goal of preserving the theater as a public good.

But the dialogue is moving from “public goods” – an economic term – to a recognition that more direct, accountable forms of citizen governance are needed. People understand that their struggle is not just about physical things, but about their own political sovereignty and emancipation. Government cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises. It can’t assure fairness and freedom. Enter the commons?

There is a pride among the self-governed that comes with stepping up to responsibility. A 20-year-old boy, Matteo, who now lives in Cinema America, told the reporter: “Nobody would expect us to keep this place so clean and tidy, and to be able to self-govern it. We are young, but responsible.”

The sentiment echoes Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zucotti Park. A crowd of strangers proved to be remarkably resourceful in self-organizing themselves and managing essential functions. Commoning almost comes naturally. To be sure, there is a difference between a short-term occupation and a long-term, stable system of management. But the sting of dispossession that comes with market enclosure also focuses the mind and spirit. People are motivated to show that another way is possible. As Della Ratta writes, there is “general outrage at the greed of private interests and the weakness of public sector that sells off common wealth with an excuse of efficiency and rationalization….”

The deep irony is that occupations are, in their own way, the highest form of legality. How’s that? “By taking over places like Teatro Valle, the occupiers claim to have given them back to the citizens. Paradoxically, this would be an act against legality, yet a legitimate one, since it is carried out in order to defend rights and principles granted by the [Italian] Constitution.”

The Magna Carta was similarly supposed to guarantee certain commoners’ rights and make them permanent. But as the crisis in Italy reminds us, a piece of paper does not guarantee rights. Not does the existence of government or courts. Only direct and active commoning does.

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Greek Tragedy

SUBHEAD: Under a cloud of austerity, real smoke clouds Greece as people try to stay warm this winter.

By Joanna Kakissis on 22 January 2013 for NPR News -
(http://www.npr.org/2013/01/22/169931378/under-a-cloud-of-austerity-real-smoke-clouds-greece-as-well)


Image above: Sotiris Sotiriou, 41, and his daughter Sophia, 5, check out the olive-wood kindling in the fireplace that heats their family's home. From original article.

In this winter of austerity and Depression-era unemployment, a fog of woodsmoke hangs over the Greek capital on cold nights.

It's coming from the tens of thousands of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves Athenians are using to heat their homes. Most can no longer afford heating oil, the price of which has risen 40 percent since last year. The government also cut a fuel subsidy for low-income families earlier this month.

Some Greeks buy cheap firewood; others used their discarded Christmas trees as kindling. The most desperate are burning old furniture and raiding protected forests. Someone even hacked away the remains of a 3,000-year-old olive tree where Plato is said to have taught.
In the working-class suburb of Aegaleo, west of Athens, 41-year-old Sotiris Sotiriou and his two young daughters, Magda and Sophia, are bundled up in thick sweaters. They add wood from olive-tree saplings in the flames of their living-room fireplace. The saplings grow on a small family plot outside Athens.

"Last year, the fireplace was just decorative," says Sotiriou, who also owns a home improvement shop. "This year, it's how we heat our home."

Like many Greeks, Sotiriou and his wife, Haroula Lappa, cannot afford to buy heating oil. Sotiriou has no business at his home-improvement store, since the Greek construction industry has all but halted.

Nearly all of Lappa's salary as a court clerk goes to their $930 monthly home mortgage payment. After groceries and tax bills, there's nothing left for the heating oil, she says.

She goes outside for a walk and smells the scent of woodsmoke from other fireplaces.

Two weeks ago, she also smelled something else: burning paint.

"Someone must have been burning a door with the windows still set in," she says. "When the girls and I were walking home, it was hard to breathe. We used our coats as masks."

Greeks may actually be burning old furniture to stay warm, says Stephanos Sambatakakis of the Hellenic Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists are studying the particles in the noxious fumes, which could soon leave people suffering from inflamed eyes, respiratory problems, headaches and nausea, he says. Long-term effects could include lung inflammation and, "in extreme cases, lung cancer," he says.

Environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis is worried about another scourge — deforestation. Twice a day, he and his colleagues climb into a jeep and patrol a protected forest on a hill west of Athens. Illegal logging is rampant here.

He says it's not just the poor cutting down saplings to use as fuel to stay warm. Poachers also sell the wood for profit.

"Before World War II, this forest had so many trees," Gourdomichalis says. "But the Germans and Italians took the heating oil and coal during the war, and Greeks were forced to chop down all the trees for firewood so they could cook and keep themselves warm. The forest has since recovered, so we can't let it be destroyed again."

He says the patrols have stopped some of the deforestation. But then he and a colleague spot another threat to the forest: Someone has destroyed a giant water tank used to fight summer forest fires. Gourdomichalis says the tank's steel frame was cut to be sold as scrap metal.

"People are destroying everything in a desperate effort to survive, or they're using the crisis to make a profit," he says, shaking his head in despair.

He peers out the jeep's window at the city below. It's getting dark and cold. He sees the first wisps of the smoky fog that will soon hang over his city.
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California Dreamin'

SUBHEAD: California's Governor Brown introduces a budget that will possibly create a 2013 budget surplus.

By Staff on 10 January 2013 for Reuters -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/california-budget-surplus-2013_n_2450349.html)


Image above: Governor Jerry Brown introduces budget that may result in surplus that could reduce austerity in California schools and public services. From (http://www.neontommy.com/news/2013/01/california-budget-may-result-surplus-gov-brown-predicts).

California's budget deficit is gone after years of financial troubles, Governor Jerry Brown said on Thursday, proposing a plan that raises spending on education and healthcare, boosting total expenditures by 5 percent.

Brown vowed to push back at legislators eager to raise spending quickly, restoring the billions of dollars to social services and other state functions that were cut in lean years.

"I am determined to avoid the fiscal mess that the last few governors had to deal with," Brown told reporters as he introduced the budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year beginning in July.

The state expects $98.5 billion in revenues and transfers and plans spending $97.7 billion, according to the proposal published on the state Department of Finance website.

That leaves a surplus of $851 million for the year, in addition to a projected $785 million surplus for the current fiscal year, which ends in June, allowing the state to put $1 billion toward a rainy day fund.

Brown said he saw a balanced budget for the next four years.

Spending in the upcoming year is set to rise 5 percent, or $4.7 billion, from the current 2012-13 budget. Schools and universities will see a $4 billion boost, health care spending will rise $1.2 billion, while transfers to local government will drop $2.1 billion.

The 74-year-old Governor said he aimed to focus education spending on the neediest students and districts, such as kids in poor areas like Compton, California.

Brown, a Democrat with a national reputation as a liberal, plays up his penny pinching in California. He has repeatedly stressed the need for spending restraint, even amid signs the state economy is picking up.

California job growth tops the national average, unemployment has fallen below double-digit levels for the first time in nearly four years, and voters in November approved a tax increase that closed most of the lingering budget gap.

The state Department of Finance on Thursday projected unemployment will fall to 9.6 percent this year and 8.7 percent in 2014.

California faced deficits of $9 billion just a year ago and $25 billion two years ago. Brown noted that federal government issues could challenge California's forecasts and warned the state not to get over exuberant.

"It's very hard to say no. That's going to be my job," he said.

Signs of improvement in the state's economy have raised hopes among some liberals that cuts made to healthcare and welfare programs of the last few years can be rolled back.

Democrats won a supermajority in the state legislature in November's vote, giving them the power to raise taxes without Republican support.

Republican State Assembly Leader Connie Conway said she supported Brown's messages of fiscal restraint and support for education.

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Privatizing Greek Water

SUBHEAD: As foreign investors eye their public utilities, Greek water workers scramble to create cooperatives.

By Daniel Moss on 8 January 2013 for On the Commons -
(http://onthecommons.org/magazine/greeks-stand-protect-their-water-privatization)


Image above: Athens public water utility, Eydap, has been privatized after conference in 2009.  From (http://www.behance.net/gallery/EYDAP/257801).

Greece knows a thing or two about democracy. And as an increasingly arid nation, good water management is fundamental to its future, both political and physical. The recent financial crisis hasn’t only tested Greek democracy, but its water as well.

“You can tell if a society is democratic if its water is available to everyone, if it’s clean, and in public hands.” That’s how Kostas Marioglou sees it. When he’s not distributing water meters and pipes from a warehouse as with his job at EYATH ( Thessaloniki’s State Water Utility) he is a union leader and organizer for Initiative 136, a citizen’s initiative to buy the water utility from the Greek government.

Greece is under enormous pressure to privatize its water system. As the country drowns in debt, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank (often referred to as the “troika”) work with eager Greek political parties to balance the books by selling off public water. Greece wouldn’t be the first place to privatize public water utilities during a fiscal crisis. Conditioning loans based on full or partial water privatization is an increasingly common practice of international lenders – and much criticized.

“Although the people’s message after two elections (6th of May and 17th of June) was clearly that of renegotiating the debt and the measures imposed by the Troika”, said Theodoros Karyotis, a member of Initiative 136, “the new government continues to apply the Troika program.”

In June 2010, the Ministry of Finance announced that through the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, the Greek government would reduce its shares in EYATH and the Athens State Water Utility (EYDAP), from 74% to 51%. Since then, the Ministry has adjusted the target, planning to sell off 100% of its holdings in the two state companies. Today, approximately 21% of EYATH trades on the Athens stock market.

The French water company, Suez, owns 5% of EYATH, and could increase its share if privatization proceeds. However, after a 2006 tour of EYATH facilities, reports George Archontopoulos, president of the EYATH workers union, company officials asked, “Why do you have so cheap water here in Thessaloniki?” Archontopoulos hopes that the financial crisis will make clear that water can’t be a counted on as a reliable profit center. “Everyday, people come to central offices, trying to negotiate the water payment because even water is expensive for them.”

Archontopoulos and Mariglou are confounded by the government’s claim that it will reduce debt through privatization. An article entitled, “Buying Back the Public 136 Euros at a Time”:http://www.136.gr/article/buying-back-public-136-euros-time, reports that ,“EYATH has an annual profit of 75 million Euros (EUR) and in 2010 and 2011, despite the debt crisis, their profit rose to 12.4 million and 20.18 million Euros, respectively.” That profit margin has, however, diminished in the last 9 months.

As to privatization backers’ claim that EYATH’s sale would help Greece pay off debts, Theodoros Karyotis, an Initiative 136 member said, “This is a silly excuse. The company’s value is estimated at 50 million Euros, while the country’s debt exceeds 400 billion.”

But if the state doesn’t want EYATH, so be it. Thessaloniki’s citizens do. In a counter- strategy to allowing the Greek state selling off shares to private investors, Initiative 136 organizers are knocking on neighborhood doors to interest Thessaloniki’s households in buying a share for 136 euros each – which explains Initiative 136’s name. That might not seem like an onerous sum for a high-income country like Greece, “but with 35% employment,” said Marioglou, “I’m not so sure it will work.”

Greek activists were moved by a show of solidarity at an October meeting of the European Water Assembly in Florence. There, European allies offered to help raise additional funds to purchase the company.

The Initiative seeks to establish a network of 16 cooperatives in Thessaloniki to manage a truly public company. Because it would be unmanageable to have one large citizen body oversee the city’s entire water works, explained Marioglou, they will decentralize. Initiative 136’s organizers propose that the neighborhood cooperatives decide on such issues as water tariffs and an investment budget. The cooperatives would play a co-management role with the public water utility and serve as water watchdogs, stewards of the public good. The union badly wants to stop the threatened privatization, but if it does proceed, the cooperatives will do their best to hold the company accountable.

Even in his halting English, Marioglou was careful to distinguish between public and state. Initiative 136 is not an effort to preserve the status quo. In fact, Marioglou bristled at the characterization of EYATH as a public utility. “A public utility is what we want to create with Initiative 136,” said Marioglou. “Right now it’s a state company where the management is political appointments with no water service experience, running the company poorly before they move on to another party position.”

While Greece’s Communist Party is against privatization of EYATH, they don’t agree with the idea of community cooperatives. They support continued state ownership. Other left parties argue that the public shouldn’t have to buy the company from the state – it’s already theirs.

But Marioglou and Initiative 136 members insist that state business-as-usual just isn’t working Sweetheart contracts with politically-connected contractors, for example, are commonplace. “To fix a leaky pipe, they make a big hole to make more money. It should be 2 meters but they make it 4 meters.” It rankles Marioglou that he state company has laid off almost half of the water workers in recent years – water workers who could be fixing leaky pipes.

“Why should the state company make a profit?”, asked Marioglou, exasperated. “That’s the public’s money. They should give it back to people or install drinking fountions or build public toilets. Why should we be obliged to ask a shopkeeper to use their rest room? We’ll decide on public investments.”

Marioglou asserts that the cooperatives will also do a better job of ensuring water source protection. Thessaloniki draws its drinking water from both springs and the Aliakmon River. The spring water is “absolutely gorgeous”, said Marioglou, and preferable to consumers. It is also cheaper and easier for EYATH to distribute. Around 1990, the springs were overdrawn and the area ecology withered. Farmers protested and burned an EYATH facility, demanding that the company only take as much as flowed naturally.

As for sewage, the European Commission has put the Gulf of Thessaloniki on its “sensitive” list. High nitrogen discharges imperil the coastline with eutrophication. Marioglou is concerned about how sewage treatment and water source stewardship would fare in a private business guided by short-term profit interests. He fears that practices could be even worse than the current state management.

A mainstream media poll showed significant support for Initiative 136. It has never simply been a campaign to protect state jobs. There has been a hunger strike, a referendum against privatization, and large demonstrations. “This is a very important detail,” says Archontopoulos. “Citizens sympathized our activism. We are not fighting for our jobs, we fight for our water, for poor people who really now cannot pay the water bill.” The Initiative also draws support from among the mayors and local town councils of Thessaloniki’s metropolitan areas. It captures people’s imagination broadly, countering the fear, cynicism and uncertainty caused by the Greek political system and the debt crisis.

Until now, Marioglou and Archontopoulos have not suffered political persecution for his organizing work. “They think it’s a romantic idea, that it will never happen” Marioglou said. “They’re not threatened.” Not yet anyway. But Initiative 136 is just getting started.
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United States of Delusion

SUBHEAD: Not facing the necessity of deep cuts in borrow-and-squander budgets will lead to the involuntary reset of the entire system.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 4 January 2012 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan13/USofDelusion01-13.html)


Image above: The "Best and Biggest" - America's self delusion. From (http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=57655).

The irony is that clinging to delusion rather than face the necessity of deep cuts in borrow-and-squander budgets will lead to the involuntary reset of the entire system, depriving every vested interest of their share of the swag.

We are living in the United States of Delusion. The delusion has four key sources:

1. We can borrow-print-and-spend our way to prosperity when debt and fiscal/monetary stimulus are yielding ever more marginal returns.

The Dangerous Blindspots of Clueless Keynesians (January 2, 2013) The Keynesian model is a Cargo Cult, mired in a distant, romanticized past where Central Planning, intervention and manipulation were solutions rather than the root of the economy's fatal disease.

2. The risks of this fatal fiscal delusion are masked by a complicit Mainstream Media and a perception-management, manipulation-dependent Central State and Federal Reserve.

Spoiled Teenager Syndrome (January 3, 2013) Masking risk, cost and consequence creates an illusory world that eventually crashes on the unforgiving rocks of reality.

Is masking risk, cost and consequence a strategy that leads to success? No; it is a pathway to repeated catastrophic failure. What is the Central Planning strategy being pursued by our Central State and the Federal Reserve? Masking risk, cost and consequence.

3. The true costs of the Neoliberal Cartel State are cloaked, massaged and distorted by bogus budgets and wildly unrealistic projections.

Sickcare Will Bankrupt the Nation--And Soon (March 21, 2011)

Sickcare is fundamentally a system of interlinked politically powerful cartels.

Insiders who refuse to speak on the record for fear of antagonizing the powers that be, exorbitant price increases, confidential agreements and a tug-of-war between warring tribes. Is this the Mafia we're talking about?

From the point of view of investigative journalism, it could also describe America's health care industry. Stated truthfully, the industry is a highly profitable and politically powerful group of companies which operate in cartel-like fashion: that is, they use their clout to limit competition and establish highly profitable pricing.

Western Pennsylvania has about 140 MRI machines, while the 32 million residents of Canada share 151 MRI machines. And the U.S. machines are getting a lot of use: the number of CT and MRI scans (scans other than old-fashioned X rays) tripled from 85 to 234 per thousand insured people since 1999.

While proponents are quick to note that scans are cheaper than the alternative diagnostic procedures, one firm's research found that a doctor who owns his own machine is four times as likely to order a scan as a doctor who doesn't.

As if that wasn't enough to highlight the self-serving nature of "fee for service" cartels, MRI scanner manufacturer General Electric waged a two-year lobbying campaign to roll back cuts in Medicare reimbursements for scans. While the effort proved unsuccessful due to the intense political pressure to reduce soaring Medicare costs, critics observed that providers simply made up the reduced reimbursements by increasing the number of tests administered.

The only solution that actually addresses the systemic problem is to get rid of the entire fee-for-service structure and break up the cartels. Healthcare must be reconnected to diet, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle and community, and to education and emotional well-being.

If You Want Solutions, First Pin Down Where the Money Is Going (May 23, 2011)

If you really want a solution, then start by pinning down exactly who's getting all the money. Then find out if they're accountable for how it's spent. Nobody wants to admit the reality: our nation is dominated by cartels and fiefdoms serving entrenched constituencies whose budgets are simply not sustainable.

Please consider this chart of the University of California system's employment of professors and administration. If we extrapolate the lines, then soon there will be more highly-compensated seat-warmers in administration than there will be professors teaching in the classrooms.



It seems that some members of the Education Cartel and Fiefdom came to do good but stayed to do well--as in triple the national median earnings of full-time workers:

(Source: www.championnews.net/ftf_teacher.php?tid=78195&year=2010)

Salary: $172,163
Position: High School Teacher
Full/Part Time: Fulltime
Percent Time Employed: 100%
Assignment: Physics (Grades 9-12 Only)
Years Teaching: 30.5
Degree: Master's

Salary: $163,526
Position: High School Teacher
Full/Part Time: Fulltime
Percent Time Employed: 100%
Assignment: Driver Education
Years Teaching: 32
Degree: Master's

And how about those pension and retirement costs? We have an answer for New York City, and it is sobering. NYC budget - pension costs skyrocketing:

Over the past decade, New York City hasn’t really grown its population but has increased expenses from $28.8 billion to $49.7 billion. The vast majority of that $20.9 billion increase has been in the form of more dollars to fewer employees. Pension costs are killing us most: this has grown from $1.3 billion in 2002 to $8.3 billion in 2012.

That's a 638% increase in pension costs in one decade, while the city budget leaped 72% despite a stable population. The share of the budget devoted to pensions jumped from 4.5% in 2002 to 16.7% in 2012.

I have addressed these issues many times, for example in The Devolution of the Consumer Economy, Part II: Rising Costs, Declining Wages (April 8, 2011) and Complexity: Bureaucratic (Death Spiral) and Self-Organizing (Sustainable) (February 17, 2011).

I have highlighted the Education and Sickcare Cartels, but there are many others with exploding costs and zero alignment with accountability or performance. The Department of Defense, famous for routinely losing track of hundreds of billions of dollars (and does anyone lose their job over that gross mismanagement? No, everyone gets a promotion and raise for doing such a swell job), manages to triple the cost of every weapons system, regardless of the actual performance benefits (increasingly marginal, perhaps?)

The new F-35 fighter aircraft cost $150 million each, once we add in the overruns, replacing the Super Hornet F-18 E/F that cost $57 million each. (Once lifetime costs are included, the F-35 will cost upwards of $300 million each.) Is the F-35 really three times better than the F-18? Which would a commander facing 100 bogeys rather have, 30 F-35s or 90 F-18s? (I suspect they'd take the 90 F-18s, as long as they were loaded with the latest Sidewinder and long-range air-to-air missiles. As has been famously pointed out, at some point quantity becomes a winning quality.)

Will 100 F-35s prevail over 1,000 dirt-cheap drones? How about 10,000 drones? If the future of warfare is increasingly powerful unmanned networked drones (and it clearly is), why are we spending $1 trillion+ on hyper-costly aircraft that are essentially designed for a previous era?

4. The consequence of substituting delusion for reality is ignored or hidden from view, with the complicity of all the self-serving, entrenched vested-interests.

Is there any evidence that continuing to borrow and squander money on diminishing returns will magically cause a sudden return to productive investment? Of course there isn't; the magical belief that doing more of what has failed will eventually evade causality is delusional.

Does anyone seriously think that counterproductive "investments" in diminishing returns will "grow our way out of debt"? Of course not; everyone with a vested interest in the crumbling Status Quo is terrified that their share of the borrowed/printed swag will be cut. So the only alternative is to cling to a delusional state where belief in the impossible replaces a realistic assessment of risk, cost and consequence.

The irony is that this strategy of clinging to delusion rather than face the necessity of deep cuts in borrow-and-squander budgets will lead to the involuntary reset of the entire system, depriving every vested interest of their share of the swag. Is delusion a sustainable state? No. Thus we can confidently predict that causality, factuality and karma will eventually sweep aside delusion and all those who cling to it.


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