Why I'll be holding my nose and and voting for Remain

I really don't like the EU. In simple terms the EU is a neoliberal stitch-up, a club for the corporations. The fiscal waterboarding handed out to Greece, following on from the imposition of a 'technocratic' premier in Italy was just about the last straw for me. The punishment of Greece was essential pour encourager les autres, to prevent Portugal and Spain and any other Eurozone countries trying to break free from the iron grip of neoliberal austerity. These events made it clear to me that the EU as it stands has no respect for democracy - period. 

Whatever the Remain campaign say about the environment and workers' rights I have no doubt that there will be more pressure to water down the relevant European directives in the future. That is inevitable unless the whole direction of travel of the EU can be changed. Neither am I confident that protests in the EU will be able to stop TTIP. I'm also very pissed off with the pitiful campaigning of the Remain groups, including those of my own party the Greens, because it's relentlessly negative. Has-been politicians like Tony Blair and John Major and 'experts' are constantly wheeled out of their cupboards to warn us of the impending armageddon if we leave. Where are the positive reasons for remaining? Can't they think of any?

Clive Lewis, Labour MP at Another Europe is Possible on 4 June Manchester

I'm also with Suzanne Moore in that I think that the almost unanimous support for remain from the establishment is proving a huge turn off for many. I her excellent article today in the Guardian she says:

"But I sense that, for many, a strange game is being played out whereby voting leave is not seen as such an enormous gamble. Much of England is ready to roll that dice; this part of England, so often despised, demonised and disrespected by those who claim to represent it, does need to be spoken for. This England will not do as it is told."

I agree with her, I too suspect that many people will simply stick up two fingers to the establishment and the EU and take that leap in the dark. 

So why am I voting for Remain on June 23rd? Its because I'm a socialist and socialists are internationalists, because I want to build solidarity with the left and oppressed groups across Europe, because it's the best way to deal with climate change and the refugee crisis and because I'm willing to join Diem25 and have one last shot at making the EU democratically accountable to the people.

If we do come out of the EU there will undoubtedly be a crisis but crises are the stock-in-trade of neoliberal capitalism, we lurch from crisis to crisis anyway. Will I lose much sleep over it? - no I won't because the fight for social, economic and environmental justice will go on just as it always has done.

The EU is determined to crush Greece and enforce austerity

I intended to write this post prior to the Greek referendum but so much has happened recently I hadn't the chance to do it. The referendum result on Sunday was a stunning 61% for No or OXI. A massive rejection of austerity and an outcome which reverberated around Europe, and gave hope to all those who believe in democracy, and believe that democracy should determine how a society and economy should be run, trumping all other interests.

Before the referendum Caroline Lucas said at a Greece solidarity rally in London:

“Austerity isn’t only socially destructive, as we know – it is economically deluded as well. Greece’s government debt to GDP ratio hasn’t gone down as austerity was imposed, it has increased”

Of course she was right. The Troika's bailout and programme of so-called economic reforms, which entail cuts in pensions and worker's salaries, are intended to make the poorest pay for the economic ills of Greece and protect those who caused the global economic crash which opened the door to austerity in the first place  - the banks. In fact the bailout was never intended to help the Greek people but to protect French and German banks which lent recklessly to a corrupt Greek establishment so that they could buy German weapons and goods.

The Greek people voted OXI (no) in the referendum on the humiliating Eurozone offer

Greeks were threatened openly by the Eurocrats in the run up to the referendum, they were told that the financial taps would be turned off by the ECB and they would be ejected from the Euro. Now, in the aftermath of the referendum, it seems clear that unless Syriza accept humiliating conditions no better than those rejected by the Greek electorate, the threats will be carried out. The EU Goliath is determined to crush the Greek David to ensure that no other Eurozone country has the  temerity to even think that democracy can prevail against the interests of creditors. This is a foolish and short-sighted approach which has the potential to cause real and lasting damage both to the Eurozone and the EU itself.

The Syriza government is between a rock and a hard place but there is only one way out - default and a return to a Greek currency. In fact they should have already set up a parallel currency to the Euro to allow taxes to be paid and the economy to function. Their immediate problem is not solvency but liquidity. This is a very hard road but in the longer term it it offers dignity and hope to the Greek nation. The alternative is decades of debt-slavery in the Eurozone.

Greece can lead the fightback against austerity in Europe

Today Greeks go to the polls to vote in one of the most important elections in the country's history. After seven years of grinding austerity imposed by the 'Troika', it looks like Greeks could be about to vote in Syriza, an alliance of radical leftists, who have pledged to write off some of Greece's debt and set the country on a new path. Of course, the media have played this up into some kind of showdown between the leader of Syriza, Alexis Tsipras, and the European Union, in which Greece will almost inevitably have to exit the Eurozone.

But exit, or Grexit as the media love to call it, is not inevitable. Given the suffering the Greeks have had to endure with unemployment hitting a high of 28%, 50% youth unemployment and wages falling 12% year on year, it wouldn't be surprising if the Greeks wanted to leave the Eurozone and go back to the Drachma - but they don't. And why should they? They are as much a part of the Eurozone as any other country and still remember having had a currency that was almost worthless.

In simple terms the Greeks are being portrayed as the feckless ne'er-do-wells who are being bankrolled by the industrious, hardworking Germans but this is a false picture. Entry into the Euro for Greece was political not economic, and the Euro was always bound to create problems for the Greek economy. Couple that with a corrupt government and reckless lending by German and French banks - so that Greece could buy German goods - and its not easy to see that Germany did very nicely out of this Euro-arrangement at the expense of the Greeks. All that has now been conveniently forgotten. Thus I heard on The World This Weekend today a half-baked analysis of Greek 'wrongdoing' - essentially Greek bad, German good - as the BBC lined up pundits to criticise Greece and Syriza. With reporting on this level we might as well be living in the Soviet Union.

Its as well to remember that after the Second World War the Germans were mired in debt and struggling economically just as the Greeks are now, that is until 1953 when the London Debt Agreement was reached and half of Germany's debts were written off. This is often credited with starting the 'economic miracle' which transformed the German economy with output doubling between 1953 and 1963.

We know that austerity in Europe is designed to protect banks from going under at the expense of the people. These are the same banks that contributed to the global economic crash of 2008. Its absolutely unacceptable that people should be made to pay for the epic failures of financial capitalism. We need a programme of Green quantitative easing in Europe for investment in energy efficiency, renewables and public transport, getting millions back into meaningful work. That, not debt-driven austerity, must be the future. Here's looking forward to a Syriza majority government and the start of the historic fightback against austerity.

While Cameron schmoozes Murdoch, Greeks and Spaniards are fighting austerity

There are thousands of Spanish and Greek workers fighting to defend their jobs against the dead hand of austerity which is threatening to wreck Europe's economies. You would hardly know about this if you followed the mainstream media, which is instead fascinated by David Cameron's schmoozing of the Murdoch empire, and Simon Cowell's string of girlfriends.

Meanwhile, in Spain thousands of miners have been on strike since the end of May, defending their jobs and communities. In time-honoured fashion the Spanish government have unleashed the police who have been given a free hand to break up the strikes and protests leading to violent clashes. In Greece, striking steelworkers have stopped work for 228 days in their fight to protect their jobs.

So why doesn't this make the headlines? Because it doesn't fit with the media agenda which is the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, designed to distract and manipulate us, whilst pandering to the 'free' market neoliberalism of the corporations and their tame politicians. Its OK to report such clashes in the middle east, in places like Egypt,  because that is considered safe, but in Europe such events are not considered to be "newsworthy".

The big event this weekend is the Greek election and its looking like the Eurocrats have managed to turn the screws enough on the electorate to ensure a government which will support the 'memorandum' which is killing the Greek economy, and causing great pain to the Greek people. If New Democracy and its pro-bailout allies can form a government the Greeks will be ground down even further to protect the banks and the Euro vanity project. We can only hope that SYRIZA and its allies can gain enough votes to prevent this from happening. Since the bailout cannot work, a victory for the pro-bailout parties would be based on fear and ultimately fruitless. Either the terms of the bailout must be renegotiated and the debts written off or Greece will have to default anyway. Whatever happens the European Union has been badly damaged by this attempt to make its people pay for the blunders of the ruling 'free' market elite, who are wholly responsible for the current crisis.

We need boldness to replace the weak timidity of the Coalition

When people are under pressure they often retreat into what they think they know, and what makes them feel safe. The global economic crisis, triggered by the banks and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, threatened to bring down the whole global economy and capitalist order. The response, lead by politicians in the UK, including Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, was to use the power of the state to preserve the status quo. Losses were nationalised and profits remained in Wall Street and the City as taxpayers were required to bail out the private sector banking system. The aim was to restore "business as usual", as if nothing had ever happened.

Since the 2010 general election in the UK, David Cameron and George Osborne, have continued to use the British state to maintain "business a usual", playing the class war card and ensuring that corporations and the rich continue to be shielded by making the rest of us pay to reduce the structural deficit and prop up the banks. As long as the 'markets' and bondholders are safe, the rest of us can go hang. The recent budget provided ample evidence of this with the top rate of tax being reduced to 45% and Osborne later claiming that, even though he is a millionaire, that he didn't know that wealthy people pay lower taxes overall than the rest of us.

But its not just the ongoing economic crisis that we should be concerned about, we are facing a crisis of resource depletion and climate change. Far from being a sign of strength as, Cameron, Osborne, Brown and Darling have claimed, in 'protecting' 'our' economy they have shown weakness. Brown and Darling could have taken the opportunity of the crash to bring the banks under control, Cameron and Osborne could have taken the opportunity of election victory to re-engineer our economy to deal with the very real challenges we face. They all failed. The same mistakes have been reproduced by Sarkozy and Merkel in the EU, making the Eurozone crisis even worse, something which the economist Joseph Stiglitz has recently described as a "suicide pact".



What we need now is politicians like Caroline Lucas who have the courage to cast aside the failed 'free' market neoliberal ideology of business as usual and build an economy which can deal with the very real challenges which we face. Sadly, there is no hope of this happening with this government, Cameron and Osborne will continue to protect the interests of their class, and fiddle while Rome burns, but lets be clear - what they offer us, apart from years of hardship is, for all the posturing, not strength, but weakness in the face of adversity.

A Tory driven ideological class war attack on British workers won't promote growth

It was bound to happen here, as it did in Wisconsin and other American states. First the capitalist class, or 1% if you prefer,  creates a crisis, a crisis of financial capitalism which nearly brings down the world economy. It does so through its ideology, neoliberalism; which means destruction of public services by privatisation; letting the banks and corporations run riot through deregulation; and the looting of natural assets by corporations through globalisation. Then, using their tame politicians in the UK, USA and Europe, it makes the middle and working classes and unemployed, the 99%, pay to bailout the banks and save the skins of the bankers. This is privatising the gains and nationalising the losses. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

So the banks get saved but there is still a big problem because much of that debt incurred by the banks has now been transferred to governments and taxpayers leading inevitably to a sovereign debt crisis, which is where we are now. The Eurozone crisis has been triggered by the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the banking crisis. Still with me? We are nearly there.

In response to the sovereign debt crisis governments in the UK and Europe implement austerity programmes, ostensibly to bailout government debt, particularly in Greece and Ireland. But its not the poor old Irish and Greek taxpayers who are being bailed out, the money is being used, once again, to bailout French, German, Spanish and Greek banks. So taxpayers have been shafted twice, first in the bank bailout and secondly by austerity - which is just another bank bailout.

To top all this the right wing politicians who are the friends of the bankers and the 1%, are now using the crisis to try and smash workers rights. In the USA, in Wisconsin, the Tea Party backed Governor Scott Walker has used the deficit to not only slash services but to try to deny unions their collective bargaining rights. Now in the UK today we hear that the government is contemplating undermining workers rights by making them easier to sack and limiting further their already limited rights to an Employment Tribunal. This crude, class war attack on workers is being carried out in the pretence that it will encourage growth.

The real irony is that the rising unemployment, increasing poverty and lack of growth in the UK are a direct result of this government's austerity programme. Economically, this government is already a complete failure and its only to be expected that it should dishonestly try to pin the blame for that failure on working people and the unemployed, that, after all, is what class war is all about.

Quantitative easing, and how to help to avoid the big crash

Just after the Tory party conference, which ended last week, we were told that the Bank of England had introduced a new round of quantitative easing (QE) in the UK  to the tune of £75 billion. This is throwing bad la la money after bad.The bad is the £200 billion already wasted on QE to little effect on the UK economy so far, except perhaps as an increase in inflation. The la la, is that it is made up money which comes from nowhere, so it might as well come to you and me, and I'm not joking, because if it did, that really would lift off our economy. But we all know that is not going to happen. The iron law of capitalism is - "To those that have shall be given".

What we have with this economic crisis is the perfect storm, which was described by Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in the link above, as:

"There is not enough money. That may seem unfamiliar to people." [he told Sky News.] "But that's because this is the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s, if not ever."

All of which makes our current situation potentially worse than the Great  Depression. This is because; we still have a huge amount of debt in the system; we have nation states (like Greece) bust; we have bust banks; and all the economic levers, including record low interest rates, and QE, have been pulled, both here and in the USA. So there's nowhere left to go - not as far that is, as neoliberal economics is concerned - see Larry Elliot's article in the Guardian.

On top of all this, now we hear that yet another bailout of European banks is planned by Sarkozy and Merkel in the EU. This will cost at least £200 billion, but the EFSF could go up to €2 trillion. But  hang on..... where is all this money coming from? Why, from you dear taxpayer, you and your children, and your children's children will have to fork out at least that amount, and possibly more, to bail out commercial banks. And yet, this really is the plan - a kind of madness.

The Guardian have summarised the current situation in their Eurozone graphic - see below:

The Eurozone crisis - source: The Guardian

So what is the answer? Not more QE, that is for sure, and no more bank bailouts. The state has done its bit, now it is time for the market to bear all of the costs of the debt in the system. That sure will hurt bad, it wont be easy for anyone, but it is the only solution. The major banks must be nationalised and the rest written off. Then the nationalised banks need to be turned into national investment banks (with some mutualised). We then need a sustained burst of Green QE, starting with the Green New Deal.The Green Party plan is to start by investing £44 billion in creating one million green jobs, a far better investment than QE. There is much more to be done, including building renewable energy sources, and affordable housing, and a citizen's pension, but this is only  the start. If you want to know more, take a look at our manifesto here.

The Neoliberalspeak dictionary

This post was inspired by George Orwell's Newspeak. According to Wikipedia:

Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state.

Over the past 30 years or so neoliberalism has contributed to the impoverishment of our language by the usage, or perhaps mis-use of certain words. The aim of a neoliberalspeak dictionary is to give some of the key words their real meaning.

• affordable housing / adj. - unaffordable housing. Mythical housing unavailable to most citizens in the UK
• bailout / n.; v. - a method of privatising financial gains and nationalising financial losses
• capitalism / n. - a gigantic global Ponzi scheme designed to benefit a small elite whilst plunging billions of people into abject poverty
• deficit reduction / n. ; v. - a means of class war by which the populations of countries are made to pay for the failures of the markets
• efficiency / n. - increasing profits by lowering the living standards of workers. This is typically achieved by cuts in pay, a reduction in holiday entitlement and reduced pension.
• efficiency savings / adj. - cuts
• Eurozone / n. - proto-European capitalist empire where commercial interests are put above democratic rights
• gig economy / adj. low paid - sweatshop labour
• globalisation / n.; v. - a process of opening up the world to Western economic imperialism. A means of looting the natural resources, exploiting labour in all the countries of the world and lowering the standard of living of workers in the West
• Labour market flexibility / adj. - attack on workers conditions, lowering pay reduction in holidays - cheap labour. 
• privatisation / n.; v. - asset stripping of the public sector by the private sector 
• quantitative easing / adj. handouts for the rich. Printing trillions of dollars to prop up a broken global economy
• Social mobility / adj. - conservative fraudulent frame which is used to legitimise inequality in society
• strong leader / n. - a weak leader i.e. someone who will do what we tell them to against the wishes of their own party and its supporters. we being the neoliberal so-called free press (corporate media)
• sustainable / adj. - unsustainable. A word that has become so debased and devalued as to have rendered it virtually meaningless
• tax / n.; v. - a levy by the state on the 99%
• Trump / n.; v. - a fart, noxious gas released from the anus
• we're all in this together / adj. - you pay for our crisis
• WTO / n. - 'we've taken over' . Global organisation for the purpose of promoting the commercial interests of global corporations above the democratic rights of nation states.

I'm sure that in time the dictionary will grow into a comprehensive guide to Neoliberalspeak. I hope that I'll be able get some contributions from some of the greatest exponents of Neoliberalspeak  such as Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Barak Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nicola Sarkozy.

The European project is failing the European people

The Eurozone debacle continues. Now Italy, the third largest economy in the Eurozone, is having to pay much more to finance its debt. Yields, the interest that Italy has to pay on government bonds, have reached over 6% which is unsustainable. So that is Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and now Italy which are already in, or in grave danger of falling into, the sovereign debt crisis.

The people of Europe are being asked by the leaders of Europe to pay for a crisis which is not of their making, whilst the perpetrators of that crisis, the banks and financial capitalists, are being protected. This is not just a betrayal of the people of Europe, by their elected leaders, but of democracy itself. Politicians in Greece have recently sold out Greek sovereignty to the banks, bondholders, and the financial technocrats of the ECB and the IMF by agreeing to a second bailout.

We have been sold the story that the EU is a European creation with the countries of Europe coming together in solidarity after WWII. But the EU is fundamentally an American cold war creation foisted on a weakened Europe after the war, the aim being to create and ensure a capitalist 'free' market ideological and economic hegemony in Europe, at a time when Soviet communism was seen as a real threat. Despite strongish trade unions and a tradition of social democracy, the EU is now a neoliberal state - with neoliberal 'free' market policies enshrined in its constitution. The purpose of the Euro is to pave the way for a European superstate. The aim now of politicians and financial technocrats is to reduce the living standards of workers and the middle classes, in order to create a great big bonanza for western corporations and their capitalist owners. The only thing which distinguishes this capitalist corporatist European project from fascism is the use of suits instead of uniforms and jackboots.

Having created a crisis by building a casino financial capitalism out of democratic control, and nearly bringing down the world economy, politicians and bankers have used the crisis to cut welfare and workers terms and conditions in the USA and  Europe. This is straightforward class war, with ordinary people being made to pay for the failures of 'free' market capitalism. In the current circumstances the EU and its leaders are the enemies of the European people. In his excellent Guardian piece, Mark Weisbrot explains why the Euro deserves to fail. It is beginning to look like its failure may be the only hope for European democracy.

The EU may be a supertanker, but it will have to be turned round if the European people are going to be liberated from neoserfdom (neoliberal serfdom). That means a massive reform of the EU and re-writing of the constitution to remove the neoliberal shackles which bind the EU into this extreme right-wing project.

What is the Labour Party for?

A lot of people are wondering what the Labour Party is for. Since Ed Milliband became leader its been hard to to tell. But at least we know what the Labour party is not for; its not for the working class, it abandoned them a long time ago, letting the BNP fill the vacuum; its not for decent public sector pensions; its not much interested in housing; or the poor; or trade unions. It is, we know, in the historic words of Peter Mandelson - "intensely relaxed about the filthy rich" and it seems to be pretty keen on the banks; Oh!, and privatisation of the NHS, education, and well, pretty much anything else that moves.

The Labour Party is a party that has lost its way completely. So much so that it doesn't really know what it is for, except perhaps a vehicle for its leaders to get elected and hold political power, a vehicle for career politicians, the political class that I blogged about in this post. That means that it is the job of party members, who presumably think they are part of a project to change things, merely to have a role of furthering the career aspirations of Milliband, Jowell, Balls, Alexander et al.

I'm sure that Ed would be horrified if he read what I'd just written. He'd protest that he believes in a progressive future and that he, and his colleagues, have been traduced by that statement. If he thinks that I'd like to suggest its his own fault, because I think I think those are perfectly reasonable conclusions for onlookers like me to draw, based on the statements, and behaviour of Ed and other leading Labour politicians.

For example, for him to state that the June 30th strike was wrong, on the basis that negotiations about public sector pensions were ongoing, was laughable. It was obvious to all but the most naive that the government wasn't involved  in meaningful negotiations and had no intention of compromising on terms remotely acceptable to the striking teachers and civil servants. Not only that, but it was clear that the government had been hiding the fact that the Hutton Report showed that public sector pensions were affordable, and this had been exposed on the Today programme.

The Labour party has become a right-wing reactionary neoliberal party and there is little to distinguish it from the other neoliberal parties; the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. The reason for this transformation is not difficult to discern. This transformation has happened to 'left' parties all over the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Social Democracy has been abandoned in favour of 'free' market globalisation, and the domination of democracies by the multinational corporations and the banks. In fact, this is little different to Fascism. It is only a matter of degree, because Fascism is the subjugation of democracy to capitalist corporations -  with some goose-stepping in uniform, and gratuitous violence, thrown in.

This is what is happening in Greece. Democracy has been openly replaced, under a 'Socialist' government,  by the control of financial technocrats from the EU and IMF, on behalf of their market masters. Our politicians, including Ed,  are complicit in this free market coup d'etat. There is only one way we can stop this. We must stop voting for these people. We need to vote for parties which can stop the rot. In the UK there is only one party of social justice left - the Green Party.

The Greeks MUST default on 'their' debt

I came across this post by Mark Hudson yesterday on a blog called Naked Capitalism. It's an excellent description of how the failures of financial capitalism, which culminated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and threatened to bring down the world economy, are being used by the capitalist class to roll back all the democratic gains made in the past century by ordinary people. This is, as Naomi Klein has described, an economic shock doctrine - use a crisis to impose cuts in living standards on the mass of the people which they would ordinarily never accept.

Its worth a brief recap of how we got here. Financial deregulation since the 1970's, combined with an aggressive free market doctrine known as neo-liberalism, which originated in the Chicago School, have lead to banks and financial institutions such as hedge funds becoming out of democratic control in Western countries. At the same time the standard of living of all except the wealthiest has come under attack. The lack of controls on financial capitalism has lead to a series of economic crashes since the 1980s, each one worst than the last. These include; the Asian crisis, the dotcom boom, and the latest and greatest crisis since the crash of the Great Depression, which began in the USA with the collapse of subprime mortgages in 2006.

The latest crisis resulted in the virtual collapse of banks worldwide which was only halted by state intervention. What began as a crisis for the financial sector lead directly to the current sovereign debt crisis which we are now in. This sovereign debt crisis, in which taxpayers are being asked, once again, to bail out the financial system is being used as a weapon to impose neoliberalism on people in Europe and the USA. This means an attack on welfare, pensions, wages, workers rights, and environmental regulation, and privatisation of public services and state assets. This is driven not by economics but ideology. The aim is not to find a solution to the crisis but to use the shock of the crisis to destroy the standard of living of the mass of the population in the West. Those who gain from this will be the capitalist class.

Nowhere is this revealed more starkly at the moment than in Greece. The bailout of Greece, imposed last year to the tune of €110 billion, failed. The important point is that this bailout was only ever in tended to protect French and German banks, and other bondholders, and not the Greek people. Also of great importance was the desire to protect the great European single-state project know as the Euro. Of course the Greeks should never have been in the Euro. Without their own currency and the ability to set interest rates they were always going to struggle economically. Of course it can be argued that successive Greek governments mismanaged the economy and that the Greeks were living beyond their means but that misses the essential point. This is really about a coup d'etat, about financial technocrats and finance capitalists taking control. It is a struggle between democracy and capitalism.

The only way forward for the Greeks (and the Irish for that matter) is to default on their debts and leave the Euro. The alternative is the end of Greek democracy and the wholesale privatisation of the country at knock down prices. Greece will become a sovereign state and democracy in name only. As Mark Hudson said in his post; this is the road to financial serfdom;

"This new road to neoserfdom is an asset grab. But to achieve it, the financial sector needs a political grab to replace democracy with financial technocrats. Their job is to pretend that there is no revolution at all, merely an increase in “efficiency,” “creating wealth” by debt-leveraging the economy to the point where the entire surplus is paid out as interest to the financial managers who are emerging as Western civilization’s new central planners".