[p2p-research] must read: The era of extreme neoliberalism and the end of the European social state

Tue Jun 29 05:21:49 CEST 2010

Nice history of the British welfare state:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/field_01.shtml

Bismarck actually introduced national healthcare as a military supporting
scheme in Germany.  The US tried in 1919 and failed by a few votes after
ferocious lobbying by doctors against a national system.

The US Social Security System of the 1930s was the model for most modern
systems that came into being after WW2.

It was the effective bankruptcy of the UK in the 1970s that really launched
Thatcherism.   Many of the discussions current now in the US, Spain, Italy,
Greece, etc. were commonplace in 1965 and again in the 1980s.  Demographic
models have been predicting the current outcome for a generation.

France seems to be the place still to retire early with good benefits:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37725169

Here's some OECD numbers...

http://focus.ie.edu/entry.php?id=1264

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> The era of extreme neoliberalism and the end of the European social state<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-era-of-extreme-neoliberalism-and-the-end-of-the-european-social-state/2010/07/04>
>
> see
> http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/06/europes-fiscal-dystopia-new-austerity.html for
> the full article
>
>
> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
> Michel Bauwens
> 4th July 2010
>
>  *Europe is dying. If its trajectory is not changed, the EU must succumb
> to a financial coup d’êtat rolling back the past three centuries of
> Enlightenment social philosophy*. The question is whether a break-up is
> now the only way to recover its social democratic ideals from the banks that
> have taken over its central planning organs.
>
> *Michael Hudson* has a brilliant analysis<http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/06/europes-fiscal-dystopia-new-austerity.html>of the tragedy that is unfolding in Europe, where the politicians beholden
> to the financial predatory class are ’suiciding’ the European social state
> and three centuries of a particular logic of civilization.
>
> *Excerpt*:
>
> *“The idea is to create an artificial financial crisis, to come in and
> “save” it by imposing on Europe and North America “Greek-style” cutbacks in
> social security and pensions. For the United States, state and local
> pensions in particular are to be cut back by “emergency” measures to “free”
> government budgets.*
>
> *All this is quite an inversion of the social philosophy that most voters
> hold. This is the political problem inherent in the neoliberal worldview. It
> is diametrically opposed to the original liberalism of Adam Smith and his
> successors. The idea of a free market in the 19th century was one free from
> predatory rentier financial and property claims. Today, a “free market”
> (Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand style) is a market free for predators. The
> world is being treated to a travesty of liberalism and free markets.*
>
> *This shows the usual ignorance of how interest really are set – a blind
> spot which is a precondition for being approved for the post of central
> banker these days. Ignored is the fact that central banks determine interest
> rates. Under the ECB rules, national central banks can no longer do this.
> Yet that is precisely what central banks were created to do. As a result,
> European governments are obliged to borrow at rates determined by financial
> markets.*
>
> *This financial stranglehold threatens either to break up Europe or to
> plunge it into the same kind of poverty that the EU is imposing on the
> Baltics. Latvia is the prime example. Despite a plunge of over 20% in its
> GDP, its government is running a budget surplus, in the hope of lowering
> wage rates. Public-sector wages have been driven down by over 30%, and the
> government expresses the hope for yet further cuts – spreading to the
> private sector. Spending on hospitals, ambulance care and schooling has been
> drastically cut back.*
>
> *What is missing from this argument? The cost of labor can be lowered by a
> classical restoration of progressive taxes and a tax shift back onto
> property – land and rentier income. Instead, the cost of living is to be
> raised, by shifting the tax burden further onto labor and off real estate
> and finance. The idea is for the economic surplus to be pledged for debt
> service.*
>
> *In England, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has described a “euro mutiny” against
> regressive fiscal policy. But it is more than that. Beyond merely shrinking
> the economy, the neoliberal aim is to change the shape of the trajectory
> along which Western civilization has been moving for the past two centuries.
> It is nothing less than to roll back Social Security and pensions for labor,
> health care, education and other public spending, to dismantle the social
> welfare state, the Progressive Era and even classical liberalism.*
>
> *So we are witnessing a policy long in the planning, now being unleashed
> in a full-court press. The rentier interests, the vested interests that a
> century of Progressive Era, New Deal and kindred reforms sought to
> subordinate to the economy at large, are fighting back. And they are in
> control, with their own representatives in power – ironically, as Social
> Democrats and Labour party leaders, from President Obama here to President
> Papandreou in Greece and President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain.*
>
> *Having bided their time for the past few years the global predatory class
> is now making its move to “free” economies from the social philosophy long
> thought to have been built into the economic system irreversibly: Social
> Security and old-age pensions so that labor didn’t have to be paid higher
> wages to save for its own retirement; public education and health care to
> raise labor productivity; basic infrastructure spending to lower the costs
> of doing business; anti-monopoly price regulation to prevent prices from
> rising above the necessary costs of production; and central banking to
> stabilize economies by monetizing government deficits rather than forcing
> the economy to rely on commercial bank credit under conditions where
> property and income are collateralized to pay the interest-bearing debts
> culminating in forfeitures as the logical culmination of the Miracle of
> Compound Interest. *
>
> *This is the Junk Economics that financial lobbyists are trying to sell to
> voters: “Prosperity requires austerity.” “An independent central bank is the
> hallmark of democracy.” “Governments are just like families: they have to
> balance the budget.” “It is all the result of aging populations, not debt
> overload.” These are the oxymorons to which the world will be treated during
> the coming week in Toronto. *
>
> *It is the rhetoric of fiscal and financial class war. The problem is that
> there is not enough economic surpluses available to pay the financial sector
> on its bad loans while also paying pensions and social security. Something
> has to give. The commission is to provide a cover story for a revived
> Rubinomics, this time aimed not at the former Soviet Union but here at home.
> Its aim is to scale back Social Security while reviving George Bush’s
> aborted privatization plan to send FICA paycheck withholding into the stock
> market – that is, into the hands of money managers to stick into an array of
> junk financial packages designed to skim off labor’s savings. *
>
> *So Mr. Obama is hypocritical in warning Europe not to go too far too fast
> to shrink its economy and squeeze out a rising army of the unemployed. His
> idea at home is to do the same thing. The strategy is to panic voters about
> the federal debt – panic them enough to oppose spending on the social
> programs designed to help them. The fiscal crisis is being blamed on
> demographic mathematics of an aging population – not on the exponentially
> soaring private debt overhead, junk loans and massive financial fraud that
> the government is bailing out.*
>
> *What really is causing the financial and fiscal squeeze, of course, is
> the fact that that government funding is now needed to compensate the
> financial sector for what promises to be year after year of losses as loans
> go bad in economies that are all loaned up and sinking into negative equity.
> *
>
> *When politicians let the financial sector run the show, their natural
> preference is to turn the economy into a grab bag. And they usually come out
> ahead. That’s what the words “foreclosure,” “forfeiture” and “liquidate”
> mean – along with “sound money,” “business confidence” and the usual
> consequences, “debt deflation” and “debt peonage.”*
>
> *Somebody must take a loss on the economy’s bad loans – and bankers want
> the economy to take the loss, to “save the financial system.” From the
> financial sector’s vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve
> bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy.
> Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and
> financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to
> keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be
> used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital
> investment. *
>
> *The economy is to be sacrificed to subsidize the fantasy that debts can
> be paid, if only banks can be “made whole” to begin lending again – that is,
> to resume loading the economy down with even more debt, causing yet more
> intrusive debt deflation.*
>
> *This is not the familiar old 19th-century class war of industrial
> employers against labor, although that is part of what is happening. It is
> above all a war of the financial sector against the “real” economy: industry
> as well as labor.*
>
> *The underlying reality is indeed that pensions cannot be paid – at least,
> not paid out of financial gains. For the past fifty years the Western
> economies have indulged the fantasy of paying retirees out of purely
> financial gains (M-M’ as Marxists would put it), not out of an expanding
> economy (M-C-M’, employing labor to produce more output). The myth was that
> finance would take the form of productive loans to increase capital
> formation and hiring. The reality is that finance takes the form of debt –
> and gambling. Its gains therefore were made from the economy at large. They
> were extractive, not productive. Wealth at the rentier top of the economic
> pyramid shrank the base below. So something has to give. The question is,
> what form will the “give” take? And who will do the giving – and be the
> recipients?”*
>
> --
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