[p2p-research] john pilger on the greeks

Mon May 24 21:20:41 CEST 2010

Michel,

I am reading a good book now by Matt Ridley called the Rational Optimist.
He points out that doom and gloom about the future is an old sport that
rarely if ever plays out to be true or useful.  The reality he claims is
that things are getting wildly better rapidly, and will get wildly better
still.  Whether or not he is ultimately correct or not is, I suppose, in the
eye of the beholder.  He makes compelling arguments to my mind.

I recommend it for anyone who wants to pay his publisher 26.50 rather than
99.95 to the publisher of the book on abundance for all.

Ryan

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> thanks ryan, but you missed another important statistic by John: 40 million
> americans have problem with finding enough food, how can such a system work?
>
> a quote form john robb, to  put my reply below in perspective:
>
> *When this war ends, and it won't be long, the global economic and
> financial system will be the victor.  Once that occurs, the nation-states of
> the West will join those of the global south as **hollow states*<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/hollow-states-vs-failed-states.html>
> *: mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the
> global economic system.  These new states, more market-states than
> nation-states, will offer citizens a mere vestige of the **public goods*<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/failed_states.html>
> * they offered historically.  Incomes will fall to developing world levels
> (made easy to due highly portable productivity), and wealth will stratify.
>  Regulatory protections will be weak.  Civil service pensions will be erased
> and corruption will reign.  The once dominant militaries of the West will be
> reduced to a small fraction of their current size, and their focus will be
> on the maintenance of internal control rather than on external threats.*
>
> in this era of high automation and production of abundance which you so
> often highlight, why would everyone have to work ...?
>
> the point is, france is doing well, and the quality of life is good, and it
> has been economically competitive; second, other states with even higher
> welfare, such as scandinavia, are doing even better, on the other hand,
> countries which destroy any form of solidarity and welfare, abandon
> education and pensions, are self-destructing  and doing a lot worse ... that
> should tell  you something, that any policy which proposes to bleed the poor
> towards the pockets of the highly rich, is probably counterproductive, and
> these statistics are part of that social warfare
>
> so, any statistic should be read wholistically, as part of a full picture
> of the country ...
>
> no doubt a few things should change, including the balance of those who
> work and don't work, but the current scorched earth policies will only make
> matters a lot worse,
>
> Greece is simply being destroyed, following the prescriptions which I'm
> sure you are advocating, i.e. beltightening etc..
>
> here is john Robb, not a leftie like Pilger:
>
> really worth reading:
> http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/05/the-decline-of-the-west.html
>
>
> Most analysts (at least the ones that are worth reading) contend that the
> sovereign default crisis (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.) in the EU is about
> the collapse of a system that created monetary union without a political
> union.  It isn't.  That's actually a narrow, parochial view.  Instead, the
> current sovereign debt crisis is about something much more interesting:
>  it's another battle in a war for dominance between "our" integrated,
> impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states.  At issue
> is whether a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves
> the interests of a global economic system.
>
> Who's winning?  The global economic system, of course.  The 2008 financial
> crisis, the first real battle of this war (as opposed to the early losses in
> skirmishes in Russia, Argentina, the Balkans, etc.), generated a very
> decisive outcome.  It was a resounding defeat for nation-states.*   The
> current crisis in the EU will almost certainly end with the same results.
>
> When this war ends, and it won't be long, the global economic and financial
> system will be the victor.  Once that occurs, the nation-states of the West
> will join those of the global south as hollow states<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/hollow-states-vs-failed-states.html>:
> mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the global
> economic system.  These new states, more market-states than nation-states,
> will offer citizens a mere vestige of the public goods<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/failed_states.html> they
> offered historically.  Incomes will fall to developing world levels (made
> easy to due highly portable productivity), and wealth will stratify.
>  Regulatory protections will be weak.  Civil service pensions will be erased
> and corruption will reign.  The once dominant militaries of the West will be
> reduced to a small fraction of their current size, and their focus will be
> on the maintenance of internal control rather than on external threats.  The
> clear and unambiguous message to every citizen of the West will be: * *
>
> *You are on your own.  You are in direct competition with everyone else in
> the world, and your success or failure is something you alone control.  *
>
> For those that think that this will bring about a surge of peaceful
> economic vigor, you will be wrong.  It will fragment society and lead to
> perpetual stagnation/depression, endemic violence/corruption, and squalor.
>  For absent any moral basis (a social compact), stability, or (widely
> shared) prosperity: new sources of order will emerge to fill the gap left by
> the hollowing out of the nation-state.  These new sources of order will be
> first seen in the rise of the criminal entrepreneur, whether they be the
> besuited corporate gangster or the gang tattooed thug.  For in the world of
> hollow states (without a morality that limits behavior) and limitless
> connectivity to the global economic system, these criminal entrepreneurs
> quickly become dominant, violently coercing or corrupting everyone in the
> path to their enrichment.
>
>
>   On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi Michel:
>>
>> Here is a profound statistic I read this weekend: 50% of French nationals
>> over 50 do not work for a living and are on some form of pension--usually
>> from the government.  In an age where people live to be 80 regularly, how
>> can such a system work?
>>
>> Ryan
>>
>>
>>
>>   On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Michel Bauwens <
>> michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> via
>>> http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The crisis that has led to Greece's "rescue" by European banks and the
>>> International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system
>>> that itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely
>>> reported as such, but waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial
>>> rich.
>>>
>>> What makes Greece different is that it has experienced, within living
>>> memory, invasion, foreign occupation, military dictatorship and popular
>>> resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that
>>> dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis
>>> that preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou was
>>> described by the sociologist Jean Ziegler as "a machine for systematically
>>> pillaging the country's resources".
>>> Epic theft
>>>
>>> The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve board is
>>> investigating the role of Goldman Sachs, which gambled on the bankruptcy of
>>> Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited
>>> €360bn in Swiss banks. This haemorrhaging of capital continues with the
>>> approval of Europe's central banks and governments.
>>>
>>> At 11 per cent, Greece's budget deficit is no higher than America's.
>>> However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international
>>> capital market, it was effectively blocked by the US corporate ratings
>>> agencies, which "downgraded" Greek debt to "junk". These same agencies gave
>>> triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage
>>> securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.
>>>
>>> What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar,
>>> scale. In Britain, the "rescue" of banks such as Northern Rock and the Royal
>>> Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon Brown and his
>>> passion for the avaricious instincts of the City, these gifts of public
>>> money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other
>>> the booty they call bonuses and to spirit it away to tax havens. Under
>>> Britain's political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the US, the
>>> situation is even more remarkable. As the investigative journalist David
>>> DeGraw has reported, the principal Wall Street banks that "destroyed the
>>> economy pay zero in taxes and get $33bn in refunds".
>>>
>>> In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told
>>> they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred them. Jobs,
>>> pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers
>>> put in charge. For the EU and the IMF, the opportunity presents to "change
>>> the culture" and to dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF
>>> and the World Bank have "structurally adjusted" (impoverished and
>>> controlled) countries across the developing world.
>>>
>>> Greece is hated for the same reason Yugoslavia had to be destroyed
>>> physically behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks
>>> are employed by the state, and the young and the trade unions comprise a
>>> popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels' tanks on the
>>> campus of Athens University in 1967 remain a political spectre. Such
>>> resistance is anathema to Europe's central bankers and regarded as an
>>> obstruction to German capital's need to capture markets in the aftermath of
>>> Germany's troubled reunification.
>>>
>>> --
>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>
>>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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>>>
>>> Think thank:
>>> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Ryan Lanham
>> rlanham1963 at gmail.com
>> Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
>> P.O. Box 633
>> Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
>> Cayman Islands
>> (345) 916-1712
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> Think thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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