The EU and 21st century Feudalism

PETER SIRE

The Author has an MBA from Cass Business School, London and a background in international finance. He is a long-time observer of international and European affairs.

Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk writes in his open letter resigning from Germany's Social Democrat party of the betrayal of the social democratic dream. Germany is not alone in this. Every European social democrat party, from Labour in the UK, to PSOE in Spain or Pasok in Greece has sold out to neoliberalism and none more so than those in control of the new steamroller against democracy that the European Commission, its instrument the European Central Bank and - to a large extent - the European Parliament have become.

Owen Jones rightly points out in the New Statesman that the German-led terrorist coup by the Eurozone cabal against Greece was designed no more no less than "to stop an anti-austerity movement spreading across the continent" or, put another way, to stand with the powerful against the most disadvantaged across Europe, ravaged by the bank-created 2008 recession.

There is no doubt that the social democratic promoters of the European project of one or two generations past will be turning in their graves at the events unfolding, but if they were still alive, they would be warning of a repetition of history.  While national socialism lurks on the sidelines of institutional politics, an even greater and more powerful threat is attempting to march its jackboots over the sovereignty of European citizens under the cover of the consensus submissiveness of those cosy and still dominant bedfellows, the Christian Democrat and Sclerotic Socialist establishment. The threat comes in the form of an international corporatism that seeks to turn Europe and the whole world into a a tax-free, risk-free paradise where the citizens are expected to pick up the price tag for the unscrupulous recklessness with which greedy corporations (not all, but far too many) exercise their muscle, yielding rich dividends for those faceless "markets" and ethic-corrupting bonuses for their directors.

Europe's Christian Democrats have cleverly appropriated the tag of "popular" to describe their essentially anti-popular, pro-elite paternalism. So while new parties such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain are labelled "populist"and "radical",  it is ironic that they are in fact propounding no less than the political philosophy known as social democracy in the 20th century or that proposed by Bakunin as his alternative to feudalism in the 19th, demonised at the time as anarchy. Indeed, it is always the threat of social disorder and economic collapse that is wielded by the political elites against those who challenge their self-rewarding power with its thinly-veiled authoritarianism and oppression of the common man and woman.

The instrument the corporatist tax-evaders are employing to exercise their feudalist plunder on the people of Europe, with a multi-million investment in manipulative lobbyists and lawyers, is TTIP. This transatlantic treaty seeks to eliminate what was commonly accepted as a political risk, meaning that corporations will now be featherbedded from parliaments or local authorities passing laws to protect public health, food safety, the environment or public services because they will be able to claim compensation for loss of earnings through tribunals that by-pass national jurisdictions. It will also in effect override national agencies in matters of public health, forcing them to accept the lowest common denominator of standards such as those of the corrupt FDA in the USA, stuffed with corporate appointees.  

Europe is already declining to the levels of physical and mental illness prevalent across large swathes of the US.  By letting TTIP in under the table, the powers that be in the European Commission are, in the name of flexibilisation and competition, seeking to facilitate the process, with its consequent health costs, both human and economic, requiring ever-increasing austerity and accelerating the spiral of private profit and public loss that is so ravaging Europe's most disadvantaged since the 2008 crisis. Such is the project that is being forged by Europe's elites with the shameful acquiescence of a majority of the social democrats (in name only) sitting in the European Parliament who supposedly act in the interest of their electors but take their orders from the party apparatchiks back home that dance to the corporatist piper's tune.

Like Yascha Mounk in Germany, there are growing numbers of supporters of the traditional parties - internationalists at heart - who are becoming disillusioned and indignant at the European project's slide into this new feudalism. In the UK, there are those who are considering using the opportunity presented by next year's referendum to express their rejection. A"radical", Jeremy Corbyn, seems favourite to lead a Labour party whose militants have grown weary of waiting for their leaders to break away from the tainted Blairite legacy  to put an end to the rapacious corporatism that demands zero-hour contracts and yet more benefit cuts for the most vulnerable, including 300,000 children.

As Ronald G. Asch writes in The decline and fall of the European Union: is it time to rip it up and start again? Europe is already in crisis following the upheavals of Greece and the failures of austerity against a background of accelerating inequality.  The threat of a "no" vote in the UK referendum would cause panic in the EU and likewise for David Cameron who is hoping to return triumphant with Treaty changes to please his corporate backers and secure a "yes". It is time for progressive UK voters to use the opportunity he has unwittingly handed us on a platter to put a bomb under the foul-smelling State of Europe and re-vindicate social democracy as once was - on the side of the people.

Germany's new nasty party

PETER SIRE

The Author has an MBA from Cass Business School, London and a background in international finance. He is a long-time observer of international and European affairs.

The events unfolding in Greece have brought out the nasty streak among Germany's authoritarian politicians, heedless to the misery and suffering they have already caused the largely blameless Hellenic people.

Though it would be absurd to attribute an equivalence to the behaviour of the barbarous and psychopathic Third Reich, there are, nevertheless, parallels of a different scale arising from the German policy towards debt relief and austerity in Europe. While the inspiration might not be national socialism but rather global neoliberalism, there are indeed comparisons to be found in the ideological mindset represented among others by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schlaeuber, who is also turning out to be a master of propaganda.

This time round it is not racial purity but financial discipline, not lazy Jews but lazy Greeks, ironic considering the role that Goldman Sachs has played in the financial skullduggery. It is the clash of authoritarianism against democracy, or what was erstwhile known as social democracys. This time, with Germany as leader and its Axis of countries - curiously those that came under Nazi dominance such as the Netherlands or Lithuania in WWII - as well as Finland and governments such as Spain's Popular Party or Fine Gael in Ireland, who had already subjected their own people to the ravages of austerity, submitting themselves to the will of the Reichstag in return for a burgeoning debt obligation and a stunted economy.

As Wolfgang Munchau writes in the FT, Germany's pursuit of regime change through its strong-arm tactics with Greece is undermining the European project.  "In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order."

The arguments in defence of each side's position have been well rehearsed but, whatever else, it is unquestionable while oft unacknowledged that much of the existing Greek debt has been converted as if by magic, following the de facto reality of private profit/public loss that has gained predominance in financial trickery and provoked the 2008 crisis,  into a citizens' obligation to repay the French and German banks' reckless lending to corrupt politicians for grandiose projects when credit flowed free of moral hazard for the bankers aboard the hurtling neoliberal bandwagon. Indeed, thanks to some nifty ECB handling, a large chunk of Greece's liabilities have passed from the Franco-German private banking sector to the taxpayers of austerity-hit countries, e.g. some 25bn euros in the case of Spain.

What has been absent in the discourse of hardline German politicians and their quislings elsewhere in Europe is the slightest sense of compassion or humanity and it is this that triggers memories of the fascist mindset that gained traction in 1930s Germany. As the ideological juggernaut tramples over Europe's citizens and its unelected executive barefacedly launches a blitzkrieg against so-called "radical" and "populist" (i.e. genuinely democratic) political movements such as Syriza and Podemos, interfering in the internal politics of supposedly sovereign nations, it indulges in secretive trade negotiations that undermine democracy in favour of global corporatism.

The shadow of the Iron Curtain still hangs not only over ruling politicians in Germany itself - not least Merkel - but over a number of the countries in its Axis where the fear of Soviet tyranny has been replaced by submission to that of neoliberalism. But it is the politics of fear that rules. As Varoufakis described it, and several distinguished economists and journalists have concurred, what has been perpetrated on Greece is an act of Eurostate terrorism.

It was Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives who earned the name of the Nasty Party when she introduced the neocon policies of so called trickle-down economics that devastated a whole generation of the British working class amid the conspicuous consumption of unbridled financial speculators who have turned money into a valueless monopoly commodity, throwing all caution to the wind knowing the taxpayer would pick up the tab, as had happened in the Latin American debt crisis. Thus came credit derivatives, the collapse of Lehman Brothers et al  in 2008 and the ludicrous sticking-plaster creation of quantitative easing, emergency liquidity assistance and other sundry buffooneries soon to fall apart.

It will turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory for European neoliberalism when the people of Europe rise up against a discredited and increasingly rejected European pogrom of mounting inequality, injustice and inhumanity. And if ordinary Germans and the people of its satellites do not put a stop to the authoritarian rigidities of the politicians they elect, the peace that has held during the building of the European project over the last half century will crumble and divide the continent again.

But this time the defeated Germans should not expect the same debt and other forgiveness they received and used to rebuild themselves last time round.

Soon the EU will adopt TTIP, another exercise in the crushing of democracy to aggravate the already shameful inequality across and within its member states, with its citizens picking up the tab for the public health, ecological and social devastation it promises to bring once implemented.

Meanwhile,  the UK European referendum presents an excellent opportunity for those progressives who no longer buy into the worthless, computer-generated, trillions of dollars, euros, pounds, yens and yuans that have come to represent the values which have enslaved the credit burdened consumer masses of Europe. The time has come to put a bomb under corporatist Europe.