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July 06, 2015 12:27 AM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 7 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Public service is my motto.”

–Al Capone

Comments

7 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread

  1. Economic World Cup: Citizen Democracies 2, International Banksters 0

    First the Citizens of Iceland, now the Citizens of Greece, have decided that the banksters have gotten enough and that their threats and extortion should end:

    All I could think of all day was Iceland. A big middle finger to creditors. Throw a few bankers in jail. It was as bracing as Iceland's winters. Less than a decade later, Iceland is doing fine, thank you, said President Olafur Ragnar Grimmson in 2013:

    “Why are the banks considered to be the holy churches of the modern economy? Why are private banks not like airlines and telecommunication companies and allowed to go bankrupt if they have been run in an irresponsible way? The theory that you have to bail out banks is a theory that you allow bankers enjoy for their own profit, their success, and then let ordinary people bear their failure through taxes and austerity. People in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long run.”

    But Greece is not Iceland, as the Washington Post noted on Saturday – even as the authors' prediction on the vote went awry on Sunday:

    The stakes are high. They are perhaps higher for Greece than they were for Iceland. While at the time the cost of accepting the repayment terms was quantifiable for Icelanders (calculated as approximately $17,000 per person), there’s no easy way to know what voting either way will mean for Greeks. The choices being put to them are costly either way and, sadly, Greece’s economic woes seem unlikely to be resolved anytime soon — even if voters say yes in the referendum. Icelanders said no to their creditors and seem now, four years later, on a sure enough economic footing again that they deliberately withdrew the application for EU membership they submitted in the midst of the Icesave crisis. Yet Greece faces a much larger, longer economic battle, even if it yields to the current bailout conditions.

    Well, Greek democracy stood up to the central bank technocrats. Democracy — governance by the people — is so inconvenient for "Merkantilism" that way. The bankers, thus, have behaved like loan shark enforcers with Greece. … as if they learned that from watching Wall Street banks insist homeowners with underwater mortgages keep paying, while the banks themselves received bailouts. For me, but not for thee.

    Letting banks have the responsibility for their own bets sounds like a good thing to me. Subjecting a citizenry to austerity as some kind of moral curative for excessive "taking" goes against our high-mined principles and most of the evidence:

    Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been imposing singeing public spending cuts on her neighbors, and George Osborne, Britain’s finance minister, who has been doing the same to the Brits, to ease up. The IMF is now urging fiscal measures beyond monetary easing “to nurture a sustainable recovery and restore the resilience of the global economy.”

    Earlier this month, Lagarde criticized America’s automatic sequester cuts for being too deep, too soon. The United States, she said, “should consolidate less in the short term, but give … economic actors the certainty that there will be fiscal consolidation going forward.”

    So much for the economics of austerity. 

    Austerity has failed everywhere it's been tried. But that won't shake the belief, certainly among America's Conservatives (this includes Fiscally Conservative, yet Socially Progressive /smileyface) Democrats and Republicans alike, that austerity is the only way to deal with. That belief sits on foundation that says the poor really don't need our help and that the rich really do deserve unlimited wealth with no strings attached. But people are noticing the gaping moral hole in that belief:

    The prospect of no work is diminishing and socially corrosive. Depression is rife. Cuts to health budgets have led to a sharp rise in HIV cases. New research from Stanford and Oxford Universities suggests austerity is deeply damaging to individuals and sharply increases the number of suicides.

    While mainstream politicians revel in their impotence, religious leaders are speaking out with unprecedented vigor. It takes a lot before senior churchmen dare to intervene in politics, for fear they will offend half their followers. But the extent of the despair being endured has changed the equation.

    The Roman Catholic primate of Spain, Braulio Rodriguez, archbishop of Toledo, predicts that austerity will lead to despotism. “We have to change direction,” he said this week, “otherwise this is going to bring down whole political systems. We have to give people some hope or this is going to foment conflict and mutual hatred.”

    Archbishop Ieronymos, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, has written to the Greek premier to warn against administering “larger doses of a medicine that is proving deadly.” “Greeks’ unprecedented patience is running out,” he said, “fear is giving way to rage, and the danger of a social explosion cannot be ignored.”

    In London, where the ruling coalition’s austerity program has led the nation twice back into recession, the leader of the Anglican church, the archbishop of Canterbury, argues that “what we are in at the moment is not a recession but essentially some kind of depression. It therefore takes something very, very major to get us out of it, in the same way as it took something very major to get us into it.”

    When spiritual leaders warn that austerity may lead to the end of democracy, it’s time for political leaders to take notice.

    That's where we are today. Some of our political leaders have taken notice: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, who are attacked for advocating common sense and proven economic policies. Others are quiet, satisfied the system is working fine, or afraid of being lumped in with the socialists or populists.

    There is a moral question at the heart of all the friction between lenders and debtors, makers and takers, banksters and citizens. The people, when given the chance, will choose fairness and compassion over vindictiveness and profit.

    1. Only if you include the things that make it uniquely Greece.

      The Scandinavian countries are more of an example of the "left" compared to Kansas' "right" – but they're successful, so they don't make much of a rhetorical counter-point to Kansas.

      Greece has had other issues for a long time; their problems are more than a bad economic model – they're bad implementation and poor math. The math in Kansas isn't bad – they managed to balance their budget. Their implementation is purposeful. It's just the economic model that's screwed up. In Greece the problems as I understand them are unbalanced budgets, bad tax collections, and systemic corruption/waste. Those aren't a left/right thing.

    2. Unlike many of the left leaning countries of northern Europe, Greece has a massive tax evasion culture. Basically people just don't pay taxes as a matter of course and it's kind of tough to fund all those benefits without them. 

  2. Got this email from Dan Thurlow.  I never emailed him, but I'm on the RMGO mailing list (shhh) and they probably sent him something in my name.

    This District 55 update is going out to all of you who emailed me about my votes on Gun issues during the 2015 Legislative Session. I wanted to thank you once again for your input and keep you informed of what's going on in District 55

    The full email, which regards an article in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, is here:

    http://us10.campaign-archive1.com/?u=9ba5aa9dcba56d165af693895&id=7c5ad62b54&e=26a67e0d38

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