January 23, 2015 archive

A Slippery Slope For Austerity

Transcript

Europe’s Lapse of Reason

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

JAN 8, 2015

Across the Atlantic, there are few signs of even a modest US-style recovery: The gap between where Europe is and where it would have been in the absence of the crisis continues to grow. In most European Union countries, per capita GDP is less than it was before the crisis. A lost half-decade is quickly turning into a whole one. Behind the cold statistics, lives are being ruined, dreams are being dashed, and families are falling apart (or not being formed) as stagnation – depression in some places – runs on year after year.



The current mess stems partly from adherence to a long-discredited belief in well-functioning markets without imperfections of information and competition. Hubris has also played a role. How else to explain the fact that, year after year, European officials’ forecasts of their policies’ consequences have been consistently wrong?

These forecasts have been wrong not because EU countries failed to implement the prescribed policies, but because the models upon which those policies relied were so badly flawed. In Greece, for example, measures intended to lower the debt burden have in fact left the country more burdened than it was in 2010: the debt-to-GDP ratio has increased, owing to the bruising impact of fiscal austerity on output. At least the International Monetary Fund has owned up to these intellectual and policy failures.

Europe’s leaders remain convinced that structural reform must be their top priority. But the problems they point to were apparent in the years before the crisis, and they were not stopping growth then. What Europe needs more than structural reform within member countries is reform of the structure of the eurozone itself, and a reversal of austerity policies, which have failed time and again to reignite economic growth.



Now Greece is posing yet another test for Europe. The decline in the Greek economy since the start of the crisis is in many ways worse than that which confronted America during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Youth unemployment is over 50%. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s government has failed, and now, owing to the parliament’s inability to choose a new Greek president, an early general election will be held on January 25.

The left opposition Syriza party, which is committed to renegotiating the terms of Greece’s EU bailout, is ahead in opinion polls. If Syriza wins but does not take power, a principal reason will be fear of how the EU will respond. Fear is not the noblest of emotions, and it will not give rise to the kind of national consensus that Greece needs in order to move forward.

The issue is not Greece. It is Europe. If Europe does not change its ways – if it does not reform the eurozone and repeal austerity – a popular backlash will become inevitable. Greece may stay the course this time. But this economic madness cannot continue forever. Democracy will not permit it. But how much more pain will Europe have to endure before reason is restored?

On Verge of Victory, Europe’s Ascendant Left Declares “Subservience is Over”

by Jon Queally, Common Dream

Friday, January 23, 2015

Syriza and Podemos have become the mouthpiece of the anti-austerity movement in southern Europe while Tsipras and Iglesias have emerged as key political leaders who emerged from the grassroots, street-level protest movements which rose in opposition to the severe economic policies imposted by elite forces following the financial crisis that began in 2008. In relatively short time, both Syriza and Podemos went from being non-existent political entities to standing on the doorstep of taking power.

With national elections in Greece just days away, and Syriza’s polling numbers only improving, Alexis Tsipras announced that his party is prepared to “overthrow” the status quo and vowed to implement swift changes to undo the austerity policies-imposed at the behest of foreign creditors and attached to a bailout package offered by the European Central Bank and the IMF-that have left the Greek economy in tatters. Standing before the large crowd, Tsipras announced that by Monday, “[Greece’s] national humiliation will be over. We will finish with orders from abroad.”

Syriza’s answer to austerity, he continued, would be this: “The bailout is over. Blackmail is over. Subservience is over.”



Taking the podium to address the thousands gathered, Iglesias indicated the fate of the Greek and Spanish people-both crushed by unemployment and the gutting of the public sector-were intimately tied. But, Iglesias declared, “The wind of democratic change is blowing in Europe.” Less than one year since its inception, Podemos is now polling ahead of Spain’s ruling party. Though national elections in Spain could happen later this year, they have not yet been scheduled.



Ahead of the Greek election on Sunday, the latest polling in the country shows Syriza has built on its previous lead over the ruling New Democracy party, now led by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.



Though Prime Minister Samaras has tried to counter the rise of Syriza by telling Greek voters that its leftwing policies will lead the nation to ruin, experts and economists argue that it has been the austerity policies  imposed across Europe, though most severely imposed in nations like Greece and Spain, that have been the clearest culprits of economic ruin.

Syriza stretches poll lead as Greek election campaign ends

Helena Smith, The Guardian

Friday 23 January 2015 06.06 EST

Greece’s anti-austerity party of the left, Syriza, has stretched its election lead to six points, putting it on course for a historic victory in Sunday’s crucial elections.

With the incumbent prime minister, Antonis Samaras, warning of economic catastrophe if Syriza prevails, and Europe looking on nervously, the shortest election campaign in Greek postwar history concludes on Friday.

Barely four weeks after the failure of parliament to elect a president, triggering the ballot, Greece’s fate now lies in the hands of 9.8 million voters. All the polls show, with growing conviction, that victory will go to Syriza. A poll released by GPO for Mega TV late on Thursday gave the far leftists a six-percentage-point lead over Samaras’s centre-right New Democracy, the dominant force in a coalition government that has held power since June 2012. A week earlier, GPO had the lead at four percentage points.



Syriza has threatened to “cancel austerity” and stop interest payments on Athens’ monumental debt – moves that will almost certainly put it on a collision course with the international creditors that have injected €240bn into Greece since its brush with bankruptcy five years ago.



Analysts maintain that Syriza’s ability to attain an outright majority will be difficult. With pressure mounting from the EU and IMF to “respect” the commitments made as the price of aid, speculation has been rife that the party might prefer to enter a coalition government that would enable it to forge ahead with the structural reforms and budget cuts demanded in exchange for the biggest financial assistance programme in global history.

But Tsipras put paid to that. The leftists, who have never held office in the near 200 years of the Modern Greek state – and who, after a bloody civil war, were hounded and imprisoned for decades – wanted to win an absolute majority that would allow them to govern unimpeded, he insisted.

“We are asking for a clear mandate, crystal clear, undiluted, indisputable,” he told the crowd. “The time of the left has come.”



If there was any question about whether the anti-establishment rebels had ambitions of plotting a similar course elsewhere in Europe, it was firmly dispelled when Tsipras was joined on the podium by Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos movement. To the strains of Leonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin, the duo punched the air and Tsipras, putting his arm around Iglesias, announced that the anti-austerians were poised to challenge the old order across the continent.

The Breakfast Club (Counting Up The Years)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

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This Day in History

President Nixon announces accord to end Vietnam War; North Korea seizes the U.S.S. Pueblo; The TV mini-series “Roots” airs on ABC.

Breakfast Tunes

Cartnoon

On This Day In History January 23

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 23 is the 23rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 342 days remaining until the end of the year (343 in leap years).

On this day in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell is granted a medical degree from Geneva College in New York, becoming the first female to be officially recognized as a physician in U.S. history.

Blackwell, born in Bristol, England, came to the United States in her youth and attended the medical faculty of Geneva College, now known as Hobart College. In 1849, she graduated with the highest grades in her class and was granted an M.D.

Banned from practice in most hospitals, she was advised to go to Paris, France and train at La Maternite, but had to continue her training as a student midwife, not a physician. While she was there, her training was cut short when in November, 1849 she caught a serious right eye infection, purulent ophthalmia, from a baby she was treating. She had to have her right eye removed and replaced with a glass eye. This loss brought to an end her hopes to become a surgeon.

In 1853 Blackwell along with her sister Emily and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, founded their own infirmary, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, in a single room dispensary near Tompkins Square in Manhattan. During the American Civil War, Blackwell trained many women to be nurses and sent them to the Union Army. Many women were interested and received training at this time. After the war, Blackwell had time, in 1868, to establish a Women’s Medical College at the Infirmary to train women, physicians, and doctors.

In 1857, Blackwell returned to England where she attended Bedford College for Women for one year. In 1858, under a clause in the 1858 Medical Act that recognized doctors with foreign degrees practising in Britain before 1858, she was able to become the first woman to have her name entered on the General Medical Council’s medical register (1 January 1859).

In 1869, she left her sister Emily in charge of the college and returned to England. There, with Florence Nightingale, she opened the Women’s Medical College. Blackwell taught at London School of Medicine for Women, which she had co-founded, and accepted a chair in gynecology. She retired a year later.

During her retirement, Blackwell still maintained her interest in the women’s rights movement by writing lectures on the importance of education. Blackwell is credited with opening the first training school for nurses in the United States in 1873. She also published books about diseases and proper hygiene.

She was an early outspoken opponent of circumcision and in 1894 said that “Parents, should be warned that this ugly mutilation of their children involves serious danger, both to their physical and moral health.” She was a proponent of women’s rights and pro-life.

Late Night Karaoke

The Daily/Nightly Show (Sometimes It’s Just A Cigar)

What do we know now?

Not as much as we thought we did about tonight’s panel.  Can’t find the list anywhere.  I see the Kinks are still with us.

Couldn’t think of a thing to ask about Cuba either, though on reflection it would probably have been something stupid like-

Are the Cigars as good as they say?

I wonder if someday he’ll be able to get Cornell West or Glenn Ford on the panel.  They would have fit right in.

Since it’s the end of the first week I feel compelled to make a snap (the yet unheard of Zorro in flying Z formation) judgement about what we’ve seen so far.

The show is very fast paced and you have to pay close attention.  The humor, such as it is, is very dry and Larry doesn’t stop and wait for you to catch up.  The panel discussion is highly intelligent and sets a standard that makes the Sunday Shows look like the vacuous preening and hackneyed cliches that they are.  Even the Republicans attempt to make sense and there is only a hint of ‘bottiness, mostly from the white guys.  ‘Keeping it 100’ should be a staple of every talking head program- it really reduces the clueless disconnectedness of most panels by exposing, or threatening to expose, it.  Larry Wilmore is a nice, likable character (who knows what he is in real life) who comes off as super smart but laid back and inofficious.

Continuity

We’re correspondents on a basic cable fake news show

That’s the waiting tables of being on television.

Next week’s guests-

The Daily Show

Jennifer Aniston will be on to talk about her Oscar snub for Cake and her new film, She’s Funny That Way.