"Drop Dead Economics": The Financial Crisis in Greece and the European Union - The Wealthy Won’t Pay Their Taxes, So Labor Must Do So


By Michael Hudson
Global Research
May 11, 2010


Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?

Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed a utopian desire simply to shrink government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

The Greek bailout should be thought of as a TARP for German and other European bankers and global currency speculators. Almost $1 trillion is being provided by governments (mainly Germany, at the cost of its own domestic spending) into a kind of escrow account for the Greek government to pay foreign bondholders who bought up these securities at plunging prices over the past few weeks. They will make a killing, as will buyers of hundreds of billions of dollars of credit-default swaps on the Greek government bonds, speculators in euro-swaps and other casino-capitalist gamblers. (Parties on the losing side of these swaps now will need to be bailed out as well, and so on ad infinitum.)

This windfall is to be paid by taxpayers Â* ultimately those of Greece (in effect labor, because the wealthy have been untaxed) Â* to reimburse Euro-governments, the IMF and even the U.S. Treasury for its commitment to predatory finance. The ³sanctity of debt Â* sacrificing the economy to pay bondholders Â* is to be used as an excuse to slash Greek public services, pensions and other government spending. But what is sanctity and religion, after all, without sacrifice. The question is, who is being sanctified, and to what god? In this case it seems to be Mammon, not Jesus. Self-immolation is to become a model for other countries to impose similar austerity as governments run up budget deficits in the face of economic shrinkage and falling tax collections.

Meanwhile, the financial sector is to be enriched by the translation of junk economics into international policy. Living in the short run is the financial sector¹s time frame Â* while distracting the attention of indebted populations from calculations that Wall Street understands quite well: the debts cannot be paid in the end.

But they can be paid in the short run, with promises to pay someday Â* as if any economies ever have been able to grow by imposing austerity! It is all junk economics, of course. But it buys time for the bankers to pay themselves yet more bonuses this year. By the time the financial system collapses, they presumably will have put their money into hard assets.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

Greek labor is not yet so pessimistic as to give up the fight. What it recognizes that its American counterparts do not is that somebody will control the government. If labor – the demos – loses its spirit, power will be relinquished to foreign creditors to dictate public policy by default. And the more the bankers’ interest is served, the worse and more debt-burdened the economy will become. Their gain is bought at the price of domestic austerity. Scheduled payouts by Greek pension funds and government social spending programs must be to replenish German and other European bank capital.

This worldview already has been delivered to Europe’s northernmost periphery, where it has elicited a fiscal masochism that banks hope to see in Greece. Having fallen on their swords, Baltic governments would be jealous and even resentful to see Greece rescue its economy where they themselves failed to repudiate arrogant creditor demands. “Seen from the eastern rim of the European Union, the looming austerity drive in crisis-afflicted Greece reads like old news,â€