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Εγγυήσεις και υποχρεώσεις, Κύριο Άρθρο, Ελευθεροτυπία 06/08/2010
ΕΙΝΑΙ κοινή η παραδοχή ότι οι μισθωτοί και οι συνταξιούχοι είναι οι μόνοι που πληρώνουν, μέχρι στιγμής, βαρύ τίμημα για τη δημοσιονομική προσαρμογή, την οποία επέβαλαν οι διεθνείς δανειστές της χώρας.
Αποκτά, όμως, πρόσθετη σημασία όταν ακούγεται από τους ελεγκτές τους ως βασικό συμπέρασμα στο τέλος της δεύτερης φάσης του ελέγχου τους.
Η ΠΑΡΑΔΟΧΗ αποδεικνύει ότι η μέθοδος αυτή για την αύξηση των εσόδων του κράτους δεν μπορεί πλέον να αποδώσει. Το έχουν κατανοήσει και οι εκπρόσωποι της τρόικας και το είπαν χθες καθαρά. Γι' αυτό η σύστασή τους προς την κυβέρνηση ήταν να στρέψει το ενδιαφέρον της προς τα υψηλά εισοδήματα και να φορολογήσει τον πλούτο. Σε περίοδο κατά την οποία δοκιμάζονται τα χαμηλά και μεσαία εισοδήματα, είναι πρόκληση να εξακολουθούν να έχουν φορολογική ασυλία όσοι έχουν μεγάλη φοροδοτική ικανότητα. Αυτά τα αυτονόητα -κατά την πρωθυπουργική έκφραση- ακούστηκαν από τα χείλη των ελεγκτών της τρόικας και η κυβέρνηση έχει πλέον την ευθύνη να τα υλοποιήσει.
Νομικές μανούβρες με το μνημόνιο, του Νίκου Κοτζιά, Ελευθεροτυπία 01/08/2010
Η παρούσα κυβέρνηση είναι μια κυβέρνηση ισχυρής σχετικής πλειοψηφίας ψήφων, αλλά δεν είναι πραγματική πλειοψηφία (50%+1) εντός του εκλογικού σώματος. Ταυτόχρονα, εφαρμόζει μια πολιτική για την οποία δεν υπήρξε προεκλογικά συμφωνία με τους πολίτες. Η κυβέρνηση ορισμένες στιγμές δείχνει να αδιαφορεί για τη γενική βούληση των πολιτών, διότι πιστεύει ότι εκείνη (και μόνο) γνωρίζει, καθότι βρίσκεται σε «αποστολή σωτηρίας» της χώρας (μάλλον και ορισμένων μεγάλων επιχειρηματιών της χώρας). Με βάση αυτή την «αποστολή» τείνει όλο και περισσότερο να παραβιάζει δημοκρατικούς κανόνες. Το όπλο της κοινωνίας απέναντι σε αυτή την κυβερνητική νοοτροπία, προκειμένου να προστατευτεί από τυχόν εξουσιαστικές αυθαιρεσίες, είναι το σύνταγμα.
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Τι πράττει η κυβέρνηση εκ του πονηρού; Γνωρίζει καλά ότι πέρασε το μνημόνιο στη Βουλή ως νόμο. Δεν διέθετε πλειοψηφία για κάτι άλλο. Ομως, από εκείνη τη στιγμή και πέρα, το επικαλείται ως να είχε εγκριθεί από τη Βουλή ως διεθνής συμφωνία. Η κυβέρνηση, στη συνέχεια, προκειμένου να στηρίξει την κοινωνική πάλη που διεξάγει από τα πάνω σε βάρος των αδύναμων, επιλέγει ευθέως τη νομική μανούβρα: εμφανίζει τον νόμο για το μνημόνιο ως δέσμευση που υπερέχει εξ ορισμού των άλλων νόμων και του συντάγματος. Η κυβέρνηση γνωρίζει ότι τοιουτοτρόπως πράττει αντισυνταγματικά. Αλλά δεν τη νοιάζει. Διότι σκέφτεται τώρα σε ένα δεύτερο επίπεδο: Γνωρίζει ότι πολλά μέτρα της θα πέσουν στα δικαστήρια. Επιδιώκει, όμως, να έχει προλάβει να τα εφαρμόσει πριν τελεσιδικήσουν δικαστικά. Και δεν σκέφτεται, δυστυχώς, ότι με αυτά της τα καμώματα, στο όνομα των τρεχουσών αναγκών της πολιτικής της, υποσκάπτει μακροχρόνια θεσμούς και δημοκρατία.
Reflections on the Future of Global Capitalism, by Carlos Garramón, OpinionSur July 2010
In the first place, the crisis in the US destroyed approximately $14 trillion of wealth, a figure that is similar to its Gross Domestic Product, and more than 7 million jobs since it started. That wealth will not be restored because it was fictitious, created on the basis of sophisticated financial devices and “has now disappeared”. As a consequence, consumption by American households - which accounts for 70 % of GDP – has come down substantially and now becomes the starting point of the economic recovery. The same holds true for Europe; overnight the newfound wealth was replaced by huge amounts of debt. Moreover, in many of the EEC countries, their debt is twice as much or three times as much as their GDP. Even worse than in the US, in the old continent, unemployment fluctuates between 10 to 20 %. It will tend to grow in the next quinquennium as a result of the “brutal”, yet inevitable, adjustment plans whose implementation, to different extents, has started in the EEC countries.
In the second place, a deep cultural change has occurred in the American and European consumer. Consumption levels had been exacerbated to such an extent that in 2007 the indebtedness of American homes represented 120 % of American GDP. The destruction of wealth and the loss of jobs have generated a sensitive and lasting change in the savings-consumption relationship. I believe this change will last for many years. According to Wesley Hutchinson, Marketing professor at Wharton, “in the coming years consumers will learn to behave in a more frugal way and will not abandon this attitude in the short term although the economy regains stability”. As a result, we will witness austere capitalism and thus economically depressed capitalism for a while. The low growth rates and high unemployment rates that we now have in the US and Europe will remain for a long period of time. Furthermore, companies have responded to global demand contraction with deep restructuring plans, based upon the reduction of personnel. Thus, the high unemployment level has become a structural problem and, as a consequence, we have entered a world led by a central capitalist system with high rigidity levels for the creation of new jobs.
In the third place, and regardless of Obama’s financial reform approval, we will never go back to a process of risk acquisition with the recklessness that characterized the first years of this century. Therefore, for many years the financial sector will not grant credit to individuals (mortgage and consumption loans), and to small and medium sized businesses, that could significantly stimulate global demand. In other words, “recovery” does not have a clear correlation with the real and productive economy.
This graph shows the rate of job losses since the start of a recession, in percentage terms (h/t Calculated Risk). RED marks the current recession. Note the dotted line which accounts for ex-census hires.
6 Charts That Suggest The Unemployment Crisis Is WORSE Than It Looks, posted in Huffingtonpost.com 06/08/2010
If today's uninspiring data on the mounting jobs crisis isn't enough to convince you of how difficult it will be to turn employment situation around, we've gathered some graphical evidence of just how bad it is out there.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. economy shed 131,000 jobs in July. Private employers added 71,000 jobs, while the Census eliminated some 143,000 temporary positions. In sum, the report was widely seen to be weak and, as Calculated Risk noted, was actually weaker than many of the headlines suggested. Accounting for the Census hires, the economy added just 12,000 jobs last month, far below the 200,000 new jobs required each month to drive the unemployment rate down.
Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Homeland Security Department suggesting ways to administratively circumvent existing law to allow several categories of illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed “in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves.
Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate. Administrators administer the law; they don’t change it. That’s the legislators’ job.
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A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions if it could demonstrate that they threaten human health and the environment. The Obama EPA made precisely that finding, thereby granting itself a huge expansion of power and, noted the Washington Post, sending “a message to Congress.”
It was not a terribly subtle message: Enact cap-and-trade legislation — taxing and heavily regulating carbon-based energy — or the EPA will do so unilaterally. As Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch noted, such a finding “is likely to help light a fire under Congress to get moving.”
Too Soon To Cry Victory?Confidence Has Returned To Europe’s Financial Markets, But Lasting Economic Growth May Not Be So Easy To Achieve, by Edward Hugh, eurowatch.blogspot.com
It's The Export Share Silly!
To offer just one example of the problems which lie ahead, while Spain's exports have grown more or less as fast as German ones in recent months (on an interannual basis), Spain's exports only amount to around 16% of GDP, while German exports account for more like 40%. Now that Spain's economy depends much more on exports than it did (construction activity is not coming back as a growth driver), the rate of growth in exports in Spain needs to be much more rapid than in Germany.
Does this seem like an extremely difficult task? Then this is exactly why it is hard to be optimistic about trend growth for Spain in the coming years. Put another way a 17% increase in Spanish exports (more or less the interannual rate in May) is an increase over 16% of GDP, or has an impact of around 2.7% on headline GDP, whereas a 17% increase in German imports is an increase over 40% of GDP, which exerts a 6.8% upward push on GDP. Of course, what matters is the net trade impact, but in any event the point holds, Spain is trying to leverage over a much smaller part of her economy, and in doing so cannot hope to equal the results obtained in Germany.
Xenophobia: Fear-Mongering for American Votes, Editorial, The New York Times 05/08/2010
Thankfully, the Constitution is sturdy. The birthright-deniers will not easily rewrite it or legislate around it. More than a century of jurisprudence stands against their claim that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (an exception for diplomats’ children and members of sovereign Indian tribes) also alienates undocumented children.
The proponents of changing the 14th Amendment also would have to acknowledge the big-government colossus that new rules would require, burdening all parents to prove their children’s status. New battalions of attorneys would gain full employment to fight over thousands of newborns rendered stateless each year, an instant, permanent underclass. Then there’s the obsolescence of all those civics texts, old movies, patriotic picture books and red-white-and-blue songs.
The United States has never had a neat, painless way to add newcomers. But our most shameful moments have involved the exclusion of groups, often those that do our hardest labor: Indians, African-Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics. America has stood proudest when it dared to stretch the definition of who “we” are.
As a result, this is still the most welcoming country for immigrants. A few politicians chumming for votes in an off-year election cannot be allowed to destroy that.
Putin Sang Songs While Russia Burned, by Yulia Latynina, The Moscow Times 04/08/2010
There were two main groups who lobbied Putin to pass the Forest Code: paper mill owners — one of the biggest being Oleg Deripaska — and real estate developers.
Independent analysts and environmentalists heavily criticized the Forest Code. They predicted several years ago that the code would inevitably result in an increase in wildfires. Even the most loyal United Russia members from heavily forested regions opposed the code, but it was shoved through the State Duma under strong pressure from Putin’s presidential administration.
Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers.
In Fire Country, by Timothy Egan, The New York Times 04/08/2010
You fall asleep on a summer night bound for the mind’s winter pantry, a memory to be opened in some dark, cold day as an anti-depressant. Windless. Warm. The lake in glassy repose. The mountains in silvery silhouette lit by the moon. Sleep is deep. You control your fate.
Sometime in the first hours past midnight you’re awakened by percussive crash and snap, a symphony of thunder. Outside, from the deck of the cabin, the silhouette is gone, the lake is churn and chop. And the wind, from the north, washes out all other sound. You watch the crooked forks of lightning, stabbing at serrated tops of the dry side of the Cascade Mountains.
At daybreak, you rise in a soup of smoke. Something big is burning. You don’t see flames. But they’re out there, whereabouts unknown. The veil is so thick it hides the sun. “What’s on fire?” everyone asks.
Coming of age with Hiroshima's mourning, by Jane Braxton Little, The japan Times 06/08/2010
I gravitated toward the English speakers, enjoying the escape from being the American professor and the anonymity of being one of many young blondes. By the time the memorial celebration got under way, I was freelancing my fluent Japanese to American and British TV crews covering the day as if it were an athletic event.
I might not have noticed the woman with the cropped hair and ill-fitting gray silk dress if a cameraman hadn't zoomed in on her. She was stooped, seated in a cobblestone courtyard on folded legs before a black-and-white family photograph flanked by vases of golden chrysanthemums. In my eyes she looked old but she could have been middle-aged, a young mother on Aug. 6, 1945.
Maybe the other foreigners and their cameras emboldened me. Forsaking the respectful distance I generally accorded my Japanese hosts, I moved within 35 mm range and clicked off a shot. She noticed me, hissing her disgust. Embarrassed, I apologized.
The 'big society' is a big fat lie – just follow the money, by Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, 7/8/2010
Little Britain: How the rest of the world sees us, The Independent, 7/8/2010
Rocard sur le tout sécuritaire: «On n’avait pas vu ça depuis les nazis», Liberation, 6/8/2010
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