“Double meltdown” warning for Europe

Today the leaders of the 27 countries that make up the European Union meet in Brussels. Their desperate aim is to keep the debt crisis in Europe from spiralling out of control and ‘promote jobs and growth’.

On Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the 17 countries that use the euro risk falling into a "severe recession." It called on governments and Europe's central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.

After three years of pushing for ‘austerity’ to reduce debts accumulated by governments as they shored up the bankrupt banks, cuts in public expenditure have wrecked services, driven unemployment levels beyond anything seen in the 1930s, and triggered a political revolt – certainly in Greece. In a sharply polarised Greece polls indicate that the left-wing coalition Syriza is likely to win the election being held on June 17.

The French elections brought a new government committed to abandoning austerity in favour of growth, which is also the International Monetary Fund’s perspective. So the long-term pact between Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Merkel is broken. 

The financial columns are full of doomsday scenarios assessing the consequences if an anti-austerity government results from a second election in Greece on June 17th and defaults on its debts.

But the impact would be small compared to the spectre of a ‘double meltdown’ which could see the simultaneous departure of Greece from the eurozone and a Spanish banking implosion, warned former IMF economist, now hedge fund manager, Stephen Jen, after credit rating agency Moody’s downgraded the entire Spanish banking sector.

Stephane Deo, an economist at UBS, says the slow-motion collapse of Spanish banks from toxic real estate loans could suddenly turn into a fast-moving bank run, as depositors accelerate the withdrawal of their deposits.

In the UK, the insults in the Coalition’s camp are flying back and forth between a previously unknown advisor - venture capitalist, Adrian Beecroft, and Business Secretary Vince Cable. Beecroft’s proposals to enable growth would remove protections for workers - allowing employers to sack them virtually at will. Cable says the idea is ‘bonkers’ because Britain’s workers are already amongst the least protected. Beecroft says Cable is a socialist.

But this renewed assault on workers’ rights and living standards throughout the world is the real meaning of all the talk of ‘restructuring’ and ‘rebalancing’.   

Today, as the discussion in Brussels reaches fever pitch the main idea is for Europe to move to a stronger, more mutual common defence by issuing ‘eurobonds’, in which the European Central Bank would raise loans from investors to be used wherever they might be needed. Eurobonds would protect weaker countries, like Spain and Italy, for example by insulating them from the impossibly high interest rates they now face when they raise money on bond markets.

But, also today, in a direct challenge to a more united Europe, Germany’s federal government is strengthening its national interest, holding an auction for some new bonds, borrowing money from investors in the way that governments do.  Only there’s something new about this auction. The relative strength of the German economy is so attractive to investors desperate for a safe haven, that the Germans have set the interest rate they’ll be paying at zero – 0%.

The IMF is also pushing the Bank of England to reduce its base rate below the half per cent it has been at for more than three years.

So, at its moment of sharpening crisis, the capitalist system has arrived at a new contradiction: competing to save the for-profit system means issuing credit at a not-for-profit 0%.  And with inflation above zero, investors will be inverting the essence of finance - paying to lend money.

The declining value of money reflects and can only accelerate the contraction in the real economy, bringing a global slump into view. The system is definitely broken. How to bring into being a needs-based, co-operatively run economy based on people’s assemblies is the issue of the day.

Gerry Gold

Economics Editor

Scandal of German state's cover for far right

News of an astonishing catalogue of wanton failures by Germany’s intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungschutz – Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfS) – is sending shock waves through the country.

Details of a 30-page confidential investigation was commissioned for the German government and sent to the state authorities just before Christmas have been revealed by Der Spiegel magazine. They document how a murderous neo-Nazi terror group known as the Zwickau cell was well-known to the authorities and could have been stopped years ago.

Right-wing terrorism in post-unification Germany is nothing new. Germany was wracked by a spate of killings between 2000 and 2007 in which eight people were killed by two members of the terror group which called itself the National Socialist Underground. The men, Uwe Bohnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, later shot themselves after a failed bank robbery.

What is new is the sharp increase in acts of right-wing violence over the past year – from 300 to 9,800. But the neo-Nazis are not only targeting people of foreign descent, gays and the homeless. Recent months have seen some 100 attacks on members of Germany’s Left Party, including its leader Gregor Gysi.

Lists of names and addresses of Left Party officials were found amongst the Zwickau cell terrorists. The Left Party’s security policy spokeswoman, Ulla Jelpke, has seen her Dortmund office attacked by paving stones, graffiti, acid and steel balls fired through the window.

The exposure of the intelligence service’s failings, has brought to the surface a truly shambolic situation within the German state itself. Even mainstream media are asking how much of the state’s blind eye to right-wing terrorism is due to bungling and how much to protection from within the security agencies themselves.

Far from being a secret, the activities of the neo-Nazis in the former east Germany states of Saxony and Thuringia were closely monitored by the state.

But due to distrust between different branches of the German state and lack of action by local prosecutors, far right terrorists in groups like the Thuringian Homeland Protection and Jena Comradeship continued their bank robbing and murdering people of foreign descent.

As long ago as 1997, the Thuringian state sold a luxury mansion to a far right group of holocaust deniers and some accuse the Thuringian section of the state intelligence service of disrupting police investigations into the terror cells. The head of Thuringia’s state branch in Erfort, Helmut Roewer, was suspended in 2000 for a “range of irregularities” and a confidential report said that some sections of the agency had “failed completely” during his period in office.

Der Spiegel has long been known for exposing murky aspects of Germany’s state – but matters are now so bad that even authorities themselves are expressing shock at the scale of the inaction, bungling and bureaucratic infighting.

The president of the BfS, Heinz Fromm, who has headed the agency since 2000, professed shock in an extraordinarily apologetic interview with the Tagespiegel newspaper. He said the agency had transferred its attention from the far right to Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, but claimed not to know why investigations into neo-Nazis were halted in 2001.

Despite the state running 130 paid informants within Germany’s chief neo-Nazi organisation, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and within the Thüringer group itself, the security services failed to prevent the National Socialist Underground group’s terror activities.

Jorge Ziercke, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has said that public confidence in the rule of law has been “shaken to the core” while opposition parties in the Bundestag are calling for a parliamentary investigation.

But the Zwickau scandal is only one sign that the relations within the German state are under stress. Even the long-standing cosy relationship between Das Bild newspaper and Angel Merkel’s ruling CDU party is showing signs of breaking down. With German capitalism fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent a collapse of its cherished eurozone project, the divisions within the state indicate a deep turbulence in ruling class circles.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Headless chickens rule EU roost

A French president playing second fiddle to a German chancellor announcing a “fiscal union” to keep eurozone spending under control was patently an uncomfortable moment for Nicolas Sarkozy. His misery was written all over his face.

Perhaps Sarkozy was reflecting on historical precedents from past conflicts between the two countries while he was standing next to Angela Merkel. More likely, Sarkozy realised that the idea of Germany laying down the rules about a country’s national spending could only harm his re-election prospects.

Whatever was going through his mind, the announcement itself was more wordy than substantial. Within hours, the agency Standard & Poor said that the credit ratings of all 17 eurozone countries – including Germany and France – was threatened with a downgrade. All except Greece, whose debt now carries the dubious sobriquet of “junk status”.

As financial commentator Jeremy Warner noted, the agreement between Germany and France was about “as clear as mud” and notably failed to “address the immediate crisis” of the sovereign debt burden that is overwhelming country after country.

Warner’s concern that a long-term plan to keep spending under tighter control, reinforced by plans for a new European Union treaty, is hardly what the markets were waiting to hear, is all too real. But the inaction in the eurozone is not simply the result of German intransigence over using the European Central Bank to buy up a country’s bad debt.

Debt mountains express not simply profligate spending by member states but the consequence of the collapse of a credit-fuelled period of rapid economic expansion. While it lasted, debt could be repaid out of higher tax revenues. Bond dealers, banks and non-EU states couldn’t get enough of the interest-bearing debt.

The economic recession was not caused by the financial collapse of 2008, as is usually stated. In Britain, for example, the economy slowed markedly in the first years of the century. This trend was obscured by easy credit and rising house values (which many used to borrow against). When the meltdown came, it exposed the deep flaws within the capitalist system of production which requires year-on-year growth to sustain profit levels.

Merkel and Sarkozy can only address the debt issues because the nature of the capitalist economy is a given and not up for debate or change. Even so, creating more debt to “solve” existing debt is hardly a solution. Nor do cuts in state spending help. That only intensifies the recession by reducing consumer demand still further. And printing new money, as central banks are doing, simply adds to inflationary pressures while providing speculators with more resources.

All in all, policy makers and political elites are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. In management speak, it’s a lose-lose situation. Their predicament is made more complicated by a political system based on individual nation states in the midst of an entirely globalised, transnational economic and financial system.

The political class resemble headless chickens right now and is mostly concerned with self-preservation and gaining an edge over competitor nations. Democratic procedures are being jettisoned as too lengthy, too costly and too bothersome. Italy and Greece have non-elected governments run by bankers, while EU bureaucrats intend to determine spending on social welfare programmes under the Merkel-Sarkozy project.

Turning things round into a “win-win situation” will require bold strategic thinking and action – sooner rather than later – that aims at a political and economic transformation. We have to extend democracy in new ways beyond the all-too-narrow confines of capitalist ownership and control which is the root problem.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Greece is stuffed by the Merkozy

If the political meltdown in Greece tell us anything, it is that the eurozone crisis has gathered an unstoppable momentum and the ruling elites can’t do anything about it.

Whatever decisions are made by the major economic powers at the G20 summit in Cannes, the die, as Julius Caesar is reported to have said on crossing the Rubicon, is well and truly cast.

The unravelling of the second phase of the financial meltdown that got under way in 2008 is running ahead of and proving stronger than the half-baked decisions made by political leaders from the US to Europe.

It is not a matter of if but when the euro’s claim to be a stable currency that rivals the dollar and sterling falls apart. The debt contagion has already embraced Italy, the world’s eighth largest economy, with France and Spain considered next in line.

Italy has the second largest nominal government debt outstanding in the eurozone, at €9.3 trillion. “Italy is a banana republic that didn’t depend so much on foreign capital in the past, but now it does, and markets are less forgiving,” said Daniel Gros, the director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “Italy is in the danger zone; that is quite clear now.”

The political consequences are grave. Silvio Berlusconi’s government is close to collapse, while George Papandreou's government in Greece is now in a state of utter chaos. Whatever little political dignity Athens had as it carried out spending cuts ordered by the IMF and European Union, was lost this week.

After Papandreou called for a referendum on the latest austerity package he signed up for in Brussels last week, the storm clouds broke and the markets tumbled. He was immediately summonsed to meet the Merkozy – aka the chancellor of Germany and the president of France. Papandreou was given his marching orders – call off the referendum and impose the cuts.

While the referendum plan was undoubtedly a populist move to quell the strikes and mass demonstrations that have racked Greece, it at least offered the opportunity for a democratic debate. Opposition to it came from the opposition New Democracy (conservatives) as well as the Greek Communist Party (KKE).

The KKE, an ultra-Stalinist party, is the third biggest in the Greek parliament. It has spent the summer striving to keep the Pasok government in power while posturing against it.

On October 20, its members in the trade union front PAME formed a human shield at the entrance to parliament during a two-day general strike. Armed with clubs and dressed in a para-military fashion, their aim was to prevent workers and students from storming the parliament building. This led to ugly clashes with anarchists, who the Stalinists typically labelled as agents provocateurs.

Fresh election in Greece – or anywhere else for that matter – would solve nothing. The dilemma remains. How can the mountains of state, corporate and personal debt that have overwhelmed the capitalist system be reduced in a way that does not lead to mass unemployment, a collapse of living standards and a global depression?

The answer is that from a capitalist point of view, there is no alternative. This is the twilight for parliamentary democracy everywhere. Its fortunes are inextricably linked to the corporations and banks who dominate economic matters.

In defending the limited political freedoms we have against the Merkozy and others, it is clear that we need something better. A new political and sovereign power that puts into practice the very meaning of the term “democracy”, which ironically comes from the Greek words “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power), will be needed to overcome the imminent catastrophe.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor