Disinventing Democracy -MONBIOT

GEORGE MONBIOT

The assault on Greece is just the latest episode in a long history of shutting down choice on behalf of the financial elite.

Greece might be financially bankrupt; the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers: powers of the kind now afflicting us all.

Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes. It’s controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and the other means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.

The same programme is imposed regardless of circumstance: every country the IMF colonises must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove its barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise its banking system; reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments; and privatise the assets which can be sold to foreign investors.

Using the threat of its self-fulfilling prophecy (it warns the financial markets that countries which don’t submit to its demands are doomed), it has forced governments to abandon their progressive policies. Almost single-handedly, it engineered the 1997 Asian financial crisis: by forcing governments to remove their capital controls, it opened currencies to attack by financial speculators. Only countries such as Malaysia and China, which refused to cave in, escaped the crisis.

Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics; only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion, through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.

The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation was kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.

All this is but a recent chapter in the long tradition of subordinating human welfare to financial power. The austerity now imposed on Greece, brutal as it is, is mild by comparison to earlier versions. Take, for example, the Irish and Indian famines, both exacerbated (in the second case caused) by the doctrine then known as laissez-faire, but which we now know as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.

In Ireland’s case, one eighth of the population was killed – one could almost say murdered – in the late 1840s, partly by the British refusal to distribute food, to prohibit the export of grain or to provide effective poor relief. Such policies offended the holy doctrine that nothing should stay the invisible hand of the market.

When drought struck India in 1877 and 1878, the British imperial government insisted on exporting record amounts of grain, precipitating a famine that killed millions. The only famine relief permitted was forced work in labour camps, in which less food was provided than to the inmates of Buchenwald. Monthly mortality in these camps in 1877 was equivalent to an annual rate of 94%.

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http://www.monbiot.com/2015/07/08/3796/

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