economic crisis

Greeks responded by heavily voting “no” to further austerity. The Syriza government then did a remarkable about-face. Eight days later, Prime Minister Tsipras signed an agreement even more unfavorable that what had been demanded by the troika. More than half of Syriza’s central committee signed an opposition letter and most Syriza members were furious. This was ignored.

You cannot build a left when you trash the very basis of our beliefs. It came from a mix of blatant opportunism, genuine confusion, psychological distress, and postmodernist sophistry.

That this is a “you are there” document from a personalized standpoint does not at all mean that The Syriza Wave is anything other than a serious political analysis. The work could have been strengthened in two ways: one, a deeper discussion of the economic issues, including the ramifications of staying in (or exiting) the eurozone, and, two, a discussion of how virtually every euro of the troika loans are going to creditors and banks rather than to the Greek people, a topic barely mentioned in passing only once. These are topics that would have added to the narrative.

Meanwhile, the global take home pay for workers continues to go down in real terms (ie in relation to people's bills) and go down in relation to the amount of money we can call profits. So simply put, the vast majority of people have less money to buy the goods that the capitalists would make and try to sell, if they could. The main pressure downwards on pay comes from government initiated pay freezes, unemployment, part-time, short-term employment and lack of union organisation to resist this pressure.

In my dream world, Labour would be saying all this. They would be spelling it out with diagrams, films, and leaflets. They would be showing that a tiny group of people held and are still holding the world to ransom on account of their speculative lunacy and greed. They would be showing that each time Osborne and all the press pals say that it's the deficit that's the problem they would say, Oh no it isn't, it's the private debt. Every time Iain Duncan Smith and his press pals point the finger at this or that 'benefit cheat' or 'welfare dependent underclass', Labour would point the finger at the vast debts seizing up the system causing much more damage than a few people working a small time racket. They would point the finger at the vast millions people earn who manage these debts and who are of no productive use whatsoever. They are parasites. And they would talk about the greed-dependent overclass who got us into this fix. 

In the coming weeks, many progressives will be working to ensure Donald Trump isn’t elected on Nov. 8. But the election of Hillary Clinton provides us no relief on global trade issues. Indeed, her anticipated victory will only extend a long line of presidents deeply committed to pro-corporate trade practices.

Meanwhile, economist Jared Bernstein and Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach just issued a thought-provoking manifesto on progressive principles for global trade.

in the last two decades developing countries taken as a whole have been running large trade surpluses with wealthy countries. This implies large trade deficits in rich countries, especially the United States, which in turn has meant a further loss of manufacturing jobs with the resulting negative impact on wage inequality. However, there was nothing inevitable about the policy shifts associated with the bailout from the East Asian financial crisis that led the developing world to become a net exporter of capital.

In this context, it would hardly be surprising if the development of “technology” was causing an upward redistribution of income. The people in a position to profit from stronger IP rules are almost exclusively the highly educated and those at the top end of the income distribution. It is almost definitional that stronger IP rules will result in an upward redistribution of income.

This upward redistribution could be justified if stronger IP rules led to more rapid productivity growth, thereby benefitting the economy as a whole. However, there is very little evidence to support that claim. Michele Boldrin and David Levine have done considerable research on this topic and generally found the opposite.

While tax and transfer policies that reduce poverty and inequality may be desirable, we should also be aware of the ways in which policy has been designed to increase inequality. It is much easier to have an economic system that produces more equality rather than one that needlessly generates inequality, which we then try to address with redistributive policies.