Group items tagged

Parts of our economies, societies, and states in Europe are being stripped bare by an extreme form of predatory capitalism.[1] And this stripping can coexist with growth in much of our economies. The majority of workers and economic operations keep functioning, even if at reduced levels.

The unemployed who lose everything—jobs, homes, medical insurance—easily fall off the edge of what is defined as 'the economy' and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide. And so do the weakened and ill newly poor who can no longer access basic medical services. All are stripped from what gets measured as 'the economy.'

The reality at ground level is more akin to an economic version of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in which specific kinds of negatives are dealt with by simply eliminating them from view. Thus in early January 2013, the European Central Bank announced that Greece’s economy was on the path back to growth, and Moody’s upgraded Greek debt by a point; the country’s rating is still low, but such shifts matter to investors, always desperate to find destinations for their capital. It meant that Greece was again becoming safe territory, and largely meant the buying up at very cheap prices of what had been valuable parts of the national economy. We saw a similar process in South Korea and Thailand during the so-called Asian financial crisis.[2] Greece’s 30% of workers who had lost their jobs, countless broken firms and neighbourhoods were left out of the picture. This economic cleansing works, but it does so on the backs of all those who have been expelled.