Greece: Parliament passes bill, Athens burns

Dannyboy83 wrote: »

Comparing this
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/10/us-greece-police-idUSTRE8190UC20120210

with this
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2007949/The-Big-Fat-Greek-Gravy-Train-A-special-investigation-EU-funded-culture-greed-tax-evasion-scandalous-waste.html

It seems the Greek police have taken aim at the wrong target...............should they not be lashing out at the Greek public sector and tax-dodgers trying to pull them back into the water, rather than the EU/IMF Lifeguard trying to pull them out of the water?

A public demanding representation (i.e. a refletion of their collective will, as devolved to their elected representatives) over a crisis not of their own making? Predictable right wing misrepresentation from the mail as usual.

efla wrote: »

A public demanding representation (i.e. a refletion of their collective will, as devolved to their elected representatives) over a crisis not of their own making?

You're not being serious are you?

Would the Greeks not be better off heading off to Berlin or Burssels and rioting and buring down shops there? Might bring the reality of the situation closer to the home of the ruling classes!

efla wrote: »

No doubt you get the politicians you deserve/elect, but we are also quick to externalise our faults to actors like Fianna Fail. I fail to see how the majority of the Greek electorate should be held accountable for the misrepresentations / corruptions of its government (i.e. GDP misreporting), given that the Greek collapse (as with ours) is partly rooted in events beyond its borders, and the actions of a minority.

I'm not dismissing the clear need for austerity, just pointing out this profound ideological shift forwarded by commentators like the mail. It seems to be part of a broader, worrying tendency toward statism where every step is taken to ensure the will of the electorate is subverted (as per deliberations over the constitutional-level enactment of the fiscal compact).

I think the people have to bear some responsibility for the actions of the people they elect. Also, I think that the Greek people have been far more complicit in the financial recklessness and malfeasance of their state than the Irish have in theirs. The Irish spent too much and were fiscally irresponsible, but they don't partake in the type massive tax evasion and fraud that is an integral part of Greek society. The Greek people have to pay some price for that culture. I don't relish that and I certainly don't seek it as a form of punishment, but how can the Germans and the Dutch be expected to simply hand over another €140 billion to a society where tax fraud and evasion are still rife, which has a massive military relative to its means, and which treats promises and commitments as mere fripperies?

The Greeks have a choice: implement the measures and, to put it frankly, cop the fup on, or withdraw from the euro. They have, for the most part, been the authors of this mess, and yet they seem to want everyone but themselves to go the distance to clear it up.

And all this anti-German rhstoric and flag burning is really shameful.

Scofflaw wrote: »

Would you argue, then, that in a democracy the citizens are not responsible for the actions of their government, and/or have no responsibility for ensuring that their government is honest and sensible?

How is it that the Greeks have a government who appear to have more or less swindled their way into the eurozone, and who have very evidently spent much more money than their state can afford ever since, and lied about it - while the Germans (and the Scandinavians, etc etc) don't? Was bad government somehow imposed on Greece?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Such a question invokes a false assumption of rationality. What scope was there for such critical input, given that liberalisation of trade and financial capital constituted the essential basis of every inter-state agreement over the last twenty years? (I really would like to hear your thoughts on this - I dont have an answer)

My point is that explanations should probably be sought at a levels beyond national mentality - there are commonalities at work that suggest a greater level of complexity*. The problem is that seeking out what is essentially 'Greek' about this - significant as such local nuances are - results in uncritical, reductionist rubbish like those articles from the mail, or the above comment that my replies are somehow 'anti-German rhetoric'.

*i.e. Marxist answer - logical response to ensuring free movement of capital / Instrumentalist answer - conscious, class-based centralisation of power, neither of which I particualrly subscribe to

Scofflaw wrote: »

Does it? Surely if one claims the assumption of rationality is false one is essentially stating that the Greeks aren't responsible by virtue of not being rational.

I'm not sure of the relevance of that, because it seems to me to beg some enormous questions - it assumes that liberalisation of trade and financial capital are (a) the root of Greece's problems; and (b) something that could prevent reform of Greek government. The former seems merely wrong, or at least out of line with the prima facie evidence - the latter seems frankly bizarre.

My point is that there is something fundamentally unsettling about the dominant rhetoric of unqualified 'collective responsibility'. Your responses imply a degree of active responsibility by the electorate to ensure accountability which is truly possible only under conditions of complete information. If politics is as selectively issue-driven and localised as Ireland, I find it difficult to imagine how any such culture/system of accountability could be expected (this is not an excuse or dismissal, I believe it is fundamental).

Furthermore, if the roots of this Greek crisis are in an official misrepresentation of its debt-GDP ratios, surely this underscores the inequity of burdening the majority electorate with austerity? My argument is not against the specifics, or necessity of the austerity programme, but with the inequity of its consequences, and the manner of its public representation and justification.

Scofflaw wrote: »

Why should explanations be sought "at levels beyond national mentality", though? What commonalities "suggest a greater level of complexity", beyond the obvious commonalities of public debt and market borrowing? Which other current crises are the result of what appears to be reckless borrowing, feckless spending, and relentless massage of figures at a state and individual level?

Because you appear capable of conceptualising in terms of its economic roots, rather than solely a product of national character - I believe (perhaps arrogantly) most would hold to the latter

Scofflaw wrote: »

Unfortunately, that just moves the problem one stage back. Is it not the electorate's responsibility to be informed? If politics in Greece is as selectively issue-driven and localised as Ireland, is that the outcome of an imposed system or an expression of the preference of the Greek public? In Ireland it certainly seems to be an expression of preference, and I see no reason to assume differently in the case of Greece.

Unfortunately, this is not the case, and your expectations of the electorate, although desirable, are unrealistic. Electoral politics is not fought on concise argument over the relative technical merits of libreralisation / national debt financing - I would suggest the majority public (despite what I believe to be their responsibility) have neither the time, nor the interest, and in certain cases the capacity to pick through the specifics of complex policy implications and financial intruments. In either case, the question of imposition/expression (and consequently, culpability) falsely relies on the assumption that both parties are mutually informed.

Electoral politics is structured in such a way as to obscure the long term implications both of party policy and trans-national agreements (e.g. the tone and standard of the Lisbon treaty debates). Politics is instead pitched around short-term local issues, and agreements/policies which establish far-reaching long term economic and social precedents are depicted in terms of short-term, appealing benefits such as growth, nondescript mechanisms of job creation - or selective, ideologically appealling issues. If you want to be really instrumentalist-conspiratorial about it, it is probably in the active interests of policymakers to reduce complexity as such, but the overall concentration of wealth engendered by liberalisation suggests a more concrete explanation.

This does not absolve the public of a responsibility to be informed, but it is an awfully difficult thing to accomplish when faced with a political system dependent on presenting politics around issues of selective appeal for its own preservation.

Scofflaw wrote: »

There are two problems there: first, that if the majority electorate benefited from the borrowing and spending that led to the austerity, and voted for parties that did the borrowing and spending without asking too many questions about where the money came from, it's hard to call imposition of austerity at the same general level inequitable.

Second, with respect to the internal distribution of the burdens of austerity - again, the problem here would seem to be that the Greek public accepted the buying off of certain power blocs and corporate interests within Greek society during the good times, and are now stuck with the entrenched mechanisms of inequity that created. Again, that's similar to Ireland - we allowed vested interests to be bought off during the boom to give us a quiet life, and are now outraged when they defend their buy-off at a time when action by those strengthened interests would be potentially crippling - a bit of reaping what one sowed.

Approaching the question of equity from another direction - assuming the complicity of the Greek public in policies to their majority favour, should this not imply a similar equitable distribution of gain throughout the growth years? ILO rankings suggest aggregate Greek income levels are modestly comparable to other EU-15, despite recording consistently above-average (above eu15) scores on poverty risk measures, and displaying income inequality levels comparable to others of similar UNDP HDI level*. Yet the burden of austerity, as with Ireland, relies on inducing further upward transfers with little explicit discussion of the net beneficiaries, nor a balanced discussion of who should be expected to bear the brunt of the tax burden.

Scofflaw wrote: »

Unfortunately, though, I'm not being offered much in the way of economic roots as opposed to national particularism as an explanation for the particular form of the crisis in Greece. It seems rather more the case that Greece used the market perception of being eurozone-backed to go on a borrowing spree, and used the proceeds partly to pretend to a level of public wealth that their economy couldn't actually support, partly to sustain their arms race with their much larger eastern neighbour, and partly to buy off potentially divisive forces within Greek society by ensuring that there was a superfluity of pork for everyone.

*Let me know if you want specific links - I'm referring to the UNDP table of gini coefficients, and the eu-15 poverty measures are from eurostat

oscarBravo wrote: »

At the risk of seeming argumentative, it looks to me like you want to eat your cake and have it too. This is actually encapsulated in your opening point in this thread:

If it's unfair to expect the electorate to have a full understanding of all the complexities facing the government they elect, then the corollary is that it falls to government to fill in the gaps and act on its own initiative, even if that means doing things that fall outside the expectations of the under-informed electorate.

Not at all, I appreciate the discussion. It is not a question of allocating specific responsibility or culpability, my concern is that this appeal to collective culpability ignores systemic deficiencies in representation. The result, ultimately, is inequality of both material outcome and the consequent austerity burden which is in turn normalised by (falsely) appealling to the idea that (a) the electorate had reasonable scope to intervene, and (b) gains were evenly distributed as a result of 'rational' calculation on the part of the voting public

oscarBravo wrote: »

The alternative - reflecting the collective (albeit uninformed) will of the public - relieves the burden from both electorate and elected. It's too much to ask that the electorate fully understand the issues, but the government - of whom, presumably, it's not too much to ask - are not allowed to operate outside the mandate of the mob.

It doesn't add up for me, I'm afraid.

It would be sufficient merely to acknowledge that there are numerous elements complicating the question of collective responsibility. As per my original post, my concern rests with the manner in which these factors (i.e. the nature of electoral politics, complexities of policy, difficulties in long-term prediction) serve to undermine representation - arguably across states other than Greece - and how these complexities are in turn reduced to a question of national character in public discussion. It does nothing to address the real consequences of diminished representation, and inhibits evidence-based discussion.