The crowds in Athens have sent jitters across Europe and America, where fears of financial default by governments are haunting bankers, investors and the business elite.
The exasperation over Greece, where the possibility of sovereign financial default is very real, is by far more invasive in Brussels than was the Ukraine fatigue a few years ago. This time the fate of the Eurozone itself may be at stake, as the contagion could spread.
In Ukraine, the focus of debate remains on President Viktor Yanukovych’s cynical prosecutions of opposition leaders. But a growing social discontent is not far behind the ravage of widespread poverty, if not yet at center stage.
If socio-political confrontation hits the streets, the winners will be those best organized and logistically savvy, and the losers will be marked by breakdown at the start. The implication is that the democratic camp in its present disarray is not prepared for such contingencies.
Like the Great Recession itself, the root cause of the ongoing global fiscal calamity is the worldwide overhang of debt. The debt is public, private and sovereign, visible in massive government borrowing, and hiding in toxic financial assets on the books and off the books, which will take years to unwind.
Banks in Ukraine are in as much trouble as anywhere.
The turbulence of fiscal crisis and the threat of extreme austerity measures is now rising to a crescendo in the same place where the financial meltdown of 2008 had started in the U.S. A default of the U.S. government on its debt is inevitable, say the financial literati as well as the amateurs, unless Congress raises the legal debt ceiling to enable the government borrow more to pay its bills.
The stumbling block is that the congressional Republicans and the Obama administration differ sharply on how to reduce budget deficit, and are setting totally contradictory preconditions for agreeing to a deal to raise debt ceiling.
The problem has become political and ideological, not financial. It centers on the refusal by Republicans to increase taxes for the superrich. Sound familiar?
Congressional Republicans representing the top of the feeding chain have proposed to narrow the budget gap on the backs of the poor and the elderly by dismantling the essential social entitlement programs that are not even the source of red ink, unlike “off-budget” military spending.
Freedom from excessive taxation – defined in fleeting numbers – has always been part of Wild West mentality. Its inconsistency with the concept of civil society has been of little consequence for fake think-tanks and talk-show shills.
I have been reminded that such matters are less important in comparison with freedoms we enjoy, such as the freedom to do this writing, and the marvelous education opportunities we have. Nice try.
That’s when it dawned on my page that an education bubble has existed in America for some time now, in spite of which more people seem to be showing a diminished capacity to think.
That’s why, when a recent study by the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute revealed the cost of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as $4 trillion in the last 10 years, one can understand why the powers-that-be intend to take it out of the U.S. social programs without much informed opposition. A question comes to mind: Do you think the American people have a clue? I hear sardonic laughter.
One gets eerie feelings about unemployed university graduates, many of them carrying tuition debt – a notorious outcome of mass education with four years of partying, very little geography or history, and no marketable skills.
It may be recalled that the wile used by private jet-set in the run-up to 2010 mid-term U.S. elections, to preclude enactment of top-biting tax legislation was the staging of Tea Party mob scenes – capitalizing on some white middle-class anti-Obama misgivings, magnified by the usual rightwing paste – to elect a Republican House majority.
It worked. In a skewed, top-dog dominated economy, while some American employers are pinched by shortages of practical labor skills, there is no shortage of financial advisers who specialize, hold on, in wealth development – but not for the have-nots. This is a sad landscape of 20 percent unemployment, officially 9 percent.
If the wealthiest country in the world is overwhelmed by such problems, what about devastation in Ukraine? That question is academic, as that country has been run dry, in relative terms, over a longer period, long before Greek rioting.
Some say that Ukraine lately is showing signs of economic revival under present regime. Others write that dissatisfaction is so intense that “this sucker will blow sooner or later” (Zenon Zawada in The Ukrainian Weekly).
If the latter is more likely, a blowout or shakeout may come from the regime’s own, until now, staunch bastion of support in the east. It could be a version of “Vstavay, podymaysia rabochiy narod” (Rise up, working people). This tune can resonate in the traditionally left-leaning east as well as in nationalist west of Ukraine. It may not be a menace to privatization’s holy grail, but nevertheless a major upheaval.
If this is what happens, the existing democratic opposition, as we know it, may need to reinvent itself in sharper populist terms and discipline, so as not to fade into irrelevance.
