Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:The Fascist Danger -- On Occupy EPIC -- Tuesday Oct 25.

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Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: The Fascist Danger -- On Occupy EPIC -- Tuesday Oct 25.
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2016/10/the-fascist-danger-on-occupy-epic.html

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Neoliberalism and austerity [feedly]

Neoliberalism and austerity
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2016/10/neoliberalism-and-austerity.html

I liketo treat neoliberalism not as some kind of coherent political philosophy, but more as a set of interconnected ideas that have become commonplace in much of our discourse. That the private sector entrepreneur is the wealth creator, and the state typically just gets in their way. That what is good for business is good for the economy, even when it increases monopoly power or involves rent seeking. Interference in business or the market, by governments or unions, is always bad. And so on. As long as these ideas describe the dominant ideology, no one needs to call themselves neoliberal.

I do not think austerity could have happened on the scale that it did without this dominance of this neoliberal ethos. Mark Blyth has describedausterity as the biggest bait and switch in history. It took two forms. In one the financial crisis, caused by an under regulated financial sector lending too much, led to bank bailouts that increased public sector debt. This leads to an outcry about public debt, rather than the financial sector. In the other the financial crisis causes a deep recession which - as it always does - creates a large budget deficit. Spending like drunken sailors goes the cry, we must have austerity now.

In both cases the nature of what was going on was pretty obvious to anyone who bothered to find out the facts. That so few did so, which meant that the media largely went with the austerity narrative, can be partly explained by a neoliberal ethos. Having spent years seeing the big banks lauded as wealth creating titans, it was difficult for many to comprehend that their basic business model was fundamentally flawed and required a huge implicit state subsidy. On the other hand they found it much easier to imagine that past minor indiscretions by governments were the cause of a full blown debt crisis.

You might point out that austerity was popular, but then so was bashing bankers. We got austerity in spades, while bankers at worst got lightly tapped. You could say that the Eurozone crisis was pivotal, but this would be to ignore two key facts. The first is that austerity plans were already well laid on the political right in both the UK and US before that crisis. The second is that the Eurozone crisis went beyond Greece because the ECB failed to act as every central bank should: as a sovereign lender of last resort. It changed its mind two years later, but I do not think it is overly cynical to say that this delay was partly strategic. Furthermore the Greek crisis was made far worse than it should have been because politicians used bailouts to Greece as a cover to support their own fragile banks. Another form of bait and switch.

While in this sense austerity might have been a useful distraction from the problems with neoliberalism made clear by the financial crisis, I think a more important political motive was that it appeared to enable the more rapid accomplishment of a key neoliberal goal: shrinking the state. It is no coincidence that austerity typically involved cuts in spending rather than higher taxes: the imagined imperative to cut the deficit was used as a cover to cut government spending. I callit deficit deceit. In that sense too austerity goes naturally with neoliberalism.

All this suggests that neoliberalism made 2010 austerity more likely to happen, but I do not think you can go further and suggest that austerity was somehow bound to happen because it was necessary to the 'neoliberal project'. For a start, as I said at the beginning, I do not see neoliberalism in those functionalist terms. But more fundamentally, I can imagine governments of the right not going down the austerity path because they understood the damage it would do. Austerity is partly a problem created by ideology, but it also reflects incompetent governments that failed to listen to good economic advice.

An interesting question is whether the same applies to right wing governments in the UK and US that used immigration/race as a tactic for winning power. We now know for sure, with both Brexit and Trump, how destructive and dangerous that tactic can be. As even the neoliberal fantasists who voted Leave are finding out, Brexit is a major setback for neoliberalism. Not only is it directly bad for business, it involves (for both trade and migration) a large increase in bureaucratic interference in market processes. To the extent she wants to take us back to the 1950s, Theresa May's brand of conservatism may be very different from Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal philosophy.

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Buried in the fine print: Forced arbitration [feedly]

Buried in the fine print: Forced arbitration
http://www.epi.org/blog/buried-in-the-fine-print-forced-arbitration/

From First Lady Michelle Obama's speech in New Hampshire to accusations by Fox News' Gretchen Carlson against Roger Ailes, sexual harassment and sexual assault have been dominating the headlines for months.

Also in the news has been the topic of forced arbitration agreements that limit victims' ability to have their day in court. Very much a part of the Wells Fargo scandal has been the bank's argument that it shouldn't have to face its clients at trial.

These two stories actually have more in common than is often mentioned. First, of course, Fox tried to shut down Carlson's suit by saying her contract's arbitration clause prevented her from using that public forum. Few realize how common it is for women and men who allege harassment at work to be shunted into a secretive process that often prioritizes the interests of the employer.

Read more

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Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:

A new player to access EPIC Radio without those nasty URLs!

Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/p/blog-page_28.html

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Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:WV AFL-CIO President Kenny Purdue on LABOR BEAT

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Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: WV AFL-CIO President Kenny Purdue on LABOR BEAT
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2016/10/wv-afl-cio-president-kenny-purdue-on.html

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Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:Run Run Runrig

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Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: Run Run Runrig
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2016/10/run-run-runrig.html

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Structural Reforms and Greece [feedly]

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Structural Reforms and Greece
// mainly macro

Should the Troika - the Eurogroup, ECB and IMF - be concerned about how bread is sold in Greece? You would think they had more important things to worry about, like getting Greece out of the huge recession caused by their own policies. But no, you would be wrong. The Troika decided that standards specifying the weights that loaves could be sold at were a restrictive regulation, and demanded change.

This is one of the examples Joe Stiglitz quotes in his new bookon the Euro, which I review in the New Statesman here. Now you might agree that at the very least this represents a misdirection of the Troika's energies, and more generally that it involves unwanted interference in national sovereignty. But in Joe Stiglitz you have one of the best economists in the world, so he also tells you that there is a long-standing economics literature on how regulations like these can increase competition because they facilitate comparison shopping.

Stiglitz is very critical of many other 'structural reforms' that were imposed on Greece by the Troika. The only structural reforms that it might have made sense for the Troika to suggest were measures that would have moved resources into exports, thereby helping an external demand led recovery (see Ireland or Spain). As I note, even here Troika meddling may have had undesirable consequences.

As I said in a recent post, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But of the three parts of the Troika, the IMF ought to have the knowledge to do better. (The ECB has apparentlyjust created a task force to consider economic reforms.) Over 1,500 economists work at the Fund. Whether that knowledge gets to the right people at the right time is another matter. But I suspect the main problem at the fund is politics rather than economics. I have written about this recently, in the context of an Independent Evaluation Office report on the IMF's Troika role. Hereis a more substantive piece by Edwin Truman at the Peterson Institute in a similar spirit.

Greece is currently trapped in a debtor's prison created by the Troika. The Troika insist that debts have to be repaid. The IMF knows the prisoner does not have the ability to do this, but does not have the political will to demand that as a result the prisoner should be released. Debt repayment requires yet more austerity, which kills the chance of the recovery, so even with austerity debts are not repaid. Some debt forgiveness is probably in the interests of everyone, including the creditors, because after a recovery Greece will be in a much better position to pay any remaining debts. But it is politically unattractive for the creditors, so it does not happen.

This is a disaster for Greece, but a bad omen for Brexit. Those who advocated Leave say it is in the Eurozone's interests to agree favorable trading terms with the UK. To do otherwise would be to sacrifice economic interests to make a political point. The obvious irony of course is that this is exactly what Brexit was: sacrificing economic interests to make a political point. But Brexiteers want to believe, in their topsy turvy way, that European leaders would not be as reckless as they are. Greece is an example of how Europe's political leaders can also discard economic logic if it is in their own political interest to do so. 

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