Abstract
While the US was able to delay reducing its deficit, and even to increase its debt, the ECB and the IMF demanded Eurozone economies suffering significantly from the Great Recession immediately reduce government spending and begin paying down their debt. Demand killing austerity which caused further economic contraction, often resulting in the decline in GDP being greater than the reduction in government spending. Their national debts, therefore becoming an ever-greater percentage of their shrinking GDP, made it increasingly difficult for these economies to pay them off, occasioning the replacing of democratically elected leaders in countries such as Italy and Greece, by financial technocrats. This in contrast to the US, where the political class, having long subordinated the national interest to those of the corporate oligarchs, faced no such challenge from their owners.
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Notes
- 1.
Greider, W. 2012. The Fed and the Silence of the Left. The Nation. (Nov. 26) p. 18.
- 2.
The deficit is, of course, the (annual) negative difference between the value of (both visible and invisible) exports and imports, while the debt is the (year on year) accumulation of such annual deficits.
- 3.
Robinson, A. 2012. Euro Austerity Under Fire. The Nation. (Dec. 10) p. 8.
- 4.
Ibid., quoting the IMF’s Economic Outlook report.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Thus while Disney’s ownership of ABC is an immediately understandable example of vertical integration, in that Disney may produce the programming that ABC broadcasts, recent owners of CBS, Westinghouse, manufactures of nuclear and other power plants, military aircraft, navy power units and the like, and NBC owners General Electric, whose interests include finance, oil and gas, military weaponry and the like, seem to have no immediately identifiable common interests with the broadcast corporations they own. However, by controlling the media they clearly exert enormous influence over the information and its interpretation readily available to the general public, and thus over cultural norms, public opinion, and consequently over the manufacturing of consent around government or “public” policy. An influence which in determining the social, cultural, political, and economic “climate” or world view [weltanschauung] in which they operate, is clearly of the upmost significance to their non-media operations and their profitability!
- 7.
Thus, even publically funded educational institutions, increasingly governed by trustees and regents and so on selected almost exclusively from the business community, are—as evidenced by former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to replace the “search for truth” and “improvement of the human condition,” which were traditionally the missions of the University of Wisconsin system, with that of “meet(ing) the state’s workforce needs”—under mounting pressure to look to the corporate world to inform them what it is that they should be teaching in order to remain “relevant.” While students increasingly perceive institutions of higher learning, not, primarily, as places where they may receive an education, try to understand interesting facts and ideas, and raise, and perhaps try to settle, significant issues, but rather as places where they may get a degree, understood merely as a credential facilitating their entry into the job market.
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Glynn, S. (2020). The Disaster of Austerity as a Road to Recovery; “Democracy,” Understood as a Source of Legitimation to be Suspended by the Financial Oligarchs in the Name of Austerity. In: The Economic Logic of Late Capitalism and the Inevitable Triumph of Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_6
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