Cargo of Questions: The victims of Ireland's economic collapse

The Re:LODE Cargo of Questions 2017 recognizes the critique laid out in the book by Yanis Varoufakis And The Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability that sets out a thesis that points to the following:

The architecture of governance in Europe is rooted in the structure of industrial cartels that were formed in the early foundations of the European Union project.

That this architecture has resulted in the triumph of a bureaucracy and its technocratic political elite over the necessary political and democratic structures that would provide the citizens of Europe with the kind of economy that would meet everyone's needs.

That, consequently, the eurozone is politically flawed, and the policies adopted by the European Central Bank are, at every turn, haunted by the SPECTRE of the Bundesbank stalking Europe.

This modern spectre has little relation to the one haunting Europe back in 1848! "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism."

Is this the madness of economic reason?
"Or, is it something worse?"

Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse
That sends me down to the river
Though I know the river is dry

Bruce Springsteen, The River 1980

A modest proposal!

The Eurozone crisis is unfolding on four interrelated domains.

Banking crisis: There is a common global banking crisis, which was sparked off mainly by the catastrophe in American finance. But the Eurozone has proved uniquely unable to cope with the disaster, and this is a problem of structure and governance. The Eurozone features a central bank with no government, and national governments with no supportive central bank, arrayed against a global network of mega-banks they cannot possibly supervise. Europe’s response has been to propose a full Banking Union – a bold measure in principle but one that threatens both delay and diversion from actions that are needed immediately.

Debt crisis: The credit crunch of 2008 revealed the Eurozone’s principle of perfectly separable public debts to be unworkable. Forced to create a bailout fund that did not violate the no-bailout clauses of the ECB charter and Lisbon Treaty, Europe created the temporary European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and then the permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The creation of these new institutions met the immediate funding needs of several member-states, but retained the flawed principle of separable public debts and so could not contain the crisis. One sovereign state, Cyprus, has now de facto gone bankrupt, imposing capital controls even while remaining inside the euro.
During the summer of 2012, the ECB came up with another approach: the Outright Monetary Transactions’ Programme (OMT). OMT succeeded in calming the bond markets for a while. But it too fails as a solution to the crisis, because it is based on a threat against bond markets that cannot remain credible over time. And while it puts the public debt crisis on hold, it fails to reverse it; ECB bond purchases cannot restore the lending power of failed markets or the borrowing power of failing governments.

Investment crisis: Lack of investment in Europe threatens its living standards and its international competitiveness. As Germany alone ran large surpluses after 2000, the resulting trade imbalances ensured that when crisis hit in 2008, the deficit zones would collapse. And the burden of adjustment fell exactly on the deficit zones, which could not bear it. Nor could it be offset by devaluation or new public spending, so the scene was set for disinvestment in the regions that needed investment the most. Thus, Europe ended up with both low total investment and an even more uneven distribution of that investment between its surplus and deficit regions.

Social crisis: Three years of harsh austerity have taken their toll on Europe’s peoples. From Athens to Dublin and from Lisbon to Eastern Germany, millions of Europeans have lost access to basic goods and dignity. Unemployment is rampant. Homelessness and hunger are rising. Pensions have been cut; taxes on necessities meanwhile continue to rise. For the first time in two generations, Europeans are questioning the European project, while nationalism, and even Nazi parties, are gaining strength.

A Historical Note and an Irish Connection

A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729.

Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.

The primary target of Swift's satire was the rationalism of modern economics, and the growth of rationalistic modes of thinking in modern life at the expense of more traditional human values.

In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.

The victims of Ireland's economic collapse

When Ann Moore returned to have breakfast with her family after a 12-hour night shift at a nursing home, she found riot police and bailiffs outside her home of 16 years. She and her husband, Christy, and their three children were being evicted. Despite climbing a ladder to the top of the house for six hours in a desperate attempt to thwart the bailiffs, the distressed care worker was eventually coaxed down and taken to hospital. Her home in the southern suburbs of Dublin was promptly boarded up.

The Moores were badly in arrears, owing the council €10,000 (£8,500). For eight months, Ann had been paying back €50 on top of her €100 weekly rent. But in a country where 300,000 homes lie empty, the authorities decided to make the Moores homeless and punish them for their perceived fecklessness. Yet it is the politicians, bankers and developers of Ireland who have been rather more feckless.

George Bernard Shaw on the lie that poverty is a moral failing !

Back in the day . . . George Bernard Shaw was unafraid to confront an Irish Audience and to condemn the privations inflicted on the Irish poor by Ireland's Poor Laws, not Britain's Poor Laws but Ireland's Poor Laws!

Fintan O’Toole: The lie that poverty is a moral failing was buried a century ago. Now it’s back

George Bernard Shaw knew that the rich are no better than the poor. But though the argument seemed settled then, it now rages more fiercely than ever

Wed, Oct 18, 2017, 11:43

If you know Alfred Doolittle only from Stanley Holloway’s infinitely lovable portrayal of him in My Fair Lady, you might not realise that he’s a bit of a monster. In George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, he arrives in high dudgeon at the home of Henry Higgins, who has, Doolittle assumes, taken control of his daughter Eliza for sexual purposes. He is not morally outraged – he just wants to be paid: “The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in?” Doolittle is a member of the most despised of all social classes: the undeserving poor. He has no desire to be reformed. But he asks – and answers – the most penetrating question: “What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”

In the second half of the play, though, the monster who was willing to sell his daughter for a fiver reappears in a silk hat and patent leather shoes. He is clean and elegant. He is getting married. He is now, as he bitterly complains, a paragon of that same middle-class morality. What has transformed him? Money. In an outrageous plot twist, Doolittle has inherited millions and he is now obliged to appear thoroughly respectable.

Pygmalion is not just about Eliza’s transformation from flower girl to apparent duchess. It’s about her father’s transformation from a disreputable chancer to the epitome of propriety. And in this morality tale is one of Bernard Shaw’s most important arguments: people are not poor because they are immoral; they’re immoral because they are poor. Or, to put it in the terms of today’s assumptions about poverty: the problem with the poor isn’t their “culture” or their want of character. It’s just that they don’t have enough money.

By the time he died, in 1950, Bernard Shaw, as the most widely read socialist writer in the English-speaking world, had done as much as anyone to banish the fallacy that poverty is essentially a moral failing – and conversely that great riches are proof of moral worth. His most passionate concern was with poverty and its causes. He was haunted by the notorious Dublin slums of his childhood. As his spokesman Undershaft puts it in Major Barbara: “Poverty strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it.”

The question – why are the poor poor? – has a number of possible answers in the 21st century, just as it had in the late 19th. A Eurobarometer report in 2010 examined attitudes to poverty in the European Union. The most popular explanation among Europeans (47%) for why people live in poverty was injustice in society.

But the other half of respondents opted for some other cause: 16% said people live in poverty because of laziness and lack of willpower, another 16% saw poverty as an inevitable part of progress, and 13% said people live in poverty because they have been unlucky. These arguments were also raging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Shaw was a crucial figure in making people understand that poverty is about the way society is organised, not about the failings or bad luck of the poor.

In the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw attacks “the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were … a wholesome tonic for lazy people”. His great political impulse was to de-moralise poverty, and his most radical argument about poverty was that it simply doesn’t matter whether those who are poor “deserve” their condition or not – the dire social consequences are the same either way. He assails the absurdity of the notion implicit in so much rightwing thought, that poverty is somehow more tolerable if it is a punishment for moral failings : “If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor … Let nothing be done for ‘the undeserving’: let him be poor. Serve him right! Also – somewhat inconsistently – blessed are the poor!”

In an era when many on the left purported to despise money and romanticised poverty, Shaw argued that poverty is a crime and that money is a wonderful thing. He recognised that there is no relationship between poverty and a supposed lack of a work ethic: Eliza Doolittle is out selling her flowers late at night in the pouring rain but she is still dirt poor. (Conversely, when she is “idle” and being kept by Higgins, she leads a life of relative luxury.) And therefore the cure for poverty can never be found in moral judgments.

The cure for poverty is an adequate income. “The crying need of the nation,” he wrote, “is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.”

The solution he proposed was what he called a “universal pension for life”, or what we now call a universal basic income .

By the end of Shaw’s immensely long career, it seemed that these arguments had been won. They even seemed rather passé – what thinking person could ever revert to Victorian notions of poverty as a moral disease? But moralising about poverty returned with a vengeance. When, in January 1983, Margaret Thatcher declared in a television interview that “Victorian values were the values when our country became great”, it was clear that one of those values was the belief that poverty is fundamentally a question of character.
The rich are now as confident as they ever were that they deserve what they have. We have returned to what Shaw called the “absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man’s income should be given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday school prize for good behaviour … Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of virtue in money?”

We live again in a world where, as Shaw wrote of his own times, “we have million-dollar babies side-by-side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery”. We live again in a world where that unremitting drudgery is, for millions of people, no guarantee of being able to afford a decent and dignified life.

We live again in a world of Victorian values risen from the graves in which Shaw and the other great anti-Victorians buried them. We live again in a world where the rich pleasure themselves with the belief that they don’t just have more money – they are better people. We live again in a world where people struggling to survive have to prove that they are “ deserving ” of the welfare payments they need to keep body and soul together. And in such a world, it seems right that Bernard Shaw should live again too.