JULY 26 2015
MY CROCK POT, GREECE AND EUROPE
I am a man of regular habits, and that makes life easier. Every evening, when I do the dishes – we don’t have a mechanical dishwasher, just a human one (me) – I also clean the crock pot of our slow cooker, always being careful not to bang it or, worse, drop it, because replacement are impossible to find.
Each evening I fill it with a cup of organic rolled oats, and when I go to bed, promptly at 10 p.m. I scoop in 3 ½ cup of water, plug it in and in the morning 2 smooth meals of oatmeal porridge are ready. Nothing is simpler.
The slow cooker itself is more than 30 years old. Our youngest daughter used it in university and somehow I inherited it. It only has one speed, actually no speeds at all: no knobs, nothing to set, so also nothing that can go wrong. Oh, the old time simplicity!
When the old insert broke, I had to buy a complete new cooker, but that new thing did not work very well, so I inserted the removable pot in the 30 year old machine and now, despite my ever so careful handling, there is a large vertical crack, now also joined by a smaller horizontal one, about three-quarters of the way down.
These cracks somehow remind me of Greece, the vertical split, and Europe the horizontal one. It won’t be long or Greece will split from Europe, and go back to its former national currency: the drachma. And after that it won’t be long before the Euro goes as well, to be split again into marks and guilders and francs. The two cracks point that out, even though my reasoning may sound cracked as well. What is sure is that before too long my cracked crock pot too has an irreparable break, and will become garbage.
When Greece or Finland or Portugal or Spain – all countries with unsustainable debts – go alone, they can regulate their own financial affairs and not be subjected to draconian austerity, imposed by Germany, the only country who has benefited from the Euro, the common currency for 18 countries in Europe. “Das Herren Volk has certainly thrown its weight around in this affair, where nobody came out a winner.
So, why the Euro?
The introduction of the Euro was based on the vision of “sustainable growth” and “social inclusion”. Both these concepts have been written into every European treaty from Rome to Maastricht. Nice-sounding words, and both totally meaningless today. “Sustainable growth’ is an oxymoron, is a contradiction in terms, because any growth is unsustainable for the simple reason that the earth is finite. “Social inclusion’ is totally negated by Germany’s cruel treatment of Greece.
In 1998 or thereabouts the new currency was introduced, aptly called the Euro. Basically it was a political decision. The 20th Century had seen two devastating wars and, so it was thought, more political cooperation, especially in the financial world, would prevent another disastrous war. And, yes, 70 years later no military conflict has taken place. The new currency has benefitted especially Germany which is the leading economy in Europe. Thanks to the Euro all participating countries had access to cheap money. Greece really wanted some of that and, thanks to some clever book keeping, it was admitted to the club, where one of the rules was that national budget deficits could not exceed 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. But rules are there to be broken, and they did, with the consequence that deficits soared. Deficit is a nice word for debt. Today debt is the great enemy of stability.
Debt is only manageable when economies grow. If the debt carries 2 percent in interest, and the growth is 2.5 percent, then debt can be carried. If the debt carries 2.5 percent in interest and the growth is 2 percent or less, then we have troubles. Today we have troubles, big troubles, because the growth is much lower than the cost of money. Actually in many ways we have deflation in raw materials, in oil prices, in minerals, but inflation in food products, thanks to weather related events, mostly. People may pay a little less for gasoline, but all food products are shooting up. Soon Janet Yellen, the woman at the top of the money-mountain in Washington wants to increase the cost of money, and that will really screw up matters.
Back to Greece.
Greece is really being screwed. Basically Greece is no longer an independent state. Europe has imposed such cruel economic measures there that comparisons have been drawn to the Treaty of Versailles, which set Europe on the path to Nazism after the end of World War I. But the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended a small country’s brave experiment in policy independence, is almost as good an analogy. In crushing Czechoslovakia, the invasion also destroyed the Soviet Union’s reputation, shattering the illusions that many sympathetic observers still harbored. It thus set the stage for the final collapse of Communism, first among the parties of Western Europe and then in the USSR itself. Today Europe’s reputation is in shatters.
To many Greeks, the debt the country has amassed is the evil fruit of austerity policies, imposed from the outside that asphyxiated its economy and trampled on its sovereignty. Today that debt is more than 310 billion euros, or almost $(US)339 billion, make that more than $400 billion (Can). Basically there is no way that Greece can pay its debts. It needs to have a substantial amount of it forgiven, but Germany, Greece’s largest single creditor, says that Greece’s debts are a sacrosanct commitment that must be paid as a matter of law and of principle, forgetting that in 1948 Germany was forgiven many more billions.
The current stalemate
So for the time being, we have a stalemate which sooner or later will be broken. Greece cannot pay its debts. Germany does not want to lose the $200 billion lent to Greece. A big reason for the stalemate is the nature of Greek debt. In many previous international negotiations — including those over money owed by Latin American countries during the region’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the €107 billion in debt that Greece got written off in 2012 — the creditors were mostly foreign banks and other investors. In this case, though, the Greek government’s debt is held mostly by other governments. So tampering with this debt is impossible without approval from lawmakers in Germany and other countries, and any losses would be borne by taxpayers in those nations. Nearly 60 percent of Greece’s debt is held by fellow euro-zone countries, which gave Greece a second bailout in 2012 and are now preparing to throw it a third lifeline worth a further €86 billion. Germany’s contribution to the two initial bailouts was more than €50 billion, making Berlin the biggest contributor.
But some experts believe that once German contributions to the European Central Bank and to other lenders are taken into account, Berlin is on the hook in Greece for upward of €100 billion.
Small is beautiful
Oh, I wish that politicians were wise and let go of their megalomania. “Megalos’ is the Greek word for ‘big’ and ‘mania I don’t have to explain: we all have a touch of it. Politicians want power: the bigger the stakes, the better they like it. That’s how the Euro-zone came into being. The saying goes, Think locally, act globally, or is it the under way around. Never mind. My thinking is ‘think locally, act locally’.
“Small is beautiful.” That’s the title of a book written by German-born, English educated economist by the name of E. F. Schumacher. It was written in 1973 and immediately become a best-seller. The sub-title is Economics as if People mattered.
The title says a lot about the book and the subtitle even more. The European Union has imposed measures upon the Greek people with total disregard of the population there. The Euro goes directly against the notion that “Small is Beautiful.” To the politicians, abolishing the German Mark, the French franc, the Dutch guilder, all good currencies in their own right, now all superseded by the one Euro, signify that Big, not small, is Beautiful.
The book advocates that human beings remain close to the nurturing land in both fact and spirit. Of course today we see rapid world-wide depletion of the world’s resources and the corresponding destruction of the environment: even the sharks in the seas are angry at people.
Much of what Schumacher predicted has come to pass: we now see every day how traditional economics is bringing the world to the edge of ruin. My wife recalls how in the late 1930’s her father, a minister, was extremely afraid that Hitler would start a war and overrun Europe. People in the know sensed the approaching danger, which proved justified when war broke out in 1939. Johan Huizinga, a well-known Dutch Historian in the Dirty Thirties wrote a book with the telling title: In the Shadows of Tomorrow (In de schaduwen van morgen) where he too expressed fearfulness.
Today we again live “In the Shadows of Tomorrow” the unavoidable cataclysm that is to come, and will ruin everything we hold dear.
By failing to heed Schumacher’s advice that “Small is beautiful” we have built a society entirely on debt. That immense debt, thanks to ultra-cheap money, those untold trillions, created out of nothing, sheer computer generated, with nothing to back it up, has caused China to use in one decade more cement than the entire world used in the 20th Century. Now China stopped growing leaving overcapacity in oil, in coal, in iron ore, in manufacturing capacity, all of which will have such a backlash in the years to come that, rather than inflation – which wipes out debt – we will experience deflation which enhance debt and make it much more difficult to come to terms with the trillions of dollars governments, corporations, and people owe to banks. Deflation means lower prices but also lower profits and less tax income and more unemployment. It means depression, means banks going belly up and hunger and hardship. All this means that within a few years, perhaps sooner, the entire world economy will crack up, just as my crock pot, just as Greece and just as the Euro.
What should we do?
Schumacher is correct: small is beautiful. In the book by that name he writes: “Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If these foundations are unsound, how could society be sound? And if society is sick, how could it fail to be a danger to peace?” Today meaningful work is quickly going the same way as viable families. Also we are in a global war against creation, a war where everybody is a loser.
There is indeed a satanic element in our contest with creation. All of us, Christians, non-Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, we all, without exceptions, are allies with the Evil one, the Satan who hates God and who, from the very beginning, has as his sole aim to destroy creation. Take China: the Chinese central government is building a city which will have 150 million inhabitants, with no provisions for schools or for parks because those are the responsibility of the local councils.
Schumacher writes that the upper limit for a city is about 500,000, the size of Hamilton, Ontario. Go bigger and problems multiply, so much evident in traffic congestion, and human degradation, in unaffordable rent, in factory food. Give me a place in the country any time.
What was the norm during the depression and the 1940-45 War will become necessary again. I mean the growing of food, where a “Small (garden) is Beautiful”. Most of the year we are privileged to eat from our small, 2,000 square feet – about 200 m2 – garden where much of our food is grown. With rolled oats porridge in the morning prepared in my crockpot, the main meal at noon –usually totally home grown – and little or nothing in the evening, a slice of bread perhaps, a few nuts, we stay healthy. In the summer I spent only a few hours in the week to look after the garden. Just as everything else, it takes a bit of discipline. Nowadays with raised gardens, even on a small city plot much can be grown. Try it.
And buy a crock pot, even though they crack sometimes.