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Chris Hayes has been the Editor at Large for The Nation magazine for a few years now, among numerous other gigs, and now has his own show on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It’s a brilliant re-envisioning of the stale weekly public affairs shows dominated by the same rotating cast of characters, in part because of the sheer diversity of the guests Hayes features. Sunday’s program had 3 women at the table along with Hayes and another male guest, for example. Try finding that sort of gender-ratio on “Meet the Nation News Sunday.” Beyond the guests, however, the show strives to offer a diversity of opinions on a multitude of topical stories, and to dig into the details of what’s happening and why in a way the typical news program is simply unable to. As a perfect example and segway into my point, in the video above, Hayes lays out an argument as to why the Supercommittee’s failure this past week is in fact a good thing for America; his sentiments are ones that I have been mulling over recently myself. Do watch it.
Hayes mentions the recent ascensions to the top leadership posts of two technocrats in Greece and Italy, noting that their jobs, their mandates upon entering office, are to push through deeply unpopular austerity packages over the will of the majority of their supposed constituents.
Technocracy has suddenly become all the rage amidst the debt crisis of the eurozone. In Greece, prime minister George Papandreou was ousted in favour of the unelected former central banker Lucas Papademos, after he had the effrontery to call the referendum that never was. In Italy, Mario Monti, the unelected former EU commissioner, has anointed a cabinet of academics, bankers and an admiral, without a single representative of Italy’s political parties. This novel step is designed to reassure international bond markets, which have recently pushed Italy’s yields to perilous levels. (emphasis added)
Key takeaway: the political process is anathema to international finance.
Consider a few short weeks ago when then-Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou had (shockingly!) called for a national referendum to be held on the terms of an European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout plan that would have included harsh austerity measures to be imposed on the Greek people. The markets crashed, and the two biggest European economies’ leaders reacted with scorn:
At a bruising meeting in Cannes on Wednesday night, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned [Papandreou] that Athens would not receive a cent more in aid until it met its commitments to the euro zone.
Greece was due to get a vital 8 billion euro installment this month and says it will run out of money in mid-December if it does not get the loan.
Despite the turmoil in Athens and uncertainty over the euro zone, European stock markets and the euro rallied in volatile trading as the likelihood grew that Greece would not hold the highly risky referendum.
Note that opening the decision-making process up to those who will bear the brunt of any economic decisions made by the powers-that-be, the citizenry, is tantamount, in this calculation, to introducing high risk into the equation. The cold logic of finance, of interest rates and debt-to-GDP ratios, does not comport well with the warm inefficient fuzziness of the electorate, with their myriad voices and parochial/familial concerns. How are the financiers supposed to get their bailouts when the poor rubes paying for it demand something more than the simple extraction of wealth from their country?
The power relationships on evidence in the foregoing snippet of the Greek referendum situation are revealing: the larger “creditor” economies of France and Germany here acted as front-line enforcers with the wayward Greek leader Papandreou; the EU, a supra-national body of European nations acted in concert with the IMF, another supra-national body representing the strictly monetary interests of client nations, to craft a bailout package for Greece that brings great pain to the Greek people; meanwhile, the Greek people are demonstrating and rioting in the streets by the tens or hundreds of thousands to show their disapproval, and yet, they are pawns in the grand scheme. What are the Greek people supposed to do when it seems the entire world (particularly the sanctimonious Germans) is blaming them as a people for being profligate – where are they to turn to voice their opinions democratically when the one opportunity they would have had to do so is brutally snatched away from them by shadowy international forces?
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This sordid and ongoing tale of crisis in Europe reveals the flipside to the ethos of globalization that has dominated international politics since the early days of the “Washington Consensus”. In order to govern worldwide flows of goods, services and capital, world-bestriding structures of governance must be created. To the extent that those structures are endowed with the authority to act in crises, those actions are by nature going to be out of the direct control of the citizenry of the nations affected, thus denying the citizens of the world recourse to shape the responses of those supra-national institutions. The structures of these institutions ensure that their responsiveness will be primarily directed towards the largest stakeholders – the largest economies and the largest private financial institutions – thus making the decisions made representative of the policy prescriptions of an even more rarefied status of elites. Power is thus concentrated further, with the results trickling down upon the rest of us. And again, we have effectively no recourse to change much at all.
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The notion that centralization=efficiency, related to the economic concept of “economies of scale,” has reigned supreme in much of the modern industrialized world. We see these tenets manifested in the superstores we shop at, the industrially-produced agriculture we purchase, and the (public) school systems we send our children to be educated at, for just a few examples. Our governmental policies, and indeed, the growth of the federal government itself in the past century, has reflected the notion that centralized governance is necessarily better for all due to greater standardization of outputs and efficiencies gained.
And yet, centralization creates with it a certain culture as well, an elite culture where those well-versed in the human power relationships and bureaucratic operations of the institutions influence the direction of decision-making to their own ends. Centralization creates, not only an institution’s set of substantive actions with which it operates in society, but an entire class of administrators devoted to the upkeep and promulgation of the institution itself through budgeting, revenue collection, inter-institutional lobbying, and so forth. Institutions, first and foremost, desire to keep existing, thus creating a tension with their public service functions.
I would argue that much of the Occupy-inspired debate currently ongoing in our society is at least in part related to the discussion of how much the public interest is served by various institutions of government versus how much those institutions merely serve as vehicles for particular interests to enact their wills. The public wants accountability for the financial sector, but the relevant regulators have shown themselves to be rather more beholden to the interests of Big Finance than the public interest (see my posts on housing for more on that). The public wants more investment in clean energy, yet there is an institutional structure within our government dedicated to fossil fuels, from the military fighting wars that just happen to be in oil-rich regions, to the massive tax breaks and other indirect subsidies for fossil fuels baked into our tax code. How do we get the changes the populace wants enacted into law? We have to rely on elected representatives with a slew of other institutional and professional competing interests to act on our behalf – not an easy thing to do, apparently!
The clear answer to these problems appears to be decentralization – a reduction of the scale of decision-making to a more manageable, democratic, and community-oriented size. The General Assemblies occurring at the Occupy encampments around the country have represented that trend most vividly, as Chris Hayes highlighted in the clip above. While some efficiency may certainly be lost along the way, democracy and true representation can be gained, ensuring that the rule of an unaccountable elite, such as we are witnessing today, is significantly more difficult to achieve. Consider the supra-national institutions I’ve noted above – they are, if anything, abstractions of representative government; meta-representative democracies, if you will. Who are their constituents but other client states and their assorted national economic interests? Who are their leaders but those who have been most agreeable to said client states and economic interests? How have you been personally helped by the IMF lately?
I hope to pick up further threads of this discussion in a future post, as there’s a lot to the topic of decentralization to discuss. As always, your comments are welcomed and appreciated in the comments area below.
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