American Tsars: Dissidence In dystopias
In the twentieth century, a narrative was established that distinguished autocratic communism and liberal democracy — with the two systems being described as antithetical both in theory and practice. The distinction between communist fascism and western liberty came to be received wisdom, as did the superiority of western democracy.
When communism was defeated, many declared the unequivocal triumph of the capitalist west over its rival. However, scrutinising the treatment of whistleblowers in the US and USSR reveals that the two systems have far more in common than the official narrative permits, that the US has been much closer to dictatorship since 9/11 than the hagiography of liberal democracy will allow for.
Liberal theory is encoded with bias and dogma. In both the US and USSR, vicious commentary has been passed on dissidence. The two states have been decidedly authoritarian in their approach to dealing with non-conformists. In both states, the military industrial complexes have exerted control over political discourse.
Notorious names — Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange — correspond to notorious cases. While the case specifics encompass a varied range of actions and activities, they are united by concerted efforts to subvert the imperialist regime of the US. They do this through electronic means — through whistle blowing, data dumping, hacking. These are activities which, rendered through the realpolitik filter with which politicians have been conditioned in the corridors of Yale and the pentagon, is tantamount to treason.
Silencing dissent is at the core of imperial strategy.
Treason is an untenable accusation against those who — with the exception of Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz — have never been American citizens. Indeed, such charges sullying the names of these renegades seem designed to inculcate fear and obedience to American objectives not just within but beyond domestic spheres of influence.
Wikileaks, the apotheosis of contemporary whistleblowing, is much like the Samizdat underground press, in which dissidents reproduced censored texts through makeshift publications. Both enterprises have been fearlessly dedicated to defending spaces for alternatives to state-approved thought, often at great personal risk. The Samizdat press can be credited for stoking the atmosphere in which reform was eventually possible, and represents the triumph of the mind over repression. Wikileaks mounted the same challenge to the machinery of the war on terror that the Samizdat press did to Soviet apparatchiks. And like the Samizdat press, Wikileaks’ publications had the power to foment revolution, as in the case of Tunisia in the Arab Spring.
Beneath the myth of media freedom in the West lies the truth that news is a cartel that disseminates propaganda on behalf of the empire state, propagating a pro-corporate agenda. In both the US and USSR there has been a state monopoly on acceptable opinion, with criticism of state policy being punishable. Time and again, the ruling classes of both states accuse non-conformists of treason, with dissent unacceptable from the perspective of hegemonic power.
Criminalising critique of state policy remains one of many ways oppressive states wage war on their citizens. These actions were and remain largely divorced from democracy. To drive home just how superficial and empty liberal theory is and how little it knows about the real state of affairs take the fate of Julian Assange, facing 175 years in prison for journalism. America’s decision to officially indict Wikileaks won’t just gag free speech to the same extent as the Soviet Union, it might even represent the advent of globalised dictatorship, indivisible from US power and world order.
The deep state has penetrated mainstream politics.
A large part of America’s strategy for maintaining its power over narrative is to criminalise alternative perspectives. As a result of Wikileaks’ subversive activities, a grand jury has been instituted to investigate and prosecute those involved, and the whole sordid affair constitutes a show trial worthy of commentary from Trotsky. America’s visible punishment of dissent from the pro-war, corporate line proves that the deep state has penetrated mainstream politics, demanding full compliance with the war on terror, to the denigration of the future of the democratic system. The US administration’s punishment and pursuit of Wikileaks is reminiscent of the Gulag.
The same wars fought abroad by imperialist powers like the US are also carried out on its people. The common struggle that unites Americans is against the injustices of a government that is undemocratic and repressive, and that does not respect their rights or their humanity. The country’s politics is dominated by an oligarchy that has paved the way for the introduction of dictatorship, with the government violating the constitution in order to expand its own power.
America’s dystopian political climate points to a democratic decline.
The current trend towards autocracy discredits America’s ostensibly democratic institutions and fuels disillusionment with democracy. Ever since 9/11, the leader of the ‘free world’ has attacked anybody who critiques and exposes the war on terror. For over a decade, Wikileaks’ publications of humanitarian crimes have repeatedly contradicted the official narrative of American virtue.
In the spirit of intellectual honesty we must acknowledge that like the USSR, the US is a centralised political power that suppresses inconvenient truths that contradict its hegemonic narrative. The US has not tolerated the free expression of dissenting views and has managed to set a paradigm in which the state manages a monopoly on acceptable thought.
Megan Sherman is a History and Politics graduate, postgraduate researcher, freelance independent analyst and essayist, campaigner interested in civil liberties.
Image attribution: ProPublica.
The scramble for Edtech — just another data mining operation?
Schools and universities are being forced online at a time when education finds that it is further incorporated into the global turn to neoliberalism.
Everything is going online, and job requirements are fast changing as major US and famous ‘red brick‘ UK universities are moving the learning process online through ‘blended Learning‘. This generally means a combination of online lectures and ‘face-to-face‘ teaching groups, all mediated through third party software companies.
Covidnomics is here to stay.
Some university staff have foreseen a wave of ‘institutional shock doctrine’ and a round of austerity. At a time where after being embarrassed out of claiming its coronavirus package, Harvard announced that its course fees would stay at $49,653 despite its move online. The scramble for online learning is indeed challenging established players in education while shaking up the market. At stake — the data streams student learning will provide.
But covidnomics is here to stay. Hurried by the multiple billion dollars investment of Chinese domestic initiatives into Edtech since 2014. In 2018, Chinese startups received over 50% of all start up capital invested by venture capitalists in Edtech globally. The Edtech market in China has been thriving but is firing up again due to coronavirus, with Beijing home to the most valued Edtech companies. The chinese startup education ecosystem is fast building and dynamic, with most of them being funded and backed by the state. Furthermore, the suspension of the one-child policy also means an upcoming blossoming market with companies such as Squirrel in China — a personalised platform that makes learning accessible to students in remote areas.
Fuelled by another challenge from China, silicon valley and european wide investments feel the pressure to catch up. But investments into education aren’t new; VC capital and silicon valley have been investing in Edtech since at least 2013. This means that state schools and universities, both currently mired in problems, must change fast. However, the online learning ecosystem is vast, it includes student management tools, professional training, coding specialized task based schools to the more classic online lecture based learning. There is no one size fits all solution here.
Edtech’s shadow business model has invaded our education systems.
Rising student tuition fees are a loud sign of trouble from the educational establishment. The educational landscape has dramatically morphed into a wave of universities all tussling for shiny software for their interactive lessons. This is fertile territory for the ‘surveillance capitalists’ that Shoshana Zuboff describes.
In a coronavirus special broadcast hosted by the French Chambre of Commerce in California, an educator and innovator in education Gregory La Blanc stated that in Edtech, student’s aren’t really the customers, they are the product. He suggests that tech companies could capture even much more student data in higher education. He explained that ’10 seconds spent on Facebook yields more data than four years at university’. He claims that capturing 10 GB of data per student to “know everything about them (…) would provide real value” to the recruiters, who are the real customers.
Many researchers have helped illuminate the extent to which data extraction and behavioural analytics is ingrained in the digital economy. Google’s policy regarding the ‘creepyline’ — coined by then Google CEO Eric Schmitt — is illuminated in this now infamous interview: “the Google policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not to cross it.”
Feeding that dance around the ‘creepyline’ is data for ‘personalization’. Personalization is the oil behind Google and Facebook holding 56.8% of US digital advertising. It turns out that targeting ‘users’ with their own data gets more ‘bang-for-your-buck’ — it’s a very profitable business model.
Personalizing school material has empowered teachers, but demands more from teachers than ever before. Many teachers have resisted calls for increased Edtech, and warned others of the increased workload and disintermediation of human relationships. They warn about the siren call of tech to solve ultimately budget issues in education, and bemoan the loss of human connection in the learning process. Teachers are now more active in vetting and curating classroom material rather than referring to textbooks that need updating and replacing every few years.
There has been an increasing amount of research and advocacy around more appropriate screen time, and the importance of teacher directed instruction. Findings show that lowering screen time and favouring independent learning offline serves to strengthen the quality of research done by students. Paul Emerich passionately states that:
“We must walk away from this hyper-individualized brand of personalized learning. We must walk away from its reductionism, assuming that education is simply an arrangement of individualized playlist cards or isolated experiences. We must run from the idea that technology is necessary to make the classroom a more personal and humanized place.”
However, within five years of targeting educators directly, Google has managed to circumvent district officials and therefore outmaneuvered competition with their low-cost chromebooks and ‘free’ classroom apps. As Hal Friedlander from the NYC Department of Education describes, “Google established itself as a fact in schools.”
Google developed a practice that involved woo-ing school officials with easy-to-use, money-saving services. They then enlisted the schools to market to other schools, who were held up as early adopters and forward thinkers among their peers. The result was that in 2016, Chromebooks accounted for 58% of mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the US, up from 1% in 2012. This ‘achievement’ from tech giant was often after exploiting public school teachers and students for free labour by helping them build Google’s kid app, essentially bringing in new markets at low cost.
Companies like Google and Facebook are mining the digital lives of children.
Google has made it very easy for millions of students who have school accounts to upgrade to a regular google consumer account once they graduate. This has the potential to create brand loyalty since it invites them into the Google ecosystem from a young age. It surfaced last year from FTC Chairman Joe Simons that
“YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients (…) Yet when it came to complying with COPPA, the company refused to acknowledge that portions of its platform were clearly directed to kids. There’s no excuse for YouTube’s violations of the law.”
Google responded in a blog post stating that they would treat data from anyone watching children’s content on YouTube “as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user.” They continued to state that this will “limit data collection and use on videos made for kids only to what is needed to support the operation of the service.” The Federal Trade Commission had by then announced a record fine in September of 2019.
Google’s statements are an implicit confirmation of ‘behavioural surplus’ as a business model. This is when data obtained goes beyond what is funneled back into the platform for its necessary functions. Evgeny Morozov explains ‘behavioral surplus’ as when tech firms use the extracted data for targeting ads and modifying behavior. Behavioral surplus is thus a key aspect of“surveillance capitalism”.
Facebook, who was also vying for a share of the Edtech market, backed an Edtech offshoot armed with 5 engineers called ‘Summit’. However, they found after a nationwide system launch involving 380 schools and 74,000 students that 70% of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional. It was later terminated despite Facebook having sold them on the idea of personalized learning and a ‘level playing field’. The results showed that children missed talking to teachers and friends and as a result felt more stressed.
As the co-chairwoman of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy Leonie Haimson stated “Summit demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond.” Although Summit says it complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, we shouldn’t forget that Facebook manipulated 689,000 users’ emotions for a science experiment back in 2014.
Mary Helen Immordino Yang at the Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning & Education (CANDLE) and Dr. Pamela Cantor from Turnaround for Children, show how online learning illustrates the interrelation of cognition and emotion, both in the brain and in each child’s everyday lived experience. One of their students said that “distance learning has all of the elements of school, but none of the fun stuff.” Another element is that adolescence is the most dramatic period of brain development after infancy.
COPPA requires that websites and online services directed to children obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from anyone younger than 13. However, Dr. Kanad Basu — assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering — research found that many popular apps do not comply:
“When you download an app, it can access a lot of information on your cell phone (…) You have to keep in mind that all this info can be collected by these apps and sent to third parties. What do they do with it? They can pretty much do anything. We should be careful about this.”
In the US data from children under 13 is considered private, but their parents or guardians usually sign away their privacy in platform-based legal forms. Children beyond the age of 13 do not even have this protection; they therefore do not have data privacy in school. Due to this, Basu advocated for caution when introducing new apps into education.
‘The goal is to change people’s behavior’.
There are many privacy issues generally, yet when centred around children whose development is being recorded forever, these issues become all the more pertinent. Zuboff recalled being told by a chief data scientist of an admired Edtech software was that “the goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behaviour at scale.” The data scientist explained how users’ behaviours can be predicted and manipulated:
“When people use our app, we can capture their behaviours, identify good and bad behaviours, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us.”
This largely shadow business model constitutes the real boon behind the blossoming interest for Edtech and the potential for data capture. The ‘actionable cues’ are techniques of behavioural change. An often employed euphemism included terms such as ‘nudging’, which is essentially a non transparent way to herd a person or group of people, at scale. This is proven to work and has already affected elections, and been used against protesters and worker’s unions and in urinals.
The Norwegian Consumer Agency, Forbrukertilsynet, issued a report ominously called “Deceived by Design” which dives into the settings and User Interface (UI) Google, Facebook and Microsoft submitted. The agency found that these mega corporations funnelled users into their desired non private configurations and that only 5% would change their personalization settings.
As Safiya Umoja Noble argues in her book Algorithms of Oppression, search engines are “allegedly neutral technologies.” The silicon valley ideology has promoted that they provide “accurate information that is depoliticized” — but this is far from being the case. In fact, it has been exposed that algorithms have “statistical regularities of historical injustices and social biases” woven into them.
Austrian privacy advocate Max Shrems famously brought a lawsuit forward against Facebook and Google. His main argument was that they exceeded the minimum required data to perform the service and went beyond their mandate. His camp argued that Facebook is categorized as a social media network, which is the reason that users join. Users are therefore not consenting to being part of an ad targeting database. Shrems criticizes the ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ approach applied to users attempting to exercise their data rights, which he calls ‘blackmail’.
The digitalisation of education comes with many challenges.
Technology should act as a servant to teachers, not the other way around. Unfortunately, using proprietary technology invariably means submitting to its irreducible business logics and internal privacy rules which are always amenable.
These types of platforms have become increasingly embedded in regulating, surveilling and accounting many aspects of our lives leveraging our behavioural data against us. Roxana Marachi, a San Jose State University professor of education, warns teachers to ‘not advocate for their own demise’ and avoid relying on technologies during remote learning. We should correlate the need for data unions — as DIEM25 has been campaigning for — in the education sector.
In many ways, allowing a child’s development to be translated into data and exported constitutes ‘accumulation by dispossession‘. It should serve as a moment of clarity. As Zuboff states, surveillance capitalism qualifies as a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. A developing mind should not be subjected to observational forces regardless of what they offer in return, and they should certainly not be playgrounds to embryonic neuroscience theories.
Open sourced solutions and networked teachers can act as a defense barrier to the coming invasive wave in Edtech.
The observational marketplace trading in “human futures” at least while children, should be reconsidered. We must strike a more natural balance; putting educators at the fore in a framework of digital sovereignty DIEM25 backs and encompassing emotional connection, curiosity, compassion spearheaded by empowered teachers.
The UK’s Windrush Generation still suffers from injustice today
The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement have highlighted systemic racism in our social systems. As a social worker, I have witnessed the financial disadvantages that people of color have suffered, often working low paid jobs during their working lives and then moving into retirement with little financial security and assets.
The Windrush Generation of the UK.
I recall a gentleman who was from the Windrush generation — David* had emigrated from the Caribbean, to work and help rebuild Britain in the post war era. He was 83 years old and had a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. I was his mental health social worker and visited his home to support him to remain well.
David lived in darkness in a third storey council flat. One might have assumed he was paranoid as he didn’t open the curtains. However, it was to blot out old and broken furniture that he had moved to the balcony many years ago. He didn’t have the money or anyone to help dispose of it, so he put it there out of sight, stacked up against the window. He lived alone, occasionally cooking on the stove top, using his one small saucepan, and getting a hot meal at the local cafe when his legs allowed, and the budget stretched. He couldn’t afford a TV licence or a TV so he listened to the radio. He had very little, no family, and knew no one. He was totally alone.
He was living on a retirement pension of £90.70 per week and I could see he wasn’t getting the Pension Credit or the Disability Living Allowance. He was reluctant to claim what he was owed and I couldn’t understand his reluctance. His income barely covered his bills and years of poverty had left him deprived of basic needs. The bristles on his toothbrush had frayed years ago and his bed had no sheets, the mattress was stained and sagging. I took him a leaflet explaining the benefit entitlement, hoping to change his mind. There was an awkwardness as he lowered his gaze. He apologised that he couldn’t read. His shame met my guilt and I realised I had not taken the time to understand his situation.
He told me the story of his marriage. He loved his wife, although she had wanted a child. Having experienced racism himself since arriving in Britain, David could not bear the torment of seeing his child suffer the same abuse. He sacrificed his marriage, his only family, and chose not to bring another child into this world. His wife left him. His loneliness, the price to pay for the overt, insidious and relentless racial abuse that he had suffered. The penalty he continued to pay for being black; the loss of family making sure he was safe and had enough to eat, the joy of grandchildren never felt.
It was after his wife left that David developed Schizophrenia. Sitting with David, I felt a sense of his sadness, loss, and fear. A gentle, kind man who was grossly disadvantaged by his skin color. He felt a burden, like he didn’t belong. He took very little and gave so much. He owed nothing.
A Universal Basic Dividend can fight systemic racism.
Yanis Varoufakis describes how the welfare system is a “weaponised system against the poor” that causes shame and forces claimants to prove that they need income support in order to survive and risk eroding a person’s dignity. One solution to this would be a Universal Basic Dividend, (UBD), as advocated by DiEM25. It would be set up as a basic right to a minimum income and remove the degradation so often felt when applying for benefits. One of the issues that he Windrush Generation faces is that they are often denied access to benefits — this has been considered a scandal for many years. A UBD, which all peoples would receive, would act as a direct payment.
David did eventually agree to claim the full benefit entitlement and his income increased. A new bed was bought, the old furniture was removed and he started to open his curtains. Yet this isn’t a happy ending. My role as a social worker in enabling David to maximise his income was just a small part of the solution.
The Hostile Environment Policy designed to curb immigration, has deported many of the children from the Windrush Generation as they never obtained citizenship, after travelling to Britain on their parent’s passports. When I heard of this, I thought of David and remembered his foresight of future generations having to continually suffer systemic racism. The deportees could have been his children or grandchildren. Elderly members, who have only ever known the UK as their home, have also been deported.
Black Lives Matters has highlighted how slowly change occurs and that racism continues to be perpetuated through systems and policies. Each time David steps out onto the street he is still a black man in the UK. He still suffers from racism.
Social work has taught me to be aware of my biases, because they are there, as they are in us all.
As a social worker, I am frequently reminded that you can’t meddle with people’s lives — a good intention can cause harm if it isn’t considered with the other person at the center of finding solutions. As a white woman telling the story of a black man, I became starkly aware of my desire to finish the story on a light note, by glossing over and denying the reality of David’s life. Driven by the urge to make right my guilt with a story of benevolence, made necessary due to limitations of systems that are systemically racist.
In watching news of the recent protests, I felt enraged with the injustices and could no longer sit on my sofa feeling angry and helpless. It moved me into activism and supporting the work of DiEM25. We need to collectively keep talking about and address the countless issues at the intersection of systemic racism. At a macro level, the UBD is one solution in removing such power differentials and respectably acknowledges the role of the majority in earning dividends for wealthy companies.
For guidance on having conversations about racial equality see the links below:
Communicating for racial justice
Our role as non-black people of color in disrupting racism
Lessons: Talking about race, racism and racial justice
*The name of the person has been changed for the purposes of this article.
More irony than gold: The Bank of England relives its “Pirates of the Caribbean” moment
Perhaps more irony than gold can be found in a recent ruling by the British high court on the fate of Venezuelan accounts once entrusted to the Bank of England, which has refused to release 31 tons of Venezuelan State gold deposits to anyone other than Juan Guaidó.
Invoking the authority of “Her Majesty the Queen”, British judge Nigel Teare endorsed the Bank of England to endow opposition figure Juan Guaidó with the Venezuelan State’s confiscated gold. The transaction sets a dangerous precedent for British international relations, (especially when dealing with former colonies other than the US). The interventionist, activist decision by the British judge may even have surprised Guaidó, who had until then only publicly asked that the Bank of England deny access to Maduro’s PSUV government, who was reelected in May 2018 for another 6-year term.
Guaidó, at that time a deputy of the province of Vargas, never ran for presidential elections in Venezuela.
He made his initial self-proclamation as President in what could most charitably be interpreted as an act of protest in January 2019, when he invoked article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution. He did so after claiming that the democratic process had been undermined by Maduro’s summoning of a National Constituent Assembly in parallel to the existent National Assembly, as both sides called each other intransigent.
But only naiveté would lead an observer to believe that the countries currently embargoing Venezuela had paid much attention to the internal partisan games of Venezuelan politics. Rather, the liberal EU governments and illiberal right wing American heads of state — who seem capable of reaching a consensus only on aggressive foreign policy positions — co-opted Guaidó’s highly symbolic gesture, seizing the opportunity to formalise sanctions on Venezuela with a local political figurehead.
Whilst a large part of the Northern hemisphere anointed its preferred “pirates of the Caribbean”, Caracas’ usual adversaries simultaneously invoked the rhetoric of human rights abuses — recalling how the EU and US foreign policy and sanctioneer-establishment justified disastrous military interventions in the Middle East, after it turned out that sanctions often prove insufficient towards the project of collapsing the foreign governments isolated by such embargoes.
AP reported in May that Guaidó’s advisors abandoned the provincial deputy after a bungled raid in which Guaido had allegedly contracted the US mercenary firm Silvercorp USA, dispatching former Green berets to carry out armed operations in Venezuela. Guaidó has left the party he represented at the time of his gesture, and has become a more extreme figure entangled in Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence’s agenda for Latin America. Guaidó, meanwhile, has long since fallen from the zenith of his popularity and credibility in Venezuelan opposition.
May’s “Silvercorp” mercenary scandal gave a clear image as to what kind of regional conflicts the Bank of England wishes to sponsor with stolen booty in Venezuela, and shows European states’ resolute willingness to keep sowing divisions that spark civil wars abroad, dispersing new refugees that no state seems willing to embrace. Authorities, for example, recently discovered smuggled Venezuelan suitcases containing gold bricks on the small island Aruba, inflaming already severe tensions between the tiny semi-independent island nation and its neighbour.
Meanwhile, those who advocate exporting “freedom” to Venezuela by way of aggressive interventionism, continue deporting Venezuelans and Syrians as we slowly exit the world-quarantine.
Rather than reallocate the stolen gold towards Venezuelan refugee relief in the diaspora, the gold would likely boost armed insurgent activities if awarded to the doppelgänger-politician “recognized” by Europe and Washington rather than by Venezuelan electorates.
Venezuela, a former European colony, has always celebrated its independence from Spain. Before the onset of the world-quarantine and its cautioning silence, in early 2020 Spain’s parliament and media-theater found diversion in numerous parodical accusations lodged by center-right politicians accusing PM Pedro Sanchez of having “degraded” or “stripped” Guaido of Presidential status, when Sanchez indecorously referred to Guaidó as mere “leader of the Venezuelan opposition.
One cannot miss the irony when European countries, including Venezuela’s defeated former coloniser, discuss the democratic process of a foreign country. It is as if lieutenant governors of a buccaneer outpost could once again be demoted or reinstated by the masters in Madrid.
General Simón Bolivar fought long campaigns to liberate South America from imperial rule. Bolivar’s (along with his Haitian close forerunner Toussaint de L’Ouveture’s) revolutions implemented European Enlightenment ideals for the first time in history—without the cynicism and opportunism that led to Napoleon’s imperialism, and to George Washington’s and the US revolutionary founders’ support for enduring slave-trade, despite their commitment to discourses of liberation. Bolivar, by contrast, called for abolition of slavery as a vital component of Independence.
History denies European countries the right to introduce democracy in Venezuela.
Far less controversial within the EU establishment today, would be to contend that the illiberal antics of the Johnson era in British politics represent major threats to the Enlightenment legacy in Europe. Therefore, the EU can send a clear message by adopting a dissenting position to that of the UK and USA, as their stances foster dangerous interventionism in Venezuela by European brokers who know nothing of the volatile region.
British officials who support the decision of Judge Nigel Teare and the Bank of England want to mete out punishments to any foreign government that strays from the model set by Western financial firms. Such performative finger-wagging in the US and Europe — echoing John Bolton’s comical chants of “Libertad!” — seldom originate in genuine solidarity with local dissidents. Rather, these gestures intend a spectacular punishment of any foreign government’s expression of economic dissidence against official business ideology espoused by the Latin finance-pundits on CNN En Español.
If EU officials wish to distinguish themselves from illiberal and Eurosceptic forces, the hour has come to do so, by dropping the inhuman economic sanctions against the Venezuelan people.
In Venezuela all sides claim the tradition of Bolivar who first brought postcolonial democracy to the region. Let Venezuelans determine the future of their democracy. Let them do so without soldiers of fortune or 21st century pirate interventions.
While EU leaders squabble, the Elephant in the Room remains unnoticed
While the media are reporting the news of the deadlocked EU Summit negotiations over the so-called ‘Recovery Fund’, an eerie silence prevails regarding the Elephant in the Room: The huge wave of austerity the Eurozone is sleepwalking towards. Let’s look at the facts.
Even if the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Rutte, and the rest of the ‘frugal four’, were to remove their objections to the Recovery Fund’s terms and conditions, the net fiscal effect across the Eurozone will be no more than 1% annually for three years. Now, let us turn to the Elephant in the Room: the dreaded return of the obligation to balance government budgets, the infamous Fiscal Compact.
According to the optimistic scenario of the European Commission, the Eurozone’s mean government budget in 2020 will be -8% of total Eurozone GDP. Of this, next year, the nascent steady-state recovery will remove, at best 4%, leaving the Eurozone, on average, with a -4% 2021 budget deficit. Moreover, as this is a mean, some countries (e.g. Italy and Greece) are facing, in 2021, a steady state budget deficit in excess of -8% (down from -15% in 2020). Which means that, to get back to balanced budgets, on average, the Eurozone will impose upon itself fiscal austerity of approximately 4% of its aggregate GDP, with countries like Italy and Greece facing an austerity nightmare in excess of 8% of their crushed GDP.
If this were to be allowed to happen, the Recover Fund’s 1% annual fiscal boost will be countered by a 4% fiscal austerity wave. As Europe begins to recover from the pandemic’s disastrous effects, Brussels will be hitting our economies over the head with a sledgehammer. And yet, ultimate proof that the EU’s establishment resembles the Bourbons (in that they forget nothing and learn nothing!), our great and good leaders refuse to discuss this ominous Elephant in the Room, choosing instead to invest hours in endless negotiations over the 1% fiscal boost and whether it should be reduced or how it will be managed.
Regarding that, relatively insignificant (in macroeconomic terms), so-called ‘Recovery Fund’, let’s take a quick look at what our leaders are fretting about. Five are the issues at stake. The first three sound important but it is only the last two that constitute truly burning issues.
The three lesser issues are:
- The overall size of the package (to be financed by debt the EU Commission will take out from private debt markets on behalf of member-states) and the distribution of these monies between grants and loans. While it is true that loans are irrelevant (as member-states and EU companies are facing insolvency, not illiquidity), it is unlikely that this will be a major sticking point.
- The allocation of the monies between different countries. Here, I fear, the Dutch Prime Minister has a good point: It was silly for the Commission to specify how much money each country would get on backward looking metrics while not taking into account the (yet unknown) effects of the pandemic on the economies, and health systems, of member-states
- The voting mechanism by which payments will be authorised or blocked: Will Holland have veto power? Will Qualified Majority Voting be used to enable payments? Or to block them? (As we know, the default matters a great deal in decision making, private or collective)
And now to the two, truly, burning issues:
- Conditionalities: The Dutch (and others hiding behind them, including I dare say… Berlin) want pre-conditions for disbursement – e.g. for the Italian government to legislate, e.g., pension cuts before it collects monies. As this is no less than the politically debilitating troika process that Greece and other countries know well, the demand for conditionalities is a blocking move (especially for Rome) by whomever insists on them.
- Rebates: One way of pacifying governments that do not want to be seen by their electorates to cave in to mutualisation (e.g. the Dutch PM), or which are not in the Eurozone and cannot see why they should be paying for its ill-design (e.g. Sweden), is to promise them rebates of the monies committed. However, this means that, to preserve the size of the Fund, countries like Germany, France and, yes, Italy, must fork out more.
So, that’s the state of play. Once more, all night negotiations in Brussels, in the midst of a crippling crisis, are focusing on the lesser issues and studiously avoid talking about the Elephant in the Room, that is Europe’s ‘natural’, and self-defeating, proclivity toward austerity for everyone, except for the financiers and the captains of corporations who are treated to the most extravagant of socialisms.
Platform Cooperatives: Workplace Democracy for the 21st Century?
Worker-owned ‘Deliveroo alternative’ Kolyma2 offers a potential blueprint for transitioning the platform economy to a post-capitalist world.
The platform economy — as the business model of Deliveroo, Lieferando, UBER and Airbnb is called — is a relatively new phenomenon. When it appeared, traditional unions did nothing to protect the workers from the new forms of exploitation that came along with it. It appears as independent, freelance work, but in reality it is not. Class struggle still lies at the heart of it: Some platforms like e.g. UBER do employ ‘freelancers’ because they don’t want to pay social benefits like health insurance, sick leave, vacations etc. This disruptive behavior has fierce effects on national and global economies.
A delivery rider earns 10,50 Euro on average, which is more than minimum wage in Germany, but in fact it’s less: If no order is dispatched to you, you don’t earn anything and flat hourly rates are rare. Most riders pay their own gear — smartphone, bike, maintenance — and don’t have paid holidays or sick leave.
In big cities like Paris most of the delivery riders are (illegal) migrants that do the job because they simply won’t find another one. They often work as subcontractors for other bicycle couriers that have a legal status and don’t perceive the flexible working conditions as a benefit. This not entirely the fault of the platforms, however, but also a result of the general situation of migrants that politics failed to address. Also there is a fierce competition between different platform companies, as they aim for market dominance.
When food delivery giant Deliveroo left Berlin for good in August 2019, a group of bike riders founded their own cooperative: Kolyma2.
This caught my attention immediately because it touches on many of the topics that we at DiEM25 discussed in our seminal policy paper: Technological Sovereignty – Democratising Technology and Innovation. I couldn’t wait to observe our theoretical concepts in real life. In early summer 2020 I finally got to talk to some people of Kolyma2 in a video conference.
Stefano Lombardo — the prolific founder of Kolyma2 — had been working for Deliveroo for more than four years. He was already planning to form a cooperative during his Deliveroo years. While riding for the multinational company, however, the idea never kicked off. But when Deliveroo left Berlin, he seized the opportunity. This is how the food delivery cooperative Kolyma2 started: with a tiny landing page and a telegram channel.
As adorable as this lo-fi approach was, technology seemed to play a crucial part, as it was really complicated to complete an order. The amount of communication between customers and riders was enormous. As a result, in November 2019, Kolyma2 had to close down operations. Apart from the technology there have been other issues. It simply was too much work on the shoulders of too few people.
But that wasn’t the end of Kolyma2. In January 2020 they returned, equipped with better infrastructure. They teamed up with the French developer Alexandre Segura, who goes by the moniker Mex, and the platform Coopcycle. For once the COVID-19-Shutdown came in handy and business boomed in spring 2020.
The Coopcycle app brought in new customers that insisted on using a real app. From 60 orders on one weekend, the turnover rose to 80 orders per day. This was important to sustain Kolyma2, says Stefano.
“You need to generate revenue, because dedication and idealism alone don’t sustain your life. In 2019 we just imploded. We burnt out.”
Mex’ platform Coopycycle — the new app that is at the core of Kolyma2 — has been built upon the remains of another failed startup: The Belgian delivery company Take Eat Easy. Mex tried to wrap his head around the fact that this billion-dollar startup could fail so badly and lose all its money. He felt that it couldn’t be so complicated to build a food-ordering app. So Mex cloned the application and played around with it. Meanwhile, the idea of rider cooperatives with collective bargaining power started circulating across Europe.
A cooperative for the 21st Century.
Until then, Mex had thought that cooperatives belonged in the 19th century, as he vaguely remembered some socialist writings by thinkers like Charles Fourier or Robert Owen. However, he suddenly realized that the concept makes perfect sense in the modern world.
The idea arose that he could develop an app that belonged to delivery riders and that it could act as the “factory” they commonly own. Riders could run the platform on a local scale without global structures involved. “Technology is not everything, for sure”, he adds, “but you need to have an app and a functional website to compete.”
So why not build an open source solution and spread it around? For cooperatives like Kolyma2, this means having a boilerplate code for a monthly fee that is based on their turnover on the platform.
Kolyma2 teamed up with Coopcycle and returned to the scene.
The idea of (publicly financed) open source software platforms that don’t belong to a private entity but can be used by all citizens is something that DiEM25 already identified in the Technological Sovereignty paper. Such a commonly usable tool is a crucial means to “level the playing field”: To make sure that newcomers like platform cooperatives have a fair chance to compete against global players.
Bike messaging organised as a cooperative has been a thing in urban areas for some time now. The individuals working in this field are particular, as they are often left-leaning, anarchist and ecological. In that regard, e.g. UBER drivers really are a different crowd.
Mattia and Dana — early members of the Kolyma2 collective — think that the difference between a cooperative like Kolyma2 and a company like Deliveroo is the level of group engagement. It is different to work for a collective that you are part of, as opposed to working for a boss that you will probably never meet. At Kolyma2 there are no regular meetings, but they communicate via text messenger as this feels more organic in terms of chaos and flow. Not everyone likes to get involved at the same level. Some people only want to ride a bike for a living. Self-organization can be a lot of work.
“There is a benefit to getting to know the work process”, says Mattia, “because at a company like Deliveroo you always feel kept at bay and there also was a kind of anxiousness about how long your job was about to last.”
The gig economy, however, isn’t a one way street. At least in the world of bike messengers.
Most people value their freedom more than a fixed contract. There can be flexibility for everyone, not just for the upper echelons of these emerging economies. For Dana, for example, security isn’t really an issue when it comes to her job. She prefers to live in the now and not in a possible future. Mattia, on the other hand, did have a fixed contract while working for Deliveroo. In reality, however, he wasn’t secure in his job. It was a six-month contract with automatic renewal, but when he became sick near the end of one contract it turned out that the contract hadn’t been renewed. Now, he prefers to work for a cooperative that he trusts and where he — despite his freelancer status — feels safer.
As of now, Kolyma2 is just a network of freelancers, but that is going to change soon as the company is now joining Smart Cooperative. Smart is a legal structure that enables freelancers to employ themselves in a cooperative. You make a contract based on your projected income and they pay you a monthly wage. Smart will host Kolyma2 under a legal umbrella until they are ready to fund themselves.
Reputation and Source Code.
An important issue in the platform economy is the agency workers have over managing their ‘reputation’. Even liberals will agree that someone that has a good working biography should be able to use it in the labor market. If you work for platforms like UBER or Deliveroo, however, your reputation or rating belongs to the company and it disappears as soon as you stop working for them. That’s one of the reasons why DiEM25 argues for data unions — representative organisations of platform workers that make sure that they can negotiate the terms and conditions of their contracts and prevent such bad business conducts.
Furthermore, the software itself is a crucial tool for platform cooperative like Kolyma2. Coopcycle’s app runs on a license inspired by Dmytri Kleiner’s Copyleft concept – Coopyleft. To prevent that a giant like Lieferando just comes and takes away the software, in the Coopyleft license, the source code can only be used by entities who stick to certain ethical principles. To use software protected by a Coopyleft license, you need to use a cooperative model and fit the definition of a social economy actor as defined by the European Union.
Are platform cooperatives like Kolyma2 the walkthrough solution that ensures the transition of the economy to a post-capitalist world?
This certainly has to be explored in more detail, as the world of delivery drivers is a unique ecosystem that doesn’t necessarily translate to other work areas. In any case platform cooperatives can play a crucial part in helping to imagine new models of workplace democracy and workers organization.
Nick Srnicek argues in his book “Platform Capitalism” that the state should act as a kind of Venture Capitalist in the platform economy to ensure competitiveness. Stefano doesn’t agree, because he thinks the state should stay out of these issues. Workers should learn to run a company the hard way, instead of learning to fill in funding applications. Otherwise you don’t learn to get to know your customers and their needs.
In our Technological Sovereignty policy paper we demand to make EU funding for research and innovation more easily accessible for civil society organisations, non-profit technology projects, cooperatives and other actors with a clear mission of green and social change. With that and a Universal Basic Dividend — that makes sure society gets a fair return on its public investment — future cooperatives might have the financial means to explore these possibilities in a safe space.
The Eurozone’s grappling with crisis, class war & the North-South divide
Yanis Varoufakis interviewed by Berliner Verlag.
What did you think when the Euro-group elected its new leader last week? At least this was not the outcome Frau Merkel had wished?
My first thought was that it spelled the end of any possibility of harmonizing corporate tax rates across the Eurozone, an issue that I am on Mrs Merkel’s side. The second thought was that the Irish finance minister’s victory was a victory for forces pushing for greater, not less, austerity across the European Union. It was not a good moment for Europe. [From the above you can see that I never automatically opposed whatever Mrs Merkel favoured!]
If you look at fiscal and monetary politics in the Euro area today – what is your impression? Have the Europeans learnt a lesson from the Greek crisis?
To begin with, please let us not conflate Europe’s rulers with the… Europeans. Turning now to your question, Europe’s leaders resemble the Bourbons: they have forgotten nothing and they have learned nothing. More precisely, while the ECB’s monetary policy reaction has been far improved since Mario Draghi succeeded the catastrophic Jean-Claude Trichet’s, monetary policy has long ago reached the limits of what it can do. So, the only thing that matters now is Europe’s fiscal stance.
Our fiscal stance remains the most tepid and the weakest amongst developed economies. It must be considered yet another dereliction of duty for two reasons, one ex ante and one ex post.
The ex ante failure has to do with what we are doing now, in 2020: Taking out all the loans provided to business (that are irrelevant fiscally), the fiscal injections into the EU economy are: (a) small overall and (b) hopelessly lopsided, with Germany on the one hand pumping a great deal more fiscal power into its economy while Italy and Spain cannot – the result being a magnification of Europe’s greatest weakness: our internal imbalances.
The ex post failure stems from the demise of the idea of a Eurobond – the only instrument that could prevent, in 2021 or 2022 (when the fiscal compact is re-energised) massive new austerity in countries like Italy and Spain. Since the budget deficit of these countries will exceed 10% of GDP, you can imagine that the fiscal consolidation necessary to return to the fiscal compact is going to produce a further increase in the imbalances that have been tearing the Eurozone apart since 2010.
You are very critical of the European Recovery Fund. Why?
For at least three important reasons: First, it was devised as a substitute to the Eurobond, which it is not. Secondly, because its structure is divisive and likely to cause greater disunity among Europeans. Thirdly, because it will be too little and it will come too late to counteract the new austerity that the reintroduction of the fiscal compact will bring. Let me explain these three objections in greater detail.
While it is true that the Recovery Fund involves a degree of common debt, it is explicitly (and legally) designed as a one-off debt with specific details on how and when it will be repaid. Thus, we have wasted a fantastic opportunity to create the equivalent of US Treasury Bills, which is what makes the dollar powerful and the United States far better placed to absorb shocks.
Moreover, I am appalled that the Commission specified in advance, based on backward looking data, which country will receive how many billions. It was an awful thing to do because it set one country, one people, against another. What we needed was a sum that would be diverted to regions in Europe most in need of support. There are poor parts of Germany that will be hit more than richer parts of Spain. The total sum available should be distributed ex post on the basis of the needs of particular European regions and sectors, not by means of the usual sordid bargain in Brussels that divides a pie between governments.
Lastly, this Recovery Fund will do very little to ameliorate the austerity that the reintroduction of the fiscal compact will necessitate. It will fail in the same way that the many billions of the structural funds failed to ameliorate the effects of austerity between 2010 and 2016.
What consequences will the Fund have in Europe?
It will entrench the false view in Northern Europe that it was all about handouts to the Southerners while, at once, entrenching the false view in Europe’s South that the whole of the North benefits from pushing the South into greater impecunity.
What will happen to the working class people in the Euro-Zone?
It will continue to watch its prospects decline both in the North and in the South while the financiers and the members of the boards of directors of large companies enjoy the fruits of socialism for the oligarchy and stinging austerity for the majority of the Greeks and of the Germans.
Will the consequences be different for Greece and Germany, aka South and North?
Yes and no. Workers in the North and in the South will be facing increasing precarity and will be getting angrier and more discontented. Except that the rate of deterioration will be much greater in countries like Greece, the result being the continuation of the mass exodus of young people which makes our countries of the South impossible to sustain as functioning societies.
What role are the “frugal four” playing — isn’t it legitimate to keep in mind the public debt in each country?
Governments have a duty to defend their people from a number of threats. One of them is excessive public debt. But, there is also excessive private debt. And, even more ominously, low investment that jeopardises a nation’s chances to repay both private and public debt. The so-called frugal four are working in favour of large conglomerates that want their cake and to eat it: They like the effect Italy and Greece are having at keeping the exchange value of the euro low (so as to maximise their exports, eg, to China) and the interest rates below zero (so as to get free money from the ECB).
Like all free-riders, they take what suits them but then take no responsibility for the damage that the policies favouring them do both to the South and to their own working classes (which find themselves increasingly squeezed and indebted as part of the same process that squeezes and indebts the South).
You frequently speak of “oligarchs” — who are they in Europe?
In the early fifties, when the EEC was first created, they were the captains of the steel and coal industries. Soon after, they were joined by the electrical goods industries plus the automakers. In the 1980s the captains of industry were increasingly sidelined by the bankers who, by 2008, had ended up as the masters of Europe’s destiny.
Can the European oligarchs at least provide new jobs and/or be competitive with the US or China?
Absolutely not. The capacity of European financialised capitalism to produce good quality jobs is at its nadir and is getting worse and worse due to the EU’s failure to create the public finance instruments that DiEM25 has been proposing for years now — e.g. a joint European Investment Bank and European Central Bank program by which EIB-bonds can be backed by ECB-bonds to mobilise idle cash (that is currently destroying German pension funds) and turn it into green investments.
Most observers have no doubt that there will be austerity in exchange of money from the fund. What austerity else can Greece bear, keeping in mind the sacrifices that have already been made?
This is like asking a patient nearing death as a result of having been subjected to massive radiation how much more radiation she can take!
What is the current state of the Greek economy? Debt is still at 180 percent, despite 200 billion Euro for bailing out the banks?
Greece’s debt is unpayable not despite but because of the banks’ bailout. Since 2009 I have been saying that Europe’s rulers, and this is where I do blame Mrs Merkel, cynically saved idiotic bankers by transferring their losses onto the shoulders of Europe’s weakest taxpayers. Mrs Merkel, Mr Sarkozy, the troika and everyone else who has maintained this crime-against-logic for a decade will forever by guilty in the conscience of Europe’s progressives. [And, by the way, Greece’s debt is not well about 200% of GDP!]
What will Europe look like if the Recovery Fund really delivers on 750 billion Euro?
Sad and divided. For a start, of these 750 billions, 250 billions will be loans. The last thing Europe’s devastated businesses that are facing insolvency need is more loans — Greece’s fate provides a great lesson to those who refuse to recognise this simple truth. As for the remaining 500 billions, more than 100 of them are re-purposed funds (i.e. not new money) and another 200 will be sacrificed to buy the frugal four’s consent. That leaves us with, at best, 300 billion. It sounds a lot but it is puny. Over three years it comes to less than 1% of GDP. Given that the austerity that Berlin will demand and Brussels will impose will be more than 4% of GDP over the same year, the only conclusion is that, as the pandemic (hopefully) subsides, European capitalism will be inflicting another unnecessary blow to itself – just as in 2010.
In your view — what would be an adequate program to cope with the Corona-devastation?
DiEM25 has already answered this: our 3 point plan.
- The ECB must issue a long-maturity, 30-year, Eurobond for €1 trillion euros solely backed by the ECB, with the possibility of further issuance in needs be. This €1 trillion should then be used to replace national debt, in proportion to the coronavirus-induced regional recessions & public health costs.
- The ECB must inject a €2000 European Solidarity Cash Payment to every European resident
- The EU must create a European Green Recovery & Investment Program funded by EIB bonds approximately equal to 5% of the EU’s GDP, to be backed in the bond markets by the ECB.
You are talking about “class war”. Are we already there?
We have been there since 2010. The austerity imposed upon Greece in May 2010 was the first move toward a fiscal consolidation in Germany (and all other countries) that shrank German workers (and every other European working class’) total income and job prospects.
What should the workers and/or leftist parties do to stop the call war? Or will they have to fight? And can they be the winners?
Form a transnational, pan-european movement with a single economic agenda that we campaign in favour of in Holland, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, everywhere. This is what we at DiEM25 have been working towards. Can it succeed? Yes, it can. Will it succeed? It depends on us.
Click here for the interview in german, as published by BERLINER VERLAG.
DiEM25 condemns Aleksandar Vučić’s violent takedown of Serbian protesters
A wave of civic unrest engulfed Serbia amidst the Coronavirus crisis.
The immediate cause for the outbreak of the protests was Aleksandar Vučić announcing a new lockdown and movement ban, and blaming the spiking numbers of the ill and the deceased on “irresponsible citizens”.
In the past two months, since the state of emergency officially ended, the ruling parties held public rallies and elections, football games were organised with 20,000 supporters in the stadiums, factories worked normally, bars and nightclubs, mostly owned by the super-rich, were open, and the government gave false information on the numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Citizens finally took to the streets, as the only place left to voice their dissatisfaction not only over how Vučić (mis)handled the Covid-19 crisis, but against the 8 years of his government. This is the real cause for the current protest wave in Serbia.
Demonstrations that took place on July 7 and 8, were marked by strong police brutality and the dominance of small, but well-organised right-wing groups that incited the violence. People, who wanted to express their rightful protest in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and other Serbian cities, found themselves in the middle of an orchestrated fight, on the receiving end of police batons and tear gas.
Some of them even ended up in prison, even though they tried to prevent the violence. On the positive note, the third night of Serbian protests was peaceful and the protesters managed to single out the violent groups by chanting “Sit down”, disabling them to provoke the reaction from the Police. Among the various groups trying to take over the protests, it is yet to be seen if the energy will be directed in the right direction.
Miran Pogačar, an activist of the anti-eviction organization “Združena akcija Krov nad glavom“ (better known as simply “Krov”/”Roof”) and other social struggles, from students’ protests to workers’ strikes, was arrested in Novi Sad on Wednesday.
He is still incarcerated and awaiting indictment. Miran expressed popular demands at the protest, including demands for resignations of those responsible for the horrific epidemic situation and the overburdened healthcare system, permanent employment for the medical staff, and reemployment of the workers that have lost their jobs because of the crises. Later on, during the protest, he warned that right-wing groups related to the ruling party are trying to take over and are vandalizing the town. Not long afterward, he went missing and only hours later did the lawyers get the information that he was arrested.
Several progressive and leftist organisations and political parties in Serbia, including DiEM25 local groups in Belgrade and Novi Sad, are demanding the immediate release of Miran Pogačar, as well as the end of police brutality.
Dangerous escalation of violence in the streets of Serbian cities, and the ties between the police, the government and the right-wing hooligans that become more evident by the day, call for a strong and decisive reaction of the left on an international scale.
It was the EPP and Donald Tusk himself who supported Vučić ahead of the elections, in the same way they supported the Croatian conservative government (together with Ursula von der Leyen using the EU flag), they also bear responsibility for what is happening in the periphery of the EU. DiEM25 condemns the EU establishment that obviously still supports the current autocratic turn of politics all around Europe.
Stop the virus of police brutality! Freedom for Miran and all courageous activists and citizens in Serbia!
Photo credit: EPA – EFE/Andrej Cukic
DiEM25 vs ECB: A good day in our struggle to expose the weaponisation of the ECB against European democracy
The General Court of the European Union was wrong says Advocate General: the ECB cannot deny Europeans access to the #GreekFiles
This is not a mere legal opinion about things that happened in 2015.
This goes well beyond Greece and the illicit closure of its banks to overturn the OXI referendum and, thus, to impose further inhuman austerity upon a small European country.
This is a decision that could end the use of the ECB as an instrument for imposing upon European peoples austerity for the many and socialism for the oligarchy-without-frontiers.
This decision is particularly important now: As the pandemic subsides, the ECB will be used, once again, as an instrument by which to force Parliaments to accept a shift of the crisis’ costs from the few to the many.
Today, a small step was made in the struggle for democratising Europe. A small step that, however, could make a large difference.
Read on and join DiEM25’s struggle to build a transnational political revolution that ends the weaponisation of the EU’s institutions against the interests of the majority of Europeans everywhere.
In 2017, together with Member of the European Parliament Fabio De Masi (now German MP), Yanis Varoufakis, on behalf of DiEM25, filed a Freedom of Information (FOI) request before the ECB to make public the legal opinion it used to legitimise the imposition of capital controls on Greece in the summer of 2015. In addition, we launched our #GreeksFiles campaign to bring awareness to this case. As our request for transparency was ignored, in 2018 we took the ECB to court.
Yesterday, in a remarkable turn, Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, Priit Pikamäe, has stated that “the European Court of Justice has erred in judging the European Central Bank to deny access to the document in question.” Here you can read Pikamäe’s full legal opinion on the case.
A dubious central bank action that crushed the Greek economy and the country’s sovereignty
In June 2015, the newly-elected Greek government was locked in tense negotiations with its creditors– the ‘Troika’ composed by the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – doing what it had been voted in to do: renegotiate the country’s public debt, fiscal policy and reform agenda, and save its people from the hardship of the most crushing austerity programme in modern history.
The Troika knew they needed to make a drastic move to force the Greek government to capitulate. And that’s just what they did: through the ECB, they took action to force Greece’s banks to close, in order to force the Greek government – against its democratic mandate – to accept the country’s third ‘bailout’, together with new austerity measures and new reductions in national sovereignty.
But in their haste, their zeal to crush the Greek government’s resistance, the ECB feared their actions might be legally dubious. So, they commissioned a private law firm to examine whether those decisions were legal. The legal opinion of this law firm is contained in #TheGreekFiles.
When Mario Draghi was asked to release the legal opinion in question, he refused hiding behind ‘attorney-client privilege’. One of the foremost experts on European Law, Professor Andreas Fischer-Lescano, examined whether the ECB was right to refuse to release #TheGreekFiles. His detailed conclusion leaves no room for doubt: the ECB has no case for withholding from MEPs and the citizens of Europe the legal opinion the ECB secured (and paid for using your money) regarding its own conduct.
But in addition to the legal imperative: in today’s Eurozone, the power of the ECB to close a member-state’s banks violates every democratic principle. It also violates the ECB’s own aspiration, and charter obligation, to be independent and above political strategising.
The case is under consideration and the decision of the European Court is pending.
MeRA25 takes the Greek government to task
Upon learning about Pikamäe’s statement on the case, Secretary of MERA25 and DiEM25 co-founder, Yanis Varoufakis, filed the following questions to Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis:
- Do you agree that European citizens have the right to know whether it was legal for a private law firm (paid for with European citizen’s taxes) to advice on the suspension of liquidity in a EU member state’s banking system?
- Do you realise that the publication of this opinion strengthens the position of your government in view of the pressures that you will soon receive to accept a de facto 5th MoU?
- Will you support the legal case that German MP Fabio De Masi and myself have took to the European Court so that European citizens can see for themselves who planned the closure of our banks that resulted in capital controls during three months back in 2015?
The Advocate General at the European Court of Justice’s assessment of the case brings new hope not only as a potentially major step towards bringing transparency to the European Establishments, but also for Greece’s future. Crushed by inhumane and impossible to fulfil austerity measures, access to the #GreekFiles could result in a major victory for the country.
MeRA25’s MP Fotini Bakadima has stressed the importance of this turn in the case: “The Advocate General’s opinion issued yesterday is a significant step towards a more transparent future. All Europeans have the right to know the truth behind Mario Draghi’s decision to close the Greek banks in 2015. All citizens of the EU should and must know the motives behind any political and economic decisions of such magnitude.”
For a detailed account of the ECB’s actions in this case, and how it likely acted outside of its mandate, see our eight-page backgrounder.
DiEM25: Europe’s standard-bearer for Transparency
Since we began in 2016, DiEM25 has fought to make the case for transparency as the foundation of democracy. Our founding manifesto declares transparency to be the prerequisite to transform Europe and deliver our common project to the people. Our collaboration with WikiLeaks editor and DiEM25 Advisory Panel member Julian Assange is essential in our bid to support and defend the efforts of true champions of transparency.
On March 14, 2020, for the first time in history, Europeans were able to take a front seat in the meetings where their future is decided: DiEM25’s #EuroLeaks took Europeans inside the secretive, powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty where far-reaching decisions about all our lives are made.
#Euroleaks is a wake-up call to all politicians in Europe to serve the citizens of Europe again and to make them aware of all important decisions that affect them.
Because only radical transparency will help us democratise Europe and legitimise its institutions.
Please support DiEM25’s campaigns and actions to #LetLightIn our institutions by making a donation today.
*DiEM25 receives no public funds or government grants of any kind – we depend exclusively on our members’ financial support.