Our two week trip to Ireland (to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary) was an opportunity to try something I'd been wanting to try for a long time; cut myself off from all American news for couple of weeks and see how differently I view current events.
So I did just that. Instead of CNN and MSNBC I watched SkyNews and BBC and Irish TV and read Irish newspapers. As we drove through that lovely country I listened to Irish radio talk shows, which led me to my very first conclusion; Irish talk radio is to American talk radio what comic books are to fine literature. Irish talk show hosts are uncommonly well-informed as are the listeners who called in.
That last fact is due to them screening their callers for a measurable IQ before letting them on the air. They did not waste time letting just any dimwit rant about inconsequential BS, like where someone was or wasn't born. It was refreshing, turning talk radio into something more like a free-form seminar on the real pressing issues of the day.
And, when one of these Irish talk show hosts got a politician to come on their shows they had their facts in a row. I did not hear one Irish pol on any of these shows get away with pumping out talking points instead of answering the question posed. The host would simply not allow them to go onto the next subject until they answered the damn question. It got so intense in some cases that I almost (almost) felt sorry for the poor pol. I asked my wife, Sue, "Why do they even go on these shows and subject themselves to this kind of abuse?"
The answer of course was self-evident; either they put up with the interrogations or they didn't get any airtime at all. If only our own radio talkers were as .... oh hell, what am I saying. Never mind.
I should stop and explain here that Ireland in a fiscal mess. For it's size it's a monumental fiscal mess. It's already where the US is afraid it will be five years from now when all the fiscal hot air that been pumped into to keep our balloon aloft dissipates.
As a member of the European Union Ireland was used by the European Central Bank (ECB) and German multinational banks the same way Countrywide Funding treated American subprime borrowers. They flooded Ireland with cheap loan money figuring that, since the "Celtic Tiger" - Ireland's version of our dot.com bubble - was on a tear, the risk of lending people more money than they could possibly repay was a safe idea.
Of course it wasn't any safer there than it was here and, when the Celtic Tiger finally croaked, most of those loans went into default. (Homes with 300,000 euro loans were selling at auction for 60,000 euros for example.)
But there was no sympathy for Irish borrowers from the EU or the Germans. Rather than sucking it up and taking their own medicine by writing down those loans, they imposed a "restructuring" on the Irish so severe and so punitive that Irish economists have dubbed it a "second Treaty of Versailles [1]."
As we traveled the countryside, staying away from tourist areas and staying instead in mostly small Irish village-towns, I was struck by how well-informed the average Irish person was. Unlike Americans in similar small towns, the average Irish man or woman understood precisely what had happened to them, and who was responsible for it. They could cite chapter and verse on matters from EU trade policies, labor and wage laws, interest rate policies and banking practices that contributed to their latest "troubles."
They also could name the individual bankers and insurance company executives and industrialists and financiers, in Ireland and Europe, who made a bundle off their misery and got away with it. Private sector jobs were all but gone, with the official unemployment rate of 17%. Wage concessions had been forced on unions in "take it our leave" negotiations overseen by EU and ECB officials. When that did not balance the books for the bankers they are now going after public sector jobs and public sector unions. (Sound familiar?) With government spending whittled down to next to nothing, the public is being asked to fund now desperate charities through more fundraising efforts that I've ever seen in a country. Tin cups were rattled at us on every corner of every town or city we visited, asking already struggling citizens to share what little they now have.
Headlines in major Irish newspapers reflected their anger. These headlines were in just one day's Irish Times:
- Banks 'should share profits with suffering charities'
- ECB fat cats talk tough from their 1 billion eruo house of pain
- Puppets hope wordplay will hide truth that masters pull the strings
- Now lawyers need a 'bailout' as insurance fund closes
- From poster boy of the boom to owing millions
- Let's not forget human stories behind hoopla at 'distressed" property auctions
And if you think the US is the only country in the world cutting healthcare to its citizens, think again. The European model of universal healthcare is crumbling under the weight of aging population, cuts in government funding and the same kind of predatory pricing by medical/pharmaceutical complex we have here.
The Irish government is so broke (how broke are they Steve? ) They are so broke they are putting their three national airports up for sale to the highest bidders.
Now, if this were just Ireland, I would be just as sorry for the Irish people, but not all that alarmed. But Ireland is simply the most transparent of EU countries on fiscal life support. Ireland is the "I" in PIGS; Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Portugal is second right behind Ireland in the "one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel," category. Neither Portugal or Ireland can possibly repay what they owe to the ECB and its healthier member states. In fact one noted Irish economist has stated categorically that, come 2013 when the ECB's rescue package has to be repaid, Ireland will simply default. Portugal will follow, unless it jumps first.
"The ECB keeps telling us that a sovereign default would trigger disaster," the economist said on the radio. "They say the consequences for Ireland and EU would be catastrophic. But they can never tell us just what precisely would happen, why and how it would catastrophic. I don't think they know themselves. But we're all going to find out in 2013, because there's absolutely no way Ireland will be able to meet the demands they are making on us."
When I returned last Tuesday night to the US, and before I dove back into the information cesspool that American's call "news" these days (Lindsay who?,,, birthers what?) I considered what I'd learned during that hiatus that I didn't know before.
- There really are too many "disturbances in the Force." I already knew that capital markets as we have come to know them in the 20th century were under an unusual amount of stress. But I had no idea how deep and profound those problems are, and what they herald for the developed economies in the decades just ahead.
- One cannot pay close attention to the full panoply of fiscal disarray in these once dominant economies, and the almost total lack of success the wizards of high finance have had in getting them back into balance, without wondering if free-market capitalism has reached a historical tipping point.
- Has the capitalist model met its match, not against communism or socialism, but something far more powerful; complexity. Have they systems of finance, wage rage rates, laws, regulations, ecological impacts, job flight, immigration patterns, become too complex? So complex and so convoluted, they can no longer be managed by democratic political forces, but instead are gamed for profit at any social/ecological/political expense by a diminishing number of those with the means and motives to do so?
Finally, I was left wondering if those honestly trying their best to fix this train wreck in progress is talking about the most important and explosive reasons they can't get a grip on it: the "P-word." No one dares to utter it, yet it is fixing to deal mankind a final death blow unless it's addressed, and soon. That would be population growth. A billion Chinese and another billion Indians are now in the same line as the US and Europe demanding their share of the earth's finite resources; oil, copper, tin, rare earth minerals, food and clean drinking water. The earth simply cannot support 7 billion humans demanding even the most modest modern lifestyle. Immigration is not just an issue on our border. Europe is being flooded by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East because they're tired of waiting for their governments to better their lives.
That's what I got by cutting myself off from American-style "news." Which reaffirms for me the adage that "ignorance is bliss." You'll never hear that kind of talk from Brian Williams. General Electric was, and remains, a major player in the world of finance. They'd much rather we concentrate on the clowns in this circus, not the lions and tigers. Which explains Donald Trump, doesn't it.
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newsforreal.com
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