Από το http://www.matrix24.gr/2016/12/giati-prepi-i-ellada-na-epistrepsi-amesos-sti-drachmi/
"...Γιατί λοιπόν να μην επιστρέψουμε, και μάλιστα γρήγορα - γρήγορα, στη δραχμή; Η εγκατάλειψη του δομικά προβληματικού ευρώ θα έχει πληθώρα θετικών επιδράσεων στη χώρα μας. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα τερματιστεί το νομοθετικό χάος, η πολυνομία. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ τα δικαστήρια θα βγάζουν γρήγορα αποφάσεις. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ η δικαιοσύνη θα λειτουργεί αποτελεσματικά. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα εξαλειφθεί η γραφειοκρατία, η δημόσια διοίκηση θα υπηρετεί αποτελεσματικά τον πολίτη. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ η χώρα θα αποκτήσει κτηματολόγιο (είμαστε η μοναδική χώρα στην Ευρώπη χωρίς κτηματολόγιο). Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα τερματιστούν τα ρουσφέτια. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα έχουμε αξιοκρατία, μόνον οι καλύτεροι θα στελεχώνουν το δημόσιο. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα σταματήσει η πρακτική του “μέσου”, του ρουσφετιού και η αναζήτηση πολιτικής βοήθειας για διάφορα ζητήματα. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα μπει τέλος στα «φακελάκια». Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ τα σκουπίδια θα μαζεύονται από τους δρόμους και θα συγκεντρώνονται σε ειδικούς χώρους. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα εφαρμόζονται οι νόμοι. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ η χώρα θα αποκτήσει πολεοδομικό και χωροταξικό σχεδιασμό και θα τερματιστεί το σημερινό χάος. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα πάψουν πρακτικές όπως νομιμοποίηση αυθαιρέτων. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα τερματιστεί η κακοδιαχείριση και οι σπατάλες στο δημόσιο. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ τα Πανεπιστήμια θα αναβαθμιστούν. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ τα φροντιστήρια και η παραπαιδεία θα τερματιστούν. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα περιοριστεί η φοροδιαφυγή. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αποκτήσουμε ένα δίκαιο φορολογικό σύστημα που όλοι θα συμβάλουν σύμφωνα με τις δυνατότητές τους. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ η χώρα θα αποκτήσει στρατηγικό μακροπρόθεσμα σχεδιασμό. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα γίνουν επενδύσεις. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αποκτήσουμε νέα παραγωγικό μοντέλο. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αυξηθούν οι εξαγωγές. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αντιμετωπιστεί η υπογεννητικότητα. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αντιμετωπιστούν οι μεγάλες δαπάνες για τις συντάξεις. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα επιστρέψουν οι χιλιάδες νέοι που μετανάστευσαν στο εξωτερικό. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα μειωθεί η ανεργία και θα αυξηθεί η απασχόληση. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα τερματιστούν ο κομματισμός και η ευνοιοκρατία. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα αποκατασταθεί η λειτουργία των τραπεζών και θα διοχετεύουν και πάλι χρήματα στην πραγματική οικονομία. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ θα σβήσει το μίσος και ο διχασμός στην πολιτική ζωή. Με τη δραχμή ΑΜΕΣΩΣ οι θεσμοί θα λειτουργούν αποτελεσματικά. Πέραν αμφιβολίας με τη δραχμή η χώρα θα αποκτήσει μια νέα ελπιδοφόρα στρατηγική. Και στο τέλος της ημέρας δεν διακινδυνεύουμε και πολλά. Μετά από όσα έχουμε ζήσει, πόσο χειρότερα μπορούν να γίνουν τα πράγματα;"
“Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything Better than you.”— song from Annie Get Your Gun
The conventional wisdom is that democracy
is the best form of government. As the imperialist demagogue Winston
Churchill, put it, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except for all the others that have been tried.” But such
conventional wisdom comes by default. No one has ever offered any
evidence in support of it. In fact, no one even knows what such evidence
could be. No established criteria exist for the comparative adjectives
worst, worse, bad, good, better, and best when they are applied to
governments.
Furthermore, that democracy is the best form of government has not
always even been the conventional wisdom. Plato, who founded his Academy
in Athens around 400 BCE, where democracy is said to have originated,
writes, “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy.” And at least
some of those who wrote the American Constitution in the 1700s were well
aware of democracy’s pitfalls and that no democracy had endured for any
length of time. John Adams writes, “Remember, democracy never lasts
long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Despite their
knowledge, the Constitution’s writers persisted, believing that they
could build a nation that avoided the faults that had destroyed earlier
democracies. But they were wrong!
In fact, no genuine democracy has ever existed. The citizens of no
nation have ever governed themselves. Lincoln’s “of the people, by the
people, and for the people” is pure bombast. What has passed for
democracy has always been some form of representational oligarchy. But
no one can represent two different ideologies at once. Even the word
‘democracy’ has never been adequately defined. If you read the Wikipedia
article, you will find numerous different forms of government
described, all of which are named democracies but differentiated by a
qualifying word. There is representative democracy, constitutional
democracy, people’s democracy, etc. As George Orwell says, “It is almost
universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising
it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it
is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if
it were tied down to any one meaning.” Talk about an unqualified
democracy is nonsense.
Democracy’s weaknesses are well known. Electorates are poorly
educated and inadequately informed. Politicians are corrupt. People are
diverse; diversity leads to factions; factions are combative; the
combativeness requires a resolution; oppression resolves it. As Mahatma
Gandhi understood, “The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to
be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires a change of heart.” As
present day India demonstrates, changes in heart seem to be impossible
to achieve.
Between the two world wars, two Italians, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano
Mosca, claimed that democracy was an illusion that served only to mask
oligarchic rule. They claimed that oligarchy is the result of apathy and
disagreements among common people as opposed to the drive, initiative,
and unity of those who really control society. Pareto’s and Mosca’s
error is that they defined the oligarchy as ‘elite,’ and instead of
empirically discovering what characteristics these people share, ideal
characteristics are attributed to them. Such thinkers seem always to
believe that those they believe rule are a select group with a certain
ancestry, higher intellect, and wealth whereas if the characters of
those in the ruling class were identified empirically, it would have
been discovered that they are in reality egomaniacal, shallow, greedy,
unimaginative, uncaring, and grossly immoral. Such people never perform
good deeds. They are not the best and the brightest, but the worst and
the dullest. Original ideas are not a product of their status quo attitudes. See my piece, “The Psychopathic Criminal Enterprise Called America.”
Pareto and Mosca are right, however, in attributing superior
organizational skills to the ruling class, skills which are especially
useful in gaining political power.
But even the oligarchic democracies described in the Wikipedia
article once gave a better appearance of rule “by the people” than they
do now. Elections were held, ballots were counted, and the winners took
office. Well-organized minorities are now unwilling to accept elected
governments. The results of elections are merely rejected by the losers.
I have written about it in a previous piece: “Demented Democracy.”
When this tendency began is uncertain, but it was certainly given a
boost when the United States and its Western allies rejected the results
of the election held in Palestine on January 25, 2006. The election was
encouraged by the United States and its allies. They admitted that it
was not fraudulent. Yet they rejected the result when Hamas rather than
Fatah prevailed. The rejection exposed the West’s claim that it promotes
and protects democratic movements as a lie. The West was only
interested in the outcome. When the result was not what it favored or
expected, that the result was determined democratically was irrelevant.
If the great defender of democracy could turn its back on a valid
democratic election, so could anyone else. Now the rejection of election
results is a common practice. Egypt, Thailand, Turkey, Syria, Ukraine
are well known examples.
In the countries where this is happening, those who lose elections
are easily provoked into public demonstrations in attempts to foster
regime change. Sometimes they succeeds; sometimes they don’t! But they
always cause conflict. And even if regime changes occur, the regimes
that come into power are not always the ones sought by the
demonstrators. Just look at what happened in Egypt.
Egyptians began demonstrating in Tahrir Square and elsewhere on
January 25, 2011, demanding that President Mubarak be removed from
office. The demonstrations brought about the government’s fall. Mubarak
was imprisoned. Elections were held, a Constitution was written by the
winning followers of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohammed Morsi prevailed.
But the unwillingness of many urban Egyptians as well as many of the
Mubarak government’s elite to accept the results of the election brought
the anti-democratic, repressive military back in full force, likely
destroying the prospect of democracy in Egypt for some time. President
Morsi and other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were rounded up and
arrested. Egypt’s Monopoly gameboard has a square on it that says, “Win
an election. Go straight to jail.” Not only was the revolution undone,
tyranny follows. The consequence of this tendency of peoples to reject
the outcomes of elections is bizarre. This attempt to bring about better
government produces government which is worse! Of course, similar
events can occur in Ukraine and elsewhere.
You see, a fundamental function of government everywhere is conflict
resolution. But the oligarchic democracies the world has become
accustomed to, those governments comprised of factions, cannot resolve
conflicts. When an election is a contest between people representing
contrary factions, unless one faction prevails in all contests, conflict
in government is inevitable. The elections exacerbate the conflicts.
Fundamental factional views cannot be compromised. Even when possible,
compromises between those who want to do something and those who want to
do nothing always result in ineffective policies which the factions can
then use against one another. “Inadequate spending” becomes “wasteful
spending,” for instance. Thanks to institutions like the Kochacola
Court, these fundamental conflicts persist decade after decade. When
Lincoln emancipated the slaves, he merely transformed the concept of
slavery into the concept of racism. The people who were once enslaved
were evermore to be considered as second class human beings. Separation
of the parties or the oppression of one of them becomes the only
solution to such fundamental conflicts. Government allowed people to
oppress the blacks Lincoln freed to create a semblance of unity. Egypt’s
military rulers are oppressing the Muslim Brotherhood for the same
purpose. When governments can’t resolve conflicts, the conflicts are
hidden by oppression.
The practices that nation’s use to stir the witches’ cauldron to
bring about regime change are childish tit for tat games. Anything one
government can do, another can do too. The practices do nothing more
that generate conflict. When the tit for tat becomes the rat a tat tat
of machine guns, we will all pay the price in pounds of flesh and
gallons of blood. And absolutely nothing will ever be better for it.
Generating conflict is dumb! Those who start wars often lose them.
The advocates of democracy who believe they can make things better by
rejecting the results of elections make even our oligarchic democracies
dumber than they already are. They are then undone by the emergence of
tyranny. The well known history of democracy, which our ruling
oligarchies have ignored, then repeats itself. Time marches on a
treadmill.
Thanks to the proliferation of communications devices, disillusion
with political leaders is spreading. In the United States, the approval
ratings of government are dismal. There is a general dissatisfaction
with the ruling class across much of Europe. The so-called “Spring”
exhibits the disillusion in the Arab world. Disillusion is growing in
India, Japan, and Turkey. Never has the world seen such disillusionment.
No institutions have emerged to dissipate it. The ruling class is under
fire almost everywhere; yet it is completely effete. The danger is that
it will everywhere revert to tyrannical policies as it has throughout
history. If the “change of heart” that Gandhi mentions was ever needed,
it is needed now. John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy
and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After
serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a
university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has
published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals
and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of
guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.
The original source of this article is Global Research
The Polish-born sociologist is skeptical about the possibilities for political change
Zygmunt Bauman has just celebrated his 90th birthday and
taken two flights from his home in the northern British city of Leeds to
get to an event in Burgos, northern Spain.
He admits to being tired as
we begin the interview, but he still manages to express his ideas calmly
and clearly, taking his time with each response because he hates giving
simple answers to complex questions.
Since developing his theory of
liquid modernity in the late 1990s – which describes our age as one in
which “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until
further notice” – he has become a leading figure in the field of
sociology.
His work on inequality and his critique of what he sees as
the failure of politics to meet people’s expectations, along with a
highly pessimistic view of the future of society, have been picked up by
the so-called May 15 “Indignant” movement in Spain – although he has repeatedly highlighted its weaknesses.
Born in Poland in 1925, Bauman’s parents fled to the Soviet Union
following the German invasion in 1939.
In 1968, after he was stripped of
his post as a teacher and expelled from the Communist Party along with
thousands of other Jews in the wake of the Six-Day War, he left for the
United Kingdom, taking up a post at Leeds University where he is now
Emeritus Professor of Sociology.
His work has been awarded numerous
international prizes, among them Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award, in
2010.
He has outlined his pessimistic world view in books such as 2014’s Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All?,
which argues that the world is paying a high price for the neoliberal
revolution that began in the 1980s and that wealth has not trickled down
to the rest of society.
In Moral Blindness, published last
year, he and co-author Leonidas Donskis warn about the loss of community
in our increasingly individualistic world.
QUESTION. You have described inequality as a “metastasis.” Is democracy under threat?
ANSWER. We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis
of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not
just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to
do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what
needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the
hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but
politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off.
People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t
keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis:
it’s a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic
institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of
interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of
democratic institutions.
Q. In which direction is the pendulum that you describe between freedom and security swinging at the moment?
A. These are two values that are tremendously difficult to reconcile.
If you want more security, you’re going to have to give up a certain
amount of freedom; if you want more freedom, you’re going to have to
give up security. This dilemma is going to continue forever. Forty years
ago we believed that freedom had triumphed and we began an orgy of
consumerism. Everything seemed possible by borrowing money: cars, homes…
and you just paid for it later. The wakeup call in 2008 was a bitter
one, when the loans dried up. The catastrophe, the social collapse that
followed hit the middle classes particularly hard, dragging them into a
precarious situation where they remain: they don’t know if their company
is going to merge with another and they will be laid off, they don’t
know if what they have bought really belongs to them… Conflict is no
longer between classes, but between each person and society. It isn’t
just a lack of security, but a lack of freedom.
Q. You say that progress is a myth, because people no longer believe the future will be better than the past.
A. We are in a period of interregnum, between a time when we had
certainties and another when the old ways of doing things no longer
work. We don’t know what is going to replace this. We are experimenting
with new ways of doing things. Spain tried questioning things through the May 15 (15M) movement,
when people took over public spaces, arguing, trying to replace
parliamentary procedures with a kind of direct democracy. This hasn’t
lasted long. Austerity policies will continue, nobody could stop them,
but they could still be relatively effective in finding new ways to do
things.
Q. You have argued that the likes of 15M and the global
Occupy movement know “how to clear the way, but not how to create
something solid.”
A. People set aside their differences for a while in the public
squares for a common goal. If that goal is negative, about getting angry
with someone, there is more chance of success. In a way it could have
been an explosion of solidarity, but explosions are very powerful and
short-lived.
Q. You also believe that by their nature, there is no room for leadership in rainbow coalitions.
A. It is precisely because such movements lack leaders that they can
survive, but it is also precisely because they lack leaders that they
cannot convert their sense of purpose into action.
Q. In Spain, the 15M movement has helped create new political forces.
A. Changing one party for another will not solve the problem. The
problem is not that the parties are wrong, but that they don’t control
things. Spain’s problems are part of a global problem. It’s a mistake to
think you can solve things internally.
Q. What do you think about the Catalan independence project?
A. I think we’re still following the principles of Versailles, when
the idea of each nation’s right to self rule was established. But that’s
a fiction in today’s world, when there are no more homogeneous
territories. Today, every society is just a collection of diasporas.
People join the societies to which they are loyal and pay their taxes,
but at the same time, they do not want to give up their identity. The
connection between where you live and identity has been broken. The situation in Catalonia,
as in Scotland or Lombardy, is a contradiction between tribal identity
and citizenship. They are Europeans, but they don’t want to talk to
Brussels via Madrid, but via Barcelona. The same logic is emerging in
almost every country. We are still following the same principles
established at the end of World War I, but there have been many changes
in the world.
Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social
media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is
dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the
social networks are the new opium of the people?
A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are
born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But
communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What
the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a
community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a
network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you
wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the
important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a
result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our
individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the
internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you
need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you
find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction
with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after
being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a
self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about
talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t
teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But
most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons
wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the
only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only
things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are
very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.
