Jorge Amar & Scott Ferguson — Podemos & the Limits of the Neoliberal Order

In the wake of Syriza’s disappointing challenge to the Troika’s punishing austerity politics in the Eurozone, leftists around the globe are now turning their eyes, and hopes, to Podemos in Spain. Podemos grew out of the 15-M, or Los Indignados anti-austerity protests back in 2011. The organization took myriad local government seats after forming as an official political party in 2014. And as of the national parliamentary elections held in December of 2015, Podemos has emerged as a viable third-party counterforce to Spain’s historically two-party neoliberal government. During the recent elections, the ruling and conservative People’s Party (PP) lost 64 seats, while the opposing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) hemorrhaged 20 seats. Podemos, by contrast, earned 69 seats, coming in just 300,000 votes behind PSOE and securing roughly 20% of the votes within the Spanish parliament.

Commentators have dubbed Podemos’ upset of Spain’s two-party system a political earthquake, while the international left is characterizing the battle ahead as source of great hope and an opportunity to bring real change to Europe. Here, however, we dampen the leftist enthusiasm now surrounding Podemos, putting pressure on what we argue to be the party’s under-theorized and rather conservative program for economic change. Specifically, we offer a critique Podemos’ commitment to so-called “sound finance,” as well as the tax-and-spend liberalism upon which its proposed solution to Eurozone austerity is supposed to hinge. But we also suggest a more promising way forward: that Podemos join forces with the fifth-ranking Unidad Popular party. Unidad Popular’s primary economist has turned to the heterodox school of political economy known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), coming to see what Podemos takes to be economic truths regarding the Eurozone as neoliberal myths that should be overtly politicized and rejected as such. By collaborating with Unidad Popular, we conclude, Podemos stands to not only issue a serious threat Eurozone austerity, but also help spur the dismantlement of the neoliberal order on the whole.

This is a significant post worth reading in full. The fist part is about Spanish politics but the second half is about applying MMT to the Spanish economy. Bill Mitchell seems to be making an impact there.

flassbeck economics
Podemos & the Limits of the Neoliberal Order 
Jorge Amar & Scott Ferguson

telesur — Podemos Walks Away from 'Incompatible' Deal with Socialists

Spain could go without a government for several more months after talks broke down when Podemos, or We Can, canceled negotiations with the Socialist Party on Wednesday.…

telesur
Podemos Walks Away from 'Incompatible' Deal with Socialists

Bill Mitchell — Spain in limbo but has not rejected austerity

Summary of the fault lines built into the structure of the EZ. The only practical way to reject austerity is either to change the rules, or for countries to exit the zone and return to issuing their own currencies.

So when a political party claims to be anti-austerity but then supports the nation remaining within the monetary union with all the pernicious and unworkable rules that go with that, then we know the political leaders are lying and trying to pretend to be progressive rather than neo-liberal (lite or otherwise).

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Spain in limbo but has not rejected austerity
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Alejandro López — Podemos recruits former chief of Armed Forces to run in Spanish election

Podemos even worse than Syriza as a party of the left?

Podemos’ decision to offer itself up as a political platform for NATO and the Spanish army to play a public role in political life is a warning as to its utterly reactionary role….

Whilst General Rodríguez was overseeing four F-18 fighters, one Boeing 707 refuelling plane, a frigate, a submarine and one surveillance plane in Libya, then-unknown academics Pablo Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón were criticizing “humanitarian” intervention and “those supposedly on the left” who voted for it.

The days in which Iglesias and Errejón tried to exploit anti-war sentiment and railed against the Spanish army’s bloody history in their local TV programme La Tuerka are long gone, however.

Three years after the Libya war, they founded Podemos along with a group of former Stalinists, academics and the Pabloite Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anticapitalist Left). The latter had supported the NATO intervention, calling for an “unconditional supply of weapons to the [Libyan] rebels.”

In Catalonia, Podemos is now in coalition with the Greens (ICV), who denounced opposition to the Libyan war as “infantile anti-Americanism.”
Iglesias’ alignment on the general staff is a political indictment of all the bankrupt middle class organizations who helped create this reactionary, anti-Marxist populist party.

Podemos was in particular closed aligned with the Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party in Greece. Since the Syriza government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras came to power this year promising to end austerity, and then implemented new savage austerity against the workers in Greece, there can be no question that Iglesias would carry out similar right-wing policies in Spain. Its populist rhetoric was merely a political cover for utterly anti-working class politics.…

WSWS
Podemos recruits former chief of Armed Forces to run in Spanish election

Alejandro López

Mehreen Khan — Europe braces itself for a revolutionary Leftist backlash after Greece

A pre-revolutionary fervour is sweeping Europe.

“The atmosphere is a little similar to the time after 1968 in Europe. I can feel, maybe not a revolutionary mood, but something like widespread impatience”.

These were the words of European council president Donald Tusk, 48 hours after Greece’s paymasters imposed the most punishing bail-out measures ever forced on a debtor nation in the eurozone’s 15-year history.

“I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion”
Donald Tusk

A former Polish prime minister and a politician not prone to hyperbole, Tusk’s comments revealed Brussels’ fears of a bubbling rebellion across the continent.

“When impatience becomes not an individual but a social experience of feeling, this is the introduction for revolutions” said Tusk.

“I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion.”….

I'm betting the Right to win this, not the Left. There is no Left. It's a myth. The Right is real and they have the swastika tattoos to prove it. Just (half) kidding.

The Telegraph
Europe braces itself for a revolutionary Leftist backlash after Greece
Mehreen Khan

Looking to Fight Austerity by Greening Spain — Sharmini Peries interviews Robert Polin

Video and transcript

Triple Crisis
Looking to Fight Austerity by Greening Spain

Sharmini Peries interviews Robert Polin, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI)

James Petras — The Radical Reconfiguration of Southern European Politics: The Rise of the Non Leftist Left

Epilogue

Currently, the best example of the opportunism and bankruptcy of the NLL is found in the successful Mayor-elect of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, whose victory was hailed by Podemos as the ‘great victory for the people’ at recent celebration.

For her part, Mayor-elect Carmena has wasted no time repudiating all ‘five basic emergency reforms’ promised during the elections. In a press conference, the so-called ‘progressive Mayor of Madrid’ announced (with a cynical grin) that ‘promise number one’ - a public bank - was no longer needed because she was satisfied to work with the private banking oligarchy. She refused to pursue ‘promise number two’ - to provide subsidies for electricity, water and gas for poor families cut off from those services, claiming such support was too early and could wait until winter.

Regarding Podemos ‘promise number three’ - a debt moratorium, Carmena insisted that “we will keep paying, for now”. On ‘promise number four’ favoring public over private contractors for municipal contracts, Carmena reversed the position: “We can’t change right away”.

Carmena even repudiated ‘promise number five’ - to immediately implement a summer meals program for poor children, insisting that she would rely on the inadequate programs of far right predecessor.

Moreover, Mayor-elect Carmena went even further, staffing her administration with far-right holdovers from the previous government to strategic policy-making positions. For example, she appointed Carmen Roman, a former Director General of the far right Prime Minister Aznar, as Senior Executive of Madrid. She defended these reactionary decisions claiming that she was looking for “technocrats who are the best professional administrations”. Indeed, Carmen Roman had implemented mass firing of public workers and the dismantling of social programs in the ‘best professional’ manner possible!

Carmena further betrayed her Podemos electorate by insisting she looked forward to working with the hard right Prime Minister Rajoy and flatly rejected the idea of promoting a progressive alternative!

In less than one week, the euphoria over the victory of Podemos backed candidates has been dissipated by these acts of cynical opportunism: the non-leftist left has betrayed its electorate, from the very start!

James Petras Website
The Radical Reconfiguration of Southern European Politics: The Rise of the Non Leftist Left
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — Germany faces impossible choice as Greek austerity revolt spreads

EU elites who forced a currency experiment on countries not ready for it have only themselves to blame

Eurocrats, when you lose AE-P you have a problem. But he is just telling it like it is. The eurocrats are in denial and their project is collapsing. Unlike the US and UK, they don't have a domestic security force to enforce it.

The kicker.

Mr Varoufakis is trying to limit the damage, praising Mrs Merkel as the "most astute politician" in Europe, and Mr Schauble as the "only European politician with intellectual substance" - a wounding formulation for the others. He has called on Germany to cast off self-doubt and assume its roll as Europe's benevolent hegemon, almost as if he were evoking the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire when pious German emperors stood as guarantors for Christendom. 

This is the only pitch that will work. Angela Merkel has risen above her narrow East German outlook and her fiscal platitudes of the early crisis to emerge as the soul-searching Godmother of Europe and the last credible defender of its unity. But even Mrs Merkel can be pushed too far.

Yanis really thinks that?

The Telegraph
Germany faces impossible choice as Greek austerity revolt spreads
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph

Robert Hunziker — Revolutions Start in the Streets!

Suddenly, the “Syriza Virus” is circulating throughout Europe. The “people” have had enough austerity crammed down their throats. They’re in the streets! 

Headlines depict bitterness: “Austerity Anger Sweeps from Greece to Spain as Hundreds of Thousands March Through Madrid in Support of Fledgling Radical Leftist Party,” Daily Mail, January 31, 2015. The “March for Change” converged around Madrid’s Cibeles fountain. People are fed up, tossing their support to a pony-tailed jean-wearing charismatic leader named Pablo Iglesias, the Podemos Party candidate, a 36-year-old political science professor.…

The target of this continent-wide discontent is neoliberalism’s self-serving paternalistic policies of privatization, reduced government, and dependence upon the “free market” as the arbiter of socio-economic justice but it’s turning sour because so few attain millions at the direst expense of way too many. Given enough time, people catch on. 

Along those lines, neoliberalism has become an “occupying force” throughout the world, to wit: Neoliberalism’s motif consists of (1) assault on the state, in favor of the market, (2) on politics, in favor of economics, and (3) on political parties, in favor of corporations. Singularly, neoliberalism brings in its wake a hard-hearted “corporate state” sans nation/state allegiance, no grounding with the people. 

As follows, people take to the streets. They flock to the streets by the hundreds of thousands. It is the French Revolution redux but without the pitchforks, stones, and sticks.…

As it happens, free market neoliberalism is all about control, controlling the people, exporting wages to the lowest overseas bidders, moving facilities offshore to avoid governmental regulations, diminishing unions, privatizing state assets, cutting social programs, austerity, austerity, and more austerity whilst privatizing everything in sight. The upshot is lame economic performance as sector after sector of workers are cutback, reduced to rubble.…

Counterpunch
Revolutions Start in the Streets!
Robert Hunziker

Jon Queally — Thomas Piketty: Strong Anti-Austerity Parties Are Just What Europe Needs

The prominent French economist Thomas Piketty says the rise of new the anti-austerity political parties in southern Europe, including Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, are just what the European economy needs in order to push back against the tide of regressive economic policies that have punished the continent's most vulnerable people at the behest of the wealthy and powerful. 

In an hour-long interview set to air later this month with Pablo Iglesias, the de facto leader of Podemos, Piketty argues that the increasing popularity and political power of the leftwing populist parties—which have built their base of support around a rejection of austerity measures—is "good news for Europe."…

In a boon to Podemos, Piketty has agreed to act as an economic advisor to the party, which Iglesias said was "an honor" and would surely benefit their overall economic thinking. 

Speaking of Syriza in Greece, Piketty said that though portions of their economic plan remain murky, "You have to offer them support because they want to build a democraticEurope, which is what we all need."…

Common Dreams
Thomas Piketty: Strong Anti-Austerity Parties Are Just What Europe Needs

Jon Queally

Don Quijones — It’s Official: Spain is Unraveling

The most popular party in the poll was Podemos, a stridently left-wing political movement founded just at the beginning of this year….

The fledgling party also has the luxury of being able to espouse policies and strategies that sharply mirror the demands of a long-ignored, long-disenfranchised electorate. Those policies include a redistribution of wealth, the right to a basic income, a cap on executive salaries, an independent audit of the country’s public debt, increased transparency of political party funding, more stringent restrictions on political lobbying, stronger government support for SMEs and R&D-intensive industries, higher penalties for tax evasion, the creation of a national bank for investment and the renationalization of strategic sectors such as telecommunications, utilities and the country’s formerly public-owned savings banks [Spanish speakers can read the party's full manifesto by clicking here]. 

Such promises – whether realistic or not – can be extremely seductive to a public sharply embittered by a two-party system that long threw them overboard. That’s not to say that Podemos can be expected to turn their current popularity into an electoral victory – in Spain, as in most managed democracies, the electoral system is rigged in the favor of the incumbent parties. Nonetheless, if it continues to capture the hearts and minds of the disaffected – in a country where the disaffected are now the overwhelming majority – it could well hammer the final nail into the country’s two-party system. As such, the result in the next elections would be a very weak coalition government at best or a hung parliament at worst – and just at the very moment when Spain’s richest region, Catalonia, is itching to break free.

Wolf Street
It’s Official: Spain is Unraveling
Don Quijones