Power Systems (9 page)

James Madison made the same point, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich.
³¹
They would carry out what we these days call land reform. And that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce inequality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually proposed a vision for a city that would put in place what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this.

If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of “the wealth of the nation,” those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participating too much—voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASSACHUSETTS
(J
ANUARY
20, 2012)

Talk about the economic crisis in Europe and its impact on the United States. The euro zone, with seventeen countries, has a unitary monetary system, but the European Union itself has twenty-seven member countries.

 

It's pretty hard to explain what the European Central Bank (ECB) is doing except in terms of conscious class war. A pretty broad spectrum of economists, including those who are pretty conservative, recognize that the worst possible policy during a recession is austerity. You have to stimulate economies during a recession, not cause them to decline. But the European Central Bank is rigidly adhering to austerity programs, under mostly German influence. The U.S. Federal Reserve, at least in principle, has a dual mandate: one of them is to control inflation, the other is to maintain employment. They don't really do it, but that's the mandate. The European Central Bank has only one objective, to control inflation. It's a bankers' bank, nothing to do with the population. They have an inflation target of 2 percent, and you're not allowed to threaten that.
¹
In fact, there is no threat of inflation in Europe. But they insist on not carrying out any stimulus or anything like quantitative easing or other measures that might increase growth.

The effect is that the weaker countries in the European Union are never going to be able to get out of their debt under these policies. In fact, debt levels are getting worse. As you cut down growth, you cut down the possibility of debt repayment. Hence they sink deeper into misery. Under ECB policies, Greece and Spain, in particular, are being punished and driven down.

It's hard to think of a reason for this other than class war. The effect of the policies is to weaken welfare-state measures and to reduce the power of labor. That's class war. It's fine for the banks, for financial institutions, but terrible for the population.

 

How will this effect the United States, which is a major trading partner with Europe?

 

Not only is it a major trading partner, but U.S. banks are heavily invested in European institutions.
²
So yes, they may suffer from it, too. In fact, what's been happening is that there's been a flow of investor funds to the United States, to Treasury securities, which are regarded as a safe haven now, which has a mixed effect for the United States.
³
It tends over time to raise the value of the dollar and harm exports. So it's not good for a healthy economy. But, as usual, there are winners and losers. So far the banks are making out okay.

 

Economist Richard Wolff has been traveling around Europe. He said in an interview I did with him in New York that this German-driven economic policy “is accomplishing for Germany what Hitler tried and failed to achieve—a Europe whose dominant center is in Berlin.”
⁴

 

There's something to that. Ever since the economic recovery began in the postwar period, the European economy has been basically German-based. Germany has the strongest economy in the region. It remains a major manufacturing center and even an export center. It's the powerhouse of Europe. And all these policies just make it more powerful. On the other hand, they may be killing the goose that lays the golden egg, because they've relied pretty heavily on the export market of the euro zone. If that collapses, German industry will take a hit. But Wolff is basically right. As I said, in Greece it's particularly striking, because they fought really hard to try to free themselves from Hitler's domination.

 

Let's talk about Turkey, which has been trying for years, without success so far, to get into the European Union. A front-page
New York Times
article notes, “Charges Against Journalists Dim the Democratic Glow in Turkey.” Turkish human rights advocates say the crackdown on journalists “is part of an ominous trend…. The arrests threaten to darken the image of [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo
an], who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West.” According to this report, “There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists' Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China.”
⁵
One of those imprisoned is Nedim
ener, an award-winning journalist for his reporting on the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007.

 

Since you brought up irony, I should note, first of all, that this report in the
New York Times
has ample ironic connotations. What's going on in Turkey now is pretty bad. On the other hand, it doesn't begin to compare with what was going on in the 1990s. Then the Turkish state was carrying out a major terrorist war against the Kurdish population: tens of thousands of people killed, thousands of towns and villages destroyed, probably millions of refugees, torture, every atrocity you can think of.
⁶
The
Times
barely reported it. It certainly didn't report the fact that 80 percent of the weapons were coming from the United States and that Clinton was so supportive of the atrocities that in 1997, when they were peaking, he sent more arms to Turkey that single year than in the entire Cold War period combined.
⁷
That's pretty serious, but you won't find it in the
New York Times
. Its  correspondent in Turkey, Stephen Kinzer, barely reported anything. Not that he didn't know. Everybody knew.

So if the
Times
is upset about human rights violations, we can take the reaction with a grain of salt. Now reporters are willing to highlight the human rights violations because Turkey has been standing up to the United States. And that they don't like. Erdo
an's popularity in the Middle East does not make him popular in the United States. He's by far the most popular figure in the Arab world, whereas Obama's popularity is actually lower than Bush II's, which is quite a trick.
⁸

Turkey has taken a fairly independent role in world affairs, which the United States doesn't like at all. The country is increasing trade relations with Iran.
⁹
Turkey and Brazil carried out a major crime. They succeeded in getting Iran to agree to a program of transferring the low-enriched uranium out of Iran, which happened to virtually duplicate Obama's proposal.
¹⁰
In fact, Obama had actually written a letter to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, urging him to proceed with such a plan, mainly because Washington assumed that Iran would never agree, and then they could use this refusal as a diplomatic weapon and gain more international support for sanctions.
¹¹
But Iran did agree. There was great anger here, because any agreement might undermine the push for sanctions, which is what Obama was really after.

And there are other sources of U.S. hostility to Turkey. For example, Turkey, which is a NATO power, interfered with NATO's early efforts to carry out the bombing of Libya.
¹²
Washington didn't like that either.

So now it's appropriate to condemn human rights violations in Turkey. And they do exist. Actually, there was quite considerable progress in Turkey over human rights over the past ten years, but the last couple of years have been pretty unpleasant. There's been regression. Cynicism aside, it's correct to protest the abuses in Turkey.

 

In March 2011, Orhan Pamuk, a leading Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner, was fined for his statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians.”
¹³

 

I was in Turkey a year ago at a conference on freedom of speech. A large part of it was devoted to talks by Turkish journalists, describing their activities in trying to expose the Hrant Dink murder, the atrocity against the Armenians, the repression of the Kurds. These are very courageous people. It's not like a
New York Times
correspondent, who could write about these topics if he wanted to and would suffer no consequences. Maybe he would be censured by the editors, but these guys can be sent to jail and undergo torture. That's serious. But they talk openly and strikingly.

In fact, one of the most interesting things about Turkey—again, ironically—is that the European Union says that Turkey can't join because it doesn't meet our high standards of human rights.
¹⁴
Turkey is about the only country I know of in which leading intellectuals, journalists, academics, writers, professors, and publishers not only constantly protest the atrocities of the state but regularly carry out civil disobedience against it. I actually participated to an extent when I went there ten years ago. There's nothing like that in the West. They put their Western counterparts to shame. So if there are lessons to be learned, I think it's in the other direction. Frankly, I've never thought that Turkey would be admitted into the EU, mainly on racist grounds. I don't think Western Europeans like the idea of Turks walking around freely on their streets.

 

How do Turkish-Israeli relations influence Washington, with the 2010 Israeli commando raid in international waters on a Turkish ship killing nine Turks, one of whom was an American citizen?
¹⁵

 

Turkey was the only major country, certainly the only NATO country, to have protested very sharply against the U.S.-Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008–09.
¹⁶
And it was a U.S.-Israeli attack. Israel dropped the bombs, but the United States backed it, with Obama's approval.
¹⁷
Turkey came out very strongly in condemnation. In a famous incident in Davos at the World Economic Forum, Erdo
an spoke out strongly against the attack while Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, was onstage with him.
¹⁸
Of course, the United States didn't like that. Having cordial relations with Iran and condemning Israeli crimes does not make you a favored figure at Georgetown cocktail parties.