September 7, 2018. Thessaloniki, Greece. Public health workers expressing their anger against Greek govt. public health cuts scuffle with riot police as they try to enter parliament. Giannis Papanikos/ Press Association. All rights reserved.
The poet Fernando Pessoa taught us that no stupid idea can gain general acceptance unless some intelligence is mixed in with it. So how can it be that austerity appears to have been generally accepted? Objectively it is a bankrupt policy – the data is clear on this – and yet it continues to be part and parcel of our daily lives.
It happens that we now know what was already obvious for a while: that austerity is not only inadequate as a policy method to exit economic crises but that its continuation depends almost entirely on the inability of politicians to abandon the political capital thus far invested in advocating for it. It was true in Greece, in Portugal and it is true today everywhere in Europe. While the International Monetary Fund [IMF] now publicly condemns the austerity policies that the Troika of lenders – which incidentally included the IMF – forced down the throat of peripheral Eurozone economies, almost nothing has been done to turn away from them. Instead, we hear our leaders proclaim the end of the crisis as if we live in a black and white world which offers us simple binary options like: crisis/no crisis as if we were able to turn it on and off as we pleased.
