by Victor
Grossman
In a recent
news video I watched people pushing and shoving at a bank entrance. I
immediately recalled another scene, also with people pushing at a
bank entrance. In the older scene people looked eager and gleeful,
pushing so hard, I believe, that one man's rib was broken. In the
recent pictures they looked very grim. Uncannily, the two events were
exactly twenty-five years apart to the day: July 1, 1990 in Berlin
and July 1, 2015 in Athens. And strangely, despite the
quarter-century lapse and differing expressions, they were related,
and in both cases one man was a major actor:
Wolfgang
Schäuble
Wolfgang
Schäuble (pronounced Shoy-bleh), West Germany's Interior Minister in
1989-1990 when the German Democratic Republic went down the drain,
played a central role in welding the pipes. Four months after the
Berlin Wall was opened, when the eastern sister of his Christian
Democratic Union won out in the first open East German elections, he
produced, after two and a half exhausting months together with an
overly willing, later well-rewarded eastern yes-man, an 800-page
Unification Treaty.
Its first
result was the switch from GDR currency to the West Mark, the
yearned-for dream of millions of East Germans, to whom it represented
fashionable western consumer goods, free world-wide travel - and the
feeling, at long last, that as Germans they too would be a factor of
strength and respect, to be looked up to in the world.
Their eager
rush to the banks, so different from the sad, angry elder men in
Greece who later hoped for some sorely-needed Euros, was caused only
by a wish to be among the first to get and own the new currency.
After a wild
night of joyfully dancing on cars and waving flags, the next day saw
a consumer run on newly-stocked shops - for the fanciest cars, the
latest electronics, hitherto unavailable books, from Leon Trotsky to
Stephen King, and maybe, if no one was looking, a sample or two from
the sudden rash of porno magazines.
The
Privatization Fund ("Treuhand")
On that very
same day a new institution was set up: the Privatization Fund
("Treuhand"), a model for what Schäuble has now forced
down the throats of the Greek people. But the effects of this Fund
soon hit like a battering ram. Former trade partners to the East
could no longer afford products now payable only in very hard
currency. At home the local GDR products were spurned for years - and
were suddenly almost unavailable, while competition from the West was
overwhelming.
To guarantee
against any "populist" solutions like dividing up shares in
the nationally-owned industry among the population, its former
owners, as some had suggested, the Privatization Fund made sure that
it was all either sold to private owners or shut down; by September
the lights had been turned off in a third of the East German economy.
West German competitors or speculators from everywhere but East
Germany bought factories for a song, made a quick buck, then removed
any machinery worth selling and shut down. East German industry,
calculated to be worth 1.2 trillion marks in January 1990, and in
September, even by the biased Privatization Fund, still at 600
billion, was somehow hexed by that fund, until it closed down in
1994, to a weird deficit of minus 250 billion.
This despite
some true gems like the Baltic coast shipbuilding industry, an
especially modern new steel plant or a heating equipment factory in
East Berlin, worth an estimated 68 million plus liquid assets of 150
million and valuable real estate, which went to a shady speculator
for two million and was soon shut down. Or the company which
developed the first Chlorofluorocarbon-free, climate-friendly
refrigerators, a possible source of billions, but quickly axed by
West German competitors.
Within
twenty months 3700 plants were shuttered, their work force cut from
4.1 million to 1.24 million. Jobless rates soared and that eager
early buying rush leveled off. Of course the kindergartens,
libraries, music, hobby and sport clubs, well-staffed medical clinics
and seaside or lakeside vacation homes, so typical of GDR factories
but not productive, were the first to disappear.
East Germany
is still well behind West Germany in full-time job rates, wage
levels, even pension rates. Many towns and whole areas are still
relatively barren, with young people off to job chances in the West.
But with Germany as a whole profiting from its trade advantages, it
has been possible to squeeze past catastrophe and keep at least a
fair section of the East Germans more or less satisfied.
Key aims
of European Union 45 years ago
Schäuble
and Germany's bosses couldn't be more satisfied. The attempt at
socialism, despite its many blunders with many successes, had been
choked to death. Krupp-Thyssen, Siemens, Bayer, BASF and the Deutsche
Bank could move back to where they had been ejected 45 years earlier
and expand from there.
Also
achieved were key aims of the European Union, whose earliest
founders, OSS boss William Donovan, CIA boss Allen Dulles, West
German Chancellor Adenauer and Winston Churchill, wanted not simply
"the union of Europe as a whole" but, as Churchill
stipulated, "the liberation of the nations behind the Iron
Curtain."
Despite many
fine words, Schäuble's visions had little to do with "human
rights." An unusually frank fellow Cabinet minister accused him,
then Interior Minister in charge of the police force, of trying to
turn a "state based on justice" into a "state based on
government monitoring and surveillance... reducing all basic human
rights to a fictitious right to security." Others recalled
charges against the secret police in the GDR and spoke of his plans
as "Stasi 2.0."
Schäuble,
unperturbed, might have been fully satisfied at the amazing success
in defeating the Communists - and any socialist ideas. But nine days
after GDR annexation was finalized on October 3 1990 two bullets
fired by a mentally deranged man paralyzed him from his waist down,
forcing the use of a wheelchair. Nine years later he was exposed for
illegally accepting secret envelopes with large bribes for his party
from a notorious weapons-dealer. But, always tough, he defied the
consequences of both events and remained powerful.
Hopes of
becoming chancellor were dashed but he came back, first as powerful
Minister of Interior and in 2009, even bigger, as Minister of
Finance. Working closely with Angela Merkel, he keeps pushing for
wage and job uncertainty in the labor market, keeping German exports
strong, and step by step achieving central power in the European
Union, with Merkel as a sort of motherly "good cop" (the
concealed firearm only rarely visible) while Schäuble, the bad cop
and main spokesman for ruinous pressures on southern Europe only
occasionally used a bitter, sardonic sarcasm to augment his brutal
message.
With German
domination within the European Union ever clearer, and most of what
had once been Yugoslavia subordinated, several goals remained very
much on the agenda.
EU goals
today
The EU must
move ever closer to the Russian borders in Estonia, Latvia, Poland,
Rumania, if possible Georgia, Azerbaijan and above all the Ukraine -
with the military might of NATO close behind. Any allies were
welcome, even swastika-marked armed hate groups based in Lvov and
Kiev. And who could say what might someday be further possible?
Secondly,
any attempt at independence, any move towards a progressive or, God
help us, some socialist solution to the growing crisis lurking just
below the surface of the European economy, must be halted in its
tracks. This had already been accomplished in Cyprus. The victory of
Syriza in January proved a far greater threat. If the ruinous
austerity measures imposed on Greece with the help of a corrupt
government were resisted by this new force and it achieved any
success, the danger of contagion was alarming.
It was clear
from the start that Schäuble wanted not compromises but Syriza's
total capitulation, indeed, its removal from office.
Recent
statements by the International Monetary Fund that it was impossible
to solve the Greek debt situation with severe austerity measures
arrived too late, went unheeded and were irrelevant. This knock-out
victory was against any attempts anywhere to find independent
policies helping not the giant banks but the "common people",
the 99 percent. Willing helpers, or subordinates, were found: the
curly-locked unelected head of the Euro Group, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a
right-wing Dutch Social Democrat, the staunchly conservative European
Council President Donald Tusk from Poland, and Jean-Claude Juncker,
European Commission President, who was finance minister, then prime
minister of Luxembourg from 1989 until 2013 when 343 major companies,
including Ikea, Deutsche Bank and Pepsi, benefited from secret tax
deals with the Grand Duchy so as to pay as little tax as possible on
their global profits.
Aided by
such men, supported by arch-conservative countries in eastern and
northern Europe, with the governments of Italy, Spain and Portugal
kowtowing to Schäuble for fear that a party like Syriza might
threaten their own rule in coming years, and with the weak resistance
of France succumbing to smiling Angela Merkel's steely pressure, the
threat has now seemingly been contained.
Hellenic
Republic Asset Development Fund, or TAIPED
Greece must
now raise value-added taxes in poverty-stricken Greek island
communities, cut pension benefits, further slice government jobs on
which so many were dependent, and further cut social services. These
Spartan measures, meaning more hunger, untreated illness, emigration
of the youth and suicide for many of the elderly, now forced on
Greece and endorsed by its Parliament, involve a new institution, the
Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, or TAIPED. Behind the fine
name is a rebirth of the privatization fund or Treuhand of 1990 to
1994 which destroyed the GDR economy. TAIPED, closely monitored by
the hostile foreign officials who humiliated Greece before the Syriza
victory, will organize the sale of everything the Greek state owns,
its international airport, seaports, its Olympic site, rail system
and utilities. Unlike the other measures such actions, once taken,
are almost irreversible and are a retreat from the hesitant steps
once taken towards an economy not totally ruled by big business and
its oligarchs. Since buyers know it is obliged to sell these items,
they will offer as little as possible. The bargain sale of
state-owned property, going for a song like that hummed in Germany
after 1990, will not help the country find its legs but ruin it as a
dire warning to all concerned - never to move the clock forward.
Despite occasional squawks and a few improvements won by the European
Parliament, the only popularly elected section of the EU, the true
character of the European Union has become unmistakably clear.
Another
cause for tears: Not a single country in the world was willing or
able to help Greece in its travail; foreign solidarity was never
strong. The demonstrations I joined in Berlin were brave, loud but
not big enough; the fact that Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, a
Social Democrat, backed Schäuble, left the smaller LINKE (Left
Party), some Greens and various rebellious organizations too weak
with their OXI - "No" - signs. A long, vicious media
campaign was far too successful in picturing Greeks as lazy, spoiled,
no-goods dodging legitimate debt payments at the cost of "us
industrious German working people."
The end of
the GDR had eased the way for a wave of increasingly visible racists
and open Nazis, marching in towns all over Germany and especially
menacing if times get worse. A defeat of Syriza and the hopes it
raised could well open the door to a strengthened the neo-Nazi Golden
Dawn movement which threatens Greece with violence, bloodshed and
reversion to terrible times like those the country has faced so
often. This is the specter now haunting Europe; men like Schäuble
are greatly responsible.
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