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https://jnccn.org/search?access=user&page=3&pageSize=10&q=%22fever%22&sort=relevance
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Timing of Initial Antibiotic Treatment for Febrile Neutropenia in the Emergency Department: The Need for Evidence-Based Guidelines
Demetrios N. Kyriacou, Borko Jovanovic, and Olga Frankfurt
suppression with resultant leukopenia that renders these patients susceptible to serious infections, often with fever as the only clinical finding. 5 – 8 This complication, known as febrile neutropeni a (FN), occurs in 10% to 30% of patients undergoing
In Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Volume 12 (2014): Issue 11 (Nov 2014)
Counterpoint: Hyperthermia with Radiation Therapy for Chest Wall Recurrences
Beryl McCormick
: Perez CA, Brady LW, eds. Principles and Practices of Radiation Oncology . Philadelphia : J B Lippincott ; 1987 : 317 – 352 . 2. Warren S . Preliminary study of the effect of artificial fever upon hopeless tumor cases . Am J Roentgenol
In Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Volume 5 (2007): Issue 3 (Mar 2007)
Mimicking MacGyver in the Oncology Clinic: Improvisation and Creative Solutions, Only Rarely Involving Duct Tape
David P. Steensma
low-grade fever during the night, and the PICC team's policy is that all cultures must be negative for 48 hours before a line can be placed. (This scenario is not difficult for me to visualize, since it happened to me twice recently.) You might wait 48
CLO22-081: Clinical Efficacy and Quality of Life of Oral Cancer Patients Treated With Paclitaxel/Cisplatin/5-FU Vs Paclitaxel/Carboplatin Chemotherapeutic Regimens in a Tertiary Cancer Center in Eastern India
Pranab Kumar Sahoo, Sinjini Sarkar, Sutapa Mahata, Ranita Pal, Tanuma Mistry, Sushmita Ghosh, Trisha Choudhury, Sriparna Datta, Anup Kumar Bhowmick, Kalyan Kusum Mukherjee, and Vilas D Nasare
toxicities like anaemia (13.3%) followed by neutropenia (2.4%) and thrombocytopenia (2.4%) whereas non-hematological toxicities include diarrhoea (30.5%), vomiting (26.6%), fever (23.1%), myalgia (19.7%) and mucositis (5.41%). 82 (40.39%) patients succumbed
In Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Volume 20 (2022): Issue 3.5 (Mar 2022): Abstracts from the NCCN 2022 Virtual Annual Conference
HSR22-154: Treatment Patterns Following Osimertinib Discontinuation in Patients With EGFR Mutated Metastatic NSCLC
Elizabeth Marrett, Winghan Jacqueline Kwong, Jinlin Song, Ameur M. Manceur, Selvam Sendhil, and Eric Wu
/pneumonitis (3.0), infection/sepsis (2.1), nausea and vomiting (1.9), fever (1.7), and diarrhea (1.5). Conclusions : After osimertinib discontinuation, plat-chemo regimens were the most common subsequent LOT, followed by reuse of EGFR-TKIs. Overall, the
Prevention and Treatment of Cancer-Related Infections
Lindsey Robert Baden, William Bensinger, Michael Angarone, Corey Casper, Erik R. Dubberke, Alison G. Freifeld, Ramiro Garzon, John N. Greene, John P. Greer, James I. Ito, Judith E. Karp, Daniel R. Kaul, Earl King, Emily Mackler, Kieren A. Marr, Jose G. Montoya, Ashley Morris-Engemann, Peter G. Pappas, Ken Rolston, Brahm Segal, Susan K. Seo, Sankar Swaminathan, Maoko Naganuma, and Dorothy A. Shead
); management of neutropenic fever; management of site-specific infections (eg, pneumonia, abdominal infections, catheter-associated infections); and, importantly, prevention of infectious complications, including the use of antimicrobial prophylaxis and
A Study of Novel Febrile Neutropenia Risk Factors Related to Bone Marrow or Immune Suppression, Barrier Function, and Bacterial Flora
Leila Family, Yanli Li, Lie Hong Chen, John H. Page, Zandra K. Klippel, and Chun Chao
administration in the absence of fever/infection; (3) received dose-dense chemotherapy regimens or weekly regimens; (4) had bone marrow/stem cell transplantation; or (5) were patients of Orange County Medical Center if their cancer was diagnosed before 2007, for
In Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Volume 16 (2018): Issue 10 (Oct 2018)
Diagnosis and Management of Castleman Disease
Jeremy S. Abramson
to as idiopathic MCD (iMCD), and is further classified as iMCD-TAFRO (thrombocytopenia, anasarca, fevers, reticulin myelofibrosis, organomegaly) or iMCD-NOS (not otherwise specified). The least common subtype of MCD is POEMS-associated. In addition
In Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Volume 17 (2019): Issue 11.5 (Nov 2019): Highlights of the NCCN 2019 Annual Congress
Brentuximab in the Treatment of CD30-Positive Enteropathy-Associated T-Cell Lymphoma
Waleed F. Khalaf, Meghan E. Caldwell, and Nishitha Reddy
bowel obstruction that was preceded by a few months' history of intermittent diarrhea, fever, and weight loss. Pathology of the small bowel resection was consistent with enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma (EATL) that expressed CD3 and CD30; was
Real-World Impact of a Decision Support Tool on Colony-Stimulating Factor Use and Chemotherapy-Induced Febrile Neutropenia Among Patients With Breast Cancer
Abiy Agiro, Andrea DeVries, Jennifer Malin, and Michael J. Fisch
FN were identified by the presence of inpatient hospitalization or emergency department (ED) visit with an ICD-9 CM code for neutropenia (288.0) and fever (780.6) using previously validated claims-based algorithms (positive predictive value [PPV], 87


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Global Land Surface Databank: Version 1.1.0 Release
In June 2014, the first version of the global databank was released (Rennie et al., 2014), which included data from nearly 50 different sources and an algorithm to resolve duplicate stations and piece together complete temperature time series. Since then, there have been monthly updates, appending new data to existing stations. Thanks to user feedback, along with additional analysis described below, minor changes were introduced and implemented to the merge program to ensure the most accurate data were incorporated in the final product. This, along with updates to current sources required a small change to the versioning system. The remainder of this post will highlight the changes implemented in the global land surface databank, version 1.1.0. More information about the structure of the databank, including sources, formats, and merge algorithm, can be found on the databank website (www.surfacetemperatures.org/databank)
Updates to Stage 1 and Stage 2 Data
The databank design includes six data Stages, starting from the original observation to the final quality controlled and bias corrected products. For the purposes of this update, only three stages were modified: digitized data (Stage One), data converted to a common format (Stage Two), and the merged dataset (Stage Three).
The highest priority source comes from the Global Historical Climatology Network – Daily (GHCN-D) dataset (Menne et al. 2012). In June 2015, GHCN-D underwent a large update, which included a new average temperature element (TAVG), along with the addition of 1,400 stations that are a part of the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Regional Basic Climatology Network (RBCN). Because these stations are important for real time updates, it was necessary to include this new version in the latest merge.
Further assessment was also done on one of our sources known as "russsource." This source contained over 36,000 stations reporting maximum and minimum temperature. While the original format was consistent across all stations, it was discovered that this source included 27 individual sources. It was decided to split these sources up and place them individually in the merge following the source hierarchy defined by the databank working group. Because of some duplication with sources used in GHCN-D, only 20 of the 27 sources were included. In addition, station ID's were brought into the Stage Two data, so that the merge's ID test could be implemented. The same was done for the source known as "ghcnsource."
Other than the above, no additional sources were added to the source hierarchy. One source however was removed (crutem4), because it was determined that the use of these stations as a last resort was causing stations to be unique because of the data changes through bias corrections. Candidate stations from crutem4 were matched with their respective target stations through metadata tests, but were chosen as unique from the data tests, because of these corrections. In order to avoid excessive station duplication, this source was removed.
Changes to Merge Algorithm
The merge algorithm, as described by Rennie et al. 2014, underwent no code changes. However, a couple of thresholds were modified in order to maximize the amount of data the final recommended product would have. The thresholds are defined in a configuration file that is required for the program to run successfully.
The first step of the merge algorithm takes into account the metadata between a target and candidate station, including the stations latitude, longitude, elevation and name. A quasi-probabilistic comparison is made and the result is a metadata metric between 0 and 1. In version 1.0.0, this metric needed to pass a threshold of 0.50 in order to be considered for merging. Analysis showed that too many stations were being pulled through and forcing merges between stations that shouldn't have. As a result, a stricter threshold of 0.75 was applied, in order to avoid this issue.
In addition, once a candidate station is chosen to merge with a candidate station, it needs to fill in a gap of at least 60 months (5 years) in order to be added to the target station. It was determined that this gap was too large, and target stations with short gaps in its data were not being filled in by qualifying candidate stations. This gap threshold has been reduced to 12 months as a result.
Similar to version 1.0.0, all decisions made were tested against an independent dataset generated from hourly data for US stations available in the Integrated Surface Dataset (Smith et al. 2011). Results only show a small change between the two versions
Version 1.1.0 of the recommended merge contains 35,932 stations (Figure 1), nearly 4,000 stations more than v1.0.0 (32,142). Figure 2 depicts that the addition of stations reflect the most recent period, as there is relatively a 10% increase in the number of stations since 1950. It should be noted that there is a drop in coverage prior to 1950 with the new version. However it is the author's opinion that this was reflected by removing crutem4 as one of the sources. Including this source had made candidate stations unique, due to differences in its data as a result of the data providers bias corrections. While the number of stations is lower during this time period for v1.1.0, it should be noted that the number of gridboxes used in analysis (Figure 3) was either equal, or slightly higher than v1.0.0.
Stage Three normally includes a merge recommended and endorsed by ISTI, along with variants showing the structural uncertainty of the algorithm. Due to time constraints, these variants are not available, however will be provided at a later date.
Figure 1: Location of all stations in the recommended Stage Three component of the databank. The color corresponds to the number of years of data available for each station. Stations with longer periods of record mask stations with shorter periods of record when they are in approximate identical locations.
Figure 2: Station count of recommended merge v1.1.0 by year from 1850 to 2014, compared to version 1.0.0, along with GHCN-M version 3.
Figure 3: Percentage of global coverage with respect to 5 degree gridboxes for the recommended merger v1.1.0 by year from 1850-2014, comparted to version 1.0.0, along with GHCN-M version 3.
Posted by Jared Rennie at 8:49 AM
Global Land Surface Databank: Version 1.1.0 Releas...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Category Archives: Europe
There is nothing that capitalists won't grab if they see a possibility to score a profit. Not even the most basic needs for human life, such as water, are exempt.
A favorite tactic for grabbing what had once been in the public domain and converting it into private profit is the "public-private partnership." A tactic sadly abetted by the world's governments, as the name implies.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs), a decades-long string of disasters for the public but often a bonanza for the private, have left behind a long trail of one-sided results in water systems, electricity distribution, sewers, highways, hospitals and other infrastructure. The latest report testifying to the damage wrought by PPPs comes to us courtesy of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), a federation of 8 million public service workers from over 250 trade unions across Europe, and the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), a network of 49 civil society organizations from 20 European countries "working for transformative yet specific changes to global and European policies, institutions, rules and structures."
The Palace of Westminster (photo by Andrew Dunn)
The EPSU/Eurodad report, "Why public-private partnerships (PPPs) are still not delivering," paints a damning picture. The report declares:
"PPP advocates claim they bring financing, efficiency and innovation. But real-life experience reveals a different picture. The following points outline eight reasons why PPPs are not working: 1. PPPs do not bring new money – they create hidden debt 2. Private finance costs more than government borrowing 3. Public authorities still bear the ultimate risk of project failure 4. PPPs don't guarantee better value for money 5. Efficiency gains and design innovation can result in corner-cutting 6. PPPs do not guarantee projects being on time or on budget 7. PPP deals are opaque and can contribute to corruption 8. PPPs distort public policy priorities and force publicly run services to cut costs."
The EPSU/Eurodad report defines PPPs as "long-term contractual arrangements where the private sector provides infrastructure assets and services that have traditionally been directly funded by government, such as hospitals, schools, prisons, roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, and water and sanitation plants, and where there is also some form of risk sharing between the public and the private sector." There may be risk sharing on paper, but in reality even this definition is a little too generous toward PPPs — in almost all cases, contractual clauses put the risk squarely on the public, and when the private company that has taken over a previously public good proves unable to manage or goes out of business, it is the public that pays.
The paper drew on examples across Europe, with some of the worst examples coming in Britain. Privatizing public services leads to higher costs, reductions in the quality of service and lengthier periods in completing construction. All of these results, of course, are directly opposite of what incessant capitalist propaganda continually blares. Although the EPSU/Eurodad report didn't speculate as to why these results occur, it takes little imagination to see the reasons: Corporations exist to make the biggest profit regardless of social cost while governments need only provide a reliable service without having to generate seven- and eight-figure salaries for executives and windfalls for stockholders and other speculators.
It's not profits above all else, it's nothing but profits
Consider the words of Milton Friedman, godfather of the Chicago School of economics whose words are widely followed in corporate boardrooms and in financial publications. He put it plainly in an interview with author Joel Bakan in the context of a former BP chief executive officer suggesting (however disingenuously) the company would make environmental concerns more important:
That is the standard of the corporate world: Profits for speculators, period. No other considerations, no matter how flowery their public relations concoctions may be. There are no exceptions because a service or product is necessary for human life.
To return to the EPSU/Eurodad report, a much higher cost of financing was one cause of higher costs for the public to access previously public goods. Noting the hidden debt in these deals, the paper said, "In a PPP, instead of the public authority taking a loan to pay for a project, the private sector arranges the financing and builds the infrastructure, then the public sector pays a set fee over the lifetime of the PPP contract. In some cases, users also pay part or all of the fee directly to the private sector company (e.g. toll roads)." The United Kingdom National Audit Office "found that the effective interest rate of all private finance deals (7%-8%) was double that of all government borrowing (3%-4%)."
The Grand Palais in Paris (photo by Thesupermat)
An even larger differential was found in France: "A particularly vivid example was the Paris Courthouse PPP, signed in 2012, which featured an investment of €725.5 million and no less than €642.8 million in financing costs. The French Court of Auditors found that the interest rate for borrowing for the PPP was 6.4 per cent, while in 2012 the weighted average rate for government bond financing in the medium-long term was 1.86 per cent," the report said, adding that operating costs were also higher.
Another example is a Stockholm hospital that cost €2.4 billion instead of the projected €1.4 billion. The hospital was not only completed four years later than scheduled, but a "design competition" resulted in "operating theatres not being adapted for operations; the risk of medicines being destroyed because of medicine rooms being too warm; and physicians having to carry administrative material in backpacks because of the lack of space for administrative tasks." One conclusion from this poor result is that "the high level of complexity, together with the private partner's interest in cost-cutting as much as possible, can easily result in undesirable corner-cutting."
The report concludes that "What decades of experience has shown is that PPPs come at a high cost and are not delivering the expected benefits."
If you can sell it, they will buy it
PPPs are particularly common in Britain, an unfortunate development that is not the cause of any one party. Britain's version of public-private partnerships are called "private finance initiatives." A scheme concocted by the Conservative Party and enthusiastically adopted by the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the results are disastrous. A 2015 report in The Independent revealed that the British government owed more than £222 billion to banks and businesses as a result of private finance initiatives. Jonathan Owen reported:
"The startling figure – described by experts as a 'financial disaster' – has been calculated as part of an Independent on Sunday analysis of Treasury data on more than 720 PFIs. The analysis has been verified by the National Audit Office. The headline debt is based on 'unitary charges' which start this month and will continue for 35 years. They include fees for services rendered, such as maintenance and cleaning, as well as the repayment of loans underwritten by banks and investment companies. Responding to the findings, [British Trades Union Congress] General Secretary Frances O'Grady said: 'Crippling PFI debts are exacerbating the funding crisis across our public services, most obviously in our National Health Service.' "
The Independent article reported that private firms can even flip their contracts for a faster payday. Four companies given 25-year contracts to build and maintain schools doubled their money by selling their shares in the schemes less than five years into the deals for a composite profit of £300 million. Clearly, these contracts were given at well below reasonable cost. Nor is health care exempt: A 2019 report by the Progressive Policy Think Tank found that there are English hospitals forced to divert one-sixth of their income to paying back private finance initiatives, with National Health Service trusts paying more than £2 billion on such repayments per year, "taking money away from vital patient services." For just £13 billion of private investment, the NHS must pay back £80 billion! Quite a windfall for banks.
Naturally, such financial legerdemain is not limited to any particular country. Here is just a small sampling of outcomes:
During the course of a 25-year contract with Suez and Veolia, water rates in the city of Paris doubled after accounting for inflation. Thanks to a secret clause, the two companies received automatic price rises every three months. When the contract finished, Paris re-municipalized its water system. Despite the short-term expenses of doing so, the city saved about €35 million in the first year and was able to reduce rates by eight percent.
A privatization of the Buenos Aires water and sewer systems resulted in chronic failures to meet contractual obligations, repeated demands that the contract be renegotiated (granted by the neoliberal governments of the 1990s), failure to meet water-safety standards, worsening pollution of underground water sources, and price increases over the first decade of the contract 12 times that of inflation. The Argentine government then had to spend years raising legal challenges to take back the system even though the private company was in obvious default of its contractual obligations.
The German city of Bergkamen (population about 50,000) reversed its privatization of energy, water and other services. As a result of returning those to the public sector, the city began earning €3 million a year from the municipal companies set up to provide services, while reducing costs by as much as 30 percent.
A report by Food & Water Watch found that investor-owned utilities in the United States typically charge 59 percent more for water and 63 percent more for sewer service than local-government utilities. After privatization, water rates increase at about three times the rate of inflation, nearly tripling on average after 11 years of private control. Corporate profits, dividends and income taxes can add 20 to 30 percent to operation and maintenance costs.
A study by University of Toronto researchers of 28 Ontario public-private partnerships found they cost an average of 16 percent more than conventional contracts. Elsewhere in Canada, the Sea-to-Sky Highway in British Columbia will cost taxpayers C$220 million more than if it had been financed and operated publicly, and the cost of a project at the Université de Québec à Montréal was doubled to C$400 million.
Water as a commodity rather than a human right
That even water is a commodity is no surprise when corporate leaders consider it just another product that should have a price, most notoriously enunciated in 2014 when the chairman of Nestlé S.A., Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, issued a video in which he denounced as "extreme" the very idea of water being considered a human right. And not only water — various schemes exist to destroy the U.S. Postal Service in the interest of corporate profit.
There are even corporate executives who want to privatize the weather. No, that's not in the realm of science fiction. The head of a private weather forecaster, AccuWeather, has repeatedly lobbied to prohibit the U.S. government's National Weather Service from issuing forecasts! Under this scenario, the Weather Service would hand all of its data to private companies, who would then issue forecasts, while of course letting taxpayers foot the bill for the data. One of the U.S. Senate's dimmest bulbs, fundamentalist Rick Santorum (thankfully no longer in office), once promoted a bill to do just that. And, incidentally, the National Weather Service issues forecasts more reliable than those of AccuWeather.
Photo by Marlon Felippe
Public-private partnerships are one of the surest ways of shoveling money into the gaping maws of corporate wallets. The result has been disastrous — public services and infrastructure maintenance is consistently more expensive after privatization. Cuts to wages for workers who remain on the job and increased use of low-wage subcontractors are additional features of these privatizations. Less services and fewer employees means more profit for the contractor, and because the contractor is a private enterprise there's no longer public accountability.
The rationale for these partnerships is, similar to other neoliberal prescriptions, ideological — the private sector is supposedly always more efficient than government. A private company's profit incentive will supposedly see to it that costs are kept under control, thereby saving money for taxpayers and transferring risk to the contractor. In the real world, however, this works much differently. A government signs a long-term contract with a private enterprise to build and/or maintain infrastructure, under which the costs are borne by the contractor but the revenue goes to the contractor as well.
Public-private partnerships are nothing more than a variation on straightforward schemes to sell off public assets below cost, with working people having to pay more for reduced quality of service. Capitalism in action.
6 Comments Posted in Capitalist ideology, Europe Tagged austerity, Britain, infrastructure, privatization
Brexit will only count if everybody leaves the EU
Britain can leave the European Union, but it would remain just as tied to capitalist markets as before. The decision to leave the EU is not a decision to leave the world capitalist system, or even disengage from Europe, and thus is not a decision that will lead to any additional "independence" or "sovereignty" outside of proponents' imaginations.
What has been unleashed is the nationalism and xenophobia of right-wing "populism" — those on the Left celebrating a blow against elites might pause for thought. Yes, voting in defiance of what elites told them to do played its part in favor of a British exit from the EU, but nationalism, scapegoating of immigrants, and convincing people at the mercy of corporate power that less regulation is in their interest were dominant.
It is the far Right that been given a shot in the arm from Brexit — from the National Front in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the hard right within the Conservative Party. The Labour Party's Blairites have also been emboldened, as the parliamentary coup against Jeremy Corbyn illustrates.
Sunset near Tromsø, Norway (photo by Moyan Brenn)
By no means is the above survey meant as any defense of the EU. It is a neoliberal project from top to bottom, an anti-democratic exercise in raw corporate power to strip Europeans of the gains and protections hard won over two generations. The EU has a similar function to the North American Free Trade Agreement on the other side of the Atlantic. European capitalists desire the ability to challenge the United States for economic supremacy, but cannot do so without the combined clout of a united continent. This wish underlies the anti-democratic push to steadily tighten the EU, including mandatory national budget benchmarks that require cutting social safety nets and forcing policies designed to break down solidarity among wage earners across borders by imposing harsher competition through imposed austerity.
So we should be celebrating anything that weakens the EU, yes? Perhaps. If this were the first blow to a visibly crumbling edifice, then surely yes. If there were a continental Left with a clear alternative vision to corporate globalization, then emphatically yes. But neither of these conditions are in force, so a more cautious response is called for. What is really needed is the destruction of the EU, for all countries to leave it, not only one.
Britain leaving by itself will lead to far less of a change than Brexit proponents hope, and not necessarily for the better. This is so because the conditions of capitalist competition will remain untouched.
Norway and Switzerland are out but are really in
Brexit proponents point to Norway and Switzerland as models of countries outside the EU but which retain trading access. But what those countries have is the responsibilities of EU membership without having any say.
Norway has the closer relationship of the two. Norway (along with Iceland and the micro-state of Lichtenstein) is part of the European Economic Area, essentially an agreement tightly binding those three countries to the EU. The EEA has been described as a "transmission belt" whereby the EU ensures that the EEA countries adopt EU laws as the price for being a part of the "free trade" area of the EU. That is a one-way transmission. Norway has no say in the creation of any EU laws and regulations.
The EEA treaty calls for Norwegian consultation, but Norway is not represented in any EU body. The agreement allows Norway to "suspend" any EU law that is disliked, but Norway has done so only once. By contrast, Norway's parliament has approved EU legislation 287 times, most of them unanimously. This loss of sovereignty does not seem to be an issue for Norway's political leaders. A 2012 Norwegian review of EEA membership concludes:
"This raises democratic problems. Norway is not represented in decision-making processes that have direct consequences for Norway, and neither do we have any significant influence on them. … [O]ur form of association with the EU dampens political engagement and debate in Norway and makes it difficult to monitor the government and hold it accountable for its European policy."
The chair of the review committee noted that "There is no upside for Norwegian politicians to engage in European policy. … Because politicians are not interested in European policies, the media are not interested, and lack of media interest reinforces the lack of politicians' interest."
The minister of European Affairs in the current Conservative Party-led Norwegian government, Elisabeth Aspaker, confirms government ease with adaptation to EU law. Norway, in fact, has committed to voluntarily contribute €2.8 billion in aid to poorer EU countries for the period 2014 to 2021. In an interview with EurActiv, Minister Aspaker said:
"[W]e believe this is in our interest to improve social and economic cohesion in Europe. If Europe is doing well, Norway will also be doing well. If Europe is doing poorly or is destabilised, this will have a negative impact on Norway and the Norwegian economy. So this is why we believe we should involve ourselves beyond what is required under the EEA agreement."
Switzerland has a separate agreement with the EU that is essentially a "free trade" agreement. Switzerland has a little bit of room to not adopt EU laws, but some of its goods are blocked from export to EU countries as a result. Switzerland, however, is under pressure to do as the EU dictates, and not only does Berne not have representation, it lacks even the toothless consultation that Oslo has.
Britain will still pay but have no say
Will Britain really be free of transfers to Brussels as the "Leave" campaign, dominated by the Tory right and UKIP, loudly claimed before the referendum? Their immediate back-tracking on that, and on their implied promise of significantly reduced immigration, provides an important clue. The Centre for European Reform, a neoliberal think tank that declares itself in favor of European integration, in a nonetheless sober analysis declares that Britain would pay a substantial amount to retain its access to European markets. In its report, "Outsiders on the inside: Swiss and Norwegian lessons for the UK," the Centre writes:
"Britain would also have to pay a financial price, as well as a political price, for retaining access to the single market. As a relatively rich country, it would presumably be expected to pay special contributions to EU cohesion and aid programmes on a similar basis [as] the Norwegians and Swiss do. Currently, Norway contributes €340m a year to the EU. If multiplied by 12 for Britain's much larger population, that rate would imply a contribution for the UK of just over €4 billion, or nearly half its current net contribution to the EU budget as a full member. That is a lot to pay for associate status of the club."
It is possible to grumble that the foregoing is a product of a pro-EU perspective, but doing so would ignore that Britain's firm place in the world capitalist system, geographical location and trading patterns dictate that it retain its commercial access to Europe. A post-Brexit Britain's remittances to Brussels might be larger than even that postulated by the Centre for European Reform. An Open Europe analysis calculates that Norway's net contribution to the EU works out to €107 per person, while Britain's current contribution is €139 per person. It may not be realistic to expect a future British contribution to be substantially less than Norway's.
Sea defenses on the South Coast near Winchelsea, England (photo by Atelier Joly)
Furthermore, the Open Europe analysis notes that gross immigration to Britain is significantly less than that of Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. Those countries each must accept the free flow of people (along with goods, services and capital) the same as any EU member. The scare tactics of UKIP and the Tory right were simply that, tactics. And the promise by Brexit proponents of the return of an golden age and the scare tactics of Brexit opponents that financial armeggedon would be at hand? A separate Open Europe report finds the most likely range of change to British GDP would be within minus 0.8 percent to plus 0.6 percent by 2030.
Not much of a change. The high end of that modest range assumes that Britain adopts "unilateral liberalisation" with all its major trading partners because "free trade" offers the "greatest benefit," the Open Europe report asserts. But studies purporting to demonstrate the benefits of "free trade" agreements tend to wildly overstate their case through specious assumptions. These often start with models that assume liberalization can not cause or worsen employment, capital flight or trade imbalances, and that capital and labor will smoothly shift to new productive uses under seamless market forces.
Thus groups like the Peterson Institute invariably come up with rosy projections for "free trade" agreements, including fantasy figures for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership that ignore the reality of job losses and resulting downward drag on wages. So it is perhaps not a surprise that the rosiest prediction here is for Britain to throw itself wide open to world markets, as if Britain wasn't already one of the most de-regulated countries in the global North.
There are lies and then there are damned lies
A different sort of lack of realism pervaded the Brexit campaign, and their avowed desire to remain in the European single market surely has something to do with their rapid backtracking. Boris Johnson, a leading spokesperson for Brexit, certainly was far more cautious in his post-vote June 26 column in The Telegraph than during the campaign. He claimed, in the face of all evidence, that immigration fears were not a campaign factor, that the British economy is "outstandingly strong" and "nothing changes" except for a goodbye to European bureaucracy. Seldom do we see so much undisguised lying in a single article.
The response from the other side of the English Channel is illuminating. A commentary in Der Spiegel, undoubtedly reflecting official thinking in Germany, concludes by declaring, "The British have chosen out, and now they must face the consequences," given with a favorable reference to hard-line Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. The Guardian, quoting an assortment of European diplomats, provided this report:
" 'It is a pipe dream,' said [one] EU diplomat. 'You cannot have full access to the single market and not accept its rules. If we gave that kind of deal to the UK, then why not to Australia or New Zealand. It would be a free-for-all.'
A second EU diplomat said: 'There are no preferences, there are principles and the principle is no pick and choose.'
The diplomat stressed that participating in the single market meant accepting EU rules, including the jurisdiction of the European court of justice, monitoring by the European commission and accepting the primacy of EU law over national law — conditions that will be anathema to leave advocates who campaigned on the mantra 'take back control.' "
No wonder no Tory seems eager to start negotiations. Perhaps "more of the same but with less say" will not meet the expectations of those who voted for a British exit from the EU. Certainly, corporate ideology has done its job well of convincing some that corporations abandoning communities isn't the fault of the corporations leaving nor the capitalism that rewards those abandonments. Consider this passage in The New York Times on June 28, quoting a blue-collar worker in an English city that voted heavily to leave:
" 'All the industries, everything, has gone,' said Michael Wake, 55, forklift operator, gesturing toward Roker Beach, once black from the soot of the shipyards. 'We were powerful, strong. But Brussels and the government, they've taken it all away.' "
Of course, the ceaseless competitive pressure of capitalism, ever ready to move to the place with the lowest wages and weakest regulations, is responsible for the hollowing out of Sunderland, England, and so many industrial cities like it. Britain adhering to EU rules on unrestricted mobility of capital as the price of retaining its European trade links will have exactly zero effect on that dynamic, and British entry into "free trade" agreements like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or similar deals will accelerate it. Governments sign such agreements, true, but they are acting under compulsion of powerful industrialists and financiers within and without their borders, conceding ever more sovereignty to multi-national capital as the price of remaining "competitive."
The EU is a bonanza for multi-national corporations and an autocratic disaster for working people across Europe. But one country leaving and agreeing to the same terms as an "outsider" will effect no change whatsoever. An exit from capitalism is what the world needs, not from this or that capitalist treaty.
21 Comments Posted in Europe Tagged Brexit, Britain, European Union, neoliberalism, Norway
Fear takes root in Syriza
Fear is a powerful human emotion. Fear of the unknown surely played a significant part in Syriza's humiliating climbdown and surrender of what national sovereignty had remained to Greece.
Fear is a powerful emotion if consenting to become a colony, agreeing to sell off your country and further immiserating millions is a preferable option to taking back your independence.
Perhaps the signal that was not given due consideration was Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' statement on July 10 that "we have no mandate to leave the euro." The Syriza-led government also had no mandate for the continuation, much less the intensification, of austerity. Five and a half months into an administration that could have been used to prepare Greece for a different path instead marked time in futile negotiations, allowing the country's economic crisis to develop to the point where the troika could dictate any terms it wanted.
And make no mistake: There is glee in corporate boardrooms, trading floors, banks and the government ministries that serve them that a Leftist government has committed itself to the harshest austerity terms.
Fira at Santorini Island, Greece (photo by Yoo Chung)
A good example of this comes from the late 1990s, when dissident Kim Dae-jong won election as president of South Korea as the first candidate of the Left to win office, only to immediately impose an austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund. President Kim's candidacy had been opposed by the U.S. government, which had supported a series of military dictators, but likely was pleased in the end that he won since it demoralized his supporters and provided a priceless propaganda prop for the idea that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.
Although the agreement imposed on Greece by the troika — the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — is indeed a coup, as the instantly popular Twitter hashtag proclaims, it shouldn't be looked at simplistically as a German diktat. That is not because smaller countries like Finland and Slovakia aligned themselves with Germany in the manner of schoolyard kids standing next to the playground bully so as to not be the next target, but because the German government is acting as the European enforcement wing of international capital.
The upside down world of money over people
It is a neoliberal world indeed when entire countries are bled dry to safeguard bankers' profits and doing so is presented as the highest moral duty. The human face might have been German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble in the role of Dr. Evil, but the minister is no more than a physical embodiment of powerful social and economic forces. Forces of human creation but not necessarily in human control.
So let us not over-simplify and place all blame at the feet of Syriza by declaring the party "opportunists" or whatever word of opprobrium one wishes. Nor should there be illusions that walking away from the euro, canceling the debt and the resulting cutoff from financial markets would be an easy road to take, even if, in the long term, it is the road that should have been traveled. Socialism in one country is not possible in one small country. Socialism in a single big country would be extremely difficult, if the entire might of the capitalist world were arrayed against it.
There are no Greek solutions for Greece, there are only European or international solutions.
Nonetheless, somebody has to go first. Finding allies is indispensable for any Greek turn from the eurozone to have a chance at success. It does not appear that Syriza looked beyond the European Union for allies. In an interview with the New Statesman, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, when asked if the government attempted to work with the governments of other indebted eurozone countries, gave this answer:
"The answer is no, and the reason is very simple: from the very beginning those particular countries made it abundantly clear that they were the most energetic enemies of our government, from the very beginning. And the reason of course was their greatest nightmare was our success: were we to succeed in negotiating a better deal for Greece, that would of course obliterate them politically, they would have to answer to their own people why they didn't negotiate like we were doing."
Fear of offending the more powerful and internalizing the "moral" hectoring they deliver at every opportunity. Guaranteeing bank profits is somehow more "moral" than the health and well-being of entire countries. Social Democrats have absorbed this ideology as thoroughly as conservatives.
In the same interview, Mr. Varoufakis, recounting that his counterparts, the other eurozone financial ministers, refused to negotiate or even engage intellectually with him from the start, was asked why the government kept talking until the summer. His reply:
"Well one doesn't have an alternative. Our government was elected with a mandate to negotiate. So our first mandate was to create the space and time to have a negotiation and reach another agreement. That was our mandate — our mandate was to negotiate, it was not to come to blows with our creditors. … The negotiations took ages, because the other side was refusing to negotiate. They insisted on a 'comprehensive agreement,' which meant they wanted to talk about everything. My interpretation is that when you want to talk about everything, you don't want to talk about anything. But we went along with that."
Eurozone membership or an end to austerity
Yes, Syriza was elected with a mandate to negotiate; that follows from Greek majority popular opinion that the country should remain within the eurozone. But there was also a mandate that austerity be brought to an end. Syriza proved unable to resolve this contradiction: Greece can end austerity or be in the eurozone, but not both at the same time.
What we do make of Prime Minister Tsipras declaration, "An end of the blackmail," issued in late June at the time of his decision to call a referendum on austerity. In his statement, referencing the troika negotiators, he said:
"They asked the Greek government to accept a proposal that accumulates a new unsustainable burden on the Greek people and undermines the recovery of the Greek economy and society, a proposal that not only perpetuates the state of uncertainty but accentuates social inequalities even more."
The vote went ahead, against direct orders by European governments, and Greeks voted 61 percent to 39 against the terms offered. A week later, the Tsipras government agreed to terms that were worse — the harshest austerity yet imposed. So much for democracy. And make no mistake, this deal is consistent with the "structural adjustment" that the IMF has imposed across the global South.
Prime Minister Tsipras' final set of concessions in exchange for a fresh bailout was an undiluted structural adjustment. Included in the Greek "reform" package were:
Allowing greater wage inequality and a fall in wages as a percentage of gross domestic product through 2019.
Raising the pension age to 67 and increasing the health care contribution of pensioners by 50 percent.
Gutting labor laws through a "review [of] the whole range of existing labour market arrangements, taking into account best practices elsewhere in Europe." In other words, loosening worker protections.
An "irreversible" privatization of the electricity provider.
Privatization of the country's ports, airports and much else.
The nearly immediate answer was "No, still not enough."
The prime minister said the popular referendum would strength his negotiating hand. So in the end, what concession did he extract? The fund that will supervise the fire sale of Greek assets, in which the rules will be set by the troika, will be managed from Greece instead of the tax haven Luxembourg.
Hurray.
The Greek government has committed itself to sell off state assets worth €50 billion, with half the total to be used to recapitalize Greek banks and the half to pay down Greek debts. Not one euro toward social welfare!
Resistance continues
Although the government appears to have the approval of Greece's corporate parties, including New Democracy and Pasok, it does not have the support of all of Syriza. The latter's Left Platform calls for a "radical reform" of the banking system, the complete halt of austerity policies, an exit from the euro and a writedown of most of Greece's debt. Outside of Syriza, Antarsya calls for the nationalization of the banks and an exit from the eurozone. A general strike has been called for July 15. And there is no shortage of ideas on alternatives to austerity.
The online news site Greek Reporter summarizes the Left Platform's expectations of the benefits should its program be adopted:
"An exit from the Eurozone would generate further benefits according to the proposal. Namely, the restoration of financial liquidity, a sustainable growth program based on private investment, the rebuilding of the internal economy to reduce dependence on imports, an increase in exports, independence from the European Central Bank, its policies and restrictions and finally the utilization of unused resources to create rapid growth so as to protect against the first difficult months following the Grexit. The document also concedes that an exit from the Eurozone should have been prepared by SYRIZA but was not."
Instead, the prime minister says he is choosing a bad choice over a catastrophic choice. Those are the only two choices that the European Union, a project in which rule by finance replaces democracy, can offer.
As assuredly as with nature, politics hates a vacuum. If the Left is not going to offer an alternative to the tightening hegemony of the most powerful industrialists and financiers — the "market" is nothing more than their interests — then the gates to the authoritarian Right, even fascism, are thrown wide open. In a separate interview, Mr. Varoufakis gave this warning:
"In parliament I have to sit looking at the right hand side of the auditorium, where 10 Nazis sit, representing Golden Dawn. If our party, Syriza, that has cultivated so much hope in Greece … if we betray this hope and bow our heads to this new form of postmodern occupation, then I cannot see any other possible outcome than the further strengthening of Golden Dawn. They will inherit the mantle of the anti-austerity drive, tragically. The project of a European democracy, of a united European democratic union, has just suffered a major catastrophe."
Europe's capitalists, who established the European Union as a mechanism to tighten their control over the continent and force U.S.-style policies on their societies beyond popular control, won't be ruffled by that conclusion. But will the world's working people be?
17 Comments Posted in Europe Tagged austerity, capitalism, economics, eurozone, Greece, longreads, neoliberalism, Syriza
The straitjacket of austerity tightens on Syriza
The contradiction of putting an end to austerity and remaining within the eurozone has manifested itself in full force for Greece. At this early stage, it is alarmist to argue that Syriza has "sold out" nor is it realistic to proclaim that Syriza has achieved "victory" in its negotiations.
How Syriza uses the four months until the extended bailout program expires in June, and what Greece's governing party will do once this period ends, will begin to reveal to what extent Greece can put an end to austerity and Syriza can make good on implementing the program that carried it to victory in January's elections. That is surely the minimum amount of time necessary to begin to make any judgment on Syriza as it is tightly boxed in by circumstances not of its making.
Athens (photo by A. Savin)
It is difficult to avoid the belief that New Democracy intended to hand Syriza a poisoned chalice. Although corporate-media commentary at the time almost uniformly suggested that New Democracy, Greece's main Right-wing party, was taking a reasonable gamble that it could successfully get its candidate elected as president by parliament, attempting this seemed more an act of suicide. The party had moved up the presidential election, and its failure to seat its candidate automatically triggered early parliamentary elections. There was no reasonable chance of its presidential candidate winning, and little chance of it retaining its parliamentary majority once fresh general elections were triggered.
Parties ordinarily don't intentionally bring down their own government. But with a series of large debt repayments due in 2015 from February to July, the difficulty of making those payments and the rising anger of the Greek people at their immiseration, going into opposition and ducking responsibility for their own policies must have seemed tempting.
Tightening the financial screws
Syriza has no easy task, nor have Europe's dominant institutions made it any easier. A week after Syriza took power, the European Central Bank said it would cease accepting Greek government bonds or government-guaranteed debts as collateral for loans to Greek banks. This effectively cut off the main source of financing for Greek banks. The ECB, in its supervisory capacity, also prohibited Greek banks from further loaning money to the Greek government, cutting off another source of funding.
This sudden action of the European Central Bank constitutes a "noose around Greece's neck," writes Ellen Brown in her Web of Debt blog:
"The ECB will not accept Greek bonds as collateral for the central bank liquidity all banks need, until the new Syriza government accepts the very stringent austerity program imposed by the troika (the [European] Commission, ECB and IMF). That means selling off public assets (including ports, airports, electric and petroleum companies), slashing salaries and pensions, drastically increasing taxes and dismantling social services, while creating special funds to save the banking system. …
Not just Greek banks but all banks are reliant on central bank liquidity, because they are all technically insolvent. They all lend money they don't have. They rely on being able to borrow from other banks, the money market, or the central bank as needed to balance their books. The central bank (which has the power to print money) is the ultimate backstop in this sleight of hand. If that source of liquidity dries up, the banks go down."
The result of this power play was a cash-flow problem for the government and Greek banks. It also triggered an exodus of capital out of the country, Mark Weisbrot writes:
"This move was clearly made in bad faith, since there was no bureaucratic or other reason to do this; it was more than three weeks before the deadline for the decision. Predictably, the cut off spurred a huge outflow of capital from the Greek banking system, destabilizing the economy and sending financial markets plummeting. … The European authorities appeared to be hoping that a 'shock and awe' assault on the Greek economy would force the new government to immediately capitulate."
With an estimated €20 billion of bank deposits believed to have been taken out of the country from December through late February, and the impossibility of paying off debt while continuing to have enough money to run the government, Syriza's room for maneuver rapidly shrank.
Bailouts for banks, not people
What is crucial is to understand that the "troika" bailed out large multi-national banks, in particular German and French banks, and are now asking Greek working people to pay for it.
Through 2009, Greek debt was mostly held by European banks; French and German banks alone held more than 40 percent of Greek debt. The €227 billion of loans from the European Union and International Monetary Fund that have since gone to Greece were used to pay large financial institutions elsewhere. By one estimate, only €15 billion has gone to state operations; none after 2012. The Greek government has been a pass-through, taking the loans given it and promptly sending it to financiers.
There are more payments coming soon. Greece is due to pay €450 million to the IMF on April 9 and €7 billion to the IMF and European Central Bank in July, among other deadlines. Because Syriza remains committed to retaining the euro as Greece's currency, reflecting majority Greek opinion, it remains committed to paying off its debt, which can only be accomplished through cutting government services and spending. This is the pitiless logic of austerity.
Unlike the previous New Democracy and Pasok governments, Syriza has not completely surrendered. Last month, two bills were passed in parliament that subsidize electricity, food and housing. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called the extended-bailout measures an "interim agreement" and that the government will not ask for a third bailout when the program ends in June. He also vows that making Greece's wealthy pay taxes will be a centerpiece of reform.
Nonetheless, Syriza has made major concessions, agreeing in February to continued supervision by the troika and that it would refrain from any "unilateral action." It also failed to get any reduction in its debt, and must pass an inspection by the troika in late April before it receives any of the money agreed in February, when the bailout extension was signed. Syriza was required to submit a list of reforms that must be approved. It did so on March 27; negotiations are continuing but the list was met with initial disapproval for not giving the troika everything it wants.
Among those reforms are a series of tax measures estimated to raise an additional €3.7 billion in revenue for the government, including cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy and on smuggling. But there is also another major concession, allowing the privatization of Greece's most important port, at Piraeus, to go ahead despite promises to halt all privatizations. That is estimated to raise another €1.5 billion. A Chinese state-run shipping company seeks to buy a two-thirds stake.
Still insisting red lines will not be crossed
Syriza continues to declare that it will prioritize working people over debt repayment. The international economic affairs minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, told The Guardian:
"Our top priority remains payment of salaries and pensions. If they demand a 30% cut in pensions, for example, they do not want a compromise."
The austerity that has been imposed has resulted in a contraction in gross domestic product of 25 percent, unemployment above 25 percent, a fall in real wages of 30 percent and a reduction in industrial output of 35 percent. And the size of the foreign debt has risen!
There is no way out of this without renouncing at least some of the debt, and doing so means leaving the eurozone and re-adopting its old national currency, the drachma. There should be no illusions that doing so will be free of pain. Left to the tender mercies of speculators, the drachma could conceivably lose 75 to 80 percent of its value in a short period of time. Assuming that a re-instituted drachma is initially valued at one euro, this would mean that imported goods will cost the equivalent of three or four euros instead of one, a drastic inflation.
Such a drastic currency devaluation would presumably spur a big increase in local production, because Greeks would need to produce internally to make up for being able to buy far less products from outside the country. It would also give a boost to exports, because Greek goods would now be cheap. This is the "Argentina option," so called because Argentina followed this path in the early 2000s, almost immediately improving its economy. But the Argentine government did nothing that touched capitalist relations, and of late the country has suffered from mounting difficulties.
Is leaving the eurozone necessarily the question?
Thus there are Left, even Marxist, economists who do not believe Greece should leave the eurozone but rather go ahead with nationalizations and other measures anyway. So the debate over euro versus drachma does not fall along clear-cut lines. For example, a prominent economist elected to parliament on the Syriza ticket, Costas Lapavitsas, argues that Keynesian measures are what are possible in the immediate moment but that Greece must drop the euro. Another prominent economist, Michael Roberts, argues for an immediate Marxist-inspired program but that Greece should retain the euro.
Professor Lapavitsas argues that, although getting rid of capitalism is what is needed in the long term, for now getting rid of austerity is what is necessary and that is impossible within the framework of the eurozone. He believes that a negotiated exit from the euro would be the best solution. This would include a 50 percent debt write-off and that the devaluation of the drachma be limited to 20 percent through an agreement with the E.U. to tie its value to the euro; that is, the drachma would not be traded freely as currencies customarily do.
Capital controls and immediate nationalization of banks would be necessary as part of this proposed program. Rationing would be inevitable for a time, but Professor Lapavitsas argues that rationing already exists "through the wallet" as millions of Greeks can not afford even basic necessities. Crucially, he says that all this would be carried out with workers' control (a factor missing in Argentina); bank employee unions should have a role in running the nationalized banks. Unused productive capacity would soon kick-start the economy, he said:
"What you've got to appreciate, though, is this: devaluation would not work simply, or mostly, through exports. It would work through the domestic market, more than exports. At the moment, there are vast unused resources in Greece. … There are vast unused resources across the country! Small and medium enterprises will come to life immediately if there was a devaluation. There is enough small-scale capital to do that. The revival of the economy, the return of demand and production, will be very rapid, and it will take place primarily through that. … I have — and econometric studies I've seen confirm it — little doubt that small and medium enterprises will allow a return of Greece to a reasonable productive state within a very short period of time, a couple of years."
Professor Roberts, on the other hand, argues that it is "extremely unlikely" that the drachma would depreciate by only 20 percent, and that a larger devaluation and rising prices would offset any gains from cheaper exports. He wrote:
"Greek capitalism is no position to turn things round with its own currency. Greek capital will be saddled with huge euro debts following devaluation and it won't be able to export enough to stop the Greek economy dropping (further) into an abyss and taking its people with it. [A Greek exit] also means not just leaving the euro but also the EU and without any reciprocal trade arrangements that Switzerland has, for example."
Bank nationalization and a public takeover of strategic industries should be at the center of any Greek plan to raise investment and growth, Professor Roberts argues. Although in favor of Keynesian prescriptions such as progressive taxation and labor rights, these measures should be geared toward a larger project of replacing capitalism, not to try to make capitalism work, in or out of the eurozone. But he acknowledged that should his program be adopted, Greece might be expelled from the euro anyway.
There are no guarantees. Professor Lapavitsas' belief that a drachma devaluation can be held to 20 percent seems overly optimistic and Professor Roberts' belief that Greek must leave the European Union (and thus have trade cut off) were it to drop the euro seems overly pessimistic. Whatever direction Greece takes, however, it can't travel as far as it needs to on its own. An economy drastically remodeled on a democratic basis is the only solution in the long term, but such a country would face severe pressure from capitalist governments seeking to destroy it.
Greece must create links with countries attempting to move past capitalism, such as those in Latin America, and must be joined by other European countries traveling the same path. Greece can't be a socialist island in a global sea of capitalism. There are only international solutions, not Greek solutions, to Greece's problems. The capitalist alternative is to continue to be immiserated for the sake of private profit, the same fate as the overwhelming majority of humanity.
6 Comments Posted in Europe Tagged austerity, capitalism, economics, eurozone, Greece, longreads, neoliberalism, Syriza
We have no money so central banks give more money to banks
It's unanimous! The European Central Bank confirms that the only possible solution to falling wages and depressed spending is to throw more money at the banks and inflate another stock-market bubble.
The ECB thus joins the world's other most important central banks in the hope that "quantitative easing" — a form of "trickle-down" economics — will somehow work despite having never achieved anything other than the inflation of asset bubbles, a benefit primarily to the one percent. Then again, perhaps that might explain it.
Mario Draghi, the president of the ECB, last week committed €1.1 trillion to buying eurozone government bonds and, to a lesser degree, asset-backed securities and pools of mortgage loans known as "covered bonds." Starting in March, the ECB will buy €60 billion of assets a month, with a commitment to continue this program until September 2016. The ECB's stated goal is to boost inflation and prevent deflation, while also driving down the value of the euro.
The European Central Bank joins the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan in flooding the financial system with money, and joins all those central banks and the Swiss National Bank in attempting to drive down the value of its currency. One problem is that all currencies can't decline against one another, any more than all countries can simultaneously produce trade surpluses. At the moment, it is the euro that is declining in value, which theoretically will give a boost to exports from eurozone countries, but as eurozone countries conduct most of their trade with one another, the boost from a weakened euro will not necessary be significant.
Blockupy 2013: Securing the European Central Bank (photo by Blogotron)
But with declining wages, fewer people have enough to spend, and the super-wealthy already have more money than they can possibly use for productive investment. Nonetheless, the "market" has decreed that more austerity for working people and more speculation by the one percent is the magic elixir that will finally fix the economy.
Fix it for whom? Let's start to answer that question by noting the supposed purpose of quantitative-easing programs: to stimulate the economy by encouraging investment. Under this theory, a reduction in long-term interests rates would encourage working people to buy or refinance homes; encourage businesses to invest because they could borrow cheaply; and push down the value of the currency, thereby boosting exports by making locally made products more competitive.
In actuality, quantitative-easing programs cause the interest rates on bonds to fall because a central bank buying bonds in bulk significantly increases demand for them, enabling bond sellers to offer lower interest rates. Seeking assets with a better potential payoff, speculators buy stock instead, driving up stock prices and inflating a stock-market bubble. Money not used in speculation ends up parked in bank coffers, boosting bank profits, or is borrowed by businesses to buy back more of their stock, another method of driving up stock prices without making any investments.
Trillions for asset buying sprees
We are not talking about small change here. In three rounds of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve spent about $4.1 trillion. The Bank of England has spent £375 billion. The Bank of Japan, after boosting its QE program last October, will now spend ¥80 trillion (about US$680 billion) per year. This after 18 months of quantitative easing failed to revive the economy, as with an earlier QE program that ran from 2001 to 2006. In just the past 18 months, the Bank of Japan's QE spending was ¥75 trillion ($640 billion).
Imagine what could have been done with these enormous sums of money had they been used for directly creating jobs, or simply by giving it directly to working people, who would have gone out and spent it. Or by putting the money to productive use, such as rebuilding crumbling infrastructure.
Instead, what is planned is more austerity — that is, more punishment. The other component of the European Central Bank's January 22 announcement is that favorite term, "structural adjustment." A euphemism used by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund when ordering an end to job security and social safety nets as a condition for granting loans to developing countries, this is now being applied to the global North. Near the end of his remarks announcing the quantitative easing, ECB President Draghi said:
"[I]n order to increase investment activity, boost job creation and raise productivity growth, other policy areas need to contribute decisively. In particular, the determined implementation of product and labour market reforms as well as actions to improve the business environment for firms needs to gain momentum in several countries. It is crucial that structural reforms be implemented swiftly, credibly and effectively as this will not only increase the future sustainable growth of the euro area, but will also raise expectations of higher incomes and encourage firms to increase investment today and bring forward the economic recovery."
Labor "reforms" are necessary to "improve the business environment." In plain language, that means more austerity in an effort to boost corporate profits. In the question-and-answer session after the announcement, President Draghi gave revealing answers to two different questions: "For investment you need confidence, and for confidence you need structural reforms" and "it would be a big mistake if countries were to consider that the presence of this programme might be an incentive to fiscal expansion. … This programme should increase the lending capacity of the banks."
Firing workers and pushing wages lower will make capitalists feel better? Perhaps, but if there isn't demand for their products, they still aren't going to invest.
If consumers have no money, they aren't buying
The ECB wishes to believe that further reducing job security and social safety nets will provide capitalists with the magic "confidence" that will prompt them to invest. But there is already plenty of industrial capacity sitting idle — E.U. manufacturing capacity utilization is only 80 percent while the E.U.-wide unemployment rate is 10 percent. The youth unemployment rate is 21.9 percent. More austerity isn't going to reverse these effects of austerity.
The Bank of Japan boosted its quantitative easing program in October 2014 because it had not pulled the Japanese economy out of stagnation. Gross domestic product contracted in the second and third quarters of 2014. (Fourth-quarter statistics have yet to be reported.) Japanese wages have declined in the past year while profits have increased. Household spending in Japan had fallen for six consecutive months at the time of the Bank of Japan's announcement, in part due to an increase in sales tax pushed through by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The Federal Reserve's quantitative easing has served to prop up a stock market that continues to rise despite ongoing stagnation. The standard measure of stock market valuation, the price/earnings ratio, remains high by historical standards. (This ratio is a company's market value per share divided by earnings per share, or to put it another way, how many dollars a buyer pays for one dollar of profit.) The composite P/E ratio for the broadest measure of U.S. stocks, the S&P 500 Index, is 19.7. The rare times in history that ratio has risen above 20 has been followed by a crash.
Japan's stock market has also risen during its quantitative easing; its benchmark Nikkei 225 Index has doubled since November 2012.
Trillions of dollars has been poured into programs that do little more than produce stock-market bubbles; more trillions have been poured directly into banks and other financial institutions for bailouts. The European Central Bank says more of the same, and European workers will continue to pay for it. The markets demand this, it is said. Capitalist markets, however, are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the largest industrialists and financiers — when we let "markets" make social decisions, that really means a dictatorship of big business and big banks. And supporting those banks is very expensive.
9 Comments Posted in Europe Tagged austerity, central banks, economics, European Central Bank, eurozone, neoliberalism, quantitative easing
Will a Syriza victory be the first blow against austerity?
Is the first step toward the unraveling of European austerity about to begin, courtesy of Greek voters? The future direction of the European Union certainly won't turn merely on the results of Greece's January 25 parliamentary election, nor will the world slip off its axis if the expected Syriza victory materializes.
Nonetheless, the first blow has to be struck some time, by somebody. If Syriza does take office and if it can hold firm against the withering pressure that it will immediately be subjected to, an alternative to financial industry diktats could provide an example elsewhere in the E.U., particularly within the eurozone. That example can not be taken up too soon, given the many economic weapons likely to be deployed against a Syriza-led Greece. (Perhaps in Spain, where Podemos, the party organized a year ago by the Indignados movement, already is a near three-way dead heat with Spain's biggest parties, Popular and Socialist, according to recent polling.) There is no Greek solution to Greece's economic collapse, only a European solution.
View of Vikos Gorge, Greece (photo by Skamnelis)
As the Greek parliament was in the process of failing to elect a new president last month, thereby triggering automatic parliamentary elections, Syriza issued this statement about the New Democracy/Pasok coalition government that had continued to impose punishing austerity:
"The only option left to them is the policy of fear and terrorization of the society, the creation of false dilemmas and fake polarization. This option is triggered by the fact that the government as well as the dominant economic and media system and forces inside and outside the country are very well aware that they have a lot to lose."
Such fear-mongering won't only come from the Greek establishment. European governments have alternated between ordering Greek voters to vote for pro-austerity parties and to insisting that both a Greek exit from the eurozone and any changes to Greece's debt obligations are unthinkable. These have not only come from German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, as would be expected, but from French President François Hollande, continuing his journey to becoming Paris' Monsieur 1%.
Certainly the financiers who hold decisive power over the undemocratic institutions of the European Union, nor their representatives such as Finance Minister Schäuble, can be expected to welcome the basic self-description of Syriza's intentions:
"Syriza insists strongly on its position that it will abolish the memoranda signed with the Troika of lenders when it assumes office and will re-negotiate the loans. At the same time it will promote a programme of social and economical reconstruction, aiming at development that promotes human needs and well-being and respects nature. … Syriza is fighting for the re-foundation of Europe away from artificial divisions and cold-war alliances such as NATO. As for the E.U., Syriza denounces the dominant extreme neoliberal and euro-atlantic policies and believes that they must and can be transformed radically in the direction of a democratic, social, peaceful, ecological and feminist Europe, open to a socialist and democratic future."
Putting forth a program of reforms
Syriza — the Coalition of the Radical Left — re-constituted itself as a single party at its first congress in July 2013. Nearly 500 organizations were represented at the congress, which elected Alexis Tsipras as party president and a 201-member central committee. Close to 20 groups comprised Syriza prior to this congress (when it was formally a coalition), most of which remain as part of the party while a few became "allied groups." The party includes Trotskyist, Maoist, Eurocommunist and other non-orthodox communist Leftist groups, but that does not mean it intends to implement a revolutionary program.
The "Thessaloniki Program," announced last September by Mr. Tsipras in the Greek city of that name, promises that Syriza will:
Re-negotiate the national debt and a "haircut" on the foreign debt.
Impose higher taxation on the rich.
Raise salaries for some low-paid employees.
Abolish a recently enacted property tax.
Provide more money for the municipalities and the local authorities.
Create 300,000 new jobs.
Re-open public radio and television, which were summarily shut by the outgoing government.
Establish a new national development bank.
Restore Greece's previous monthly minimum wage of €751.
Ilias Milonas, a member of the Left Platform grouping within Syriza writing on The Socialist Network web site, in pointing out that the Thessaloniki Program consists of reforms that fall short of effecting a necessary structural change, said:
"In the Syriza leadership's programme also absent is the most crucial matter of the nationalisation of the banks, a policy that was decided on at the last congress of Syriza – almost all the banks in Greece have been privatised in recent years. We believe that there is not one programme that can be implemented without the nationalisation of the banking system along with and the rest of the economic system. In contrast, the leadership's proposal for the establishment of a New Development Bank with a budget of one billion Euros is like planting a tree in the Sahara in the hope of greening the desert. Indeed, all they propose for the banks is a vague form of "social control."
Even within Germany, the Left Party advocates a nationalization of banks, so Syriza doing so would not be outlandish (especially as public control of banking and the elimination of speculation are prerequisites for a democratic economy). And a restoration of the previous Greek minimum wage of €751 a month is not living in luxury — at current exchange rates, that's US$893 or £589. Nobody is living well on that.
The program, Mr. Tsipras said, is to cost about €13.5 billion. The Greek newspaper To Vima reports that, of that total, about €2 billion would go toward addressing the humanitarian crisis, €6.5 billion would be used in measures to help restore the economy (with an estimated €3 billion toward benefits), and €5 billion would be invested in restoring employment. This cost is six percent of the total of the loans by the troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund).
Debt relief for Germany
These reforms — which would do nothing to challenge the prevailing power relations and amount to a program of Keynesian initiatives — are nonetheless presented as the crazy schemes of dreamers. "Every new government needs to fulfil the contractual agreements of its predecessors. … But if Greece goes in another direction then that's going to be a difficult situation," Finance Minister Schäuble said, as reported by Reuters. Well, no need for any more elections, then.
Most of all, it would be some sort of moral outrage, scream European leaders and echoed by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Conveniently overlooked is the huge debt forgiveness given to Germany after World War II, which surely helped the Federal Republic recover. Germany's pre-war debt amounted to 22.6 billion marks, including interest, and its postwar debt was estimated at 16.2 billion marks, according to the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt. Yet the U.S., the U.K. and France agreed in 1953 to forgive nearly two-thirds of that total, and allowed Germany to negotiate payment schedules in cases of financial difficulty. On top of that, the allies voluntarily reduced the amount of goods they would export into the Federal Republic so that it could reduce its trade deficit and give a boost to its internal manufacturers.
Syriza argues, not unreasonably, that what was done for Germany in 1953 should be done for Greece today. And, although debt writedowns and aid programs such as the Marshall Plan went toward raising living standards of Germans, the €227 billion of loans that have gone to Greece benefits large financial institutions elsewhere, none more so than German and French banks. By one estimate, only €15 billion has gone to state operations; none after 2012. The Greek government has been a pass-through, taking the loans given it and promptly sending it the financiers who own the debt. At the end of 2008, more than 50 percent of the debt was owed to banks in Germany, France and Italy alone.
The troika has not been propping up the Greek government, it has been propping up Europe's banks and financial houses.
That derives from the neoliberal concept is that people exist to serve markets rather than markets existing to serve people. Entire countries have been harnessed to the dictates of "markets." This has long been the pattern imposed by the global North on the South through institutions like the IMF; now the stronger countries of the North are imposing it on their weaker neighbors. Taxpayers in those stronger countries are on the hook, also, as some of their taxes go toward the bailout funds, for which bailed-out countries are merely a conduit to pass the money to financiers, often from their own country.
If it looks like a depression, talks like a depression …
What has Greece received from the troika's loans? Greek gross domestic product has contracted by 25 percent, unemployment is above 25 percent, real wages have fallen by 30 percent and industrial output has declined by 35 percent. The country's foreign debt has actually risen, to 175 percent of GDP from approximately 130 percent in 2009. This is what the International Monetary Fund hailed as "progress" two years ago!
Just as "the market" dictates a race to the bottom for labor, the harshest terms that can be imposed are mandated for debtors, always wrapped in a hypocritical, sanctimonious "morality." German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not stubborn nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation, as she is sometimes portrayed; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that economic harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany so happens to have that tightest policy. This is the will of the "market" to which they chained themselves.
None of the eurozone's national leaders are reducible to "puppets," but their perceived national interests are distorted by whatever consensus their industrialist and financiers arrive at. Big industrialists and financiers dominate their societies through control of the mass media and a range of other institutions to the point that their preferred policies become, through repetition, the dominant ideas across society and the ideas adopted by the political leaders who become dependent on them. Their aggregate interests constitute the "market."
Greece can not be a socialist island in a capitalist Europe, nor can any other country; that understanding is reflected in Syriza's program. What might a different Europe look like? Various non-orthodox economists have proposed programs, some envisioning Greece remaining in the eurozone and some envisioning Greece dropping the euro and returning to the drachma. What these programs have in common is a vision of a European-wide economic restructuring.
To summarize some of these ideas: The E.U. should be leveraged to internationalize the resistance of working people; full employment demanded as an explicit goal; banks should become publicly owned and democratically controlled so that capital is directed toward socially useful investment instead of speculation; a highly progressive taxation system should be coordinated at the E.U. level; wages raised to account for improved productivity that has, for three decades, gone to capitalists; governments should default at least some of their debts to banks; bank deposits should be guaranteed; and there should be more investment in education to enhance future productivity.
Impossible? In a capitalist Europe, yes. But in a better world, these kinds of ideas would simply be common sense. Why shouldn't they be?
8 Comments Posted in Debt, Europe Tagged austerity, bailouts, capitalism, economics, eurozone, finance, Greece, Syriza
Please make your comment after we make our decision
Taking a page from their United States counterparts, European Union trade negotiators apparently interpret the word "consultation" as a synonym for "ignore." Fresh evidence for this attitude toward the public was provided thanks to a leak of the final text of the proposed "free trade" agreement between Canada and the EU.
Although the E.U. trade office, the European Commission Directorate General for Trade, promotes a process of public consultation on its web site, it isn't the public who gets listened to. The final text of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) includes language mirroring corporate wish lists unchanged from previous drafts despite the fact that the E.U. trade office has not had time to analyze comments submitted by the public.
This farce of a "consultation" process mirrors the secretive negotiations in the better known Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic trade agreements. Corporate lobbyists are well represented in these talks, but the public, watchdog groups and even parliamentarians and legislators are barred from seeing the text. The CETA text is also secret, but was leaked by the German television news program Tagesschau, which published the entire 521-page document on its web site. Yep, 521 pages.
The Rideau Canal in Ottawa (photo by John Talbot)
Critical to understanding the CETA text is Section 33, the portion simply labeled "dispute settlement." Under that bland heading a reader finds the muscle — what is known as an "investor-state dispute mechanism." These "mechanisms," found in many bilateral and multilateral trade deals, are corporate-dominated secret tribunals that hand down one-sided decisions with no oversight, no public notice and no appeals. Governments that agree to these mechanisms legally bind themselves to mandatory arbitration with "investors" in these secret tribunals on which most of the judges are corporate lawyers who represent the "investors" in other legal proceedings.
Kenneth Haar, a spokesman for the watchdog group Corporate Europe Observatory, in an interview with the EurActiv news site, called the dispute mechanism "an outright danger to democracy," and said:
"The Commission is not really serious about its own consultation. It's more about image than substance. … I think those who chose to respond to the Commission's consultation are being ridiculed."
Decisions will be final and unaccountable
Employing the standard sweeping language, CETA's Article 14.2 (the articles here are numbered "14" even though they are found in Section 33) states: "[T]his Chapter applies to any dispute concerning the interpretation or application of the provisions of this Agreement" [page 472]. Article 14.10 goes on to declare, "The ruling of the arbitration panel shall be binding on the Parties. … The panel shall interpret the provisions referred to in Article 14.2 in accordance with customary rules of interpretation of public international law" [page 476].
"Customary" international law is whatever one of these secret tribunals says it is. Environmental regulations, "buy local" laws or any other government action that a corporation claims will hurt its profits can be, and frequently are, ruled illegal by these tribunals when adjudicating disputes under existing trade agreements. Such rulings set precedents that become "customary" international law.
In case these "customary" laws are not clear, on page 480 of the CETA text is Article 14.16, which would supersede national law:
"No Party may provide for a right of action under its domestic law against the other Party on the ground that a measure of the other Party is inconsistent with this Agreement."
Your law was passed in a democratic process? Too bad — it will be overruled if an "investor" doesn't like it.
CETA's proposed rules are consistent with what is being secretly negotiated in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the U.S. and E.U., and in the Trans-Pacific Partnership being negotiated among 12 Pacific Rim countries. A majority of the world's economy would be removed from any possibility of democratic control should these three trade deals come into effect.
The watchdog group Council of Canadians warns:
"The Harper government has thrown Canadian municipalities under the bus, forever banning 'buy local' and other sustainable purchasing policies that help create jobs, protect the environment and support local farmers and businesses. The Harper government has also agreed to lengthen patents and give new monopoly protections to already profitable brand name drug companies, which will needlessly add hundreds of millions to the cost of prescription drugs in Canada."
Not even water would be exempt. If a water system is privatized and a local government chooses to re-municipalize it because rates have risen while service declines (as has routinely occurred on both sides of the Atlantic), the investor would be able to hold out for an extra windfall under the terms of the trade deal.
Only corporate lobbyists need apply
Although the public, and public-interest groups, are not heard, corporate lobbyists are. For example, there are 605 "advisers" with access to the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and who shape U.S. negotiating positions. Virtually every one is an executive of a multi-national corporation or a corporate lobbyist working for an industry association.
It is little different in Europe. Corporate Europe Observatory reports that 92 percent of the closed-doors meetings of the E.U. trade office have been with corporate lobbyists, while only four percent have been with public-interest groups. The trade office has gone so far as to actively solicit the involvement of corporate lobbyists. That perspectives other than those of multi-national capital are not considered can be inferred from the very way public input is solicited, the Observatory said:
"How would the average citizen respond to questions such as: 'If you are concerned by barriers to investment, what are the estimated additional costs for your business (in percentage of the investment) resulting from the barriers?' So, clearly, the close involvement of business lobbyists in drawing up the EU's position for the [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] talks is a result of the privileged access granted to them."
It's no different for CETA, and the same dynamic exists across the Atlantic. Former U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk once admitted that if people knew what was in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it would never pass. It is important to remember that these massive "free trade" deals are not simply business as usual — they go well beyond even the draconian rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
So although the competitive pressures of each country attempting to give an advantage to its multi-national corporations does mean that maneuvering through differing interests requires lengthy negotiations — not to mention the sometimes conflicting interests of various industries — at bottom there is a unifying class interest in the overall project. It is true that the U.S. adopts the hardest line in the trade negotiations it participates in (before we even get to the military muscle it applies to force open Southern countries), yet the absence of the U.S. from a Canada-European Union trade deal has made no practical difference to its outcome.
That different countries, different administrations, reach similar one-sided "free trade" agreements in which "investors" are allowed to overrule national laws, and labor, safety and environmental regulations are "harmonized" at the lowest level, is a product of capitalist competition. The rigors of that structural competition mandate expansion and growth — as local markets mature, capital has no choice, if it is to survive relentless pressure from competitors, other than opening new markets and relentlessly cutting costs to maintain profit levels. "Free trade" agreements represent one of the most effective ways to accomplish that.
Popular revolts against these agreements must be continued, and strengthened, but there will be no end to them as long as economic and social decisions are allowed to be made by "markets," which are not disembodied entities sitting dispassionately on an Olympian throne but rather are the aggregate interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers.
9 Comments Posted in Europe, Trade agreements Tagged Canada, capitalism, CETA, economics, markets, neoliberalism


We feel the need to pack so much into each day. We drive too quickly. We eat too quickly. We spend any spare moments checking up on emails or social networks. Our minds race. We work long hours. We're constantly juggling different things, desperately trying to multi-task our way to whatever success means to us. And when we exercise, we might run or go spinning – we keep that fast, competitive race going.
Days, weeks, months, even years fly by almost without us noticing.
It's no surprise that many of us have a niggling sense that something isn't right; that we're missing something. But too often we try to fill that gap with more stuff – more activity, more material goods.
I believe that what we're actually missing is the present moment. Being in the here and now. And that's why I practise, and teach, slow yoga.
I have a busy life. I talk quickly, I walk quickly, and my mind can all too easily race away thinking about a million things.
That's why I love Dru yoga. It's slow; it's graceful; it's flowing. It gives me permission to move without hurry. It allows me to gently and gradually release tension. It allows me to be here, where I am in the present moment and encourages me to accept that place without judgment. I might be full of energy or I might be frazzled; I might be content and radiant or I might be irritable and grumpy. It's all fine.
For me, to practise one of the many, popular, fast and dynamic forms of yoga (such as Vinyasa, Ashtanga or hot yoga) would be adding fuel to that fire. I need to slow down!
Slow yoga allows my body to relax and my mind to let go. It invites me to gently release tension and blocked energy. It creates space for me to notice how I'm feeling and to be OK with that. It can do that for you too.
With Dru yoga your feel your body stretching; you notice which muscles are being used as you move. This slower style of yoga encourages you to practise safely as you notice the alignment of your joints. You feel your limbs moving. You really feel your spine twisting. You notice your heart rate. You feel the movement of your breath in your body. You notice thoughts and feelings arising.
In other words, slow yoga encourages your mind to focus on the here and now. It brings you back to yourself. It gives your mind space to focus on one thing – your own body, your breath, and all the sensations you are actually feeling, NOW.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that slow yoga is better than any other style of yoga. Some people need and benefit from a higher intensity style of movement. But for me, more dynamic styles of yoga are just too fast because I have a predisposition to rush – I find it all too easy to tune out of my body and to go through the motions.
So for people, like me, who know they need to slow down, who want to connect to a slower pace of movement and connect with their bodies, minds and emotions, I think slow yoga can be really beneficial. It's also wonderful for people who find more dynamic styles of yoga too physically demanding or intimidating.
It's not because it's easier though! On the face of it, slow, graceful Dru yoga may not feel like it's working your body that much. But I find that moving more slowly actually encourages us to use your muscles more efficiently in poses. Rather than using speed and momentum to move from pose to pose, we have to really use our muscles, to use strength to balance our body. And slow stretching encourages our flexibility to increase gradually but deeply. Slow movement demands mental focus too.
So retrain your body and brain to accept a more leisurely pace in a culture which seems to demand and reward speed!
Slow down and notice how you benefit. Give yourself permission to make time to let go of worries; to nurture yourself; and to relax.
Slowly begin to let go of the tensions you daily carry around in your body and expectations you carry around in your mind.
And as you go through your day you may begin to notice our posture, to breathe more deeply and to place less stress on your body. You might begin to stop getting stressed about things which previously irritated you – instead stepping back, letting go of the irritation and gaining a sense of perspective.
Learn to flow through life with a relaxed but alert body and mind.
This is why I love, teach and practise slow yoga.
Have you ever tried Dru yoga or experienced slow yoga? What's your take on what I've written about? Do you agree or disagree? Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear what you think.
Discover more about Dru Yoga.
If you'd like to experience the slow mindfulness of Dru Yoga then come along to one of my classes: check out my class timetable. And I'll be starting new classes in autumn 2014 so sign up to my mailing list to be the first to hear about them.
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Oh! Stella, thank you, you speak so much sense and so eloquently. I've just been looking for things that I need to do, i.e clear away the ironing so I have got space to create a new pile of ironing :)) instead I am going to sit at the french windows and soak up the late afternoon sun.
Happy to see a "name" for slow yoga (Dru yoga) – and all the reasons that it's good for you, are reasons it would be good for me, too.
Plus – my 'beginner mind' doesn't *already know* what all the pose names mean, so it takes a beat or two to grok where your arm goes next, and what "downward-facing dog" looks like, and how to get there from where I am now!


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