There is one thing that I want to get out of the way...
People with an economic background refer to the current enduring crisis as The Great Recession. According
to them the current situation is not a depression like the Great Depression in the Twenties and
Thirties of last century. However, I don’t understand why it is still referred
to as a recession and not a depression. I really think that we are in the
middle of a depression and a very nasty one. I do think so for years already!
In my humble opinion, a depression is not only an (economic) situation; when it occurs, it
is a mindset among large shares of the population!
In the Sixties and Eighties of last century, we had a few nasty
recessions, due to a.o. stagflation and an economy that had to catch its breath
after the quick rebuild that took place directly after the Second World War.
Yet, the greatest difference between these recessions and the current one
was the mindset of the people.
The Sixties were a time of change. A time that youngsters fought against
the narrow-minded chastity and fear of sexuality of their parents. All over the
world students wanted to be taken seriously at their universities. Black people
wanted to have the same legal and civic rights as their white adversaries in
the Southern and Mid-Western states of the United States. And children wanted to
have sex without being worried if the girl would end up pregnant.
It was the time of the struggle for freedom and decolonolization all over
the world. That the cold war was still dangerously close and the risk of a
nuclear war was still at a peak level did not matter much, as it were times of in general optimism and positive change.
And also the Eighties were a time of (slightly hedonistic) optimism and
exuberance. After the nihilistic punk rock music of the Seventies, the new
romantic movement and the glam rock / hair rock bands radiated joy of living and
a larger-than-life attitude, that was in stark contrast with the economic
situation. It was a time in which free sex, possession of glamourous goods and
looking good were extremely important. It was the time of "big hair", wild colours and large shoulder-fillings.
Both recessions were therefore in times very different from our current time...
Lower
and middle-class people in the current times seem shellshocked by the crisis and its side-effects and don’t feel optimistic
about their future, but – rather to the contrary – feel depressed.
The economy has been growing wildly for five years in a row, on behalf of the happy few in charge all over the world. It was spurred by the massive influx of money printed by the
central banks and sent a tsunami of additional wealth to the wealthy. But even now there has been virtually no trickle-down effect from the top echelons to Joe Sixpack and his 'mrs' Jane...
The leading
classes in society can do whatever they want nowadays and can immerse themselves in
hedonistic “spenderism”. Why bother about other people?! They have enough money
to protect themselves from the rest of the world.
The middle and lower classes, at the other end, are still suffering from the enduring
years of wage restraint, economic hardship and the knowledge that their jobs
are more and more on the line. This is all caused by the mounting flexibilization of labour that keeps more and more people on the hook of their (temporary) employers,
as well as the further increasing job uncertainty, due to the robotization of
basic routine jobs.
On top of that the whole social security system and the labour unions are being demolished brick by brick, as the people were made to believe that both were a
waste of money and the people were better off without them.
All this means that
times of economic hardship can again lead to a life in poverty, just like at the end of
the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century.
But what makes these times so outrightly dangerous is that the multinationals,
the bankers and the exuberantly rich people made the middle and lower classes
believe that their money hoarding, their tax avoidance / evasion and their
political bartering for more favourable, “bespoke” legislation are the new
normal.
If large multinationals are hoarding money and trigger favourable
legislation for their shareholders overseas, that is normal. When Starbucks is
only paying a few odd bucks in sales taxes on sales figures mounting to billions
of Pounds in the UK alone, it is a sensibly led company. Why should companies
pay taxes after all?
The same is true for rich people and especially heirs of family wealth
who don’t have to work for their income anymore :
“Why would I pay taxes for their money? When my father earned it, he
already paid taxes over it. Taxes on wealth are legal robbery!!!”.
These
are the worn-out arguments that are used always by these people to defend their point of
view. They forget, however, that if the large companies, the top-class workers
and the owners of large amounts of inherited or earlier earned wealth don’t pay
their taxes, it are always the small retail companies, the freelancers and
especially the middle class workers, who have to foot the bill for the taxes not paid by the others.
But these large
companies and rich people are not to blame for that...
They are not to blame for
locking themselves up in gated communities and expensive holiday resorts, so
that they are never confronted with the side-effects of avoiding taxes in their
own country and abroad. They feel not attached to these people, so why would they have to care.
They know they are not to blame for their hedonism, as their expenditures are good for the economy. And they don't feel guilty at all for their
unhealthily strong relation with the leading politicians.
They (in this case the large multinationals and other large employers) are also not to
blame for keeping the lower and middle class wages ar roughly the same levels as 15-odd years ago:
“If we all would raise the wages, our
companies would soon be out of business, for becoming too expensive. No,
instead we move the labour to the low wage-countries, hire dozens of workers
from India and Eastern Europe, because they are so inexpensive, and we give our
CEO a 40% wage raise because he is worth it!”.
So what happened now that the large corporations and the rich people could not be blamed for anything?!
It slowly became cool for lower and middle class people to blame the immigrants
and especially the muslim minorities for the economic misery in the country.
Even
though these people in most cases did their best to earn a decent living in an honest
job, they were nevertheless blamed for everything that was wrong in the
country. The emergence of the
islam-inspired terrorism in the Middle East and in cities in the Western World helped
this process to mount, but even before that it was an already mounting process.
Nevertheless, even though the emergence of (often islamophobic )
conservative anti-establishment parties like Lijst Pim Fortuyn and the Party
for Freedom of Geert Wilders already started at the beginning of the 21st
Century, it really took off when the Second Great Depression broke out.
Instead of the lower and middle classes blaming the
people and institutions that deserved a much larger part of the blame and instead of sticking
with organizations that could change things for the better for the middle class workers (like f.i. labour
unions), the blame game against minorities became more virulent by the year.
- Dutch Blend tea as a new flavour for Pickwick;
- A beer brand advertising with " Our beer" as a slogan;
- Campina only using milk from
Dutch cows;
- And many companies waving the Dutch flag or using the orange colour in their commercials
All these things were a disguised signal that The Netherlands was the best and the rest of the world really did not
matter.
I already had a notion
that these nationalist tendencies could soon become a more grim character. And that happened indeed…
The mounting hatred
against f.i. the jewish business man George Soros and the utterly aggressive speeches against the muslim minorities by seasoned politicians in The Netherlands and elsewhere were
a rocksolid signal that things were starting to go really wrong.
And so was the
Brexit, that was basically about the English who protested that immigrants “took
their jobs away and stole their healthcare money”.
The epitomy (or new low)
was the election of Donald Trump and his America first policy, which was a very
strong signal of unhealthy and aggressive nationalism.
The unhealthy
nationalism in The Netherlands became very visible with the more and more
aggressive battle against Black Pete, the archetypical black aid of Sinterklaas:
our national holy man and centuries-long symbol of the biggest children’s holiday in The
Netherlands.
For black and coloured
people Black Pete stood symbol for ages of slavery and suppression by the white
majority. And in a broader sense he stood for an inferiority complex, that was reinforced
by the coloured people’s difficulties to be tolerated as fully Dutch citizens and
to get equal chances in society, just as the white majority did.
Instead of the white
majority in The Netherland showing understanding and compassion for the
sensitivities of the coloured minorities in the light of their history of the
last four centuries, some of then went on an “all-out war” against the Black
Pete protestors.
They used more and more rude words, uttered serious threats and were caught in petty
violence against the Black Pete protestors. They even organized a reckless blockade of the A7 highway, in order to
stop the Black Pete protestors from disturbing a parade of Sinterklaas and
Black Pete for the children in Friesland with their demonstrations. And also the tone of voice of some Black
Pete protestors themselves became more and more aggressive and violent.
This was not a simple
dispute about a children’s holiday and its historical background. No, it was a
battle between us (the real white Dutchmen) and them (the immigrants with a
coloured background, who were considered to be second rate citizens by many of
the first, who should just adapt and shut up). This is the kind of nationalism
that is mounting everywhere all over the globe.
My point is here that
the reasons for this virulent nationalism can be sought and found in the
economic circumstances and the current political caste, which doesn’t care much
about the circumstances of the lower and middle classes and their enduring
battle against wage restraint.
And of course the terrorist
violence in Europe of the last two decades plays an important role, just as the
enduring unemployment is partially(!) caused by immigrants from Eastern Europe,
who were willing to do the less sexy jobs against a lower payment.
However, for me the most
important cause is that the lower and middle class people are really suffering
from a widespread depression, because of their enduring economic hardship, their
difficulties to acquire a home at a fair price, their stagnating wages and
their increasing job insecurity.
And at the same time, they see the “fat cat”
people who can afford anything at any time of the year and who don't feel compassion for their fellow countrymen anymore.
As this is the biggest
difference between the Sixties and the Eighties at one hand and the last two decades at the other hand. Those decades were decades in which Europe was still
built up after the Second World War, while the last decade is first and
foremost a decade of breaking up things like the social welfare state and the
most fundamental job security, on behalf of an elite that becomes richer and
richer in the process.
The worrisome part is
that initially the aggression among the population was limited to the social
media, like GeenStijl, Twitter and Facebook. People felt free to react from the
comfort of anonimity.
Currently, however, the
tone of voice on the streets "in real life" becomes really aggressive at protests and there
are more and more symbols of dangerous nationalism and racism everywhere. The
so-called Prince’s Flag (orange-white-blue) and swastika-like symbols are used
more often, in combination with nazi-gestures that had been bannished in public
for years. At the same time the tone of voice in the political arenas had already
become worse for years.
Where this nationalism
and the widespread depression lead to is anybody’s guess. I myself have a
suspicion that things first will become worse, before they might improve. The societal mood is still very poor at the moment and the frustation is going through the roof everywhere.
I hope
that an improving economy can canalize these feelings of frustration and
despair, but at this moment it feels like a volcano that is about to break out
with a massive explosion.
