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	It is now a fact: Hungary is no longer a democracy by Benjamin Abtan New Statesman, Eurozine   Mar 2013   President János Áder has just signed the implementation decrees for new constitutional reforms that wipe out what was left of opposition forces against the government.   More particularly, the Constitutional Court is no longer allowed to give its opinion about the content of the laws and to refer to its own case-law – which results in the loss of almost all monitoring power on the legislature and the executive.   This meticulous destruction of democracy and its values – whose starting point was the tidal wave election of Fidesz in 2010 – has taken place for months and months under everybody’s eyes.   The attack was clear and continuous: crippling restriction of the freedom of the press, political tutelage of the Central Bank, inclusion in the Constitution of Christian religious references and of the "social utility" of individuals as a necessary condition for the enforcement of social rights, deletion of the word "Republic" in the same Constitution to define the country"s political system, condemnation of homosexuality, criminalization of the homeless, attacks against women"s rights, impunity afforded to perpetrators of racist murders, strengthening of a virulent anti-Semitism…   Only a few days ago, Orban officially decorated three extreme right-wing leading figures: journalist Ferenc Szaniszlo, known for his diatribes against the Jews and the Romani people, that he compares to "monkeys"; anti-Semitic archaeologist Kornel Bakav, who blames the Jews for having organized the slave trade in the Middle-Age; finally, “artist" Petras Janos, who proudly claims his proximity to the Jobbik and its paramilitary militia, responsible for several racist murders of Romani people and heiress of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, that organized the extermination of Jews and Gypsies during the Second World War.   This political degradation gives us a gruesome history and political lesson.   Throughout the twentieth century, representative democracy suffered the attacks of the two major totalitarian systems of the century – Nazism and Communism.   Nowadays, in the twenty-first century, it is under the blows of an anti-European, nationalist, racist and anti-Semitic populism that democracy has fallen, at the heart of Europe, amidst the indifference of the European Union and of too many of its citizens and leaders.   Obsessed by the economic and financial issues, too indifferent to its fundamental values of freedom, equality, peace and justice, the EU has seemingly abandoned the fight to promote or even maintain democracy as the political system of its member States. Unlike Putin’s Russia, for example, Hungary does not have instruments of power, and realpolitik cannot be invoked as a reason for this desertion. Since Hungary is strongly dependent on European subsidies and assistance, and since the EU has ominously shown in Greece how its financial support could be politicized to the extreme, a supposed lack of room for maneuver of the EU cannot be invoked either.   The reason for this desertion of Europe is worrying: a lack of commitment of the citizens and European leaders towards strongly protecting representative democracy as a political system.   This is the reason why, since his re-election in 2010, Orbán has received the support of a number of European leaders, notably from his own political family; this is also why the European Commission does not use any of the instruments available – though it does have many – to enforce the EU’s fundamental values.   For example, the Commission, the Parliament and the European Council, where the states are represented, can act in concert to pursue actions under Article 7 of the EU Treaty, introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 in order to avoid any backward step on democracy for any EU member state. Article 7 intends to suspend the voting rights of a country within the Council in case of a "potential violation of common values".   In Hungary, however, the stage of risk was overstepped a long time ago. Actions under Article 7 should therefore be urgently taken, as a first step towards a strong EU commitment to defend democracy and its values.   Similarly, the European civil society must continue to commit itself strongly to support Hungarian democrats who bravely fight within the country itself.   If the EU and the civil society were not to commit themselves with the determination required by the gravity of the situation, we would be doomed to witness its rapid decay, in Hungary and soon elsewhere, if the European commitment turned out to be insufficient.   Let there be no mistake: what is at stake here is the nature of the European project and the ability of Europe to preserve our common and most precious commodity: democracy. For several decades, the choice between barbarism and democracy has never been so obvious. Resolutely, we have to choose Europe and democracy.   * Benjamin Abtan, is President of the European Grassroots Antiracist Movement(EGAM). Hungary has been a constant concern for anyone interested in European politics and Eurozine has published extensively on different aspects of the Hungarian situation. Ahead of the Hungarian elections in 2014, we have collected some of those articles dealing with both recent developments and broader issues relating to Hungarian politics, history and culture: http://www.eurozine.com/comp/focalpoints/hungary2013.html
	The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel, Michael Rosen Project Syndicate, Open Democracy & agencies   The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel.   Today, there are very few things that money can’t buy. If you are sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, and don’t like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison-cell upgrade for about $90 per night.   If you want to help to prevent the tragic fact that, each year, thousands of babies are born to drug-addicted mothers, you can contribute to a charity that uses a market mechanism to ameliorate the problem: a $300 cash grant to any drug-addicted woman willing to be sterilized.   Or, if you want to attend a US Congressional hearing, but don’t want to wait for hours in line, you can enlist the services of a line-standing company. The company hires homeless people and others in need of work to wait in line – overnight if necessary. Just before the hearing begins, the paying customer can take his or her line-stander’s place in the queue, and claim a front-row seat in the hearing room.   Is there anything wrong with buying and selling these things? Some would say no; people should be free to spend their money to buy whatever someone else is willing to sell. Others believe that there are some things that money should not be able to buy. But why? What exactly is wrong with selling prison-cell upgrades to those who can afford them, or offering cash for sterilization, or hiring line-standers?   To answer questions such as these, we need to pose a bigger question: What role should money and markets play in a good society?   Asking this question, and debating it politically, is more important than ever. The last three decades have witnessed a quiet revolution, as markets and market-oriented thinking have reached into spheres of life previously governed by non-market values: family life and personal relations; health and education; environmental protection and criminal justice; national security and civic life.   Almost without realizing it, we have drifted from having market economies to becoming market societies. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society, by contrast, is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It is a way of life in which market values seep into social relations and govern every domain.   We should be worried about this trend for two reasons. First, as money looms larger in our societies, affluence – and its absence – matters more. If the main advantages of affluence were the ability to afford yachts and fancy vacations, inequality would matter less than it does today. But, as money comes to govern access to education, health care, political influence, and safe neighborhoods, life becomes harder for those of modest means. The marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality.   A second reason to resist putting a price tag on all human activities is that doing so can be corrupting. Prostitution is a classic example. Some object to it on the grounds that it typically exploits the poor, for whom the choice to sell their bodies may not be truly voluntary. But others object on the grounds that reducing sex to a commodity is inherently degrading and objectifying.   The idea that market relations can corrupt higher goods is not restricted to matters of sex and the body. It also applies to civic goods and practices. Consider voting. We don’t allow a free market in votes, even though such a market would arguably be “efficient,” in the economist’s sense of the term. Many people don’t use their votes, so why let them go to waste? Why not let those who don’t much care about an election’s outcome sell their vote to someone who does? Both parties to the transaction would be better off.   The best argument against a market in votes is that the vote is not a piece of private property; rather, it is a public responsibility. To treat a vote as an instrument of profit would be to degrade it, to corrupt its meaning as an expression of civic duty.   But, if a market in votes is objectionable because it corrupts democracy, what about systems of campaign finance (including the one currently in place in the United States) that give wealthy donors a disproportionate voice in elections? The reason to reject a market in votes – preserving the integrity of democracy – may be a reason to limit financial contributions to political candidates as well.   Of course, we often disagree about what counts as “corrupting” or “degrading.” To decide whether prostitution is degrading, we have to decide how human sexuality is properly valued. To decide whether selling prison-cell upgrades corrupts the meaning of criminal justice, we have to decide what purpose criminal punishment should serve. To decide whether we should allow the buying and selling of human organs for transplantation, or hire mercenaries to fight our wars, we have to think through hard questions about human dignity and civic responsibility.   These are controversial questions, and we often try to avoid addressing them in public discourse. But that is a mistake. Our reluctance to engage morally contested questions in politics has left us ill-equipped to deliberate about one of the most important issues of our time: Where do markets serve the public good, and where do they not belong?   * Michael J. Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author, most recently, of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Watch the 12-part series “Justice” the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on public television. Nearly a thousand students pack Harvard’s theatre to hear Michael Sandel, “perhaps the most prominent college professor in America,” (Washington Post) talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship.   http://www.justiceharvard.org/   http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/michael-sandel3a-what-money-can27t-buy/4657940 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/philosopher-michael-sandel/4826106 http://www.project-syndicate.org/focal-points/the-clash-of-the-capitalisms   http://www.themonthly.com.au/video/2013/07/11/1373504483/what-money-cant-buy-michael-sandel-conversation-julian-morrow   March 2013   Exposing the Big Lie at the heart of this economic catastrophe, by Michael Rosen.   Budget week thoughts: The people who got us into this fix are holding the world to ransom by their speculative lunacy and greed. The big brake is not government debt.   Whole sections of the "west" are in recession or near zero growth. This was not caused by some kind of mass activity by working people. It wasn"t caused by governments in one or several countries spending too much. What has caused the recession in the first instance is that the financial sector ran up huge debts, far, far in excess of public debts and deficits, as it went in for some wild speculative behaviour - a good deal of which involved them selling debts to each other!   We might ask why did they do that? They did it because one of the problems that capitalism has, is that it is locked into making profits. That"s what it does. That"s what it"s for. However, when it makes profits, its bosses know that they have to do things with those profits over and beyond spending them on luxury goods for themselves. If they don"t, their own firms will start to be not sufficiently modern and the surplus money that they have will decrease in value. So, part of the capitalists drive is what they call "investment". They hunt for places to put the money. However, they will only do this if certain conditions are met, most of which revolve around the idea that the money they invest must bring them more money in return ie be profitable. Any other kind of investment is charity or bad business.   So, the speculative bubble which burst in 2010, was in essence an attempt by financial capitalists to find more and more profitable opportunities. In the anarchic lunacy which is called "good business", more and more of them borrowed money to buy debts which they thought would be profitable for them. (If I buy a debt from a moneylender I will collect the payments people pay him for having borrowed money from him. Nice. But if the people who are supposed to pay the interest are unable to pay, not so nice.) They did this because the returns on putting that capital into other ventures were lower and/or slower. Capitalism doesn"t act for the general good. It would have been better if capitalists had invested in housing, hospitals, alternative energy but in a ''''''''free'''''''' society, no one tells capitalists to do this, so instead they cook up crackpot schemes like hedgefunds and the like.   One of the underlying reasons for the crisis happening at that time was that at the end of the line of debt were people who were being laid off from work. They were being laid off from work because, capitalists don"t fix their rate of production according to planning, they do it by projecting sales. However, this works according to boom and bust: produce more and more until there is saturation of the market, then sack as many people as you can (cutting costs) who immediately become less able to pay their mortgages, their insurance or buy things. So the economy goes into slump, bottoms out, until wages, rents and primary goods get so cheap, more and more capitalists start to think they can take the risk to produce stuff and try to flog it.   What has happened this time round in the boom bust cycle is that the capitalists have a huge great brake on the system: their own debts. However, as you know, the big lie - no The Big Lie - that has been put about for the last two years is that the big brake is government debts, ie the money and the interest payments that are paid out for our benefit on education, health, welfare - and, though I don"t agree with it - defence, because theoretically it"s there to defend us.   We are meant to believe that the reason why the economy won"t or can"t "grow" is because Labour ran up a deficit ie its outgoings per year on money borrowed was too high. And we aren"t supposed to think that capitalists are unwilling to "grow" (ie invest, employ people and sell more goods) because the finance sector in particular is in the worst indebtedness it has ever, ever been in. So, though its managers and owners pay themselves salaries and bonuses worth millions, they can"t and won"t lend money at a sufficiently fast and high rate for manufacturing and service industry capitalists to be able to invest in plant, new machinery, or start-up funds to take on workers.   Meanwhile, the global take home pay for workers continues to go down in real terms (ie in relation to people"s bills) and go down in relation to the amount of money we can call profits. So simply put, the vast majority of people have less money to buy the goods that the capitalists would make and try to sell, if they could. The main pressure downwards on pay comes from government initiated pay freezes, unemployment, part-time, short-term employment and lack of union organisation to resist this pressure.   So there is a double squeeze on capitalists - banks who won"t lend them money at a low enough rate because they are scared stiff that they (the banks) will crash; workers with not enough money in their pockets for capitalists to think it"s worth trying to make stuff for workers to buy.   In my dream world, Labour would be saying all this. They would be spelling it out with diagrams, films, and leaflets. They would be showing that a tiny group of people held and are still holding the world to ransom on account of their speculative lunacy and greed. They would be showing that each time Osborne and all the press pals say that it"s the deficit that"s the problem they would say, Oh no it isn"t, it"s the private debt. Every time Iain Duncan Smith and his press pals point the finger at this or that "benefit cheat" or "welfare dependent underclass", Labour would point the finger at the vast debts seizing up the system causing much more damage than a few people working a small time racket. They would point the finger at the vast millions people earn who manage these debts and who are of no productive use whatsoever. They are parasites. And they would talk about the greed-dependent overclass who got us into this fix.   They would and they should say that this government everyday blames and punishes the victims of the bankers and financiers greed. And they would show that it is the system of basing everything we do, need, eat and drink on profit that caused the problem in the first place. As I said, capitalists base all their actions on profitability. They don"t base it on general need or for the general good. That"s why the financiers went off thinking that they had created a new alternative world where money could create money and there would be no consequences.   We have to think of other ways in which we can create a society that is not based on profitability, otherwise all that will happen is that we will go on and on destroying people"s lives through unemployment, poverty, lack of welfare and permanent small wars — which one day might burgeon into even bigger ones.
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