We Are Humans, Goddamned

Photo via RoarMag.org

February 22

Dear people,

It won’t take too long before I can start writing a blog about the ‘Dutch Revolution’. The newspapers have been announcing it for weeks: Holland is the new Greece. And since yesterday, when the figures came in, it’s official.

I’ll try to give you an idea.

Before the crisis started, Holland had three-and-a-half big banks. One of those collapsed and was nationalised in 2008. Another one could only be saved with a massive injection of public funds. The third is a cooperative bank, still pretty safe, and the half bank was nationalised a month ago. This one had always been specialised in savings accounts, but when the economy went through the roof in the early 2000s they decided to compete with the big banks and started building castles in the air.

The bank massively invested in real estate, mostly in Spain, in 2008, which turned out to be neither the time nor the place to make a lucrative investment. They were able to creatively mask the fact that they were broke for almost five years, but when a run on the bank began to take shape the state decided to take over.

It’s a curious thing. For the last twenty years or so, EU legislation has outlawed public support of national industries, but obviously for banks one can make an exception. They are, practically, above the law.

A very reasonable Dutch law says that no public servant should earn more than the prime minister (about 200k euro per year). Fortunately there are ways to circumvent this. Over the last few decades the government has outsourced much of its tasks to semi-public entities, whose managers have the advantage of being able to fill up their pockets with bonuses, without the disadvantage of having to respond to the public.

These are the modern ‘regents’ as they say in Holland, an urban oligarchy that divides lucrative jobs among each other, without possessing any capabilities to speak of.

Now, what goes for semi-public entities, doesn’t go for the nationalised bank. The bank is public, but the social-democrat minister of finance still hired a banker for over twice the allowed pubic salary, while stressing that all employees will see their pay checks and pensions cut.

Of course, with the banks being exceptions, you can break the law, if you’re a minister. Because you need a good banker, and you won’t find one for less than 50,000 euros a month. It’s not me who says so, no, it’s the market, and the market is always right.

You’re allowed to doubt, sure, but doubt is ridiculous. I would say: why a banker? Weren’t they the ones who caused this mess in the first place? Are we absolutely sure we can’t find a capable person that will cure a bank for less than half a million per year? And instead of a banker, can’t we find a renowned economist, a professor maybe? Someone with enough self-esteem to lack the need for an exuberant pay-check?

Sure we can. But we have to convince our so-called representatives to make it happen. They still have the nasty habit of listening to the priests of high finance who keep predicting doom and destruction if their advices are not put into practice to the letter.

Well, if it’s going to be doom and destruction, we better make sure it’s going to be fun as well.

One Dutch columnist wondered, ‘Why haven’t the windows of the banks been shattered yet? Why haven’t they been burned to the ground?’

He was smart enough to add that he wasn’t instigating anyone to do anything. He was just wondering.

Me too, I’m just wondering what it’ll take. In 2008 the whole economy collapsed, and yet, nothing was done to punish those responsible, or to avoid it would happen again. The high priests could keep harvesting their bonuses while the rest of us were asked to make sacrifices. Then in 2011, occupying all over the globe, people tried to make a change, peacefully. But nothing happened. The high priests are still there, they are laughing at us from their ivory towers.

So what will it take?

A demonstration? Or two? Three?

A riot? Or two? Three?

A molotov? A bomb? Or ten?

An armed insurrection?

A revolution?

The guillotine?

Hell yeah, all of it. And you know why? Because we are humans goddamned. We might be sedated by comfort, but deep down we realise that we are being screwed over every day. Deep down we’re longing to be free, waiting for the moment when it all explodes and we will smash up the ivory towers of power.

Remember, this is Holland. The fucking best place in the world to be born in. And it’s sinking.

How come? Why Holland? You want to know more? Alright, listen. I’ll teach you a word of Dutch, a very important word. No, it’s not ‘apartheid’. You already know that one. It’s ‘hypotheekrenteaftrek’.

Got that? No? Okay, once again, slowly: ‘Hy-po-theek-ren-te-af-trek’. It means tax deductability of mortgage interest.

Holland is maybe the only country that still gives this type of incentive to stimulate people to buy a house. It made real estate prices rise much faster in Holland than in other countries. Especially because many people took a mortgage that they didn’t bother to repay, because prices were rising anyway. A house was an investment, a chicken with golden eggs.

Or at least, that’s what it used to be. Now it turns out it was only a bubble. New laws state that if you take a mortgage, you have to pay it back. The hypotheekrenteaftrek will be phased out. The result of this is that hardly anyone can afford a house at the current inflated prices. Those prices are starting to fall. And they will fall further, they will readjust at normal levels of the countries surrounding us. Which is what, half the current price? A third?

The real estate bubble in Holland, like in Spain, has been the motor of the economy for years. Now people find the value of their assets going down every month. They are reluctant to spend. The economy is in recession, unemployment is soaring.

So, we have a country which is ruled by ventriloquist bankers, and politicians sitting on their lap. We all have to pay. Not only the home-owning middle classes, also the students who no longer get subsidised to study, but who will have to indebt themselves American style before joining the ranks of the unemployed. And the elderly of course, the people who built up this great country and its once admireable welfare state. Right now, while the baby boom is reaching the pension age, the government has decided to close almost half of the elderly homes. They can die at home, agonising on the floor for days, there’s no money to take care of them, or let their offspring do that, like the days of yore. Come on! We need three billion to buy a bank, another ten billion to buy the latest generation of super cool jet fighters! We can’t take care of our elderly! They’re useless anyway.

So what’s left? Maybe the last traces of the famed Dutch tolerance? Hardly. We are decent people, we don’t do drugs, we don’t do hookers. So we don’t want others to do it either. Foreigners can get their weed from a dealer in the alleys. We don’t want them in the coffeeshops anymore. And the social-democrats prefer the prostitutes of the red light district to return out of sight, to the shabby parking lots on the edge of town, to get fucked for a shot of heroine without any health care at all.

It’s a lot better this way. The real estate value of the red light district is (still) huge. The brothels can be turned into a luxury shopping district with classy restaurants. Hell yeah! Let’s be proud of ourselves. We are such decent people.

So, let’s get back to the big question.

‘How long will it take?’

We tried to be reasonable, a few years ago, when we occupied. We can also be unreasonable. After all, we are the 99 percent. We are too big to fail. If the powers-that-be are deaf to our most reasonable demand of an economy that serves the people and not the bankers, then there is no reason to talk to them anymore.

All we can do, at that point, is to bring them down with whatever means necessary.

Evolution Theory

Homage to Mondriaan (2007)

 

Dear people,

The last time I was in Holland it was autumn, and occupation fever had broken out. In no other country, except for the United States and Spain, so many squares were taken in so many towns and villages.

I was amazed. I visited occupations in Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Eindhoven. And in my native town of Dordrecht of course.

I felt the blind enthusiasm of a blossoming revolutionary movement, the great feeling that the rules of the game have changed and that everything can be possible. But with a difference. I didn’t get carried away by it this time, because I had seen it all before in Spain. I knew that sooner or later the enthusiasm would inexorably consume itself, and reality would return like the sun after a night of fiesta.

Since then, the rains have come, and the snow. Christmas came by, and new year’s eve. Spring was late, and even though it’s July by now, summer in Holland has only started last week.

During all this time, many of the occupations resisted. But as the long dark season wore on their numbers dwindled, not so much because of the weather, but because of internal turmoil and growing impatience from the authorities.

When I came back, a fortnight ago, the occupations in The Hague and Utrecht still resisted. The remainders of Occupy Amsterdam had been cleared by the police in March.

“Wow,” I thought, “they are still here. I have to pay them a visit soon.”

Next day Occupy Utrecht folded their last tent, and the day after also Occupy Den Haag finally surrendered. It was too late for me to say goodbye. The camps had become a magnet for drug addicts, outcasts and homeless. The few brave indignados who had resisted were finally outnumbered. They didn’t feel safe any more, and they abandoned the square.

So the occupations in Holland withered away, and the image they left is one of a naive bunch of protesters with no clear ideas on any subject, and of shabby downtown campings, potentially dangerous and smelling of dope and alcohol.

Last year, when the general assembly of Puerta del Sol decided to lift the acampada after four weeks of occupation, someone asked me if I agreed. At the time, I didn’t answer. But now, with sufficient hindsight, I can say it was the right decision.

Nevertheless, the Dutch occupations resisted a harsh winter and two of them lasted for almost nine months. It’s a remarkable feat.

I step off the train in Eindhoven. For me this is another little piece of home. And a most interesting place it is. Many western cities have become what they are today because of the multinationals they spawned. Turin and Fiat, Atlanta and Coca-Cola, Detroit and General Motors. But few cities have been so intimately linked to a company as Eindhoven is to Philips.

Quite literally, Philips built this city. So allow me to take you on an infomercial tour to a corner of the Netherlands that proudly presents itself as ‘the smartest region of Europe’. Don’t worry, there is a point to all this. You will see.

It all started off with a good idea. A light bulb, so to speak. It had been the result of many decades of research and the final ‘invention’ is usually credited to Thomas Alva Edison.

If modern copyright custom were in vigour at the time, each of those small advances would have been rigourously patented, and Edison would never have been allowed to create his light bulb.

But the good idea traveled fast and far. In a small village in Brabant, two brothers took it up and started constructing their own bulbs in a country shed. Today, the Philips brothers would be considered pirates, they would be sued out of business by Edison. But back in the closing years of the 19th century the Philips family had no trouble starting up their business, because American patents were not applicable under Dutch legislation.

Without ‘pirates’ like Anton and Gerard Philips, Eindhoven would never have turned from a sleepy Brabant village to the ‘smartest region of Europe’.

So first came the factory, then came the city. Cozy little houses for the blue-collar workers, spacy villas for the management, facilities, parks, swimming pools, sportsclubs etc. Soon the village of Eindhoven swallowed the five villages around her to form a curious star-shaped agglomeration.

During the Great Depression, a company orchard was planted on the outskirts of the city. It was one of many employment projects of the age. Because in the 1930s the reigning economic philosophy on how to counter the crisis was quite the opposite of today’s. More government spending, instead of harsh austerity measures.

The unemployed labour force was harnassed to build works for public use. It caused the debt to increase, but this way the workers would have money to spend. And money needs to keep rolling. As long as it does, so economic guru John Keynes predicted, the economy would continue to grow.

Unfortunately, in the midst of rising political tensions and visceral demagogy, the economic crisis spiraled down to a devastating world war.

The Philips brothers evacuated themselves and many of their directors to the United States and took most of the company’s capital with them. The factories continued to operate under German supervision during the war, and the Philips orchard proved to be very useful. In times of shortages the apples were used to make the infamous rations of Philiprak (‘Philips mash’).

After the war, Philips pioneered its way into various branches of consumer electronics (with mixed results) and Eindhoven continued to be at the center of its global web. But by the end of the century the relationship between the company and the city was radically changing as a result of globalisation.

Manufacturing had been outsourced to low-wage countries, the monumental old factories were being given new residential or commercial use. The city reinvented itself as a place of design and high-tech R&D.

In the midst of this great makeover, the Philips orchard still exists. We had family lunch there the other day. You can eat pancakes with apples straight from the garden. It holds thousands of trees, neatly planted the Dutch way, making maximum use of minimum space. It’s an experimental ground for students of the agrarian university of Wageningen for research into biological ways of extensive farming.

I take a quiet walk there. When the harvesting season comes you can pick as many apples as you can carry for a small fee. And me, I wonder about the whole revolution/evolution issue.

It’s true that many things are very wrong with our way of life, and getting worse. But in a broad perspective, many other things are definitely getting better. So maybe change is happening, very slowly. It’s a matter of economy, sure, but it’s also a matter of social and moral acceptability.

Maybe we will do away with chemical agriculture and industrial animal exploitation. Not only because in the long run it’s unsustainable and unhealthy, but also because people will convince themselves that it’s no longer acceptable.

For ages, until not so long ago, the institution of slavery has been morally acceptable. It was finally abolished not in the least because people became aware that it was wrong. The same thing eventually happened with child labour, with the legal inequality between men and women, between whites and blacks, between gay and straight.

So why shouldn’t this moral awareness slowly extend to the treatment of animals and the earth itself? I have a feeling it’s already happening right now.

Or maybe not. Social awareness doesn’t come by itself. You have to keep pushing it. That’s why it’s a good thing to be a revolutionary, to keep demanding the impossible, always.

In case we don’t succeed, we will at least have shaken things up. Ideas will take root, and with a bit of good luck, history will prove them right.