Tide of Anger

Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their
government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist
circles in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."

Its message was simple enough. You--politicians and CEOs huddled at some
trade summit--are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course,
we didn't know the half of it). We--the rabble outside--are like the
people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily
similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They
shouted, "!Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!")
and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks.
What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't
directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the
abstract. The target was the dominant economic model--this was the first
national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece,
the rest of the world is finally having its !Que se vayan
todos! moment.

The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their
kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?)
echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective
rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they
could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic
office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I
don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the
political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and
they ruined it."

Another echo: in Reykjavik, the protesters clearly won't be bought off
by a mere change of face at the top (even if the new PM is a
lesbian). They want aid for people, not just banks; criminal
investigations into the debacle; and deep electoral reform.

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has
contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the
government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been
rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on
January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders'
refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV
what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing
special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed
the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also
causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year:
money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with
plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that
many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland,
Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's
leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary
Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of
it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake.
Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the
streets and the protests never stopped.

This same bottom-up refusal to bear the brunt of the crisis unites many
of today's protests. In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on
government austerity measures--mass layoffs, reduced social services and
slashed public sector salaries--all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan
(no, nothing has changed). In Greece, December's riots followed a police
shooting of a 15-year-old. But what's kept them going, with farmers
taking the lead from students, is widespread rage at the government's
crisis response: banks got a $36 billion bailout while workers got their
pensions cut and farmers received next to nothing. Despite the
inconvenience caused by tractors blocking roads, 78 percent of Greeks
say the farmers' demands are reasonable. Similarly, in France the recent
general strike--triggered in part by President Sarkozy's plans to reduce
the number of teachers dramatically--inspired the support of 70 percent
of the population.

Perhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a
rejection of the logic of "extraordinary politics"--the phrase coined by
Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis,
politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular
"reforms." That trick is getting tired, as South Korea's government
recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the
crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with
the United States. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes,
legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in
private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Opposition politicians were having none of it: with sledgehammers and an
electric saw, they broke in and staged a twelve-day sit-in of
Parliament. The vote was delayed, allowing for more debate--a victory
for a new kind of "extraordinary politics."

Here in Canada, politics is markedly less YouTube-friendly--but it has
still been surprisingly eventful. In October the Conservative Party won
national elections on an unambitious platform. Six weeks later, our Tory
prime minister found his inner ideologue, presenting a budget bill that
stripped public sector workers of the right to strike, canceled public
funding for political parties and contained no economic stimulus.
Opposition parties responded by forming a historic coalition that was
only prevented from taking power by an abrupt suspension of Parliament.
The Tories have just come back with a revised budget: the pet right-wing
policies have disappeared, and it is packed with economic stimulus.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by
free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited
agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken
to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"