I’m a Basque separatist, euskal separatista naiz

[00:01:43.080] – Steve Grumbine

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is from across the pond in Spain. We have Stuart Medina Miltimore. He’s an economist and a founding member of the Red MMT Spain, of which he is currently the President. He is currently an advisor to parliamentarians of the progressive political movement. And I will let him break these names out because my goodness, I will butcher them.

Oh, man. There you go. In Basque country, he has developed his professional career in the biotechnology sector, where he has held a management position such as controller and director of business development.

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[00:12:25.190] – Medina Miltimore

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And one of my jobs right now is to review the general budgets of the regional governments of the Basque country. And I’m going to spare you the complexities of the institutional structure of Spain. But there are several regional governments there, and each one has their own general budget. And when you see the increases in spending, they’re quite tepid.

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But there they are basically bonded or chained by all the other restrictions that are in place. For example, the number of public employees cannot grow. It has been basically frozen for the last 15 years. So we’ve had the same number of public employees in the Basque country since the year 2011. If I remember correctly. And we’re not allowed to hire more people in the local governments, it’s just simply not allowed.

This year, for 2022, the central government of Spain made an exception by people in the healthcare system and a few other areas where they allowed 1.2 people to be hired for every person leaving employment in the public sector. And that’s an exception. But it hasn’t been picked up by the Basque government, which is in charge of managing the health system. So the irony is that they’re allowed to walk out of their cells, but the inmates prefer to stay indoors. You know, it’s crazy.

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[00:31:02.330] – Medina Miltimore

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And when Spain became a Democratic nation again in 1975, after the death of the dictator, it just happens to coincide with the ideological victory of neoliberalism and the idea that state intervention is nothing desirable and potentially causing our welfare cost or creating our welfare cost and not efficient.

So basically the Spanish elites decided to dump the whole public led industrialization program in 1960s and 70s, which had been, I think, relatively successful and transformed a country that had been really less industrial than certainly the UK had been or France or Germany and decide for a deregulation and let the market decide and so forth to shut down all the public banks and so forth.

And I’m not sure it has been a successful model. You have South Korea at the other end of the planet. South Korea happens to be a Peninsula like Spain. South Korea also suffered a right wing dictatorship, by the way. And South Korea also has around 45 million people. So there was our twin in the Far East and they opted for developing their industry and meeting  these [inaudible 00:33:28] titles.

And I know that the South Korean model has a lot of things that can be critiqued and criticized, and I know that life can be pretty grim for South Koreans, but their unemployment rate is less than 3% today. And the fact is that industrial jobs, at least from the statistics I’ve reviewed in Spain to be slightly better paid or significantly actually better paid and tend to be a lot more stable than the jobs created by the service sector, so it’s sort of a mixed bag feelings.

I know that industrial work can be a bit grim as well, but it tends to be more stable and pay a little better than jobs in the service sector. But however, I don’t think this is going to come back. I think a lot of the industry moved to the Southeast Asia to China. South Korea, for example, Spain was the largest manufacturer of ships in the 1970s by tonnage.

That advantage was lost to South Korea in the 1980s. Today, South Korea has a higher GDP per capita than Spain does, when in fact, in the 1980s it was Spain that had a higher GDP per capita than South Korea. So the failure to protect our industry and to choose with this open market, no state intervention or minimum state intervention model.

This decision of the elites of Spain to enter this European project, I don’t think has been extremely successful. There are things to be said for it, but in general, when I look at what other countries have done, I think Europe has made a strategic historical mistake. I think in general, the west has made some pretty large mistakes in the last few decades.

Spain a democratik nation? Eta autodeterminazio eskubidea babestea? AD espainiar legerian dago onarturik, sinatutik⁴!

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[00:36:52.430] – Medina Miltimore

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So in a sense, the European Union is sort of a surrogate Imperial project to replace the old Imperial project, right. There might be an element of that. There’s also the fact that the elites of Italy and Spain somehow needed or wanted some tool to control the restless trade unions, the industrial unrest of the 1970s and early 1980s. And let’s face it, these elites are not doing badly.

Eta espainiar estatuan oso bizirik dagoen barne inperialismoaz, zer esan?

Some of these elites are doing extremely well. You have some very wealthy individuals making heaps of money. You have billionaires like Amancio Ortega, who owns chain Zara. You might have seen shops in the United States. The banks have done handsomely. The telephone company Movistar has done well. The automobile industry, although mostly in the hands of foreign multinationals, is exporting a lot.

WOW!

So those who are living of exports, those who have an export led growth model, are doing well. And of course, they are interested in this system. They’re interested in the access to the European markets, they’re interested in keeping that open. They’re interested in repressing wage growth. They’re interested in fiscal rectitude because it helps to discipline the workforce and either consciously or unconsciously, they know it’s in their best interest to enter into the arrangements of the European Union.

The European Union is a neoliberal project. It is the project of the European elites, and they control the media. And they have convinced most of the population, I would say, is in agreement that the European Union has been good for Spain. And if we have high unemployment, it’s probably because we have some kind of cultural… We must be backward.

Euskaldun asko ez gara espainiarrak, zorionez!

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[00:50:19.150] – Medina Miltimore

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Prices are determined elsewhere in international markets and hence are prone to see very large swings in the value of their exports. I think particularly dramatic is the case of Venezuela. Venezuela just exports basically oil and not very good quality oil, crude at that, they don’t even refine it. We actually refine Venezuelan oil in Bilbao, believe it or not. They export gold and diamonds and oil.

Datu interesgarria.

So of course, the price of their oil comes down. Oil has plummeted last year. It’s gone up this year, but doesn’t fetch a good price in the market. They import everything else. All consumer goods are imported. Well, those imports are a benefit, but you need to change your model you probably need to do some sort of input substitution strategy because otherwise you’re just going to be like a rudderless boat in the ocean in the middle of the storm.

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[00:55:45.540] – Medina Miltimore

No, they’re trying to renegotiate the terms with the IMF and the creditors to extend payments and so forth. But basically, I think Argentina just should default under a foreign debt. They’ve done it before. That’s when the famous Corralito Crisis in 2001, they defaulted on their debt. And they did very well. The economy started to grow.

They implemented this plan Jefe is this sort of imperfect job guarantee program. The economy started to grow. Unemployment diminished drastically, employed 3 million people in less than a year. It was absolutely spectacular. And the economy started to grow and they say, oh, you can’t default in your currency because then foreign creditors will not be willing to lend you money.

Well, from my point of view, I would change the Constitution and I will get rid of that balanced budget clause that we have in the Spanish Constitution. Instead, I would replace it with banning the government from taking debt in foreign currency because you want to issue a non convertible currency. You want to issue a currency that is your currency, the sole issuer and that currency if you use it wisely, you will be able to secure full employment for your population.

Eta Katalunia? Eta hego Euskal Herria? Konstituzio berri horren barruan?

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Oraingo honetan are txarragoak izan dira nazio arazoari dagozkion ‘adierazpenak’.

1 Ez inongo mandagarik, arren!: Mandanga, zer ote da?

2 Kasu, Kataluniari dagokionez, ikus Autodeterminazioa eta Katalunia.

3 Ikus https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-153-red-mmt-espana-with-stuart-medina-miltimore.

4 Autodeterminazio-eskubidea: Espainian (onartua eta sinatua) eta Katalunian (gauzatua).

5 Familia osoa egon ginen 2017ko autodeterminazio eskubidea martxan jarri zutenean Katalunian, begirale gisa. Gehiegi ikusi eta ikasi genuen. Ez dugu ahantziko!