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Carrots and Sticks

Greece, grease, and a referendum

Am I alone in seeing Actors’ Equity Association’s proposals for L.A.’s 99-seat theaters as a kind of allegory for the austerity measures being proposed by the European Union for Greece – the place that gave us Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus?

The actors’ union is essentially saying to L.A.’s intimate theaters, you must work within the confines of our economic model or leave the union. Most of the small theaters are saying, we can’t afford that. The union’s response: Too bad. We’re not interested in your history, or in financing your fiscally dubious operations. That’s not what we do in other places. Besides, what makes you think you’re so special?

The austerity measures already in the 99-Seat Plan have thus far have led to fewer and fewer theaters, not because of the union, but because of the growing harshness of real estate conditions in Los Angeles. And now, the union aims to further ratchet up the austerity on our money-losing theaters.

This is a kind of allegory for what the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, with Germany’s Angela Merkel leading the charge, have proposed for Greece. Keep in mind that in 1953, at the London Conference, Greece voted for a massive bailout of the then-bankrupt post-War Germany, in order to help get Germany on the road to recovery. But tit has no interest in meeting tat.

After stonewalling any number of Germany’s punishing demands, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras finally acquiesced to some of them, only to have Merkel and company raise the bar yet again. That’s when Tsipras called for a national referendum on whether or not he should accept the European troika’s uncompromising conditions. He argued that a “No” vote would give him a stronger negotiating position with Greece’s creditors, in order to set Greece on the road to economic recovery, rather than continuing the already failed domestic policies, urged by Merkel, of further raising taxes and squeezing pensions in a contracting economy – a policy that has impoverished Greeks while doing nothing to pay off the nation’s debts.

In what, for L.A.’s thespians, should sound like a familiar refrain, bankers from Germany to France argued that if Greece doesn’t like the troika’s new plan, it should get out of the union. (That would be the European Union.)

From the New York Times:

“I voted with my heart and also my mind,” said Marie Triadafillou, who works in transportation logistics and voted Yes. “I believe when you are in a union you cannot leave. We say in our country if the sheep leaves the flock it cannot live.”

European bankers/pundits were urging a Yes vote deep into last night.

At this moment, The No vote appears headed to a 61% victory. The word “landslide” is being used by media sources from London’s The Guardian to The New York Times.

Sound familiar?

Prior to the referendum, European bankers were boasting, or blustering, that a “No” vote victory would not lead to further negotiations with Tsipras but could lead to Greece’s expulsion from the eurozone and even from the European Union, and that the EU would endure regardless. However, the European economy may be more delicate than they care to admit. As of now, the French and German governments have made no public statements.

What is the smarter way to guide a debtor economy or a culture that has deep historical value but struggles to pay its bills? Where lies the value of a nation and its people, or of an art form, that lives beyond its means in a tempestuous economy, but may provide services nonetheless that seem to benefit the society in other ways? When does such a nation, or an art form, deserve philanthropy, or a grant, or a bailout, or a plan for recovery? And what is the cost of letting them starve in the face of viable alternatives?

These are perennial questions in the arts. Sometimes, such as at this moment, they extend to the lives and livelihoods of a nation’s people. The difference in the financial stakes is exponential, but the cultural and quality-of-life issues may be more closely related than they first appear, merging on the questions not only of a strategy for recovery, but of where we prioritize our values.

To quote The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliot, “[The Germans] should try a bit less stick and a bit more carrot.”

Like many clichés, its application is universal.