EU: Politics Financialized, Economies Privatized
Below, must read piece from Hudson. What implications could Icesave have for Greece, Ireland and possibly other countries in trouble?. The concept of uniting Europe seems vanishing by the day. The problem with bail out, is the creditors want austeriy proven asap. Greece received it’s bail out last year, and creditors want big cuts in spending over night. This is almost impossible. It takes more than a year to turn around a company, not to mention a whole country. Now, the creditors are pressing Greece to sell the countries crown jewels at discount prices. Let’s see if that happens, or Greece simply gets too pushed into the corner, and says bye to the Euro and the creditors?
Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Icelandic support for membership in the Eurozone has fallen to just 30 percent. The feeling is that European politics are being run for the benefit of bankers, not the social democracy that Iceland imagined was the guiding philosophy – as indeed it was when the European Economic Community (Common Market) was formed in 1957.
By permitting Britain and the Netherlands to blackball Iceland to pay for the mistakes of Gordon Brown and his Dutch counterparts, Europe has made Icelandic membership conditional upon imposing financial austerity and poverty on the population – all to pay money that legally it does not owe. The problem is to find an honest court willing to enforce Europe’s own banking laws placing responsibility where it legally lies.
The reason why the EU has fought so hard to make Iceland’s government take responsibility for Icesave debts is what creditors call “contagion.” Ireland and Greece are faced with much larger debts. Europe’s creditor “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), European Commission and the IMF – view debt write-downs and progressive taxation to protect their domestic economies as a communicable disease.
Financial power is to achieve what military conquest had done in times past. Pretending to make subject economies more “competitive,” the aim is more short-run: to squeeze out enough payments so that bondholders (and indeed, voters) will not be obliged to confront the reality that many debts are unpayable except at the price of making the economy too debt-ridden, too regressively tax-ridden and too burdened with rising privatized infrastructure charges to be competitive. Spending cutbacks and a regressive tax shift dry up capital investment and productivity in the long run. Such economies are run like companies taken over by debt-leveraged raiders on credit, who downsize and outsource their labor force so as to squeeze out enough revenue to pay their own creditors – who take what they can and run. The tactic of this financial attack is no longer overt military force as in days of yore, but something less costly because its victims submit more voluntarily.
The strikes continue. Anger is rising. When incoming IMF head Christine Lagarde was French trade minister, she suggested that: “France had to revamp its labor code. Labor unions and fellow ministers balked, and Ms. Lagarde backtracked, saying she had expressed a personal opinion.”[5] This opinion is about to become official policy – from the IMF that was acting as “good cop” to the ECB’s “bad cop.”
I suppose that all that really is needed is for people to understand just what dynamics are at work that make these attempts to pay in vain. The creditors know that the game is up. All they can do is take as much as they can, as long as they can, pay themselves bonuses that are “free” from recapture by public prosecutors, and run to their offshore banking centers.
http://michael-hudson.com/2011/05/eu-politics-financialized-economies-privatized/