Could those Euro Commissars, assorted Fuhrers (that is leaders) and IMF apparatchiks please take those blinkers off their eyes and empty the saw dust from their heads?
They are all stuck in a rigid dogma that is leading nowhere near the results even they would like to achieve. News out today from manufacturing figures for the Eurozone. It is officially in recession. Even the German manufacturing sector is continuing to shrink. Yet all the above continue unashamedly to stick with their destructive policies, that have lead to this growing crisis.
As I have said many times before, the only thing they mean by “flexibility” is how best to screw the workers and nothing else!!! Yet flexibility cannot apply exclusively to the labour market and to the detriment of the workers any more. Taking Greece for instance where all labour rights are being attacked with the barbaric ferocity of a latter day Genghis Khan:
Even if we get to the desired point, desired by THEM that is, of a zero wage, or even better paying for the right to work, no one but no one in their right mind will consider investing in an economy where everything from taxes, to cuts, to abolition of healthcare etc, is designed to stifle if not annihilate demand and increase costs! Yes, because costs are not just labour costs, but costs of raw materials, transport and a load of others which are continually being made to go up and up through this insane taxation imposed.
In the Guardian today we were informed that: “a senior economic adviser at Deutsche Bank delivered a damning assessment of the country’s [Greece] progress on Bloomberg TV this morning.
Thomas Mayer said the international creditors should let Greece’s bailout programme expire and the European bailout fund, the ESM, should take over and run its banks.
Ideally, one should have let this program now expiring because it is not working. What we should have done is to change the approach. Do a specific bank restructuring exercise so at least the banks are afloat. Take them over and have the ESM run the Greek banks so they have a banking system. And then offer help through the European Investment Bank and through structured funds. But basically say that the macro program does not work”.
The man said it plainly!!!! the programme “is not working” how else could one put it, and mind he is not some Looney Leftie in Greece, he is a senior advisor at Deutsche Bank! And still, the Troika is twisting the arm of the Greek government to breaking point (and lets hope it does break) and the Greek government is cringing and groveling and doing its damnedest (operative word here) to comply with a whole swathe of barbaric and completely deflationary and recessionary measures. Why?
Because the powers that be have no idea what flexibility really means, just as they have no idea what competitiveness really means and, in the end they have absolutely no idea how the economy really works in the real world. Yet they are so drunk with power, a power derived from the complete and utter unaccountability or Parliamentary scrutiny they enjoy.
Because it is one thing for The Frau to address her own Parliament and quite another for her to come strutting around and go trampling the Greeks with her jackboots, because those she is devastating have no say in who runs their country any more, and have lost the right to call anyone to account.
And a post script. The Greek Constitutional Council has just declared that the slashes in pensions, the abolition of the Christmas section of pensions and the rise to 67 years from 65 of pensionable age are UNCONSTITUTIONAL!
However, the unelected, unaccountable, appointed Minister of Finances said these measures would be passed anyway, because the opinion of the Council did not bind him.
Oh really? If the Greek Constitution cannot bind the Greek Minister of Finances, then what exactly does that mean?