The Pigheaded ones in Brussels and Frankfurt said there was no other way but austerity and downplayed the day’s importance
Last Wednesday saw the outbreak of organised demonstrations and civil disobedience against the ECB, IMF and German-imposed austerity across the eurozone’s capital cities: Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome and Paris, and in many regional cities too: Marseilles, Lille, Terni, Turin, Bologna, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Barcelona, Valencia and Vigo.
And Paris? Oh yes, France is the next Pig to fall, make no mistake about it, as 130 marches, or manifestations, took place across the country. (Belgium had riots too, and will fall with France.)
Read more: Eurozone, meant to unite, has divided
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The organisers were the unions – who else? – united by the rising unemployment and recession across the eurozone: the Solidaires, CGT and CFDT in France, the CGIL in Italy, and the Comisiones Obreras, UGT, and CCOO in Spain. There were many arrests and injuries; and this is just the beginning.
Why? Because the Pigheaded ones in Brussels and Frankfurt said there was no other way but austerity and downplayed the day’s importance, as they pressed on with monetary union and more European initiatives and yet more austerity, which they think is the solution to a crisis that originated as a banking crisis.
But the crisis is now morphing into one of sovereign debt, caused by the size of the state bail-outs of the greed-driven bankers: €3,700,000,000,000 (€3.7 trillion)* of state aid has been doled out to the EU’s bankrupt bankers, while 25,000,000 EU workers are flung on to the dole, the bankers continue to pick up their bonuses and the politicians enjoy their tax-free salaries and pensions and perks.
This is not a society with a future at all: the death-knell of the European Union has begun to toll. The next step will be extremism, and probably more protectionism. It’s time to abandon ship: any pretence that the UK needs to play a part at the heart of this Europe is just so much woffle and piffle.
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Now the gap between Europe’s so-called leaders – Gadarene Swine would be a more accurate sobriquet – and the electorate is underlined by the EU demanding 10% increases in its own budget, just as its auditors refuse to sign off its accounts for the eighteenth year in a row! This exercise is heading for disaster, but the Pigheads cannot see what is right in front of their own eyes!
Read more: Eurozone can’t keep the euro and recover
Why? Because they are blinded by their own dream of a Eutopia, a constructivist rationalist folly called the single currency, which harbours imbalances, is deeply deflationary and causes unemployment at its periphery and inflation at its centre.
This inevitable outcome was apparent to anyone who bothered to read the Maastricht Treaty twenty years ago: and many of us said so at the time, as in the symposium book Visions of Europe. We Eurorealists were completely right, and the Europhiles were completely wrong: game, set and match.
What will happen now? That’s easily predictable: a self-induced Depression will build up in the eurozone; unemployment will continue rising; the civil disobedience will get worse; the Pigheads will get thicker, and resort to blinkers and ear-pads; and extremism on the left and right will inevitably re-emerge.
Welcome back, everyone, to the 1930s… courtesy of the ‘harmonisation’ dream of the Maastricht Treaty, as its single currency destroys the wealth of nations. As I seem to say at the end of each of these blogs: you couldn’t make it up if you tried! Well, you couldn’t, could you?
Read more by Stephen Hill on the eurozone crisis
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