www.transicionestructural.NET es un nuevo foro, que a partir del 25/06/2012 se ha separado de su homónimo .COM. No se compartirán nuevos mensajes o usuarios a partir de dicho día.
0 Usuarios y 1 Visitante están viendo este tema.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday's referendum. He is now trapped and hurtling towards GrexitLike a tragedy from Euripides, the long struggle between Greece and Europe's creditor powers is reaching a cataclysmic end that nobody planned, nobody seems able to escape, and that threatens to shatter the greater European order in the process. Greek premier Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday's referendum on EMU bail-out terms, let alone to preside over a blazing national revolt against foreign control. He called the snap vote with the expectation - and intention - of losing it. The plan was to put up a good fight, accept honourable defeat, and hand over the keys of the Maximos Mansion, leaving it to others to implement the June 25 "ultimatum" and suffer the opprobrium.This ultimatum came as a shock to the Greek cabinet. They thought they were on the cusp of a deal, bad though it was. Mr Tsipras had already made the decision to acquiesce to austerity demands, recognizing that Syriza had failed to bring about a debtors' cartel of southern EMU states and had seriously misjudged the mood across the eurozone.Instead they were confronted with a text from the creditors that upped the ante, demanding a rise in VAT on tourist hotels from 7pc (de facto) to 23pc at a single stroke.Creditors insisted on further pension cuts of 1pc of GDP by next year and a phase out of welfare assistance (EKAS) for poorer pensioners, even though pensions have already been cut by 44pc.They insisted on fiscal tightening equal to 2pc of GDP in an economy reeling from six years of depression and devastating hysteresis. They offered no debt relief. The Europeans intervened behind the scenes to suppress a report by the International Monetary Fund validating Greece's claim that its debt is "unsustainable". The IMF concluded that the country not only needs a 30pc haircut to restore viability, but also €52bn of fresh money to claw its way out of crisis.[Greek Sov. Debt vs GDP graph]They rejected Greek plans to work with the OECD on market reforms, and with the International Labour Organisation on collective bargaining laws. They stuck rigidly to their script, refusing to recognise in any way that their own Dickensian prescriptions have been discredited by economists from across the world."They just didn't want us to sign. They had already decided to push us out," said the now-departed finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.So Syriza called the referendum. To their consternation, they won, igniting the great Greek revolt of 2015, the moment when the people finally issued a primal scream, daubed their war paint, and formed the hoplite phalanx.Mr Tsipras is now trapped by his success. "The referendum has its own dynamic. People will revolt if he comes back from Brussels with a shoddy compromise," said Costas Lapavitsas, a Syriza MP."Tsipras doesn't want to take the path of Grexit, but I think he realizes that this is now what lies straight ahead of him," he said.What should have been a celebration on Sunday night turned into a wake. Mr Tsipras was depressed, dissecting all the errors that Syriza has made since taking power in January, talking into the early hours.The prime minister was reportedly told that the time had come to choose, either he should seize on the momentum of the 61pc landslide vote, and take the fight to the Eurogroup, or yield to the creditor demands - and give up the volatile Mr Varoufakis in the process as a token of good faith.Everybody knew what a fight would mean. The inner cabinet had discussed the details a week earlier at a tense meeting after the European Central Bank refused to increase liquidity (ELA) to the Greek banking system, forcing Syriza to impose capital controls.It was a triple plan. They would "requisition" the Bank of Greece and sack the governor under emergency national laws. The estimated €17bn of reserves still stashed away in various branches of the central bank would be seized.They would issue parallel liquidity and California-style IOUs denominated in euros to keep the banking system afloat, backed by an appeal to the European Court of Justice to throw the other side off balance, all the while asserting Greece's full legal rights as a member of the eurozone. If the creditors forced Grexit, they - not Greece - would be acting illegally, with implications for tort contracts in London, New York and even Frankfurt.They would impose a haircut on €27bn of Greek bonds held by the ECB, and deemed "odious debt" by some since the original purchases were undertaken by the ECB to save French and German banks, forestalling a market debt restructuring that would otherwise have happened."They were trying to strangle us into submission, and this is how we would retaliate," said one cabinet minister. Mr Tsipras rejected the plan. It was too dangerous. But a week later, that is exactly what he may have to do, unless he prefers to accept a forced return to the drachma.Syriza has been in utter disarray for 36 hours. On Tuesday, the Greek side turned up for a make-or-break summit in Brussels with no plans at all, even though Germany and its allies warned them at the outset that this is their last chance to avert ejection.The new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, vaguely offered to come up with something by Wednesday, almost certainly a rejigged version of plans that the creditors have already rejected.Events are now spinning out of control. The banks remain shut. The ECB has maintained its liquidity freeze, and through its inaction is asphyxiating the banking system.Factories are shutting down across the country as stocks of raw materials run out and containers full of vitally-needed imports clog up Greek ports. Companies cannot pay their suppliers because external transfers are blocked. Private scrip currencies are starting to appear as firms retreat to semi-barter outside the banking system.Yet if Greece is in turmoil, so is Europe. The entire leadership of the eurozone warned before the referendum that a "No" vote would lead to ejection from the euro, never supposing that they might have to face exactly this.Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission's chief, had the wit to make light of his retreat. “We have to put our little egos, in my case a very large ego, away, and deal with situation we face,” he said.France's prime minister, Manuel Valls said Grexit and the rupture of monetary union must be prevented as the highest strategic imperative. "We cannot let Greece leave the eurozone. Nobody can say today what the political consequences would be, what would be the reaction of the Greek people," he said.French leaders are working in concert with the White House. Washington is bringing its immense diplomatic power to bear, calling openly on the EU to put "Greece on a path toward debt sustainability" and sort out the festering problem once and for all.The Franco-American push is backed by Italy's Matteo Renzi, who said the eurozone has to go back to the drawing board and rethink its whole austerity doctrine after the democratic revolt in Greece. He too now backs debt relief.Yet 15 of the 18 governments now sitting in judgment on Greece either back Germany's uncompromising stand, or are leaning towards Grexit in one form or another. The Germans are already thinking beyond Grexit, discussing plans for humanitarian aide and balance of payments support for the drachma.Mark Rutte, the Dutch premier, spoke for many in insisting that the eurozone must uphold discipline, whatever the financial consequences. "I am at the table here today to ensure that the integrity, the cohesion, the underlying principles of the single currency are protected. It is up to the Greek government to come up with far-reaching proposals. If they don't do that, then I think it will be over quickly," he said.The two sides are talking past each other, clinging to long-entrenched narratives, no longer willing to question their own assumptions. The result could be costly. RBS puts the direct financial losses for the eurozone from a Greek default at €227bn, compared with €140bn if they bite the bullet on an IMF-style debt restructuring.But that is a detail compared with the damage to the European political project and the Nato alliance if Greece is thrown to wolves against the strenuous objections of France, Italy and the US.It is hard to imagine what would remain of Franco-German condominium. Washington might start to turn its back on Nato in disgust, leaving Germany and the Baltic states to fend for themselves against Vladimir Putin's Russia, a condign punishment for such loss of strategic vision in Greece.Mr Lapavitsas said Europe's own survival as civilisational force in the world is what is really at stake. "Europe has not show much wisdom over the last century. It launched two world wars and had to be saved by the Americans," he said"Now with the creation of monetary union it has acted with such foolishness, and created such a disaster, that it is putting the very union in doubt, and this time there will be no saviour. It is the last throw of the dice for Europe," he said.
The story goes that the UK would be better of staying in the EU due to trade and unity etc etc bla de blaWell. who the f*** would want anything to do with this bunch of Tw**s after the way they've mismanaged this crisis? Methinks the zee Geman high command may come to regret its high handed attitude as the whole sorry edifice slowly collapses. UK out now!
Cómo les encanta a los anglos meter cizaña
[...]Con salvedades, podríamos emparentarle con Vázquez Montalbán, y algo me dice que MVM no vería con buenos ojos a Podemos con su "niñatismo" adanista. Parece que la generación del yogur y la universidad para todos, que es la mía, ha salido en todo el Sur de Europa caprichosa y malcriada seguramente porque a papá y mamá les faltó un poco de firmeza; también por la "delusion" del crecimiento económico "quemaetapista" de los años dorados en los que llegamos a mirarnos al espejo y vernos germano-escandinavos cuando nos falta un buen palmo y algunas otras cosas. [...]
Pour la zone euro, ramenée à 18 membres, une fois le risque de contagion circonscrit grâce à un pilotage habile de la Banque centrale européenne, ce devrait être l'occasion de pousser plus avant les feux de l'intégration politique. Le désastre grec conduirait ainsi à une Europe plus resserrée et, in fine, revigorée. http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/europe/grece-comment-sauver-l-europe-apres-le-referendum_1697128.html#gZEK3Tzj0Sq56mwB.99
From laissez-faire economics in 18th-century India to neoliberalism in today’s Europe the subordination of human welfare to power is a brutal traditionGreece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.The same programme is imposed regardless of circumstance: every country the IMF colonises must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise its banking system; reduce government spending on everything bar debt repayments; and privatise assets that can be sold to foreign investors.Using the threat of its self-fulfilling prophecy (it warns the financial markets that countries that don’t submit to its demands are doomed), it has forced governments to abandon progressive policies. Almost single-handedly, it engineered the 1997 Asian financial crisis: by forcing governments to remove capital controls, it opened currencies to attack by financial speculators. Only countries such as Malaysia and China, which refused to cave in, escaped.Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics, only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation were kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.All this is but a recent chapter in the long tradition of subordinating human welfare to financial power. The brutal austerity imposed on Greece is mild compared with earlier versions. Take the 19th century Irish and Indian famines, both exacerbated (in the second case caused) by the doctrine of laissez-faire, which we now know as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.In Ireland’s case, one eighth of the population was killed – one could almost say murdered– in the late 1840s, partly by the British refusal to distribute food, to prohibit the export of grain or provide effective poor relief. Such policies offended the holy doctrine of laissez-faire economics that nothing should stay the market’s invisible hand.When drought struck India in 1877 and 1878, the British imperial government insisted on exporting record amounts of grain, precipitating a famine that killed millions. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted was forced work in labour camps, in which less food was provided than to the inmates of Buchenwald. Monthly mortality in these camps in 1877 was equivalent to an annual rate of 94%.As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the gold standard – the self-regulating system at the heart of laissez-faire economics – prevented governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries from raising public spending or stimulating employment. It obliged them to keep the majority poor while the rich enjoyed a gilded age. Few means of containing public discontent were available, other than sucking wealth from the colonies and promoting aggressive nationalism. This was one of the factors that contributed to the first world war. The resumption of the gold standard by many nations after the war exacerbated the Great Depression, preventing central banks from increasing the money supply and funding deficits. You might have hoped that European governments would remember the results.Today equivalents to the gold standard – inflexible commitments to austerity – abound. In December 2011 the European Council agreed a new fiscal compact, imposing on all members of the eurozone a rule that “government budgets shall be balanced or in surplus”. This rule, which had to be transcribed into national law, would “contain an automatic correction mechanism that shall be triggered in the event of deviation.” This helps to explain the seigneurial horror with which the troika’s unelected technocrats have greeted the resurgence of democracy in Greece. Hadn’t they ensured that choice was illegal? Such diktats mean the only possible democratic outcome in Europe is now the collapse of the euro: like it or not, all else is slow-burning tyranny.It is hard for those of us on the left to admit, but Margaret Thatcher saved the UK from this despotism. European monetary union, she predicted, would ensure that the poorer countries must not be bailed out, “which would devastate their inefficient economies.”But only, it seems, for her party to supplant it with a homegrown tyranny. George Osborne’s proposed legal commitment to a budgetary surplus exceeds that of the eurozone rule. Labour’s promised budget responsibility lock, though milder, had a similar intent. In all cases governments deny themselves the possibility of change. In other words, they pledge to thwart democracy. So it has been for the past two centuries, with the exception of the 30-year Keynesian respite.The crushing of political choice is not a side-effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.
Pobre Varoufakis, como se recochinean ahora todos de él Pues yo seguiré diciendo que es de lo mejor y más inteligente de entre los defensores de su posición, y que prefiero a un Varoufakis 100 veces antes que a un Monedero.
In the final minutes of his budget the chancellor had to repeat his key lines on the new national living wage – for the benefit of the evening television bulletins – to ensure his headline measure was understood. In his second go, he said: “Let me repeat myself because I don’t think the other side heard it. Britain deserves a pay rise and Britain is getting a pay rise. I am today introducing today a new national living wage.”The chancellor said the new living wage would achieve the government’s objective of ensuring that the low paid earned at least 60% of median earnings by 2020. This was the minimum level of pay recommended by Sir George Bain, chair of the Low Pay Commission, in a report to the Resolution Foundation.In a wide-ranging statement, Osborne announced a blizzard of policies, including fresh tax cuts for companies; a four-year freeze on public-sector pay and a surprise tax raid on buy-to-let landlords.