Tuesday 24 April 2012

Eurozone austerity; neoliberal dogma rebranded

Mario Draghi, head of the ECB and neoliberal austerity lover.
Even as IMF and European Central Bank imposed "austerity measures" cripple the European economy with low growth, falling living standards, negative equity, massive reductions in welfare standards and labour rights, mass unemployment and dramatic falls in discretionary income the orthodox neoliberals have their fingers in their ears as they repeat their pathetic anti-state, free-market incantations.
 
They keep chuntering on about how excessive welfare spending is responsible for the Eurozone crisis but state spending didn't cause the neoliberal economic meltdown, three decades of insane ideologically driven greed-is-good neoliberalism caused it, after which the state sector had to step in the financial sector and their temples of neoliberalism with the biggest state subsidies in human history (massive bailouts, secretive ultra-low interest central bank loans and the nationalisation of debt riddled banks).
Without the intervention of the state sector, the whole neoliberal economic experiment would have come crashing down, yet these orthodox neoliberals know no other economic elegies. So their mantra tells us that the blame for this crisis lies with the "excessive costs of statehood" not with the reckless financial sector gambling they enabled through neoliberal market deregulations that actually triggered the economic meltdown.

Since November 2011 the European Central Bank has handed out over one trillion euros in ultra-low interest loans to help private sector banks pay off their reckless gambling debts (a process euphemistically referred to as deleveraging) and in order to pay for this splurge of reckless lending to cover the debts incurred through reckless lending, they are insisting that the ordinary working people of Europe pay for it through "austerity measures".
These beloved "Austerity measures" of the IMF and the ECB are just the same old defunct, ideologically driven neoliberal clap-trap that caused the crisis in the first place with a new name. A decade or more of economic stagnation doesn't matter a jot to these people as long as they can keep milking the system for their disproportionate share of the wealth, they don't give a single toss that millions of decent hard working people and their families across Europe are going to be driven deep into poverty.

The ruling elite of bankers, politicians and unelected technocrats have completely lost touch with reality, they're singing from a book of defunct pseudo-scientific economic dogma, leaving the people of Europe searching for an alternative to their willfully destructive policies. Will they look to the left wing with their policies of mixed economy, state investment and regulated capitalism, selective re-nationalisations, financial sector re-regulation and clampdowns on tax fiddling? Or will they join the even-further-right wing in their traditional blame the minorities scapegoating?


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