Today Ireland......
By Jeff Berg
30 November, 2010
Countercurrents.org
"Ireland's teetering government will announce plans on Wednesday to cut welfare spending sharply and raise taxes to help pay for the country's catastrophic banking crisis and meet the terms of an international bailout." (Reuters)
The austerity agenda is being set loose on the Eurozone. First Greece, now Ireland. Next up Portugal. This is crisis capitalism writ large. I.e. The use of crisis to push through social changes long sought by a tiny, well funded, well organized, and highly influential segment of the investment class. The fact that the very same sector - the FIRE sector - that created the crisis will benefit most from the restructuring being enacted being not so much beside the point as the point itself.
Or as I put it on the heels of the G20 summit in my hometown of Toronto.
"Today at the G20 Canada led the forces agreeing to refashion our economies in the vision that the bankers of the ECB have brought to Latvia: Spending cuts on pensions, education, infrastructure, public transit, health. Unsurprisingly the net result of all this contraction is soaring unemployment and the depression of wages - the latter a publicly avowed goal of all this wreckage."
http://www.countercurrents.org/berg280610.htm
Nigel Farage, UK, MP, put it in somewhat more dramatic language to the European Parliament a few days ago. (see youtube clip)
http://tinyurl.com/3ansqlk
A very great deal has been taken away in the last 30 years. The 'Reagan Revolution' to get "government off our backs" was no such thing. Instead government spending soared. Taxes on the rich dwindled. Deficits, as expected, soared and military spending and activity increased disastrously. One bubble after another was inflated by targeted government policies that caused the flow of hundreds of billions into the coffers of the wealthiest among us. One bubble after another burst because they were based on little more than banker funded predations. Now the end game is upon Europe and N.A. The roll-back of the old deal almost complete. Governments everywhere - after blowing their money on bailing out their financial sector - are going to balance the books on the backs of their public.
Here in Canada. The recent election of Rob Ford as Mayor of Toronto. As stark a proponent of dismantling the public sector as has been found in many a year. The continued full scale dismantling by the federal government of so very many of the Canadian institutions that once defined us. Our money increasingly being being spent on the military, homeland security, the prison system and corporate bail-outs. F-35's, surveillance, prisons and SUV's. Some vision of the future.
All the while there continues the 30 year program of a massive upward shift of wealth. Precisely none of the data disputing this conclusion. None of it. The solution? Abolish the long form census. Perhaps the single most regressive act performed by this Harper government. Which is saying something giving their historically unprecedented - in this country at least - attacks on democracy and the environment. Prorogation, the unelected and stacked by Harper Senate killing the House of Commons Climate Change bill. To which one can add the firing of some half-dozen of those hired to guard the guardians at the very highest level. All of this by no means exhausting the list.
Precisely targeted corporate policies enabled by our governments have hollowed out North America's, and Ontario's manufacturing sector. At the very time that we need to convert it to address our energy insecurity. (Canada imports half its oil, the U.S. over half) The Canada we once knew having moved a very long way from a 1st world mixed economy to a Petro-State. A change that includes the wholesale dismantling of the progressive taxation system, and the viability of the family farm. The list goes on and on. And lest we forget it includes some very big ticket items such as environmental degradation and climate change.
It very much appears that things are going to get a considerable amount less democratic and affluent before they get better. The World Bank and the IMF in concord with the ECB have their sights set on their latest SAP. (Structural Adjustment Program) And that sap is now us. How bad things will get, and for how long, is very much up to those willing to sacrifice what is necessary to restore our democracies.
On the plus side. Public opinion, even in the U.S., is very much not the problem but the solution. Not much to stack up against the forces arrayed on the other side of the ledger I know. But it is both a starting and an end point - and circle's have long had a power not only in our minds but also in the nature of the universe that sustains us.
ton confrere,
Jeff Berg
Jeff Berg is a founding member of Post Carbon Toronto. www.postcarbontoronto.org He is a politically engaged citizen and a freelance writer. Focusing on energy & emissions and their micro and macro implications ecologically, economically and socially. He can be reached at [email protected]
