So the question becomes, can those of us who are democrats and greens and for want of a better word, progressives, find the political leaders of Europe willing to wrench leadership away from the neoliberal northern states, and take charge of the European project sacred to all Europeans?
Can we find political parties to represent us who are willing to take a joint European-wide approach, whether the countries concerned are in or out of the Euro, and build a pan-European project for inter-union co-operation, economic justice, solidarity and peace?
Can Social Democrat political parties and others extricate themselves from their love affair with Thatcherism and Blairism in order to regain political credibility with voters amongst Europe’s working and middle classes? This must involve a complete rejection of deflationary policies bankrupting sovereign nations, and be replaced by the kind of independent, fair (to both creditors and debtor) transparent framework for the orderly resolution of unpayable sovereign debts, proposed by Professor Raffer of the University of Vienna.
Such an alliance would mean that a real challenge could be mounted against the old monetary order that once again threatens peace in Europe, and that feeds the monsters of political populism and reaction.Prime
The Eurozone crisis: what way forward?
Ann Pettifor
1 comment:
3,600 words of useless waffle from Ann Pettifor. And to answer her question as to whether saintly “democrats” and “progressives” like herself can rescue Europe from those wicked “neo-liberals”, the answer is: NO.
The reason, as has been spelled out a hundred times by Bill Mitchell, is that the political left is just as dumb as the political right.
Like most self-appointed saints on the political left, she thinks that Europe’s problems are all down to those wicked neo-liberals. Actually the problem in the Euro periphery is simply that they cannot devalue their currency: at least not in a hurry.
Put another way, once a method is found of devaluing the periphery currency in a hurry (and I can think of ways of doing it), that solves the problem of inadequate periphery competitiveness, which in turn makes the periphery credit-worthy. There is then much less need for austerity (although a finite cut in living standards always results from devaluing a currency – whether it’s the currency of a monetarily sovereign country, or the “currency” of an EZ member).
Having devalued, one can then have as extreme a neo-liberal regime as the population likes, or the opposite: an extreme left wing socialist regime. The latter choice is entirely separate from the central problem currently afflicting the periphery.
Post a Comment