Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The coming social revolution

Just wanted to recommend this excellent article by Eric Walberg on the Greek / PIGS / EU crisis.

If you haven't been following it, basically Greece is being screwed because they no longer have their own currency, which means they can't take the usual action (currency devaluation) to stave off what promises to be a severe economic depression. Latvia has long been in the same situation, with its stupid government insisting on maintaining a peg to the euro even though it means sinking their people into poverty. This isn't going to fly in the long term (or even the fairly short term). From the article:

Last week saw a succession of strikes and protests throughout Europe: Lufthansa’s pilots, French air traffic controllers and oil refinery workers, protest rallies in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia against the austerity measures of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party government. Trade unions in the Czech Republic announced that public transport would be halted this week. A one-day general strike of the public sector in Portugal protested measures to cut the deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2013. A truly pan-European movement is being born. The Independent's Sean O’Grady predicts such actions “promise to be just the start of the greatest demonstration of public unrest seen on the continent since the revolutionary fervour of 1968.”

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