Wednesday 1 December 2010

The Euro has already failed!


Always good to see people exercising their right to march in protest on Irish streets, but to whom are they protesting? 

To the property developers whose greed had no bounds? 
To the (at best) criminally negligent Irish bankers?
To the complicit politicians who sucked money from the dirty sponge of corruption?
To the self-serving ECB?
To the floundering EU?
To the anonymous monolithic IMF?

Whoever it is you're most upset with, march loud angry and proud, because your footsteps are the soundtrack to the sight of capitalism eating itself. 

The EU decided that their currency is more important than the people of Europe. Everything must be done to protect the euro. The people of Ireland haven’t been helped in any way whatsoever. We have been sacrificed on the altar of the euro. The people of Greece and Ireland (and maybe Portugal next) will suffer for decades so that the single currency might survive for the greater good.

For ‘greater good’ read: ‘German and French economies.’

The Euro has already failed. The bailout which injected us with untold billions of new national debt is the same Band-Aid they used to cover up the mess in Greece, in the vain hope that the speculators won’t move in on Portugal and then Spain. 

If Spain goes down, the euro disappears. No amount of Band-Aid debt injection will revive an economy that size. So we people of little PIGs (Portugal Ireland Greece) are deemed expendable to the survival of the euro. 

Except it’s not working, because they’re missing the whole point of capitalism, which is to make as much money as possible and devil take the hindmost. Those speculating bondholders are flying around like fiscal Death Eaters, moving from this ailing economy to that, all for the dream of making a fast buck.

They are as likely to stop as you are to walk past a big fat 50 note sitting on your doorstep. 
Collect fire wood now.

3 comments:

Paz said...

Its going to be a tough few years

Ciaran said...

The longer I stay in Nicaragua, the more I realize that capitalism has failed. The whole point of it is that an elite get richer while the ordinary people, the poor, are left to suffer.

It's a sick world when retired American military people, whose lives were spent interfering with small countries, can come to a place like this and live like millionaires while treating the people like dirt.

Why did we need this bailout? To cover up for the mess caused by bankers, politicians, and developers, people who never gave a damn about ordinary people in the first place.

So they hit the old, the poor, the needy, for the sins of an elite who won't pay the price.

Here in Nicaragua, all the American expats lament the fact that Daniel Ortega is in charge. It's precisely their rotten capitalist system, their willingness to back a rotten dictator (because he was 'their' dictator) that drove the Nicas to a revolution and a form of socialism.

Charlie Adley said...

Thanks for that gents - funnily enough Ciaran, one of the reasons I fell in love with the west of Ireland was that although capitalism prevails here as it does elsewhere, the rampant drive to earn more more more still runs slower here than in the UK and USA.

Even at the height of the Tiger, people in little shops on Dominick Street and Mainguard Street still found the time to be personable, human and patient ... even if i didn't!

But this business of sacrifcing people's lives and livelihoods to safeguard an ostensibly abstract notion like a currency is absurd at best, vile and despicable.