Europe’s dirty secret:The dictatorship of the financial elite

[Hannah Bell]

(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)

In a revealing admission concerning the relationship between capitalist governments and international financial interests, the Financial Times on Tuesday wrote of “Europe’s dirty secret.”

The newspaper editorialized against the plan of the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund to loan Ireland tens of billions of euros in order to guarantee in full the investments of international bankers and bondholders in the country’s failing banking system.

Under the plan, Ireland will effectively surrender sovereignty over its economic policy to the EU and the IMF and agree to claw back the latest bailout of the global financial elite by imposing a new and even more savage round of attacks on the wages and living standards of the working class.

The Financial Times argued that using the €440 billion European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to cover the bad debts of the financial elite by propping up zombie banks, while driving the Irish state closer to default, would be “a fatal mistake.” The Times insisted that such a policy was shortsighted and self-defeating, since sovereign defaults would trigger new financial panics and bankruptcies.

“It would,” the Times wrote, “keep the Irish people indentured to those who recklessly fund their banks: EFSF funds must, after all, be paid back by taxpayers. It would also give an official EU imprimatur on Europe’s dirty secret: public treasuries will do anything to make private bank creditors whole.”

(snip)

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/pers-n19.shtml

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8cc6b564-f0f7-11df-bf4b-00144feab49a.html#axzz15ieMaaQh

[geckosfeet]

1. I have to say, this statement really rung my bell -

'The state is, as Marxism has long explained, the instrument of the corporate-financial ruling class for the suppression of the working class...'

This European legacy (the state as owned and run by elites) has been the curse of the US and capitalist nations everywhere.

[Starry Messenger]

2. k&r