Striking Europe

Today will demonstrate how many people who still have jobs will join millions who do not have jobs, in the first almost-EU-wide strikes and demonstrations against the policy to protect the euro [and with it the objective of a bureaucratic European Union, freed from democracy] at the expense of people's living standards.

Divided Germany and the then-communist EU states fostered no delusion about political and economic reality in the 'sixties,'seventies and 'eighties of the last century: hence their economic policy subsequent to the credit crunch has been - and still is - dramatically different from the countries in western and southern Europe where the real economy in the 'sixties, 'seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties and 'noughties' was starved of investment [to different degrees in different countries] in order to create the fantasy-world of welfare freed from the individual personal obligation to work.

The present austerity, which is the more intense from one country to another according to the extent in which the welfare delusion previously prevailed there, is doing absolutely nothing to restore investment in actual output; the squeeze is barely sufficient to reduce the rate at which national indebtedness is being increased to pay for imports of manufactured goods from emergent countries and Japan and South Korea and the North America.

Today's mass demonstration of discontent at present policy will merely be a harbinger of what is to come; unless a wholly new and convincing pattern of policy is offered to the people by credible leaders. At present the leaders have not emerged: and no experienced individual has a scrap of expectation that the 'economics profession' or half-baked think-tanks will produce an intellectual basis for new policy. Still the right questions are not even being discerned by those who claim to have a popular mandate. The scene is bleak indeed!