Tag Archives: International Monetary Fund

Spain elections: the view from the edge of the precipice

Mariano Rajoy’s PP will win tomorrow’s general elections in Spain. The size of the majority it achieves will shape Spanish and Catalan politics for the next few years.

The prospect of seeing the PP in power again after 8 years is not a happy one. While I’m no fan of the PSOE (I think I called them ‘the very worst party in Spain’ at one point, though I can’t find a link), my suspicion is that before long many who loathe the Socialists will remember how much more they loathed the PP last time they governed.

In Barcelona, the general mood seems to be one of totally ignoring these elections. After a swing to the right in recent Catalan and city hall elections, most people here seem to be trying to avoid thinking about having the PP in government. My prediction is that the turnout will be very low.

It is once the PP take over government (in a few weeks’ time, according to Spanish electoral law) that the dread will really set in. This is a party running for office in a country on the verge of massive economic disaster which has failed to express any coherent economic policies whatsoever. Their posters include slogans like “Primero, el Empleo” (Jobs First) but their policies will doubtless be savage cuts and successive rounds of redundancies and privatisation.

At the same time, it looks increasingly possible that Spain could be forced into needing a bailout from the European Central Bank or the IMF. I say ‘forced’ because categorcially, this does not need to happen. The pressure being applied to successive European countries is organised, focused and has at its core the aim to destroy the Euro. Politically, I’m no great fan of the EU. But forcing Spain’s exit from the Euro along with other countries in 2012 could threaten the very existence of the EU. I’d rather try to make it better for people.

In Catalonia, there are already some hints that the PP might try to buy an end to the Linguistic Immersion education policy with a fairer share of tax revenues. CiU, craven demagogues that they are, may well go for this. I worry too that fascist groups like ‘Plataforma Per Catalunya’ (Catalan fascists whose electoral pamphlets are seemingly only published in Castilian Spanish), may win a seat or two.

Finally, I expect this PP government to be faced with huge protests and strikes. One of the many problems with a PSOE government pushing through neo-liberal policies was the failure of the unions to properly challenge them. Now that the PP will be in government, there will be more inclination on the part of unions and workers to fight back. The Indignats (which inspired the Occupy movement in the USA) will also probably fight back harder: I’ll bet that more than a few Indignats have voted PSOE in the past and will do again, but that basically none of them are PP supporters. Also, the harder left wing party Izquierda Unida might fare better at the polls this year than for the last decade or so: they may be able to use this to force a more left wing opposition.

So here we are on the edge of a precipice, you and me. We face the prospect of a government which will not have won on merit but by default, with no policies for saving Spain’s economy, but hopefully with broad opposition from a curiously revitalised left. People might not be interested in these elections but the next four years will be anything but boring.

‘Antisistema’ activist ‘stole’ €492,000 from banks, to prove how stupid they are

This is a brilliant story.

Basically, this guy claims to have defrauded several banks and Caixas (savings banks) of €492,000, purely in order to prove how easy it was to do. He used the money to publish 200,000 copies of his free newspaper, Crisi, which denounces the world financial system for inefficiency, dishonesty, living in a make-believe land and causing poverty and famine throughout the world. The money not spent on the Crisi newspaper project was given to charities and NGOs. And the author has also fled Spain (understandably) and will only return when his crimes have been pardoned.

The author couldn’t really have timed this better as the world’s financial markets are still reeling from the largest crisis since 1929, and the insurance giant AIG has just been nationalised by the US government (something they refused to do for Lehman Brothers just the other day).

Opinion is divided on who exactly is to blame for this calamitous situation. I think it’s obviously the bankers’ fault as they’re the ones playing with imaginary money, things they don’t own and other things which they invent the value of. Banking analyst, Diana Choyleva made the incredible claim on Monday’s Newsnight that central banks (and therefore, by extension, governments) were to blame for the crisis because they had allowed a long period of low policy (interest) rates to occur, they allowed a situation to develop whereby bankers felt almost obliged to take more and more risks. In other words, bankers are nothing but irresponsible risk-taking children with no control over their actions, who need to be reigned in better. I’m not sure how well that will go down with her banking chums.

Actually, there have been a lot of people who put this entire crisis down to poor or ineffectual regulation. Yes, the very same regulation which was previously railed against as strangulating and diametrically opposed to the ‘ethics’ of neo-liberal free market capitalism. Of course, the real problem is the system of so-called free market capitalism. From inventing vast amounts of ‘value’ where no true capital exists, to deregulating money markets, this socio-economic ideology has done nothing more or less than place the fate of pretty much every living person under the direct control of three unelected, practically unseen organisations. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation are the tripartite leadership and main proponents of this ideology, and they are all wholesale controlled by the United States government.

If we are ever to escape this inherently unstable and totally illusionary cycle of boom and bust, it will not be, as Gordon Brown thought, via the means of free market capitalism which is, after all, the name of the problem itself.