Cristina Lagarta, oops, I mean Christine Lagarde, IMF top boss and former right hand of fascist French President Sarkozy, wants Spain to slash salaries another 10% (a 7% was already cut last year to all public officers, excepted MPs).
Not just that Lagarde also wants a reduction of 1.7% in social security fees, along a substantial increase in the time needed to be entitled to a pension (from 25 to 35 years) and an undetermined further increase in the VAT tax (already dramatically increased).
She also wants impossibles such as to to reach "a credible social pact".
On the other hand her forecasts are gloomy, even in the event of acceptance of her stupid demands: private consume would fall initially on these changes (of course) and unemployment would remain extreme even in 2017 (26% forecast).
In spite of rising the VAT and demolishing the social fabric, Lagarde imagines that prices would drop.
Source: Gara[es].
Lagarde is a retard, reality instead
This woman is plain stupid (or rather a criminal and compulsive liar): salaries simply cannot fall under the living costs and she is not proposing any such measures other than hallucinating with a hypothetical price drop based on nothing.
Real effective measures would be to force the housing market to adjust prices downwards dramatically and brutally increase the availability of cheap public housing (and/or allowing squatting of speculators' idle property). The extremely high (and anti-market) costs of housing are surely the main barrier to salary drop. You just can't work for less that it costs you to live.
Another key barrier are the totally unjustified high prices of electricity bills, which have grown more than 50% in the last few years and more than 100% in the last decade. Spain now has the most expensive electricity bills in all the Eurozone, excepted Cyprus and Ireland.
If Spanish salaries have to fall, living costs have to fall first and foremost. And that means hurting the banks and the energy monopolies.
Neither Lagarde nor Barroso nor Rajoy will do that. But is the only logical thing to do other than outright communism.
I am not a commie or even a socialist but I agree the woman is foolish. I would not go for squatting, as this will lead rather to a micro-mafia dealing with the flats. But I would go for the massive nationalisation of many of those flats owned by the banks that cheated on the people. I would, for instance, take immediately about 25% of idle flats and transform them into flats to be sold at very low prices to poor families (with some priority for those with children, etc). If the situation does not improve, I would nationalise more flats, offer them for rent to the poorer.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think about Spain leaving the euro zone?
In the past many highly advanced European legislations were relatively tolerant with squatting and even allowed automatic transfer of property to the user if unclaimed after some time. For many people there's no other way out of the housing price trap, although it may imply legal difficulties because the law and administration is overly protective of private property (as belongs to their Capitalist nature).
DeleteI see no way how squatting can evolve into mafias, it is private property what allows and promote mafias already, as some people can concentrate wealth, including first need goods such as homes, well beyond their needs, only to speculate with them, distorting the market and extracting undue profit from it.
Nationalizing is a good idea but guess what, the Spanish justice courts recently forbade them because of the right to property, which they arbitrarily consider higher than the right to a home, even if the Spanish constitution clearly says the opposite.
That is a mafia! A state that is a mafia and works for the mafias!
"What do you think about Spain leaving the euro zone?"
Pointless. More harm than good from that. Germany should leave instead.
What I think is that the euro should have been devalued long ago, keeping a parity with the dollar or something like that in order to keep competitiveness (but the German capitalist class is against it). Now it's probably too late anyhow: Europe will fall like a cards' house and chaos will ensue here and at global level.
There's no revolution without crisis, so in the long term it may be even good, but in the short many will die and suffer.
Well, you may be right about Europe. I just thought from the Venezuelan (Latin American) experience. The problem there is that a lot of the squatting actions are misused by some people: they take a lot of people to occupy land or flats, then they keep some of the best parts, they "resell" the space to someone else, usually the military...and move on. It's a whole mafia. One of the huge problems in Latin America is the terrible cadastre. Somewhere I read Venezuela - for instance - has a clean cadastre of around 2% of its surface. This is worse than in the Low Middle Ages.
DeleteSpain, on the other hand, seems to have a more or less complete cadastre, even if I have heard distribution of land in places like Andalusia still resemble the Middle Ages (obviously, registry doesn't mean much in this case). But at least there is the digitalized information already and there can be controlled of who is where.
Latin America urgently needs massive land reforms. Unlike you I do think the land has to go to farmers individually and not collectively. There should be then a regulation so that some landlord doesn't start to buy land back or something.
How is land distributed in Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya?
As for Spain versus Germany: I think it amounts to the same, they cannot be in the same system under these circumstances. The problem is that Germany won't leave the eurozone. It would be more difficult for them to export tanks and cars to Greece and Spain.
"Latin America urgently needs massive land reforms".
DeleteTrue. And some parts of Europe too.
"Unlike you I do think the land has to go to farmers individually and not collectively".
What happens when they sell their land, when they have more than just one kid? That's just a patch. In America there is a long pre-European tradition of collective land ownership (ayllus and the like), with the parcels being self-distributed by the community and others remaining in collective hands. That's best for land management, both for the users and for the land. As all the community is collectively interested in the best for all and democratically decide on such matters, it works best.
"How is land distributed in Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya?"
It is a pesant-bourgeois private property system with exceptions. It has changed somewhat through time but the main legal provision is that the "root goods" (family property) can't be divided and must go to one of all heirs, so the farmland is never divided. This probably fits your idea, but what happens to most children of a family? They became mercenaries or priests or other "junk people" without roots like merchants or servants. That's why the Basque diaspora is so large.
Also in many areas the non-farmed land was and still is simply communitary, allowing people to use it rationally for wood and other uses (pastures, etc.), what is probably a residue of our own form of "ayllu". Such communities still practice the "auzolan" (neighborhood work, translated literally), with people joining seasonally for collective work, usually for community needs but also to help private people with things they can hardly do alone in a long-term give-and-take circular self-reinforcing mechanism.
The land can't be divided without social control because it has no natural boundaries: if you spray pesticides it will affect my land just beside it and many others downstream. There must be a social control or this Capitalist chaos of total environmental destruction and human exploitation and degradation.
"As for Spain versus Germany"...
There's no such thing: the Spanish governments, like all others, dutifully obey what is dictated to them by the oligarch-controlled EU bureaucracies. They sign devilish pacts once and again with the blood of the People. It also happens in Germany but it is a bit less obvious maybe because their economy so far is doing slightly better (not too good either and can only get worse as time passes). It is in fact the People of Europe (and elsewhere) versus what they call "the markets", which are anything but true markets, rather an euphemism for Big Capital, especially banksters.