Oh my G............... eorge Orwell and Aldous Huxley! The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, commented on the Eurozone accession to indentured servitude under German and financial sector domination as constituting "a brave new world." Unlike Huxley, however, he was not being the least bit ironic. He and others really do seem to believe it. Most worrisome though is they also believe a lot of economic nonsense, which is continuing to hamstring and cripple virtually every country on the continent. They have swallowed the Orwellian "double speak" prescriptions for growth through contraction, which is what the German steamroller is pressing on its lesser Eurozone partners, in exchange for the promise of ECB loans to keep their sundry budgets afloat.
Worse, the members of the zone are also being required to adopt ridiculous balanced budget strictures, to be overseen and enforced by some onerous mechanism pleasing to the Germans. All of this is being insisted upon to protect the global banking system, which has a lot to lose should any of several possible national defaults occur. What is more, it is happening at the worst time possible, at a time when government spending and market shoring is most needed to pick up employment and increase economic demand. These measures, taken anytime, would be wrong, wrong, wrong, taken now, they are disastrous.
We have seen these mistakes made on a large scale before, but apparently have forgotten how unwelcome are Depressions. And how violently destructive of democracy are the political changes they facilitate. For more on this discussion, see the two earlier posts:
The Scarecrows Of Europe ... Or Return To Oz
The Straw Man Of Europe
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