It's still class warfare

The European Monetary Union was born of countries pegging their exchange rate to Germany's so all countries would have the same inflation rate of 2 %. The EMU gave those countries a formal voice.

The plan was to have each European country’s wages rise in line with their own productivity plus 2%, ie living according to your means – not above it, not below it.

Just before the euro was implemented, Germany cut wages to bring down unemployment, deviating downward from the agreed-upon 2%, resulting in the beggaring of all its neighbours by making German products cheaper and wiping out its EMU partners' exports.

German economist Dr. Heiner Flassbeck: 

“The big battle that we have in this world is not between Germany and the other Europeans, is not between south and north, China and so on. The big battle is still, believe it or not, between labour and capital. This is still the big battle. I know it’s fashionable in the US to a priori dismiss such arguments by calling them class warfare arguments – Republicans like this very much to say “This is class warfare”. 

 I’ll tell you what happens in this world is class warfare. Look at the US. What happens in the US right now? For the first time in modern history since WW2, we are two years into a recovery and nominal wages are rising by absolutely zero - they’re not rising at all. For the first time we have not only a jobless recovery - that’s a normal thing – for the first time in the US we have a wageless recovery. Wageless recovery. And that is exactly what Germany did 15 years ago – wageless recovery – and I can tell you how this experiment is going to end because in the US there is no market that they can occupy, no partners that they can exploit, there is no currency union that they can use - the experiment will end in disaster. It will end in disaster because if you do not have a regime that allows the systematic participation of workers in the productivity increase – and this is what the people are talking about when they talk about the 99% but it is worse now than 10 years ago, worse than ever  -  then capitalism hits the wall because no economy can grow successfully if their people only have to rely on bubbles, that sooner or later burst, to consume, and if they cannot expect that they will participate in the success of all.”

Via The Real News Network


Iceland arrested the former CEO of one of its three failed banks, along with a broker and market director. Here in North America we arrest people for protesting the banks instead.

Bruce Campbell, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives : Rising Inequality, Declining Democracy
on how this works in Canada.

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Icelandic Modern Media Initiative

With the help of Wikileaks, Iceland is aiming to become an international safe haven for investigative journalism and whistleblowers, in the same way that other small countries provide offshore financial havens for corporations. Interesting idea. In passing the world's strongest combination of protection of sources, freedom of expression and information, and libel-tourism prevention laws, Iceland would become an offshore online publishing centre for free speech - "a Switzerland of Bits" as Wikileaks cofounder Daniel Schmitt once described it.

Last week Wikileaks published videos shot from the cockpits of two US Apache helicopter gunships, showing the brutal attack on a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, walking down the street in Baghdad. Reuters was itself unable to obtain those videos. Think about that for a moment.

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