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ALL WAGES, PENSIONS, WELFARE AND TAXES IN EUROZONE TO BE CONTROLLED BY NEW, UNELECTED BODY

EUROPE TO BECOME PLANNED ECONOMY LIKE CHINA

By Jane Burgermeister | February 5, 2011

*Germany and France to control all wages, taxes, pensions and welfare benefits across the Eurozone under new plan unveiled in Brussels.

*Economic coordination will result in  a planned economy and inefficiency, economic experts say.

*People of Europe will have no say in the transfer of control over their pensions, wages and taxes to a central authority, national leaders to decide.

A plan by Germany and France to enforce the same labour, welfare, pension and economic policies across the entire Eurozone by decree was unveiled in Brussels on Friday.

Economist Hans-Werner Sinn from Germany’s IFO said that the attempt to introduce new binding agreements on labour costs, taxes and pensions that would apply to every single citizen in every single country in the Eurozone, amounted to introducing a planned economy that will promote inefficiency.

http://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/international/631259/HansWerner-Sinn_EUPlaene-wie-in-einer-Planwirtschaft

The plans set out by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for the harmonization of the corporate-tax base, the abolition of indexing pay raises to inflation, and also for the linking of pension ages to demographics i.e. the pension age to be raised across the Eurozone.

Merkel and Sarkozy are pushing for an agreement in March.

They claim their push for economic convergence in the euro monetary union without a political union and without any opportunity by the people of Europe to have a say and also without any adequate basis in an EU treaty will allow economies in Europe to overcome the financial crisis and grow faster. But experts say their plan is a way of introducing through the back door the transfer union and Eurobonds benefiting banks at the expense of ordinary people .

The plan also includes a binding indicator for labour productivity and labour unit costs across Europe i.e. the amount of earnings every person working in a specific job sector is to be set centrally across Europe.

In any event labour cost units do not address the problem of enormous and growing unemployment in the Eurozone as a result of the failed policies of Merkel and Sarokzy and EU, especially in countries in the southern European zone where many jobs have been lost because they joined the Eurozone at an exchange rate that was too high and so became uncompetitive.

To regain competitiveness, the countries need to be able to devalue their currency or introduce a regional, parallel currency, experts say. However, there is no mention of devaluation in the Merkel/Sarkozy plan.

Crucial also to a buoyant economy is the demand for products. Germany, for example, was prosperous in the 1980s because people earned enough money to be able to buy German products, creating a virtuous economic circle of demand and production. Today, Germany’s domestic demand is small because real income is barely enough to cover essentials, and the new plan does nothing to change that.

In fact, Germans along with the rest of Europeans are set to have even less money if the new pact is agreed in Brussels in March with wages and pensions set to be slashed in real terms.

Scrapping the link between annual wage increases and inflation will mean that wages will fall in real terms across Europe, leaving people with even less money to spend resulting in reduced demand in the economy.

Far from boosting the economy, the measures unveiled will, in fact, accelerate Europe’s transformation into a centrally planned, labour Gulag such as in China.

It has been estimated that more people in the developing countries will have an income of 10,000 dollars a year than in Europe and the USA together in five years time, underlining just how steep the drop in the real incomes in Europe and the USA has been.

Charities have calculated that the minimum required to live in Germany is about 1000 euros a month. That means almost 80% of the Germans are now already living on or close to the minimum needed to exist.

According to Die Welt, more than 20% of Germans have less than 1,070 euros a month and another 60% of Germans earn between 1,070 to 2,350 euros a month. Only 3% earn more than 7,000 euros a month.

http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article12349505/DIW-Forscher-sehen-schwindende-Mittelschicht.html

The long-term unemployment benefit Hartz IV is 350 euros or only about 7 times more than the poorest Egyptians have to live on a month in spite of much higher costs in Germany.

The Hartz IV benefit is set to rise by only 5 euros this year on the insistence of Merkel, far below inflation, further eroding the real purchasing power and driving millions deeper into poverty.

It is not just in Germany but all across Europe that salaries have been decimated. Gone are the days not so long ago when professions such as young teachers for example earned 30 times more than their average cost of accommodation in major cities. In Greece, for example, the average pension is just 600 euros.

The next logical step for Merkel and Sarkozy is to float plans to send millions of Europeans to live in barracks and work in factories or roads with a bowl of soup and bread until they are 90  or drop dead as in the 1930s after a similar engineered financial crisis.

I can’t see the people of Europe allowing a centralised bureaucracy set up by governments in Berlin and Paris to cut their pensions and wages in order to give yet more to the banks and corporations – not after these same governments aided the banks in an engineered financial crisis that wrecked economies, and plunged nations into debt.

Merkel has said that the rest of Europe has to keep up with the “best”. Implying the low wage, slave labour concentration camp that Germany has become, with its corrupt financial sector, corrupt corporations caught bribing its own and foreign politicians (Siemens in Greece) is in some way to be emulated.

I suspect Europeans will not share that view.

Not the Irish for sure. Even tame politicians and newspapers like Enda Kenny and the Irish Times are comparing the brutal take-over of the Irish economy by the German and EU bankers via an enforced 85 billion euro loan with the armed conflicts of Leningrad and the Easter Rising.

How much longer will the people of Europe put up with this?

After helping the banks wreck the European economy in front of everyone’s eyes and pushing toxic vaccines on their populations, Merkel and Sarkozy pair up in a flagrant bid to steal pensions (etc) instead of presenting a serious plan.

How dare they?

February 7, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Corruption, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular