How can the European Monetary Union survive the current crisis? Economists Costas Lapavitsas and Heiner Flassbeck have conducted a thorough analysis of the current state of the Eurozone in their new document
The Systemic Crisis of the Euro – True Causes and Effective Therapies, published by Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung this month. This significant contribution to the debate around the future of the EMU is available to download from the
Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung website.
By
Huw Lemmey
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28 May 2013
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In the UK this month austerity has revealed itself to be in the mode of naked class war. Monday began with welfare reforms, the introduction of the notorious bedroom tax and reductions in the access to Legal Aid. These attacks will be followed in the coming weeks by the replacing of disability living allowance with a personal independence payment policed by Atos, the reduction in the 50p tax rate (providing tax cuts to the rich) and the introduction of the controversial Universal Credit scheme. Combined with other aspects of late capitalism (from food prices to housing shortages) the reality of life in austerity Britain is uglier than it has been for some time.
With textbook ideological manoeuvring these assaults have been accompanied by a rhetoric designed to divide the working classes between “workers and shirkers.” To the chorus of the right wing press, statements, such as this one by Liam Fox or this from Iain Duncan Smith, ultimately aim to crush the possibility of an organized resistance. Most revealing this week has been efforts by the right wing to frame the horrific Philpott manslaughter as a result of ‘benefit dependency.’ Almost beyond belief, this story’s beginnings in the Daily Mail and right wing blogs were reinforced yesterday with this statement from the grubbiest man on earth: Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.
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By
Lewis Bassett
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05 April 2013
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Costas Lapavitsas, author of
Crisis in the Eurozone—a controversial call to break up the Eurozone and stop the debt crisis—has just written in the
Guardian about the destructive new austerity measures in Greece.
"At the root of this bad economics is a misreading of the causes of the crisis. Greece's problem is the same as Portugal's and Spain's: a flawed monetary union that has split Europe into core and periphery. Peripheral competitiveness has been destroyed, and the periphery has accumulated vast private and public debts – owed to eurozone banks – which will probably never be repaid."
He notes that it is not the states, but rather the banks that are at the epicenter of the crisis. The Eurozone banking system has been fragmented over the past three years as national bankis have increasingly relied on their own states to rescue them and states on their own banks to borrow, creating a vortex of debt. As Lapavitsas notes, "The monetary union is collapsing from within."
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By
Matthew Cole
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07 September 2012
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