Sunday, November 28, 2010

Irish massive protests underline the need for a paradigm shift in Europe. Capital has no ideas anymore: it's just entrenched in a desperate situation

Some 100,000 people (50,000 according to police 100-150,000 according to organizers) demonstrated in Dublin yesterday against the government and the EU "rescue" (debt trap) plan. Irish are clearly saying that they are not going to pay others' debts anymore and I feel reasonably confident that at some point they will just decry all these illegitimate loans that are not benefiting the least the Irish People and are only intended to keep the farce of a financial system that went bankrupt in 2008 in fact, while keeping fat the paychecks of CEOs and politicians and, of course, the yearly payments to shareholders.


The rich are becoming richer while the poor and even middle classes are being squeezed to pay for their luxuries, abuses and mismanagement. Whoever thinks this is any sort of "plan" is very wrong.

The ball of de facto defaults will keep rolling and becoming fatter and fatter (next are not just Portugal and Spain, but Britain, Italy, Belgium and also France, Netherlands, Germany...) There is no way to stop it: the system has effectively collapsed in EU and we will just have to wait a few months to see all these uncontrolled explosions bringing down the whole building.

Our real problem is what next? How do we remove the oligarchic control over the economy that so harmful is for all but a few oligarchs? This is something that is only now being asked (except for the avant-guard elements, including myself, of course) or even being considered at all.

We are now realizing collectively that Capitalism is a failure and cannot offer any viable project. That this paradigm that so ruthlessly has lead the World for the last two centuries or so is finished, that it cannot propose any solution to the problems it has accumulated. For a while it hid them inside the credit bubble but now that the bubble has burst, what? The have no plan at all. And maybe they cannot ever muster any plan, other than entrenching themselves in their grip of power and resist for as long as they can.

This is not a plan: it is just a hopeless siege that will end, the latest, when provisions run off. Nobody will come to rescue, among other things because it would require more resources than anyone can muster. It's all a matter of time but the siege can be sped up if there are assaults or internal betrayals/infighting. And both will happen, though I cannot predict exactly how, who or when.

Source for the Irish protests news: 20 Minutos[es].


Update: 57% Irish prefer bankruptcy over the EU toxic rescue (source: Capital[ro], via Cuestionatelotodo[es]).

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