Occupy Europe: Fighting the Diktats of the Global Financial Elite

At its inception, the European Union was an attempt to counterbalance the dominant global geopolitical power of the United States and the USSR. The EU was also supposed to offer a better, more democratic social and political system where the 99 percent had a voice and where political decision were made by equal nation partners with the interests of the people in mind. This democratic dream that was the EU of open national borders, not only for finance, products and services, but also for people, is in the process of being downgraded.

In Italy and Greece, former bankers, Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, have taken over exploiting the fear of bankruptcy and social “chaos”. Monti and Papademos are the faces of this new EU in the making where the 0.1 percent financial elite is in the process of ruling the 99 percent by economic diktats. Both men are not merely apolitical technocrats, they are players of the global financial elite working on behalf of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the Franco-German directorate of the EU.

In this financial form of enslavement, Greece, Italy, and soon to follow Spain, Portugal and Hungary will not be operating as equal partners in a union dominated by banks and financial considerations. The European Union was once a dream to secure prosperity for all, strengthen democracy in formerly autocratic states such as Greece, Spain and Portugal. But one of the main goals of the European Union was to make sure Europe couldn’t be engulfed in the madness of war anymore by getting rid of nationalism.

However, the take over of the EU by public and private financial institutions, with Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy acting as brokers and enforcers, is having the opposite effect and re-opening all wounds. More and more young people in Spain, Italy and Portugal are voicing their anger at having to go to Germany or France to find work. This financial take over by the IMF, the European Central Bank and private banks follows a doctrine of limited sovereignty, and can be described as collective enslavement by national debt. Greeks are so outraged about this new form of occupation of their country that some Greek cartoonists are depicting German Chancellor Merkel in Nazi uniform.

The Berlin consensus, imposed on the “poor” members by Merkel and Sarkozy in early December, was painted as a “sign of political will and a new step forward in unification”, but it will more likely lead to a dismantling of the EU. American banks are smelling the blood in Europe’s troubled economic water, and are seizing on new investment opportunities by going on an European shopping spree. The global financial market speculation on the European debt crisis has become an excuse to enforce an austerity agenda to curb labor rights and roll back the welfare state. The costs of the EU debt crisis are being strictly shifted to the poor and the middle class which are depending on public services that are being systematically slashed.

The European Union has entered a phase of global austerity enforced from the top without consensus or democratic control. However, history has given us many examples that a system based on sharp social regressions, dictated from the top, is not sustainable in a democratic system. Occupy movement’s chapters are exploding everywhere in Europe, including within the boundaries of the two dominant powers: Germany and France. Anyone with  political acumen understands that as the regressive austerity measures are implemented everywhere in the EU, the opposition from Occupy will keep growing, and at some point, perhaps in the spring, will gain such a  critical mass that it will reach a tilting point which is likely to play out in Europe’s streets.

 

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Das Schaf Dolly.