As the Cameron/Osborne millionaire cabal continue with their "austerity" plan and you and I slide ever further down the poverty plughole, their mantra of "we are all in this together" and "tough decisions have to be made" merits a little examination.
Through the period of the "crisis" from 2008 to 2011, average wages for UK workers rose by a mere 3.7% while those who engineered the "crisis" the 1% top financial sector, saw the salaries rise by 8.6%. When the "crisis" arrived in 2008, it is not as if the banks hadn't been raking it in. European banking profits for the year 2003 were approximately €8 billion, for 2007, this had risen to €40 billion, and in 2008, the year of the "crisis" they still made €10 billion. However, those vast sums of money seemed to have disappeared. Where did it all go? Since 2008 until 2011 the European Commission approved €4.5 trillion in state aid to that same financial sector that had been raking it in since 2003.
We are told we can't afford decent social services, can't afford decent pensions, and benefits have to be cut, where did that €4.5 trillion "state aid" to the financial sector come from? State aid is your money, the state doesn't have any money except what it takes from the people. "In good times, banks took the benefits for their employees and shareholders, while in the bad times the taxpayer bore the costs. For the banks, it was a case of heads I win, tails you - the taxpayer - lose." Mervyn King, Governor of The Bank of England. All of that €4.5 trillion "aid" to the privately owned financial sector was plundered from the public purse, stolen from the people.
Another aspect of the deepening poverty among the ordinary people of Europe is the obscene fact that of a European population of approximately 500 million, 0.6% are millionaires and their wealth is approximately €7.6 trillion, equivalent to roughly 50% of the European GDP. In other words those 0.6% millionaires could have bailed out the banks with €4.5 trillion all by themselves and still had €3.1 trillion left between them.
Europe is made up of very rich countries, we are awash with wealth, it is just that the system is loaded against the ordinary people and in favour of all those greedy, sweaty palmed, millionaire/billionaire parasites that go to make up the financial Mafia. "the crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire----- we conclude this financial crisis was avoidable." US Congressional report 2011. Ah, the wonders of capitalism.
