EU helps bankers, not Spanish people

This is a video about a Spanish protest against bailing out the Bankia bank.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Bankers win big in Spain

Sunday 10 June 2012

The right-wing Spanish government‘s decision to apply for a eurozone bailout loan is another victory for the bankers.

Up to £80 billion from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) will be used to recapitalise Spain’s major private banks. Under the EFSF rules insisted on by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Madrid government is responsible for repaying the loan should the banks default.

In other words, the funds previously lost through “investment banking” – better known to the rest of us as speculation – are to be replenished, with the Spanish people standing as guarantors for the loan.

This is being presented as a different arrangement from the bailouts in Italy, Portugal and Greece, where the money went directly to the governments so they could redeem their own bonds and continue to borrow.

Major bondholders such as the German, French and British banks can thus be assured of their returns.

But the result is no different. Public money is channelled via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to Europe’s private-sector banks, replenishing their funds and securing their profits.

In countries such as Ireland, the state has temporarily nationalised the banks until they become profitable again, but the scam is essentially the same.

In Britain, successive governments have handed hundreds of billions of pounds directly to the British-based banks through “quantitative easing,” while also temporarily nationalising parts of the banking system.

At the same time, across Europe, austerity and privatisation programmes are imposed in order to ensure that even more public funds are available to bail out the banks.

This is their real purpose, not to eliminate public-sector borrowing – which is usually a profitable business for the bond markets.

Certainly, austerity policies are not designed to stimulate economic recovery, having failed to do so in Japan for 16 years just as they are failing in Britain and Europe today.

Modern-day monopoly capitalism is an Alice Through the Looking Glass world, where working people and the poor are held responsible for the failures and excesses of speculators and the rich – and must pay the price.

Public-sector wages and pensions, public services, state pensions and welfare benefits are deemed to be extravagant and unaffordable as the wealthy and big business are awarded tax cuts.

The Spanish loan is also a victory for the “troika” of the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission.

They will intensify their supervision of the Spanish banking system, which will be done with the “light touch” always applied when dealing with corporate spivs and speculators.

But they will also crawl all over Spain’s public finances, licenced by the new and laughingly named EU fiscal stability treaty and doubtless demanding more cuts in public services and welfare spending programmes of every kind.

Most of all, the Spanish loan is a victory for Chancellor Merkel, the able political representative of German monopoly capital.

It will be used to buttress her case for fiscal and political union – for the establishment of an imperialist, militarist United States of Europe.

That prospect underlines the need for the peoples of Europe to resist on every front. Britain’s withdrawal from the EU would be the single biggest blow we could deal to this deeply reactionary project.

Indeed, it would be a supreme act of internationalism, a victory for popular sovereignty over the anti-democratic forces of Big Business Europe plc.

100bn euros for Spanish banks! – 21,000 euros of new debt for every Spaniard: here.

Joseph Stiglitz: Spain Bank Bailout ‘Not Going To Work’: here.

Paul Krugman: Another Bailout for Banks and Not the Unemployed: here.

Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted on Sunday that “this year is going to be a bad one” after eurozone finance ministers agreed on a €100 billion (£80bn) bailout for the country’s bank: here.

The Spanish bailout and the specter of the 1930s: here.

SPANISH BANK BAILOUT WILL NOT HELP IRELAND says Finance Minister Noonan: here.

Bailout of Spanish banks will “tighten the austerity thumbscrew”: here.

Unraveling a Tangled Tale of German Corruption in Greece: here.