International

Last week, we saw two meetings of European heads of government. During these European Council summits a crucial role was once again granted to the financial institutions’ leading lobbyist, Deutsche Bank Chairman Josef Ackermann. The government leaders had no choice about this, as their goal was to conclude a deal on the writing off of 50% of the Greek debt, and on a ‘voluntary’ basis.

And so the heads of government handed themselves over to the financial lobby. No wonder that they were more sensitive to what these lobbyists from the ‘financial markets’ had to say than they were to what moved activists among the citizens of Europe. Combatting the financial lobby forms part of our Action Plan against Speculators, but there is still a long way to go. That’s why the Tour d’Europe, the series of meetings throughout the Netherlands at which the SP’s elected representatives will give our explanation of the eurocrisis and outline our solutions, remains of great importance, and every SP member has the task of persuading the man and woman in the street of the need to combat the financial lobby. It won’t come from the established political parties, who have completely surrendered to this lobby. That’s why ‘the street’, including movements such as Occupy, is needed.

The government leaders have been pushed into a corner by the financial lobby. As the SP said as long as eighteen months ago, the Greek debt is untenable. Only a ‘restructuring’, which is to say a partial annulment of the debt, can offer Greece a way to get back on its feet and stay on its feet. You can do this yourself, independently, as a country: if the Greeks were to tell the banks that they were ‘bankrupt’ and fail to pay the greater part of their debt, this would be possible. The consequences would then be grave, however. Banks would lose confidence in such a country and the Greeks own banks would go bankrupt, because these too hold a great deal of their own countries’ bonds. It would then become extremely difficult for the state, in the short term, to borrow any more money. In the long term things would be rather different, because the financial markets have a memory like a sieve, as is shown by the case of Argentina which adopted precisely this method a few years ago and lived to tell the tale.

In Europe this is more difficult: the Greeks have adopted the euro, and Greece’s bankruptcy would mean not only that confidence in the country would collapse, but that the same would go for other weaker Eurozone countries, such as Portugal, Ireland and Italy, which could fall into bankruptcy in their turn. That’s why the government leaders are doing all they can to prevent such an ‘unmanaged’ bankruptcy. At the same time this means that they have to dance to the financial lobby’s tune, which is why the most important representative of this lobby has in recent times invariably been present at such summits. For Greece it is now important that the banks actually start paying, but in addition an end must be put as swiftly as possible to the blackmailing of government leaders by the financial lobby. The financial world must change, and the power of the speculators must be broken. That is Occupy’s core message, and one which also lies behind our Action Plan against Speculators.

If you want to know more about the financial lobby, take a look at the website of the Institute of International Finance. In their annual report you can read that they have a modest €30 million per year (approx. $41 m./£25.7m) to spend and that they are represented at every important meeting in the world.