Spain: IMF wants to slash salaries another 10%

Cristina Lagarta, oops, I mean Christine Lagarde, IMF top boss and former right hand of fascist French President Sarkozy, wants Spain to slash salaries another 10% (a 7% was already cut last year to all public officers, excepted MPs).

Not just that Lagarde also wants a reduction of 1.7% in social security fees, along a substantial increase in the time needed to be entitled to a pension (from 25 to 35 years) and an undetermined further increase in the VAT tax (already dramatically increased). 

She also wants impossibles such as to to reach "a credible social pact".

On the other hand her forecasts are gloomy, even in the event of acceptance of her stupid demands: private consume would fall initially on these changes (of course) and unemployment would remain extreme even in 2017 (26% forecast).

In spite of rising the VAT and demolishing the social fabric, Lagarde imagines that prices would drop. 

Source: Gara[es].

Lagarde is a retard, reality instead

This woman is plain stupid (or rather a criminal and compulsive liar): salaries simply cannot fall under the living costs and she is not proposing any such measures other than hallucinating with a hypothetical price drop based on nothing. 

Real effective measures would be to force the housing market to adjust prices downwards dramatically and brutally increase the availability of cheap public housing (and/or allowing squatting of speculators' idle property). The extremely high (and anti-market) costs of housing are surely the main barrier to salary drop. You just can't work for less that it costs you to live. 

Another key barrier are the totally unjustified high prices of electricity bills, which have grown more than 50% in the last few years and more than 100% in the last decade. Spain now has the most expensive electricity bills in all the Eurozone, excepted Cyprus and Ireland.

If Spanish salaries have to fall, living costs have to fall first and foremost. And that means hurting the banks and the energy monopolies.

Neither Lagarde nor Barroso nor Rajoy will do that. But is the only logical thing to do other than outright communism.

Andalusia: Spanish Constitutional Court uses the Constitution as toilet paper

Occupied homes in Andalusia

A year ago I commented with satisfaction that the Andalusian Parliament had approved a law that would allow expropriation of empty homes in order to guarantee the fundamental right to a dignified home, established in the Spanish Constitution. 

By this basic law of the Kingdom of Spain, the right to a home, as well as to a job, are fundamental rights, well above the accessory right to private property. Until now the main formal argument against tribunals upholding such fundamental rights was that they were not regulated by the state and therefore there was a legal vacuum. 

So what happens when the Andalusian institutions in full use of their legislating capabilities do regulate these rights as clearly intended by the letter and spirit of the Spanish Constitution of 1978? That the ultra-conservative Constitutional Court declares that hyper-constitutional law "possibly unconstitutional". 

It is not yet a firm sentence but just a procedural suspension for five months but the fact that the high court even dares to consider debatable the Madrid and Brussels claim of the right to property being above the right to a home, in clear contradiction with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, is a clear signal that, exactly as it has been for the last many decades, the Spanish Constitution is only worth as toilet paper. 

The Constitutional Court is clearly underlining this well known fact: there's no constitution, just banks.

Source: Diagonal[es].

Japan: government announces Cyprus-like "bail-in" mechanism to face bank collapse

The Japanese government has announced this self-defeating mechanism by which savers' money will be made part of the bank's capital if the private financial corporation is at risk of bankruptcy.

The mechanism will be to convert savings deposits into preferential shares, a scam mechanism already used in Spain to massively rob small savers, or something called "subordinated bonds".

According to some Japanese-language economic media:

By having the investors shoulder part of the loss in a financial crisis, the system will reduce the burden on taxpayers.

Problem here is that savers are not investors. Investors are those who hold capital shares, aka stock, aka equity. What this system does is to force customers into forcibly becoming investors precisely when the investment is collapsing.

Large scale savers will probably have no problem here: they will already be rushing their money to overseas banks, where it will be safer, so the main victims of this scheme will unavoidably be small and middle savers, often people who have been saving all their lives in order to have something to rely on when old. 

Japan is by far the most indebted state on Earth. Its stock market woes have been driving the global ones downwards in the last weeks. 

Source: EXSKF.

USA: protesters demand: "foreclose the banks"

From Black Agenda Report (excerpt):

Hundreds of protesters massed at the Department of Justice to demand that banks be held accountable for their multitudinous crimes. That’s like asking the Pope to convert to Islam. “If the Obama administration has been consistent on any one issue, it is the untouchability of the biggest banks.”

Attorney General Eric Holder won’t lay a hand on the cabal of banks that are “too big to fail” and far too politically powerful to jail, but DC police seemed eager to use their tasers on homeowners and anti-foreclosure demonstrators at Holder’s Justice Department, this week. Five hundred protesters from organizations around the country, including Occupy Minnesota, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the Home Defenders League, and Occupy Our Homes gathered to demand that banks be held accountable for the massive frauds they’ve committed against homeowners and society at large. Several dozen protesters were arrested, including a number of elderly persons, but Eric Holder and his top lieutenants didn’t even bother to acknowledge their presence.

Spanish banksters: rise taxes to the poor, lower taxes to the rich

The BBVA's think tank BBVA Research claims that, in order to get out of the crisis, taxes on consume like VAT (which are equal for all, regardless of income) should be raised, while the taxes on income, very especially for the highest echelons, should be reduced. 

Spain already has extremely low taxes for the high incomes, a mere fraction of what advanced and stable EU countries like Sweden or Finland or even Germany do, as well as ridiculously low taxes on financial transactions and corporate profits. 

Also a major cause of the economic collapse is the collapse of purchasing power, which is directly related to direct taxes like VAT (21%), energy taxes (>50%), etc. Never mind that such high direct taxes encourage buying elsewhere when possible (this again applies especially to the wealthy, who often live with one foot overseas). 

The BBVA corporation also demands further demolition of workers' rights, of the pension system and of municipal government.

Source: Kaos[es].

Tens of thousands march in Paris against austerity for the poor

Called by the Front de Gauche, many citizens protested yesterday in Paris the EU-imposed austerity policies that are having the double effect of dismantling the European real economy altogether and dooming most to most miserable standards of life, while the wealthy accumulate more and more money and power. 

Jean-Luc Melenchon, speaking at the end of the protest, rejected austerity policies that result in miserable life conditions and emphasized that the banksters, the financial sector, are not wanted in power.

Source: Euronews.