Europe’s Agony Could Become Our Future Under Mitt Romney

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/europe-s-agony-could-become-our-future-under-mitt-romney-1351266242

At last Monday's debate Mitt Romney said the United States is "heading toward Greece." That remark was filled with bitter ironies, not the least of which is the fact that the world's current economic miseries were triggered by financial speculators like Romney himself. And while Romney says his harsh economic policies are designed to reduce the national debt, we now have proof they'll have the opposite effect.

Austerity makes victims pay for other people's crimes. And the lesson of Europe confirms what we always suspected: It's not just morally wrong. It's self-defeating.

Nations like Greece aren't just wracked with sky-high unemployment, endangered by full-scale depression, and experiencing the first throes of social disintegration. They're also struggling with soaring debt. That why even the International Monetary Fund, hardly a bastion of leftist dissidence, has turned against Romney-style austerity.

The United States isn't immune from contagion if Romney and Ryan enact a full-blown austerity program. The riot-torn streets and malarial villages of Greece could become our nation's future.

[tama]

1. US is the source of contagion

of neoliberal ideology of banks before people and IMF programs. On US state and local level the debt and bankruptcy problems have produced similar and worse cuts to public sector as in Greece. US levels of homelessness and child malnutrition are much worse than anywhere in Europe, there is nothing comparable to rust belt cities like Detroit in Europe. The main difference is that people in Europe who are unionized and used to well-fare state are resisting instead of accepting what people in US are taking for granted.

The real issue is global and structural, neoliberalism vs. global revolution, the limits of growth and final crisis of global capitalism-as-we-know-it, and both establishment parties in US are on the wrong side of history and common decency, a modicum of sanity.

[EconomyInCrisis]

2. Spam deleted by bluesbassman (MIR Team)