Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-04-Speech-4-102"
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"en.20011004.3.4-102"2
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".
A single currency requires a single economic policy. This, basically, is the conclusion drawn by both the Commission report and the rapporteur's report. Member States are being further restricted in the exercise of economic policy to a framework of decisions taken in advance and national parliaments are required to do no more than observe or, even worse, execute decisions taken by the ΕU. This is an attempt to undermine the workers' facility to react, as they are doing more and more decisively, to the choices made by big business.
The EC report welcomes the EU's anti-grass roots policy and includes proposals whose sole function is as an alibi for the rampantly neo-liberal economic and social policy of the ΕU and the tragic impact which it has on the lower classes, such as prior agreement on the allocation of fortuitous or exceptional tax revenue – just to make sure nothing is spent on the social security sector. Integrating the "issue of the ageing population" into national budgets is another move in the same direction.
While the report posits that unemployment still affects 14 million Europeans and that the economic and social situation has not improved, it remains faithful to the policy of structural change and unemployment sharing.
The involvement of the national parliaments in the form of an annual evaluation of the application of the broad economic policy guidelines decided in the European Council and the debate on the stability programmes approved by the Commission and the Council, are no more than a semblance of democracy, the aim of which is to entrap national representations in Community procedures, especially when it is proposed to strengthen the role of the Commission and impose sanctions on Member States which fail to apply the economic policy imposed by Brussels.
It is an attempt to make national institutions accessories to a process which, on the pretext of coordinating economic policies within the broad economic policy guidelines, is further subjugating wage measures and social policy measures in general to the suffocatingly restrictive criteria for cohesion and of the Stability Pact. The Member States are expressly called on to "coordinate their actions and refrain from adopting tax, budgetary or wage policies".
The break-up of the guaranteed national insurance system, in conjunction with wage cuts and the fact that working hours and costs are arranged to suit employers, are demonstrably increasing poverty and social exclusion among the working classes and reducing the quality and extent of services offered.
Obviously, the more measures passed to restrict income and workers' rights, the greater the pressure for more structural measures, and the more the signs of slump in the economy increase, the stricter austerity policy becomes."@en1
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