Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-21-Speech-2-067"
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"en.20081021.7.2-067"2
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"Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Mr President of the Commission, never in the history of the European Parliament have we had to react to a multidimensional crisis of such depth and such gravity, and one cannot help but fear that the worst is yet to come.
Firstly, a number of countries of the South, in principle partners of the European Union, are on the brink of the abyss: in addition to the food, environmental and energy crisis, there is the financial crisis. These countries have got nothing to do with it, but it is hitting them hard. A fall in revenue, a fall in investments, a fall in growth: they are the ones overlooked most by the international effort, to the extent that the Director-General of the FAO, Mr Diouf, was obliged to point out that only 10% of the emergency funds pledged by the major powers in June have so far been allocated. Those seeking to clean up capitalism have their work well and truly cut out.
For their part, emerging countries are being affected by the crisis, but it is not yet possible to assess the social consequences of this. On our doorstep, a State not long ago presented as a model of success, Iceland, is under threat of bankruptcy. Within the Union, new member countries such as Hungary – which cannot even invest its treasury bonds anymore – are wrestling with extremely serious problems that are going to result in unprecedented sacrifices for their populations. The turnaround has also been spectacular in countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain, which were cited just now as an example. The shock has been considerable everywhere. This is liable to be the case in France, too, if the recession further exacerbates a particularly tense social climate, with huge job cuts, a fall in public spending, financially starved local authorities and public service privatisation projects.
This is another issue, you may say. It is not, for if each of our countries is threatened with a social crisis of unimaginable dimensions, it is because of a development model for which our people are today paying a high price. The model was formed in the United States and in the United Kingdom, but the European Union fully embraced it as its own with the toppling of the international balances of power twenty-odd years ago. Since then, it has been this model that the Commission has fed us with, month after month, and it is this model that pervades our treaties, the case-law of the Court and a number of our policies.
That is why, Mr Sarkozy, I cannot share your diagnosis of the terrible evil currently eating away at our societies. The spark that started the fire can certainly be traced back to New York, but the fuel that caught fire is as much in Europe as it is in the United States, and all those political leaders who have worked on Europe’s strategic change of direction over the past 20 years owe our fellow citizens an explanation. They must not think that they are off the hook today by taking measures – necessary measures, all the same – concerning reporting standards, financial supervision of rating agencies, or golden parachutes.
Beyond this, however, it is the heart of the system that needs to be changed: money for profit, and profit for money, that awful spiral that gives rise to the devaluing of work, salary deflation, social expenditure rationing and the wasting of the planet’s resources, as well as the marginalisation of a huge proportion of the global population. Indexes do not lie: only 2% of monetary transactions today concern the production of goods and services; 98% relate to finance. Tackling the root of the evil from now on means attacking the increasingly drastic financial return criteria, which are absolutely incompatible with the non-discriminatory promotion of human capacities and with genuinely sustainable development.
Equally, a Bretton Woods II worthy of the name should aim to introduce collective control of money creation worldwide, that is to say, to replace the false international common currency that is the dollar with a true international common currency designed to serve as a lever to correct the intolerable inequalities that destabilise the world and to contribute to the balanced development of humankind and of the planet. We are so far away from that that it is better, at this stage, to avoid an excess of superlatives on the radical reforms at work, unless the European leaders’ sudden propensity to want to change the world is inspired by the motto of Prince Salina in
: ‘everything changes so that nothing changes’. They are in danger of having a rude awakening before too long, however."@en1
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"The Leopard"1
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