Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-16-Speech-3-016"
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"en.20100616.4.3-016"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the criticism from our group is not directed at whether we need the newly created euro rescue package, but at how it will be implemented. As in 2009, it is once more all about rescuing the banks and the financial sector. Yet again, they will not be helping to pay the cost of averting imminent crises. The EU countries that are in difficulty are once more being ordered to make cuts in social security spending, in public investments, in public services and in salaries and pensions and to increase the pension age. The plan to tighten up the stability pact is pure sado-monetarism. Workers, pensioners and the unemployed are being asked to pay for the crisis which was caused by the failure of European economic policy and gambling on the financial markets.
However, this orgy of cuts will send demand on the internal market and tax revenues in Europe through the floor and, as a result, the recession will return. From our perspective, this policy is fundamentally wrong and will not lead to healthy public finances. We are hearing once again that structural reforms should bring about increased growth. More deregulation is to be introduced into the labour markets and the European internal market, while public services will be privatised by means of public-private partnerships. As a result, industrial relations will end up in an even more uncertain and precarious position. This will cause an increase in poverty and social exclusion in the very year when we are supposed to be combating these two phenomena.
This is what the Europe 2020 strategy is allegedly intended to fight against. Where will the investment in education, research, green jobs and combating poverty come from if all the Member States are adopting austerity programmes? To put it bluntly, the Europe 2020 strategy is not worth the paper which its very modest objectives are written on.
Our group supports the protest campaigns by trade unions and social movements against the catastrophic course taken by the European Union. We agree with the European Trade Union Confederation that an EU-wide tax on financial transactions, Eurobonds, green taxes and heavy taxation of high incomes, assets and inheritances will allow for investment in the environmental and social reconstruction of our industrial societies.
Firstly, Europe needs a European social and environmental programme of investment in the future to overcome the crisis. Secondly, it needs decisive measures to break the power of the financial markets and, thirdly, it needs European economic governance and more economic democracy in the interests of the workers. We must have a social Europe or there will soon be no common Europe left."@en1
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