Petirrojo Capucha

Generali

Or Robin Hood.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/spains-robin-hood#r=nav-fs

Diego Cañamero, the SAT union’s national spokesman, have gained renown in recent months with a series of controversial protests against the austerity measures embraced by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish government. On Aug. 7, the two led union members on raids on Carrefour and Mercadona supermarkets, leaving the stores with shopping carts full of “expropriated” food they gave away to the hungry poor.

In other news:

Greece is still FUBAR'd

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-22/greece-austerity-diet-risks-1930s-style-depression-euro-credit.html

Greece is spiraling into the kind of decline the U.S. and Germany endured during the Great Depression, showing the scale of the challenge involved in attempting to regain competitiveness through austerity.



The economy shrank 18.4 percent in the past four years and the International Monetary Fund forecasts it will contract another 4 percent in 2013 as Greece struggles to reduce debt in exchange for its $300 billion rescue programs. That’s the biggest cumulative loss of output of a developed-country economy in at least three decades, coming within spitting distance of the 27 percent drop in the U.S. economy between 1929 and 1933, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington.

And some people think that the Northern Hemisphere is reaching the limit of what monetary stimulus can acheive:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-21/worst-carry-trades-show-central-banks-reaching-stimulus-limits.html

Oh dear. Those bailouts don't seem to be helping much.

Conrad

Generali wrote: »

Or Robin Hood.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/spains-robin-hood#r=nav-fs

From the article; “No! No! We do not want to pay off debt with health care and education!" and “The government is answering our demands for jobs with repression,”

.................


The subtext to these demands stipulates that somehow certain people in some places are owed things by others.
That these 'entitlments' are a foregone automatic right that someone somewhere will pay for.

If this is true, then surely every person on the planet is also automatically entitled this way and the rest of us will pay up.

Is this the case?

Loughton_Monkey

One thing I don't understand is why these people sit over there and demonstrate, when simply buying a rail ticket to UK "to seek work" would give them benefits unheard of in their own country. Housing benefit, child tax credits,.....

What do Somalians, Turks, Afghans, etc know that Spanish & Greeks don't know?

purch

Generali wrote: »

Those bailouts don't seem to be helping much.

When your vessel has a huge leak, it doesn't really matter how hard you bale out the water :eek:

Generali

Conrad wrote: »

From the article; “No! No! We do not want to pay off debt with health care and education!" and “The government is answering our demands for jobs with repression,”

.................


The subtext to these demands stipulates that somehow certain people in some places are owed things by others.
That these 'entitlments' are a foregone automatic right that someone somewhere will pay for.

If this is true, then surely every person on the planet is also automatically entitled this way and the rest of us will pay up.

Is this the case?

The fact is that you have no entitlements outside contract law. Even then some things (e.g. bankruptcy/insolvency) can override those entitlements.

Another fact is that Socialist extremism is on the rise in Southern Europe (Golden Dawn are a Socialist party that attract the label 'right wing' because they are racists).

I've gotta be honest, I think the Spanish Robin Hood is a misguided fool. Well meaning certainly but misguided. I can also see why he's popular right now. Here is another article I came across today (work is quiet):

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/us-greece-mosquitoes-malaria-idUSBRE89L0PM20121022

Species of the blood-sucking insects that can carry exotic-sounding tropical infections like malaria:eek:, West Nile Virus:(, chikungunya(?) and dengue fever:eek: are enjoying the extra bit of warmth climate change is bringing to parts of southern Europe.


And with austerity budgets, a collapsing health system, political infighting and rising xenophobia all conspiring to allow pest and disease control measures here to slip through the net, the mosquitoes are biting back.
Already malaria, a disease eliminated from Greece in 1974, is not just returning with visitors and migrants - as it does from time to time in the rest Europe - but is being transmitted from person to person within Greek borders.


This year's death toll from West Nile Virus, a disease spread by Culex modestus mosquitoes, stood at 16 on October 11.


It's a sign of the times that Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), a global medical charity more usually associated with the fight to save lives of babies in sub-Saharan Africa, is now working full time in parts of southern Greece.

The trouble is, we're all conditioned to believe that healthcare and all the other bits of the welfare state are free. Not 'free' but free. There isn't a limit to how bad an economy can get.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Generali wrote: »

. There isn't a limit to how bad an economy can get.

True.

But there is a limit to how bad an economy can get before the outcome is a war or revolution.

Continuing along the path of a failed austerity agenda is playing with fire.

Generali

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

True.

But there is a limit to how bad an economy can get before the outcome is a war or revolution.

True but generally that just makes things worse unless you get to replace a failed state with a working one.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Continuing along the path of a failed austerity agenda is playing with fire.

I agree. Better for the Southern European states to repudiate the debt, quit the Euro and rebuild their economies.

For the UK and France, austerity is a better response at present given that they want to continue the crazed policy of shoveling tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers money into the banking system each year.

As that Spanish chap said, probably in Spanish or some such, banks are borrowing money at 0.75% from the ECB and lending it to the Spanish Government at 6%! The difference is a direct subsidy from taxpayers to banks.

Conrad

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

True.

But there is a limit to how bad an economy can get before the outcome is a war or revolution.

Continuing along the path of a failed austerity agenda is playing with fire.

My socialist mate argues this, but he forgets the keynsian model worked well because the whole world needed re - building and we had little competetion for our output.

Spain has many competitors doing a great job and cheaper, so the Spannish model was simply broken. Borrowing more to fund entitlments the rest of the world do not have, and pumping even more debt into infrastructure would only have resulted in even higher interest rates, even more strife.