Finance Watch aims to counter domination of EU decision-making by bankers and speculators
Dennis de Jong, Member of the European Parliament for the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, which is affiliated to the United Left Group, has for the last two years been a member of the EP’s temporary Crisis Committee, the results of which he describes as ‘disappointing’ and ‘a missed chance’.
Its failure to propose any meaningful measures will at least, however, give a boost to a new body set up to combat the dominant influence of the financial lobby. De Jong explains:
“Entirely because the financial markets have made it too expensive for them to borrow money, Portugal’s interim government has been forced to seek help from the EU’s emergency fund. And for no other reason than that German and French financial institutions own large amounts of Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds, taxpayers’ money – yours and mine – has to be used to get the three ailing countries back on their feet. It’s always all about the interests of the speculators, but will they help pay for the crisis? No fear.”
This could best be achieved, De Jong argues, by means of “a partial debt forgiveness for the weaker Eurozone countries, which would mean that at last the speculators would have to chip in and the affected governments would not be forced to impose antisocial and irresponsible spending cuts.”
The failure of the Finance Committee was certainly a death foreseen, which is why last June De Jong and others set up FinanceWatch http://www.callforfinancewatch.org/, a body which aims, amongst other things, to increase the influence of the member states’ long-suffering citizens at the expense of the finance industry fat cats who currently rule Europe as effectively as Hitler once dreamed of doing. As De Jong notes, the Crisis Committee’s report, despite his own best efforts and those of other progressive members, also calls for austerity and contains no recommendations which would involve speculators paying up. He will join the rest of his group and probably only a handful of other MEPs in voting against it. In his view, the report merely confirms what we already knew, that “the financial markets have far more influence on the European Parliament than do the voters.
The hope is that FinanceWatch will be able to n the future act as a counter-lobby, exposing the finance industry’s lies, its undue influence, and its underhand and sometimes illegal methods.
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