Corporate Cash Con
Corporations Have Captured 88% Of All Post-Recession Income Growth
"Jobless and Wageless" Recovery in Pictures; Trends in Jobs and Wage Growth
Meet The 15 Biggest Retailers In America
Greek bail-out holds ‘impossible knot’
When Greece passed a €28bn austerity package last week, it appeared that months of infighting had come to an end: Athens would get its next aid payment, avoiding sovereign default, and the European Union would sign off on a second, €120bn bail-out to keep Greece solvent through 2014.Portugal’s Debt Rating Cut to Junk by Moody’s
But only one of those things is now assured: the €12bn July aid payment is expected to be finalised by the International Monetary Fund on Friday. The second Greek rescue is now being held up by what one senior European official called “an impossible knot” – getting private holders of Greek bonds to help pay for the bail-out, but without the financial markets judging the plan to be a default on Greece’s debt commitments.
Standard & Poor’s made clear on Monday that clearing the default hurdle could, for them, be an impossible knot indeed, warning that the most prominent French-backed plan for bondholder participation would force them to declare a default.
New figures published by the European Commission make clear just how big Greece’s budgetary hole now is. Over the next three years, the Commission says Greece will need €172bn in financing. But the current bail-out only has another €57bn left – meaning €115bn has to be found.
Greece itself has committed to raising €30bn on its own by privatising government assets. The rest was supposed to be signed off on Sunday. But according to several officials involved in the talks, the decision was held up by an inability to agree enough commitments from private bondholders.
A German-led group of creditor countries, including the Netherlands, wants private bondholders to shoulder a “significant” portion to get support in their national parliaments. Although neither Berlin nor The Hague has given specific figures, both have hinted at anywhere from €20bn to €30bn.
Big Banks Easing Terms on Loans Deemed as Risks
Why Only One in Four Teens is Employed
BMW layoffs exemplify the evisceration of the middle class
Yet what gives BMW the freedom to convert good American middle-class jobs into low-wage piecework is the evaporation of American workers' power of collective action. The labor lawyer and writer Thomas Geoghegan contends that BMW could never outsource union jobs like this in its home country, Germany, where union solidarity extending from the professional staff down to the shop floor would stomp the living daylights out of the very idea. "Foreign companies know there's no solidarity here," he says.
On Monday, the Fourth of July, Americans will gather to celebrate the overthrow of tyranny. But the ease with which we allow corporate employers to impoverish their loyal workers should make us pause under the fireworks and think about how over the ensuing 235 years we've simply substituted one set of tyrants for another, the new ones immeasurably more heartless and bloodthirsty than the ones we shed.
No comments:
Post a Comment