The ECB’s Governing Council is currently meeting in Barcelona. Here is a picture of them, from their website, so you can see how much they look like other people in Europe, especially women.
The increasingly authoritarian Spanish government, on account of the ECB’s visit, and mindful of the increasingly widespread awareness that the ECB is indeed operating as an Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie, has suspended the Schengen agreement, providing a timely illustration that the primary freedom accorded by European Union member states is the free movement of capital, followed by the freedom of capital to move labour.
There will be protests (and, if the immediate history of protest in Barcelona is anything to go by, there will be agents provocateurs).
Translation:
WE DON’T CARE
3M ECB SUMMIT
WHATEVER YOU DO
WE WILL PUT AN END TO
YOU
Below is a translation of a letter of accusation made by the Assamblea de Treballadors/es en atur de Barcelona i la Coordinadora d’assambleas i co.lectius de Treballadors/es en atur de Catalunya – the Barcelona Unemployed Workers’ Assembly and the Collective Unemployed Workers’ Assemblies of Catalonia, which is circulating widely on social networks.
We, the unemployed, accuse you of the poverty that strikes 115 million people in Europe, of the rampant unemployment which threatens to rise above 6 million in the Spanish State and which reaches 25 million in Europe; of the cuts to social, labour and citizen rights that place under risk the health and the lives of the majority; of ruining the education system and of the policies that narrow the access of the sons and daughters of the people to university; of shredding rights to self-determination, of degrading democracy, and of threatening civil liberties under the growing shadow of an authoritarian State; of imposing your technocrat cronies, seasoned amid the sewers of financial speculation, onto the rule of nations.
You behave like little gods by virtue of your so-called independence, in deciding day after day the present and future of the 99% of the citizens. Today you turn on the tap of credit and tomorrow you turn it off, so as to put pressure on governments and oblige them into applying the policies of adjustment and cutbacks in social spending. But in reality you are the servants of the banks and speculators, who have promoted you to the job, and to whom you guarantee the repayment of their loans.
You believe you are wise men, but in reality you are fools who do not learn the lessons of economic history, drugged as you are by neoliberal ideology. So blind are you that your obedience to “price stability” and your contempt for full employment are driving Europe into depression and collapse.
You are meeting these days in Barcelona, a city whose inhabitants consider you “personae non gratae”, and so you will be surrounded by a colossal police detail organised by your servile governments of Spain and Catalonia.
None of this will free you from judgement for your odious acts. The people, as on other occasions, will bring down the gods, and sooner or later you will have your Nuremburg.
Listen to the voice of the suffering people, change your policies radically, end your paranoia over social spending and deficit reduction, and put the wealth of the elites at the service of social rights and full employment. If you do not dare, at least have the dignity to resign and dissolve.
Cunning Hired Knaves 