Dal sito del Transnational Institute di Amsterdam, una recente intervista a Susan George, sugli effetti delle politiche di austerità in Europa
We are punishing the innocent, the people who are supposed to pay through austerity, and we are rewarding the guilty because the banks are continuing to receive huge privileges and subsidies from our governments.
What is the continuity you see between the moment of Maastricht through the Lisbon Agenda and the Lisbon Treaty, to the Six Pack and now this new Fiscal Treaty?
The Maastricht Treaty was a treaty that presented two completely arbitrary figures: 3 percent budget deficit with regard to the GNP and 60 percent for the debt. Why not 4 per cent or 2 per cent? Why not 55 or 65 per cent? Nobody knows. They came out of the sky, those numbers, doubtless from the Bundesbank. But they have become sort of religious symbols, the holy numbers of Maastricht. That was the first effort to get government policy under control, but countries did not respect that, including Germany
When the time of Lisbon came, we'd rather stopped talking about that. Lisbon was about different issues. When people read that treaty (which they did in France, it was the biggest debate we've had since May ‘68) - and realized what was actually in the European treaties, they were horrified. There were innumerable issues in that treaty which people were opposed to: that we were going to be forever under the command of NATO with the American President as commander-in-chief; all the economic detail and other issues in France which made people frightened of ‘laïcité’ - secularism. But above all, people understood often for the first time that the entire economic programme of the EU was, and always had been, completely neo-liberal and put “free and undistorted competition” and the free market way above social protection.