Uk is pondering pillaging pensions

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-walks-out-uk-braced-for-biggest-wave-of-strikes-since-the-1980s-2298105.html

"Britain is facing the largest wave of strikes since the 1980s as about 750,000 public-sector employees stage a protest against threatened changes to their pensions. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union yesterday announced that its members had voted to join teachers and university lecturers in a one-day co-ordinated walk-out on 30 June."...

...."The Government admits that money cut from pensions will go straight to the Treasury to help pay off the deficit in what is nothing more than a tax on working in the public sector," he said.

"The very modest pay and pensions of public servants did not cause the recession, so they should not be blamed or punished for it. Unless ministers abandon their ideological plans to hollow out the public sector, they will face industrial action on a mass scale." ....

..."He dismissed the talks still happening between Government and the unions as a "farce" because ministers have already brought in changes to public-sector pensions which will force state employees to work longer and contribute more before receiving lower pensions at the end of their working lives. "....

..."Unlike other nations, including the U.S. and Ireland, which injected billions of dollars of capital into their financial institutions to keep them afloat, Iceland placed its biggest lenders in receivership. It chose not to protect creditors of the country’s banks, whose assets had ballooned to $209 billion, 11 times gross domestic product."....

...“Iceland did the right thing by making sure its payment systems continued to function while creditors, not the taxpayers, shouldered the losses of banks,” says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York. “Ireland’s done all the wrong things, on the other hand. That’s probably the worst model.”...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-01/iceland-proves-ireland-did-wrong-things-saving-banks-instead-of-taxpayer.html

and showing Stiglitz is correct, yet so many of the U.S. and European leaders seem more than ever determined to socialize the debt owed to the bankers who caused the situation and already made off with their privatized profit. And in doing that by raiding social systems from education to retirement , they are making swiss cheese of the social structures built by people over generations :

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304319804576387572241329838.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

There may be no better contrast between restructuring versus bailouts than to compare Iceland to Ireland. Dublin faced the same predicament as Reykjavik in 2008, but it responded with a blanket guarantee that turned Irish taxpayers' money into collateral for Irish bank debts. Rating agencies and so-called experts hailed the move at the time, in part because Dublin had the euro and the mighty German state vouching for its credibility. But Iceland's experience of botched government takeovers and private-capital flight has also played out in Ireland—only much more slowly and, arguably, more painfully.

The crucial difference between Iceland and Ireland is that Icelandic taxpayers relinquished responsibility for their banks' bondholders, while their Irish counterparts are on the hook for their banks' crushing debts. Even worse, we may not have seen the full scale of the Irish banking system's losses, given that it remains on government life support.

It is becoming clearer by the day that too many of Europe's banking crises were initially misdiagnosed as liquidity, rather than solvency, problems. For some countries, most notably Ireland, the policies prescribed for that misdiagnosis have transformed banking crises into sovereign-debt crises.

Europe's bailout path has only diverted ever-more resources to failing enterprises, postponing and deepening the problem. Iceland's restructuring was both painful and costly for the population, but the government did not throw good money after bad, and the taxpayers were spared a nationalization of private debts. Is it any wonder that forward-looking financial markets are now betting on the Icelandic recovery?

really FISHY

And one pertinent to all the current G20 leaders since they all seem to have signed onto the austerity plan.
Why are they all determined to take this path when it's clear it's not working? Very fishy indeed.


In the meantime in Iceland, they've charged their former PM and are bringing him to to trial. Another powerful lesson on how to proceed:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/07/iceland-former-premier-trial-banking-crisis

The former prime minister of Iceland has been formally charged over his part in the collapse of the country's banks in 2008.

Geir Haarde was charged with failing to prevent the banking crisis and failing in his prime ministerial duty to manage the fallout. He could face two years in jail if found guilty.

~~~

Haarde is the first world leader to face criminal charges in relation to the global financial crisis, which caused the collapse of banks across the world and helped plunge the UK into recession. He is also the first person to be hauled before Iceland's Landsdomur, a criminal court created in 1905 to hear charges brought against ministers.

Last year Iceland's parliament, the Althingi, voted to indict Haarde for "economic negligence" in failing to prevent the 2008 financial crisis, which brought the country to its knees.

whether "pillaging" was a gerund or an adverb. :banghead: