Anti-austerity Protestors in Portugal: "Screw the troika, we want our lives back"

Austerity is spreading across the globe like a bad virus, despite the vehement opposition of the general population. In Portugal, thousands of demonstrators have held marches across the country in protest. From Al Jazeera:

Tens of thousands of people filled a Lisbon boulevard during Saturday's protests and headed to the finance ministry carrying placards saying "Screw the troika, we want our lives back". 

The troika is a reference to the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, the lenders behind the country's financial bailout. 

Many protesters were singing a 40-year-old song linked to a 1974 popular uprising known as the Carnation Revolution. 

Portugal is expected to suffer a third straight year of recession in 2013, with a two percent contraction. The overall jobless rate has grown to a record 17.6 percent. The marches were powered mostly by young people among whom unemployment is close to 40 percent.

 ...After several years of tax increases and welfare cuts, austerity is poised to deepen as the government looks for another $5.2bn to cut over the next two years. The national health service, education, pensioners and government workers are likely to be the hardest hit. The government is locked into debt-cutting measures in return for the $102bn financial rescue set up in 2011.  

More tax hikes and spending cuts are on the way for Portugal: when it comes to the IMF, you must pay your debts regardless of the consequences. That was always the IMF way of course, but when austerity plus regressive taxation was being imposed on impoverished countries with disastrous social and economic results, the global North didn't seem too bothered by it. One protestor in Lisbon is quoted as saying, "This government has left the people on bread and water, selling off state assets for peanuts to pay back debts that were contracted by corrupt politicians to benefit bankers." That scenario is lifted straight out of the IMF's playbook throughout Africa in the 1990s.

UNCTAD update

UNCTAD gets fresh mandate, "after a huge battle between developing and developed countries": the G77 hung together and resisted attempts to silence it or narrow its mandate.  the Guardian's Poverty Matters Blog has this: Unctad is astute and progressive – so why don't developed countries like it?  For several of the reasons Vijay Prashad explained, such as:

"Some explanations for the apparently surprising attitude of developed countries can be found from the informal statements made by certain negotiators. One such representative of an important developed country told his counterpart from a major emerging market economy that they "did not want Unctad to engage in intellectual competition with the IMF"!"

The author follows that with "Intriguing, isn't it? Such people are usually all for competition in everything (certainly in labour markets) – except, apparently, ideas."

Silencing UNCTAD

Naked Capitalism links to this RNN video in which they interview Vijay Prashad on the topic of controlling debate on trade policy, a topic that is getting more attention after that letter written by the likes of Dani Rodrik; here's what Yves has to say of the video:

"Real News Network segment gives a window into the efforts to squash criticism of the neoliberal orthodoxy in the world of international agencies. Even though the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) gets very little attention in the major media, its well researched and often prescient reports are enough of a threat to the orthodoxy to produce efforts by the advanced economy block in the UN to try to clip the wings of the agency. The start of this interview may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but it shortly gets to issues that are critically important."

Prashad talks about the multiple reports issued by UNCTAD that accurately predicted the financial crisis and "warning the world about what has basically taken place, which is that our social lives have become financialized," while the IMF continued to champion financialization and "in the midst of crisis was recommending the exact same recipes that it had recommended when there was no immediate crisis."  Then he talks about the institutional structure of negotiation in the UN, and talks about the attempt by Switzerland to railroad the discussion, redlining anything about financial controls and regulations.

Around 10:40 in, Prashad starts talking about IMF reports and UNCTAD reports--"for my sins, I read almost all of the IMF Reports, I read the UNCTAD reports,"and of which he says

"if you were relatively objective you would see that the IMF reports don't seem to learn from each other.  There's a lot of religion in the IMF reports.  The UNCTAD reports, on the other hand, are very strongly empirically based, there's a lot of evidence in the reports, and they have warned about specific, concrete problems in the financial sector.  This is not just a kind of religious document.  These are very precise documents that warn about specific things.  So the North has been saying that UNCTAD writings about finance exceed the mandate of UNCTAd, and it needs to return to its mandate, so what does that mean?"

He says it means deal only with the effects of the financial crisis on the developing world--don't look at the root causes of the crisis, which would entail looking at the institutions and regulations of the global north.  Prashad asks who is looking at the causes, and the answer is, no one is, and those in the global north would prefer to keep it that way.