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Post-Soviet States
Free market shock therapy devastated them, lowering, not raising, living standards, Poland one of its victims. In the 1980s, Solidarnosc (Solidarity) unionized 10 million members, gaining the right to bargain and aspire to transform state-controlled companies into worker-run cooperatives. Instead, mines, shipyards and factories were privatized, subsidies slashed, and price controls lifted, skyrocketing unemployment, poverty, depression, and overall worse times than before.
On January 18, Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers headlined their article, "The Spectre Haunting Europe: Debt Defaults, Austerity, and Death of the 'Social Europe' Model," saying:
"(D)ecades of neoliberalism....crashed the US and several European economies. Years of deregulation, speculation and lack of investment in the real economy left them with rising inequality and little consumer demand, except for what was financed by running up debt."
In an earlier April 2010 interview, Hudson explained that suffering economies "from Greece to the Baltics and Iceland (were) directed to pay the financial sector first - international bankers, creditor-nation governments (like America, Britain, France and others), the IMF, World Bank, and financial institutions - before (spending) on sustaining their own employment and economic growth."
In other words, depriving their people for finance capital as well as balancing their budgets on their backs. IMF diktats shrink economies. As a result, enormous hardships throughout Eastern Europe were created, targeted nations having no choice but go along.
It's a "financial war against industry, against labor, against the post-Soviet economies, against the Third World....(It's) a war against government, against public spending. Its solution to unpayable debts is to demand that governments sell off whatever assets remain in the public domain. (It's) the most naked property grab since the Viking invasions."
It's opposite of what responsible governments should do, putting popular interests ahead of predatory foreign lenders. It's redistributing wealth equitably and fulfilling a social contract. It's growing their economies, not shrinking them.
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