Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-19-Speech-3-011"
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"en.20100519.3.3-011"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this debate is taking place against the backdrop of a very serious situation which represents a threat to the European Union. We have decades of
ideology behind us and these have been decades during which anyone who questioned the alleged superiority of the capitalist economic system was ridiculed. This economic system has taken us into the deepest financial, economic and employment crisis and the deepest crisis in the morality and legitimacy of the institutions since the end of the Second World War.
The system is wrong. It is, to a certain extent, immoral, and it is also warped. I would like to give you an example, because many of our citizens do not understand the jargon that is used. What is the trade in credit default swaps and credit default insurance all about? It means that you can take out an insurance policy which can then be bought and sold like a commodity. Let me put this in practical terms. I am sure that the lovely farm owned by Mr Daul is covered by a fire insurance policy. If I, Martin Schulz, can buy Mr Daul’s fire insurance policy and if I receive the insurance payment instead of him when his house burns down, then I simply need someone, for example Mr Cohn-Bendit, who is prepared to set light to the house and I am a made man.
This is a warped system. It should be abolished and these practices should be banned. These are exactly the mechanisms that we are discussing and the real-life examples are not funny. One concerns the pension fund of the Californian teachers’ union which wanted to buy a German airline via a hedge fund. The pension fund did not succeed, but it bought something else instead. However, the pension fund then went bankrupt. This has brought ruin to a whole generation of teachers, who have been paying into the fund for 40 years. That is the reality of this economic system, which has now reached its limits and which must be put on a tight leash.
Now it is the governments’ turn. This is what you have said, Mr López Garrido and Mr Rehn. That is all well and good, but we are the ones who are reacting, we are the ones who have been driven to action and, in my opinion, we are reacting far too late. Regulations should have been introduced in many areas at a much earlier stage and we have often called for this to happen in this House. Now we are bringing in regulations for hedge funds, but when will the European Rating Agency be established? Is it really normal for an American rating agency, at exactly the point at which the speculation against Greece reached its climax, to set its sights on the next target and lower Portugal’s rating? What type of institutions are these which can decide on the fate of entire nations? They must be controlled and regulated. However, this should not be happening now. It should have taken place years ago and we called for it years ago, but our calls were rejected. They were rejected by the same governments which today claim to be managing this crisis.
Mr Langen, I know that you are tabling an amendment this afternoon to ensure that Parliament is not in session during carnival time in Germany. That is a good thing. It is just that when you are here, it is carnival every day that Parliament is in session. I am really sorry.
We have structural deficits in the EU, which the institutions are responsible for resolving. We have allegedly created an economic and monetary union. However, the reality is that we have a monetary union, but not an economic union. In Europe, we have a patchwork quilt of economic policies. A total of 16 sovereign states are failing to coordinate their economic policies, some of which are inconsistent with one another, within a single currency area. This represents a huge risk. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his beautiful state of California are completely bankrupt, but that does not affect the dollar at all, because the economic policy of California forms part of the single currency area of the United States. If 2.8% of the gross domestic product of the euro area is put at risk, as in the case of Greece, a serious crisis will be caused here. We must get rid of this deficit, which is why we need economic governance. Anyone who is still opposed to this has not heard the warning shots.
We are in the middle of an extremely serious crisis of legitimacy. People are realising that this economic system has failed and they no longer have any confidence in it. They have seen that the national and international institutions are being driven by this system and therefore they no longer trust the institutions either. During this phase, many people are returning to the refuge of national rhetoric in the face of this globalised, Europeanised challenge. This three-way contradiction between the crisis of confidence in our economic system and in our state institutions and the retreat of many state institutions into taking a national approach, rather than looking for solutions in the international structures, is a mixture which puts the EU as a whole at risk.
Therefore, we need economic governance and we also ultimately need the strength to implement our own regulations. Finally, Mr Daul, who is the chair of the group which includes the representatives of Nea Dimokratia, should be a little more restrained in his criticism of other parties."@en1
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