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Metaphorically. Or abstractly, anyway.
There's all this news about Greece's debt crisis and Syriza apparently capitulating to the austerians[1], which is pretty depressing. But, as a reminder, Greece's GDP is 20% below peak. Unemployment is nearly 26%, and 60% for youth. While the EU fiddles over debt, the economy is burning -- human capital, the basis of developed economies, is atrophying. Or leaving. No one has a plausible proposal for fixing this on the euro, which has become basically a gold standard for eurozone countries, with all the problems thereof. AFAICT, hardly anyone is even talking about it as a problem.
And Spain, with 4x the population, is nearly as badly off, with unemployment over 22%. They're making their interest payments though, so no one cares. And we may hear even less from them thanks to a new gag law on political dissent. As a Spaniard I know tells us, Franco simply died, Spain didn't really purge the fascist influences from itself.
Still has a ways to go to catch up to Hungary though, which last I heard had gone pretty much full fascist, with a constitutional hardball coup d'etat.
In the UK, the Lib Dem collapse and plurality voting allowed the Tories to get a solid seat majority, even with hardly any more votes (just as the Tories did in Canada, with the Liberal collapse -- same vote percentage even, about 40), and Osborne's using that to double down on more austerity -- big welfare cuts -- without even the excuse of kowtowing to external creditors.
I don't have as many details, but the Nordics I know seem to think they've been swept by neo-liberal if not anti-immigrant parties, and that the Scandinavian welfare state is in deep danger.
[1] Coinage of 'austerity' and 'Austrian', as in school of economics. Expansionary austeriy has pretty much no support from economists, and is as intellectually respectable as Creationism, anti-vaxxer thought, and global warming denial, but clung to by many European leaders.
There's all this news about Greece's debt crisis and Syriza apparently capitulating to the austerians[1], which is pretty depressing. But, as a reminder, Greece's GDP is 20% below peak. Unemployment is nearly 26%, and 60% for youth. While the EU fiddles over debt, the economy is burning -- human capital, the basis of developed economies, is atrophying. Or leaving. No one has a plausible proposal for fixing this on the euro, which has become basically a gold standard for eurozone countries, with all the problems thereof. AFAICT, hardly anyone is even talking about it as a problem.
And Spain, with 4x the population, is nearly as badly off, with unemployment over 22%. They're making their interest payments though, so no one cares. And we may hear even less from them thanks to a new gag law on political dissent. As a Spaniard I know tells us, Franco simply died, Spain didn't really purge the fascist influences from itself.
Still has a ways to go to catch up to Hungary though, which last I heard had gone pretty much full fascist, with a constitutional hardball coup d'etat.
In the UK, the Lib Dem collapse and plurality voting allowed the Tories to get a solid seat majority, even with hardly any more votes (just as the Tories did in Canada, with the Liberal collapse -- same vote percentage even, about 40), and Osborne's using that to double down on more austerity -- big welfare cuts -- without even the excuse of kowtowing to external creditors.
I don't have as many details, but the Nordics I know seem to think they've been swept by neo-liberal if not anti-immigrant parties, and that the Scandinavian welfare state is in deep danger.
[1] Coinage of 'austerity' and 'Austrian', as in school of economics. Expansionary austeriy has pretty much no support from economists, and is as intellectually respectable as Creationism, anti-vaxxer thought, and global warming denial, but clung to by many European leaders.