Poverty Returns with Misguided Policy by Franz Segbers

The poor are the first ones who suffer from a false or misguided economic and political policy.  Economic and financial crisis on one hand the crises of the social state are two sides of one and the same coin of a flawed economic and social policy.  A policy according to the motto "Less state and more market" has failed.  That was the EKD's (Evangelical church in Germany) theme in its word on the global economic- and financial crisis of June 2010.  In its Foreword to the memorandum, Wolfgang Huber, chairperson of the EKD, said: "A new era or chronology has begun.  We speak of the time after the crisis as twenty years ago in Germany after the turn… The call for a strong state can suddenly be heard where privatization and deregulation were heralded as bringers of economic prosperity."

 

The financial market crisis has not ended by any means – it has only shifted.  It has become a crisis of the public budget.  The crisis costs should now be shifted to the weaker and the poor and not be assumed by the profiteers of the crisis, the banks, the speculators and the wealthy.  The German government has made it unmistakably clear from whom it will get the money to finance the financial crisis.  The "austerity package" of over 80 billion euros altogether will result in more poverty.  There can be no talk of social justice as long as Germany represents a tax haven for heirs, speculators and the super-rich.