Unemployment Update in the EU

Source: Eurostat

Well, the figures give more or less the same story as last month. Unemployment is roughly the same in the EA17 or the EU27 (up just 0.1% in the EA17), Greece and Spain are champions both in youth as well as in overall unemployment, Italy, Ireland and Cyprus saw their unemployment rate rise while Austria's, Netherlands's, Luxemburg's and Germany's remained the countries with the lowest figures.

What I am eagerly waiting for some time now, is for the Eurostat announcement that EU27 and EA17 GDP has contracted over the last quarter thus officially throwing the Union into recession. I am not doing this out of hate towards the Union; just because I hope that this will be a wake-up call for politicians and policymakers all through Europe that what they have been doing up to now is erroneous. What the reader may ask is whether they have the common sense to admit their mistakes, which unfortunately I cannot answer now. Time will show and hopefully after that time we will still be part of a Union. Better late than never.

Change can only come from within as Protesilaos states in his latest article. Here's the part that I liked the most:

"The troika's "expertise", or in general the technocratic, "objective" knowledge of the various bureaucrats that make crucial decisions on the citizens' behalf (e.g. the preposterous proposal to have a Commissioner veto national budgets), is in effect nothing more than the facade which conceals an apocryphal desire or rather a specific strategy for the redesign of the Euro area along the lines of a corporatist-neoliberal economic system that will realize economies of scale for a selective corporate elite at the expense of suppressing the standard of living of most people across Europe; while also rendering any spontaneous entrepreneurial initiative practically unprofitable or near-impossible due to the complexity of legislation and entry criteria, which always operate as means of insulating big business from the powerful forces of real competition (neoliberalism should never be confused with genuine free markets)" 

I do not know whether there is a plan or strategy behind Troika's decisions. Nevertheless, it seems that the measures they are proposing are damaging the middle and lower class and leave the upper class unaffected. This basically means that people pay for the faults of their governments and/or banks without the latter assuming anything of the blame. Now I do not know how do you call such a regime but exploitism sounds like a good name.