Week of Global Action against Debt and IFIs.
Debt is illegitimate because it threatens democracy
DON’T OWE! WON’T PAY!

From October 7th to 14th, the Global Week of Action against Debt and IFIs will be celebrated worldwide. This week’s fight was established in the World Social Forum at Nairobi in 2007, to denounce the injustice of foreign debt on peripheral states and the submission policies imposed by multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Since the housing bubble burst and triggered the financial crisis, debt has become our worst nightmare and the perfect excuse for financial powers to impose the ultra-liberal reforms they have been after for some time in order to ensure a higher rate of capital transfer from low and middle class incomes to high ones.

As with the people of Latin America, Africa or Asia since the 80’s, debt has become financial power’s instrument of mass domination to also subjugate European democracies. Since the Maastricht Treaty for the adoption of the Euro, the treaties signed by our governments (such as the Euro Pact and the Financial Stability Pact) granted increasing monetary, fiscal and budgetary power to unelected bodies such as the European Commission or the European Central Bank, which is a direct usurpation of sovereignty.

The most blatant interference of these organisms in our sovereignty occurred last year with the shameful constitutional reform to prioritize debt repayment over people’s rights, without any social consultation. To make matters worse, a new blow to our fragile democracy is being prepared by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which will subject us to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund and its sadly famous Structural Adjustment Programmes that devastated the economies of poor countries for decades. Theft of popular sovereignty has made clear that democracy is incompatible with capitalism.

This is why we claim that debt is illegitimate. As in peripheral countries, debt has been induced by financial powers to subdue populations to their private interests. In addition, most of Spanish public debt has been subscribed to benefit a small elite in detriment of the majority. The clearest example is seen in the bank rescue, which has meant more than 215,000 million euros to the public treasury, to which we must add the 100,000 million bailout fund that the EU has made available for Spanish banks and which the State is the ultimate guarantor. Private debt becomes public debt and we are all made to pay, never benefiting from it, rather the contrary, for debt payment implies a huge drawdown of resources that ensure basic rights such as health, education, pensions or decent wages.

Therefore, from the Citizen Debt Audit Platform (PACD), we have started a citizen debt audit process to demonstrate the illegitimacy of debt, to repudiate its payment and demand civil and criminal liability for those who generated it. We call on all people to join this process and hit the streets this week, specially on the October 13th, global day of action against debt (http://www.globalnoise.net/) to defend our sovereignty and shout out loud and clear: DON’T OWE! WON’T PAY!

The activities planned for this week in different cities are available on the web: http://www.auditoriaciudadana.net, Facebook http://www.facebook.com/AuditoriaCiudadanaDeuda and Twitter: @AuditCiudadana