simply ending the massive tax evasion by multinational companies operating in developing countries could generate as much as $50 billion per year for investment in health care and other services, without taxing local people at all.
It is no coincidence that the onslaught on the pension rights of Europe's working class comes at a high point of greed and corruption in a rotten system which also allows top capitalists to pocket millions in pension pay-outs and rewards for failUC.
The trade unions have increasingly retreated in the face of a determined offensive by capitalist governments. They must draw together the generations, rebuild the solidarity of young and old, and build a continent-wide resistLet's make the bosses pay for the crisis their system has created, and build a better Europe based on collective ownership and the old socialist principle: from each according to their ability: to each according to their needs. It's not just the payment of state-funded pensions and relatively low retirement ages that are driving the employers to take action, but the fact that few workers in countries with generous pension entitlements have been persuaded to take out private pension schemes.
In the USA 61 per cent of workers have private pension coverage, while in the UK, after decades of government cutbacks a massive 80 per cent of workers have private schemes: but only one German or Dutch worker in ten pays into any retirement fund, and fewer than one per cent of workers in France do SO.
Clearly the only way to force larger numbers to entrust their hard-earned savings to private companies which might lose it, steal it, or fail to deliver promised benefits is to cut right back on the preferable state system.