While they were formulating, discussing amongst themselves and then coming to an agreement over the details of the national government’s budget for 2009, the figures who currently fill the leading positions within the hierarchy of the Romanian state (President Basescu, Prime Minister Boc, President of the PSD Mircea Geoana, etc.) clearly had this dismal economic data in hand and were well aware of the gravity of the situation; nonetheless, not only did the respective politicians renege, as mentioned above, on all of their populist proposals for spending on social measures or programs, but they actually produced (and then successfully shepherded through both of their country’s parliamentary bodies) an austerity budget.  Not only does the budget stipulate that employees in the public sector will, during the current year, receive wage increases which are almost certain to be below the rate of inflation, but it also substantially boosts a number of regressive levies, such as the tax on gasoline and the social-insurance tax; if we keep in mind the fact that earlier in 2008 virtually all of Romania’s leading politicians had been promising to continue to reduce the social-insurance tax in the future, then we can state with a high degree of confidence that their decision to increase it at the first sign of budgetary difficulties demonstrates clearly that their fundamental concern at the present is not to honor the (impossible-to-take seriously) populist promises that they previously made, but to ensure that, if someone must pay for the recession which is ravaging their country, it won’t be their super-rich backers, but the workers and poor people who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population of their country.
While all of the details which concern it are not yet known, the loan money that Romania’s government will soon start to receive in tranches from the IMF, the EU as well as, it now appears, the regional and international capitalist financial institutions called, respectively, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank (WB) will clearly not be used to protect ordinary working peoples’ material living standards from the effects of the crisis, but instead to complement, support and probably make still more austere and stringent the “belt-tightening” budget referred to in the previous paragraph.  Several bourgeois economists who were interviewed earlier this month regarding the likelihood that the IMF and the EU would loan money to the Romanian government expressed their opinion that, given the fact that the previous (and now well and truly finished) years of economic growth for the respective borrower country had been accompanied by a large increase in its current-account deficit, a further 15% devaluation of its currency vis-à-vis the euro -- which is the money used by its most important trading partners -- was to be expected by the end of 2009; what the respective economists did not mention was that a further devaluation of the Romanian leu would make the assets of that country cheaper to buy for the American and Western capitalist investors who constitute the primary and controlling constituency behind institutions such as the IMF, EU, WB, EBRD, etc.  
If the unfolding economic disaster in Romania has any positive aspect whatsoever, it is that it not only   constitutes a fairly substantial piece of evidence demonstrating to the workers, peasants, progressive youth, professionals and small businesspeople from there that the continued existence of the capitalist system is completely incompatible with the promotion of their fundamental material and social interests but also that the just-named system is unequivocally defended by every single figure who occupies a significant figure in the judicial, legislative and executive branches of “their country’s” government; thus the current crisis shows the masses in Romania that the entire existing legal-political order in their country is nothing but an elaborate conspiracy designed to keep them down and oppressed so that a tiny and fabulously rich financial elite can continue to enjoy the lifestyle of almost unimaginable luxury and opulence to which it has grown accustomed.  
It is high time that the workers, the peasants and the progressive youth, professionals and small businesspeople from Romania engage in a serious study of history, and not least the history of their own country during the last 100 years or so; a serious study of the history of Romania will reveal that, over the course of the last 100 years, political power in the country in question has been held by, respectively, a profoundly corrupt, semi-monarchical, semi-democratic bourgeois regime, a short-lived crisis-ridden right-wing regal dictatorship, a murderous military-fascist dictatorship, a repressive Stalinist dictatorship and, ever since 1990 an unstable parliamentary bourgeois regime, but never by a revolutionary government of the working and peasant masses.  In other words, while at one point or another over the course of the last 100 years, the bureaucratic-nationalist betrayal of socialism known as Stalinism and also every imaginable type of capitalist regime has, with truly disastrous results, been imposed on the ordinary people who live in Romania, genuine socialism – in other words, the truly democratic rule of, by and for the masses – remains as the single untried and logical alternative.  All those people, be they from Romania or elsewhere, who understand that there has never been a more critical moment than right now for the development of a coherent, just, rational, sustainable and progressive alternative to the manifestly failed world capitalist system are, as an absolutely vital first step, urged to visit The World Socialist Web Site at wsws.org .