Well yes. Sort of. Mario Monti went about it the right way and got results. Merkel appeared to back down, but you can never trust a dogmatic bigot who always knows she’s right. So, reculer a mieux s’avancer? Perhaps. Then again perhaps not. After all a bully always backs down when the stronger guys step in. That is the nature of bullies.

Now, as to the essence. As a matter of principle it stands to reason that the re capitalization of the banks should NOT increase sovereign debt and consequently deficits. It remains to be seen how this will be implemented and for whom. The Irish should perhaps be recompensed for having had their economy ruined through the Nonsense Economics applied to her. For one.

Now the 130 billion growth pact. Hmmm. A step in the right direction and lets hope a little more than hot air. Though the actual amount is somewhat puny and where the funds will come from rather nebulous. The Frau says, since Europe is so indebted we cannot fund growth through more loans. It would sound sensible except that The Frau has been the one to pile more and more debt burden on the over indebted countries such as Greece.

But, ah, comes the answer. We are not interested in promoting growth in Greece. Quite the contrary. All we want to do with that is prop up the banks and have Greece pick up the tab through interest payments. Never mind that its debt and deficits will only grow. Then we can wag the finger at them and blame them for everything else going wrong.

So no great enthusiasm? Well, moderate enthusiasm.

Congratulations to Mario Monti for taking on The Frau and making her back down.

And congratulations to la Squadra Azura for kicking the Germans out of the Euro! Football will do for a start.

I am grateful to my reader Chrys for giving me the following idea.

The EU, the Eurozone in particular, is like a marriage. It started off as a marriage of convenience, went through various phases mostly good until problems struck and has now turned very sour. The spouses have started hating and blaming each other.

There is a further feature to this marriage. Hubbie is the bread winner and has the money and the clout. As things have soured so has he become more intransigent, more opinionated and more bossy. He always wins the argument with: “It’s my money! I’m the one paying for everything in this household so just you shut up and do as I tell you!” Because, of course, “I know best!” So there. And the only reason he knows best is because he is the one with the money.

In the late J.K. Galbraith’s excellent little book “The Great Crash 1929”, he tells us how, in the run up to this crash, bankers and other “very serious people” to quote Paul Krugman, would declare all was going well, things would continue on the up and up and all sorts of crazy and deceitful reassurances. However, these people were believed. Completely and utterly. Why? Because, Galbraith tells us, when someone has a great deal of money (like the banker Mellon as he mentions) everyone automatically assumes that they are infinitely wise.

Now back to our sour and unpleasant marriage. Things have got so bad that hubbie often resort to violence. He slaps his poor wife around, throws her out into the cold to punish her and show her what it will be like if she dares leave him, cuts down on housekeeping money making her eat left overs while he’s enjoying a steak and things like that.

It’s getting to the point where life is not really worth living any more for the wife. She can’t stand him, he’s overbearing, he’s cruel, but above all he is so pompous and self righteous and keeps blaming everything on her. She was profligate, she squandered his money, she couldn’t manage the household accounts, she over charged his credit cards and so on.

She’s had enough, she wants to leave him but she doesn’t have the resources. What does she do? If she has the guts she’ll just walk out of the house, slam the door in his face and go out and find a job any job till she manages to get back on her own two feet again.

Now if this were a film, the closing sequence would be ten years down the line, when she has flourished and is independent and in charge of her own life again while he has withered, looks old and much sadder because, the cause of his worries was not his wife as he had convinced them both, but his own arrogance and dependence on his money for power. He may even have lost all his wealth on the stock exchange or something.

The other outcome of this story is that the wife caves in. She is afraid to face the world on her own. He has already thrown her out into the snow and left her to go hungry several times and she doesn’t have the guts to go out there and face it and fight for a better future. So she bows her head and accepts his terms. You will have no freedom to do anything unless I tell you. You will only eat enough to keep you alive. Oh, and you don’t need any heating in winter either!

Despite the ostensible “reconciliation” we all know that this will not end well. The closing sequence for this film script will either be her stabbing him to death in the night with the kitchen knife or else her jumping to suicide on the train tracks. Either way it won’t be nice.

So what will Europe do? Stay with sadistic, overbearing, arrogant hubbie who always knows best, on his terms and end up suicidal or murderous, or divorce?

I’m sorry about the cliff hanger, but we don’t know yet. Though I’m afraid in our heart of hearts we do know what the temporary outcome will be.

[What’s that I hear?  A scraping sound in the dead of night? Is someone sharpening the kitchen knives?]

Well okay, The Frau didn’t put it quite like that. But that was what she meant. The jist of it being that either Europe and the Eurozone will comply unequivocally to what she wants or… or what Angela? Think about it.

You say you want the Euro, and you do of course, because it has been extremely good for you, if for nobody else. But you want it on your terms alone. That is turning the European project into a a German Empire with vassal states and protectorates. States that will be stripped of all their rights, their very sovereignty while Berlin (well yes, it will be Berlin and not Brussels anymore) decides on everything. Naturally with Germany’s interests, as The Frau sees them, first and foremost.

However, since the rest of Europe is unlikely to surrender its very being to you without a fight (don’t forget, they didn’t do that even with a hell of a fight) why don’t you concentrate on something more constructive?

The Euro as you envisage it cannot and will not survive. You do not intend to compromise on anything. So what is left? An orderly winding down of the Euro, perhaps even the EU itself. That is all that is left in the light of German utter intransigence and the strangulation of the economies of an ever growing number of Eurozone states, because of the Nonsense Economics you insist on imposing.

So rather than keep wasting everybody’s time and kicking the wretched battered can down the road, take a realistic and creative approach. When you meet Francois just tell him. Okay. Game over. Lets all work on the least disruptive way to wind down what has turned out to be an unsuccessful experiment. Lets all shake hands and part as friends who can work together again in the future in a more sensible way.

Otherwise all this Nonsense talk of “not as long as I am alive” will only lead to bad ideas from desperate people. Do not tempt fate my dear Frau. You have shown us, from how you have treated the people of the indebted Eurozone countries, that for you, the life of others is not precious.

That may prompt some demented maniac to think the same about yours. Tone it down Lady, tone it down!

Cheers cheers! “Four European Presidents” Ian Traynor tells us in The Guardian today, “make proposals to ramp up the powers of Eurozone authorities over national governments.” And as if that weren’t bad enough (talk about arbitrary power!), we are then told who these four European Presidents are. They are none other than “the gang of four”, Rompuy, Draghi, Barroso and Juncker.

To quote Nigel Farage yet again “Just who are you?” Just where does this unelected, unaccountable, arrogant band of appointed officials find the nerve to propose a plan whereby European national governments will sacrifice more (or all of their) sovereignty to….? What?  “Eurozone Authorites”? And what are Eurozone authorities? And how will they act? By fiat?

During the dictatorship in Greece the ‘authorities’ would declare “We have decided and we order” every time they slapped some new law or regulation on  a captive people deprived of all their democratic rights. Is this the current vision for the future of a United Europe? No hampering democratic idiocies any more. Just Eurocrats deciding what they know is right completely ignoring what used to be known as “Citizens” or even “we the people”, and appointed by….? Whom exactly?

Well we all know the answer to that one of course! The Frau! And every successive German chancellor, who by the way, may consider scrapping elections altogether in Germany too. That would be a far more efficient way to run…. run what? Well an Empire with protectorates and subjugated people!

Hurray! We have finally hammered out the European ideal!

Fascism.

No thanks.

That is Germany destroying Europe for a THIRD time within a century, albeit “by other means”, perhaps more “benign” as Anatole Kaletsky puts it in his excellent article Can The Rest of Europe Stand Up to Germany? More benign perhaps, but no less destructive. Greece already resembles a war devastated county barring the actual bomb sites.

In a radio interview this morning Professor Yani Varoufakis enlightened us a little as to why an effective and reasonable solution to the Euro crisis (even perhaps the dislodging of The Frau from the Euro as Kaletsky suggests) is not so easy. No, not because Germany holds the purse strings and simply relishes throwing her weight about and bullying the weakest kids in the school yard.

Our great hope for a showdown with The Frau, he tells us is not Hollande. (Hardly a great surprise there), because he is controlled by the Bank of France, which in its turn does nothing without consulting the Bundesbank. So not much hope for any light from there.

No, Varoufakis tells us our only hope at the moment is the unlikely Euro technocrat Mario Monti. Why? Because The Frau’s Nonsense Economics (aka Camerkozy, as Paul Krugman has dubbed it) has led to an ever accelerating destruction of the Italian Economy. Not only are bank deposits flying fast out of the country like paper caught in a wild gale, but also assets are being sold off in haste and capital is racing wildly out of the country.

It is not a condition that can, or should, be sustained for very long which is why, he believes we have a greater chance of Monti doing something to stop the dreadful, destructive German Juggernaut in its tracks. My personal hunch is that it won’t be poor Monti after all, but another Italian gentleman, one that The Frau and the defunct Sarkozy had the audacity to sneer at when they were at their peak, even though he was, at the time Prime Minister of Italy.

Following Kaletsy’s analysis, should Germany be persuaded, forced, pushed out of the Euro (rather than hapless little Greece who wouldn’t make any difference one way or another), the Eurozone crisis could be easily solved. The Euro could be devalued by 50%, and inflation could be allowed to rise, so we could diminish overall debt and give a real boost to growth through stimulus of the economy rather than the retrenchment induced by austerity.

Oh if only. Unfortunately I do not think we have the leadership in Europe that could remotely rise to such a challenge. Unfortunately, Anatole Kalestky’s closing remark is spot on.

German voters “…. need to be reminded that trying to create a German Europe always leads to disaster.”

Since I don’t think the German voters, already being whipped up into a frenzy by the populist press and The Frau’s own electoral ambitions, will be reminded by anybody…..

So….  Maybe we should just batten down the hatches and prepare for disaster!

Plan B anyone? Particularly the bed ridden Greek government!!!

For Humpty Dumpty read Euro. Incidentally, the helmets are rather reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. Unfortunately, it does look as though the inevitable is coming too close for comfort. Humpty Euro looks set for its great fall, after which no one will be able to put it together again.

After the Nonsense so called agreements in Rome (which even our good old friend the haughty Marie Antoinette – Lagarde had a fit over how useless these were), and a new Merkel Sauce hollandaise meeting to be held in Paris prior to that all important same old same old European summit, we can see the final solution finally emerging.

Siobhan Dowling writing from Berlin tells us “Germany fears Eurozone collapse would decimate country;s economy”.

No! No way! You don’t say?

Anyway the malicious minister has never been right about much before, why should this time be different? Has reality finally slapped him in the face (because nobody else has) or is it just that even the proverbial broken clock is right twice in a day?

Francois Hollande, the hero of the day for moribund Europe, geared up for the great confrontation with The Frau over GROWTH! It would be a struggle, a fight and in the end they would get her to grovel! Or so the narrative went.

The meeting of the 22nd of June to be held in Rome between the three largest economies of the Eurozone, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, would be the scene of the great confrontation and the humbling of Bismarck’s great grand daughter.

However, it didn’t quite work out like that. No. The Frau took the wind completely out of their sails. Growth? Why yes of course! I agree. I fully agree with everything everyone here has said. We will fund growth with 1% of GDP and, well, first of all, before we can do anything else we have to make sure our fiscal rectitude is in place, debt must go down and deficits too of course. Oh, and we do need greater unification.

In other words, yes growth. But  only once we have more order and more unity in the Eurozone. In other words, we carry on with my policies and as I say, and then yes, indeed, growth. Now, please may I go to the football and give that pesky little upstart Greece the thrashing she deserves?

Mario Monti who comes out with dire warnings that the Euro only has one week in which to be saved! Who tells her we shall all be blown to Kingdom Come if we don’t do something about growth quick and… well yes. She says. No argument from me.

So the three stooges go dumb and gawk at her. Well yes, growth. But what is growth and how do you plan to achieve it? In detail. The Frau says No More Loans! Especially not for growth. And they just nod meekly. None of them, not even Rajoy, daring to suggest that perhaps it is not such a good idea piling all this extra debt on beleaguered countries NOT for growth, but to suck the life blood out of the economies and into the ailing banks.

And our hero of the day? Francois Hollande? Is he so delighted that the Formidable Invincible Frau has said yes to growth that none of the details matter? 1% of GDP. Okay, how will this actually materialise? 130 billion Euros. Is that nearly enough? And if so, why not just tell Greece to declare full bankruptcy officially and use the 130 billion destined for the banks via Greece, for this great growth project instead. It would benefit everybody far more, including Greece.

The Frau has done exactly as she wished. She has kicked the can down the road yet again. She has fought off the challenge to her policy with the greatest of ease and thumbed her nose to an exasperated world yet again. Now could it be that we really need real people rather than paper politicians to handle this?

Mario Monti, the successful Eurocrat, promoted to Senator for life, taking over from that despicable Berlusconi whom Merkozy chose to deride publicly even though he was the Italian Prime Minister, just what has he done? Austerity. The Italian Economy is entering recession. Civil unrest is growing. In short he has done everything The Frau demanded of him.

Francois Hollande, the career politician, the devoted Party Man, who has never done a real job in his life. The great hero riding to the rescue? And he has no idea how this magical concept ‘Growth’ could be implemented? He has no plan B to counter The Frau’s master plan. She says 1% of GDP and that’s that?

As for Rajoy… well never mind him. When he arrogantly told his Minister to hold firm in the ‘negotiations’ for the 100 billion “bailout” for his moribund banks that “We are not Uganda!”, he got his come uppance. The Ugandans answered, it is we who are not Spain. We have a healthy economy with 5% growth. And, we could add, take that!

So how will Europe ever get out of this death spiral when The Frau’s destructive Nonsense Economics can only be countered by the three stooges who appear to have no idea how to work out a real plan for real growth, with all the nitty gritty details.

And don’t anyone ever say again that all this is Greece’s fault! Even if we did lose the football match!

Well they don’t actually. Work that is. So here is an example of European solidarity via the ‘bailouts’ at work.

Upon signing the second Memorandum of Understanding the Quisling Greek government, under an appointed European Central Bank supposed Prime Minister,  the Greeks lost their very right to exist. In exchange for this privilege they were to receive billions of Euro in loans again. (Funny way to reduce debt you may say.)

Now the German taxpayer, egged on by his vile yellow populist press does not like the idea he is being fed. That he works hard to ‘give’ money to the lazy, profligate Greeks who do nothing but sit in the sun all day. And if that were really the case, they would be right to be very angry. But it is not the case.

Now back to our example. The first tranche of this new loan, in an amount of 5.2 billion Euro would be granted provided the Greek state did a number of things, one of which was to slash all wages in the private sector and abolish all labour laws providing any rights to workers. The diligent Greek government did everything that had been demanded of it in return for this tranche.

However, the Greek people were getting dangerously rebellious. It wasn’t clear why a people driven into recession, growing unemployment exceeding 20% already, poverty and hunger should not be extremely grateful for all this. Nevertheless pressure to hold an election was so strong that the Eurotyrants had to concede. In any case, they were pretty sure that a coalition of stooges supporting the austerity would be voted in.

Still, just to be on the safe side, instead of paying the 5.2 billion as they were bound to since the Greek side had met its side of the bargain (with disastrous consequences but that is neither here nor there) they chopped off one billion which they retained till after the election.

Now why did they do that? Well, the ECB held Greek Bonds, of the kind that had not been shorn, that had to be paid in full, and these had become due and payable. Now, the ECB had NOT bought these bonds at face value but at a substantial discount. Nevertheless, the Greek State was still obliged to redeem them at full face value. The amount to be paid? 4,2 billion Euro.

So what was given with one hand was instantly taken back by the other. And the Other made a decent profit too. Meanwhile the Greek debt burden grows and the interest payable by the tax payer also grows. And not one cent of this generous loan even reaches the Greek coffers, let alone goes any way to help rebuild the Greek Economy.

Now, as if that were not enough, we are now being told, that since we were good little children and voted in the very people responsible for the destruction of the Greek economy, they would now release the pending one billion by the end of the month.

The catch. Of this one billion, 900 million is instantly payable to the ESM fund by Greece. Does this make any sense to any normal brain in the world? Whatever it is it is neither solidarity nor a bailout!

Meanwhile the German tax payer is not told anything of this and he resents these swarthy parasitical good for nothings we are supposed to be. As for the Greeks, every cut in income, every hike in taxes, every measure taken to deprive us of any rights is presented as: “We can’t help it! The troika decides! We have to do as they say or we will go bankrupt!”

Result? The Germans hate the Greeks, the Greeks hate the Germans and the European Economy is getting caught in a downward, destructive, possibly irreversible cycle.

As for tonight’s football match between Greece and Germany…. Well, let us hope it will in no way remind us of the water polo match held at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 between the Soviet Union and Hungary also known as the “Blood in the water match”*.

*This was played against the background of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The Hungarian team beat the Soviet Union by 4 – 0, and the pool was filled with blood. This match is also known as the Blood Bath.

Ok, we were bullied and threatened and cajoled and ended up voting for precisely what The Frau wanted. The pro “bailout” austerity parties. They have agreed to form a government and the conservative prime minister has already been sworn in.

Has this made even a dent of difference to the Euro crisis and the underlying problems? Did anyone really ever believe it would?

Now we have just seen a tweet from Nouriel Roubini saying: “Berlusconi says ‘It isn’t blasphemous to exit the Euro’ signalling that he/his party  & powerful business interests want to return to the Lira.”

Now when Alexis Tsipras said, in answer to a pressing question, “The Euro is not totemic [the word he used was fetish, but translates as totemic] and no currency can ever be sacrosanct.” The cries against the rabid rebel, the demagogue, the crazy wild man who wants to upset the apple cart went up.

I don’t think anyone could be as far removed from Alexis Tsipras than Berlusconi. So that ideas converging from the two diametrically opposed points of the political spectrum should not be dismissed. Not only is the Euro not sacrosanct, it appears to have failed miserably. That is if you are a southern European. It has worked admirably well for Germany. And is still working admirably well for her.

However, if The Frau continues to mismanage the crisis to her short term benefit she does risk a long term disaster. And not just for the rest of Europe but for Germany too. Hopes of perhaps staving off this imminent disaster seem to be fading fast. Particularly after the G20 meeting.

And the irony is that Greece was cajoled into voting for a government comprising all the worst elements of the failed system in order to stay in the Euro. That consideration alone tipped the balance of the very close vote. But since the Euro looks set very likely to be laid to rest altogether, we should demand reparations for having been saddled with all that is worst on the Greek political scene, simply for a chimera!

In this hour of utter despair for Greece, it comes as no consolation that the whole of the so called Euro “project” appears doomed to complete and utter failure. After all, the Greek electorate has just succumbed to the terrorization of: vote for the corrupt and useless guys who ruined your country or else! You will be flung out of the Euro!

You must stay in the Euro at all costs! Ring a bell? The Gold Standard? Yes? It had to be maintained at all costs… Oh dear oh dear.

Today I would like to share with you an article by Simon Jenkins appearing in the Guardian, “The Eurozone’s People Are Like Prisoners in Colditz“. I strongly urge you to read it. It is the quintessence of all that is wrong with the Eurozone, and why it cannot work.

More and more rapidly The Frau in her brilliant intransigence is turning the whole of Europe into a Waste Land. Soon we shall actually look as though we have been devastated by nuclear bombs, bar the mushroom cloud. As for the latest wizard bazooka idea of directly buying bonds by the EFSF to lower the interest rate… well, will it help or will it be just another aspirin?

Since the only thing that will calm The Markets (apart from regulating and taming the damn beast!) is when they can see that growth and prosperity are returning to the Economies of Europe, I doubt whether The Frau’s latest tactical retreat to gain time will really make any difference at all to the fundamental problem Europe is facing.

So we are condemned. First to slump into destitution as we are doing now. Indeed we are prisoners in a system as flexible as granite as Simon Jenkins puts it. And then we shall find ourselves, as we are already to a certain extent, living in a Waste Land. Those few who will have survived, that is.

I think a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is quite appropriate here, not about April being the cruelest month, but a little further down:

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. […………]

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

‘The Burial of the Dead’