A headline from the start of the Euro summit in Brussels. I was quite flabbergasted when I read that statement. No! Can it be? Can it really be? Just when did Barroso come to this staggering conclusion? Probably only after the Germans suddenly realised that the austerity they were so cheerfully imposing on others actually hurt their own sales too! How unexpected!

So what do we expect from this summit? Not exactly same old same old in that at least we have been spared the presence of Merkel’s lackey Sarkozy. All Hollande has to do is mouth some objections and he already appears great. Nevertheless, the situation in Europe is way beyond posturing.

I very much fear though that in essence nothing will change. The leaders of Europe will carry on looking narrowly at their own particular state’s picture and hang Europe. What is Europe after all? No one has any kind of vision. Except perhaps The Frau and her little lot who think it is high time a German Imperium were established. As for the others? Can’t say there are any visionaries, even cranky ones.

As for the highly overpaid and completely unaccountable Euro apparatchiks such as Barroso and Van Rompuy, well they do have a vision. Of sorts. Their selves in lovely chairs, making vacuous statements (like the one captioned) doing nothing other than pandering to the undisputed Mistress so as to keep their cushy jobs and that is it.

Barroso may well have said something must be done about growth. But he has no idea what, nor does he intend to find out either. He is waiting for The Mistress to tell him. Still if Mme Lagarde’s statement is anything to go by, don’t expect anything concrete or anything that could really kick start the European Economy.

What Lagarde said in Tokyo with a charming smile, as if she had just allowed herself the luxury of telling a dirty joke, was that we really can’t increase debt to provide a stimulus! What an idea indeed! However, she never bothers to explain why more and more debt is being piled on a country like Greece for example UNIQUELY to pay back debt to the northern banks at a high rate of interest.

The result is of course that Greek debt has gone up and up in absolute terms, not to mention the ratio to a sinking GDP. Bot NO! Nothing must be leant to start the economy working again. No matter that a growing economy would provide more and more revenue which could help debt repayments without starvation of the population, which helps no one and nothing. It merely exacerbates an already appalling situation.

Well if the EU got the Nobel Prize for peace this year, maybe Christine Lagarde and Angela Merkel should be proposed jointly for that Nobel Prize that goes to Economists. They really do deserve it.

On the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to the EU, a journalist (whose name I did not get) on BBC World TV pointed out the following:

It was not, he said, the EEC then EU that brought peace to Europe, it was the overwhelming desire for peace in Europe after the barbaric blood letting of the war Europe had just experienced that led to the creation of the EU.

Now, however, the generations who experienced that European barbarity and the atrocities and all that went with that terrible war, are either dead or too old to influence politics and thinking, Europe seems to have reverted to its bad old ways.

Now, the European leaders are not moved in their policy choices by any desire for a peace they just take for granted,  forgetting that you have to nurture peace, work to keep it and not just let it happen. Now the age old European lust for hegemony has returned, possibly with a vengeance.

That is why supposedly economic policies are no longer based on economic principles at all, but on a need to punish. Who do you punish? Those weaker than you, otherwise you wouldn’t dare. You punish the weaker ones and you subjugate them.

That is what is going on in the EU now. The need to impose, to subjugate. The need for hegemony. No longer the need for peace which has been forgotten. And unfortunately the EU is proving an excellent framework for exercising raw power and satisfying this lust.

The framework and the institutions of the EU appear to have easily adapted to their new, or rather old, role.

I am sorry. I couldn’t help myself. But with yet one more excruciating Euro Summit coming up, I couldn’t help being reminded that we have been here before and it is all becoming rather tiresome. History repeating itself, except the “Deciders” have progressed. They have realised that if they nuke the planet, then nothing will be left and they too risk no longer existing either.

Now, a previous idea was a kind of gas which just killed people but left all buildings and infrastructure intact. I suppose this idea did not find all that much favour because you still had to have a hot war, and in any case you would have to wait for the gas to get dissipated before you could walk in and take over the assets.

So what did the latter day Dr Strangeloves think up? Simple, slow, painful annihilation of the masses through Stringent Austerity! This method has the added merit that you are not even perceived as the enemy, the bad guys out to get you. No! With this Weapon Of Mass Destruction that has now been deployed with a vengeance in Europe, you take on the mantel of “friend” and “Saviour”, just as you are wreaking destruction. And when you walk in and take over the assets you tell those you have destroyed that you are actually doing them a favour!

Nevertheless, some things never change. The following clip from Dr. Strangelove could easily be just another summit of European leaders.

Don’t forget, this is a work of fiction and any similarities with real people is purely coincidental. Though I can’t blame you if you do see some rather upsetting similarities among the team of “Deciders”.

The IMF, European leaders, everyone who is anyone or anything agrees in this grand consensus. We must increase competitiveness! Which is also The Frau’s grand design for Europe. Every country in the Eurozone to begin with must become competitive! Now what is meant by that?

Well, we all know, don’t we? Competitiveness as understood by Mme Lagarde, Frau Merkel and a host of lesser males wielding power on this planet, consists exclusively of slashing all salaries and wages to below subsistence level as soon as possible! Abolishing such costly things like social welfare, healthcare, state education and so on completely, because these sissy things only increase costs. And we must reduce costs at all costs…. ? Well yes.

And although one assumes that not all of these decision makers dictating what happens to the global economy are daft, one cannot help wondering just a little. I will not go into the self evident of when they achieve their supreme goal, who is going to buy all these cheaper products, when no available income for consumption will be left?

To the question The Frau refuses to answer. If the whole of Europe is cutting back and imposing austerity at the same time, then how pray is anyone going to “export” itself out of its financial woes, the way Germany did when the rest of Europe was caught up in the boom?

This is all a pernicious ideology that has gripped the powers that be who have conveniently forgotten that they are elected by their peoples. Well some of them that is. Not the IMF chief of course. Now, as to the others, they do know that of course, but they also know all the tricks Goebbels was a master of. The three Ps you could say, Propaganda, Populism and of course Perjury.

But the point is, global problems are nothing to do with “creating growth through competitiveness”. That is a recipe for complete global melt down. The planet faces a number of very severe problems, one of which is the ecology. Another, which we have greater control over, or should have, is growing hostility and wars. A third, how to tackle starvation and disease. Globally. Not just for the privileged.

Competition is no way to tackle any of these problems. Competition as understood by Mme Lagarde and her ilk leads to animosity. And if they do manage to take it to its logical conclusion, it will lead to isolationism, protectionism and wars.

So perhaps a new re organization (and reform!) of all international institutions and received wisdoms is long overdue. First of all, why must you be competitive? To sell more, to boost profits. Why must basic commodities like oil, grains and other foodstuffs be traded the way they are? So that speculators can make big profits. In other words, so they can make “a killing”. Very apt as an expression, because these practices are what lead to the deaths of so many all over the less privileged world.

Now what is that poisonous mixture of the IMF and EU trying to do? Exponentially increase the numbers of the underprivileged on the planet who will start dying much earlier through their plans to achieve “competitiveness” by “cutting costs”, the cost of useless unproductive, in their terms, lives.

It is absurd. Not only absurd but perhaps the greatest crime against humanity ever attempted.  Humankind has reached quite a high in terms of technology, medicine and science. Why should the only thing the so called leaders everywhere be concerned with is how to increase the already unrealistic profits of the fewer and fewer at the expense of the growing majority on this planet?

I think a great big loud clarion call to wake up! And wake up quick! Is in order. We need cooperation. We need global cooperation. We need to shed all self serving ideologies and take a good hard look at the real problems of the world, the problems of the people of the world, and start setting up institutions to tackle them all through CO-OPERATION, at last.

The object should no longer be held self evident as the “maximization of profit”, but the reduction of hardship, the minimization of the destitute all over the world. Rather than its opposite which is now the object of all those creatures holding power globally. And it is only with global cooperation that we can achieve that. Not with competition as understood.

If the current idea of competition remains in the ascendant, then all we can look forward to is trade wars leading to real wars, dangerous shortages of commodities leading to famines and anarchic violence the world over. Don’t forget, the greatest expression of competition is war. That is where tribes and empires and states and nations have always proved their competitive superiority.

The EU has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Well now, what do we make of that? First of all that it is well deserved. The Coal and Steel Union was originally set up to tie the economies of France and Germany to reduce the likelihood of war between these two countries yet again. The Common Market of the six ensued from this, consisting of France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy of course, where the Treaty of Rome itself was signed.

For as long as the cold war was going strong, the Common Market which then changed into the European Union was indeed a staunch pillar for peace, tying the European Economies closer together and making war more and more a remote possibility in the area.

However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc, the EU’s glitter did get a little tarnished with the wars of Yugoslav succession, taking sides in the Kossovo debacle with EU countries as key players and in fact the German Foreign Minister the Green Joshka Fischer being the most gung ho and sheepishly admitting he may have got the facts wrong years later.

Then came the introduction of the Euro and the reunification of the two Germanies back into one mighty entity under Helmut Kohl, with the help of all the EU members.

Well we know now what a few had said from the very beginning, that the Euro was badly designed, destined for failure, perhaps even grief and woe, but was only created for political reasons rather than economic ones. The result is what we are living through now. A United Europe of the Peoples (if ever it was, but that was the aspiration) has turned into a kind of Empire where the big bullies prevail over the weaker states.

The EU has turned into an experiment for the imposition of an extreme neo liberal project where welfare must be destroyed, where the only thing that matters is keeping the banks afloat at the expense of the people who are being violently pushed into unemployment, poverty, destitution.

This is being driven primarily but not exclusively by Germany. The other northern surplus states have joined the sanctimonious vilification of the southern deficit states in the push to establish this neo liberal paradise of theirs where the clock will be turned back to Dickensian times with no rights for workers and below subsistence wages.

This has resulted in animosity, the flaring up of old enmities and prejudices, where the northerners look down on the southerners as inferior, where stark images of the Nazis have come back to the fore with a vengeance. And perhaps worse of all where extreme right wing, nationalist, xenophobic, intolerant parties are rearing their ugly heads all over Europe, from Norway to Greece.

This European Austerity Madness as Paul Krugman has dubbed it, has lead to a disintegration of all the values the European Union was supposed to stand for. Welfare, which is now considered an unnecessary expense, Democracy, which is considered a bothersome impediment to implementing the neo liberal dogma, intellectual resilience, since now anyone daring to say that perhaps Keynes was right is booed down and ridiculed.

And the famous Thatcher dictum of “There Is No Alternative!” reigns supreme. All and any objections to this ludicrous, destructive policy are met with a taunting, “What do you propose? What do you propose? You have nothing else to propose, do you?” Always said without even bothering to listen to the miriad other far more sensible and workable proposals. It is a fascism of thought to which even the miserable little supposedly left wing party supporting Greece’s government has succumbed. Funny how they have all clean forgotten their Marxist analyses! (Let alone foregone all common sense.)

This does not augur well for the future of Europe. There is already deep social unrest which will probably lead to insurgency and internal clashes. Meanwhile, just as the IMF has had a moment of epiphany and realised that oh dear, perhaps austerity was not really the best way to go about solving this crisis, it is the EU apparatchicks like Olli Rehn and the German Minister of Finances who poo poo them and say that the IMF is wrong.

The arrogant Eurocrats want to keep running the show in their small minded little way, kow towing to the lead of the strongest nation, Germany, risking turning the EU or what may be left of it into a kind of German led Empire where none of the other states has any rights.

This Nobel Peace Prize could be just one more irony, like when Henry Kissinger was awarded the same prize in 1973, or even Barack Obama before he had even done anything. It would indeed be very sad if what follows this European Nobel Peace Prize award is at best its disintegration  and at worse flare ups and conflicts as the big bullies insist on keeping their privileges at the expense of the weaker ones.

Perhaps someone on the Committee has a really warped sense of humour. Time will tell. And not before too long.

Back to the IMF again. Goodness me! They finally say they have realised that they… well, er… um. Sort of did not get it quite right.They had estimated that for every Euro pulled out of the Economy under their infamous austerity plans, the economy would contract by 50 cents. So great that’s fine, bring on the chopper, women and children first! First on the chopping block not the life boat.

However, whoops! Oh dear. My goodness! Look what happened. For every Euro sucked out of the economy, it contracted by 1.30 Euro. Surprise, surprise! So they got their sums wrong. Again. Do they ever get anything right? And now Mme Lagarde is hectoring Europe for not doing enough to resolve the Euro crisis, and this is hurting the rest of the world. The global economy is teetering on the brink.

Why? Because of ingrained neo liberal dogma and selfish greed on the part of stronger countries. Remember all that Greed is Good crap? Well it isn’t. Take Germany for instance, which is at the root of the failure to resolve the Euro crisis. Slamming the countries in trouble with outrageous austerity plans, she benefited from high interest rates from these very countries and negative interest rates on what she paid to borrow.

In addition, funds fleeing from countries down graded to below junk level  swarmed to German banks. And okay, our production and exports may not be as good as they were but we still have growth, so let the little weaklings go hang themselves. And keep paying in the gradual collapse of their economies.

However, it doesn’t quite work like that. In a global economy Greed is not Good. It isn’t in any economy. Germany thought, hang southern Europe, they are all swarthy idlers anyway, I will export to the new dynamic markets of China and India and the US of course! Oh will you? It appears that this did not work out as planned either. Quite simply because once Europe has started to seize up, the other economies begin to contract too. Simple first year economics one would have thought.

We are on the brink of global disaster. We need to re-plan the global economy and above all the out dated out of touch institutions supposedly in charge, such as the IMF in particular. As I said in yesterday’s blog, it is all very well for Mme Lagarde to start shouting at Europe, but in effect Europe was only following the IMF prescription and still is.  And for all her bluster, the IMF is too. Look at Mr Poul Thomsen of the infamous troika.

Now, in the middle of this, the IMF is dragging its feet over representation in the IMF and upgrading the position of the emerging countries such as China, Brazil. The IMF is very good at banging struggling states over the head and telling them to reform and be flexible, why then does it not apply these principles to its own institution? What? And lose our power and cushy unaccountable (oh and untaxed) jobs? Green eyed greed again….

The World Economic system has collapsed. It collapsed in 2008 when the bubble allowed to blow out of all proportion through criminal deregulation of the banks, burst. We have been floundering since, pushing the crisis further down the road and basically steering it away from what caused it and onto the shoulders of the weakest and poorest who simply cannot sustain it even if they wanted to. Which does not auger well for any kind of resolution.

None of this austerity driven rubbish is going to work. It is only exacerbating an already dangerous problem. What is needed is a new Bretton Woods Conference. A thrashing out of the problems with honesty and an acute sense of what is really at stake. A conference that can no longer be dominated by the strong European countries and the US. A conference that must be all inclusive and take into account what Professor Yanis Varoufalkis calls the Surplus Recycling System of the global economy.

And this is where we despair of anything happening before it is too late. Last time around there were brilliant minds at work, such as that of John Maynard Keynes. This time around we have small minded non entities who cannot see further than their noses and petty self interest to the detriment of the whole global economy. Will anyone wake up?

“Despite recent progress, the eurozone remains the main threat to the global economy. That’s the message from the International Monetary Fund today, which has warned that risks to global financial stability have risen in the last six months.” The Guardian tells us.

Now, since the IMF through its participation in the infamous Troika of IMF, EU and ECB representatives imposing the disastrous European Austerity Madness, I would say that this sudden realization is a bid hypocritical at this point.

When the crisis began, hitting the eurozone’s weakest link, after a lot of bungling and confusion it was decided to set up the so called “bail out” program, initially for Greece. Now The Frau decided that since Europe did not have the necessary know how, they would call in the IMF who knows how to do it. And what did this IMF know how consist of? Stringent Austerity and destruction of all social welfare and labour rights.

So they went ahead. Despite the recent panic from the IMF and the realization (?) that Greek debt is not sustainable, it was always Mr Poul Thomsen of the IMF and leader of the pack who was always the hardest in demanding more e cuts and more recessionary measures (and so he remains).

Now, this duplicated plan of austerity cures all, just slash away at all incomes and increase taxes has led to the only thing it could ever lead to, recession, in the case of Greece outright depression. Why, then, the panic at the IMF over the “threat to the global economy”? It was their policy that led to this situation and there was no way it would not have done so.

The Greek Debt/GDP is not sustainable. How could it have a chance in a million of becoming sustainable when your own plans, IMF that is, consisted of plunging the country into a deep recession whereby it has lost some 25% of GDP on the one hand, and piling more and more debt on the country merely to recycle these funds to the banks, on the other.

So, a simple ratio, Debt to GDP, you raise the debt level without letting one cent of these exorbitant debts go to rebooting the Greek economy and you keep lowering the GDP level, precisely because of the former condition. You don’t need matrixes or sophisticated models to realise that this is a disastrous formula.

So now here we are, ringing our hands and saying Oh! Europe must do something! But Europe has been doing precisely what you have prescribed. And Angela Merkel’s little visit to Greece underlined the fact that it has no intention of reversing this process, till everything comes crumbling down.

Mr Samaras was told that first he has to completely ruin his country through the outrageous extra austerity cuts of 13,5 billion (for now, it will go up to at least 20 before they are finished) in order to.. .Yes! Get the 31 or so billion in more debt, which again will go to the banks in an amount of 25 bn, while of the remaining 6 bn 3 have been earmarked for the payment of a bond and possibly the remaining 3 may go into the economy.

But since the Greek state already owes more than 7 bn to the market, this will hardly make a dent. No matter. The acting Greek PM Antonis Samaras was ecstatic! And okay, he may be a fool or worse, but where is the IMF and what will it do in this situation? Bow to The Frau’s wishes and bring down the global economy through this Nonsense Economics the Fund has connived in or force a complete change?

So it’s all very well for Mr Olivier Blanchard to come up with these very real assessments and dire warnings to Europe, but he would do well to accept and say so out loud, that it has been the IMF’s policies and direct involvement in Europe that has lead to this sorry state and dire prospects for the global economy and they should take responsibility at once.

A lot of talk of why? Why is this crazy visit taking place at all? What is behind it? Why should austerity ravaged Greece, on the brink of slashing pensions, wages, healthcare even more, till there is nothing left, fork out so many funds for a security operation based on draconian laws from the time of the dictatorship? Snipers, helicopters, naval commandos… when our hospitals do not even have basic supplies such as gauze and syringes.

So there is a lot of analysis, and speculation. Merkel wants to express her support for the beleaguered Samaras government which is trying to do her bidding. Merkel has come to check out the Real Estate going for a song which she intends to snap up. Merkel wants to suck out the last dregs from a moribund country. Merkel wants to bolster the Euro so she cannot let Greece leave the zone, for fear of the domino effect.

And many many more, such as her own election prospects. And then there is a lot of empty talk about how brave she is in coming to Greece at all. Brave? I would ask. Since the whole of Greek security capability and more is being deployed, I hardly think The Frau is at any risk at all. She would not have been at risk with even more sensible and regular security. At worse she might have got a yogurt flung at her. But she has so many interchangeable identical jackets that it really would not matter.

No, I don’t think she is brave at all. I think she is clueless. And I also do not really give much credence to any of the reasons being aired over why she might be making the visit. None of these require her physical presence. And as for giving a boost to the despicable Samaras government, her visit will have quite the opposite effect.

In my humble opinion the only reason why Merkel is undertaking this visit, is that like for so many other decisions of hers, she just does not know any better.

Now, what, you may well ask has the current European austerity craze got to do with the Vietnam War?

Well, last night there was a very interesting interview on BBC World. It was of the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In the course of the interview she alluded to what has gone down in history as one of the most infamous excuses for savage atrocities.

After a village in Vietnam has been completely destroyed by American troops, for no immediately apparent military reason, loud protests went up over the gratuitous carnage of such acts. So the spin doctors, as we call them now, had to come up with some explanation, some excuse. They came up with the following:

We had to destroy the village to save it.

That is exactly what the current wave of European austerity is doing.

Destroying countries, Greece first in line, in order to save them.

May God forgive them for their sins, because nobody else will.

And what is that? The Frau has announced she will be visiting Athens on Tuesday to “discuss the situation in Greece and across the Eurozone”. (I take the “dumb idea” from the tweeter ‘teacherdude’). So why is she coming and why is she coming now after well over two years of horrific punishment for Greece? And what does she expect to achieve?

Well, she has probably decided to take such drastic action as actually visiting the Capital of the state she has decided to make a scapegoat of, because the IMF says Greek debt is not sustainable (which it is not) and that Europe must either agree to a deep hair cut of official sector holdings (which they do not want) OR, failing that then they must throw more money down the Greek plug hole and guarantee all Greek debts.

So Angie panics and decides to take very drastic action! A visit to Athens! To achieve what? Probably to steel little Antoni’s squirming nerve, tell him to be a good boy and carry on with all the cuts and she will praise him for having done more than the other Greek PMs so far. Or something as intelligent and constructive as that.

This will help bridge the gap of less than a month till the American Elections and then all will be fine. Or something like that. It’s just that the idea of Angela Merkel who has, to be polite, totally mismanaged the European crisis, having totally misread it, and Antonis Samaras who does not even have a pea for a brain and is prone to blatant lying, getting together to discuss anything constructively is a nightmare.

Nevertheless, we should at least commend Merkel for her courage in deciding to visit Greece at all in the present climate. She will not be received with flowers. In fact this visit is quite likely to set off really powerful protests. So she is courageous, unless… Well, unless she is even dumber than we thought!

P.S. A slightly irrelevant historical fact. When Hitler decided to invade Crete using his well trained panzer division of paratroops, these boys (because boys they were) had been told that the Cretans would welcome them all as liberators. Instead, they were met with pitchforks and shot guns and in fact this formidable force was wiped out. The German cemetery in Malame with almost 5,000 graves of young German boys, grimly attests to that.