As we know, Generals are notorious for planning meticulously for the last war, totally failing to plan for the next one. Now Frau Merkel, being a smarter woman than all those Generals, has decided to reverse the process and plan meticulously for the war after next… With equally abysmal results.
Why? Well it’s all very well planning for the next war, but if you are in the midst of a current war and being bombed by credit agencies and hedge funds and growing recession, well if you don’t solve the current crisis there won’t even be a next one because there won’t even be a EU left to defend any more!
Merkel’s plan, condoned by Sarkozy (still suffering painfully from spinal disorders) has a lot of good sense in it, not devoid of some glaring idiocies. However, as Larry Elliott has pointed out in the Guardian, there is no provision for growth anywhere! And as Professor Yanis Varoufakis stressed in his address to the European Parliament, stabilization (which is what Merkel hopes to achieve through her plan) is not enough, and will achieve nothing without growth. Which is what Europe needs. Growth. And that is the one thing Merkel’s plan not only doesn’t provide for, but positively stifles!
This obsession with austerity is not only counter productive but absolutely catastrophic. It’s like having a fat lady in a room and you want to get her out. Now, the only way you think you can get her out of the room is by pushing her through the key hole. To do that, however, you have to get her to be able to fit.
So what do you do? You start off by starving her, then whipping her into shape and insist on abusing her for still not being able to fit through the key hole even though she has been reduced to an anorexic figure and keeps jumping the hoop. Answer. You’re never going to get her through the key hole because it simply isn’t feasible whatever you do to her.
So, rather than starving and torturing and abusing her wouldn’t it be more humane (and a damn sight more sensible!) simply to open the door and let her through? And the door that needs opening is growth. Wouldn’t it be more humane, sensible and effective to put all that energy Merkel is expending into imposing austerity and now sanctions, into creating growth instead?
Just a thought. But then what do I know when it is Frau Merkel who has the Final Solution ready to ram down the collective European throat. Just like… No. We won’t say it. But then that one didn’t work either. Did it?