What a triumph! What a Victory! Greece sold 5 year T-Bills on the market in an offer that was greatly over subscribed and at an interest rate slightly lower than feared. What a success! What proof that the country has exited not the Euro but the crisis! The economy has not only “stabilised” (whatever that is supposed to mean) but is about to start growing stupendously!

And, in the far right wing mode of the current Greek government, everybody is being ordered to rejoice or else!!! Very reminiscent of what happened in North Korea at the death of their leader. People were ordered to publicly demonstrate their emotions or else!!! That is after all the extreme right wing Samaras (and Venizelos of course) style. Rejoice you scum of the earth or be damned!

And okay, these corrupt, treacherous guys have only one object. How to cling onto power and milk this dying cow till it dies! But what about Frau Merkel? The Commission? The Markets? Hmmm… Here it comes. As to the first two they are only playing politics too. Having insisted on imposing a brutally catastrophic policy of austerity with No provisions for growth, and having thrown the EZ into a tail spin bordering on deflation, they now need to beat their drum and provide proof that their idiocy actually worked!

Look! The Frau proudly claims. The Markets are falling over themselves to buy Junk… ehem I mean Greek (tautology) bonds!!! We did it! We succeeded! Oh, and by the way German elector, we won’t be “giving” them any more money (as if they ever did “give” anything at all) but they will now be borrowing from The Markets, with the same lethal conditions set by us.

Of course there are those who know very well that this is all a nonsense, that the Greek economy is NOT set to grow but to get worse since nothing at all is being contemplated to deal with the real problems of the real economy. Piling more expensive debt on an already greatly overindebted economy while continuing stringent austerity is hardly likely to help in any way at all.

So these guys have the pat answer to impending doom. Oh well, the Greek government isn’t implementing the reforms it should! It hasn’t arranged to shut all small pharmacies! It hasn’t imposed the shelf ruling for milk! It hasn’t agreed to adulterate olive oil with seed oil (!!! yes, one of the “reforms”) and so on. That, they are preparing to say is the root cause of Greece’s failure to recover after all we did for her!!!!

Meanwhile back at the ranch, as The Guardian reports today:

Lagarde’s warnings against complacency echoed an IMF report earlier in the week that chastised Brussels for failing to put in place a financial lifeboat capable of rescuing more than a few small banks. The financial stability report also highlighted concerns at the rise of risky investments in the US and difficulties faced by emerging economies destabilised by huge outflows of funds. Low inflation in the eurozone was also a concern, especially as it could herald a downward spiral of low growth and declining real wages.

The global economy is going down the tubes because like the Bourbons before them those running the show “have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing:”. Which is one reason for the panegyrics  over Greece’s “return” to The Markets. All that matters is that “investors” are going to make a pretty buck out of high interest on junk bonds while the actual Greek economy sinks further and further into the mire.

No one gives a brass farthing (remember those?) for how the real economy actually functions and what to do to help improve it. So a lot of hot air, silly shows (like the Greek bond issue), deaf ears, inability or lack of will to tackle the real problems which are just being continually ignored and swept under the carpet. Till Nemesis arrived and takes its toll after all this human Hubris.

We are no longer on board the Titanic looking at the ice berg, but atop Mount Vesuvius a little before the eruption. Welcome to Pompeii everybody!

P.S. Just to highlight the level of the Greek government’s intelligence, the spokesman kept referring to T-Bills as T-Bones… All the same to him.

– From today’s Guardian:

Migrants face ‘living hell’ in Greek detention

M?decins Sans Fronti?res reveals outbreaks of scabies and TB and human waste seeping through the floor.

– Greek prisons are not only grossly overcrowded, conditions appalling, disease rife, but now murder and counter murder have also been added. An Albanian inmate Ilia Kareli reportedly stabbed a guard to death and after being found dead in his cell in his turn, several prison guards have been charged with torturing him and murder in their turn.

– The medical record is equally full of Samaras’ successes. Deaths from influenza soared, infant mortality has gone up too, healthcare has been steadily eroded. Could this have anything to do with the savage cuts in healthcare and pricing heating fuel so high Greeks could no longer afford to heat their homes?

Well, who cares if it did. The more deaths achieved the less demands on welfare, no? In any case all Stournaras and Samaras care about is the sham “primary surplus”! And how else could they achieve even a semblance of this farcical figure without such “collateral damage”?

Because now! They gleefully tell us, we can return to the markets!!! As if this were a panacea. They fail to point out that “Going to the markets” is another way of saying we shall increase our unsustainable debt burden even more… and why? Is this extra debt going to go towards funding investment in production?

Hell no! What a quaint idea! No. It’s just that Brother Schauble has declared he does not want any reduction in Greek debt so all Greece must do according to the Eurogroup elite, fuzzy haired Dutchman, fiendish Finn, potty Portuguese megalomaniac etc, is keeping inflating it’s already unsustainable debt in order to keep… what?

The pretence of the existence of a European Union before the whole edifice comes crashing down, not because a Samson pulled it down, but because all the rest were too short sighted, self centred, unimaginative and plain small minded to see what their brilliant handling would lead to.

Troops massing on borders. Threats. Sanctions. In other words sabre rattling. And whoops there we are. Back where we started from (and perhaps never really left.)

The EU is being destroyed by an obsession with what are called “technocratic” solutions. That is, it is being pounded into our empty little heads that This Is The Rational Way!!! That (remember?) There Is No Alternative!!! That The Economy is given, written in stone. And that there is no way you can do anything else and that therefore democracy is redundant because There Is Only ONE Way of doing things and so on.

And in the midst of such supposed rationalism and the dogma that the Economy HAS to be what is good for the bankers and nothing else and whoever objects has to be ridiculed and snuffed out, all these wise leaders lapse into arrant nonsense on their own terms! (They can’t even be consistent in their own dogmatism).

We will impose sanctions on Russia!!!! They declare. Those who invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya because they were “right” to do so now turn on Russia who has done nothing worse than they. Those who condone the continued presence of Turkish troops in Cyprus (who invaded to protect the Turkish Cypriots), those who avidly support Israel’s right to defend itself and so on, deny exactly the same to Russia. Why?

We have relapsed quite simply into the “our son of a bitch” theory. But worse, all these Economic whiz kid technocrats are now pressing for economic sanctions against Russia in this globalised economy. You would think it would be the last thing they would be pressing for. Russia is not a piddly tin pot economy that can be painlessly squashed. For starters it provides Germany with some 30% of its energy needs. There are Multinationals based in Russia. Apart from significant exports they also have significant imports from the west and so on.

This whole nonsense handling of the Ukraine crisis, apart from being incredibly short sighted could lead to a terrible humanitarian catastrophe and collapse of the whole globalised economy.

Unfortunately it has already become quite obvious that the German Europe we are no living under is nothing if not utterly short sighted.

Merkel is a short hand for German policy, since it is not confined to The Frau who is only one of the cogs. The problem, it would appear, is a great lack of imagination in the German mind set, an addiction to following the rules come what may (without ever questioning these rules, who made them and why), and a total and utter conviction that they are the ones who are always right, and that if we could do it, so should everyone else in the same way.

It has by now been extremely well analysed why the German austerity appears to have worked, what the circumstances were and how none of this bears any relation to the economies of the European periphery and the nature of their economies for one.

I do not intend to go into all that again here. But the trouble is that owing to this rigid and narrow mentality not only Europe but the global economy as a whole has got itself into a godawful mess, one Germany not only has no idea how to get out of, but insists on more of the same toxic medicine instead of trying to see what the real problems are and how to go about solving them.

Why? Well the answer is simple really and can be attributed to what I perhaps ungenerously describe as a total lack of imagination. German policy makers mostly cannot see beyond their immediate narrow interest. Which in the end may turn out not to be in their interest at all, but they do not appear able to see beyond their immediate shot term interests, and the repercussions their policies (imposed on others) will have.

They cannot cope with something different, with opposing attitudes or analyses or even with trying to imagine all worse case scenarios. No. There is only one way and that way is their way, and everybody should behave like little Germanies. We need not go any further in debunking this rigid dogma than by innocently pointing out that if every single country in the EU must achieve a budget surplus every year, then where is this surplus  going to come from without corresponding deficits?

In his column in the Financial Times Martin Wolf states and I quote:

“The eurozone crisis is not over. Despite the emergence of a degree of stability, the situation remains very fragile. The ECB might in fact be able to do very little about this. That is partly because the measures it would need to take are controversial. It is also partly because of the view held by some that its job is to stabilise not the eurozone but the German economy. That is not a European currency union. It is something quite different.”

And that is the fundamental problem which constitutes a time bomb ticking dangerously close to the explosion. The whole EZ mechanism is geared to serving Germany’s interests and Germany’s interests alone. The tragedy is that this will lead, is leading, directly to an explosion that will most certainly not be in Germany’s interests at all. But by the time they can wrap their mind round that one it will be too late.

Obama is being criticised for mishandling and failing on foreign policy issues such as Syria and now the Ukraine debacle. However, how do we define failure? Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq can be called great unqualified successes by any criteria at all.

For Obama it appears as though it has been Russia to get her way while the US has fumbled and lost. And yet, outright war through international intervention in Syria was avoided even though the brink had been reached. Is that a failure in itself? And was it not quite a feat of sleight of hand if you like for Obama to wriggle out of his “red line” over the use of chemical weapons?

Now again in the Ukraine. For all the posturing and propaganda taking place it appears again that war will be avoided. Even though here Obama has been using strong language and threats against Russia, the threats have been confined to economic sanctions (which would probably be just as bad for Europe as for Russia). Also NATO will convene to discuss situation, but no military action even hinted at. Is that a failure?

It does appear that Obama wants to avoid war and foreign interventions, of the kind that have destroyed American prestige and made a mess of the American economy. However, he does have to contend with the “looney right” (to paraphrase the old “looney left” designation).

A lot of the rhetoric is quite appalling in that how can you defend Israel’s right to defend itself, or the Turkish invasion of Cyprus to protect Turkish Cypriots and yet condemn Russian intervention to protect Russian citizens in the Crimea? Another untenable aspect is that here we do have a coup d’etat, against an elected President where the new government (usurpers?) verge on the extreme right even Nazi disposition and kick off with banning Russian, where a very large part of the population is Russian.

Can Obama be that whacky? G.W. Bush was indeed that whacky and worse. But not Obama. I believe his main goal is to reverse the whole gung ho let’s intervene policy of the US and to do this he is doing the reverse of “Speak softly and Carry a big stick”, in order to achieve this goal. He has to carry or pander to the “looney right” while at the same time take action totally different from that expected or even demanded by a large section of public opinion. It is not easy and he will be criticised, but if he manages to turn this around and avoid war, it will have been a great success, though perhaps one not as obvious as the benefits will undoubtedly be.

Afternote: Let us not forget Colin Powell’s excellent retort to Madeleine Albright’s criticism. This was when Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Albright Foreign Secretary. She upbraided him saying, what is the use of having the biggest and best army in the world if you are not going to use it? And he answered, wisely, So you don’t have to use it.

What happened thereafter in American foreign policy has proved how wise and prescient he was.

Well now, what would you expect it to be in the age we are living in?

Oh my God, not another war!!! No.

Oh dear what will happen to all the innocent the people caught up in the conflict? No.

My God! What if the Russians suddenly go mad and start nuking? No.

Could this explode into a more generalised war and suck in the whole of Europe? No.

No, no, no. Nothing like that. The reaction is:-

Oh my God!!! The markets are falling!!!

And what on earth could be worse than that, eh?

Guardian headline today: “Russian and Ukranian troops in tense stand off”.

Ring a bell? Say, summer of 1914 something like : “Russian and German troops engage in a tense stand off, as Russia mobilises in support of its ally Serbia and Germany mobiises in support of Austro-Hungary.”

The only thing we learn from history, it has been said, is that we do not learn from history.

Could the Ukraine be a new Sarajevo one hundred years on? It is a conflict between two separate power blocs. It is of course much nastier than Sarajevo was, which consisted of a political assassination which lit the fuse. And such parallels should always be taken with a pinch of salt.

Nevertheless, Russian troops are arriving on the border, ostensibly for military exercises, but quite obviously in preparation for a very possible military intervention. The West appears all gung ho in favour of the revolutionaries who are in favour of “Europe” and against Russia.

They are also in favour of the suppression of all minority languages including Russian, of the out lawing of the Communist party and in short their underlying ideology is of the extreme right, some even describe it as Nazi. And that, for them, is Europe.

And what is Europe? A bastion of right wing neo liberal suppressive policies slashing welfare, healthcare, riding rough shod over populations. And what is European foreign policy well… does even Katherine Ashton know? Or is she even responsible? Well no. Europe is what Henry Kissinger disparagingly described it. Who the hell do I call to speak with Europe?

This of course is changing and it is now much more obvious who to call. Frau Merkel. However, ever since the wars of Yugoslav succession this has been quite obvious, long before Frau Merkel arrived on the scene.

Nevertheless Frau Merkal is emblematic. She is as East German going to the other extreme. Ban the Communist party! Impose the harshest capitalism! And that is what Europe now represents. And whereas it might be to a degree understandable to find this attitude in the ex Communist states, the core of what used to be western Europe can hardly sympathise with this. Yet the peoples of Europe under this new post cold war regime have no rights left as shown by the whole troika travesty.

But beyond these, very serious matters, there is another matter that bears scrutiny, in light of the Sarajevo parallel. Europe has incited this Unkrainian “revolution” to a great extent, yet what is Europe? Russian troops are gathering on the border. Europe has no such equivalent. There is of course NATO, but this is under US hegemony. What about diplomacy? Katherine Ashton? She has no such mandate. The Foreign Minister of the presiding European state? No way. No mandate either. Besides the gentleman in question is a joke.

The German foreign minister? Well, he does appear to be taking a more active part, yet he is limited too. For all this tragic re branding of the EU as German Europe and don’t you forget it!  But the way Germany has miss handled all these crises it is most unlikely that the rest of Europe at least what used to be the West will line up behind her.

Europe blundered into the first world war incurring the worse carnage in history. Let us hope that 100 years on the Ukraine will not be the mighty blunder to trigger off something just as bad and destructive.

Quisling may be a bit too harsh a description. But Matteo Renzi is Italy’s new appointed Prime Minister, appointed by President Napolitano who has taken it upon himself to be the sole arbiter of who governs Italy without reference to the popular vote. He engineered the appointment of Mario Monti, consequently roundly rejected by the people and he has now engineered the appointment of Matteo Renzi.

Of course we shall have to wait and see before we judge him on results. However there is already something we can judge him from and negatively. His promises that he would not take on the Premiership without an election, his promise that he would not undermine Letta for instance. And then jumps at the chance to be cynically appointed by sticking the knife into Lett’as back. No qualms, no regrets. Sheer unadulterated opportunism.

Very reminiscent of the Greek PM’s shameless volte face when asked in Germany about what he ha to say over reneging on all his pre election promises in order to do exactly what the electorate voted against. His answer? Mea culpa, or, to quote the famous Jack Lemon phrase in Some Like it Hot, Nobody’s perfect. More sheer unadulterated opportunism.

In short European politicians have shown and are showing that they do  not believe in democracy, they do not believe in the will of the people, they have no shame and the last thing they care about is how to benefit and protect the people they are purportedly serving.

In short, we have sunk to the lowest level of amoralism all around.

Thus spake Chrisine Lagarde (aka Marie Antoinette). Reportedly the lady admitted to “some mistakes” by the troika but assured that Greece is back on track for growth. Oh really?

This is a criminally self serving statement. Obviously the lady does not want to admit that the IMF has been instrumental in completely ruining an economy and sending a whole population into destitution, depriving them of all and any hope of a real recovery. Now where exactly she sees this growth is another question. Probably in the same place Samaras sees it. In their dreams.

The economic facts of the matter are not the so called primary surplus (which is a bit of sham anyway) but an exorbitant level of unemployment (in the 30% area!!!), a completely unsustainable level of debt, even higher both numerically and as a percentage of GDP than when the crisis exploded and the troika stepped in to fix things, no foreign investment to speak of and domestically one company is closing down after another or relocating to Bulgaria. Not to mention a total shambles in the taxation and bureaucracy systems that strangle all and any private initiatives.

Despite the Middle Ages labour market imposed. But as we have repeated ad nauseam, what is the good of cutting down salaries and wages drastically when you hike all other costs from energy, transport, taxation? Madame? Have you failed to notice this?

So far those responsible for the mess are jubilating that in this seventh year of continual recession, the figure for 2013 will not be 3.7% recession as forecast but only 3%!!! And when it flattens out as it inevitably will for all the concerted efforts of the troika and the Greek government to make sure it does not, then, they expect, there will be dancing in the street!!!! The state of denial and arrant refusal to admit to the truth is that bad.

Nevertheless there may well be dancing in the streets of Greece. But of a Dionysian, Bacchanal nature, such as that described in Euripides’ Bacchai where in the frenzied dance Penthaeus’ own mother dances about with the severed head of her son who has been punished for  his sins as a ruler.