A cartoon by the brilliant Greek cartoonist today depicts the leaders of the three parties of the governing coalition pulling the Greek flag down at the Acropolis. Tomorrow is the anniversary of OXI day. The day the Greeks said NO to the axis powers and entered WWII.

Taking down the flag is emblematic. After the Germans had occupied Athens, two courageous young men pulled down the Nazi Swastika from the Sacred Rock of the Acropolis in the dead of night. This marked the first act of resistance to the enemy and had an immense moral impact.

The governing “troika” as they have been pejoratively dubbed, say they are taking down the flag of tyranny in this cartoon. What tyranny? After all this is the flag of the Greek nation. Their answer: the tyranny of the electorate.

Now, no one really believes the Greek political parties will do anything other than grovel at Schauble’s almighty feet. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of restlessness in Greece today. A feeling that the time is coming. A feeling that perhaps tyranny may be given a jab in the ribs at least. Before not too long.

Not the tyranny of the electorate, but the tyranny of all the arrogant and cruel troikas, both at home and abroad, who are so remote from reality they simply have no idea what they are doing. Not even in terms of the Economy which they are supposed to be fixing. Only they are not.

This song is a beautiful one, beautiful not in the sense of lyrical and romantic, though romantic it is of course, but beautiful in that it comes straight from the guts. There is a feeling we may well be singing it soon.

Europe has been gripped by a passionate infatuation with technocrats. They are the ones! Only they can run the show! Politicians are no good. Well nor is democracy for that matter, but we can’t say that out loud. Now, we just push the technocrats to the fore and push the politicians out by default (excuse the pun).

But what is a technocrat? Usually an economist. Usually one that is imbued with Chicago School Free Market Economic Dogma. Usually someone highly overpaid and inevitably someone who has come to believe he can play at being God.

And what do technocrats do? Oh well, apart from ordering the tide to stop like King Canute*, they crunch the numbers, reduce everything to models that have no relation to reality, have a corner grocer’s book keeping mentality and totally forget that the Economy is anything to do with the welfare of the people. Well, welfare is bad in itself anyway and People are only impersonal statistics and therefore expendable.

The Technocrats, with the IMF ones being the leading lights, have decided that Europe’s problem is one of competitiveness. Which is supposed to mean that it is more expensive to make a car, say, in Greece than it is in Germany. To this end, therefore, unit labour costs must be slashed in Greece. A unit labour cost is not however the nominal wage, but a measure of productivity. That is, if your wage in Greece is one tenth of what it is in Germany, but you only have a spade to dig a hole with, whereas the German worker has a high power drill, you are going to need say twelve times the time to dig the hole than in Germany, therefore making the job more expensive.

Now, to any normal mind (but not that of a technocrat!) it would mean that to improve productivity you should invest in better equipment, smoother functioning of the economy, more streamlining, and things like that. No reduction in wages? Well we can’t rule that out completely of course, but for the technocrats it is the ONLY thing that needs to be done. They do not even want to consider that in itself and exclusive of all other measures it cannot achieve anything much.

The whole of the Brutal German inspired European Austerity program has been based on just such a premise. Slash wages, increase working hours, deprive workers of all rights and there you are! The country you are doing all this to will now become competitive!

And here is where the brilliance of the technocrats comes in. First of all they draw up plans and set targets based on various numbers they crunch. These numbers never take the real world into account nor the side effects of their brilliant measures for achieving targets. Now, when the forecasts inevitably go wrong, as they always do precisely because they are not based on the real situation and all the facts, do they correct?

No! They are never wrong! It is always the fault of others, for not doing precisely as they were told. So what happens? More of the destructive measures to meet these unrealistic targets are piled on, in order to reach the unrealistic targets in the first place. Now this could be quite amusing and a source for the best satirical shows on TV, if it did not lead to the ruin of so many lives.

This is where playing God comes in. What is Europe’s problem? Uncompetitiveness between the regions. How to solve it? Well in times gone by devaluations used to do this quite well. But now we have the Euro! It is is sacrosanct. The Greek PM (and not only him), agrees (without even knowing why he does) that the Euro at all costs! This is what the technocrats believe too. So what to do?

Well, simple really. If we force wages and income down and raise taxes, thereby depriving citizens of just about everything they thought they had, then in say ten years time we will have repaired the imbalances and all will have been adjusted. This is social engineering at its rawest and most inhuman.

I have used two words in the previous paragraph, “citizen” and “inhuman”, both words that have no meaning for technocrats, who are now playing God. Citizen? No such thing. They should just shut up and do as they are told because we are the ones who know better and we have devised a plan to save the Eurozone. Inhuman? Now what’s that supposed to mean? Don’t give me this hunger nonsense and suicides and pauperization. None of that enters the equation.

The only thing that matters is the Economy, the Economy as an abstract of course. The Banks must get re capitalized, but at the expense of the people. So once we have turned all this around, in a couple of decades things will be operating smoothly again. No we cannot borrow for growth (which would be the way to restore competitiveness) and we cannot waste precious money on welfare and healthcare etc. All that is counter productive anyway.

Now the trouble with these God technocrats high up on Mount Sinai, is that apart from not giving a damn about the consequences, they also get their plans all wrong in the first place. They are so high up and removed from what is going on on the ground, they are so wrapped up in the clouds of their own warped, erroneous and bigoted theories, that not only do they refuse to admit they could have been wrong, but they refuse even to see how they have gone wrong.

And they do not even see this because, for them, people are nothing more than specs of insignificant dust that should be brushed away. Everything has become dehumanised for them. They are just doing their job.

Much the same way as the various German state employees were doing theirs at Dachau and Belsen say. They just could not see what they were actually doing and remained convinced that they were right.

*King Canute: a legendary King of England who thought he was so powerful he could order the tide to stop, only failed miserably when he tried to do so.

Okay. So it was farce rather than fracas after all. Stournaras has just told us the troika has backed down a bit on labour laws and that agreement on the package has now been concluded.

Which begs the question. If Kouvellis has to threaten not to vote for the package, for the government to actually try and get concessions, could they not have been more serious about the negotiations from the very beginning?

Samaras is a disgrace and has been shown up as one from the mere fact of “resolving” this crisis through the troika backing down before a real threat. Imagine what he could have achieved had he countered with his own threats?

So, unfortunately, Greece is on the road to perdition. Thanks to Samaras.

Yesterday the Left wing Party of Fotis Kouvellis appears to have thrown a spanner in the works by announcing that he and his party would refuse to vote for the package of stringent austerity measures demanded by the troika if any changes to the labour laws was in it. It appeared to be a point blank refusal.

The troika is insisting that without this there is no deal to hand over the tranche of 30 billion or so to go towards recapitalizing the banks.

I need to reserve judgement on this since it is as yet unclear whether Kouvellis and his Dimar Party will stick to this refusal, in which case the government coalition looks set to have problems. Since it could, however, be nothing but a spin device and he does back down at the last minute to “save” Greece, I cannot express any opinions.

The one thing I can say, however, is why was this point blank refusal reserved ONLY for the labour laws by Kouvellis and not for much in the rest of the package, cuts and taxation which will definitely lead to the total collapse of the Greek economy. But be that as it may, we have to wait for what is really behind the move.

Now, if we take it that Kouvellis and Dimar may genuinely have put their foot down, or whether this is the best way for them to get out of a destructive situation, and that, for whatever reason he persists in his refusal, then several scenarios are being bandied about.

One is that Samaras proceeds with a government reshuffle as was being rumoured for after the vote on the package. In addition, this could tie in with the other complementary rumour, that PASOK is about to dissolve and that its major players shall dump Venizelos and their Party and join Samaras in a new party to be called a different name.

There are many reasons why this is a tall order. Nevertheless supposing it does work out this way, with Kouvellis joining the opposition and the PASOK party splitting, even if most of them join Samaras, will he still have a majority in Parliament? After all, are his own MPs all going to accept such a development without a murmur?

It is inelegant to speculate over such rumours. But, regardless of whether this is just another act of the show being put on to force the Greeks to accept the troika designed destruction not just of their economy but of their very lives, or whether this is the result of real tremors and cracks in the, in any case, unholy coalition, one thing is certain.

We are reaching the point where the Greek people simply cannot be pushed any further and things are about to explode. In one way or another. Samaras may or may not be in a panic. Samaras may or may not have been jolted out of his torpor and narcissistic illusions of success just because The Frau dropped in for lunch one day without even bringing him a tiny gift.

But though, as I said I am reserving judgement on all this, on whether it is just more farce or really a turning point, I can say one thing. Whatever is behind it, it is strong indication that things are not going at all well with the neatly laid out troika/Samaras plan. He has failed miserably and is about to pay the consequences. Whatever these may be.

Being of a certain age, but not that old, in that I am at the tail end of the baby boomers, I can remember living in an age of certainties. The world was organized. In two blocks, but organized. Despite occasional flutters, it was just about certain there would not be a war in Europe of the kind that has torn it apart twice in a little over half a century.

There were always worries of course, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but still there remained the certainty, I dare say, that there would be a climb down. Nuclear war was too terrible to contemplate. As it was. The Nuclear Deterrent was just that. A certainty.

There was also a certainty in the economy in that nobody needed to talk about it much. It functioned. It had been set up after the war in Breton Woods, but even those who hadn’t a clue what Breton Woods was still less where on earth it was, there was a certainty in the western world that, never again would unemployment be allowed to reach the disastrous 10% level.

Yes indeed. We grew up in the age of Never Again. Never again would there be a war of the kind the world had just experienced. Never again would people be allowed to suffer through unemployment and economic hardship. A state of affairs that bred wars.

These certainties we grew up with and lived with throughout most of our adult lives have been blown to smithereens. Not through malice, but through corruption, in the broadest sense and erosion and a complete loss of perspective.

The great Thatcher/Reagan juggernaut of the shrill “There Is No Alternative” turned our values on their head. “There is no such thing as society” the woman proclaimed and indeed set the western world on this course. Nothing mattered any more other than making money. Preferably with ease in a casino fashion on the stock market.

Everything had to be deregulated to facilitate the only sacred thing in the world, making money. Society, welfare for the weakest, concern, inclusion were all blown to the wind through the mentality this lady represented. The idealistic hippies were replaced by the amoral yuppies. And everything was on the up and up, blowing hot, toxic air into the bubble that eventually burst.

All our certainties that had been rapidly eroding from the 1980s onwards, were completely blown away as this bubble burst in our faces. And now, the nonentities pretending to “lead” Europe are trying to patch up this mess in an ad hoc, myopic way. They are of course imbued with the values, or lack thereof that brought them to power in the first place.

All that matters is that the privileged few, the financiers (aka gamblers) should continue to make money at the expense of society. Which anyway Margaret Thatcher had already abolished as a concept. Unemployment? No longer a taboo. Indeed not. Unemployment has reached the dizzy heights of 25% in Spain and Greece and the EU average is over what used to be the abhorrent 10%.

But does it matter? No. This is necessary to get the economy right. In what way? Well, the way it was just before the crash. But better. That is a casino economy but now with no welfare, no healthcare and no social services. However, despite the clarity of this ideal, implementation is proving difficult.

European leadership is exhibiting confusion, narrow mindedness, an inability to see any further than the narrow, short term interests of the more powerful, to the detriment not only of all the rest but also of the very future of Europe.

I was going to say there are no certainties left, but in actual fact there is one predominant certainty. And that is that European leadership is incompetent, blinkered and can only be trusted to make the whole mess worse and worse before it explodes. Their nice little scheme for an extreme neo liberal Europe will not come to fruition. But what will? We have no idea. Neither do they.

Not only do they have no idea what to do they have no idea how to handle things in anything but a destructive way. After the fall of Napoleon and the return of the Ancien Regime (for a while), it was said of them that “they forgot nothing and they learnt nothing.” This is precisely what the Merkel led European leadership is suffering from now.

Perhaps we can take comfort from this. The restored Ancien Regime did not last long. Precisely because of this attitude. The neo liberal monster preparing to gobble us all up whole and undigested will not succeed. For the same reasons. The “leadership” may have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, but the people, the “sans cullottes” of the time, the great unwashed, the descamisados, have learnt more than enough. As they had then too.

Late on Sunday there was a news flash that Juncker had called a Eurogroup meeting for this coming Friday. We all perked up. Whoops! What’s going on? The troika are still digging their heels in. They still want Greeks to work around the clock for seven days a week with less than subsistence pay, the government is still a bit too scared to actually do that, or rather they can’t quite find a good way for them to pass this. So what has changed?

Has the German directed troika had a change of heart? Have they realised that perhaps they may not benefit from pushing Greece over the edge? Has Samaras’ vane boast of actually negotiating this time some meager substance to it after all? Or perhaps since the American Elections are only two weeks away, they decided to show mercy and give the Greeks (and the Greek government) a respite before summarily chucking them all out of the Eurozone?

Oh but no! Sorry! False alarm! Juncker decided there will not be a special Eurogroup on Friday to deal with the Greek question after all! Just kidding.

Meanwhile the Irish are being told that the direct bank recapitalisation scheme will, after all, apply to them too. Yet they were non plussed. Now why is that? They should have been jumping for joy and kissing Merkel’s big toe in gratitude. Well, the thing is they have already recapitlaised their banks at their taxpayers’ expense, that all this is too little too late.

And what’s more, all this tooing and froing, lack of direction, lack of serious planning and, quite frankly, playing with nerves, is certainly not conducive to creating the necessary “good climate” they claim they want.

Confusion, indecisiveness and narrow self interest is the only way to describe how the Nobel Laureate EU is functioning. Not to mention the lack of quality of all the apparatchicks from the unelected and unaccountable Presidents of the Commission and the EU, to the locally elected little tyrants mascarading as Democratic* Chancellors and Prime Ministers.

We really have had more than enough!

*Democratic is not confined to whether one came to power through a ballot or not. It amounts to much more. Things the current European leaders no longer possess. In any case, the Nazi Party in Germany was voted in. But would you describe them as a democratic party?

“Van Rompuy said that leaders had also discussed the situation in the Middle East, saying they were concerned about rising violence in Syria and reaffirming their commitments to sanctions against Iran.”  This is from his statement after the Euro Summit, as wishy washy, inconclusive, inept and even criminal as all the ones before.

How reassuring of him. He is concerned about the rising violence in Syria. He should be far more concerned by the violence that will inevitably break out in southern Europe initially, not least because of his own utter ineptitude. EU leaders and even more EU “officials” such as Rompuy and Barroso are living in complete cloud cuckoo land. And this last summit proves it.

The Frau is gung ho on abolishing democracy in Europe by creating a Central Budget Overseer with veto rights over each country’s budget. This official will be appointed and will of course not be accountable to anyone, (other than the German Chancellor, perhaps). The member states will forfeit all their rights to their fiscal policy, which means all policy, to an unelected, unaccountable Euro Mandarin, who has even been decided on. Yes, you guessed it. Wolfgang Schauble. The little man with the enormous cheap on his shoulder and desire to punish for the sake of punishment, is the one The Frau wishes to appoint to this position.

Now Hollande is against such nonsense which is good news. He is also in favour of setting up banking supervision ASAP. Which is also good news. However here is the bad news: The Frau agreed that the banking union should be set up by the end of the year. That’s bad? Not in itself, but this is: “She told journalists that a number of “complex legal issues” need to be hammered out before banking supervision can be established.”*

In other words absolutely nothing was achieved in the Euro Zone yet again. The Frau is back to her old game of tactics. OK, you can have your banking union, but…. yes, that is it. It will not be set up before the German Elections because of “the complex legal issues that have to be hammered out.”

Her great love affair for the criminally incompetent Antonis Samaras of Greece is another such tactic to kick the can down the road till her next elections.

However, what she may have failed to realise, is that the Greek can she has been happily kicking down the road for the past nearly 3 years now, has had its fuse lit. She is in danger of blowing it up in her face with the very next kick she gives it. There is no way the Greek people can put up with this criminal policy of stringent austerity, attrition in fact, as in the trenches, till she wins her precious elections.

And though, as a Mistress tactician, she may well have thought of how she could turn a Greek explosion into an electoral advantage for herself, I very much doubt if Rompuy and Barroso have thought of anything at all. So, my dear president of the EU, perhaps you should be far more concerned about the violence that is about to explode in southern Europe which is closer to you than Syria.

When the exorbitant cuts demanded by all the EZ members are voted in and when Greeks start dying of cold and even hunger this winter, when the children of northern Greece will be unable to attend school any more, do not be surprised when a massive bang of violence erupts on your very door step.

*Quotes from The Guardian.

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”.