As summer takes hold, I dare say our great leaders are heading for the beaches or the Alps or wherever else it is they wish to go and take a well earned rest from all the saving of the Euro they have been doing over the past year.

Greece has been really saved. After being blatantly threatened with oblivion and cajoled, the stupid Greeks who often like to think of themselves as clever, went and fell straight into the trap set them by Wolfgang Schauble. They voted for the very politicians who not only ruined their economy but, according to the troika itself, didn’t even implement the so called program of salvation properly, out of terror of being thrown out of the Euro.

Spain and Italy thought they’d scored a great victory by getting The Frau to agree to finance their banks directly and not through the state, and the ECB to buy up their bonds to keep interests down. However, none of that will happen. It was only a pack of empty promises. The ECB says it will only act to keep inflation down, which is its remit, and soaring interest rates do not affect inflation.

Ireland went and ratified The Frau’s Nonsense Fiscal Rectitude pact, probably out of weariness, in that the EU keeps sending them back to the polls till they get it right. Besides, they too were bombarded with threats of not getting any money if they didn’t vote the way The Frau wanted.

As for France… Oh dear. Weary sigh. Sauce Hollandaise is playing with words trying to convince his fellow citizens that austerity is not austerity when it is called another name. And is therefore set to throw France down the way of Greece and Spain and Italy and Portugal and Ireland…. Why not? If nothing else, at least the company, as in hell, is good.

All of us willing and eager to take the road straight to hell through terror of the Euro collapsing, I suppose. Greece has already put her head on the chopping block voluntarily, by voting for a government it KNOWS is useless and that will kow tow to the troika and insist on implementing a program that is not just simply impossible, but literally fatal.

It’s GDP has already dwindled by 30% and looks set to fall by another 7% or so this year if we are lucky. Ah! But should we dare leave the Euro we are told, we will have a 50% fall in GDP! In the End Greek GDP will have fallen by at least 60% by the end of 2013, if not earlier and what will we have achieved? Remaining in the Euro? What Euro?

The Italians and Spaniards look set for a fall, The Netherlands and Finland (and others too quite soon I believe) are making noises about leaving the Euro because it is too costly with all these bailouts to the undeserving profligate countries. The Euro is teetering on the brink. Many think it has already passed the point of no return and that its demise may even take the whole of the EU with it and not just the flawed and poisonous currency.

And Germany is under the illusion that it has won this war for mastery in Europe.

An Illusion she repeatedly succumbs to every 30 or 60 years or so. And unfortunately Germany’s Problem is invariably Europes’ Holocaust.

I can’t help feeling like the old man in the clip. Don’t you?

Marie Antoinette (aka Christine Lagarde and Director of the IMF) mumbles platitudes about things that have been done but not enough. And in any case has been forced to revise IMF forecasts yet again. IMF officials and troika stooges also keep revising programs and insisting on policies that have been proven not to work. Summits are held and held again and again and again and nothing ever comes out of any one of them.

Take the G8, the G20, the EU summit, heads of states, bankers. It’s all going terribly wrong, it’s all unwinding, it’s all collapsing and all these brains and luminaries of the world can come up with is: “Stick it to the weakest with a vengeance!” Starve the pensioners and deprive them of all healthcare. they don’t need it. They should just die off and help balance the budget that way.

As to the soaring unemployment rate of the young? The Portuguese PM has the solution! Why don’t you all just go away! Emigrate! Leave us alone! We can’t bother with any of you any more.

So do we need all these Very Serious (and Very Important) People (as per Paul Krugman)? All they are doing is making a bad situation worse. In fact, arguably, they are the ones who made the bad situation in the first place.

We don’t need the IMF’s forecasts. We don’t even need the IMF. All they do is ruin economies and break people. Who cares about people? Well they certainly don’t. People are merely factors of production to be squeezed for the greater benefit of enhancing profits.

But Europe has shown us the way! At this rate, not even the 1% will survive! What will there be left for them to leech off?

A spectre is indeed haunting Europe. Last time around it was well managed (thanks to the terror aroused by the USSR). This time around there is no one to manage it. Who? Christine Lagarde? David Cameron? Or perhaps ha, ha, ha, Angela Merkel? Good Gracious!

It’s time to restructure all world institutions. Root and Branch. It’s time such reformed and restructured institutions were run by democratically elected, answerable people of proven worth. Who must be democratically accountable.

Utopia? Either that or the slow demise of the human race! (Slow, but accelerating daily).

In the 5th July issue of The London Review of Books Richard Clogg wrote a very moving article “In Athens”. I urge you all to read this article in full. It isn’t very long, but in it he describes what Greece was put through in just about living memory, at the hands of the occupiers in World War II.

Famine, hyperinflation, barbaric reprisals by the Germans, homelessness, corpses gathered every morning in the streets of Athens, the utter destruction of the country. He evokes all this to remind the ladies and gentlemen pontificating and wagging their fingers at us that apart from “The Glory That Was Greece”, the country has a more recent history, that was agony and suffering and destitution, imposed on it by the fathers of those currently meting out the punishment they feel is necessary to make us behave.

Even David Cameron comes in for a spot of criticism. Richard Clogg tells us that in a recent visit to the US the British Prime Minister claimed that “… in 1940 Britain was the junior partner to America in the anti Nazi struggle. The fact is,” he continues however, “that in 1940 after the fall of France, Britain’s only active ally in Europe was Greece.” And not only that, I would add, but Greece fought hard, driving the Italians back into Albania and forcing Germany to enter the war to save her ally, earning Churchill’s famous remark: “It is not that Greeks fight like heroes, but heroes fight like Greeks.“

Christine Lagarde’s Marie Antoinette arrogant pose of “not being in the mood” for negotiations, Schauble’s barking orders, and now Cameron’s threat to close the borders to all Greeks should we exit the Euro (to protect his citizens from hordes of invaders?), show an insensitive, needless arrogance to… whom? Little Greece who has been through so much and stood up at extreme cost to herself, against fascism and nazism.

I would like to close with Richard Clogg’s closing comment:

“… a word of contrition, if not apology for German war crimes that are still in living memory (from Merkel), and a recognition of past Greek sacrifices in the common struggle against fascism, which are likewise still a living memory (from Cameron) would not come amiss.”

Thank you Professor Clogg. From the bottom of out hearts we truly thank you,

Congratulations to the physicists and scientists who worked long and hard and discovered the boson and above all to Professor Higgs who thought of it in the first place. A nonagenarian now, I hear he is ready to crack the bubbly and so he ought.

Now what is a boson? Well… I have no idea. But I dare say Frau Merkel knows all about it. She is said to be a physicist, or at any rate to have studied Physics. So presumably she does know something about it. No doubt far more than she knows about Economics.

I have just come across a really pertinent article by Joseph Stiglitz entitled: “Death-row Euro gets another last minute stay- of execution”. He describes vividly the lack of understanding and insistence on repeating failed policies again and again in this Euro crisis.

“The hope is that markets will reward virtue.” Stiglitz tells us describing the German obsession with a kind of warped morality in trying to deal with the crisis. Virtue here is austerity and atonement for sin no doubt. However, “…markets are more pragmatic.” he tells us, and therefore realise that austerity merely weakens economies rather than strengthens them and hence interest rates rise.

“Germany seems surprised by this. Like Medieval blood letters [Germany’s] leaders refuse to see that the medicine does not work and insist on more of it – until the patient finally dies.”

Hail Frau! We who are about to die salute you!

Is the span of post Euro summit euphoria getting smaller and smaller?

The surprise is that it really lasts even that long. The famous Merkel “defeat” may have been not much more than tactical maneuvering again. In any case it was nothing solid, nor immediate, nor something that would apply throughout the Eurozone, including the doghouse members of Greece, Portugal and Spain.

And as if that were not enough, in the absence of Eurobonds (over The Frau’s dead body those) surplus countries and political parties are beginning to get tetchy. And who can blame them? There appears to be quite a strong current of opinion in The Netherlands wanting out of the Euro and back to the Guilder and even out of the EU altogether.

The Frau’s own allies in government, the CSU, are threatening to leave the coalition if any more bail outs and so on are requested. And they are right. All of them. The way The Frau has presented this whole “bail out” business, it’s surprising why anyone agreed to it in the first place, (including the stricken states!)

When The Frau’s cheap populist approach of “dirty, slovenly, lazy, profligate Greeks and southerners in general” became the accepted truth of the day, then why should the decent, upright, hard working, surplus countries throw their money away to the undeserving? Because that is how The Frau has presented this whole crisis. And that is what is widely believed.

Since the fact that the surplus countries have a surplus because the deficit countries have a deficit was not only never made public but positively denied, then what is the argument of even keeping the Eurozone together at all, let alone under The Frau’s Nonsense logic? Why should surplus countries fund deficit countries, which will only be funded if they submit to recession inducing policies?  To do so means you know damn well that you are hardly likely to be paid back. How can you be, when the very terms of your loan make it impossible for the country in question ever to be in a position to pay you back?

Not to mention the fact that these “loans” do nothing for the recipient economies, since they are all recycled to the insolvent banks. We had hoped the recent summit decision would put an end to all that nonsense, but no, it doesn’t look that way at the moment, after all.

If The Netherlands do pull out of the Euro, or the CSU withdraws its support from The Frau, they will have done all of us a great service. Particularly Greece, since our current lot of sub prime, miserable governing politicians will never pluck up the courage to do it themselves!

Throughout Europe the rate of unemployment is growing. Throughout Europe the rate of youth unemployment is growing exponentially. Throughout Europe Economies are stagnating, slipping into recession. Even outright depression has already reared its ugly head.

What else do the high and mighty overpaid power hungry “leaders” of this wretched continent need to see, just see, that their dogmatic, unrealistic, cruel and vicious politics are failing miserably? A failure that will ultimately swallow down the very same “strong” and overbearing factors insisting on this slow and fatal destruction.

But, I suppose, this utter barbaric, cruel idiocy in the powers that be in Europe is not new. It has happened several times before. Most notably in the first world war where millions, yes millions of young men were slaughtered for… what? Several meters of land to and fro at the trenches. Something like that is happening now.

Blind dogmatic and yes, sadistic insistence on a policy that not only does not work but is positively destructive.

Of course the power hungry like the ones “leading” Europe today derive their sense of power and their thrills from the very misery they have the power to cause on the weak. This “success” feeds into their psyche and they are blinded to anything else. Drunk and delighted by their power to inflict untold pain, they turn up the heat more and more.

Until it all explodes in their own face. leaving such a debris behind. Millions dead, as in the first world war, millions dead and taumatised, as in the second world war. Millions suffering from grief, hunger, despair.

Is that your vision of Europe? If so, you are, once again, doing an excellent job of it.

Which is why I felt we did see some beauty at the end of the Final Match of the Euro football. Not the actual sport or who won and who lost, but because the Spaniards (as I am sure the Italians would also have done) showed us what life is really all about. Not deficits and debts and austerity and fiscal rectitude of a kind defined by those who do NOT pay, but our children.

The sight of the team’s children, taken on to the pitch and let loose to run about joyfully after their Daddies’ success brought tears to my eyes. Regardless of who won and who lost. At that moment it was a win for Europe’s future. Our children. We cannot keep ignoring them and condemning them to a life without hope.

This Nonsense Economics and dictatorship by the financiers and their political lackeys must stop.

Now!

The dead horse is, of course, Greece, and for the past eighteen months or so our friends and partners in Europe together with the IMF have done nothing but keep whipping it under the illusion that that is the only way to make it walk again.

Income tax returns were conveniently delayed by the major parties, or what used to be the major parties here in Greece, from March to mid July, so that tax payers would not realise what was install for them and vote for the left leaning SYRIZA or even the Communist Party en masse.

This year Greeks will not be charged income tax according to their income, but will be charged levies determined by whether they own a house, where, how large it is, whether they own a car and so on. And for those with no assets to their name, they will be charged for living in a flat, however small, and not on the streets and of course, so nobody gets away, they will be charged on what is considered a subsistence level of income.

In short income tax will hit appallingly the unemployed, those whose salaries and pensions have been slashed, not to mention those still in work but who haven’t seen a pay check in months. Now, before we go blaming the troika for all of this (and they are not free of blame), it is only fair to point out that this brilliant way of charging income tax on income which does not exist was concocted by the former Minister of Finances Evangelos Venizelos, aka Benny. Now this gentleman hasn’t a clue about how Economics work. But then neither has Angela Merkel I suppose.

Anyhow, between them, the troika and the governments of Papandreou and Papademos contrived to grind the Greek Economy into the ground. Nevertheless, after an electioneering respite, the troika is due back this week to ascertain that none of the anyway unrealistic targets have been met, that although Greece had to make up for a short fall of something like 11 billion it is now probably double that, that Greeks are being paid far too much, even though an exponentially growing number of them is not being paid at all, and so on.

But of course, we can never admit that we got the whole thing wrong, can we? No! It’s all the fault of the slovenly, lazy free riding Greeks! So if they really want the privilege of being loaned more and more money in order to pay off our banks at a nice little rate (since none of this money ever goes into the Greek Economy itself), then we must probably start literally killing off the old age pensioners by Guillotine rather than through refusing them their medication, as we have been doing over the last month or so.

But ladies, gentlemen (or whatever you are) the horse is already dead. You do not need to whip it any more.

And all this talk of a one or two year extension is equally idiotic. It will only extend the agony, the slow, lingering, tortuous death of the whole of Greece and again achieve absolutely nothing. Unless that is indeed the object. The complete destruction of Greece.

If that is indeed the case, wouldn’t it be more merciful to just carpet bomb the whole country and be done with it? And don’t tell me any of you give damn about some silly ruins which the lazy Greek population couldn’t even keep from collapsing!

In the end, The Frau hasn’t really lost all that much yet. As just about everybody agrees, the famous “Growth Pact’ is nothing more than window dressing. A very vague hint, that yes, okay, perhaps, maybe. Basically it is nothing other than the proverbial fig leaf. Something both Sauce Hollandaise and The Frau could use each for their own purposes. Hollande could gain time and show that look, see? I kept my Election promises! Growth is now on the agenda! And The Frau could, and did, throw the sop at the SPD who would, and did, then vote for her Nonsense Economics Fiscal Rectitude Pact.

But it is nothing more than that. A sop. Alas. Now for the bit Monti extracted from her, like teeth without anaesthetic, it is a step in the right direction of course. However, as most of those looking at the situation as it is, without the PR and the hype, agree, all it has done is give a reprieve to the bust up of the Euro. Things need to be done fast and sensibly now, so that the three month window of opportunity is taken advantage of and disaster finally averted. Will that happen?

Well, the way Mario Monti went about forcing The Frau’s hand is a good sign. If the way decisions are made is forced to change, then the Eurozone might just get down to business. On the other hand all this nonsense about the good pupils who have done their homework and the bad pupils who haven’t doesn’t auger well, in that it re establishes the moralistic way of “dealing” with the crisis. Bad children must be punished! A policy that has been the cause of the contagion and explosion of the Euro Crisis so far.

And a final remark, on the nonentities ostensibly running the show. Do we really need Herman Von Rompuy? From Mr Who Are You? He has graduated to Mr. Just What is it You Do?

At least Mario Monti put him in his place when he got up to make the statement that all was well in cuckooland because the so called growth pact (that is nothing) had been unanimously agreed. What did Monti say? Words to the effect of:

“Sit down and shut up! Nothing has been agreed!”

Now if Mr What’s His Name Who Are You? couldn’t even realise that much, what is the use of having him there at all and paying him such exorbitant amounts and perks?

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?]