I have just read an excellent interview of Christine Lagarde by Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian. She is not very nice about Greece in that she appears to have no sympathy for Greek children going hungry because it’s all the fault of their parents who don’t pay their taxes, so it serves them right.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t even have the imagination to realise that the parents of the children going hungry are not the ones who don’t pay taxes. No, those people are the ones she rubs shoulders with in Washington and New York when sharing a giggle over the purchase of their new Hermes scarves. In fact the parents of the children going hungry are the ones who are paying taxes, being bled dry by the inhuman austerity she favours so much.

Then she says she has much more sympathy for the children in a village in the Niger, than for Greek children suffering. Now, though it does seem like an odd way of putting it, she does have a point. The point being that Europe is rich enough and has plentiful resources and could well resolve this crisis on its own without any outside help. Only she doesn’t put it that way. It’s not Europe that comes in for criticism, but the Greeks as such again.

Anyway, never mind. This is her point of view and given that the Greeks are totally unmanageable as she sees it, perhaps we can understand her impatience. However, when you finish reading the whole interview you feel terrified. This wonderful, charming, composed French lady at the helm of the IMF is just as clueless as all the rest of them in the EU.

She has no idea what she is doing or even where she hopes to get. Her idea of democracy is, yes of course it is a “good thing”, but governments must do what she wants whoever is voted in. Look, she says with pride, we got rid of Berlusconi and now have Monti who is doing a very good job. (Well, perhaps, he has just plunged Italy into recession.) And in Greece the technocrat Lucas Papdemos took over. (Who did nothing at all while PM other than negotiate, or rather be dictated, a loan agreement that is a death warrant for the Greek Economy.)

Nevertheless, Mme Lagarde is very pleased with these two gentlemen and to crown it all she says, well look there were elections in Spain and the new government continued the economic policy imposed, despite his pre election rhetoric. Does it matter that Bankia has crashed, spreads have soared and Spain is teetering on the brink? Apparently not. All that matters is that Rajoy toed her line.

And her closing remark is devastating. When asked when she thinks the crisis that began in 2008 will end, she fudges and puts on the charm, ending up with, 2000 something. “I know the first two digits but not the last two”.

We may well ask with her level of competence and that of all the other “deciders” involved, how can she be so sure about those first two digits? A bit cocky of her isn’t it? Anyway, as she admires herself in the mirror while fixing her latest Hermes silk scarf, she can shrug her shoulders, confident that anyway, everybody else will be eating plenty of cake as she carries on in her cushy little job, doing nothing much other than destroying economies, for many more years to come, as she expects.

When we all start singing “La Bandiera Rossa”, I dare say she will find us horribly out of rune and shudder at that.

Many are calling it a game of Chicken. Others have likened it to the cold war. What? The Great Showdown between the EU and… little Greece! How extraordinary! The bullying and threats and blackmail the Greek voters (yes, the Greek voters, not some government) are being pelted with relentlessly on the one hand, and the counter threat that: yes, okay, but if Greece goes down it will pull the rest of the world down with it, is basically what this is all about.

If you step back a bit and look at this miserable little performance from a distance all you can come up with is, You must be joking! Unfortunately, whatever else it might be, a joke it is not. An Ionesco play maybe, but a joke no. At least not for the Greeks living through this horrible nightmare and not for the peoples of Europe being subjected to policies that risk turning them into the next Greece either.

Who is benefiting? That is always a good place to start. The instant answer that might snap to mind is Germany of course! It is making money from all these extra loans piled on Greece at a pretty good interest rate (it’s own borrowing rate has slipped to under 1%, whereas it lends to Greece at over 4% and more). But even that doesn’t warrant subjecting a country to destruction policies and insisting on their continuation in this way.

The only result will be killing the chicken that lays the golden egg. This chicken, in the game of chicken, is already moribund. So it can’t be that either. What then? All sorts of wicked and evil German schemes are being concocted by the Conspiracy Theorists. Angela is about to succeed where Hitler failed! And all that crap. But none of these cut the mustard either.

Nevertheless we are indeed witnessing this so called “cold war” between Greece and the EU, perhaps even the rest of the world. Out of fear of the outcome of the Greek election, this barrage of threats and bullying tactics has been unleashed on the Greek voter. The Greeks MUST vote the way the EU wants, or else… Greece will be consigned to a savage stone age at best.

But what are they insisting on? That Greece carry out without fail its “commitments” (which were agreed to under duress but never mind that). Now these commitments include measures that if taken as demanded will consign Greece to a savage stone age anyway, so why all the huffing and puffing?

On the other hand, the terror this side is trying to induce in the piddly little country it has chosen to so bully, may show something interesting. Could it be that they, in their turn, are terrified that if Greece does blow its gasket in this election, the whole continent, not to say the global economy as such, is in danger of devastating consequences?

So, the Cold War designation. Each side holds a bomb that could annihilate the other. The loser is the one who blinks first and puts down his bomb. A zero sum game?

The big guys want to coerce Greece any way they can into doing what they want. Quite regardless of the fact that what they want has already proved a most devastating failure and not only for Greece. In its efforts to defend itself Greece is holding onto its own bomb, ready to detonate it. Greece is being told severely, “This is not a bluff! You really will be consigned to the stone age!” To which it is feared the Greek answer may be, “One way or another that’s where we’re headed anyway, so we may as well take the lot of you with us. What have we got to lose?”

This seems to upset The Frau terribly, poor dear. But couldn’t this great woman, let alone all those minor nonentities fluttering wildly around her like moths, think of a more sensible way of dealing with this impasse? Would it really hurt her pride just to talk things over and perhaps recognize that throwing a country into prolonged Economic Depression is only going to create more problems rather than solve anything at all?

Firstly, this policy means that no one will ever get paid anything back. How? From an economy that has ceased to function because of your policies? Not to mention the fact that usually, when something like this goes on for too long, insurrection and revolution flare up. And these manifestations have proved particularly contagious in Europe.

So why this stupid game of Chicken that will lead nowhere however it goes? Except for throwing the whole of Europe in the soup sooner rather than later.

Translation: “During yesterday’s G8 summit, Frau Merkel, Mr. Cameron, Obama, Francois Hollande, Signor Monti, Barroso and… found themselves completely isolated.”

Caption on the explosives: “Memorandum” or loan agreement.

We’ve all heard of conundrums and vicious cycles and so on. Well, here is our own European version of one in the aftermath of yet another inconclusive, idiotic Brussels summit.

Why did the original sovereign debt crisis come about in the first place? Because of over indebtedness caused by cheap Euros being thrown down south not least so that the southerners would keep on buying the northerners’ products while impoverishing themselves; and of course because of the vane attempts to shore up Europe’s insolvent banks after the 2008 bubble burst. And of course at the taxpayers expense. The well known scheme of profits are kept private but losses are socialised.

That was the background against which The Markets (proved so horribly wrong with their AAA ratings of Lehman Brothers for one) started getting jittery. These jitters caused the so called spreads, that is interests on the bonds of EU countries to start rising. First victim, the weakest link in the chain, Greece. Spreads soared so high the country crashed and had to go cap in hand to the EU and IMF with all the disastrous results thereof.

Then one after another the weaker countries were targeted. Portugal and Ireland were forced by The Markets down the same miserable and destructive paths. After that, The Markets have been targeting the next weak economies up the line, Spain and Italy, even France a bit. Oh, and in case you idiotic Europeans start getting ideas, we shall eventually target the whole damn bunch of you!

Meanwhile back at the ranch in Brussels, or Berlin rather, the whole exploding crisis was met with dithering, small mindedness, the intelligence of a village grocer, indecision and above all denial that anything at all was the matter.

The EU has now reached an apogee of hysteria over… what? Elections in that tiny less than 2% country Greece, through fears that the Greeks will vote for the “wrong” parties! Disaster! Calamity! They must toe the line! They must continue the self destruction till it is complete! Otherwise they will go back to the drachma and have no access to medicine or petrol! Well, we already have no access to medicines and half the buildings in Athens and elsewhere remained without heating during the winter already. But be that as it may. A threat is a threat.

Now, at the height of the panic induced by the complete and utter failure of The Frau’s imposed policies an informal summit was held in Brussels yesterday. Just another same old same old. Dithering inconclusiveness. Everybody agreeing on “growth” or at least paying lip service to the concept. No one being at all specific on how to achieve this lofty aim sort of like “I believe in peace and apple pie” . Hollande trying to push the Eurobond idea, The Frau against it, as she is against anything at all that could be productive.

And all this against the backdrop of “We shall kick Greece out of the Eurozone UNLESS it sticks to all its commitments to destroy what is left of its economy!” We don’t really want this, but we have made contingency plans! So watch it! Make sure to vote in all those idiots who got you into this mess in the first place, rather than anyone who might just be able to get you out.

So while the EU is squabbling and threatening and the established bully girl is trying to keep her place in the school yard because there’s a new boy in town who might threaten her… The Markets have gone hay wire. Up and down, stock markets fall, the Euro drops, in short havoc all over the world. Some might say it serves The Markets right. They were the ones to get us into this mess, they should pay the price for it. Full circle. The Markets caused the crisis, The Markets find themselves paying for it. Poetic justice.

But others might just venture a question. If Greece is such a pain in the ass and creating such terrible problems for Europe and the world, then why did The Markets not soar at the loud threats and perceived imminence of a Grexit? Surely, since we are assured that contingency plans for such an eventuality have been made, that would be problem solved. Greece would be left to its fate, outside the Eurozone, and the rest of the world could carry on nicely.

But quite obviously, The Markets did not see it that way. They did not see it that way at all. Why?

Which is how the EU functions. Low on Democracy, high on threats and blackmail. In an excellent article in the Guardian today, Seamus Milne describes perfectly how the EU functions and why. The why is quite simply that the European Union has turned into a Soviet Union except that the ideology forced on the people is not a Marxist ideology but a Neo Liberal “shock and awe” ideology.

This is not new. The EU has been functioning under this dark dogma for a long time. What is relatively new is that Germany’s right wing government has decided to take over the whole show and ram it forcibly down our throats in a way only Germany, it appears, has the know how to do.

In this article Seamus Milne points out that both Greece and Ireland are being subjected to particularly hysterical threats because both countries are due to exercise their democratic rights and actually vote, much to the EU directorate’s displeasure. The Irish in a referendum on the already defunct Frau inspired fiscal stability pact, and the Greeks in a rerun of a general election that proved so alarming the first time around.

Already here in Greece the threats are reaching an extraordinary height of hysteria. Even the previous appointed Quisling Prime Minister and former Vice President of the ECB made loud statements about preparations being made to kick Greece out of the Euro… unless you stick to the terms of the program!  as the mantra goes. Or in simple language unless you continue plunging your already shattered economy into even greater and greater recession till there is nothing left.

By the way, Mr Papademos’ statements in the Wall Street Journal caused quite a flutter in the markets. The kind of flutter some wily operators tend to flourish on. Shouldn’t a former Central Banker try to avoid such ‘opportunities’ for speculation rather than create them? Are they so desperate to terrorize and intimidate electors that they don’t even bother to think of the consequences of their remarks?

So far, the only person to have spoken sensibly is Christine Lagarde of the IMF. She does not say, you must ruin your economy otherwise…! (Otherwise what? one can’t help asking). She says you must really fix you taxation system and carry out the structural reforms of your state machinery. Both of which are entirely true. And if all the idiots stopped threatening us with summary exit from the Euro, but promised help, perhaps, in dealing with these problems, then the electoral result would have greater chances of going their way than it does now.

But again. We have here another example of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland logic. The kind of logic Mr Papademos  also expresses with great zest. If you don’t stick to the plan imposed on you which will inevitably end up in the complete destruction of your economy and result in  hunger and death, we will throw you summarily out of the Euro, cut off all your funding and the result will be hunger and death! How come they don’t even realise that they are not giving us any choice?

Lots of bright ideas to solve the European crisis are being bandied about, from creating a new G-Euro, to replace the Euro in Greece at a lower value. How exactly this would work is not entirely clear. To anyone. To former German deputy finance minister Jorg Asmussen’s for a politically integrated eurozone that will be a “banking union, fiscal union, political union”.

Though this last proposal does sound extremely sensible, is there enough time to constitute such a union before the whole thing blows up in our faces? Not to mention the complex intricacies of what would actually be agreed to. That is a fully democratic union or another German imperial project where everyone cedes their sovereignty to the German Imperium?

As for the famous Euro bonds, after yet another resounding Nien from The Frau how can we hope for any remedy of the mess she has made of Europe? Let alone a remedy that may be set to work immediately since the EU no longer really has any time left.

So back to the very old idea. When the Greek armies had gathered to set sail for Troy at Aulis, the wind wouldn’t blow for them to launch their ships. So for the project to take off the Gods decreed that King Agamemnon of Mycenae, the top King of the pack (something like Angela Merkal perhaps, unless that is not a politically correct thing to say) would have to sacrifice his own daughter for the winds to blow in the direction of Troy.

The daughter who was sacrificed was none other than Iphigenia, tricked into coming to Aulis through a promise of betrothal to the hero Achilles. Now after she was sacrificed the winds did blow and the infamous “thousand ships” launched by that capricious lady Helen set off for the ensuing carnage.

The story, however, did not have a happy end. After ten years of war, when Agamemnon returned home he was savagely murdered by his wife, Iphigenia’s mother, and her lover, plunging the whole family into turmoil and more murder.

At this point the only thing that may save the rest of the EU is if Iphigenia/Greece is sacrificed. It is hoped and believed by a great many that if we throw the sick gall of Europe completely out onto the streets without a penny to her name, then the Union will have got rid of its problems and will sail off smoothly into the sunset.

So, many are hoping and planning and engineering such a sacrifice. Amputate the ailing limb! Turn Greece into the modern Iphigenia. It was their idea in the first place.

Such a solution is getting ominously nearer. It is difficult to envisage that Germany under today’s leadership will agree to anything sensible that might turn the Euro project round and bring it back on course. Would the Iphigenia style sacrifice of Greece do the trick?

Hardly! But it would play oh so well with The Frau’s voters. At least for the very short run.

When this happens, we shall go with the same dignity.

After the G8 meeting I feel it is imperative to come back to this. It is a matter of great urgency. And of course by ‘structural reform’ I do not mean what Mme Lagarde and Frau Merkel (among others) mean by it. That is for them structural reform means exclusively the abolition of all workers’ rights and any inkling of social security.

No, the urgency for reform appeared first, as our joke showed, that among the world’s richest states we do not have the world’s richest states, certainly not all of them, but we do have a number of minor players who are only still there by dint of an anachronistic established order fighting tooth and nail to retain privileges they are no longer entitled to.

And now back to the great urgency of reforming the structure of the European Union if such a union is to survive at all. At the G8 meeting, apart from the heads of the member states, the Chairman of the EU Commission Jose Manuel Baroso and the President of the EU Herman Van Rompuy were also present in their aforementioned capacities.

Whatever for? Did they have any say? Did they even try to have any say? I dare say both of them probably quite enjoyed the perks of the Cap David weekend, but that is hardly what they are being so lavishly paid for. The truth is these two nonentities (politically speaking) are both in their present positions because Germany (primarily but not exclusively) appointed them.

Their greatest qualification for the job was, precisely that they were political nonentities and could be relied upon to do as they are told. As a result, the devastating European Crisis that was sparked off by the sovereign debt crisis now threatens to break up the European Union itself if it is not tackled in time. And time is running dangerously out.

The Frau took it upon her puny little shoulders to thoroughly mismanage the sovereign debt crisis, through threats and bullying and flouting EU rules and ideals. What did the two afore mentioned gentlemen do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Perhaps even worse, they did do something. They just became the mouth pieces and bully dogs of the Great Lady because, after all, she was the one who had appointed them.

Since the European Union is supposed to be a Democratic Union of the Peoples of Europe, to say that there is a democratic deficit here is a gross understatement.

So if we really don’t want to install a Fourth German Reich governing Europe, in perhaps much the same way as the Third Reich did for a while, then when must institute structural reform forthwith!

For a start, the European Parliament which is the only body elected by the peoples of Europe, should be given full powers. It should be the one to appoint the European Commission, to empower it and the Commission should be directly answerable to the European Parliament. For a start.

Only then can we hope for genuine European leaders and not nonentities dependent upon the whim of various state leaders who only have what they perceive as the interests of their own country in mind.

When The Frau scowled in answer to President Obama’s affable inquiry of “How’ve you been?” he said , “Well you have a few things on your mind.” which was very nice of him, and totally unlike anything she would say to the leader of a lesser nation making a total botch of everything. But there you are.

Now one of the few things The Frau has on her mind is that pesky Greek question, and how those damn inferior good for nothing Greeks simply cannot realise that they must toe her line. Whatever that may be. Yes, even if it means the total destruction of their country, and not just their economy (that has already been accomplished).

The elections went extremely badly for her and now there must be a rerun. She’ll be damned if she accepts anything but a vote in favour of the two ruling parties, Pasok and New Democracy, who have wonderfully spineless, malleable, and some say utterly blackmailable politicians.

She has set the dogs barking, such as her kinetically challenged Finances Minister, to terrorize us and bully us with expulsion from the Euro, hunger and oblivion should we dare go against her Iron Will. And it does appear likely that the electorate may be cowed into partial retreat after all. But she can’t leave anything as important as this to chance! Don’t forget Greece represents a whole 2% of total EU GDP! (At least it did, but is probably far less now that she has managed to reduce our economy by something like 20%).

So in comes the diplomatic episode. She is reported to have telephoned the Greek President to tell him that Greece should hold a referendum at the same time as the elections, asking whether Greeks wanted to remain in the Euro or not. The President conveyed this request to the interim Prime Minister who of course informed the political parties as he was constitutionally bound to do.

All hell broke loose! Loud protests from both right and left. Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party said that The Frau had become used to treating Greece like a second rate protectorate and dictating terms because the former governments had given her that right through their spineless obsequiousness. But the right wing party also screamed that she was totally out of line with such a request. Not least because every act of overbearing bullying inevitably leads to a rise in the left wing party’s ratings.

As soon as pandemonium broke out a spokeswoman of The Frau denied the allegation. She had never said such a thing to the Greek President. Nevertheless, the Greek President’s office stuck to its guns and issued a statement saying that this was precisely what she had said. Confusion. Doubt.

However, we now hear that tomorrow’s printed edition of Der Spiegel will confirm that The Frau did indeed tell the Greek President that she wanted a referendum on the Euro to coincide with the elections.

What is not in dispute is that she did make a direct call to the President of Greece. Whatever for? She should know that the President of Greece has about as much power as the Queen of England (though probably not as much sense.) She should also know that Constitutionally there was no way either he or the Greek Government could call for a referendum at all. And perhaps above all, she should know that this unacceptable meddling in the democratic process of a member state, apart from being totally unacceptable and even abhorrent, would have the opposite effect on the electorate.

Is The Frau losing it? Or maybe she never really had it. Gone are the heady days of the Merkozy Triumph of the Wills it would appear. The days when she just had to snap her fingers and all the European heads of State prostrated themselves on the ground to do her bidding. Even though they knew her policies would only lead to destruction.

Well, though I am far from being convinced that she will be overpowered and prevented from turning Europe into a heap of rubble after all, it does appear that things are being made more difficult for her to achieve her aim. And though Greece will probably be blown out of the water sooner rather than later, at least a cheeky young man has had the guts to tell her what he thinks of her idiocy. That the mess is the result of The Frau’s Nonsense Economic policies imposed through threat and coercion.

And The Frau does not like this. She does not like it at all. To the extent of not only making a fool of herself with this idiotic diplomatic episode, but a fool of the German Foreign Affairs services too. There is no way they did not know, first that the President of Greece is nothing but a figurehead, unable to make decisions, second that the Greek Constitution has certain specifics governing the holding of referenda, and third that whatever the specifics may be, since elections have been announced and an interim government has been sworn in, there is no way at all a referendum may be called.

But of course, she was so hell bent on this brilliant brain wave of hers, that she just didn’t bother to ask anyone who would have known. I wont even mention the idiocy of rubbing the Greek electorate’s back up the wrong way with such arrant imperialistic heavy handedness.

Obama was kind enough to excuse The Frau’s scowling face with a “You’ve got a few things on your mind.” Lets hope the new Greek election, thanks to her own unacceptable dictatorial meddling in the democratic process of another sovereign state, changes ‘a few’ into a ‘a lot more’ on her dear little mind.

In one way or another, it will.

Since it is Saturday, and since we are in high turbulence and a blind panic over the rerun of the Greek elections and a possible disintegration of the Euro itself if German intransigence continues and Greece finally breaks into smithereens as a direct result of The Frau’s inhuman, and stupid, stringent austerity policy, I thought we’d lighten up the mood with two jokes.

First joke. A Greek man tells his wife, “I am so worried by the crisis that I can’t sleep at night any more!” The wife answers. “Oh, I find I am sleeping like a baby.” “Like a baby?” the man asks in total disbelief. “Yes.” She says quite naturally. “Just like a baby. I wake up every two hours and start to cry.”

The next joke is the composition of the G8, the richest economies in the world, currently meeting to solve the global crisis.

This club of the mightiest and strongest in the world is made up of: the United States, Canada,  Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy,  and Russia.

Now is that a joke, or isn’t it?

Jean Marc Ayrault France’s new Prime Minister has blown some fresh air, and sense, into the musty German dominated European directorate. He is urging for a change of policy and the introduction of stimulus measures rather than recession inducing ones. He said “We waited too long before helping Greece. This has been going on for two years now and only gets worse.”

Much worse, just about unsustainably so I would say.

But before your cheer that perhaps some common sense is returning to Europe, sense that might just oust the prevailing destructive sterile German imposed dogma, our great friend and Euro Group Chairman to be Wolfgang Schauble said: “We want Greece to stay in the Euro, provided it meets its commitments.” Now, Greece’s ‘commitments’ are the harsh and impossible austerity terms our appointed Quisling government signed up to under duress.

So, according to Schauble, if Greece wants to remain in the Euro it must continue down the sliding slope of recession for a few more decades. (His estimate). But in an up beat tone, he also said: “…in 12 to 24 months we shall see a calming of the financial markets.”

Based on what, Mr Schauble? The continuing destruction of Europe? Spain, also forced into the German austerity-cures-all panacea, is already in recession and surprise, surprise, her deficit is growing. Not to mention the horrendous level of unemployment.

Nevertheless, pressure is being put on Germany that this Nonsense Economics has to stop or else the whole global economy is in danger of going up in flames. So now that she has lost her faithful side kick with the spinal disorder she is beginning to make conciliatory noises and conceding with a shrug that well okay, maybe, a little growth might be of help… Though she hastens to add, but we mustn’t borrow!

In Siobahn Dowling’s article in the Guardian today (German Stance on Greek Crisis Softens  As Eurozone Fears Mount), she quotes The Frau as saying: “I have the will and the determination to keep Greece in the Eurozone.”

Now why don’t I find that at all reassuring?

The German Will has triumphed before, and look what happened:

Almost a year ago the historian Mark Mazower wrote a very prescient article entitled Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World  which was published in the New York Times. He describes how Greece has been in the vanguard or the catalyst, for the major sea changes in the history of Europe since its inception as a nation state in 1821.

The Nonsense Economics imposed so harshly and totally undemocratically on Europe, but firstly and worse of all on Greece, is finally coming to a head. The Frau’s total intransigence and absolute ignorance of how economies really work rather than the way she would like them to work, has exacerbated what started out as a sovereign debt crisis. Through her blinkered blinders she has managed to plunge the whole world into a full blown calamity, way beyond a mere sovereign debt crisis, by putting the very existence of the Europe Union as an entity in severe danger with appalling knock on effects for the global economy as a whole.

Tiny little insignificant Greece, whose problems could originally have been solved by less than Germany’s spare beer money, held an election. The result was a resounding shout of No More Nonsense Economics that have reduced us to a pulp! Inevitably, this led to a hung Parliament (given the electoral system rigged by the former major governing parties in their favour.)

When the new fragmented Parliament found it impossible to form some kind of a coalition government obliging the country to go back to the polls, all hell broke loose. Stock markets throughout the world fell, often drastically, the euro exchange rate plummeted before gaining a little of the lost ground, panic broke out. Some analysts, such as Simon Jenkins in the Guardian are not talking about if  but when Greece will leave the Euro.

Others again are screaming that the cost of such a Grexit would be a horrendous and unsustainable shock for the European perhaps even global economy. A fear echoed in Christine Lagarde’s statements and of course in the crescendo of bullying and terrorization Greek voters are being submitted to (again!), not least by people like Wolfgang Schauble, the German Finance Minister and soon to be President of the Eurogroup. (Unless sense prevails, but that seems to be too much to ask from the current hijacked EU.)

Pandemonium, panic, chaos. Catastrophe? Sorry for reverting to Greek, but we do seem to have the best words for all this.

The problem is really quite simple. It’s a matter of a disastrous nonsense economic policy being imposed by entirely undemocratic means. Threats and bullying. An economic policy tantamount to putting leeches on a comatose body to drain it of the last drops of blood it has retained.

How else would you describe a policy and “bailout” where Greece has just been given a tranche of 4 billion Euro with which it is to pay the ECB, at an interest of 4%!!! So the ECB lends us so we can pay it back, and increases our debt rather then helps diminish it, by extorting a high interest rate! Am I wrong to call this whole catastrophic rigmarole Nonsense Economics?

Greece’s utter weakness, a virtually failed state, whose economy has been ground into a pulp by this idiotic dogmatic approach, has been turned into strength. A powerful warning that the global vessel is about to crash headlong into the rocks. All we can hope for is that Mark Mazower will be proved right and that the alarm bells set off by Greece and the live example of where these Nonsense Merkelesque economics do lead, that is a headlong smash into the rocks ahead, may prove strong enough to change the course of history once again.