After four years of the violent attack on Eurocitizens by what can be called the troika dictatorship for short, that is the imposition of inhuman austerity causing soaring unemployment, stagnation of economies at best outright recession at worse at an inhuman cost to health, life expectancy, incomes being pushed to below subsistence levels and so on, the Council of Europe appears to have begun to slowly wake up.

There has been an announcement that in its zeal to impose inhuman conditions in order to “reform” economies, they have completely disregarded human rights.

Now the question is, will this be acted on? The troika is not a legal institution. It is an ad hoc arbitrary body that has assumed supranational powers and is answerable to no one. When the admittedly inept PM of Greece goes sniveling to Frau Merkel, all she says is you have to work this out with the troika. But with regard to the EU, the Eurozone and individual member states of both, just who and what is the troika? And furthermore, in this context just who is Frau Merkel?

She is indeed the elected Chancellor of Germany. But that does not make her the overlord of vassal states.

Human rights and labour rights and a great many rights of the people have been wantonly attacked and abolished by this informal arbitrary non body running amok over Europe. People in Greece are dying of cold, hunger, lack of medical attention. Education, that is free education for all citizens is being eroded. And this is only the beginning.

And what for? To “reform” the economy? The only thing that has been achieved in this respect is recession, unemployment, an increase in sovereign debt and a total collapse of consumption.

Excellent work. But that is what comes from giving unfettered power to unelected so called technocrats answerable to no one but, perhaps the leader of another country who is also not answerable to the citizens she has arbitrarily imposed this destructive policy on.

If this is the current face of Europe, not only is it ugly, it is cruel, savage and in the end untenable and something we should all be deeply ashamed of having let happen.

The formidable and infinitely wise policies (not economic  policies, but ones of attrition rather) concocted and brutally imposed by the insidious Berlin-Brussels axis of evil on what was once an advanced humane society (to a great extent) have turned the members of this society into the world’ greatest acrobats!

Well, though they were once considered citizens, which became a dirty word, they were subsequently transformed into consumers (not least by the so called centre left, social democrat parties) and then again changed fundamentally into acrobats, since they are being deprived of the wherewithal to consume .

This is the result of mixing and imposing all the worst traits of free market neo liberalism with all the worst traits of a command economy while banishing all and any good traits of either. For instance, you impose (and that is the operative word) what is known as a flexible labour market. That is you rescind all laws protecting labour and related rights, slash wages and return working hours and such to Dickensian times in the spirit of a free market economy.

Okay, so that’s supposed to make you what is metaphysically know as “competitive”. At the same time, however, you impose such taxation on everything that leads to loss of property, pauperisation and… well yes, a drastic drop in consumption and deflation.

Now in a very succinct and interesting piece published in Professor Varoufakis blog it is explained simply how the Irish Success Story, being so wantonly trumpeted,  is nothing of the kind. How the overall economy remains in a mess with unemployment, a growing debt to GDP ratio and all the rest of it. And that is the state of the Troika’s poster boy.

As for the Troika’s dunce pupil, Greece, the situation has become impossible. Lots of talk about how things have improved, how interest spreads have indeed fallen, how a primary surplus has been achieved and other such. Well, I don’t know if these selective (and not necessarily accurate) figures constitute an “improvement” in any way. What I do know is that there is no longer a functioning economy in Greece. The market has collapsed, the banks do not function, GDP has been slashed by a quarter and recession is continuing, labour has returned to the very dark ages, unemployment has soared and deflation has set in.

What we do know and can see is that this toxic mixture of all the evils of a command economy with all the evils of free market neo liberalism inspired by Germanic flair hasn’t worked, isn’t working and will not work. The time when the whole edifice will collapse into a pile of smoking rubble reminiscent of what the Germans had reduced Europe (including Germany) to at the end of the second world war is near, but we do not know how near.

There is the date of the Euro elections, but whatever the result of these, it has become quite clear that though the Brussels-Berlin  Nomenklatura can see their wizard plans are a complete failure, they have no intention of trying to change things at all.

So although the European Citizen knows we are headed straight for a collapse of this catastrophic situation imposed by obsessive, warped and German inspired ideology, he does not know when this will happen. So while he is being impoverished, punished, having his property expropriated, his life expectancy reduced, his infant mortality rise, and all the other great achievements the Greek PM (for one) is being commended for by The Frau, he is trying to hang on in the hope that he will survive till D Day.

However, in such a pernicious environment, when new taxes and new slashing of all benefits and welfare and whatever else was to the benefit of the Citizen, this is proving more and more difficult. In short, the European Citizen has been reduced to a circus act. He is on a high wire, with no safety net underneath, trying to keep his balance because one small slip and he will fall into the shark infested raging sea underneath.

The hope is that he will manage to cross the wire and set foot on safe ground. The fear is that The Frau and her coterie will succeed in destroying everything completely before he can reach base. The good news is that base is in sight, not all that far off. The bad news is that his position is so precarious and The Frau and her coterie so evilly single minded and obsessed with their own certainty (and so loath to admit any failure on their part) that they will do everything in their power to prevent this.

A bit of deja vue here when it comes to the German policy of the irrational, isn’t there?

Berlin 1945

I couldn’t help noticing on BBC World that everyone was sporting the red poppy, symbol of the end of the First World War, on the 11th your of the 11the Day of the 11th month. (And the idiotic human tragedy of those who got killed before the clock struck 11. But then the whole was was a monument of human idiocy.)

Now the question arises, was it politically correct to be commemorating a war where… dare I even say it? The enemy was Germany? Oh dear! Surely we must not mention such terrible facts! We are allies and partners with Germany…  Well…

Next year marks the centenary of the beginning of the First World War which plunged Europe into a blood bath of pain, devastation, horror and despair over the next forty years or so and then exported the savagery to the world at large with cold wars and the like.

Culminating in what is euphemistically being called the Eurozone crisis, having graduated from the sovereign debt crisis, but which is really no less than a deep crisis of civilization and values. A “rebalancing” a favourite word of the vicious tyrants ordering the death and destitution of millions. Rebalancing away from human values and in favour inhuman ones supposedly benefiting the 0.1% and worse.

Joshka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister of Yugoslav war of succession infamy said a while ago that he hoped Germany would not cause the destruction of Europe for a third time in 100 years.

It does appear that The Frau and her policies have let him down on this.

I therefore congratulate the BBC for sporting The Poppy. One should not forget even though one may forgive. But forget, never.

Europe as in the European Union, the Eurozone. There is a lot at stake and its unraveling would be a horrendous task. Not that history is not replete with “horrendous” tasks, such as the French Revolution say or any other of these historical world changing events. Are we in for one now?

If you really want to know, bring out St John’s Book of Revelation or, even better Nostradamus’ quatraines. (It has never ceased to amaze me how all these esoteric ramblings have been and are being interpreted any way one wants. But be that as it may.)

Oscar Wilde once famously commented that the US and England had very much in common apart from the language.

Professor Yannis Varoufakis has contributed with the following comment:

“A continent which began uniting under many different languages and cultures ended up divided by a common currency.”

He also reminds us of Gandhi’s famous dictum when  asked what he thought of Western civilization, ??it would be a very good idea.?

This comment no longer even arouses a smile for the witticism. Europe, as part of what used to be known as “Western Civilization”, if not the very mother of western civilization, no longer has any claim to civilization at all.

So what kind of future lies in store for the razed ground that is Europe today?

I am sure most people concerned with the downward spiral of what used to be our civilization have heard of and heard Russel Brand. Following criticism and comments after his interview on BBC with Jeremy Paxman, he has written a very interesting article published in the Guardian today.

Among other things he says: we are living in a time of huge economic disparity and confronting ecological disaster. This disparity has always been, in cultures since expired, a warning sign of end of days. In Rome, Egypt and Easter Island the incubated ruling elites, who had forgotten that we are one interconnected people, destroyed their societies by not sharing. That is what’s happening now, regardless of what you think..

This is a young man full of fire, addressing us in a direct, from the heart way in everyday language and feeling. Saying things we all know are true but which many of us fear to confront or cannot confront owing to the brainwashing we are daily subjected to and the toxic Thatcher mantra of TINA. Others because they are still hanging onto morsels of power and privilege which the do not realise are also up for grabs.

For those of you who may have missed it, this is the interview that had made waves:

Oh and as a perfect example of what Russel Brand is ranting about we have the Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras who in the process of depriving the middle and weaker sections of society of all they ever had, to satisfy the bankers as represented by the troika had the gall to tell us that

We can’t give up now! We have climbed the Kilimanjaro and are only a few meters away from the top!

As a reader of this blog, Chrys, has pointed out, he omitted to say we are a few meters from the top and once we get there it will be a terrible precipitated fall down all the way into the abyss thereafter.

Greece is in a state of total collapse. The whole of the Eurozone isn’t really doing much better. Under the pretext, because pretext it is, of the inability of the Germans to form a government quite yet, nothing but nothing is being done. This should not simply be read as, oh the EU has degenerated into a German empire. It has and it hasn’t. But what about all those others responsible for taking decisions from the Commission to all the other heads of governments and states?

If the Germans have indeed taken advantage of this they can hardly be held solely responsible. Not least because what is being done will end up in disaster for Germany too. As it always invariably does.

At the moment in Greece there is the great big quibble over whether the so called “financing gap” will be 500 million Euro as the nondescript Minister of Finances maintains or a couple of billion as the nondescript troika experts maintain. Common sense alone tells us this is all nonsense. That the problem of Greece’s economy is completely different and will never be solved as long as austerity is continued and worsened by arguments over gaps and other such irrelevancies.

You don’t need to be an economist to realise that policies that have achieved almost 30% unemployment and have shrunk the economy by 25% will not help the economy to start producing, and if the economy does not start to produce then all this talk of financing gaps is up in the air. If you don’t make things you can’t sell. If you have nothing to sell then you won’t have any revenue. If you have no revenue, being given loans on condition of continuing this policy of austerity is not going to help anyone (not even the bankers!) is it?

The same holds for the whole of the Eurozone. Every little accounting figure that shows that perhaps over the last quarter things were not as bad as the previous one is pounced upon and paraded to show that “we’re out of recession”, “the worst is behind us” and all that nonsense. When again, the whole of the Eurozone economy is in bad shape. Even where unemployment is relatively low, poverty is high owing to low wages, labour “flexibility” and all that which only helps slash consumption.

But why is all this going on? Why has blind ideology prevailed? Why has no one stood up to shout that “the king has no clothes”!? Additya Chakrabortty in the Guardian tells us why.

“….. most of the major economics degree courses and neoclassical economics ? that theory that treats humans as walking calculators, all-knowing and always out for themselves, and markets as inevitably returning to stability ? remains in charge. Why? In a word: denial. The high priests of economics refuse to recognise the world has changed.”

“Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. “There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought.” And now? “Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths.”

“How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we’re all paying for.”

I urge you to read the whole article.

OXI! Day, the 28th Oct 1940 was when Greece rejected the Italian ultimatum and was plunged into ten years of vicious war against the fascists and nazis and then a bloody civil war. I would like to present three songs here to honour the female singers who gave such hope to troops and civilians alike, and a sad epilogue from a child whose father had perished in this war.

Since this is the anniversary of OXI! day, the first song is a very sad one by Sophia Vembo, lamenting on how Greece was short changed despite the heroism this little country showed against the barbaric onslaught. It is called, Courage Greece, courage in the face of being abandoned and maligned by former allies and is extremely fitting for today.

The second is the well known Vera Lynn song, “We’ll meet again” that needs no introduction, but should draw to mind the sacrifices of the ordinary British soldier in the ranks giving his life for a better world.

And finally, the bitter “Does anyone remember Vera Lynn?” by Pink Floyd that needs no introduction but is very apt today for the whole of Europe. Does anyone remember what was being fought for? Does anyone remember the human values we were defending? And does anyone remember who was supposed to have “won”? The writing on the wall says it all.

I heard today that Noel Harrison died yesterday. We would like to remember him today with the beautiful song he gave us.

As reported in the Guardian today:

“We now have confirmation that private sector growth in the eurozone is slipping this month, defying expectations of stronger growth.

It’s a worrying sign for firms, individuals and policymakers in the euro area and beyond. Although there’s no suggestion that the eurozone is slipping back into recession, it may mean more stimulus measures are needed.”

Hallo, what’s this? “it may mean more stimulus measures are needed.”  ???

First of all this implies that there have already been stimulus measures. Where and when, one wonders? Have they all forgotten how The Frau passed her pet scheme to “outlaw heart attacks” round the table and each and everyone of the idiots running our countries signed it with a big smile?

The outlawing heart attacks was not my quip, but I have referred to it in this blog at the time. What The Frau with her iron will imposed on the collective jelly will of all the rest, was permanent austerity, with NO stimulus at all, on pain of being heftily fined. And they all signed on with big smiles of deep satisfaction at the accomplishment.

Second observation stimulus measures may  be needed. Or maybe not I suppose.

Yesterday there was a buzz that a report by the European Commission (who exactly we do not know) describing how this German policy being imposed has been catastrophic for the whole of the Eurozone, was hastily taken off the official website.

Reports that the perpetrator of this heinous crime against The Frau’s infallibility has been consigned to a dungeon, submitted to water boarding and has had his eyes gouged out, have not been confirmed. Yet.

Okay, seems Obama stood his ground and won on all counts (that is the moral high ground too). Nevertheless we are probably due for a replay at the beginning of next year. A lot of talk about the US losing the leadership of the capitalist world. Yes okay. And who will take over this leadership (of the Capitalist world?)

Communist China!!!

Ionesco died too soon!