Sunday, June 28, 2015

Was June 27 the day the EU began its implosion?

Rally yesterday in Madrid in solidarity with Greece (source)
Often only historians can in a retrospective manner gauge properly the relevance of key events like yesterday's series of door slams at Brussels, but, from the limited viewpoint of someone actively following the developments around Greece's neo-colonial demolition and the Euro-crisis in general, I would think it was: yesterday, June 27 2015, marks the beginning of the end of the European Union as we used to know it. 

Said that, the collapse will be played at slow-motion and the EU will not vanish overnight but it already bears deadly injuries that nobody seems able or even willing to heal, because healing them would imply to challenge the dictatorship of the bankster and other big capital's mafia and would imply also to challenge the national-imperialist attitudes of many of its members, especially Northern ones, worried only about striking a colonial plunder profit rather than about "building Europe".


People's choice

Some 33 hours have passed since Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that he would call a referendum on a still unsigned deal with the so-called "Troika" or "the institutions". Since then, the Greek Parliament has held a 14-hour session which approved by a large majority the holding of such referendum. Also the conservative pro-bankster opposition, the much eroded New Democracy party of A. Samaras, announced a vote of no-confidence against Tsipras that is just a mere show, as it has no chances of success whatsoever. 

The exact content of the matter to be put to vote is unclear to me, as no deal was ever reached in the end. 

In any case it is clear that Tsipras cannot force, as Venizelos first and Samaras later did, the Greek People to sign something they are not willing to accept, even if reluctantly. The referendum is a must and it ends with half a decade of one-sided anti-democratic impositions by the bankster mafia and its bureaucratic puppets. 

It is not an easy decision but it is one that nobody can take in place of the sovereign Greek People. 



Euro-putsch!

The real sign of the incipient collapse of the European Union was not the referendum however. It was the illegal and putschist decision of excluding Minister Varoufakis from the Eurogroup meeting yesterday. 

The exact details are unclear but by all accounts Yanis Varoufakis was impeded from access to the second trench of the Eurogroup meeting yesterday. This is simply illegal and underlines the lack of democracy and transparency that plagues the European Union.

Tsipras qualified this episode as "a black day" in the history of the Eurozone. I would rather describe it as a full-fledged coup. 

Spain's Finance Minister Luis de Guindos instead watered down the relevance of the incident considering that the meeting was "informal" and that "nobody contemplates the exit of Greece from the Euro" (that would be illegal as well, of course: only Greece can legally take that decision on account of its sovereignty). 

However the maimed Eurogroup issued a communication as such institution with a mere footnote noticing that the Greek minister was absent and did not ratify the decision. So it was indeed a Eurogroup meeting, even if an illegal one: the Euro-putsch has begun!



Ripple effect

The underlying problem of all this is that the official "austerity" policies are totally rigged and do not work. In the case of Greece, it is being demanded to once and again to kill their hens, destroying the egg production altogether and making recovery impossible. 

Instead of taxing the wealthy and capitalist profits, the whole plan is about taxing the common people for their daily needs, while at the same time cruelly slashing their income sources such as salaries and pensions. Instead of cutting in wasteful expenditures such as the military, the burden of austerity is totally placed on social expenditure. Instead of taking from the profits of public companies, the Greek state is being forced to suppress that source of income by underselling its property to greedy speculators.

But it does not only affect Greece: it affects every other EU state. A major collateral risk, five times the size of Greece, in all this crisis is Spain, where the situation is also very bad, with extremely high unemployment and destruction of the productive fabric. And all to pay the bailout of some stupid bank that was managed in a most corrupt way and which is engaged, like the rest of its mafioso ilk, in the criminal activity of evicting people from their homes and other scams.

A takeover of power by the "radical" Left is still unlikely to happen in this case but some of that is already taking place at local and regional institutions, putting upside down the corrupt power schemes of the pro-Troika Spanish Right. Key in this matter will be the stand of the Spanish equivalent of the PASOK, the PSOE. So far it has mostly chosen (with important exceptions) to cut deals with Podemos and popular unity lists in towns and regions (implying important programmatic concessions) but at state level, when the real substance is being decided, I bet they will rather choose to form a "great coalition" with the conservatives, following the suicidal example of the PASOK but also a model that has been worked out in Germany and, briefly, in Italy, with varied results.

But, considering that the greed of the bankster mafia knows no bounds, and that "loot while you can" is the only plan that Global Capitalism has, the situation in Spain and other EU states, probably most, will only worsen in the next few years, so I would forecast the full collapse of the EU by the end of the decade. 

It won't be simple but one thing is clear: there is nothing substantial they can do to impede it other than foster civil war via terrorist mercenaries as in Syria or Ukraine. Not a very productive plan if you ask me, really. And such developments within the core of the US Empire (i.e. Western Europe, which is about the last meaningful solid holding it has overseas) can only spell the end of the Western World Order as we have known it for the last five centuries or so. 

We are going to witness and very possibly be part of major dramatic changes in no time, that is for sure. Get ready!

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