Part of the problem of criticizing the “pan-European project” is that you have multiple bodies which overlap. And you also have some nations which are part of one, but not another. Or which pay into one body, but abstain from another. A clear analysis is needed of the most important part of the pan-European project: the Eurozone. The Eurozone is the most important because it controls the money in the world’s largest macro-economy.

By comparison, the European Union is mainly a regulatory body, and their extremely modest annual budget - about the size of Denmark’s - reflects that. 

There is a relentless focus among Western media on the European Union over the Eurozone, but this article hopes to put the emphasis where it should be: follow the money. But to examine the Eurozone you have to bring up something which mainstream media likes to ignore - the Eurogroup.

The Eurogroup rules the Eurozone and its 19 member states. It also governs the “bailouts” to member nations like Greece.

Basically, if you find the EU to be undemocratic…well, you haven’t seen anything like the Eurogroup.

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The Eurogroup: The banker cabal hidden in plain sight

I reviewed the fake-leftist book “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. The analysis and proffered solutions from this self-declared “erratic Marxist” are not Marxist at all, but his eyewitness unveiling of the cartelized capitalist structure that is the Eurogroup has truly been an enormous contribution to European democracy.

The Eurogroup is, at face value, an informal monthly meeting of the finance ministers of the member countries. Ah, government representatives getting together for discussions and planning - sounds democratic, right? Hardly….

I will quote Varoufakis often, because his matter-of-fact condemnations will carry more weight than my own:

“Moreover, the Eurogroup, where all the important economic decisions are taken, is a body that does not even exist in European law, that operates on the basis that the ‘strong do as they please while the weak suffer what they must’, that keeps no minutes of its proceedings, and whose only rule is that its deliberations are confidential – that is, not to be shared with Europe’s citizenry. It is a set-up designed to preclude any sovereignty traceable back to the people of Europe.”

So there are no rules, no records, no democratic process and no democratic accountability...and this is what is in charge of the world’s largest economic engine.

These are appalling realities. They cannot be disseminated widely enough or often enough.

Thanks to the whistle-blowing of Varoufakis, we also know that there is also essentially no discussion at Eurogroup meetings: The Troika (the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission) initiates, dominates and outlines the terms…and then the finance minister-members vote. In short, the overwhelming majority of participants in the group which governs economic policy (and thus social policy) are bankers, former bankers or intimately tied to high finance. When bankers run economic policy, one shouldn’t be surprised if the resulting social policy is for the benefit of bankers.

As Varoufakis relates, maybe the finance ministers will speak, or maybe they won’t even be allowed to speak. Maybe finance ministers will be allowed to disseminate documents which support the positions taken by their democratically-elected governments, or maybe they won’t even be allowed to champion a differing position. Many will justifiably ask: What’s the point of voting in any politician if they have little to no chance of influencing policy at the highest level – the Eurogroup?

The Eurogroup is not an EU institution and cannot declare any legally-binding decisions. It can never be blamed for a bad decision, nor held accountable, because it is not answerable to any parliament or body politic whatsoever.

In short: it is the perfect cabal.

An undemocratic Eurozone produces only hopeless non-democracies

It is axiomatic that that when [democratic] politics does not rule - where there is no law or regulation - the rich are the rulers. It is also axiomatic that in a climate of total deregulation the richest nation will benefit the most.

Unsurprisingly, the US pioneered the concept of mass deregulation in the early 1980s, which they foisted on Europe as much as possible in order to ensure the status quo-dominance of US corporations. Washington may have even created a Frankenstein’s monster, because the Eurogroup has achieved the American dream of total deregulation even more than in America.

We owe Varoufakis a debt of gratitude for extensively detailing the utter lack of democracy within the Eurogroup. What’s absolutely appalling is that most media do not hammer these facts repeatedly, but even seem totally unaware of them.

In this sense – critique of the status quo – Varoufakis’ book is essential reading for Europeans who want to know what principles their society really is based upon. For all the nonsense about “European work-life balance” and “third way politics”…that may have applied pre-Eurozone, but it sure doesn’t apply anymore.

After all, what do you get when your leadership group has no democracy, no oversight and no records? You get anti-democratic oligarchy: the richer members controlling the poorer ones:

“…Dr. Schauble and the Eurogroup had succeeded in overthrowing our government by asphyxiating us enough for Prime Minster Tsipras to surrender…our newly elected government could choose any policy mix it liked as long as it was virtually identical to the calamitous one imposed by the Troika on previous Greek governments.”

The Eurozone is, and has always been from its inception as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, merely a cartel of high finance which wants only to preserve its economic dominance and monopolies. The Eurogroup is the most anti-democratic, the most brutal and the most hypocritical aspect of the pan-European project, and Varoufakis makes that clear in multiple appalling passages.

“When I asked a friend who played a central role in Greece’s induction talks how they had managed to convince Germany to let Greece into the Eurozone, his answer was fantastically unassuming: ‘We just copied everything the Italians had done, and a few tricks used by Germany itself. And when they threatened to veto our entry, we threatened them back that we would tell the world what Italy and Germany had been up to.”

“Give me a part of the action, or I rat you out.” Is that not the very definition of criminal collusion on the part of Greece’s 1% with the 1%-ers in other nations?

“Of course, the Maastricht Criteria’s real purpose was to allow into the Eurozone countries that did not meet these criteria and then force them to do whatever it demanded to meet them.” 

Only France, Ireland and Denmark held referendums on Maastricht ratification, anyway.

“When it comes to countries like Germany and France, the rules are meant to be broken. But for countries like Greece the rules are the rules are the rules! Even if they are unworkable and unenforceable. The Greek state can default against the weakest of Greek and non-Greek citizens, against pension funds and the like, but its debts to the ECB are sacrosanct. They have to be paid come what may. But how?”

The loans are not meant to be repaid, of course, but to exist indefinitely so that the 1% can live in ease thanks to the curse of compound interest.

But who was the first country to break the EU fiscal deficit rules? France and Germany, in 2003, and they united their power to make sure they did not face sanctions (and certainly not the Troika). But in 2011, when countries like Ireland, Greece and others were loaded beyond economic recognition with (French and German) banker bailout debt, it was a totally different story.

Francois Hollande, notably, broke the fiscal deficit rules when France wanted to increase military spending after the Bataclan attacks. Military spending is always ok for the 1% - they give the orders - so the increase was approved.

France just announced that they will be under the fiscal deficit rule of 3% this year – one year early. Even if the “fiscal deficit rule” fig leaf has withered from overuse, no matter - austerity will continue anyway in 2018 with 16 billion euros of cuts. Housing and Job Ministries will be slashed, and the major cuts to social security will be paid for by slashing the already poverty-line incomes of the elderly. 

These were just a handful of examples of Eurogroup’s hypocrisy/tyranny/treachery listed by Varoufakis, but rest assured that I could add many others.

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Just for fun - remember Iceland?

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd yet to be against the European project makes you a racist, jingoistic, hillbilly, deplorable….

Iceland - which we all looked at with horror in 2009, assuming they would be in debt for generations AND also living on what must be a frozen and lonely speck of an island - has just been declared the “3^rd happiest country” according to the UN.

I guess Iceland is a bunch of deplorable racists, because they cancelled their plans to join the EU. Well, Iceland has one thing which Marx valued perhaps above all: the right to determine their own destiny in order to fulfill their potential:

“‘Surely there is no room for small sovereign countries in this globalized world,’ I was told by another finance minister during a break in a Eurogroup meeting. ‘Iceland can never truly be sovereign,’ he concluded….However limited these choices might be, Iceland’s body politic retains absolutely authority to hold its elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached within the nation’s exogenous constraints and to strike down every piece of legislation that it has decided upon in the past. In this sense, small, powerless Iceland continues to enjoy full sovereignty while the comparatively omnipotent European Union has been stripped of all forms of sovereignty.”

It’s a pretty bad scene when you can’t even stand up for yourself as much as an Icelander….

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Can we combine the Eurogroup with a parliament? Not in real life....

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat is clear is that the Eurogroup operates with even more power than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan because there is absolutely zero citizen accountability. Right now, the Troika steers the 19 national budgets the way they want, with Germany their public Rottweiler.

But now you say that you want Eurogroup citizen accountability? You mean, regarding the crucial questions of national budgets and are they in line with the rules/sound economic thinking?

Ok then, a “leviathan” in Varoufakis’ words (or perhaps just a “Eurozone Finance Minister”), must be created to accept or reject the 19 national budgets. But you can’t just have an executive branch – you need a legislative branch as well. What is this? A permanent state of emergency, where laws get made by decree and cops are the judges? Of course that’s unacceptable in freedom-loving Western countries like France, don’t be fatuous….

So there are 3 minimum conditions for this Eurozone Parliament:

1) The Eurozone Parliament can hire or fire the new “Eurozone Finance Minister”. 2) It must approve the final contents of every national budget. 3) The Parliament’s powers are clearly defined by a Eurozone Constitution.

This would move the Eurogroup from the current cabal system to 18^th century bourgeois democracy; from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, but well short of the Industrial, Socialist and Digital Revolutions.

Regardless of how ultimately reactionary such an “improvement” would be, Varoufakis acknowledges that all of this speculation is a political impossibility:

“It is crystal clear that at least two of these conditions will not be met. Neither the German government nor the Parisian elites would countenance allowing the euro chamber to hire or fire the leviathan. Nor would they dare embark upon the writing of a euro constitution.”

Obviously, there is no support among the 1% for meeting even the minimum requirements of “modern democracy” for the Eurozone’s citizens.

This means it would take a true revolution in ideology and practice to even get these paltry bourgeois powers added to the Eurozone. And why would The People make a true revolution…and then be content with something so pathetically inadequate and unmodern?

In keeping with a historical theme I elaborated in the previous article of this 7-part series, France’s historic effort for an anti-austerity Eurozone, France in 2017 remains far more progressive than their slightly-more dominant neighbor to the east: Macron wants a finance minister, parliament and budget for the Eurozone…but he’s not going to get it. Merkel has only expressed tepid proposal for a Eurozone Budget Minister, and two things appear likely: he or she will be German, and Germany will insist that the post holds much less power than the other 18 Eurozone members would prefer. After all, why would Germany want to change the status quo? As that article discussed, Germany has been a rabidly anti-communist, pro-American, economically-imperialist country ever since the US decided shortly after WWII that West Germany was to be reindustrialized in order to become their main client state in Europe.

What does have a lot of support from France and Germany is a “European Monetary Fund”, which would simply codify the current bailout fund. Democracy can wait, but safeguarding bank bailouts cannot, LOL….

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The first rule of Eurogroup is: ‘You don’t talk about Eurogroup!’

Such facts make it clear why the Eurogroup cannot be considered compatible with democracy, and thus cannot be supported. Full stop.

You might support creating a new Eurozone or changes to the Eurozone structure, but supporting the current Eurozone is simply morally indefensible, and you don’t have to be an open communist like me to see that.

What will you get if you keep supporting it, like by voting for mainstream politicians or fake “outsiders” like Macron? You will get exactly what has occurred ever since the Eurozone project began in earnest after the fall of the Bretton Woods monetary system/gold standard in 1971 - crisis and austerity across the Eurozone:

“Each one of those heart-rending attempts at monetary union led to the same pattern: a promising beginning that soon degenerated into tears and recriminations as economic warfare erupted and recession impoverished the weakest Europeans.”

Hmmm, efforts at capitalism turned out typically-capitalist results…shocking.

The secret is out about the Eurozone’s false prosperity of the late 1990s and 2000s – it was all built on the ruses of high finance. But – and this is actually really important right now - nothing has been fixed since the 2012 sovereign debt crisis:

“Since then it has been in a deep crisis reinforced largely by the European Union’s denial that there is anything the matter with its currency’s rules, as opposed to their enforcement.”

Should we be surprised that the banker cabal that is the Eurogroup has concocted a “recovery” which has only targeted the needs of bankers?

The Quantitative Easing that is the alleged “fix” has only gone to the 1% and fueled property price bubbles and stock bubbles; the Eurozone’s average growth rate – the “real economy” - since 2011 has been 0.8% - total stagnation. 

What’s amazing is the mass denial - the real propaganda effort - that back in June a pathetic projected 1.7% growth rate for the Eurozone qualified as a “surprise recovery”. Jobs don’t even begin to be created until 1.5%...and unemployment is essentially stuck at record highs in multiple countries. This makes the projected growth rates of 1.8% and 1.7% for the next two years just as pathetically inadequate.

I can best describe the media hypnosis like this: If a bully punched you 10 times yesterday, but only 8 times today, I suppose you could say that “things are getting better”…I would hope that no one paid you for that analysis, however.

What’s certain is that QE has to stop soon, simply because they are nearly out of bonds to purchase.

There’s no reason why they should even be buying bonds from economically healthy, trade surplus Germany, LOL, but the ECB will reach their 33 percent limit of debt in Germany this spring, at the current rate. Germany gets paid first, of course, not the countries which actually need it – Greece is excluded from QE.

And what happens when Germany’s 1% can’t get free money? Well, I can tell you it’s not: they finally start playing nice.

I have another theory: High finance/financial media around the world (and not just Germany) have decided they are not reaping enough from the years of no-questions-asked free money - years of gutting Greece has them sharpening up their Troika tools for the tastier meals of Spain and Italy. Therefore, they are trying to dupe/pressure everyone into stopping QE – thus the crazy nonsense that 1.7% annual growth is a “recovery”.

So, given all these real facts and plausible theories I have listed, the reality is that ECB chief Draghi is expected to announce in October that “tapering” will begin.

I have repeatedly written that when high finance is no longer being placated by the free money of Quantitative Easing, they will go back to what they were doing in 2012: squeezing the national bond markets in Europe and provoking a crisis across the Eurozone.

Here is another, different case of willful blindness: that the Eurozone is the same as the US. Many believe that just because the US had no major bond problems after they started tapering their QE, then the Eurozone won’t have any issues as well. One size fits all, right? I mean – we’re all White here.

But they ARE very, very different regions! Firstly, the US isn’t dumb enough to be run by a Eurogroup.

Secondly, the risks in the national bond markets for Eurozone nations are not anywhere as secure in comparison with the United States. They weren’t as secure in 2012, and the Eurogroup’s policies have not corrected these differences in risk whatsoever in 2017. Nor has the Eurogroup strengthened the resilience of the “real economies” in their member nations – indeed, austerity policies and labor code rollbacks have worsened the real engine of the “real economy”: the People (everyday consumers, for our capitalist readers).

So even if Draghi kicks the can down the road for a few months, a crisis is inevitable. For the reasons I’ve listed and because: this is capitalism.

And this is where Varoufakis’ lack of leftism – his failure to see capitalism as incorruptible pattern of guaranteed corruption – blinds him to the reality that the Eurozone should not be saved with his right-wing solutions, but scrapped completely in favor of central planning, safety nets, regulations on cabals: modern socialism.

The Eurozone is still as primed for collapse as ever, but that is the title of the next article in this series.

And as regards the Eurogroup…what else needs to be said?

These are our masters, and it is the IMF, ECB, and banker-loving, ex-banker finance ministers who pull the strings. All of us in the Eurozone must dance, even if these mobsters have already broken so many legs and backs.

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This is the third article I have written in a 7-part series on today’s Eurozone which will combine some of Varoufakis’ ideas with my 8 years of covering the crisis first-hand from Paris.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Varoufakis book review: Rock star economist but fake-leftist politician

Why no Petroeuro? or France’s historic effort to create a permanently anti-austerity Eurozone

The hopelessly corrupt structure of the Eurozone

The Eurozone: still as primed for collapse as ever

The Eurozone has likely entered its final calendar year, contraction coming

The English-speaking world’s fear of calling communism, ‘communism’

Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99% 

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I can easily prove the leftist utility of bitcoins by relating one question I commonly hear: “Ramin, can you please take this medicine to my family the next time you visit Iran?”

The US produces more than half of all new medicines, but there is an embargo on Iran (and Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, etc.): With bitcoins, Iranians can circumvent these criminal, terroristic restrictions and get medicines which sick people are being cruelly denied.

So I see that bitcoins can save lives. Today.

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Iran needs medicine, Cuba needs concrete, Venezuela needs toilet paper – bitcoins can be used for all these things…IF the left would immediately get involved with them.

One thing is absolutely, undeniably clear about bitcoins: The market is absolutely exploding for them in a way absolutely unseen in any field since the dot-com boom.

This process began in April, and it is fascinating. The mainstream media has only just picked up on this fact.

That means the average person is totally unaware of the technological and philosophical innovation/revolution which supports bitcoins: technically, it’s the Nakamoto consensus (a distributed consensus algorithm), but the marketing phrase is “block chain technology”.

And crucially for the future success of bitcoins: Leftists have no idea what the heck is going on.

I think bitcoins could be the biggest financial weapon seen in ages to contest capitalism. Therefore, if the left cedes this current formational period of cryptocurrency to the right, or to individualistic libertarianism, it will be an enormous setback for society, socialism and anti-imperialism.

But you won’t read that in Western mainstream media – you only hear about making money with bitcoins. To be fair, that has been incredibly newsworthy as well.

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Bitcoin has minted billionaires since May

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’m late to the bitcoin party – I imagine that everyone except the inventor feels that way – but it is mind-blowing to see the spectacular growth rate charts this year of not just Bitcoin, but all the cryptocurrencies. Click on those links and look at the tail end of those growth charts – you will be staggered.

If you have even heard about Bitcoin, you might have only heard the word “volatility”. However, take a medium-term view, and you’ll find that Bitcoin itself (capital B, and the industry leader) has gained more some $50 billion in market capitalization since March. That is a gain bigger than the size of Ford Motor Company…in less than 7 months. Besides Bitcoin, a hundred others are booming as well.

People like to rank bank size by balance sheet – its assets. But banks generally hold $10 in assets for every $1 in capital. This means that market capitalization - the total market value of a company's outstanding shares of stock – is a more accurate assessment of its worth. Add up the market capitalization of all the bitcoins and you get $135 billion – that would make them the 9th^th-largest bank in the world.

Again…this has happened in just seven months. Are you interested yet?

Yes, there is drastic short-term volatility – I had to postpone publishing this article to write this one, which explained China’s correct ban on IPOs (which can be “pump and dump” scams to con investors), and their freeze on exchanging bitcoin for yuan to make sure there wasn’t an exodus of much-needed capital (and which is not a “ban on bitcoins”).

But the long-term pattern is clear for all bitcoins: not much beyond novelty interest for five or so years, and then WHAM – straight up since May.

The reason for this is actually the rise of the #2 bitcoin, Ethereum, which offered a technological adaptation which has created tremendous ease, flexibility and more potential uses for bitcoins.

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Why the heck haven’t you heard about this?

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ere’s Bloomberg getting excited about it in July; here’s less forward-thinking Fox News Business getting on board in August, complete with a financial analyst boasting how her father was a mob enforcer (an excellent soil to grow a fervent capitalist/anti-socialist).

The mainstream media is just starting to get clued in about bitcoins, but not really. That's because they are terrible when it comes to crypto-currencies.

They are terrible because they are attached to the current neoliberal/austerity dogma; they accept the Western worldview without thinking.

And one really needs to break with that dogma to see two things clearly: 1) the current Western financial system rests upon never-arrived trickle-down Reaganomics, nothing-backed Quantitative Easing, formerly-illegal stock buybacks, and near-recession growth in the “real economy” since the 2008 Great Recession began. 2) Mainstream media cannot see that those are the reasons why bitcoin was deemed necessary to create, why it is fervently supported, and why there has been a flood of scores of billions into the safe(r) haven of bitcoins.

But those in the non-mainstream media and those who aren’t in the 1% (and I am in both categories) have every reason to question the current order. Question that order, and you will despise it, despise it and you will invest and use bitcoins…even if it all crashes.

I’m aware that’s a bold statement, but they talk of bitcoin “evangelists” because it really is a faith-based movement: They are on jihad – war against (high finance) sin. LOL, it’s too bad that many of them think they’ll be Raptured Up when not just capitalism dies but all governments as well - I’m on board with only the former….

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Block chain – it’s going to change a lot of things, and I mean A LOT

What is bitcoin?

Well, that is not really the key question. Most people know it is a “crypto-currency”, an e-currency, a cyber-currency, etc.

The key question is: what makes this product special, right? The answer is: bitcoin is when "block chain" technology was unveiled.

"Bitcoin" is just the main product name out there right now, but "block chain technology" is being described as a "foundational" technology. Like…the wheel, or the internet.

This link explains block chain technology from a purely scientific perspective. But if you don’t have 10 minutes or a fast internet connection…:

In a few sentences: It's a decentralized ledger system. To give an example: you pay Visa, and Visa records the transaction on their ledger. Visa has the only copy - it is centralized. With block chain, you have a chain of thousands of computers all verifying your transaction and making that record public - there are thousands of permanent copies.

It is open, it is communal, it relies on consensus and it takes away the power of Visa by ending their monopoly over the information. Monopolies create opportunities for corruption, especially private monopolies, which have no government oversight to protect the People. Who does not already view banks and credit cards as havens of corruption?

People predict that block chain technology will revolutionize innumerable fields like, for example, music royalties, making it actually possible to earn a living at making music: 10 million computers will be monitoring all the world's radio stations, and Lionel Ritchie’s "Dancing on the Ceiling" is played by 97.9 WLUP FM radio in Chicago. Then, 9.8 million computers will correctly register and confirm among each other that Lionel Ritchie's "Dancing on the Ceiling" was just played, and thus Lionel is owed a royalty by 97.9 WLUP. The current system is: 97.9 FM WLUP tells the royalty companies they played "Dancing on the Ceiling"...and just trust them that they only played it once that day. Or it's something not too far from that. The point is: no SINGLE computer is responsible for holding the information in block chain, and the permanent record is perpetually public…unless the entire world decides to ban the internet/stop using electricity.

This also has great potential for the way we vote: 10,000 computers will examine an electronic ballot and agree on its validity. If some hacker tries to force in 900,000 votes for Ramin Mazaheri, 98% of the computers will correctly realize that this is not a valid vote and signal that the system has been breached. While good governance certainly loses out in this particular scenario, at least democracy will be upheld. 

But what appears clear is that there have been enough technological breakthroughs in computing to give rise to a revolutionary new process (block chain). It's like Ford creating the assembly line...for publicly-monitored high-speed computing. Block chain is the technological/philosophical breakthrough, and applying that to the financial process and ending their current monopoly is what bitcoiners are investing in.

So bitcoins are not the big deal – block chain is. I would say that if you don't see the big deal about block chain, then you don't see why Bitcoin is different. So learn a bit more and think about it – you’ll see that by making everything permanently public, the public wins instead of the moneyed class.

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With socialism, Bitcoin can be a semi-capitalist tool against capitalism

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o me and many others, the political beauty of block chain is the decentralization of power. This means, in turn, the empowerment of the individual, which, I note, is the goal of communism/socialism. Empowerment of the individual, and creating a society where individuals can reach their full potential, is perhaps the fundamental tenet of Marxism.  The mainstream media certainly has misled people for decades on that….

What I wish every wayward libertarian bitcoiner would realize is this: The philosophy of block chain is already being applied politically in modern socialist countries!

This excellent article on Cuba’s 2030 Plan for social and economic policy  shows how the 2030 Plan is, “the most studied, discussed and re-discussed documents in the history of the Revolution,” per Raul Castro.

In 2007 Cuba’s government created “Great Debate” forums to discuss their common future and so people could propose solutions. That produced the Guidelines, which were made public for 6 months. Nine of 11 million people participated in the ensuing debates, and 68% of the guidelines were amended. The redraft went to their (far, far more representative) National Assembly.

This is block chain – open, communal, consensus, decentralized - in democratic governance!

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hina is very similar – they spend prolifically on surveys and public opinion polls because their democracy is driven by data. This excellent article details their communal, responsive, finely-tuned system for formulating and slowly implementing government policies in another example of “block chain governance”.

And the results for China are undeniable: Popular support for government policies, voter participation rates, trust & satisfaction rates with the government, the belief that the government is run for the people’s benefit instead of special interests: these rates are all staggeringly higher in China than in Western nations because reams of popular data support the legislation implemented by the government. 

Do we not realize that bitcoiners also have been duped by TINA -There Is No Alternative – just like the average person?

Leftists must explain to early bitcoin adopters – who are guiding the development of bitcoin, who could be filthy rich, who are open to new ideas, who could help design systems to help money flow to embargoed countries – that the problem is not “all governments”, it is “Western, capitalist governments”. 

“Public opinion is our guideline for action,” was said by Mao; Macron just ignored public opinion to ram through a 2^nd rollback to the labor code to change France to a part-time, high-poverty, high-inequality, high instability, artificially-low unemployment rate, US-emulating economy. Again, bitcoiners, it is YOUR government, not ALL governments.

But, in a shock to no one who reads my articles, the West’s fake-leftists have no idea what the heck is going on about most anything, including bitcoins and the block chain revolution.

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Leftists must embrace bitcoins immediately and without reservation

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ight now, bitcoins are continuing the rather unfortunate trend in the US of libertarians being at the crest of the political wave. Their anti-authority/pro-liberty/anti-spying stance is, after all, quite compatible with countless aspects of socialism in the digital age. True leftists have repeatedly lamented that fake-leftists dismiss libertarianism, the Tea Party, Trumpers, etc., without even examining their ideologies and giving credit when it is justified.

But this is the reality: The potential of bitcoins to empower the individual AND the collective is greatly threatened by the libertarianism/voluntarism which currently dominates the bitcoin community of early adopters. Their view is typical of the Arizona rancher who forgets that he sits on stolen Apache land, refuses to pay for air conditioning in government offices or schools and cares for nothing but ensuring his own prosperity.

In short, American libertarianism is synonymous with “radical individualism”: that’s why during the recent two hurricanes CNN could interview an economist for a segment asking, “Is price gouging during emergencies a good thing?” and actually get away with it.

No, you must be banned from selling bottled water for $99 per case in hurricane-hit areas; yes, the government should requisition your stocks for trying, you anti-social bastard. But this idea of “my rights, my rights, MY RIGHTS, MY PROPERTY”, this complete abdication of collective solidarity, is widespread in America, and CNN likely added a few more converts….

During the hurricanes the US media constantly repeated: “Now THIS is where the government should step in,” as in, “Finally, we have a good use for regulation”. This is a renunciation of the idea that an individual has social responsibility, and it is morally appalling.

Again, bitcoiners, the problem is YOUR capitalist government: Cuba’s hurricane preparation is the best in the region, with officials who were tasked with post-Hurricane Katrina saying “We could be learning from them.” You are 15 times more likely to be killed by a hurricane in the US than if you are in Cuba, and that’s despite the international blockade on things like building materials leading to innumerable, dangerous old buildings.  Bitcoin can circumvent this and reward good governance; too many bitcoiners think “good governance” is an oxymoron.

Well, if bitcoin is going to improve the world – and the many bitcoin evangelists swear that it will (and I believe them) – they must leaven their quest for personal empowerment/"MY rights", with the moral demand for collective unity that is only found in socialism.

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How can bitcoin ‘stop the betrayals of high finance’ if all they do is create a bitcoin cabal?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have proven that block chain in governance already exists in socialism. Many people have noted the way science and society have reflected each other throughout human history, so this is more confirmation that socialists like Cuba and China are firmly in the vanguard.

Block chain exists in socialism, but not in the extreme-individualist ideologies of capitalism or libertarianism. It exists in anarchism, yes, but bitcoin’s anti-statist “voluntarism” is so self-centered so as to not be worthy of “anarchism”.

Therefore, if the true Left doesn’t get immediately involved in the bitcoin discussion and swing some minds towards socialism…I don’t see how bitcoins will truly be different from oligarchical capitalism?

Yes, this may be “gold rush fever”, but many talk of a market capitalization of $1-$5 trillion dollars. That’s because this is not just a corporation – a whole new industry is being created, so it’s bigger than Amazon…plus Apple, plus Facebook, plus….

So, to the early adopters poised to be filthy rich because your tech, gamer and Dungeons and Dragons friends clued you in early on bitcoins and were fortunate enough to have money to invest: You may not voluntarily want to redistribute your bitcoin wealth…but society needs you to.

And if you don’t, we deplorables in the 99% will win and take that commodity/way to store value in the end, too, because redistribution is collective justice, if not individual justice.

Bitcoin users – will you be price gouging when the 21 million bitcoins are completely mined? If so, why don’t we just stick with Visa, Western Union and the Pentagon?

Are you engaging in immoral bitcoin stock speculation, and “gaming” the market to make a quick killing? Then how are you any morally superior to all the other lazy, immoral high finance punks who make a living at “the rich man’s gambling”?

And now to the painfully few leftists, especially socialists/Marxists, who take the time to cursorily examine Bitcoin and say: “Bah, this is just pure capitalism. Therefore, it must be bad.”

Well, simply revisit my story about Iran and medicines. A Third World Socialist looks at bitcoins and says: “Yes, Bitcoin is capitalist from the perspective of ivory tower ideology, but this has enormous potential as a weapon for anti-imperialism and against rapacious capitalism. And we need and want victory – not just change - now.”

Every dollar in bitcoin is a dollar not in the hands of high finance!

It is in the hands of the rapidly-expanding bitcoin collective, which has no “Central Bank President”. Every dollar worth of bitcoin sent to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Palestine – and Poland, the Philippines, and South Korea – is a dollar which has circumvented the imperialist/fascist centers of the US, England, France, Germany and Japan. A bitcoin dollar avoids the big banks, the SWIFT system of American financial power, the gangster credit card companies and the central banks of the neo-imperial nations!

Governments are claiming that bitcoin can be used to “fund terrorism”. First of all, paper money is used to fund terrorism – should we ban that? Secondly, this is an obvious smear campaign designed to scare away the average person, and to provide justification for unjust crackdowns on bitcoins.

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This is an enormous development on 3 enormous levels

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]r maybe I’m wrong? Bitcoin is, of course, highly speculative. But the fact is that 150 top companies have already signed on with bitcoin #2, Ethereum, so they are going to be around a long time and will make money for investors.

But Bitcoin (capital B) is really the big deal that needs to be supported. It’s the rebel, the revolutionary, the one that governments fear they can’t control, and the one that was designed from the start to be a currency which cannot be manipulated by bankers or central bankers.

That’s why giving $100 to them is more of a leftist action then donating $100 to Amnesty or some other charity. Bitcoin already is a major tool against capitalism – if we can make it too big to stop, the results could be globe-changing.

But it needs to be supported with investments.

Heck, you might make a ton of money and become a leftist benefactor thanks to bitcoin!

And it’s useful: Can you exchange it for dollars? Of course, otherwise what’s the point?

Can you buy things in a store with it? Yes, increasingly – but some merchants would rather pay Visa’s 1-3% fees per transaction instead of around $0.25 per transaction (it fluctuates).

A lot of migrant workers don’t know that this exists, so they keep losing $30 to Western Union or $45 to their bank in order to chivalrously send their slave wages back home. We need to get them aware of this.

So, the much-ballyhooed showdown (well, I’m ballyhooing it) between “bitcoin socialism” and “bitcoin libertarianism” is actually going to be fought and won in the next few years. Socialists need to get involved now, and realize that bitcoins are a space where we can evangelize for leftist economics with enormous potential results. 

People love to take bitcoin to the extreme (yes, will not be using ONLY bitcoins in our lifetime) and that obscures the very immediate, very real ways bitcoin can help RIGHT NOW, which I proved with Iran and medicines. 

I currently understand bitcoins as an ethical advancement perhaps unseen since Islamic finance, so I’ll continue to be a journalist tracking a big story and continue to share the wealth and tell people about bitcoin/block chain.

And that’s the final key: unlike other capitalist ventures, where you keep your newfound knowledge a secret for exploitation, this whole bitcoin currency/method of savings/societal change only works if more people learn about it, use it, and faithfully hold their stocks long-term in order to make it “too big to fail”.

Fiat/paper money is based on faith – in government. Bitcoin is based on faith – in each other.

That is socialism.

Wake up! Bitcoins are radical, indeed, and we’ve barely begun.

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The bottom line is: For the EU to work – for it to be of benefit to the average person – it has to follow France’s historical plan.

That has always been the case, and it has also never been the case: the flaw in the plan remains selfish West Germany (now just Germany). 

This seems like common knowledge in the Eurozone, and certainly in smaller Eurozone nations such as Greece. But according to former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis: “…Paris bears greater responsibility than Berlin for the euro’s faults.”

To be honest, I don’t even have a dog in this bilateral fight, but this declaration doesn’t correspond with the facts. It doesn’t even correspond with the facts as presented by Varoufakis himself in his book, “And the Poor Must Suffer What They Must?”

In a previous article I debunked his book as being riven with fake-leftism; I provided abundant proof that Varoufakis is as “Marxist” about as much as Marx was from Mars.

I write this article because Varoufakis doesn’t seem to believe what every European outside of Germany already knows, and even what he has written himself: France has actually been right all these decades…IF one views the construction of the Eurozone through an authentically-leftist and anti-imperialist perspective (which Varoufakis lacks).

This is the second article in a seven-part series on the Eurozone, and the next article is “The hopelessly corrupt structure of the Eurozone and the Eurogroup” – that should give some indication of how little I support this “pan-European project”/banker cabal.

But blaming France instead of Germany is simply incorrect, and this article aims to remedy that.

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France’s Eurozone: A tool against American imperialism & for ‘pan-European capitalist Stalinism’

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]e, I’m a communist – I like any country which is anti-capitalist, which means I fundamentally oppose Germany, France, and the Eurozone. But the historical reality is that France is more prone to tolerating communist thought than West Germany ever was: France’s legislature was 30% communist from 1946-1958, while the communist party was banned in West Germany.

The Eurozone is not a new project – its roots go back to the 6-nation cartel the European Coal and Steel Community, established in 1951.

And this is my thesis, totally ignored by Varoufakis: France may never have been more than one-third communist, but it was Marxist-influenced enough to realize that modern socio-economic policies are needed to fight imperialists – in France’s case, the United States. They realized that France was in a fight to keep its sovereignty, and so it conceived of the European Union as a Franco-German bulwark against imperial domination.

Now, a hard-core leftist might respond: “No, the 1% in France always conceived of the Eurozone as a capitalist cartel to enrich themselves and care nothing for their fellow citizens.” Well, I salute you – you can click onwards to other intellectual fare you find more interesting, but I suggest you read on because history’s nuances are interesting, even if they do not correspondent to our wishes.

What France has historically proposed for this European sovereignty-protecting bulwark can be termed: “pan-European capitalist Stalinism.” This is not as radical as it sounds, because we can all agree that on the spectrum of Western capitalism France is placed on the left-wing. But more proof for this thesis will come later….

I will prove that France’s machinations did contain an admirable, anti-imperialist goal: I think only a fake-leftist like Varoufakis would refuse to entertain such a view.

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Since 1965 France has been openly opposing the hegemony of US imperialism in Western Europe

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ooner than any other Western European country, the French understood that the Bretton Woods monetary system (when accounts began being regularly settled not in gold but in dollars) was not, as Varoufakis absurdly believes, “…meant as a balanced system of international trade and financial flows,” but as a plan for US domination by the dollar.

Europe’s participation meant it supported American living standards and subsidized American companies. That the US could print unlimited dollars for unlimited imports was famously deemed an “exorbitant privilege” by France, but postwar France could do nothing about it.....

Until 1965, when it became clear that there was an explosion in the US deficit. Wars in Korea, Vietnam and vast domestic spending had reduced their control of gold stocks significantly: In 1949 the US had 22,000 tons of gold, 75% of all central bank reserves and 44% of the above-ground stock; by 1960 that had dwindled to 16,000 tons, 47% of central bank reserves and 25% of the above-ground stock. Theoretically, the US had to pay their debts on demand with US gold. But the trade imbalance meant that there were increasingly insufficient gold reserves to ensure repayment of foreign debts.

And as soon as this weakness became clear in 1965, France and Charles de Gaulle ('Le Grand Charles') openly demanded a reform of the Bretton Woods system and a return to the gold standard. "Perhaps never before had a chief of state launched such an open assault on the monetary power of a friendly nation,” said Time magazine in a February 12, 1965, article. The idea that the monetary domination of the US was “friendly” is something which maybe London or Berlin would accept, but Paris saw through the fiction.

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But the French were not all bold words and no action when it came to fighting US domination: Also in 1965, De Gaulle sent a ship to the US and demanded the removal of 350 tons of gold from the New York Federal Reserve - $23 billion in today’s value. This is more than the total Ghadaffi held in reserve to launch his proposed pan-African Dinar.

Varoufakis both admiringly and dismissingly writes: “No one can deny that, when it comes to semiology, the French are unbeatable.”  Yes, France’s move was full of metaphoric poetry…but it was also a damned intelligent and bold move to ensure their sovereignty and to fight a very real US imperialism.

In 1966 France withdrew from NATO and forced their headquarters to move from Paris to Belgium.

In 1967 de Gaulle was the first to withdraw from the West’s London Gold Pool, which had been hastily constructed in 1961 to defend Bretton Woods. France withdrew more significant gold stocks, further fighting the hegemon.

Finally, let’s recall the foundational Élysée Treaty of friendship between France and Germany, signed back in 1963 – it was a clear attempt to separate West Germany from the Anglosphere. The US was livid at France’s attempt at undermining the US-led order: “I can hardly overestimate the shock produced in Washington by this action or the speculation that followed, particularly in the intelligence community,” said top US diplomat George Ball. 

So the French clearly saw what was coming and they repeatedly acted against the new Rome - for this they deserve credit.  The English did not see it coming or were too closely tied to Caesar. West Germany was pro-USA all the way, for reasons I will soon elaborate.

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France wanted a bold partnership with (still-fascist) Germany…against the US

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]es, as a leftist I see the Eurozone as a capitalist cartel…but, in a very real sense, at least it’s an anti-American capitalist cartel, no?

It’s an interesting and important distinction. Theoretically, if the capitalist elite in France could fend off US imperialism they would have more wealth which would not trickle down to the 99%, right?

And let’s not forget – the US forced France into anti-Americanism: de Gaulle was famously not invited to Yalta, where Stalin, FDR and his lap dog Churchill divvied up the spoils. France knew it was on a lower rung, and they didn’t like the view of an American boot.

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But as soon as the British soldiers returned they did something extremely intelligent: they kicked out the alcoholic, reactionary, racist Churchill and voted in the Labor Party. You can imagine that - in rabidly anti-socialist America - this made Washington very suspicious. The US immediately decided that better a fascist than a socialist (the same decision they routinely make in 2017), called off the in-progress plan to deindustrialize Germany and instead tapped West Germany for their imperial collaborators. That is why Germany is the industrial powerhouse of Europe today even though they lost WWII, make no mistake about it: it was US patronage.

When one looks at history from an anti-imperialist/Marxist perspective, we see that the French elite (capitalist, of course) clearly concocted the idea of Franco-German-led European unification to preserve their own sovereignty and to counterbalance the plans of the US.

However, Varoufakis misses this completely – he repeatedly presents the French push for a “European Union” not as a way to stave off US domination, but as way to dominate Germany: “For the French elites, a common currency with Germany was an attempt to neutralize Germany, indeed to conquer the Bundesbank without firing a shot.”

“Neutralize” and “conquer” can have two very, very different connotations. By the mid-1960s French elites were well aware that they could not compete industrially with America’s creation of a German Frankenstein, so they wanted to join with Germany. Thus it is in this sense of “neutralizing” a superior power that Varoufakis is correct, but not “neutralize” as in kill.

France wanted to not be conquered by the US-German alliance, so they kept proposing a Franco-German (capitalist) alliance.

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What France assumed everyone wanted: Anti-austerity economics across Europe

LOL, and we still want this today in the Eurozone! The French were right then and now.

The French were also right in 1981: the French Left swept to power, and with more anti-capitalist fervor than any Western nation had ever seen. Labor was united, experienced, bold and ready to lead; capitalism was only taking the very first step of high-finance Ponzi-ism; Mitterrand’s “Common Project” was the most far-left of any economic project in any major Western economy ever.

The truth is that France had a genuine commitment to a pan-Europeanism guided by a mixed socialist/pro-growth/not-rabidly-capitalist economic plan.

And yet France was forced to renounce it in favor of austerity. There are two reasons for that, but one genuine reason is that France mistakenly assumed that Germany would fight for a capitalism which was not totally modeled on American ruthlessness.

“And so President Mitterrand’s government abandoned anti-austerity policies on the dubious grounds that austerity could only be defeated Europe-wide once the French economy was subjected to doses of anti-austerity sufficiently large to placate the money markets and to convince Germany’s elites to bow to the superior wisdom of French economic policymaking.” (my bolding)

So, you see, France’s economic policymaking IS superior – defeating austerity on a continental level is what everybody should want!

Yes, as a Marxist I am skeptical and unimpressed by France’s mixed socialism, but I note that - for a capitalist project - this is a far, far more humane program than Germany’s harsh capitalism where austerity’s goal is greater inequality with Germany perpetually in surplus.

France’s crucial error was just that -they failed to realize how completely capitalistic Germany is: Grandma was a Nazi, and Pops was a US boot-licker – no wonder the kids in Germany think Merkel’s austerity against Greece is justified. Germany remains imperialistic in 2017 – they have not changed.

France’s failure is one of naiveté, which is far less of a sin than Germany’s heartless austerity. And France did not change this somewhat-noble effort from 1981 all the way up to Francois Hollande:

“…(Mitterrand) embarked on a project that is with us to this very day: to convince German voters that monetary union was Germanizing France and exporting Teutonic discipline to Latin Europe, turning grasshoppers into ants rather than importing French sloth into Germany.”

There are so many things wrong with this quote from Varoufakis: “Teutonic discipline” is absurd – they have profited from untold billions from the US and did not reinvent the wheel all alone; “French sloth” is absurd – France’s productivity rates are higher than Germany’s and among the best in the world; “convince German voters” is the biggest absurdity because there has never been an EU-related referendum in Germany. It is the capitalist and media elites of Germany who have duped German voters into not realizing that the 99% is significantly poorer thanks to the perpetual “race to the bottom/beggar thy neighbor” that is modern capitalism: The Eurozone has not brought prosperity to the average German, as inequality has risen sharply this century and their poverty rate of 16% is much higher than in France.

But Varoufakis is correct that for more than three decades France has been trying to “convince” Germany into giving up their surplus dominance and, literally, sharing the wealth with Europe’s deficit nations. Of course, of course, of course – you cannot have a surplus without a deficit: France is Marxist-influenced enough to accept that, but not Germany.

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France’s ‘pan-European capitalist Stalinism’

“Instead of the socialism-in-one-country that he had promised French voters in 1981, (Mitterrand) ended up espousing cartelized-corporatism-on-one-continent….”

A true Marxist would point out that this statement affirms – hold on to your socks, fake-leftists – the genius of Stalinism: By giving up the coordinated international revolution of Trotskyism and allowing the USSR to prosper all alone, Stalin made his great theoretical contribution to communism.

Yes, international revolution is the goal, but there is no reason why socialism cannot take hold in one country if its neighbors want to remain backward – the enemies of communism are too great, and we should do what we can, when we can do it. Just because German revolutionaries famously failed the join Soviet Revolution in 1917, there was no reason why Russians should have abandoned communism. (Sheesh…how many times is Germany gonna let everyone down...?)

The solidly real yang of Stalinism provides an indispensable base of support for Socialist victories to grow elsewhere, which is the inevitable and magnetic yin of Trotskyism – the two can never be separated, nor should they.

(Sidebar 1: As an Iranian I can tell you this: If we had waited around for Trotskyism to catch global fire we’d still be shoveling the Shah’s mud! Countries have a right to go it alone. And where would Syria be without Iranian support, or Palestine and Lebanon for that matter?) 

(Sidebar 2: When you read leftists attempting to denigrate France’s unions as “Stalinist”, this is what they mean: they are looking out for France’s unionists/labor and are not sufficiently connected to the international movement. To be fair, France’s unions have repeatedly shown a self-centered lack of solidarity during the age of austerity by selling each other out via cutting side deals with the government.)

So what France has been essentially proposing since WWII is “Stalinism-on-one-continent”, or at least the version provided by those on the left-wing of capitalism: France’s plan is based upon the idea that – gasp! – austerity is not good, while growth policies are.

It’s important to remember that this mirrors France’s own postwar economic model: the “Mixed Economy”. This is when the state gives short- and long-term targets for industry to meet, and aids them to achieve it. There is planning, but it’s not at the USSR’s level. There is state ownership, but not at the USSR’s level. There is also a commitment to a decent social safety net (but not at the USSR’s level) for things like health and education because, again, austerity is simply not sustainable: some investments must be made…assuming that you want society to gain empowerment and not just the 1%.

France’s Mixed Economy is also not at the level of Japan, where the state’s role was much larger (until the mid-1980s), and where economic success was far greater.

It’s not a terrible plan…for capitalism.

The problem is: it’s far, far too left for West Germany to follow and always has been. West Germany (now just “Germany) sees, as they stood on America’s shoulders while France could only crane their neck, that they can control everything; they can make a “United States of Europe” with Berlin as Washington DC, Frankfurt as New York City, and everyone else as flyover country full of poor deplorables.

Continent-wide anti-austerity was a decent goal, and France was right to push for it.

But France’s consistency is ultimately a foolish one; it is France’s fault for believing international solidarity plays any role at all in capitalism. I’m not going to descend into foolish stereotyping and say, “It’s those damned selfish Germans again!” – I’m just going to say, “It’s those damned selfish capitalists again!”

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US, Germany & high finance versus everybody

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nglophone, capitalist media is more than happy to keep relaying Germany’s absurd moral attacks on deficit nations, all while ignoring France’s pleas: In 1992 France’s prime minster talked of a “victory of German selfishness over international solidarity,” and I’m sure it was rarely relayed in the Anglosphere.

German selfishness is the secondary reason France’s anti-austerity push failed in 1981 and ever since, but the primary reason was: the fundamental nature of capitalism, where high-finance wages war on any nation threatening their dominance.

I must quickly lay out the true reason why Mitterrand failed to implement socialism in his own country: Despite their huge democratic mandate to end austerity and restore growth polices, France was immediately foiled by high finance and currency speculators.

Capital flight from France to Germany immediately took place with Mitterrand’s coming victory, putting the franc in immediate peril. Long-term borrowing rates (10-year bond) went from 9.6% in March 1979 all the way to 17.3% in May 1981, when Mitterrand was elected.

The franc was devalued 3 times, but Mitterrand was forced into submission. He made his U-turn in March 1983, and by March 1986 10-year bonds were down to 9.3%.

What happened was that Germany and the Bundesbank, knowing that high-finance was philosophically in their corner and betting against France with every dollar they could borrow, joined with global high finance and professional currency speculators to strangle France in order to compel them to backtrack on communist-inspired ideas.

If high finance cared at all for democracy and not a possible redistribution of their billions in personal savings, they would have supported France’s anti-austerity plan.

France’s could not boldly defy high finance and keep devaluing their currency until growth took hold for another crucial reason: they would have had to abandon the new European Monetary System (EMS) – the direct predecessor of the euro. This currency rate linkage was France’s brainchild for their long-term goal: wooing Germany away from the US and towards European integration.

To stay in the EMS, of course, meant violating the people’s will: “It was the first time a left-leaning government was to discard an anti-austerity agenda in favour of remaining true to the iron logic of Europe’s monetary union.”

Without high finance’s support France was unable to follow its own independent, sovereign, democratically-supported path.

It must be taken as axiomatic that the 1% will make war with any leftist government in the exact same manner.

(I point you to examine the “War of the Triple Alliance”, the “original sin” of post-Bolivar South America and the continent’s bloodiest war ever. In short, Paraguay had totally shut out foreign investors in favor of economic protectionism and internal development…and created a place where poverty ceased to exist. British and French bankers put the dogs (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) on them, and 70% of Paraguayan males were slaughtered for not wanting any part of foreign “loans”.)

France was pushing leftism, ok, but Mitterrand was no Khomeini. France’s leaders and their people lacked the revolutionary fervor of places like 1979 Iran to go it alone and say “to hell with high finance”.  Indeed, such a path is not for the faint-hearted: the West’s 1% foisted war with Iraq on revolutionary Iran (just as they did with Paraguay, just as they would have with Cuba if anyone in that area had a navy besides the US), and a truly deadly Cold War has existed ever after.

Given the lack of revolutionary fervor, France’s best route to the fundamentally-limited grassroots sovereignty offered by capitalism may truly have been to keep pushing the Franco-German alliance, and to stay in the EMS. France was truly fighting an imperial hegemon (while obviously also being a neo-imperial hegemon themselves) and Varoufakis and others totally miss this.

And France was on the right track to at least ameliorate capitalism - Germany was wrong to refuse any sort of economic solidarity. It’s appalling that this is still the case!

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Creeping fake-leftism culminates with Hollande, but are the deplorables infected?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he “Ponzi stability” of the 1980s and beyond blinded the French Left to the reality of class war, deluding them into thinking that high finance would ever share their wealth with the 99%.

“…Mitterrand’s unique achievement of co-opting much of the traditionally recalcitrant French Left to (French Finance Minister Jacques) Delors’s cause – effectively into support for the conservative North-Central European cartel.”

Instead of supporting communism - which will always be genuine “leftism” – the West’s left opted for pan-European cartelism. It took the European Sovereign Debt crisis to re-unveil the anti-social hydra that is high finance and capitalism. 

We now see that Hollande’s presidency fits right in-line with this leftist analysis: In 2012 he was supposed to lead a “Latin Bloc” to push Germany into – as usual – ending austerity, and to make them accept the realities of surpluses and deficits in a multi-national project.

High finance was extremely worried back in the spring of 2012 - a national bond crisis kicked off in Europe. Hollande arrived in May and by June Spain went up to the unsustainable 7% bond rate for the first time since the Euro’s creation in 1999. Bond rates got so high that Spain and Italy would soon have to fight off calls for a Troika-led gutting like in Greece.

But France was not touched in 2012: 10-year bonds stood at 2.75% when Hollande was elected, and they fell immediately and constantly. French 10-year bonds stood at 0.81% when Hollande left office…in disgrace. 

How can we explain that there was no capitalist war on France even though Hollande campaigned on promises of ending austerity, funding infrastructure and saying that “high finance is my enemy”? Varoufakis has Hollande’s number, calling him “the meekest of leaders” – high finance knew he was a patsy and the thinnest of paper tigers. Hollande put up no resistance to western Germany-led capitalism once he took office; high finance knew he would implement their will, and so there was apparently no need to punish or even threaten France.

Varoufakis, writing in 2015, ends on a high note for France, despite Germany’s continued rejection of pro-growth policies and pan-European solidarity.

“France is important in that, despite rapid decline after its ill-fated attempt to capture the Bundesbank, it remains difficult to subdue and almost impossible to absorb into a modern-day version of Bismarck’s unitary empire.”

I have a couple of interesting theories for this, so please indulge me.

France will never be subdued by Germany for a reason which is almost beyond economics: food. By nature, France will always remain powerful for the simple fact that God has designated their territory to be the breadbasket of Western Europe. Somebody MUST produce the food, and the global economy is not in a place where faraway nations can do it much cheaper than your neighbors. France’s agricultural production is 18.1% of the EU total, and that is 35% more than Germany, 47% more than Italy and 71% more than Spain – forget about Netherlands and their flower-dominated agriculture, that’s not the same thing. France leads in nearly all the key categories: cereal (wheat for bread), beef and poultry. Add in being first in potatoes and they have all the staples covered. Their dominance here is as huge as German dominance in manufacturing even if it is worth less overall than manufacturing.

I don’t think this geographic determinism can be easily dismissed. I think it is too bottom-line oriented to try to get past a simple fact of life so quickly forgotten by ivory tower urbanites: somebody’s gotta produce the damned food. The fact that France comprises top-quality farmland, while others sit on rocky mountains or in bad weather zones, must mean something. It certainly always has meant a great deal….

Secondly, France has also long-known what the US knows about their huge deficit: their nuclear power prohibits Germany or anyone else from ever collecting. Who is going to invade France? So of course they don’t mind running up the bill….

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Macron: the death knell of decades of fighting American-German imperialism

Of course…that is predicated on France having a leadership which was actually looking out for their sovereign interests.

Is it too late, now that France voted in Macron, the uber-globalist?

Macron represents the death of France’s historical push to end the imperial domination of Germany, the US and high-finance.

This is why Macron is poised to present the maximum amount of subversion from within: by selling off as much of France as possible, and by creating a Eurozone structure which decreases as much French democratic power as possible. Macron is acting as the ultimate 5th Columnist, and he is a major deviation from French postwar history. Indeed, who could have predicted his ascent not even one year ago?

Macron just kicked off a $12 billion privatization drive of state-owned companies. Oh, the shares didn’t sell as high as his government assured us? Why, I’m sure they’re all just sick about that! How will Macron be able to sleep tonight, between that and the smell of his wife’s Bengay arthritis cream?!

For Macron and all “globalists”, only money matters: not national sovereignty, not the living condition of those on the other side of their hometown, not preserving France’s unity, health and sanity. I told y’all to vote Le Pen!

However, it is very early in Macron’s presidency, and little is known about the amateur actor’s true political views.

He does seem to be on the verge of continuing the same naïve/idiotic French tactic begun by Mitterrand: More austerity is reportedly coming in next week’s 2018 budget announcement, even though France will be under the EU’s totally arbitrary 3% fiscal deficit rule one year yearly (this year). Once the “confidence fairy” of high finance was assuaged, then France used the fiscal deficit rule to justify austerity. Now that France is, after 6 years of cuts to social services, finally under the 3% cap…Macron is simply going back to the same old well:

“To be taken seriously by Germany…” France needs more austerity.

So by the end of Macron’s term it will have been a 40 year-plan to “convince” Germany. If the courtship is this bad, would a marriage to this fraulein be any better? It has already been a lifetime of painful wooing for half the population!

Blame capitalism for the failure of 8 successive 5-year plans – I never heard of that in socialist history.

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What could have been: A ‘Petroeuro’

Why isn’t there one? The Eurozone is the largest macro-economy after all?

Well, Saddam Hussein tried selling oil in euros in 2000. We know what happened in 2003.

France’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the huge front-runner for president in 2012…but also a supporter of Special Drawing Rights, which had the potential to sharply reduce dollar domination. Then Strauss-Kahn was accused of assaulting a very rare type in New York City: A hotel maid who speaks French instead of Spanish. What are the odds…? (The case against him was dropped due to lack of evidence, let’s justly recall.)

I notice that the US has not picked up Ghadaffi’s sensible pan-African Dinar plan after they toppled him? I wonder why?

Ironically, Iran – and not any European country - is the only nation which has pushed for a Petroeuro! And why not? The US keeps waging war on us by any means possible - Iran continues to say, “Bring it on!” 

So, the recent news that China is going to soon open up a yuan-gold-oil exchange is earth-shattering. It’s a commodities bombshell, a global financial bombshell, a geopolitical bombshell…and we have waited a long time for this.

Countries with oil that are strong enough to stand up to the US – Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Syria, etc. – can soon circumvent US sanctions. (Iran has been bartering oil bilaterally for years – this should get us a better rate, now that we are not all alone.)

So, “bombshell” is not strong enough, and I hope that this article’s discussion of Bretton Woods, EMS, etc. gives China’s news a bit more historical context for you.

But Eurozone citizens can add “Where’s my Petroeuro” to the question of “Where’s my bailout?”

Well, if you hadn’t voted for Macron, if your fake-leftists had seen American-German imperialism for what it is, if you were devoted to an anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist worldview…y’all would have had a Petroeuro long ago!

It’s really been quite a missed opportunity….

However, because of all these reasons I just mentioned, the new “Petroyuan” (long may she reign!) will be fundamentally different than a Petroeuro would have likely been: Even if Europe had the guts to stand up against America, neo-imperial history shows that they would have found a way to employ it as a capitalist tool for “zero-sum” manipulation. The Petroyuan is so typical of China's "non-imperial" imperialism: you can sell oil for yuan or for gold – you can choose.

And that's why China is not imperialist at all - don't believe the hype.

China has SOME communist solidarity in their makeup, as opposed to NONE for capitalists. "Mutually beneficial" is how they routinely deal with the 3rd World in Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc. and all these countries report exactly that: there is a fundamental ethical difference between doing business with China and doing business with the West.

So, with friends like West Germans and voting in leaders like Macron…a Petroeuro just wasn’t in the cards for the Eurozone.

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Knock the ‘French model’, but they’ve been fighting the “German model” since Bismarck

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nyway…it’s not all Macron’s fault. Sarkozy rejoined NATO, after all.

This is a generational, cultural trend in the making since the 1980s, when the scourge of fake-leftism began.

Let’s reflect on the historical reality: The Eurozone is ruled by bankers and not by an idea of pan-European solidarity. And it is Germany’s bankers and the Bundesbank which bear the greatest fault for a lack of pan-European solidarity, not France’s elite, even according to Varoufakis:

“…the Bundesbank was always there, guiding, enabling and actively undermining the Franco-German axis around which the European Union rotated.”

France (being capitalist) is not an angel in all this, but Varoufakis is clearly completely off the mark when he blames Paris for the Eurozone’s faults: France’s elite realized that a West Germany allied with the US meant they would be the soon-dominated 3^rd wheel. And why wouldn’t Germany be next to drop?

But decades of bold moves, daring diplomacy, anti-austerity programs and other sacrifices culminated in “Flanby” Hollande and Macron, “the Rothschurian Candidate”.

But Paris has shown that they have some sense of solidarity, whereas Berlin is not playing by the rules of humanity – they are playing by the rules of capitalism, which is “dog eat dog”.

There is historical, genuine support for communism in France; there is also historical, genuine support for socialism/communism in Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. This is all undeniable.

But such ideas have been legally verboten in West Germany, and corporate media means it is still effectively that way today. Forget about there being some sort of ideological leavening from East Germany, because the West has totally dominated the former East Germany culturally, economically and demographically. (If East Germany was reinstituted as a country today they would be the oldest country in the world, and by several years – they have gone west and left communism behind.) 

The hard-core capitalists and the elites of Berlin and Frankfurt have proved they refuse to share for decade after decade, and they will prove it again when you open your next newspaper.

Without the very real “Latin Leftism” the Eurozone is doomed…to domination by German bankers working alongside American ones.

Blame capitalism, as you should, but France deserves credit for trying.

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France is headed back from summer vacation, and head-on to more austerity-provoked social unrest. I thought it might be interesting to refresh our familiarity with the cause of the unrest: the Eurozone.

This is the second article I have written in a 7-part series on today’s Eurozone which will combine some of Varoufakis’ ideas with my 8 years of covering the crisis first-hand from Paris.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Varoufakis book review: Rock star economist but fake-leftist politician

Why no Petroeuro? or France’s historic effort for an anti-austerity Eurozone

The hopelessly corrupt structure of the Eurozone & the Eurogroup

The Eurozone: still as primed for collapse as ever

The Eurozone has likely entered its final calendar year, contraction coming

The English-speaking world’s fear of calling communism, ‘communism’

Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99%

Dateline: Thu Sep 21, 2017 

Like Tsipras and the entire Syriza leadership, Varoufakis is simply a phony, and, though hailed as a genuine leftie, a liberal thug enveloped in glamorous media treatment. 

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On this book’s back cover he includes quotes which describe him as a “rock star” and, “The most interesting man in the world.”

Those are appropriate quotes for Keith Richards’ autobiography, but Varoufakis is the guy whom many Europeans hoped would save them from years of poverty and decades of blocked futures. I would have thought that his blurbs would have only lauded his work, and not his personality: personality is what reality TV stars rely on, not finance ministers.

So it was a curious start, but I read it anyway.

For an economist, Varoufakis writes like your average mainstream journalist: More Muzak than rock and roll, bland retelling of history, predictable national stereotyping (without the virtue of humor) and the refusal to passionately acknowledge that a socialist alternative is a genuine option.

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I thought ‘Marxists’ actually liked Marx?

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou sort of get tossed out of leftism and into the ignorant, phony center when your book about European economics contains perhaps a sum total of 5 references to the USSR which are not passing historical allusions…and they’re all negative. Here’s the recap:

“…the Soviet Union was collapsing under the weight of its moral and economic decline….”

“Religious dedication to contradictory rules economic forces have no respect for has brought powerful empires down in the past – the Soviet Union most recently.”

“False dogmas are condemned to be found out eventually, in Europe as they were in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.”

“…Stalinism, warned us that the true object of propaganda….”

“…just as representatives of the soviets were expected to raise their cards during meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

That’s about all there was from the West’s pre-eminent “Marxist economist”.... Varoufakis described himself as an “erratic Marxist”, but there’s nothing erratic about those quotes: they are totally, unambiguously anti-communist.

I would like to rebut only the first quote:

Any true Marxist, or even an erratic one, would say that the reason for the USSR’s economic decline was Gorbachev’s introduction of capitalist perestroika (restructuring) measures into the economic system. The so-called “Fatal Error” was made in December 1987: to immediately reduce the state’s purchase of all products of industry from 100% to 50%. This huge shock was motivated by a capitalist-influenced desire to end central planning of the economy; the introduction of pricing by supply and demand; the attempt to formally legalize the capitalist Second Economy (Black Market/Black Economy) and to tax its profits instead of controlling these obvious corruptions of a socialist state’s resources. This plunged the economy into chaos and created shortages for the first time since WWII. By 1990 production had plunged, while inflation hit 80% in 1991.

So the fact that Varoufakis does not only not mention this but that he may not even be aware of it, should certainly prove that he is not any sort of Marxist economist at all.

As far as its “moral decline”: A Marxist would at least mention the idea that it was caused by the (state-encouraged) growth of the Second Economy: i.e., selfish, cutthroat, short-sighted, individualistic, poorly-regulated, inadequately taxed, “normal” capitalism.

I would also say another reason was Gorbachev’s moral gutting of communism in September 1988, when he effectively declared an end to the class war; the Central Committee of the Communist Party affirmed the supremacy of “universal human values” over the class struggle. These values are, of course, European and not universal, and this is the clear forerunner of the “Humanitarian Intervention/Responsibility to Protect” fig leaves for the Western military interventions which followed.

Varoufakis’ uninformed recitation of the alleged causes of the fall of the USSR are found in every mainstream broadsheet and TV news channel in the West. Nobody can claim to be a leftist and support these false notions. All economists – but especially Varoufakis – should know more about what was one of the world’s largest, most dynamic and most unique economies, and at least attempt to present a more complete analysis.

So, Varoufakis is lacking Marxism in both economic analysis and moral analysis – form and spirit. To claim to be a “leftist” and then to reject leftist economics…makes you a fake leftist. For some leftists, revealing his antipathy to the USSR is enough – for others it is not, and Varoufakis’ book affords plenty of proof.

But there is a much more interesting phenomenon to explain first, and for those who don’t want to read this whole article I will address that right away.

So why is Varoufakis so hugely popular?

First of all: he isn’t in Greece!

“Most of Greek people fail to understand the international star appeal of Yanis Varoufakis,” per Greek media. Greeks have not forgotten that the results wrought by Varoufakis were an undemocratic train wreck; rock stars do actually need to “rock” and not just pose in a black leather jacket.

But the reason he is so adored in the English-language media is precisely because he is a fake-leftist: He is someone who completely supports capitalism, who decries the abuses of sovereignty committed by the European Union, and who also warns of the structural dangers of the euro.

Think a moment and perhaps reread that formula: Did I not just describe a person who perfectly mirrors a huge section of mainstream and elite opinion in the United Kingdom? At least half of them felt this way – they voted for Brexit, after all.

Papers like The Guardian adore Varoufakis because prior to the Brexit vote he very effectively warned that the European Union was an undemocratic danger to be avoided; he made the case for Brexit – even though he opposed Brexit - but he did it without opposing capitalism or using communist reasoning.

So Varoufakis was a match made in heaven for the English-language media. Throw in his unjust claim to be a leftist and you have a media creation which Fleet Street couldn’t have concocted any more effectively.

And because Varoufakis was tapped as the “leftist European economist nonpareil” the US media – necessarily more ignorant of the Eurozone’s true situation – gladly deferred to the judgement of their British cousins and comrades in capitalism. Furthermore, Varoufakis’ book explicitly espouses a “United States of Europe”; he also disastrously believes that, “Bretton Woods was meant as a balanced system of international trade and financial flows,” and not American dollar domination. So for America’s elite he never posed any problem or opposition.

Britain was never in the Eurozone, and we cannot conflate that with the EU as they are two separate issues .What’s certain is that the euro’s near “lost decade” is hindering the US and UK economies as well (at least for the 99%). So we see another reason why Varoufakis is so popular in the English-language media: aside from making the case for Brexit, he is supremely effective in criticizing the Eurozone from his perch on the inside. His criticisms here are invaluable insider ones, yet they are not anti-capitalist.

So, if one accepts that Varoufakis is a fake-leftist who does not want to replace capitalism, who does want to maintain the unjust and corrupt Eurozone with only minor changes, and who can unjustly distort the meaning of “a Marxist analysis of the Eurozone”…one can see how he was just such a perfect propaganda fit.

And that is clearly why we have so much Varoufakis despite such disappointing political results from Varoufakis.

But it takes more than just distorting Marxism to make a modern fake leftist…

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The smugness of aristocratic fake-leftism is plastered all over his book

It is a fundamental tenet of fake-leftism that the real problem is: “Everyone is dumber than I am.”

A core belief of their adherents is enlightened technocratism over ideology: Hillary was the “most qualified presidential candidate ever”… who cares that she was on the far right of the economic and imperial spectrum? Did you vote for Brexit? Then you must not know anything about economics, politics or history. Did you support Le Pen over Macron – why are you single-handedly reviving neo-Nazism?

For such elitists in the West, democracy is too important to be left to a vote…as the majority of us voters are the “basket of deplorables” whom they hold in contempt and at a distance. For them, the danger to the West is not capitalism – even with its guaranteed cycles of depression, with the most corrupt succeeding the most, with its lack of grassroots democracy, with its permanent inequality – the danger is the “deplorables.” Or that’s what they want us to believe.

But what is so different about Varoufakis is that the deplorables are not only Greek peasants (although they are, and one of his (two) human-interest stories describes an encounter with a Nazi-supporting Greek hillbilly) but his fellow aristocratic/technocratic leaders.

“And so, when in 2008 the vast pyramids of financial capital came crashing down, Europe’s social democrats did not have the mental tools or the moral values with which to combat the bankers or to subject the collapsing system to critical scrutiny.”

If only Europe’s centrists had recourse to Varoufakis’ “mental tools” and “moral values”, they could have at least subjected the “system to critical scrutiny”. This is not the only time he makes this bourgeois “great man/rule of aristocrat” type of argument – I simply don’t have space to list all the other times. I can assure you that nowhere does he make a Marxist-inspired call like “our teaching of socio-political ideology excludes half the spectrum”, or “we need more direct democracy”, or “more grassroots groups in Parliament instead of rich lobbyists” because Varoufakis is a firm believer in rule of the elite. He is, after all, no Marxist, and he is quite thrilled to be the “rock star” of that elite.

I note that an emphasis on “critical scrutiny” is great, but it’s also a common emphasis for a technocrat in an ivory tower – everyone else caught in the muck of the street wants systemic changes now, even if they have to vote for a Trump or a Le Pen to do it.

One of the moral call-to-arms of his book is summed up by: “One thing is certain: Europe is too important to be left to its clueless rulers.” Couldn’t one imagine a bourgeois silk factory owner from Lyon making the same argument about the monarchy’s coteries in the 18th century?

Indeed, Varoufakis’ new book seems to be based around this very idea, as it’s titled “Adults in the Room”. Varoufakis is, assumedly, one of those adults. The subtitle is, “Mein Kampf With Europe’s Deep Establishment”.

Oh wait, it’s “My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment”. By the way, the subtitle for this 2016 book I am reviewing reflects its more analytical/less personal nature: “Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability”.  

Here is the main issue: Fake-leftists are content to fume and foam over the stupidity of others, of the deplorables, of how they were unfairly passed up for promotion…instead of realizing: this is war – class war. Fake leftists reject or lack this Marxist angle to view events through.

Fake-leftists who are actually centrists – due to their inability to reject capitalism – are maddeningly unable to see that Europe’s elite is NOT stupid, that they DO understand what is going today, and that they simply do NOT care to fix it because that would hurt its dominance over the 99%.

But that requires another article, Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99%, which is the final article in this 7-part series I have written on the troubles of today’s Eurozone. This is the first article.

It’s not like he’s wrong, it’s just that Greeks are new to being imperialized

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]aroufakis does not think like a capitalist-despising 3^rd-worlder perhaps because he seems to have very little familiarity with the 3^rd world: Greece hasn’t been this broke since prior to Plato.

The Eurozone absolutely is an imperial project – sucking out/owning Greece’s resources. This began, officially, in order to repay the failed bank wagers in the capitalist power centers of France and Germany.

But while European imperialism has been around for two centuries it has only very recently been employed on actual West Europeans – they don’t know it when they see it, perhaps? Forcing the public governments of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other weak countries to assume the private debts of French and German banks is…simply a repeat of what has happened all over the 3^rd world:

To give just one example: The Bey of Tunisia borrowed money from the French and his autocratic ventures failed; in 1869 he declared bankruptcy and assumed the cost of the bad loans the bankers made, which meant French technocrats now ran his government and finances; 12 years of bloody usury followed (because bankers didn’t pay for their mistakes back then either); in 1881 France formally invaded, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey ceded his sovereignty, and informal control became outright foreign domination.

You don’t have to be Tunisian to know that story; you don’t have to be an intuitive genius to see the parallels with today’s situation; but you do need to be a Marxist to see that this is how capitalism works and why it is so terrible. As any Marxist would take as a settled fact, imperialism is part and parcel of capitalism, regardless of whether the helpless natives are Tunisian, Greek, Vietnamese or whomever…and including West Europeans!

It takes some imagination for a first-worlder to identify with and understand the plight of a third-worlder, but Varoufakis does not have that imagination. It’s very unfortunate that, with fake-leftists like Varoufakis, many in Greece are being forced to comprehend a 3^rd World mentality the hard way.

However, it would be fake-leftism to assume that the non-elite of Greece – the 99%, the Greek Trash – don’t already realize what’s being foisted on them.

But this lack of true understanding of imperialism – and thus of capitalism itself – is probably why fake-leftists in the West do not see capitalism as the main enemy.

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For fake-leftists, how could they ever be guilty of authoritarianism?

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]aroufakis, in retelling stories of his childhood, clearly associates authoritarianism solely with Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism. Greece did not have Jim Crow, and he is selectively blind over the fact that the capitalist Allies supported Greek Nazi collaborators to keep the leftists from taking power, with the English even opening fire on them, killing dozens.

Varoufakis talks about a return to authoritarianism…when it already arrived two years ago in France with the state of emergency, and new Macron plans to make it common police practice. He is also seemingly unaware that the current spy tactics of Western nations are just as comprehensive and invasive as in any Cold War socialist nation, and that France will have been living one step short of martial law for two years without the socialist social safety net as compensation.

Like all fake-leftists, the main psychological motivator of Varoufakis is fear – of a return to fascism; he does not promote any sort of advance. 

And like all Western social democrats today he has nothing to tell White Trash because he sees them without sympathy and only as the dangerous potential kinetic energy – the unreflective fuel - of neo-fascism. The sad reality he cannot see is that White Trash does not want to live in the past any more than Varoufakis does, because their own recent past has been nothing but decreased purchasing power, decreased job stability and hopelessness.

In the next section I will show just how deep is Varoufakis’ contempt for Greek Trash and the people who lack college degrees, elite status and wealth. But his constantly errant focus on a return to authoritarianism means what everyone in the heartland and the poor urban areas of America, France, Greece, etc. already know and say: The Western Left has nothing to say to, or for, us.

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Three types: Misunderstood banker ‘proletariat’, hillbilly fascists and ‘good’ Nazi collaborators

Varoufakis employs only two “human interest” stories: I propose that they are indicative of his true sympathies, and I sure as heck know that they are not Marxist choices!

The first involves an honest discussion he had on a plane with a German investment banker (Do investment bankers ever fly coach?) prior to the Great Recession: The banker was decrying how Europe’s financial institutions had adopted the dubious predatory lending practices initiated in the US.

“’Lend, lend, lend!’ was their new creed. From a relaxed purveyor of scarce money he was transformed into an angst-ridden overpaid proletarian.”

I kid you not that this is the first and only time this “erratic Marxist” uses the word “proletarian” in his book...and it’s to describe a damned banker! LOL, no wonder the English-speakers love him – he makes the bankers the proletariat! Not only do those in The City and Wall Street have all the money and all the power, but they should have the ethical mantle of “proletariat” as well?!

Varoufakis has a tremendous amount of sympathy for this “poor” man, and nowhere does he condemn the immorality of somebody who is – as the banker admitted himself – a “predator lender”, a gangster with societal approval. Above all, Varoufakis feels sorry that the banker has lost his all-important elite status:

“A weekly quota of loans that he had to make regardless of the creditworthiness of his clients robbed him of the discretion that had previously made him feel important.”

I don’t think I need to explain much more….

The other human interest story comes at the end of his book and obviously serves as a scare tactic. He relates a story where an old hillbilly Greek who was hosting him left an original German copy of “Mein Kampf” in Varoufakis’ room for bedtime reading. This hillbilly was a fascist supporter and Nazi collaborator, and this allows Varoufakis to talk about the obviously-undesired rise of Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn movement.

Now I am not a far-right supporter in the slightest, of course, but I am a sympathizer with all of God’s children: my understanding is limited, but I can see that such a man as this “Kapnias” is, in reality, just as Varoufakis says:  “…a bitter, angry man perpetually seeking revenge on a world that had never given him a chance.”

The problem is the lack of opportunity and solidarity, and control over his own work and life, afforded to this modern-day peasant. Such problems require societal solutions and sympathy, because his problems are by no means rare in the world. Giving him sympathy and help is the best remedy to defeat the fascism into which he has fallen. What is certain is that he is not going away! He can only be changed. Communism says this bitter, marginalized man belongs to a huge group of the great 99%, and that can work wonders on expanding his worldview.

Even if you say my empathy is misguided, what’s certain is that this problem is far, far different than some banker whining because he no longer gets to play God with his loans!

My larger point is: We do not have a Great Recession because of racist hillbillies or violent urban illiterates – we have it because of profoundly corrupt and anti-social capitalists. For Varoufakis to evince sympathy with the banker and not with the peasant is deeply, deeply…un-Marxist, to say the very least.

“… Golden Dawn voters, who like all fascists have penchant for blood and land…” Never would I support Golden Dawn, but this cannot be called “Marxism” without rebuttal or else we will lose the deplorables: For urbanites who have no familiarity with rural life/people, phrases like this imply that all farmers are fascists.

Does it surprise you that the phrase “land redistribution” appears nowhere in this book? Well, I want land too – without a doubt!  So am I a fascist, too?

I want to own my apartment instead of losing thousands of euros every year to the bourgeois lady who owns my Parisian apartment! I have absolutely NO prospect of EVER owning even a modest plot of space in the sky as long as I work in journalism and live in Paris! And yet 95% of rural Chinese own their own home and land and 75% of urban dwellers. If I can’t get a Paris apartment, I’d sure love a patch of land and a trailer as a free second home! My God, I’d consider myself quite rich if that very real dream of mine was fulfilled!

Fake-leftists like Varoufakis would never even think in terms of the state requisitioning apartments that sit empty year round – over 20% of apartments do in Paris - but I can assure him that I do, and so do the increasing number of homeless families.

Varoufakis makes two cultural references in the book, and it’s interesting that his analysis of one of them is completely off-base.

“Istvan Szabo’s film ‘Mephisto’ is perhaps the best depiction of a good mind’s takeover by a sinister ideology.”

This Hungarian film is a classic which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981. The “good mind” is that of the main character, Hendrik, who becomes a star actor in Nazi Germany despite the constant appeals of his friends to not support the fascists. 

One would consider it rather axiomatic that "good minds" don't collaborate with Nazis…but Varoufakis obviously found much to identify with in Hendrik. Perhaps Hendrik’s defining characteristic is his relentless ambition, which was used - not taken over - by the Nazis.

If you watch the movie I think you’ll agree that the director makes it clear from the very outset that, despite his impressive energy and skill, there is something essentially phony and hollow about Hendrik. He is not a “good mind” who was corrupted – he is appallingly self-absorbed, posturing, adulterous, treacherous, held in contempt even by his mistress and, in short, an actor.

Greedy capitalists and violent imperialists are the true deplorables, but so are the power-hungry, like Hendrik.

The very last sentence of Varoufakis’ book is “Only when these principles are respected throughout Europe will the foul smirk be wiped off the faces of Kapnias’s successors.”

Ugh….

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The language is all wrong, so of course his solutions are wrong as well

I have already proven how Joseph Stiglitz’s media-hyped book “The Euro” was full of fake-leftist economic ideas.

If it seems I have an affinity for attacking economists labelled “leftist” by the mainstream, it’s because I do: We must all look with great skepticism at economists who are presented by the mainstream media as “leftists”, because they rarely are. It is also vital that journalists covering Europe realize, and even dare to present, that half of the economic spectrum which is not “capitalism”. As I wrote:

So many times in “The Euro” Stiglitz delivers a devastating conclusion about capitalism, only to immediately let it off the hook by claiming bafflement as to how this could possibly happen.

Varoufakis employs the same litany of enabling phrases which let Western leaders off the hook: “naïve”, “uncomprehending”, “incomprehension”, “capitalism’s weird ways”, “inane”, “oblivious”, “ignorant”, “ignorant of simple macroeconomic laws but, curiously, not even ashamed of their ignorance,” “bewildered”; “hubris” is not all the same as simple banker greed; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama “who may have wanted to resuscitate” the spirit of the New Deal wanted to do that about as much as I want to try being waterboarded; despite all their crimes, banks are still “venerable” to Varoufakis; and, amusingly, why not just call “reverse growth” what it really is: orchestrated impoverishment.

It’s interesting that the idea of usury is totally absent in in Varoufakis’ vocabulary. It does not appear even once in his book, nor does any sort of tirade against the rentier class which has gutted his country – “rentiers” appears just once. That’s another word which, like “bourgeois”, there is no good English equivalent but which is totally indispensable in any discussion of post-Industrial Revolution economics. Varoufakis, you will see, wants Europe to emulate the United States, which has a political structure that predates the industrial revolution and is certainly not modern, nor Marxist. 

Instead of quoting Marx – or at least not completely ignoring him - he quotes right-wing thinkers like the atrociously misinformed Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote his book on the US just one year after landing there. If I wrote a book about France after 1 year here, it would have been terribly misinformed.

He quotes a well-known “communism means authoritarianism” philosopher: “The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas long ago recognized that capitalism has the tendency to develop a ‘legitimacy deficit”…. Believe it or not this is a rare instance where Varoufakis uses the word “capitalism”…in a book about economics! Saying that capitalism has a “legitimacy deficit” is like saying the sun has a “cold deficit”! 

He is quick to use phrases like “The corrupt ruling classes of Greece, Italy and Spain…” and yet I never read the counterbalance of “The corrupt ruling classes of France, Germany and the Netherlands” even though the scope of the latter’s corruption is far greater because they are taking advantage of those who are weaker and have also failed to properly lead.

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His solution is more American-led globalization

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]aroufakis’ solution perpetuates bourgeois dominance because it keeps the Eurozone, but only changes the words. Not TINA – There Is No Alternative (to neoliberal capitalism), but “TATIANA: That, Astonishingly, There Is An Alternative”.

Sheesh, even his solutions are infected with that smugness so typical of fake-leftists….Obviously, his solution is but a modification of the ruling ideology, working completely within its faulty, capitalist framework.

TATIANA is: “…a blueprint for addressing the crisis through Europeanizing its four components – the crises of public debt, banks, underinvestment and the poverty explosion – while decentralizing political power through a reduction in the discretionary power exercised illicitly by the Brussels-Frankfurt-Berlin triangle.”

But, yes…of course! That sounds correct, obvious and great! Of course, the Eurozone should be fixed, so it works more democratically and for the benefit of the average person! But it won’t – because that is capitalism. It hasn’t yet – because that is capitalism.

He continues: “Seen from another less politically-charged perspective, the proposal’s greatest merit is that it offers a way to abandon the eurozone’s problematic principle of perfectly separable debts and banking sectors and to introduce the missing political surplus recycling mechanism without creating autocratic discretionary power at Europe’s centre and without any immediate need to rewrite the European Union’s existing rules and treaties.”

“political surplus recycling” (emphasis mine) is the absolute core of his argument for why the Eurozone has failed, and what needs to be remedied. In short: surplus money (profit) needs to be redistributed from trade surplus nation to trade deficit nations.

The key word there is “political”, because it is an inherently political choice when one decides how to “recycle” (redistribute) “surplus” money which has produced by labor.

I think we can all see what this really is: Marxism.

But Varoufakis can’t call it that, or won’t, or doesn’t realize that what he is talking about is the same old principle: “redistribution of wealth”. Indeed, if he is called a “Marxist” it is because others understand his economic ideas better than he does himself!

Regardless, he fails to see that the 1% will never allow any “political” redistribution of wealth – that’s what communism is for, and they will allow none of that in Europe, or hadn’t Varoufakis noticed? 

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The English press is right to like Varoufakis, just not THAT much

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]e has a ton of good ideas…but only when it comes to criticizing the current European order:

“…Dr. Schauble and the Eurogroup had succeeded in overthrowing our government by asphyxiating us enough for Prime Minster Tsipras to surrender….”

Varoufakis sees clearly the history and as-yet unchanged foundation of the European project:

“And yet, remarkably, the European Union began life as a cartel of coal and steel producers which, openly and illegally, controlled prices and output by means of a multinational bureaucracy vested with legal and political powers superceding national parliaments and democratic processes.”

To put it simply, there has been no structural change from what the EU has always been – an undemocratic capitalist cartel to fix prices in order to line the pockets of the 1%. But where is the necessary corresponding call to look at socialism?

“The institutions of the European Union were designed back in the 1950s and 1960s in order to bleach politics out of them.”

What Varoufakis fails to point out, however, is that what was purposely bleached out were communist-inspired ideas that were sweeping the globe and taking firm root in many places. 

“The notion that money can be administered apolitically, by technical means alone, is a dangerous folly of the grandest magnitude.” That’s great, but the next line is a predictable fearmongering instead of condemning capitalism: “The fantasy of apolitical money was what rendered the gold standard in the interwar period such a primitive system whose inevitable demise spawned fascist and Nazi thugs with effects that we all know and lament.”

I am not denying that the rise of fascism was one byproduct, but I propose that he could have immediately called for the “politicization of money”, which can only occur under socialism, instead of turning to the subject of deplorables. The problem is not that apolitical money creates racism - it’s that apolitical money creates poverty, and poverty creates racism.

“Good Varoufakis” is immediately followed by “fake-leftist Varoufakis” time and again:

“….the only way Berlin’s plan can work is if the Eurozone turns into a mercantilist fiend. What this means in simple numbers is that to escape its crisis in this manner the Eurozone must reach a current account surplus in relation to the rest of the world of no less than 9 per cent of total European income…means also exporting deflation to the rest of the world. A 9 per cent Eurozone trade surplus would destroy the hopes of America, China, Latin America, India, Africa and South East Asia for stability and growth. It would mean massive unemployment in the rest of the world, political instability, calls to erect protectionist barriers…”

Varoufakis hates protectionist barriers, being a capitalist, but the truth is there for all to see: Germany is being ruthlessly, selfishly capitalist despite the leadership position they hold in a multinational bloc.

Ironically, Varoufakis blames France for the Eurozone’s problem – this is an incorrect reading of postwar European history caused by his lack of a truly leftist perspective. The second article in this series, “France’s historic effort to create a permanently anti-austerity Eurozone” corrects Varoufakis’ error.

In a crucial “lay it on the line” section he has the courage to say that there is a problem but…that’s really all he is good for.

“Firstly…Europe’s union is nothing like America’s: it was founded as an administration for an industrial cartel, rather than as a political mechanism by which to balance competing interests in a democracy. Second, there are reasons why political leadership is not what it used to be across the world.”

The first part is excellent, but that second part is completely bourgeois. As his second book promotes further, Varoufakis actually believes that the real problem is that the high “caliber of politician (has been) driven out of politics…fewer gifted men and women enter politics”.

Varoufakis is not offering a Marxist, socialist or 99%-oriented solution - he is decrying that the elite is not as good as it used to be, rather than decrying the lack of true democracy!

Where have all the true rock stars gone? It’s making Varoufakis lonely!

Fake-leftists, heal thyselves before healing deplorables

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]aroufakis’ book gives plenty of grounds for admitting that the EU will inevitably die, because there is no way to reform capitalism – there is only replacing it with communism/socialism. The idea that Rothschild Macron, Angela Thatcher and the cabal of bankers which literally run the Eurozone are going to construct a “pro-99%” EU is totally ludicrous because it is so without any factual or historical basis.

The obvious answer for why the Eurozone has failed is: being the cartelized system that it currently is and that it always has been, the Eurozone does not care if there is poverty and suffering because the 1% is well-insulated from that; this is capitalism, after all. A communist analyst makes this clear.

The European project is so undemocratic, so pro-capitalist, and so fundamentally prone to fomenting elitism, racism and division that it cannot be supported in the cafes or at the ballot box.

I have provided plenty of examples of Varoufakis’ fundamentally fake-leftist analysis: He does not decry the very structure of the capitalist/imperialist beast and declare it incompatible with modernity, which is what a true Marxist thinker would do. Varoufakis can only offer critique – he lacks that commie capstone to every argument which is: “So, in light of this fact - change now!” His book is no blueprint for actual change because he wants to support the capitalist system.

Varoufakis is clearly very happy to be included in the 1% - and even to be considered the “coolest” 1%-er. But elitism is not progress – it is, unfortunately, the status quo across the West.

Communism is the only social ideology which tears down elites and builds up the common person. Europeans will be glad when communism returns.

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France is headed back from summer vacation, and head-on to more austerity-provoked social unrest. I thought it might be interesting to refresh our familiarity with the cause of the unrest: the Eurozone.

This is the first article I have written in a 7-part series on today’s Eurozone which will combine some of Varoufakis’ ideas with my 8 years of covering the crisis first-hand from Paris.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

France’s historic effort to create a permanently anti-austerity Eurozone

The hopelessly corrupt structure of the Eurozone

The Eurozone: still as primed for collapse as ever

The Eurozone has likely entered its final calendar year, contraction coming

The English-speaking world’s fear of calling communism, ‘communism’

Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99%