The European Central Bank
said it injected a record 489.19 billion euros (US$641bil) into
eurozone banks in its first-ever three-year refinancing operation.
Sounds really apocalyptic but at the same time prosaic and predetermined. One can only imagine the dialog that took place between Angela Merkel and Sarkozy, it could have been something like this:
MERKEL: I am not sure... I do have some bad feelings and premonitions about unconditionally subjugating the one and only healthy donor-type economy in eurozone - Germany - to the parasitic majority of the whole company.. Don't think I am too scrupulous, but it looks a bit alarming in terms of possible historic responsibility...
SARKOZY: Oh, my dear Angela, come on, we live only once. Let's do the usual thing we in democratish countries always do in such situations - borrow from our children and grandchildren and postpone the big crash for several years... Even if it means a total collapse of the EU, this will not happen tomorrow and all those journalists and publicists, never mind our lot - politicians - will be saying that you just 'made a mistake' but you tried your hardest to save the whole thing... Nobody can accuse us of a CRIME we are protected by the 'half-democracy'. We just make sometimes mistakes... Nothing criminal... Lets live in the present - in this day - you and me have only a few years left in office... Let's not over-complicate things.
Instead of a comprehensive reform of the financial capitalism and democratization of the EU, they decided to do what almost all observers and analysts expected them to do in the end (you don't need an Oxford degree to make such predictions in the modern 'decomposed' Western political world): they 'leveraged' an already existentially dangerous structural problem. Instead of 'germanization' - okay, if somebody don't like this term, let them have Finlandization or Scandinavization - of those pseudo-democratic, American type oligarchic pluto-klepto-cratic neighbors like Italy or Greece - parasitic in essence (by no means do I blame the victimized people of those countries, rather the system and the state), they on the contrary bend down the heart of the European economy - Germany - to the dictates of its ill - now quite possibly terminally ill - members. They decided to treat the economic drug dependence with additional unending mega-shots of 'the financial heroin' - just to postpone the debts of the southern countries by loaning times more money at the expense of increasing the debts even more - to a fatal extent. And, mind you my dear reader, all those people in power KNOW what they do and all the consequences, which in my humble opinion, makes the difference between a mistake and a crime.
You also don't have to be Adam Smith now to understand that the huge economic problems of Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain etc, possibly even France, are to do with structural problems of those economies, with the structural problems of their political models (especially in countries like Italy and Greece) and structural problems in the format of the eurozone - both political and economic. Those countries are in essence oligarchic plutocracies (which mistakenly considered by some credulous people to be democracies), where there's a continuity of interests of successive governments, which themselves in essence are nothing more than an appendage of the powerful rich group(s) - a kind of lackey, or doorman at the doors or the club, the owners of which never have been the peoples of those countries. Of course every new government in Greece borrowed as much as possible using state bonds just to stay in power and satisfy the ever-increasing appetites of their master - wealthy 'elites'. Now, when the situation came to a head in such countries as Greece where the minimum supply of liquidity is coming to an end (the state and banks just don't have a minimal amount of money to sustain the basic economic mechanisms, after all those huge loaned money just drained in the private pocket of the wealthy 10% of the population), they decided to pump an additional amount of this 'heroin' DIRECTLY through the bank system, and institutionalize this approach via change of the ECB role to a KIND OF Fed. Reserve of the US (which Germany resisted so long but unsuccessfully in the end). That means in essence printing money, and indirectly using taxpayers' (predominantly German taxpayer's) money for covering the losses of the banks which are too big to fail (mainly German and French banks financed the Greek banks directly or via government and now the insurance company called 'taxpayers all over the Europe' must cover this megatheft for free - see http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/11/greece-will-fail-without-euro-just.html). Immediately and unsurprisingly the banks on the first day of the auction grabbed almost 500 bln euros (!!) from ECB, and this is only a start. Looks like a 'safety shot' in the head of the economic union of Europe.
The second problem is the same old problem, which, in my view, from the very start of the EU became a time bomb for the very EU: the total absence of democracy in the very foundation of the EU (never mind eurozone), and, hence, legitimacy (http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/01/few-words-about-eu-good-idea-but-in.html). The use of Central Banks in itself for printing money and pumping liquidity into the banking system is not necessarily bad at all times, but the problem is that within democratic national systems, e.g. in the case of the USA, Japan, England etc, the emission and REDISTRIBUTION of money supply has legitimacy with the people (at least nominal), and the people, at least nominally, have the power to influence the policymakers directly (through local and general elections), influencing through them what can be an UNJUST and unbalanced redistribution of money and credit power in the national economy - there is at least on paper a democratic feedback and a place for the people in this pact between the state institutions. But nothing of this sort do you have in the EU - The Soviet Union of European Governments and Functionaries. Germans are 120% sure that the actions of the ECB are aimed at stealing their purchasing power and the value of their savings (which is 120% true too) just to save the foreign fat cats (who give nothing instead) and their own fat cats (in the form of their bankrupt banks).
And there's nothing that Germans can do about this within the EU bureaucracy's rules and so called 'laws' (a union which is in essence a form of usurpation of national sovereign powers and democracy, because it is not democratic in itself). This leads the whole system directly to a political crisis of an immense scale. But European 'leaders' just continue - knowingly so - to inject the 'heroin' into the poisoned bloodstream of the system, robe their taxpayers without saying a WORD about the critical situation with democracy and legitimacy of this whole rosy house named 'EU' (I am really amazed by the fact they call themselves 'leaders' since in my simple mind, leaders are exemplified for instance by some Roman generals or Emperors who to heighten the moral and hope of their armies get ahead of everybody else and demonstratively risk their life to start a crucial attack and fundamentally change the course of the fight. The image of the miserable self-interested and cynical RATS, whose only task is getting rid of all kind of responsibilities, staying in power as long as possible thanks to political prostitution and appearing even before their own public only in the presence of heavy security and behind the bullet-prof glass of their tank-like automobiles, doesn't easily fit into my old fashioned conception of leaders).