Varoufakis tries to democratise a banking cartel

It still remains to be seen whether Varoufakis was indeed
the great defender of Greece. I tend to think he was.
The only question I have is whether he knew, by February
that come-what-may, the troika would screw Greece
anyway. If he knew, he should have said that.
He did indeed leave many hints to that effect. He
did inform Greeks and the world very clearly
about how corrupt Brussels was, and he has said
even more since.

Verdict: he was certainly a brave politician. Whether
he qualifies as a brave person or a brave Greek waits
to be seen.

Nevertheless, he has been lobbing logic-bombs at Brussels
and Frankfurt, rather effectively since jumping from the
burning ship that is Greece.
I saw him at the South Bank Centre. He has
certainly grasped this opportunity with both hands.
He now has a large number of followers. He has
decided, in his new venture, to attack the belly of
the beast which destroyed Greece.

The Brussels democracy-free zone

The Eurogroup and the Troika were born there.

To do that, he has decided to found the first 

pan-European party which has some basic goals

it wants to achieve. 

His main argument is that 

if the EU continues as is

(which it would otherwise)

it'll be dead in 10 years.

So, now is the time to change it.

He wants to rid the EU of the cartel-like nature 

of its head office and get every European citizen 

feeling as if the EU represents them. What we
have now is a coddled Brussels elite working
for the benefit of (mainly) German banks. The EU,
which began as a steel and coal cartel, is now
a banking cartel.

What will the reaction be?

I think Brussels is so numb and full of useless elites

that they will snicker at him. But when they 

see any success, they will begin to attack him

with all their devious shenanigans.

Here's a part of an interview with Red Pepper

about the party he will soon get off the ground.

Here, he mentions the sick nature of the Beast:

(1 below)

it's a bankocracy, stupid
The second bit (2 below) is about where the real power is
in Europe, on a day-to-day basis. Of course, the EU is
in permanent crisis, so the people making the "critical"
decisions are in charge. It's a banking crisis, so the
banks are in charge. Varoufakis (below), for me, kinda
misses the point, though I believe he knows it. Is he
trying not to piss off Frankfurt bankers? Eventually, if his party
succeeds even moderately, he will have to uncover the
Head of the Beast: Deutschebank. The other banks are
secondary, yet still very sick. When Varoufakis says
"noone is in control," I think he is trying to convey
that they're just putting out banking fires, or doing
what the banks say. It's "obvious" to me, as an outsider.
In crisis mode, politicians put out the fires for the people
who rule them. So, it looks as if they're not in control
because they're acting like bank clerks.
  They really have "no choice" at this point,
not being able to see how bank failure can be bad (short term)
but excellent in the long term (text 2 below).

Here, Mark Blyth explains the shitstorm very well,
in front of the benevolent employees of Google
in Cali :


[starts at 17:09 Soc Gen bank, ING,
17:55 bank debts are double EU GDP
18:25 UK banks 4x GDP (but with own currency)
18:35 France banks 3.5x GDP (in the Euro)
20:50 the EU dance with death.
Save German banks by-

Kill the Greeks, kill the Portuguese, kill the Irish

What Blyth actually said was, if things had been left
to the market, the troubles would have forced banks
to start dumping Greek debt which would have started
a bank run,
I think that the EU knew that those PIIGs countries
were the weakest, and so the troika decided to
put their countries on show-trial, keep them there
as a potemkin village, showing everybody that
the EU is handling its problems, meanwhile the
troika is quickly or slowly bleeding these countries'
economies dry.

checkit:
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/01/29/why-a-pan-european-democracy-movement-interviewed-
by-nick-buxton/
1
Q: Is democratising Europe a matter of reclaiming fundamental principles or about developing a new concept of sovereignty?
A:
It’s both. Nothing is new under the sun. The concept of sovereignty doesn’t change, but the ways it is applied to multi-ethnic and multi-jurisdictional areas like Europe has to be rethought. There is an interesting debate that happens mainly in Britain, as the rest of Europe doesn’t seem interested. It was always frustrating trying to convince the French and the Germans that there is a profound difference between a Europe of Nations and a European Union. The Brits understand this better, especially the Conservatives, ironically. They are supporters of Edmund Burke, anti-constructivists who believe there has to be a one-to-one mapping between nation, parliament and money: One nation, one parliament, one money.

When I ask my Tory friends, ‘But what about Scotland? Are the Scots not a bona fide nation? If so, should they not have a separate state and currency?’, the answer I get takes the form: Of course there is a Scottish, Welsh, and English nation and not a UK nation, but there is a common identity, forged as result of wars of conquest, participation in empire and so on. If that is true, and it may be, then it is possible to say that different nationalities can be bound together by an evolving common identity. So this is how I would like to see it. We are never to going to have a European nation, but we can have a European identity that corresponds to a sovereign European people. So we preserve the old-fashioned concept of sovereignty but we link it to a developing European identity, that is then linked with the single sovereignty and a parliament that keeps checks and balances on executive power at the level of Europe.

At the moment, we have ECOFIN, the Eurogroup, and the European Council making important decisions on behalf of the European people, but these bodies are not answerable to any parliament. It is not good enough to say that members of these institutions are answerable to their national parliament, because members of these institutions, when they go back home to appear in front of their national parliament, say ‘Don’t look at me, I disagreed with everything in Brussels but I didn’t have power to affect a decision so I am not responsible for the Eurogroup’s or Council’s or Ecofin’s decision’. Unless institutional bodies can be censured or dismissed as a body by one common parliament, you don’t have sovereign democracy. So that should be the objective in Europe....

2
NEXT QUESTION: where is the day-to-day power in Europe
Q:
Where, then, is power in Europe?
A:
This is an interesting question. On the surface, the only powerful people in Europe are Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. But having said that, they are not even that powerful themselves. I have seen Mario Draghi look extremely frustrated in Eurogroup meetings, at what was being said, at his own powerlessness, at having to do things that he thought were terrible for Europe. At the same time, Angela Merkel clearly feels circumscribed by the demands of her own parliament, her own party, on the need to keep a kind of modus vivendi with the French that she doesn’t agree with.

So the answer to your question is that we have managed to create a monster in Europe, where the Eurozone is supremely powerful as an entity but where no one is in control. The institutions and rules that have been put in place in order to maintain the political equilibrium that set up the whole Euro currency project disempowers almost every player that has anything to do with democratic legitimacy.