sopropo.net

a bitter melon

Macron ❤ Greece

Macron appeals to Europe on behalf of Greece only days after French Eurocommissioner Moscovici denounced the Greek bailout:

EurActiv -- Macron urges Europeans not to push Greece toward non-EU investors (Sep 8, 2017)

“If there is no solidarity, we don’t have an ambitious European project […] I am not pleased when we have no European investment in Europe,” the French president said and added that “we should not push Greece to choose non-European investments” as has been the case in the past.

It is fitting that France should show leadership on Greece after Schäuble all but destroyed the country -- and the credibility of the EU -- with his pig-headed insistence on punitive austerity measures.

After all, Varoufakis contends that France is supposed to be the designated driver of the EU project, and that Germany is merely the horse that powers it:

Varoufakis.eu -- Full transcript of the Varoufakis / Chomsky NYPL discussion (Jun 28, 2016)

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: The Battle of Bretton Woods, which is an amazing episode in intellectual and financial history. At that point the problem they had when they were thinking about this in 1946, late ’45, early ’46, is they already had agreed with the French to turn Germany into a pastoral land, to deindustrialize Germany. So they had to go back to the French and say, “We changed our minds,” and they did, and they offered them a bargain. “You will agree to the reindustrialization of Germany. You will agree to a write-down of German debt, otherwise the German economy will never be able to recover if it is in a dark cloud of unsustainable debt. And in return what we’re going to give you is the leadership of Europe.” This is the goal idea, that they are the drivers of the carriage and Germany is the horse that powers it, and indeed this is what happened. If you think of—where is the OECD? It’s in Paris. What is the OECD? The OECD is a relic of the Marshall Plan. So the French were distributing Marshall aid in Europe. Think about Brussels. Brussels was completely and utterly designed by the French elite.