Transcription
an unelected lunatic, warmongering, genocide cheerleader. They were vassals of the United States.
Giannis Verufacus addresses the economic problems that Europe has overlooked and goes a step further by emphasizing that Europe has fallen into a bad position because of the secret economic agreement it has established with America. Then, the fall of the dollar and the rise of China are causing Europe to gradually decline on the global stage as a result of this situation. So, is the world being dragged into a new war as a result of all this? Giannis Verufacus brings all these overlooked issues to light. I recommend watching the video until the end. If you find videos like this interesting, don't forget to like it and subscribe to the channel.
But of course, the ruling classes were not interested. But why were they not interested? Let's ask ourselves this question. Could they not see that their version of Europe was a pyramid scheme that it would collapse? That when the many, the masses of Germans out there, don't have enough to have a decent life, there will be no growth, there will be no good jobs, no future? Did the so-called Europeanists, the SPD, the Greens, the liberals, the FDP, or on the other side of the French-German border, you know, Emanuel Mikron, not Macron, I'm from now on, I'm going to be calling him Mikron, sorry about that. Could they not see that their shenanigans were turning Europe into a colony of the United States?
Now, I'm going to say to you that I think they could see it. They were not stupid people because it was not a mistake. Europe, Europe's decline, I'm going to hypothesize here and put this view to you. Europe's decline wasn't caused by its system's breakdown, but it occurred. The decline of the European Union because the European Union system performed exactly as it was designed to perform. And here's the gist of what I'm saying. Back in the 1970s, America's and Europe's ruling classes struck a deal. I call it a dark deal after the fall of the bread and wood system. It's not a complicated deal to understand. This dark deal starts, is based on America's ever-increasing trade deficit. The traders of the United States operated like a vacuum cleaner that sucked into the United States Mercedes-Benzes, Siemens products, the net exports of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Japan, and later of China. Focusing on Europe and Germany. Germany's capitalists depended on the American trade deficit for profits denominated in dollars, but they couldn't spend those dollars in Europe. So, they sent it back to Wall Street. So, every Mercedes-Benz that went over to the United States brought dollars to Germany, and then those dollars went to Wall Street to buy shares, to purchase real estate in California and Miami, and of course, to lend to the American government.
Now, that's a dark deal. America is keeping German capitalists rich and European capitalists rich as long as they send their dollar profits to America to fund the American state, to keep Wall Street liquid, and to keep American renters in luxury, and to continue to be dollar-rich. German capitalists needed the euro to plunder poorer Europeans like the Greeks, the Portuguese, and so on. But they don't want the euro to be dominant. They want the euro, but not as a dominant currency because why? They don't want the euro to compete with the dollar since their profits depend on the dollar's exorbitant privilege. You see why? Because their exports depend on America's trade deficit. And America's trade deficit can only be maintained if the dollar is the dominant currency.
Now, this is why Europe's ruling class will back any war demanded by the United States military-industrial complex. And that's perhaps the darkest aspect of this dark deal between Americans and German, or more generally, northern European or European capitalists. So, we begin to see why Europe's ruling class condones things that damage themselves. Took Nord Stream 1. We now know who blew it up. And it wasn't the Russians. It was the Americans. There was American military that blew up Nord Stream 1, and the German authorities know that. They know this very well. Now, by blowing up Nord Stream 1, they inflicted, the Americans, a gigantic, gigantic cost on German industries. And the German industrials know that. So, the question is, why are they not complaining? But they're not complaining because German investors need America's deficits to line their pockets with dollars, which they can then take to the United States to invest. So, even though they were not happy that America, the armed forces of the United States, the Pentagon, the United States government, inflicted that huge cost on them, energy cost, by blowing up Nord Stream 1, what could they say? They were vassals of the United States and in particular of the dollar profits that they got from the American trade deficit.
So, is it any wonder that they show allegiance to the Atlantic's other side? Is it any wonder that when America seized upon Putin's cruel invasion to fuel the never-ending war, Europe's rulers rolled over? It is why Europe's ruling class, our oligarchs, would even send their own children to war, to the trenches, to be slaughtered, or imprison them if they dare protest in our universities, and they have been proliferating across Europe. When Europe's steam engine, the engine that's supposed to pull the rest of the European wagons along, you know, the German industrial model, the German business model, when it is sputtering and failing the way that the German economy has been failing, what do you expect of the rest of Europe? When the politicians have conspired to ensure that there is no political union, that there is no political solidarity, that in the name of solidarity, they commit crimes against our peoples. The result is this steady fall from grace of the very idea of a European Union.
So, we're here to talk Europe, but not to praise it. We're here to bury this heartless, hideous formation that has come out of this European Union. This union whose rulers are hell-bent on war and naked exploitation of peoples and nature across Europe, in Europe's neighborhood, and of course, beyond. We're here to tell the people, the people of Palestine, of our commitment to fight this European election on their behalf, as well as on the behalf of our Jewish comrades who cry out in Berlin. And here I want to give special mention to the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East. Our German comrades in Berlin who cry out, not in our name. Jewish comrades like Iris and Udi, who have been arrested, who help us expose Ursula von der Leyen for what she is: an unelected lunatic, warmongering, genocide cheerleader, answering only to her true masters who are in Washington D.C., not in Europe. We are here to tell the people of Ukraine of our absolute commitment to a swift and just peace instead of the never-ending war Brussels is planning for them on behalf of the United States. Especially now that hitherto peace-loving Scandinavian social democrats and the Greens, especially in Germany, have been absolutely corrupted by nature. And we're here to tell our people in Germany, in Ireland, in Greece, in Italy, across the European Union, one simple thing: everything should be different, and everything can be different. But nothing will change unless, with our vote and with our activism, we build barricades to stop the warmongers and the oligarchs in their tracks. How could our message be different tonight? Here I have the great honor to be sharing the stage with our comrades from March 25 in Germany, who are demonstrating what it means to be a true internationalist German and a true internationalist European.
But let me ask the one trillion or ten trillion euro question: Why is Europe in decline? Why is Europe fast sliding towards this abyss technologically, economically, politically, ethically? Why is Europe becoming a nasty, brutish, stupid, and therefore irrelevant for the rest of the world continent? Well, allow me to convey to you, to share with you my view, my understanding of the reasons behind this decline. For 20 years, we had austerity of the many, or for the many, combined with socialism for the financiers. This combination of austerity for the masses and huge quantities of money printed on behalf of the financiers crashed investment in the things that Europe desperately needs. That's why now, in 2019, as Johannes reminded you, we ran across Europe, in Germany as well. I was a candidate in Germany, and I really truly enjoyed doing that. We ran across Europe with the European Green New Deal, the Green New Deal for Europe, as we called it. It was a magnificent proposal. It was quite actually centrist in a sense, but you had to be very left-wing and very radical in order to put forward such a centrist proposal. What he talked about was 500, 600 billion every year to be spent on the clean transition across Europe. By the way, Mario Draghi has come out very recently saying that we need 500 billion. What we used to say in 2019, now Mario Draghi has come out, commissioned by the European Commission, to say that they scream blue murder when Ukrainians are invaded, when the Ukrainian land is occupied, when the hospitals in Mariupol are threatened, rightly so. But they consider the exactly the same thing absolutely justifiable homicide when the invaders wear Israeli uniforms in Gaza or the West Bank or in Jerusalem. Don't forget it's Jerusalem.
They also like to put it to Hitler, you know, my view about Putin. I think he's a criminal. But they like to put it to Hitler to argue against a peace process that involves Russia because they want the Ukrainians to continue fighting forever, dying forever, with weapons that they buy from them. This hypocrisy is not only a moral insult to the direct victims of war and genocide in Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Kashmir. It is also a clear and present danger for our people here in Berlin, in Athens, across Europe. Lies and orchestrated industrial-scale hypocrisy is the starting point of internal tyranny and external wars. We need to expose it to save our people from desperatism, poverty, and the insecurity warmongering that they are trying to cultivate, and they are cultivating successfully.
Comrades, we're in the midst of a long slide to authoritarianism, which you know really very well in Berlin. The European Parliament elections cannot stop it, but we can slow it up. We can place some voices like Karin, Johannes, Udi, in Brussels. Voices that will inspire Europeans to stiffen their lip and organize better across our borders. And on this, you have our word. If you send Karin, Johannes, Udi, myself, Claire Daly to the European Parliament, we commit to give them, we commit to giving them the hell that they deserve, to expose all of them as NATO stooges, as enablers of Israel. We are going to expose all the shadowy salesmen of weapons of mass destruction, real weapons and financial weapons of mass destruction. We shall demonstrate to Europeans NATO's mafia-like strategy because what mafia does, it turbocharges people's insecurity to sell them protection. That's exactly what the mafia does. We shall remind them of how the CIA groomed nasties. Remember Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and later Vladimir Putin, who was the blue-eyed boy of the West. When people like Jeremy Corbyn and myself were demonstrating in the year 2000, 2001, 2003 against Putin, the West loved Putin. Let's not forget that they groomed these nasties, the CIA, NATO, Brussels, to use them later as an excuse to justify their lucrative wars. On Israel, we shall accuse European elites for centuries of rabid anti-Semitism that begat a century of complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, as if the genocide of the Palestinians can wash off the stench of the Holocaust from the hands of German, Greek, French, Italian bourgeoisie.
But the United States will nuke itself if it needs to do it in order to preserve its dollar monopoly. So, yes, I very much fear that Taiwan, which has nothing to do with Taiwan, is going to become a very possible and a very likely point of conflict that may ignite such a war. So, we need to take out our banners, our anti-war banners, and you know, take to the streets all over the world to prevent it. It is a stupid continent. We here in Europe, under the auspices of our shady form of pan-European government, with which I had some dealings when I was in the ministry, in the finance ministry here in Greece, they effectively committed suicide. Europe is irrelevant. Absolutely irrelevant. And allow me to give you just two examples because we don't have much time. I could be talking about this forever, with a lot of pain in my heart as a European. First example, if I'm right in my hypothesis, which you mentioned in the book in which I have outlined the technicalism, if I'm right that there's a new form of capital called cloud capital, which is a produced means of behavioral modification, not a produced means of production, that that is becoming the main instrument by which surplus value is accumulated, it is effectively siphoned off from the industrial sector. If I'm right, and therefore the powerful today are those who own large quantities of cloud capital, who owns cloud capital? Americans and Chinese. Zero cloud capital in Europe. Zero. This is why Volkswagen is finished. It's kaput because Tesla is connected to the cloud. BYD is connected to the cloud. Volkswagen is not. And therefore, it's going to simply fade away. It will be like British Land, British Land in Britain. You know, something that some oldies like us, you and me, remember. That's one example.
Second example, imagine, and I wish it happened, but at the moment it stays at the plane of the imagination. Imagine that there was tomorrow at the United Nations or somewhere else, a peace process on Ukraine. We know who would represent Russia: Putin. Ukraine: Zelensky. The United States: Biden, if he's still capable of engaging with anything, or Kamala, or Trump, or whoever. China: Xi. India: Modi. Who's going to represent Europe? Once upon a time, you know, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 6 years ago, we would have said Angela Merkel, who was a very powerful German chancellor. Today, the German chancellor is not even in control of the German government. The French president is a lame duck, and he has completely lost it in every sense of the way. The people who are actually running the show in the European Union when it comes to foreign policy are the Estonians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Polish, who actually want a war with China, with Russia tomorrow. They are warmongering idiots who are, you know, if they had a button to press and destroy Europe, they would tomorrow morning. So, there's no such thing as Europe. Europe has become a figment of our imagination, which is extremely dangerous because we remain the most wealthy continent in the world, a very cultural continent, a continent with 500 million people. And yet, we are irrelevant. And that is a clear and present cause of instability worldwide. We are experiencing a postmodern 1930s. We have the complete collapse of the left, of the progressive parts of the bourgeoisie. They are in retreat, as is the left. I wish I could be as optimistic as you about the performance of the left and the addition that you performed. I would never add the link with the SPD and the FDP. The SPD is a purely austerity party. Let me remind you that austerity in Europe was introduced not by the Christian Democrats, but by the Social Democrats in 2008-2009. It was the Social Democrats, when I was dealing with the German government, and it was a coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. The Social Democrats were weaker, the Christian Democrats more austerity-minded and more class warriors against the working class. The only half of the working class on the basis that if the working class reduces its wage share, you know, that will be good for competitiveness. I mean, when a Social Democrat says that, you just lose the will to live, right? So, I would not add the SPD to the rest of the left. Now, Sarah Wagenknecht, Sarah is a formidable, very smart, very impressive woman. She is married to Oscar Lafontaine, a great figure of the left. I know them personally, and that's why I'm so depressed because Sarah Wagenknecht managed to rise up electorally and do quite very well for a newcomer by adopting a racist agenda. This combination of pro-labor, but not in a Marxist way, in a kind of populist way, you know, we need to increase wages, we need to give more subsidies to existing industries which are dying anyway, instead of finding a way of creating a Green New Deal. There's no Green New Deal in Sahra. It's an old laborist agenda, and grafted on that old laborist agenda is racism, you know, targeting immigrants, talking, adopting the alt-right agenda for controlling immigration and blaming it on the immigrants. In East Germany, which has no immigrants, by the way, there are no brown faces in East Germany, which is where anti-immigrant feelings are maximized. We see this in the United States. We see this, you know, most anti-immigrant feeling is cultivated where there are no immigrants, which is not at all a contradiction. So, essentially, to wrap this up, we have a kind of socialist nationalism in Sahra, which I always argued is not a good response to national socialism. As for Britain, Britain seems to be the outlier. You know, the center-left triumphed. Well, firstly, it didn't triumph. It is the first-past-the-post system which created this abnormality, this anomaly, this huge majority. They got fewer votes. Keir Starmer got fewer votes than my friend Jeremy Corbyn got in 2019. But as you know from the United States, with first-past-the-post, you have really very anomalous results. But if you look at their policies, forget about, you know, the vote, their policies are straight out of the Thatcherite neoliberal troika in Europe, Republican, or if you want, right-wing Democrat playbook austerity. This government, under the Labour banners, is talking about expenditure. Why? Because the credit card of the state has been maxed out. I mean, my goodness, Keynes is spinning at 4,000 revs per minute in his grave. I think that we progressives, we on the left, overexaggerate the importance of the BRICS, while Washington, the establishment, the radical center, call them what you might, underestimate the BRICS. Look, we're Marxists, Rick. So, this talk about blocs and about the clash of the titans leaves me rather cold. What I find very interesting is the class war within China and the class war within the United States. So, let me put it this way: If you are an aluminum producer in Shanghai or Shenzhen, you're completely tied up to the dollar payment system and to the American deficit, which fuels the demand for your aluminum. And you really don't want any clash between China and the United States. If you are an American blue-collar worker whose job and life is jeopardized by this recycling of surpluses, surpluses produced by Chinese proletariats that end up in their interior sector of the U.S. economy, while blue-collar worker jobs are sacrificed in the United States, it's not really very easy to take sides on this. What I think is profoundly important is the manner in which the what I call cloud capital, the internet-based technologies, digital technology, AI, and so on, of the Chinese companies, state and private, how that cloud capital has merged with Chinese finance capital to create what I call cloud finance in China. Because that is a clear and present danger to the predominance of the dollar payment system. And the reason for that, and I think you will understand this better than anyone else, is because in the United States, there's no technological problem in merging cloud capital and finance, but there is a political problem. Wall Street is never going to share its capacity to print money with the big tech brotherhood of Silicon Valley, and that is where the Chinese are a clear and present danger to the hegemony of the United States.
Yes, we are in, we're living in Europe. The European Union is no longer a peace project. It's a European war union. You can see that the only thing they're talking about is common procurement, common armies, and all that. And that is, given that the United States, the European Union is completely dependent on the United States, reflects the war footing of the United States. I'll go back to the conclusion to my previous answer. You know, why is it that suddenly Chinese development is a threat to American hegemony, and therefore this is leading even to a nuclear war over Taiwan? Primarily, the reason is the development of what I call cloud finance in China. Because there's only one reason why the United States remains hegemonic: the monopoly over the national payment system, the dollar system. Now, if they're about to lose that, they're going to lose the capacity to project power in the four corners of the earth, and they will start a nuclear war to prevent losing that monopoly. And therefore, I very much fear that these developments in China, which the Chinese have every reason to carry on and carry out, why should they submit themselves to the monopoly of the dollar payment system? Why should the Emiratis or the South Africans or the Congolese submit to the predominance of the dollar payment system, where, you know, the United States government can confiscate billions and billions at will of whoever it doesn't like? Is music to the ears of renters in Miami, in Wall Street, in Switzerland, in Dubai.
And the problem with this government is not so much that they are reluctant to break pre-election promises. They have done it. They have slashed disability payments. So, this is a government that smacks a Labour government that seems to have no problem treating with contempt the people who voted for it and to be courting at the very same time the people who never voted for them and never will. Well, yes, she made it far worse by increasing, in a silly, silly manner, the national insurance contributions last year. This was simply a tax on employment. That made absolutely no sense. And to think that she only raised about 25 billion a year when at the same time she was giving 33, 34 billion every year to the bankers through the quantitative easing program, which she had no reason to give, especially a Labour chancellor should not have done that. You know, sometimes historical accidents happen, but it is an accident, and it's an even greater personal tragedy that I'm going to say something good about the European Central Bank. And nobody can accuse me of being a lackey of Frankfurt. The European Central Bank have not been doing what the Bank of England has been doing. And just for our audience, very briefly, when the Bank of England sells off all the assets that they were purchasing during the period of quantitative easing to the bankers, the bankers use this money. They don't use this money. They don't lend it to the private sector. They park it on their reserve accounts with the Bank of England, and they get very larger, much larger interest rates. Now, what the ECB did was to say, no, you, we are going to tear these interest rates. We are not going to give money from the treasury for zero services that the banking sector is providing by parking that money instead of lending it to the private sector. This is a crime against logic. What I'm not sympathetic to is the fact that they're focusing on the pain, the symptoms, and not on the causes of the pain. And the cause of the pain, allow me to say, from my perspective as an outsider, is the fact that since the 2008-2009 crisis, the great financial collapse, there's been almost no net productive investment in this country. Indeed, not in Europe as a whole.
According to Giannis Verufacus's analysis, Greece has become a political extension of the United States in exchange for agreements made in the interests of Europe. What are your thoughts on this matter? Please share your comments below. If you find these types of videos beneficial and would like to be notified about more content, please enable notifications and subscribe to the channel.