Varoufakis as varoufuckwitted as ever.

 When Syriza first came to power in Greece, I asked my friend, Agamemnon. why a shithead like Varoufakis had been made Minister of Finance. He said, 'Achtung! German Bankers have gained mortgages on all Greek bodies, souls, brains, not to mention real estate. Varoufakis is a meat machine controlled entirely by Wolfgang Schauble. That is why he is determined to totes fuck up Greece. Auf Weidersehen. My wife has just drawn a bath for me and so I have to go.' 

Bearing this in mind, Varoufakis's latest article for the Guardian becomes comprehensible. 

In Greece, our general strike was a flop. Here’s why not enough people joined it

It was called by the Unions. But their power is selective. They can get wage increases for some workers, not all workers. They are merely pretending otherwise so as to continue to collect dues from workers with no bargaining power whether individual or collective.  

The Greek economy has been bled dry by vulture funds

vultures can only feast on what is dead. Clearly Varoufakis and administrations he supported or which listened to his 'advise'. 

and austerity, making citizens too poor to lose a day’s wages.

Employers should pay workers more so that they can afford to go on strike for at least four days a week.  

The left has an onerous task ahead

No. It will continue to shit the bed. That's not onerous, or honourable, at all.  

Rena never knew a strike in Greece she did not support, never missed a rally that our party endorsed. But on Wednesday, at a rally to mark a rare nationwide general strike, Rena was not there. Worried, I rang her.

 I too was worried. I rang Agamemnon. His wife answered. She asked me to come over because she had drawn a nice bath for me.  

No, nothing untoward had happened. “I just can’t afford to lose a day’s wages, not this week,” she said, apologetically.

Previously, Rena was over-paid and thus was able to spend a lot of time going on strike.  

Having lost her flat last year to a vulture fund – an investment fund that buys shares cheaply

Varoufakis only buys shares when they are very expensive. Also, he won't buy a McDonald's happy meal unless he is charged 50,000 US dollars for it.  

in companies that are failing in order to take control, improve their performance

Varoufakis thinks the performance of failing companies should not be improved.  

and so make money

making money is wrong. The working class should spend all its time going on strike.  

– Rena was struggling to pay this month’s rent, which eats up 60% of her income.

It would eat up more if she went on strike.  

“I shall join you briefly, during my lunch break,” she promised.

Rena wanted to have a hearty laugh at the expense of those who were losing a day's wages.  

Rena is not atypical.

Nor, sadly is Clytemnestra.  

The turnout for the general strike was depressingly low. Margaret Thatcher was right that a combination of austerity and the financialisation of working-class housing (through the sale of council houses) is the perfect poison for the trade union movement.

Being rather working class herself, Thatcher was right that most Brits thought Scargill sucked ass big time.  Incidentally Council Houses have always been 'financialised'. People had to pay rent and rates. 

In Greece, the financialisation of housing took a more circuitous route.

Nope. In Greece, people used money to buy or improve houses and land. It had 'financialization' thousands of years ago.  

A chance meeting in 1998

the same year I chanced to meet Agamemnon 

with a director of a major German bank had alerted me to it long before it unfolded.

Anything Varoufakis is 'alert' to, doesn't fucking exist.  

Puzzled by his joy that Greece had been invited to join the euro, I asked him why.

The German economy was under a cloud because of the costs of re-unification. Hopefully, attention would be diverted to the improvident Greeks who are constantly drinking wine and breaking plates.  

He explained that we Greeks were his bank’s “wet dream”.

Varoufakis doesn't get that this joyous German wanted to fuck him in the ass.  

Although much poorer than the Germans, 80% of Greeks owned their homes outright and had no debts. “Once your wages are in hard currency, you will be our best customers,” he said. “We shall sell you mortgages, Volkswagens, all kinds of appliances and the loans to buy them with.”

The German banking system is inefficient and deeply stupid. It needs a captive market. But who will pick up the tab for their inefficiency and stupidity? Ultimately, it will be the Germans. Currently, they appear totes fucked.  

Unconvinced, I asked what he thought would happen when those loans triggered a debt-fuelled economic boom, inflating bubbles that were bound to burst and then leave his Greek customers with nothing but unpayable debts. “We will take your houses,” he replied, presciently.

German wit is a fearsome thing. Still, it may be that he thought Varoufakis didn't know that if you default on your mortgage payments, the Bank or other lender can take your house. It will be sold at auction to 'vultures'.  Still, the big question is why Varoufakis assumed Greece would act like a drunken sailor? After all, Greeks- as individuals or families or communities- are thrifty, enterprising and highly intelligent. Why would the Greek nation behave differently? The answer is that shitty academics in totes shite subjects wielded political power. Also, Government accountants were cooking the books like Gordon fucking Ramsey. 

Today, in a country of 10 million people,

one million workers in Greek are foreign born. They probably contribute a quarter of GDP. 

more than one million homes and small businesses, including Rena’s flat, have fallen into the lap of vulture funds that bought distressed mortgages from the banks at a fraction of the loans’ face value.

The foreign born workers may buy those homes and businesses. Greece is a paradise of law, order, decency, intellectual honesty and endeavour compared to the countries which they have fled. I suppose, in a generation or two, they will be as proud of Greek culture and civilization as those descended from my pal Agamemnon.  

As they are auctioned off, these funds reap returns in excess of 200%, which they legally transfer to their offshore accounts.

Just as they legally transfer funds into their on-shore accounts. I suppose the foreign born will get an increasing chunk of Greek assets. Since they rose by hard-work, thrift, and enterprise, they are likely to vote for socially conservative parties though they will support better local public and 'club good' provision.  

About a quarter of Greece’s national annual income will be thus siphoned out of a country

where half a million younger workers were forced to flee for economic reasons  

whose working people can’t afford the bare essentials

77 percent of young Greeks say they are willing to emigrate because of difficulties in getting an adequately paid job at home. 

but whose wealthy have been celebrating their unexpected windfall for the last four years.

Why are they not weeping bitterly at receiving a windfall? Is it because evil German bankers are controlling them.  

When the shock waves of the 2008 financial crisis hit Greece, lacking a currency to devalue,

and thus unable to enjoy hyper-inflation 

its creditors imposed the logic of internal devaluation: instead of a currency devaluation of, say, 30%, it cut by 30% everything else – wages, pensions, expenditure on health and education, etc.

Did you know that 'creditors' beat and sodomized Greek people till they did what similar (PIGS) countries did without any beating or sodomization? This was because Agamemnon was Wolfgang Schauble's beard. Clytemnestra was so not amused.  

Alas, there is one thing that internal devaluation can never devalue: debt.

It can impose a haircut on domestic savers.  

Having lost so much of their euro income, while their euro debt grew, both the Greek state and workers like Rena went bankrupt.

So did Bernie Madoff. We should go on strike to show solidarity with him.  

Around 2018, as the state offloaded its assets in a fire sale and foreign money rushed in to buy cheap land and property, the freefall began to decelerate and a comatose equilibrium emerged.

Greece had sobered up. It wasn't really a drunken sailor. It had simply listened to the wrong economists and 'social scientists'.  

Rents and house prices went through the roof, propelled also by digital nomads and homes converted to Airbnb lets, while wages remained on the floor. Between 2009 and 2023, in countries such as Poland

which retained the zloty 

and Slovenia,

 which went into the Euro at par but had a recessionary shake-out in 2012- 2013. It responded sensibly enough with privatization etc. 

the real hourly wage rose significantly (42% and 23% respectively).

Do sensible stuff and you get richer. Do stupid Lefty shit and you become poorer.  

But in Greece, it fell by a whopping 23.7%. Greece even managed to displace Bulgaria from the bottom of the EU27 table in terms of the purchasing power of the hourly wage. In 2022, almost one in four of all Greek workers in full-time employment lived on incomes that in 2009 were considered below the poverty line.

Quit boasting Varoufakis. We all understand the scale of your great achievement.  

Moreover, when pauperisation of the many goes hand in hand with privatisation of every public asset, democracy is the next victim.

Nope. Democracy tells Varoufakis to fuck the fuck off. That doesn't make him a victim. It just makes him a guy that voters should stay the fuck away from.  

Greece’s formerly public electricity company is a case in point. Broken up into pieces that were handed over to five Greek oligarchs (alongside private equity funds such as Macquarie and CVC), their profit margins are among the highest in Europe.

Because Greece has taken its medicine and is now economically viable. 

But try criticising them and you get cancelled – at least by the five major TV channels which, by some strange coincidence, are also controlled by the same five oligarchs.

Why didn't oligarchs spend all their money like drunken sailors? How come they still get to own stuff and make 'profit'? Also, how come they don't eat their own shit? Is it because they are secretly in bed with Big Food.  

Is it any wonder that Greece languishes in 107th place, behind Qatar and Thailand, in the Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index?

Is it any wonder that actual journalists think that index is shit? 

Normally, such vistas of discontent should be a breeding ground for labour mobilisations.

Unless labour is 'once bitten, twice shy.' 

But not in Greece, where the bulk of the austerity, the electronic auctions used to evict homeowners and the sordid privatisations were written into law by the centre left: first the Pasok socialists then by my former party, the leftist Syriza, which is haemorrhaging support and MPs, and is no longer the official opposition.

Still, it got rid of Varoufakis and thus retains some political credibility.  

With the left having its dirty work done for it – with the tacit complicity of the unions that the left controlled – the centre-right government under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was utterly unperturbed by Wednesday’s not-so-general strike. His real concerns were the ominous wranglings within his governing party that surfaced soon after Donald Trump’s victory.

Oh. He's a grown up. Agamemnon would so not approve.  

Since 2019, with the left’s self-inflicted fall from grace,

i.e. the fact that they were left wing.  

Mitsotakis has built his hegemony on a coalition of two factions: one that swears by austerity, fire sales and the predation that keeps the oligarchy seriously wealthy; and a second far-right, xenophobic Trumpian faction.

Immigration has to be curtailed sooner or later.  

With three far-right parties already in parliament and snapping at his heels in the polls, Mitsotakis is facing an insurrection from his Trumpian faction.

Greek politics is pretty complicated. So is Israel's. But the people are smart.  

As for the left, our onerous twin task is, first, to regain the trust of the people we abandoned to a diligently reconstructed predatory state and, second, to elicit a belief that resistance is never futile.

Resistance to Varoufakis is not futile. Tell shitheads, who are Professors of Econ,  to fuck the fuck off and your economy is bound to improve