What's the matter with eu?

It turns out that Merkel and Sarkozi have been chatting for months about a stronger, inner EU. There are precedents. Charlemagne became overlord of large parts of what is modern Germany and France in 742. (No doubt the Chinese diplomats are already politely pointing that out.) He came to dominate northern Italy and chunks of Spain as well. Back to the future! (Don't you feel a 'non!' vote coming on? Me too.)

Here's the rub. At the moment Euroland has total 26 TRILLION Euro debt to banks. (A trillion is a thousand billion.) The separate countries also have a 10 TRILLION Euro debt* (sovereign debt - as it is so respectably called) between them. Even I can see that 36 trillion euros does not go in to the 1 trillion euros of the emergency euroland bail-out fund - if they can ever raise it - if they can ever persuade anybody outside euroland to invest in it. (*These figures come from somebody called the RBS Strategy Manager - so take a care.)

You may also want to know that in the last ten years Italy's economy grew on average by 1% a year. Euroland as a whole did not do that much better. (It was Germany that pulled the figures up.) When I add that more than half of bank debt in Europe (not just euroland but the whole EU) is 'held' by other banks in Europe - anybody can see two huge facts at once. First fact. The EU was/is a machine for making money not out of investment but - out of money - (debts, loans, selling packages of debts and loans, then selling them again in other packages, then insuring them, then selling the liabilities, then speculating on whether the liabilities go up or down, then...then...) Second fact. If Germany raced its industrial engines to a white hot heat, if what remains of industrial France and Italy and Spain joined in, if everybody in China bought two BMWs, it would still take a century to pay it all back.

The way Europe's debt was liquidated last time this happened involved a world war.

The City, as it is reverentially dubbed, is of course at the absolute epi-centre of all these shenanigans.

So. What would a rational meeting of the young people outside St Pauls, the Indignados from Spain, the Wall Street kids; what would they come up with to deal with this catastrophic capitalist mess?

Maybe they would think, as I think, and maybe you also think, that the debts that they and their countries and their euroland currency carry, should be sorted. You could have two piles. Pile one would be all those debts that affected the people. Silly pension funds that swallowed the market myths and could screw up our old people; investments in bright ideas, in new technologies, great causes, small businesses that work themselves to death to do something new, savings. Then there would be the second pile. This would be all the bets, the chiseling, the gambles, the semi-criminal crap that made more billionaires than you could shake a stick at. Pile one; the people of European countries (after a vote) would take that on. Pile two, fuck-em. We default.

Would our banking system; would the City, collapse? Yes. You bet your bippy. So when we did this stuff we would need, at the same time to build new banks. In Britain it could be called the Peoples Bank of Britain (POB for short.) It would need £billions and its job would be to invest, invest, invest. Invest in new technologies; invest in a green future; invest in a Swiss or Danish style infrastructure. Invest in a future for the 99%.

Time to take a hand in your own future.