IndignadosToday sees yet another round of hand-wringing across the Eurozone, driven by another round of hand-rubbing by the markets. When will it end?

We’re told that all it takes is a decisive move, that sufficient taxpayers’ money can be thrown at bank balance sheets to stop all this instability. It’s clearly nonsense. As Matt Taibbi pointed out yesterday in gorgeous detail, these bailouts are an endless series of ways to break the rules in favour of the rich elite, and it’s no wonder the peasants are revolting. Europe’s bureaucratic bailout merry-go-round is basically the same scam, just in more languages.

If the moral hazard is withdrawn and the value of your investment is never allowed to go down, and the traders and hedgies get offered a bet to nothing backed up by public money, they’ll just stop asking for more and threatening whoever’s next in line? Really? If the banks get offered a voluntary “haircut” only on their government debts, but the hedge funds can buy those debts and extract the full value, they won’t get together and make that deal? Really?

We know that austerity isn’t the solution to government debt. Greece’s economy fell 7.3% over the year – it’s not a technical recession, it’s a collapse. The previous link to the BBC shows what the vulture funds and multinationals are making from it too: woohoo! Cheap property in Kolonaki! Can I buy the lottery? Even the New York Times knows better than our current UK administration: “Mr. Cameron’s austerity program is the Tea Party’s dream come true“, and “unlike Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself.”

Can political union save the economic union? Those of us who never believed a single currency could work across an economically diverse continent doubt that too. It’s just an even grander elite project to replace a failed elite project. The larger a state, the harder it is to change things. This is one of the reasons I favour independence: we need a radically reformed system of governance, and that seems almost impossible even at a UK level. Assuming political union could be delivered, the democratic deficit would feel even stronger to European citizens across the continent. The wrangle and tension that would come from making all taxation and spending decisions centrally, never mind all the social policy differences, make this pure fantasy.

Personally I agree with Frances Coppola on Liberal Conspiracy yesterday – the Euro is finished. Why any responsible First Minister would tell us so confidently that joining it is part of Scotland’s manifest destiny I have no idea. But before that there’s a choice of bailouts in front of the Eurozone leaders. The first option is to bail out the banks again, become the lender of last resort, and to prop up and vindicate all the traders who thought there’s money to be made here without risk. The second option is to go beyond the current guarantees and underwrite every deposit made by every individual and business in those banks, and tell the banks they’re on their own. A big society bailout, if you like, a bailout for the people who’ve suffered through these economic hard times, not yet another one for the people who made the mess in the first place. It’s not enough, but it would be a start.

If they go the right way, they will have redeemed themselves as Götterdämmerung for the dream of a United States of Europe approaches. If not, it’ll be time for the indignados and occupiers to take it to the next level, to turf a whole generation of corrupt politicians who put banks before people out and start again.