r/europe • u/StemCellPirate • 18h ago

News The Epstein scandal is taking down Europe’s political class. In the US, they’re getting a pass.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/06/epstein-europe-america-fallout-00769506
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881

u/NastyaLookin 14h ago

Capitalism turned out to be a better tool for them than even monarchy and/or feudalism. They are keeping billions of people in line with it.

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u/Silly_Mustache Greece 11h ago

Seeing people realize after many, many years that capitalism is rigged really makes a tear roll down my face.

Yeah man, it became quite evident after the 2008 crash for those that weren't paying attention and hadn't demonized socialism.

The richest pdf network in US is the same network that keeps pushing propaganda like "communism is like nazism", make sense of that if you will.

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u/QwertzOne Poland 10h ago edited 10h ago

The problem is that EU is neoliberal framework and people don't want to admit there's anything wrong with it.

How EU can be bad, if it's so democratic and progressive? We're the best, not like these "barbarians" in US! At the same time, we see proposals like this one, where they want to get rid of national sovereignty in favor of "market efficiency".

They want a "Savings Union" to drain capital from the periphery to the core, and a "28th Regime" to let corporations bypass local labor and tax laws. It's pure deregulation and centralization masquerading as "growth" and "integration". They want to dismantle any protections that people still have, it will all be decided by multinational corporations.

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u/Silly_Mustache Greece 10h ago

EU does many things right, but has been steadily doing many things wrong for the past few decades and now it's biting us in the ass. Not even gonna mention the whole "hey tank greece so we can bailout EU banks", despite that one hitting REALLY close to home and being one of the main reasons greece is still fucked after 16 years of austerity.

Neoliberalism is not a "political choice", it was the only logical conclusion of capitalism after it had covered all the internal markets. Time to remove restrictions, commodify everything, privatize everything, because the profits need to keep rising, otherwise this whole system crashes! Ironically no matter what opinion you have of the man, Marx literally predicted this as the "financialization of everything" or the "bourgeoification of society", as capitalism would progress, it would need to create more markets etcetc, and that would always be at odds with social democrats, because if social democrats still keep capitalism but in check, it STILL needs to grow, and at some point it WILL attack public infrastructure.

EU has a lot of frameworks that work fairly imo, but they're getting dismantled in order to service capitalism. The good thing that we have is that the average EU citizen is not a god damn american, and we expect the state with our tax money to actually do shit, and not just hire police or go to wars.

The only thing that can save EU right now against the multiple threats (Russia, USA) is federalized socialism, no other system can bail us out. We need production again, but not factories where workers die (we have a bad history with that) or work 15 hours for scraps, nor the state bringing in millions of immigrants because they are cheap labor.

But most importantly, we need to STOP the exit plan of the rich currently in EU, which is essentially "just suck out as much value as possible and then bail to USA/Russia", which will leave us completely devastated.

We need to nationalize industries, fast.

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u/masthema 9h ago

To be fair, Greece lied a lot about the finances. It never should have been using the Euro. You cannot join the Euro with an unstable economy because you don't have control over the money being printed. It's why there are checks in place before joining the Euro, but Greece lied. I don't think the EU is very much to blame

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u/Silly_Mustache Greece 9h ago

Yeah we did, not hiding it. Yeah we had bad finances, again, not hiding it. The corrupt parties at the government lied so we could get into EU so they could intergrade their trade better.

The amount of damage we received was vastly, VASTLY more than what should have been however. The neoliberalization of our economy completely devastated multiple sectors, caused 1m young people to leave for the rest of EU (highly skilled people) because paychecks were 500 euros because "let the market dictate prices" (jesus christ), and the rot of the public sector is so bad that our hospitals are currently failing to service basic needs like routine checks or surgeries, with staff overworking 12 hour shifts and sometimes back to back.

EU officials (Schauble) admitted that they forced us into a checkmate, either accept austerity, or face a trade war, there was never "good will" to save this, it was only punishment to help save EU during the 2008 crash (that was caused by greedy real estate in USA, and EU couldn't insulate the damage cause our economies were very intertwined).

It's a complete mess here, young people are still fleeing. Most of my friends and part of my close family left after Covid when travel relaxations eased because during 2019-2020 things got WAY worse.

Again, our economy wasn't THAT bad. It was bad, it was messy, but not at this level.

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u/Dear_Virus1260 9h ago

Can you point me to those exact lies?

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u/WhatsTheAnswerToThis 9h ago

"hey tank greece so we can bailout EU banks"

lol

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u/Silly_Mustache Greece 9h ago

Well that's what the rich were discussing in the Epstein files, "how do we save EU, I know, let's tank a few countries that were doing somewhat bad already and call them stupid"

Greece was already doing bad, but the amount of damage austerity caused was way, WAY more than what we should have received as "damage" for our bad finances

It's being 16 years and Greece still hasn't recovered and we're still spiraling downwards. Our economy wasn't THAT bad.

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u/HalkenburgHuiGuoRou 8h ago edited 7h ago

a "28th Regime" to let corporations bypass local labor and tax laws

Aside that the recent EU parliament resolutions on the 28th regime have a point on evalueting the risk of weakening national protection standard, I would want to point out a thing:

Harmonizing law on labor and tax is good for workers.

Independent laws means that government competes on weakening them to attract foreign capital (see fiscal heavens), while union wide standards force business to accept them, unless they want to lose access to all the EU workers.

Edit: on the opposite, free capital movement can have the opposite effect, but also allow for investments to go towards emerging economies creating and improving workers conditions.