by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
Sometimes the internet being eternal works to our advantage. Recently, there’s been a dustup in European politics over a three-year old video of now Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stepping on the third rail of European politics.
In that video she openly explained that colonialism in Europe isn’t over and she tied it to African immigration into Europe, which Italy has born the brunt of thanks to the EU’s rules which force countries to accept anyone that shows up on their shores.
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The mechanism for France’s dirty colonial secret is they still control fourteen West African nations through a French colonial currency (CFA Franc) issued by France.
Now, since Meloni’s rant, the CFA Franc has been slightly revised but the real source of its power over West Africa was not, more on this later.
What’s important is that this video has all of a sudden resurfaced at a time when Italy and France are involved in a major row over France’s (and Davos’) latest attempt to paint Meloni as some heartless Fascist for denying a French NGO boatload of migrants from North Africa into Italy.
The boat eventually wound up having to go to France as Meloni stuck to her guns. Remember, folks it was then Interior Minister Matteo Salvini who first tried to defy Davos on this and his reward was to be sued in Sicilian court over ‘human rights abuses.’ This began Salvini’s fall from political power in Rome as he didn’t have enough support from his then coalition partner, Five Star Movement (M5S).
Eventually, Salvini was forced out of power, M5S cut a deal with the Rome Mafia to betray its supporters and the rise of Meloni and the Brothers of Italy (FdI) was inevitable.
The lame attempt by France to attack Meloni on immigration was met with a much different result this time as she enjoys a far stronger political position than Salvini did in 2017-18. So, the boat went to France and all the French could do was fulminate about it.
Enemy at the NGO Gates
In fact, the French Foreign Minister Gérald Darmanin went so far as to call Italy France’s enemy over this issue. This level of histrionics over less than 250 migrants is both so predictably French and overblown it borders on the comical.
So much for European solidarity, I guess.
But it’s all part of the silly Davos PR campaign against Meloni. Nothing changes with these people. They have a pathological need to win every single little battle, because as psychopaths they know any sign of weakness is an invitation to the gallows as people see them for what they are.
As always, the timing on this video of Meloni coming out is interesting. It’s a clear counterattack on France’s theatrics.
My question, as always, is who did this? Obviously Meloni’s people are part of this but does it imply she has some other support?
Stick with me, because I have a theory on this.
Ultimately, this dustup fully highlights the mendacity and, frankly, evil of the former colonial powers of Europe.
The CFA Franc was something that you ‘just didn’t talk about’ as France continued to extract wealth from West Africa through monetary expropriation.
The very idea that the vestiges of colonialism are on the wane in Europe is not only fundamentally false it is intrinsically woven into the fabric of the EU itself in every way. The CFA Franc should be an anachronism, but France holds onto for its benefit, subsidizing its ridiculous government and failing social institutions.
Among first world nations France has the highest effective tax rate for upper income earners. And yet, they still can’t keep things running effectively and have to extract wealth from north Africa.
How brutally inefficient and sickly is a French economy that derives nearly 50% of its electricity from a mostly-homegrown nuclear industry and has levels of taxation that make even a nineteenth-century slaveowner blush that it still needs to operate a colonial wealth extraction system in West Africa in the 21st century?
But it’s also a microcosm of the euro itself and even the corruption of the US dollar through national control over interest rates thanks to a monolithic central bank.
Like many of you, I had no idea the CFA Franc even existed and I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that in 2022 fourteen countries do not have monetary sovereignty, serfs to a feudal lord on a separate continent.
Again, just when I thought I’d plumbed the depths of Eurotrash globalist depravity, they make me look naïve.
But what’s been very clear is that the CFA Franc has been a no-go in international and inter-European political discussions for decades…. and someone close to Meloni just made it a global issue.
So much so, that no less than Le Monde had to put out a fire suppressor article. It’s a laughably poor piece of apologia. It’s a typical piece of ‘word parsing’ that picks out specific little exaggerations to discredit Meloni as stupid and uninformed while avoiding the basic problems of France running a wealth vacuum in 14 of the poorest countries in Africa.
Le Monde quickly switches to the ‘migrant’ issue to ‘debunk’ Meloni’s claims about African immigration as a result of the CFA Franc. Sure the country of origin of most migrants are from countries on the shore of the Mediterranean, but where did they come from in the first place?
It’s like saying Hondurans who cross into the US from Mexico aren’t Hondurans and that policy in Honduras didn’t contribute to the migration. But, this is really a side issue. Meloni is fundamentally right that the CFA Franc keeps these countries poor through currency arbitrage and contributes directly to North Africa’s instability and lack of economic progress.
To think that doesn’t have spillover effects into Algeria, Morocco or anywhere else along the southern Mediterranean is simply laughable.
It’s the Currency, Stupid!!
The key to understanding the evil of the CFA Franc is no different than understanding the evil of the euro or the Fed Funds Rate. It’s mercantilism through currency arbitrage.
The CFA Franc is not just pegged to the euro (formerly the French Franc) it is also tied to the ECB’s monetary policy debt rate. This is the part no one, especially the writer at Le Monde, wants to touch.
So, as Le Monde states there are the two central banks in Africa that issue the two different CFA Francs. What they fail to state is that both currencies are still pegged to the euro, making local monetary policy a joke. France and the ECB still control their economies.
The ECB’s monetary policy is set by Germany for Germany’s benefit. Having (up until now) the strongest economy in the EU, Germany gets an effective benefit from the euro trading at a single exchange rate.
If the euro were to collapse and the Deutschmark returned, it would rise dramatically versus the previous euro exchange rate. For Italy, the return of the lira would see it fall.
