Americans who still give a damn about anything important should pay close attention to what’s going on in Cyprus. The extended two day bank “holiday” has now been extended until next Tuesday. The banks remain closed because the Cypriot parliament essentially refused an offer they couldn’t refuse, at least as far as the EU is concerned. That offer is stark: either the parliament allows the confiscation of private property, aka personal savings, from the bank accounts of Cypriots to help underwrite the horrendous decisions of Cypriot bankers, or the EU lets the country go bankrupt.

Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money to spend.” The thugs that run the European Central Bank (ECB) the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), more familiarly known as the “troika,” are well aware of that reality. But rather than let those directly responsible take the hit, as in the bankers and their bondholders, the world is once again being subjected to the pathetically familiar refrain known as “too big to fail.” Thus, instead of running out of other people’s money to spend, the troika’s “solution” is simple: find more people to shake down.

And make no mistake: this is a shakedown, comparable to a Soprano-style protection racket. “Nice little country you have there, Cypriots. It would be shame to see it run into the ground.”

Here’s the truth about what’s going on: we’re all Cypriots now. We’re all beholden to an international cartel of governments and bankers who don’t’ give a damn about “quaint” concepts like democracy, or national sovereignty. The Cypriot parliament voted 36-0 against stealing money from peoples’ bank accounts, but as far as the troika is concerned, they got the vote “wrong.” And while there is talk about coming up with a “plan B,” what that really means is, as it was said in “Cool Hand Luke,” that the MPs in the Cypriot parliament “gotta get their minds right.”

How corrupt is this international cartel? Americans might want to ask themselves how a cabal of bankers and Wall Street titans could be bailed out to the tune of $700 billion in TARP funds, and not a single resignation was demanded in return. They might ask themselves why the government doesn’t include the costs of food and fuel when they calculate inflation rates. They might ask themselves why it took Bloomberg News more than two years of litigation after filing a Freedom of Information Act to find out that the Federal Reserve made more than $7.7 trillion available to banks all over the world in order to keep them afloat.

Here’s something most Americans haven’t figured out: just like Cypriots, our saving accounts are being raided as well. The only difference is that the EU is far less sophisticated about it than Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Instead of an outright money grab, Big Ben has made the idea of having a “savings” account a cruel joke. In order to protect the banking class, we’ve had zero interest rates for the longest time in the history of the nation. This amounts to nothing less than a phantom tax on savings, with a not-so-subtle addenda included: either you risk your hard-earned money in the stock market to get a decent rate of return – or you can go screw.

Somewhere down the line, it may occur to people in places like Greece or Spain, where the official unemployment rate is above 25% and the recession/depression has been going on for four or five years – with no end in sight – that the EU’s trump card of “do what we say, or we’ll either let you go bankrupt” is really a deuce. At some point, leaving the EU behind, going bankrupt and devaluing a national currency to get back in the game will become the lesser of two evils.

At some point, it may occur to people that reestablishing national sovereignty, and taking all the lumps that come with it, is a far better deal than being beholden to a bunch of socialist hucksters who “grand vision” is nothing less than an unmitigated disaster. It may occur to people that being Cypriots, or Spaniards, or Greeks, or Italians, and enduring two or three years of years of brutal hardship, beats the hell out of being “Euro-proles” stuck in a never-ending twilight zone of lowered expectations, courtesy of the international financiers and their political enablers.

The EU is threatening to kick Cyprus out? Here’s hoping Cypriots kick the EU and all of their socialist trappings out of their country. And here’s hoping Americans snap out of their own self-induced torpor and realize that we’re headed down the same road.