Commission Debate 4 Guess who is giving away the Keys to the European Home and leaving the back door open to Burglar-Cartels!
Tags: acquisitions, Armstrong, bananas, bank, banking, barbed, bathroom, beer, Britain, chemicals, coal, Community, Competition, Creusot, economics, Europe, European, explosives, fittings, France, Germany, Hitler, IG Farben, iron, Krupp, Lisbon, mad, mergers, nickel, patents, Robert, Russia, Schneider, Schuman, science, shells, Stalin, steel, Stumm, Sweden, toxic, treaty, trusts, Union, USA, Verdun, Vickers, war, Wendel, wire, world, WW1, WW2
Ignorance of history brings repetition of errors, sorrows and subjugation. For lack of vision the people perish. Weary of war, worn out by forced labour under Hitler and Stalin, with populations exterminated by so-called ‘science’ gone mad and toxic ‘modern economics’, surviving Europeans after World War Two wanted a sane and just solution. They wanted a real democracy. Relying on eternal principles of justice, honesty and esteeming one’s neighbour, Robert Schuman proposed building a fortress against war and evil, a palace of peace for prosperity. He provided an outline plan for real democracy.
Today’s politicians want to reform the system. How? By opening up the back-door of the fort to rapacious foes. Either by ignorance or lust for power, the political class think they will make friends by writing on the walls of the palace (that does not belong to them alone): “Welcome burglars!” or “Come in all you gangsters!”. Do they think evil does not exist? They want to overturn the Community system that can reform the mad economics we are still suffering from! They are offering to supply the keys to the treasury and all the rooms to our worst enemies! Instead they should be dealing with their obligations and democratic duties in the treaties. The haven’t dealt with some for more than FIFTY years now!
Why did Europe create the Community structure? What was the problem it solved? How was it solved?
The political parties show no inclination to answer these questions. The fact that the founding fathers insisted on creating the European Commission — a body unknown in other governance systems — is one clue. The second is the founders’ insistence that it must be independent of all private interests, including, even especially, the political parties. The European Community was designed to make war impossible. The solution in simple terms was that a Commission must exist and be INDEPENDENT.
What was the war/ economic/ moral problem that happened around the time of the Schuman Proposal in 1950 to make it necessary?
Before WW1 industrialists in cartels made a laughing stock of governments. The iron and steel barons in different countries created an armaments cartel. These so-called patriotic firms worked together to fool governments. One firm created a armour-piercing shell, another in collusion developed an armoured steel to defend it. A third (or the first) created a shell that would penetrate the new armour and so on. The first firm persuaded one country to upgrade its armies and navy with new weapons. Then it declared that it needed a new defensive steel to defend it. And so on. This cartel of arms manufacturers led to the arms race. Who were these rascals who milked French, British, German and other peoples of their taxes to build up armies?
They were the great patriotic names of national industries, Schneider du Creusot of France, Armstrong, Vickers of Britain, Krupp, Stumm of Germany, Terni in Italy and major firms in USA and Russia. They colluded to dupe governments in the armaments ring. Not only did they create armies; they fomented wars between their client states abroad. Selling arms to two potential foes seemed good business. The second usually buys more than the first! Who was evil? The foes or the merchant? Then came the consequences, like giving fireworks to unsupervised, untrained children.
The result? British were massacred by British weapons in Turkey. Austrians were killed by Austrian bullets fired by Russians. Krupp supplied munitions to 52 countries who used them against Germans and their allies. Even during the war German barbed-wire defended the French from German soldiers at Verdun. British nickel for German shells was supplied via Sweden directly or exported as Swedish arms for Germany. After the war, UK’s Armstrong Vickers paid Krupp for the use of Krupp patents in all the shells that they manufactured. The victims of the shells were not considered in this deal.
In the period between the first and second World Wars, cartels were controlling the European economy in many other areas, including chemicals, patents and petroleum. These had a stranglehold as the most vital products in the world for industrialized countries.
Such mindless ideologies, incorporating the technological search for greater destruction and the correspondingly toxic economics, were no advantage of the European people either as workers, consumers of the goods or even the industries, which were destroyed by bombs of steel and coal-based chemical explosives. It brought blood, toil, sweat and tears. The cartels were at the origin of worldwide calamities, modern slavery and extermination programmes. Cartels — that is businessmen, entrepreneurs and industrialists — hired slave workers from Hitler’s SS and their comfortable, white-shirted accountants estimated they would die after nine months’ starvation work. The SS got a few marks a day for each. The European slaves got nothing but death.
Cartels in general lead to blackmail of the consumers, exploitation of workers and huge uncertainties for industrialists who were also cheated by each other and by other cartels.
In 1951, things changed for the better. The European treaty of the Schuman Plan created the world’s first international anti-cartel agency. That was at first confined to coal and steel. Coal was not only the major source of energy but also the feedstock for the chemicals industry. Iron and steel output statistics set the measure for an industrialized nation.
These anti-cartel and anti-trust powers were gradually extended to some but not all aspects of Europe’s single market. Those years marked the most prosperous in Europe’s history. That was accomplished because the Commission as the anti-cartel buster remained INDEPENDENT of the interest groups (whether industries, unions or consumers). It repulsed control from any interest including political parties and national governments.
Today, while petroleum, patents and chemicals still define western societies, the information economy predominates. Cartel problems remain. Cartels on these and everything from beer, bananas to bathroom fittings cheat the customer.
So what are political parties doing about assuring the independence of Europe’s anti-cartel agency? They are doing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what they should be doing. They are opening up the post of anti-cartel referee of the Single Market to the highest bidder! They are thus selling cheaply Europeans’ liberty.
This is not just selling the office of a free-market judge, it is far more lethal. The Lisbon Treaty proposals about the Commission become of existential importance when one turns to the Commission’s rôle as Europe’s anti-cartel agency. Robert Schuman’s original innovation — that the Commission should be totally independent of party politics — was essential to correct pre-World War abuses. Why? Because the same powerful coal and steel cartels involving Krupp, Schneider, IG Farben, Thyssen ‘bought’ political parties, banks and newspapers. The massive inter-penetration of shareholdings, banking, acquisitions and mergers, made it difficult for citizens and governments to know how they were being taken for a ride and by whom. It still does. That’s why it was clear to Schuman after WW1 that a new system of democracy was urgently needed. This would give greater powers to civil society.
Such interests subsidized political parties directly or covertly. With multiple industrial, financial and economic instruments, they were able to control policies in line with their essential interests. The steel-making de Wendel family or Schneider was customarily represented at the Bank of France, as one of the ‘Regents’. What qualifies a rich steel magnate more than a poor but honest economist to run the money supply?
In Germany where they had some of Europe’s best resources it was much worse. Trade took the form of forced barter, little different from blackmail. The steel and armaments industry was not only seen as representing national interest; it was also the means to control the entire European economy.
A worldwide empire of cartels under IG Farben with some 400 German cartel firms and 500 foreign firms under its control, became the world’s most powerful chemical and energy trust. Patents and restrictive trade agreements became the instruments for global dominance. Then the cartels came up against a political gangster named Adolf Hitler. It is still not clear who won.
Fritz Thyssen’s book is entitled: ‘I paid Hitler’. The armaments, steel and coal barons believed they could control any political party, including the Nazis. The international cartels led an independent life. Even at the height of WW2, they seriously hampered war production in the USA and elsewhere. In fact they did survive after Hitler committed suicide and millions died. At the end of WW2, some of these industrialists (who ended up with a couple of years imprisonment) said they were ready to fight another war!
The public, their customers, suffered not only price hikes from cartels, but the ravages of two world wars. The weak link was and is the political parties.
THE LESSON OF HISTORY IS THAT ‘INFLUENCING’ POLITICAL PARTIES IS EASY-PEASY FOR ANYONE WITH MONEY OR CORRUPT POWER. That seems to be a universal law from England’s seventeenth century to this day. Any political party will tell you about how powerful interest groups corrupt political parties, but usually only about its opponents or in a neighbouring country!
Thus the selfish and ignorant reforms now before us are undermining the very Community on which we depend for safety, peace and prosperity.
How is Europe being exposed to dangerous threats of subjugation under the proposed Lisbon Treaty? The danger is so tempting to any powerful or moneyed group, it is practically an open INVITATION to CORRUPTION. You can read the details in my letters to
- all Members of the European Commission,
- all Member States representations,
- the President of the European Parliament and members of the Constitutional Committee,
- the Presidents of the Economic and Social Committee and the
- Committee of Regions.
An answer to what is probably Europe’s most serious problem is URGENTLY required. This is a FATAL FLAW in the treaty. It is due to ignoring the principle of SEPARATION OF POWERS in the five democratic institutions of the European Community.
I am still waiting for a reply to the letters! (All the presidents and other addressees are of course members of political parties.)
Today the problem is not just for one industrial group to dominate a part of the Continent of Europe. What is at risk is that an internal or external group will seek to undermine the Commission, the world’s first international anti-cartel agency. Controlling the Commission, even covertly, is tantamount, to controlling the largest commercial entity in the world! This fatal flaw will expose us all to dangerous external attack, as lethal as a military defeat.
Today, Europe is vulnerable to major foreign energy entities (oil and gas) with multiple billions, even trillions of dollars at their disposal. Some, like sovereign state funds, are particularly dangerous because a handful of people control them with little supervision. Many multinationals also seem to be a law to themselves. Then there are many private, leveraged operations, bringing together clandestine financial operators in the secrecy of their internet webs.
In the past it was the Ruhr coal barons who controlled prices for the special coking coal used in steel-making, and hence had a throttle-grip on the entire economy. Do Europeans wish to sell their heritage, lives and interests to Russian gas interests or Arab oil? But the threat does not only come from the traditional sectors of energy. Other specialized cartels too would like to illegally exploit Europe’s wealth — see www.schuman.info/Warning.htm .
Take the example of the information economy. One US multinational was recently fined 900 million Euros. It had not only created a software cartel but had refused to obey both the Commission’s anti-cartel decisions and the European Court judgement, which confirmed the Commission judgement telling it to stop this illegal practice.
If you were the boss of such a multinational and even less scrupulous than Microsoft, would you prefer to pay fines totaling multiple billions or spend just a few millions ‘fixing’ the election of the European Commission president and hence controlling the policy of a world economic super-power? Europe’s first treaty made clear that the Commission President has to be of such sterling character of honesty, independence and impartiality that he would not buckle under pressure. The office must be proofed against corruption engineered by any powerful ‘public relations’ campaign. That is precisely why the office must be held by the most honest and independent, experienced person available among all European citizens.
Under present treaties, anyone of proven honesty and solid character among Europe’s 500 million people could in law be chosen as Commission president. It is still possible. Honest lawyers, businesspeople, engineers, professors, NGO leaders could apply.
Tomorrow with the proposed reform of the Lisbon Treaty, political cartels will pick the president. They will short-list the choice to two or three individuals. These compliant candidates are selected via opaque political machines, vulnerable to ‘deals’ political, ideological, financial or otherwise. That is, if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified by all 27 States.
NOW YOU KNOW! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO STOP THIS OPEN INVITATION TO CORRUPTION?
In the next debates we will deal with proposals about electing the Commission, not in secret but as one should expect in democratic states, worthy of the name.
Commission Debate 3: The global DANGERS that Europeans face from self-centered, ignorant party machines
Tags: Add new tag, butcher, change, climate, Constitution, corruption, crisis, de Gaulle, democracy, Environment, EU Treaty & Institutions, financial, France, Germany, ignorant, institution, Italy, Lisbon, Mafia, minister, Paris, parties, party, pig, Political, Reform, Rome, rule of law, Schuman, Statesman, Strasbourg, treaty, trough
The greed and covetousness of the political party machines will put all Europeans citizens at risk. The new political elites want to undermine the Community system of supranational democracy. By attempting a selfish power-grab, this narrow-minded minority of Europeans is threatening the European economy — and much besides. More than ever, Europeans need a real Community approach to global problems.
One clear example is the financial crisis. This cannot be solved by a top-down approach, as it might in the nineteenth century. Hoping that massive infusions of money will wash out toxic assets from a corrupt system is futile when the system itself is morbidly unhealthy. Another case is the Energy/ Climate Change crisis. This too requires the full mobilization of all citizens. The science may be right and verified but human greed remains a factor than planning won’t eradicate by fiat. No party political programme has resources, the independence or brain-power to solve the extreme complexity of these problems. Human ingenuity will selfishly unravel even a plan for planetary survival. Illegitimate party political control of European institutions is likely to make many matters worse with unforeseen consequences, corruption and low-level compromises. This approach is inadequate for the twenty-first century’s infinitely complex society.
Party political hierarchies encourage hasty, ‘efficient’ decisions, usually leading to unanticipated disasters. Only a Union based on an intense, open debate and the firm agreement at the levels of individuals, all associative organizations of civil society and national governments has any hope of dealing with such all-pervasive dangers. It needs to be based on fair, European rule of law. Europe’s now dozing institutions need to wake up. be active and analytical, and assume their legal role in the original treaties.
The cracks in the replacement system, the top-down approach, are now under increasing strain. Their incapacities are becoming daily more apparent. The ever-more frequent European Council Summits with vaporous results are an obvious danger signal to the public. The leaders cannot solve the problems by international or even inter-governmental measures alone.
To solve European and global problems, Europe needs more democracy, not less. The disdain of the party machines and their ignorance of the original principles of Community democracy of the 1950 treaties will leave all 500 million Europeans in grave danger of economic and political subjugation. This is even more dangerous now in a globalized world with ruthless international entities eager to control from without or devour the Community from within.
The Founding Fathers designed European Communities in the 1950s to avoid wars among member states. www.schuman.info/ceca.htm But they also saw the grave danger that their economies could be taken over piecemeal by powerful foreign entities. In war they had seen the depths of raw, evil, human nature. www.schuman.info/Strasbourg549.htm For this they designed powerfully democratic institutions.
Self-assured politicians have over recent years selfishly tried to whittle away the independent pillars of dormant European democracy. They seem to think they are smarter than these great democrats who founded the most prosperous, peaceful Community and re-established vibrant democracies in all the founding Member States. Modern politicians seem to be little aware of the dangers the founding fathers faced and courageously tackled. These dangers included those identified as the root cause of two world wars.
The so-called reformers are ignorant of the European system, the Community. This Community is Plan Z, Europe’s last chance. It stands out like white against black to all the other national or European plans for peace over two thousand years. All the rest brought war and destruction.
How do I know the party machines are ignorant? Am I being too hard? Well I have never seen one ‘reformer’ politician properly explain what exactly is a supranational democracy. Who most recently told the public how the original Community is supposed to work? No wonder! Ministers are often quoted as saying they do not understand it. Which so-called reformer explained how their proposals will improve its dynamic structure by bringing more democracy to its five institutions? Has any politician of recent date initiated a system that makes war impossible elsewhere in the world?
Let’s ask them an easier question. If they reluctantly concede the facts that the Schuman Plan brought Europe an extraordinary peace and prosperity, why haven’t they described, scientifically and academically, how such a model works and could do the same throughout the world? Even the Commission does not explain how the system was originally designed to work. It would embarrass the present political Commissioners!
A further proof of this ignorance is the practical record. When it comes to the democratic ground rules in the European treaties, the very basis that they now want to change, they have shown no inclination or desire to respect them. Why? Because it will set them on a path for an ever-widening democracy, in Europe and at home!
We have seen in the previous Debates that (1) for more than fifty years governments have been refusing fair elections under the single statute specified in the treaties; (2) these unfair election results distort power structures; (3) the proposed Lisbon Treaty would legitimize an irreversible power-grab by party machines of the Commission; (4) the proposed treaty worsens these distortions and encourages corruption by ruling party machines because NO CORRUPT Commission President will EVER be sacked by the Parliament; (5) a morally fused Commission and Parliament will encourage corruption, try to marginalize legitimate opposition, while encouraging extreme groups with monetary hand-outs.
This was de Gaulle’s system: ignore the European Parliament, subsidize important voting groups in France with European taxpayers’ money to encourage uncritical compliance. It ended in the riots and revolution of 1968. Germany was forced to pay as his price for political rehabilitation. Supported by corrupt Italian and other governments for decades, the agricultural budget with its massive subsidies to voters remained as secret as the nuclear programme. Why? Because the CAP and much of the money flowing ceaselessly to Italy’s south for ‘structural reform’ was corrupt. When these people ‘chloroformed’ the institutions in the 1960s and 70s, the Mafia got fat. The poor stayed poor.
One would have hoped the public had learned a lesson: ‘Chloroform’ the European Community democratic institutions at your peril. You will end up breeding secret committees, secret money networks, and a level of political corruption that is still with us today.
In their wisdom and understanding of human nature, the Founding Fathers of the European Communities created five independent institutions that would assure, justice and democracy in Europe. www.schuman.info/supra5.htm It would make war impossible. They succeeded in spite of the corrupt politicians. In their system all States were equal and none was able to use power politics of the strong to dominate the weak.
Politicians who replaced the Statesmen over the last half-century have endlessly tried to subvert those institutions for their own selfish purposes. The present threat is the attack on the independence of the European Commission, the central institution of the supranational Community system. De Gaulle failed to put the Commission under French national control as a secretariat. The other States had a few statesmen with the sense to insist that the Commission must remain independent. France had its European resistance figures against a return to power politics too.
The present threat comes from a more diverse source, party political machines. They want the Commission as a secretariat in their own sullied hands. They learned the lesson from De Gaulle who had only the powers of one centralized Gaullist State. He could not succeed against the solidarity of the other smaller democratic States. Perhaps, say the party bureaucrats, a multi-pronged attack by all political parties together will succeed, where he failed.
By one perspective they are smaller than the Grand Charles and the French Fifth Republic — they represent only two percent of the population who have party cards. But on the other that two percent includes party members who control the government machines and have enormous influence in society. They promise a plethora of new jobs for the party boys and girls, career prospects, to water the appetite of the more flexible and less-than-scrupulous party followers.
The crux of their proposal is that the European Commission should give up its last pretence of independence. It should be fused to party machines. For what purpose? The ‘reform’ will remove any restraint on budget control.
Who designed this open invitation to corruption? The political drafters of the proposed Constitutional Treaty and Lisbon Treaty foolishly wanted to stitch in the yah-boo, confrontational politics like they have in the trough at home. That’s a 17th Century distortion of democracy. The Community system is a 21st Century super democracy. For Europe it would be like trying to stitch a pig’s head on a human body. Such ideological shouting matches were NOT part of the revolutionary Community system. Instead the original concept requires that the Commission should be an honest broker. The Community works on the basis of pragmatism, tried and tested steps to acquiring wisdom.
But the politicians had invented a clever ruse so beneficial to themselves that even when the Constitutional Treaty was roundly defeated in referendums, they insisted on the same thing in the Reform/Lisbon Treaty. This time they said: No referendums, wherever party machines can stop them. Only one court said NO.
How did the parties explain this power-grab to the public? They said that they wanted the EP elections to attract more public attention. Party politics would make the issues more controversial, they said. They wanted to reverse their decline with public trust. Fewer and fewer Europeans wanted to vote.
So much for high principles! But why don’t people vote? They are disillusioned by tales that politicians are corrupt. One recent scandal alleges a score of multinationals ran an expenses-paid ‘lobby office’ inside the European Parliament. Another, about MEPs’ assistants, involves millions of Euros. MEPs are refusing to publish other, apparently more explosive, auditors’ reports. If the Parliament won’t come clean on rumours involving millions, why should voters trust the ‘usual suspects’ to elect a political pal as Commission President dealing with billions? Their pal would be in cahoots with the political machines. Impartiality and budget control would go out the window.
These billions are taxpayers’ money that will be lavished at home and abroad to fulfill the myopic, ideological goals of a party machine that has taken power in parliament and has thus gained and even more valuable prize — the Commission.
Why do I call the politicians myopic? Firstly the potential instruments of democratic solidarity to solve such problems lie in the letter and spirit of the original treaties. The political class has not only ignored and bad-mouthed these principles.They offered no viable alternatives. They want the alternating competition of the trough.This is barren, even destructive. It is Plan A. There is little chance of having a lasting, honest solution either to the financial crisis or the coming environmental catastrophes by means of the Constitutional Treaty or the Lisbon Treaty.
The instruments in these treaty ‘reforms’, the product of best brains of party machines, are totally inadequate for the gravity of today’s problems! Governments have already returned to secret talks behind the walls of the Council building in the vain hope that inter-governmental agreement will be forged with the democratic control shut out. Vain hope! Our disaster!
The public is being taken for a ride, like an emergency patient being taken to hospital. You are diagnosed with serious brain and heart damage (Commission) and renal failure (Parliament). Arms and legs are broken (organs of Civil Society). What’s more you are blind and need a delicate eye operation (the secretive Council meeting behind closed doors). Arriving at the operation room, you are told that the surgeon is to be … your family butcher. He knows all about body parts, at least in a dead pig. He also knows how to make a soup of the meat (fusing legally independent organs together). But does he know how a human body works and what is needed when it is seriously sick?
Unless the politicians can provide a proper diagnosis and show adequate training, the warning is to keep far away. You are better off without the butcher, unless you want to be part of someone else’s soup!
The next debate will deal more about specific acute global problems that would follow from the party political power-grab of Europe’s democratic institutions.
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Commission Debate 2: How the Lisbon Treaty is an open invitation to CORRUPTION!
Tags: balances, cartels, checks, chicken, Community, Constitution, corruption, democracy, EU, Europe, fox, Lisbon treaty, oligarchy, political party, rascal, referendum, Schuman, USA
The proposed treaty will make it impossible for Parliament to sack the Commission for overt corruption, even of the type that stinks in the public’s noses. Here’s how the degradation of Europe’s democracy was instigated. Either by malice, lust for power or ignorance, political party machines are trying to block or subvert the checks and balances initiated by the founding fathers like Robert Schuman.
Over the last two centuries the European States were faced with major problems. Not only war - that was the common virus of the Continent. A violent outbreak of war was expected at regular intervals. The main problem was the ever-increasing deaths in these endemic wars. Increased wartime mortality, caused by the industrialization of war, took on aspects of a generalized European suicide, said Schuman. In reality there are just two ways to deal with Europe. Let us call them Plan ‘A’ and Plan ‘Z’.
Plan A was seen as the usual solution to a war. Actually Plan A caused war as much as it solved it. One country conquered another to seize property or booty, or put an end to oppression. But then with time the second country rose up and freed themselves and conquered the first. In fact all the plans from A to Y caused war. They were really only variations of Plan A. Solutions A to Y all involved one nation, or one industrialized group, or one cartel, one political, military, economic, philosophical, religious or racial ideology, dominating all the other groups of Europe. Historians say that for Europeans war was business as usual for two thousand years. Within Western Europe every generation was either recovering from war, preparing war or actually conducting war. see www.schuman.info/jubilee.htm
After World War 2, nations were still faced with the same choice, (when X= atheistic Marxism and Y= racist and neo-pagan Nazism plus the persistent W= lucrelatrous Cartels).
In 1950, the European Community’s founding fathers created an entirely new idea, called Plan Z. This was the final solution. Not for death but for living together in peace. It is also called a supranational democracy. By banning domination by a clique, it encourages prosperity while eliminating the seemingly inevitable descent into war every generation. Europeans chose LIFE. They chose peace.
Supranational democracy made war materially impossible. It made war unthinkable. There have been NO wars in Western Europe inside the Community in more than sixty years. No other period in all European history has had such a long peace.
At the turn of this new century, along comes another generation of politicians. They are a privileged third generation. The only third generation of Europeans who have not known a European war inside the borders of what was the original Community. They chose to reform the founding treaties. Fine. But how do they choose to reform it? Cocooned by peace and prosperity, they said that Plan Z is outdated. Forgetful of who caused the damage to the Community idea and why, or just willfully ignorant of the original concept of democracy, they say their idea of a political oligarchy is more efficient and more modern. It would certainly benefit them. They ignore the people who warn: ‘This continuing loss our rights and our freedom of expression will end in our subjugation and then disaster for you. You politicians do not respect our rights in the treaties. This proposal for treaty ‘reform’ is really Plan A, writ large. This time it inserts a pernicious political clique inside plan Z. Your plan A introduces the same poisonous virus, asserting control by one powerful group over the weak and apparently powerless. That virus is written in deep letters in the heart of the proposed Constitutional Treaty and the ‘Reform Treaty’ now called the Lisbon Treaty.’ In short, they say, the poisonous virus enters the Community system lethally by making the European Commission a party-political oligarchy. The other institutions of civil society are chloroformed.
This menace has been growing in the years since the departure of the founding fathers. De Gaulle attempted a nationalistic fight-back ‘to suffocate and chloroform’ the institutions. He wished to be in control of Europe with the Commission as his secretariat. He therefore subverted the Community system for his own egotistical and nationalistic purposes. Other politicians followed suit by playing nationalistic cards. They did not succeed. Whether democrats or not however, they did not stop filling the Commission vacancies illegitimately with national politicians only.
Arrogant politicians are cuckoos who have lulled the public to sleep. They coo: ‘The virus is harmless. Why not make the Commission political? Why should it be independent? All European governments have political parties, don’t they? All Commission members must be national representatives, and of course politicians’.
Democrats, WAKE UP! The politicians are attacking every autonomous aspect of the Community system with its five independent institutions for all Civil Society; www.schuman.info/supra5.htm They are turning Europe into a rubber stamp without checks or balances. The ‘reform’ fuses the competence of two independent bodies, the Commission and Parliament. It puts both under party control. It makes the secretive Council of Ministers complicit in this underhand political nepotism. The treaties say the Council should have a higher, nobler responsibility for States, not parties.
A democratic system must protect the rights of the individual against the abuse of governments. What does the ‘reforming’ treaty do? It puts the foxes (the politicians) in charge of the chicken coop and right inside the coop too! They want the key to lock anyone out who would stop this oligarchy! That means ALL non-political people and associations. Referendum results are ignored or banned wherever possible.
The foxes want to exclude the public from becoming candidates for the President of the Commission. Unlike the USA, children will be told they should not consider becoming President if they wish to remain honest, impartial and non-ideological. Only a person selected and supported by political parties will legally be allowed, the foxes declare arrogantly. Now and for ever more. Naturally, this person must also support them, the political foxes. Only two or three people have any chance of becoming the new Commission President, one each selected exclusively by the big party machines. Who makes the final selection? The Council of Ministers, themselves all party politicians. The European Parliament run by the main parties must then confirm this person by electing the Council’s choice by a majority vote. What a stitch-up!
Each party has already gone to the polls supporting ‘their’ political candidate for Commission President. Each party has also denounced the other parties’ candidates as incompetent. The Council designates who has won this hypocritical media theatre of vitriol and infantile name-calling. He or she will be the one who has gained the most votes in the parliamentary election. This person is then nominated for an entirely different institution, the Commission. The previous treaties say exactly the opposite: the Commission should be independent of ALL interest groups, including and we might say especially, the political parties.
The electoral result will also not be fair. As we have seen in the first Commission Debate, the election results are willfully distorted by national governments. They refuse a single electoral law specified in the treaties.
To succeed in being elected in Parliament, the would-be Commission president must flatter the majority MEPs, his pals, and their ideology. Thus, each new Commission presidency will boast and vaunt distinct political biases and a preferred ideology. An ideology is, for any who need reminding, a sophisticated mixture of truth, error and ignorance.
Why do politicians want to change the extraordinarily successful supranational model of democracy, by creating an undemocratic oligarchy and destroying the Community’s balanced, if chloroformed, democratic framework? They figure that a treaty written by politicians brings a sort of legitimacy if passed by the politicians’ parliaments in all States. That will trump referendums and popular disapproval. With ratification they will say they have the law on their side for a potential power and money grab, unprecedented in Community history.
The Commission has powers to redistribute the budget. In a fully functioning European Community an independent Parliament and the other independent bodies like the Consultative Committees must control the budget. The latter institutions, that the treaties say represent organized Civil Society, are already chloroformed. Members, now mostly politicians not NGOs, are hand picked to keep quiet. And in this politicians’ ‘reform’ the Parliament is no longer a controller but becomes an accomplice. Corruption? No problem! The Commission has Parliament in its pocket. The MEPs will also expect something for their open pockets and purses!
The second danger relates to turning over the reins of power to vote-gathering machines. Under the ‘reform’ system, parliamentary elections would try to vacuum up every vote, including the most extremist ones. Once a Commission is politicized, it would try to seduce the voters of either one section of the population or the other, searching for the marginal voters to make up a majority of MEPs. For example, some parties would naturally turn left to labour, others to capitalists, others to the middle ground. But that is not all. Some covertly turn to cartelists, financiers or a religion such as atheism, secularism or fanaticism, those who threaten violence. With the smell of corrupt money in the air, Europe will suffer the worst excesses of right-wing or left-wing politics, and covert politics, while trying to seduce with money the fanaticism of extreme, and sometimes highly dangerous, groupings. In our society, all should have a voice, but none should threaten violence.
If voter-gathering machines make the theatre by fair means or foul to elect MEPs for a majority, the real object is to capture the Commission Presidency. Only one person can occupy this chair. For democracy, the most important question relates to the earliest stage of candidate selection. The ‘reform’ is silent on this, of course. Who selects the candidates for Commission President from the millions of potential candidates among the public? The main political parties! Who will they chose? One of their own. That is one of the 2 per cent of Europeans who carry their party membership card. Some 98 per cent of citizens will be eliminated.
Don’t hope if you buy a card, you will have a chance to become President! The party secretariats will help chose the preferred candidate amongst a small clique of ‘suitable’ names. A bare handful of people are the real candidates. The ‘Reformers’ want to limit European free choice for democracy - of half a billion citizens - to the smallest possible number, those of the party chiefs. The people’s democratic duty will be reduced to voting Yes to one of two or three faces.
This represents the most blatant discrimination ever attempted in any democratic state. And with powerful political incentives. Top political oligarchs in a political cartel can choose their Joe President to influence the entire European economy and proposals for European funding for their own cause.
What a prize! Parliament will NEVER sack the President, even for gross corruption, www.schuman.info/LTEP.htm . The treaties give Parliament the job of dismissing the Commission for misconduct. The Commission President’s political pals, the foxes, are the only ones who could sack him. Dismissal requires an open vote with two-thirds majority! No chance of that! The majority are his most stalwart supporters. Any brave soul who broke ranks would be roundly abused for disloyalty. The Commission’s built-in parliamentary majority and the party machine would pressurize the honest MEPs who contemplated becoming turncoats! In the elections, the majority of MEPs and their party allies have chosen, nurtured and influenced the corrupt President in all his policies! The party secretariat picked him. They all not only committed their vote to him but also got the Europeans to vote to create the Parliament’s majority that put this political fox in office. This is Europe’s best person, they said, to be the referee and arbiter of European politics.
Thus the proposed Lisbon Treaty fails in the essential task of any true democracy: the ability to throw the rascals out! A politicized Commission President will be absolutely free to fund party political foundations and activities from taxpayers’ money. No questions asked. Money calms other critics. And extra funding for the main parties will eliminate any difficult grouping (especially those for the poor and oppressed) that opposes them.
This invitation to corruption is not just a local matter affecting only Europe’s half billion people. The dangers of this fatally flawed ‘reform’ are of worldwide importance as we will discuss in the next debate.
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Commission Debate 1: Where is the democratic debate?
Tags: Adhesion, Amsterdam, Commission, de Gaulle, debate, democracy, Elections, Finet, grab, Hallstein, Hirsch, Lisbon treaty, Maastricht, Monnet, moral, Nice, oligarchy, Paris, philosophy, power, Rome, Schuman, US, USA, values
America has had its presidential election. Where is Europe’s democracy? Who should be the leader of the economic Super-Power on this side of the Atlantic? Where and how can European voters find the most suitable person to help organize a Community of some 500 million people and the world’s largest trading power?
On 15 April 2008, when governments
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