Elections5 EU's Treaty Change Blitz is a blitz against open democracy

YOUR DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE

THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT OF SUPRANATIONAL DEMOCRACY FOR EUROPE BROUGHT LONG-LASTING PEACE TO THE CONTINENT. EU'S FOUNDER ROBERT SCHUMAN DESCRIBED DEMOCRACY AS BEING IN THE SERVICE OF THE PEOPLE AND ACTING IN AGREEMENT WITH THE PEOPLE. WHAT'S GOING ON TODAY? SEE ALSO WWW.SCHUMAN.INFO AND HTTP://DEMOCRACY.BLOGACTIV.EU .

http://eurdemocracy.blogspot.com/

01 JULY, 2010

Elections5 EU's Treaty Change Blitz is a blitz against open democracy

I must admit I was a bit surprised when I received a press release from the European Parliament last week. It said tersely:

Communiqué de presse - 24.06.2010.

Eighteen additional MEPs a step closer to starting work 

The 18 additional MEPs envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty are a step closer to starting work. The treaty change needed to enable them to do so was approved by Member State representatives at a brief Intergovernmental Conference on 23 June, after a green light from Parliament. The 18 MEPs can start work only after EU Member States have ratified the change (My emphasis)

A Brief IGC - you're telling me. A tad secret too. I was well aware that the European Parliament was aiming to add a few party friends at public expense. That was expected. They even had a debate and a motion. Enlarging Parliament was part of the secret deal made as part of the secret negotiations for the Lisbon Treaty. (Secret because the public was not asked about it. It was an agreement between party political leaders who take extra public money without asking the public's permission.)

All such agreements have to be agreed by the representatives of the nations. The public might like to ask: How would governments defend the extra expense at a time when governments of the PIGS are tottering trying to control their overspending and budget abuse.

However, the Blitz Inter-Governmental Conference shot past me. I was glad I wasn't hit by the lightning. I attended the European Council on 17 June. I listened at the press conference. Not a whisper about an IGC. An obscure reference to one of its internal  documents and 'necessary procedure' is in the conclusions. For democrats debate is also a 'necessary procedure.' By that I mean a debate between the politicals and the public, simply because a majority of the public has increasingly shown at elections its distrust for the politicals.

(By politicals I mean the politicians, the parties and the political party systems that say they are representatives of the people but act against the people for their own career, financial or party advantage.)

So we have a secret, closed door European Council unwilling to have a public debate on vital matters of democracy. What does it do? Add further obscurity and secret meetings to avoid a public debate.

Why? Were the politicians afraid they might get some awkward questions? It might seem a bit inopportune to publicise the increase in MEPs. People might also ask about why MEPs are also asking to spend more on assistants and other matters during a financial crisis. Others might askwhy more MEPs when at every election, more and more of the electorate is refusing to vote for any of them?

At the Council building I did not find any communiqué later about this IGC. I asked the Council for the communiqué. I was told there wasn't one. An IGC took place with no one knowing about it. So-called democratic governments did not deem it necessary to tell anyone about the IGC. No press release was published after it took place. At least the EP debated it in public before grabbing more money.

The IGC took place behind closed doors in the COREPER committee. This is a committee of civil servants called permanent representatives. They are not even politicians.  They were talking secretly amongst themselves about something else that would affect the European public. Then they changed hats, declared an IGC, and pronounced a Treaty Change.  That is the New Lisbon Democracy? Phew! Closed doors, civil servants making decisions on major issues, no press, no questions.

An Inter-Governmental Conference used to mean something. Now it means a rubber stamp by bureaucrats. Thus the European Council is confirming its disdain for democracy. It is saying its version of democracy or rather its system is what we say it is. No open debates. Another word for that is autocracy.

I have a proposal. Now the Council has developed a lightning technique for European decisions, I would like to know if the national politicians can start to catch up on the backlog of duties. Some urgent Treaty implementations have been on ice for nearly sixty years.; The Six governments signed up to these promises in 1951 and 1957 and other States immediately on accession. These Treaty articles said surprisingly that the European Parliament should be European. That means Europe-wide elections under a single statute for all.

A quick IGC could arrange that pan-European parliamentary statute. In other words the governments would forswear from cheating and having 27 national elections to the European Parliament. Each one is presently arranged according to national rules that curiously favour the main political parties in the State. A touch of honesty would therefore be helpful.

The Treaty of Paris, the founding treaty of the European community and the two treaties of Rome all agree. There should be a single election where electors can vote for any candidate in any country of the Community. Each elector should have one vote not up to twelve as some are now allowed to have.

The people must be 'free to choose' to quote from Europe's founding Charter. Half a century ago, Schuman wrote: 

'In the not too distant future it is necessary to provide for elections with direct universal suffrage of the members of the Assembly which will exercise the powers of control, in conformity with the Charter of the Community. Article 138 (of the Economic Community) moreover gives this Parliament the mandate to draw up such a such a draft electoral project. The statute must be uniform for all Member States. It is certain that people's consciousness of a united Europe would be intensified and be more physically manifested if it could be regularly affirmed by a vote across the entirety of Europe,' (Pour l'Europe pp146-7)

Come on Council of Ministers. We know you can do it! Try getting your democratic priorities right!

And while the Council of Ministers is in the business of Blitz-IGCs, would it not be possible to give adequate notice so people could ask questions. And can the IGCs and the Council be open to the public as the Founding Fathers said they should be?

Thank you, Council.

28 JUNE, 2010

Avalanche2 : Is Mr Soros right that the Euro crisis could bring about the destruction of the EU?

'The euro crisis could lead to the destruction of the European Union,' announced George Soros on 23 June 2010 in Berlin. Is the Hungarian investor/ economist right? He was right in 1992 that the British Pound Sterling was going to have to devalue by dropping out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). He made a fortune out of it -- about 1 billion dollars -- by short-selling Sterling. The UK lost more than three billion pounds. It is reported that the UK spent some 27 billion pounds from reserves in supporting the pound.

Will now the whole European structure -- created sixty years ago as the European Community -- implode? Is system that brought peace after two thousand years of warfare DOOMED? 

According to Mr Soros the whole European experiment is under threat of destruction. However, according to Mr Robert Schuman, the originator of the system, it would last for a great deal longer than 50 or 60 years.

In Mr Soros's analysis: 'It can be seen that the euro crisis is intricately interconnected with the situation of the banks.' that provided loans to weak or vulnerable countries inside the EU. He names Greece, Spain and Ireland.

'How did this connection arise?' he asks.

His answer: 'The introduction of the euro brought about a radical narrowing of interest rate differentials. This in turn generated real estate bubbles in countries like Spain, Greece, and Ireland. Instead of the convergence prescribed by the Maastricht Treaty, these countries grew faster and developed trade deficits within the eurozone, while Germany reigned in its labor costs, became more competitive and developed a chronic trade surplus. To make matters worse some of these countries, most notably Greece, ran budget deficits that exceeded the limits set by the Maastricht Treaty. But the discount facility of the ECB allowed them to continue borrowing at practically the same rates as Germany, relieving them of any pressure to correct their excesses.'

I would put it slightly differently. Some governments tried to conceal their vital statistics so they could obtain loans by sleight of hand. Everyone in the country then thought then they could get away with the same deceit. Moral: governments should have the highest standards of probity, not the average manifestation of corruption. Secondly, everyone knows that not all governments have the highest standards. Certainly if banks accept paper promises of governments who are known to be cheating (some exposed for about thirty years), it is bound sooner or later to cause grief.

Take the example of the property boom -- what Mr Soros refers to as real estate. It requires a good dose of self-deception to believe that crumbling bricks and mortar have suddenly and universally become more and more valuable as an asset. Who is fooling whom?

Japan gave the lie to this property bubble deceit a few decades ago. The centre of Tokyo around the imperial palace briefly became worth much more than the entire American economy. The bubble burst. The property emperors had no clothes. 

Japan is still paying for this folly. If some European governments have had to make sharp corrections for their folly, it is still rather less than the decades of woes that Japanese are paying.

Two economic laws are apparent. The law of the coming crunch: A proclivity to fiddle the books and spend produces (a) a desire for more money from silly creditors (which initially gives a false sense of security about profits) and (b) bad feeling among the creditors who then wake up will eventually cause many creditors to lose their patience.

The second is the law of the Community correction. The Community is designed as a closed system to expose dishonest dealing by governments or private sector banks -- and correct it. All members have the right to look at what sort of tricks the other members are up to. This is a fundamental feature of Community law. Any individual can under Community law take such a cheat to Court if his or her livelihood is affected by it. Usually it is States who take other States to Court, or the Commission.

Other members will eventually force the cheats to stop. It will all end in tears. However the Community system makes a huge difference. Happily, step by step, cheats are led to repentance. A totally reformed, former cheat welcomed back into the Community can become a solid example of probity for all the others.

The present challenge is small compared with the challenge of starting the Euro, as a common currency, in the first place. Much hard work has yet to be done as the Euro's creation was hardly based on authentic Community altruism -- the essential feature of the supranational principle. There remain several vulnerable spots. The exceptions governments give to the property market by governments is one example.

However, there is no question but that the European Community system will outlast its critics.

Am I being too optimistic? My assessment is not based on wishful thinking but scientific conclusions and hard facts. Which country is the keenest on sound currency principles? A clue: it was the country that had one of the worst currency problems in the past. Not just the Weimar inflation in the 1920s (when people carried their wages in wheelbarrow loads of useless paper currency) but also the experience which distorted the trade patterns for the whole of Europe with Hitler's economics in the 1930s. He had a hollow, complex, barter system creating political dependence and where other currencies were discounted to Hitler's rates.

Germany learned about sound currency in practice when it was given a democratic constitution in 1949. A year later it acknowledged a desire to join the European Community which reinforced sound monetary policy. The need for sound money began the moment that the first single market was opened. When did that happen? The exact date is 10 February 1953.

The European Monetary System was a logical part of the first European Community system that the Six governments and their peoples signed up to. The supranational principle, all the founding fathers said, provides the means for the democratic organisation of Europe, open to all countries 'free to choose'. That is what the Europe Declaration of Inter-Dependence says, the foundational document for the present European Union.

Schuman saw the European Community as a great democratic experiment, where the population would learn wisdom by pragmatic choice Sometimes governments make the wrong decisions, they are subject to apathy to introduce democratic measures -- like the mandatory elections they have never introduced. Sometimes they are corrupt. Some leaders may be autocratic. However, theEuropean Community system is built to provide a positive learning curve for European civilisation, based on two thousand years of living and sometimes squabbling together.

But is this above analysis all the story? Is it even the most important factor in the present crisis? Was the 'euro crisis' fuelled and then ignited by the combustibility of low interest rates? Has something been forgotten? Is this a myopic economist's view that leaves out dire warnings made to European leaders consistently for more than half a century?

I hope to deal with that later.