Tag: EU

The decline and fall of the EU

One of the things that I always find amusing is the way that those who openly mock my seemingly crazy predictions at the time I make them never seem to surface again later when the unthinkable and supposedly impossible finally becomes the topic of mainstream debate. It’s a reliable pattern that we’ve seen three times this year already, first with the “double-dip” aka depression, second with the growing “Obama steps aside in favor of Hillary” theme in the press, and now with the breakup of the EU being openly discussed in the mainstream media. All three predictions could still ultimately turn out to be incorrect, but that’s almost beside the point, which is that the trend was correctly identified long before it became readily apparent:

Until recently, the idea that the 27-nation European Union might disintegrate would have been unthinkable, for uniting a continent ripped apart by two World Wars was considered a rousing diplomatic success. But the EU’s two most cherished achievements — a common currency and the free movement of people across borders — are under threat. And the possibility that the decades-long experiment that is the EU might not survive in its present form has now entered mainstream debate.

Now, I don’t mind being held accountable when my predictions are incorrect. In the last U.S. Presidential round, my prediction was that it would be Pataki vs Hillary with Hillary winning election. Obviously, neither nomination came to pass since Pataki didn’t even run and Hillary blew the nomination with her failure to read the rules. Fine, I got those wrong. But what those who like to bring up that election cycle forget is that Giuliani didn’t come anywhere near the Republican nomination – it may look obvious now, but I predicted that when “America’s Mayor” was the widely anointed frontrunner – and the Republicans did end up going with what I suggested would be the alternative to Pataki, namely, a moderate Senator in the Dole mode who would be served up as a sacrificial lamb. Which, of course, is exactly what McCain was.

In retrospect, I should have realized that Pataki wouldn’t run against Giuliani. But I would still have gone with Hillary, there is no way I would have believed she would run such a strategically inept campaign after the way she simply strolled into the New York Senate seat without breaking a sweat. Either way, I’m not concerned about being wrong about these things since I don’t play it like Nate Silver and make 100 different “predictions”, the last one as people are actually voting. If you compare my predictions with his at the same distance out from the event, I think you’ll find that mine tend to be rather better. By way of example, look how long it took him to realize that the Republicans would win the House in 2010.

And, of course, I was the only political observer out of 50 or so writers surveyed by the Right Wing News to nail the Palin pick as the Republican VP selection. I don’t remember who the flavor of the month was back then, but it was obvious that McCain was going to pick a woman since he was going up against a half-black man. I didn’t make a prediction on the Democratic side because I had no idea what Obama would do, but I will admit that his choice of Biden absolutely astonished me. It still astonishes me.

Getting back the EU, the only question concerning the eventual breakup is if it happens now or after the politicians openly attempt to abandon democracy altogether and play the full totalitarian card. I don’t think they ultimately will, for the simple reason that they don’t have the necessary military and police resources to pull it off. As one European wag has noted, the last time an unpopular political structure was rammed down an angry German populace’s throat by other European nations, the subsequent results weren’t exactly what one would consider to be positive.

Even if Merkel manages to twist enough arms to force the $500 billion expansion of the European Financial Stability Facility through the Bundestag today, the German courts have clearly signified that enough is enough and no further European institutions will be permitted to encroach upon German financial sovereignty. The EU political elite can pontificate all they like about how further political integration is necessary to prevent fragmentation, but most of the European people would now clearly prefer the breakup of the EU and the return of their national currencies. But regardless of what happens this fall, the banks and the politicians are going to lose in the end since the global economy is going to continue to get contract, it’s not going to start growing any time soon, and the EU was always a project that required economic sunshine.

Europe: The Recanting

A former EU enthusiast finally admits the would-be Fourth Reich is a disaster:

All my adult life, I have called myself a pro-European. I deplored Brussels’ follies as much as anyone, but went on hoping for better things. I believed Europe was broadly a force for good. However, today, I recant. After much agonising and hesitation, I adopt the conclusion that many of you probably reached years ago: that the EU in its present form has become a disaster, which threatens the future of its major members, unless its terms and powers are drastically recast….

Some of us used to argue that Europe has been an economic success story. Those who remembered the past poverty of Spain, for instance, rejoiced to see the country apparently booming, its prosperity exemplified by Madrid’s glittering new airport. Much the same might be said about our western neighbour, the Celtic tiger. But now we see that their supposed success — not to mention that of Greece and Portugal — was an illusion created by smoke, mirrors, prodigious subsidy and reckless borrowing.

The time for Euroskepticism is past. Now is the time for Euroremoval.

History happens

James Delingpole provides an email that explains why it is more than a little perilous for those who aren’t familiar with London and its various boroughs to attempt to reach any reasonable conclusions about the recent riots on the sole basis of the media coverage:

Funniest interview ever on Sky. Female Sky reporter interviewing a white guy who has had his shops burned. He said to her, the arsonists/looters were all black. She said to him, you can’t say that, there must have been white guys there as well. He thought about and then said, ok they were not all black, i was the only white guy there. Is that ok to say?

This guy states this with a totally dead pan face without a hint of the pc faux pas.

She again corrects him and states nervously you just cant say they were all black, he responds, but they were i was there. Unbelievable. The interview describes the state of our society in a nut shell.

The reason that the multiculturalists and post-racialists and race deniers all consistently put themselves in such ludicrous positions is that they are fundamentally at war with observable reality. Their delusional left-wing allies in the media and government do their best to keep the raw facts from being presented without some sort of balance or spin, but eventually reality simply overwhelms it. And the multiculti position simply isn’t tenable in the long run; do they seriously think that people really aren’t ever going to notice that downtown suddenly looks like Mogadishu or that their cousin’s apartment building was burned to the ground?

Societies can only deny reality for a limited period of time. Eventually, the society will either expel the invaders, collapse entirely, or be conquered outright by the invaders. And the eventual outcome may well vary from nation to nation. It’s important for Americans to remember that mass immigration is a relatively new thing to modern England, it was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 that led to Enoch Powell’s prophetic “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Nor is the level of vibrancy anywhere nearly as high in Europe as it is in the United States, it’s merely more visible because it is so heavily concentrated in the large urban areas. But these changes take decades, sometimes even centuries, which is why the average individual is incapable of ever doing more than assuming that the present status quo will always continue, world without end, amen.

Incidents such as the three-day London riots are actually a positive sign that the multicultural end game will be reached long before most societies reach a point that would require civil war to resolve. Once the Euro and the European Union collapse, which could quite conceivably occur the next two years, the great transnational experiment of the last fifty years will have finally begun to reach its inevitable end and we can hope for a return to a healthy and relatively peaceful nationalism rather than the lethal and expansive form that was seen in Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s. The post-global nationalism should be very different than the pre-WWII version, since its focus will be internal rather than external.

This doesn’t mean that the globalists won’t be using the collapse of the transnational structures as an excuse to “fix” the problems it causes by pushing global centralization. That is the obvious and inevitable next step from their perspective. But because they are battling against reality as well as economic gravity, and because their arguments are so visibly absurd, there is no reason to assume they will be successful in their efforts. History merely happens, it does not progress.

Kick Cameron out

The British Prime Minister is a lying, treacherous weasel and has to go:

David Cameron has ruled out a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union on the grounds that the UK had their say 36 years ago. A senior aide to the Prime Minister enraged eurosceptics yesterday by claiming that the UK must remain a member of the EU because Brussels bureaucrats have done ‘useful work’ on climate change and global poverty.

And he ignored the fact that no one under the age of 53 has ever had the chance to state their views on Brussels in a public vote.

Londonistan is burning, the Euro is disintegrating, and Cameron is still on holiday in Italy. I wouldn’t have thought it to be possible, but David Cameron is beginning to make Gordon Brown look like an honest, competent politician by way of comparison. But if “useful work” on nonexistent climate change and growing global poverty is really their best argument for staying in the EU, we should be able to count on Britain leaving it by next Tuesday.

The Conservative Party promised the British people a referendum. If the Conservative Prime Minister isn’t going to deliver one, he must resign.

The dark heart of Europe

Whether it is the European Commission, involuntary euthanasia, or murderous pedophiles, there always seems to be something deeply amiss about those bloody Belgian bastards:

The organs of people killed by euthanasia in Belgium are being harvested for transplant surgery, a report revealed yesterday. A quarter of all lung transplants in Belgium are from people killed by lethal injection….

‘Given that half of all euthanasia cases in Belgium are involuntary it must be only a matter of time before the organs are taken from patients who are euthanised without their consent. The matter of fact way the retrieval process is described in the paper is particularly chilling and shows the degree of collaboration that is necessary between the euthanasia team and the transplant surgeons – prep them for theatre next to the operating room, then kill them and wheel them in for organ retrieval. All in a day’s work in Brave New Belgium.’

He added: ‘Doctors there now do things that those in most doctors in other countries would find absolutely horrific.’

So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Once the medical community threw it out on behalf of evil women demanding abortions, it didn’t take very long for doctors to start killing adults. Remember that the next time someone asserts that there is no slippery slope in ethics.

WND column

The End of Europe

Few Americans realize that the European Union is among the most deceptive institutions on the planet. It is even less democratic than the Third Reich ever was, with ambitions that rival the erstwhile thousand-year plans of the late, unlamented Reichskanzler.

Born amidst deceit and lies that dwarf those told by the most famous 20th century titans of mendacity, the Eurofascists not only kept their totalitarian political aims under wraps, but outright denied that they had any intention of infringing national sovereignties. For more than 40 years, they swore up and down that their only objectives were economic, until the moment that their vast bureaucratic infrastructure appeared to be sufficiently emplaced to permit a naked grab for overt political rule.

But fittingly, since economics was the sword they used to conquer an unwitting Europe, economics is also the sword by which their dark visions of a Fourth Reich will die

NB: I note that I am no longer one of the very commentators anticipating the demise of the European Union:
The vision of a united Europe still has a powerful hold on the elites of Europe, who see the transfer of power from nation-states to an unelected bureaucracy as insurance against future wars and, if truth be told, a relief from democratic pressures. In addition, the prospect of a euro that would replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, or at least weaken its role in world trade, has a powerful hold on the French, who make no secret of their antipathy to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. The “European project” won’t go quietly into the night. But it just might go noisily into the ashcan of history if the Germans decide they cannot convert the Greeks into hard-working, tax-paying euro-citizens worthy of continuing handouts.

NB2: Holy cats, I didn’t notice this on the first read-through:
“Ireland’s debt now appears to be bigger, in relation to its economy, than the reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War,” according to economist Anatole Kaletsky.

First the euro, then the EU

Simon Heffer sees the end of both in sight:

The failure of the euro will signify the failure of the European ideal, and that is why eurocrats fight so hard for it. What should have been a club of free-trading nations over-reached itself, and sought to unite people with little or no common culture, politics, language or economic history into one coherent federation. It could never work. The generation that thought it could is either dead, senile or (in Chris Patten’s case) governing the BBC. The dream is over: it only remains to be seen how much more German money will be squandered before everyone finally admits it.

Countries who have bail-outs must survive for years afterwards on austerity measures. They will never have the industrial power of a Britain or France, let alone a Germany, so to stay in such a strong currency means permanent privation. Portugal will soon have an election, but so what? Ireland just had one, and it was irrelevant who won. The most important thing a country has – the right to set its own economic policy – was forfeited by the Irish, and the Portuguese, when they joined the euro. All aggrieved people in those countries can do if they want a different policy is write to Frankfurt and ask politely – or riot. And I fear there will much more of the latter before this charade comes to its inevitable end.

Some of us in Britain have resisted the EU in all its manifestations because what is politely called “loss of sovereignty” actually means “loss of democratic rights”. Our votes as electors become pointless. As the eurocrats become more desperate to hold things together, more and more unreasonable demands will be made upon us – whether we are in the euro or not. That is the nature of dictatorships such as the EU. We do not vote for the commissioners who initiate, on the advice of their unelected advisers, the policies they inflict upon us. Napoleon and Hitler tried to unite Europe, but neither did so with the pretence of democracy. As Europe’s currency fails, and a last desperate attempt is made to save it, the price will be our freedom.

The comparison of the EU to Napoleon and Hitler is astute, because the only significant difference is that the EU has used banks to subvert national sovereignty rather than ranks and tanks. And like Napoleon and Hitler, their efforts will ultimately go for naught after a brief period wherein it looked as if they had been successful.

Eventual Irish default

Ireland is caught in the debt trap:

Ireland’s new leader Enda Kenny faces a daunting task as he tries to change the terms of his country’s €67bn (£57bn) EU-IMF package, either by cutting the penal rate of interest or changing the remit of the rescue fund to help Ireland claw its way out of a debt trap. The three parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition have issued a paper ruling out use of the bail-out machinery to purchase the bonds of eurozone states in trouble, or engineer a “soft” debt-restructuring by lending to these countries so that they can buy back their own debt cheaply from the market.

They’re going to default sooner or later. They have to. It’s not as if they can even convincingly play Extend-and-Pretend, given that what they’re pretending is a mathematical impossibility in the short term. At least in the case of the United States, the pretense is still potentially credible in the short term.

It is irrelevant if Merkel and the Euzi bankers manage to cow the new Irish government into backing down again. Ireland will not be able to pay the debt however it is framed and decorated. Better Kenny and company follow the example of Iceland and tell the bankers that they’ll have to pay their own debts with their own money… and if they don’t have it, then their creditors will have to book the loss.

An Irish Hitler?

Economist Barry Eichengreen reconsiders the European Union:

It pains me to say this. I’m probably the most pro-euro economist on my side of the Atlantic. Not because I think the euro area is the perfect monetary union, but because I have always thought that a Europe of scores of national currencies would be even less stable. I’m also a believer in the larger European project. But given this abject failure of European and German leadership, I am going to have to rethink my position.

The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year.

This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know.

I like Eichengreen’s work, but he is incorrect. The failure of the European Union is not a failure of French and German leadership, it is the structural failure of yet another European experiment in authoritarian, anti-democratic, centralized empire. Now, I tend to doubt that Ireland is going to develop into the 21st century version of National Socialist Germany for numerous reasons, chief among them the fact that it is an island without a navy. But given the harsh burden being imposed on the Irish people by their European and Irish governments for the foreseeable future, one can see where The Economic Consequences of the Peace might make for a timely read right about now.

Lest Ireland forget

Daniel Hannan’s little photo essay reminds everyone that the Irish government and all the major Irish parties forced the Irish people to vote a second time on the EU ConstitutionLisbon Treaty and sold it to them on the basis of economic recovery, specifically including more “jobs and investment”.  And he asks “Well, guys, here we are a year on. How’s the recovery working out for you?”

One has to wonder about a “bailout” courtesy of governments who are already robbing pension funds in order to continue their maddened spending:

>Asset managers will have the chance to get billions of euros in mandates in the next few months for the €36bn Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the French reserve pension fund, after the French parliament last week passed a law to use its assets to pay off the debts of France’s welfare system….

The move reflects a willingness by governments to use long-term assets to fill short-term deficits, including Ireland’s announcement last week that it would use the country’s €24bn National Pensions Reserve Fund “to support the exchequer’s funding programme” and Hungary’s bid to claw $15bn of private pension funds back to the state system.

Don’t worry, it’s not as if the US government is heavily indebted or would ever even contemplating the seizure of pensions or tax-free retirement funds….