YOUR DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE

Election6: The Council's President of the European Parliament: the Speaker for EU's UNDEMOCRACY

2012-01-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

The EU leaders are now repeating their mantra: the solution to the crisis is the Community method. The Community method involves open democracy. We haven't got it! We have the 'Council method' which involves a political cartel, a Politburo, ruling Europe behind closed doors. It is an oligarchy of political party chiefs. It is the cause of the financial crisis.

Take the recent happenings in Parliament.

Since the days of the three European Communities, the president of the European Parliament has descended to typify the great farce of Europe. It is also its great shame. The President or Speaker is supposed to speak for what should be the flagship democratic body of 27 democratic countries united in peace and justice. Instead it is the dishonour of Europe. It is the laughing stock of the world.

Don't just take it from me. Check what the MEPs say below on video about how the developing world calls the EU hyprocritical. See what is said abroad about EU's fake democracy, especially when it preaches democracy to Africa, Russia, Belarus and elsewhere.

The 'Council method' provides succour to all the world's dictators who want to have a model to control parliament. It shows how Europeans' counterfeit democracy works. The Council method stops any form of elections or controls the outcome regardless of the election results. It provides a curtain, a burqa, over all the power-broking deals that are made behind closed doors.

The president is not elected. He or she is chosen by fixers in the morally darkened corridors of the European Council. Who chooses him or her? Not the European electors. The cartel of politicians in the Council choose the name of the person who is supposed speak for European Democracy and its 500 million citizens. The Speaker speaks mainly for the Council oligarchy, not the public.

1. Let us start with the elections. In 2009 I was with a number of journalists at the European Council meeting BEFORE the last European Parliament elections. A spokesman of the Polish persuasion announced to us all that the tricky mix of negotiations had successfully been horse-traded. The Poles had gained what they wanted. The next president of the European Parliament would be Mr Buzek, a Pole.

Let me repeat, this was BEFORE the European elections had taken place. Notice the COUNCIL according to the Council Method decided

the NATIONALITY ,
the POLITICAL PARTY and
even the NAME of the President of the European Parliament
WITHOUT A SINGLE MEMBER OF THE PARLIAMENT BEING PRESENT!

This is Politburo politics. Schuman condemned these Soviet-style politics of the "People's Democracies" as counterfeit democracy.

Isn't it ironic that the peoples formerly subject to the Soviets are now full-time players in the corrupt Gaullist system? Why are they no longer the fearless defenders of democracy and people's solidarity? Power. Power tends to corrupt.

This remarkable announcement presumes that (a) the elections are a farce and do not play a role in what happens in Parliament. (b) that the Council oligarchs know exactly who will be elected because they control the EP candidates of the party; some of course are elected on a list system; and (c) the Council or government leaders control the MEPs when they enter Parliament and discuss the presidency. They know that no independent thinker will be allowed, or at best only a few to brighten the decor. The mass of MEPs will follow exactly what the politicians in the dark recesses of the European Council have decided.

This is an act of a political CARTEL. It decides who and what, how and where with no recourse to the consumer, in this case, the voter, representing 500 million citizens.

2. In order to get this EP presidential candidate through the EP system, a vote of two-thirds is necessary. Neither of the big parties has this proportion of the vote in the EP. But two such groups have -- the European People's Party, EPP, representing what they call rightwing parties. On the other side is the group of Socialists or Social Democrats. They agree to a collectivist solution that cuts any dissident voter or MEP out of the circuit.

These two groups hold more than two-thirds of the seats and have the potential, the possibility, and I might add the undemocratic temptation, to join forces and impose their will. That would not really be fair or just to minorities or even some majorities. But it is a big temptation.

And if there is a big temptation, you can bet your cotton socks that most politicians will seize it with both hands. The undemocratic solution is that the two big parties impose their will -- whatever the election results say. They split the five year term in two. Half goes to an EPP politician and remaining half to the Socialist choice. The European Council is the body that makes the choice of WHO -- without a TV camera or without the public being allowed to hear the arguments. The horse-trading would make great television. But such sordid dealings are hardly edifying for honest citizens in 27 democracies, especially in the small countries.

The MEPs vote in a most unusual way. They use paper votes. Normally an electronic voting system is used. It is quicker and efficient. But it also traces the names of voters. This 'secret vote' system was brought in during the Gaullist period because the open voting system then could subject the parliamentarians to unfair pressures. Nowadays it just makes sure that the public does not not how their MEP voted in the corrupt system. However some hundred or so MEPs probably voted for candidates contrary to their party's and the Council's insistence.

This is the system we have had for many years and many elections, the cartel system of the Council in Parliament. De Gaulle has passed away. Many little Napoleons support the system in Council because it suits them to have an oligarchy.

3. Smaller parties, even the Liberal group or the ecologists, not to mention the more vociferous democrats who denounce the system are cut out. They may have people who would show no favouritism and have the most neutrality in becoming the president of the Parliament but they do not have a snowball's chance of attaining the office.

What do they do? The EP has long arranged it that such candidates cannot even speak. The election takes place under 'procedure' that forbids it. So what happens? The week before we had the spectacle of private organisations including the European Voice, an Economist newspaper, organising a hustings. Thus a non-parliamentary private organisation held the only meeting of major importance to Europeans. The Parliament refused to do what democrats view as normal. The three 'candidates' were invited to attend. They did but few other MEPs came. They knew things were already cut and dried by their party chiefs.

It was rather like naughty schoolchildren having a debate when the prefects said they couldn't. One candidate said the role of parliament is to control the executive, by which I believe he meant the Council. (It isn't in a supranational democracy.)

How can the EP control the Council if the Council decides who will control Parliament BEFORE THERE IS AN ELECTION?

I sat next to an American and explained that this was how the largest trading power in the world, far greater than the USA, organized its democracy. It took a newspaper to get a meeting at all.

Mr Buzek is also reported to have congratulated 'President' Schulz several days BEFORE the election took place!

For those who want, they can check what Mr Nirj Deva and Ms Diana Wallis said about the deplorable anti-democratic Council system of Parliament.

The European Parliament has never in all its nearly sixty years ever held a proper Europe-wide election according the the requirements of the treaties of Rome and Paris.

The Council says NO. The Parliament can't even organise itself.

Monnet9: The BBC becomes a propaganda voice for the Monnet Myth

2011-12-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is now broadcasting a Monnet-propaganda view of Europe. Its emphasis on Monnet the initiator of everything European is not only false but its anti-British tone is likely to turn the younger generation off Europe. Monnet is shown as ignoring the British concerns. Yet he seemingly controls the French, US and German governments and turns them around his little finger. This is ridiculous -- Monnet was a minor civil servant in France in 1950 with few staff. It is also a dangerous policy to broadcast counterfeit history to the British population but also to many others who listen to the radio. The Monnet myth is one reason why Europe is in such a mess with its democracy.

The threatening magnitude of the present crises specifically due to the Monnet Myth is why I felt it necessary to ask a few questions that perhaps the young people may care to explore, given that the older generation appears incapable or too lazy to do so. I hope that they will also ask a few more questions too about national broadcasting media.

Beyond Borders, a play about Jean Monnet by Mike Walker; BBC Radio 4, 16 December 2011, 14.15 GMT.
The European Dream, a documentary by John Tusa, BBC Radio 4, 17 December 2011, 20.00 GMT.

The play and the documentary were designed no doubt to glorify Jean Monnet as the ‘inspirer’ of the European Union. They presented no evidence that Jean Monnet was behind the European Community idea. Strange. But also indicative of the lack of critical thinking about someone who was after all trained as a salesman. One excruciatingly flattering biography says that 'Monnet was above all a public relations man.' Shouldn't that be a red light warning to communicators? (M & S Bromberger: Jean Monnet and the United States of Europe, p33.)

In Monnet’s case he was a salesman of cognac, he received little education, wrote very little but was surrounded by a group that included publicists and journalists. Compare that with Schuman. From 1919 on, Schuman was an elected deputy for the great Steel City of Thionville that had to import German coal to survive. He knew a thing or two about the industries where Monnet still showed ignorance, even when he was President of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community. The Monnet myths started being publicized at this time and are now paid for out of taxpayers’ money by the EU-funded Jean Monnet professors.

'I feel obliged to speak about Jean Monnet,' said one such professor recently, 'because I am a Jean Monnet professor.' This sort of nonsense should be stopped. He should be reminded that he is paid out of public funds not out of Jean Monnet's treasury. Universities have fee paying students. It is an insult to subject them to glorified public relations operations. They should be taught how to discern the truth from falsehood.

Chris Patten, former European Commissioner, now Lord Patten, is Chairman of the BBC Trust, its governing body. Lord Patten is a history graduate of Oxford University and currently Chancellor of Oxford University. Doesn't he feel a little shame that the BBC has fallen to such depths and poor scholarship? The British and international audience of the BBC deserve better than propaganda and repetitions of the Monnet industry lobbyists.

Both the play and the documentary were fiction. The documentary by John Tusa, an experienced journalist and former managing director of the BBC World Service, was frankly disappointing for the same reason. It failed to ask critical questions or even look into the myth-busting national archives that are now open for all to see. It largely ignored Schuman but then reiterated Communist propaganda that Schuman had fought for the Germans in WW1. He never even wore a German uniform. A quick look at the British archives alone would destroy Monnet-centered mythology. Why wasn't this done?

What happened to investigative journalism? Any self-respecting broadcaster or journalist should ask: Are Europeans a victim of a clever salesman and public relations campaign? This is a reasonable question, as the testimony of other witnesses and the archives of the USA, Great Britain, Germany and France provide no evidence that Monnet had the part he says in the invention of the idea of a supranational European Community. All that is certain is that several members of Schuman’s staff were involved with Monnet in writing a document. If three or four Schuman staffers were involved, why suddenly does Monnet become a prima donna? What happened to Schuman?

Paul Reuter, a member of Schuman’s staff, wrote the first draft of the Schuman Proposal, not Monnet. Monnet made few useful or substantial corrections. Monnet himself says he eliminated some essential sentences. So was Monnet at the center or did he play a different part at the periphery? Schuman, an erudite, multilingual, innovative Prime Minister, finance minister and foreign minister, had already introduced the concept of a supranational European Community into public discussion long before Monnet was ever involved. Monnet is factually incorrect in saying it was discussed only once in the French Cabinet. It was discussed twice in Cabinet. What does that say about Monnet's understanding of events?

Schuman, however, was the opposite of a self-publicist. He was humble and shunned personal publicity. Schuman was unstinting in his praise for all his collaborators, including Monnet. But this does not mean that Monnet’s subsequent story of self-praise is true. Schuman, very unusually for a politician, concealed his own part. It was effective politics. After Schuman, many other people, such as Bidault, Reynaud and Philip, claimed that they were the originators of the European Community. Yet only the followers of Monnet persisted with this outrageous personal claim. Persistence, powerful PR or impudence is no proof of Monnet’s involvement. Persistent Public Relations about lies are still lies.

Documents now out in the open after the thirty-year rule show what is true and what is factually impossible in Monnet’s claims. The BBC did not check the facts. Thus the listener is left with a sad conclusion: the BBC doesn’t seem to care about truth when it comes to Europe and the future of millions of Europeans.

The play shows Monnet having some ideas after a walk in the Alps in April 1950 – when he is supposed to have hit on the idea of European unity. But hundreds of people had written books about European unity before this famous walk – and they all had specific ideas. Monnet did not. He even says he had no clear ideas. Where are they, even today? No facts were presented to indicate that he made any special contribution, except being involved in the preparation team of the Schuman Declaration.

There is nothing that is specially Monnet’s in the Declaration. Far more important words and action are evident in Schuman’s work in the years before April 1950.

Thus the big failure of the play and the report of John Tusa is the failure to take any critical microscope to the Monnet fable. Instead the Monnet fairy stories were not only repeated but augmented with other quite imaginary material that were demonstrably nonfactual.

Here are a few items that any student of history can check.

Monnet did not invent the term Community. In his Mémoires, (pp 379, 625,), he claimed to have invented the term European Community on 21 June 1950. However Robert Schuman had used it many times before including at the United Nations General Assembly a year before this. Schuman also talked to the Member State delegations to the Schuman Plan conference and defined the supranational European Community. When? On the 20 June 1950! Monnet was part of Schuman's French delegation that included Jurisconsult André Gros and deputy Jurisconsult, Paul Reuter.
Monnet did not invent the idea of supranationality. (In his Mémoires, p352, Monnet says he did not like the term and never fancied it. So obviously he was not the inventor of supranationality!)
He was not the inventor of the term High Authority. In his Mémoires Monnet says that the term came from Paul Reuter, a close Lorraine colleague of Robert Schuman.
Paul Reuter was not just a professor as Monnet maintains. He was one of the highest officials working for Schuman in the Foreign Ministry. He was Deputy Jurisconsult, empowered to supervise and check all treaties and legal documents. He provided a political guard for Schuman because other top civil servants such as the two directors general in his own ministry, were hostile to his policy of reconciliation with Germany.
The play only provided a series of hype and non-factual events, meetings and conversations, which can be easily disproved by any competent historian who has looked at the material mentioned above. Proof comes from the other people in the conversations who refute the Monnet version.
Monnet seems to have persistently claimed the parentage of earlier ideas that were first circulated by others. The BBC should have been aware of this, especially when it could easily be checked where it dealt with British politics. For example, in 1940 although Monnet may have played some part presenting a paper to de Gaulle about the wartime Franco-British union idea, he was not the inventor of the idea. (Nor was de Gaulle an alternative government at the time.) It was being circulated independently six months earlier by other Frenchmen in government and British people before he arrived in London. Curiously one of the major exponents was a close friend of Robert Schuman, then serving as under Under-Secretary of State in the French government. (De Gaulle was also an Under- Secretary of State in the government – which is why the British thought it useful to deal with him.)
Sylvia says in the play that Monnet was a very good liar. Later Monnet says that he thought Schuman had the reputation for being an honest man. He made it sound like a public relations trick. But it came from deep within Schuman’s character. In contrast to Monnet, Schuman always told the truth even when his life seemed to depend otherwise – such as when he was held by a Nazi Gauleiter and SS general and interrogated. He said politicians should always tell the truth. He refused to lie even though he had been threatened with death by the Nazis and offered posts as a collaborator. The incident where Monnet had a conversation with Schuman about honesty had nothing to do with the Schuman Declaration. It occurred years before. Schuman was insistent that, following years of Nazi and government propaganda, Europe had to be based on TRUTH.
In April 1950 Monnet was ‘inspired’ to say ‘there will be war’, as if no one else knew about the threatening Cold War with the Soviet Union. Nearly everyone expected a war at this stage. The Statesmen too! Schuman not only understood the significance of the Soviet Atomic bomb but proposed a solution – Euratom – in 1949. Both the UN's International Atomic Energy Treaty (IAEA) and the European Atomic Energy Treaty have similar goals, even the same articles.
Monnet says: ‘We have done nothing.’ He meant the statesmen had done nothing, those who were not guided by him! This is rubbish. Schuman had started the Great Debate on the future of Europe, asking whether it should be a federation, confederation or something else (such as a Community). Hardly anyone was interested in the question. Where did Schuman pose these questions? Everywhere, to stimulate a debate. He said it in the Parliament and around Europe. He said it at the United Nations in 1948 and again in 1949. Yet Monnet did not seem to have read the speech even though it was obviously in all the newspapers and on the international radio etc.
Schuman’s government and the following ones where he was foreign minister created the Council of Europe. Its specific task was to define the new Community system – which they did in detail. Monnet seems to have been ignorant of this – but it no reason why the BBC should be.
The main problem of Europe and its wars was not about land, as Monnet says. It was about coal and steel cartels that controlled governments and world politics. Such cartels including financial ones could control political parties and were often the cause of wars.
Monnet never seems to have written anything at the Planning Agency about Germany – a country he knew nothing about and did not know the language. He had never visited Germany as far as it is recorded. How could he advise Schuman about Germany? Schuman was involved everyday in German politics as Foreign Minister and it was the major thrust of his policy. He knew Germany well, being the foremost German specialist in the government, spoke the language, had many German friends, knew exactly about Nazis having been threatened with death by them, and had many meetings with the new German democrats and shared ideas with them about a supranational Community for coal and steel. A stream of his friends maintained contact with German democrats. As Foreign Minister he also received the diplomatic reports.
Schuman gave a masterly analysis of the postwar problems, German and Soviet, in a speech, perhaps the most important postwar speech, in May 1949. This was the year before Monnet was brought into Schuman's editorial group. Monnet seems to have no knowledge of it, even though it was distributed widely within the French government and to all European governments. The lack of consideration of Schuman’s achievements in Monnet’s Memoirs indicates either widespread prejudice against Schuman’s achievement or vast ignorance by Monnet and those who helped him write it.
Who controlled the Ruhr? French governments where Schuman served as minister or prime minister brought in the International Authority for the Ruhr (IAR). It was not run by the Americans, as Monnet says. It was run by an Authority (like later the Community was) composed of representatives of the Allies, such as France, UK, USA (three votes each) and the Benelux (one vote each) plus Germany (THREE votes)!! Thus this is a direct distortion of historical fact.
Why did Monnet use the term Authority – suggested by Schuman’s staff member, Paul Reuter? Because this was the term Schuman had selected to point to a new way to do European politics. He used it for the Ruhr.
The anecdote about Monnet and Hirsch in wartime Algeria is misleading. Monnet's discussion merely involved modifying minor aspects of de Gaulle’s preposterous idea of recasting Belgium, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine plus Switzerland into some new State called Wallonia or Lotharingia. Monnet was also thinking in terms of destroying the constitutions of these countries and reforming them into a buffer State. Totally unrealistic. He even believed this was possible as late as 1950! It has nothing to do with a Community system which is based on the existing nation states. Hirsch told Monnet it was rubbish (‘utopian’). How could the Americans dismantle the existing European States! What chaos it would have caused. At this stage Monnet was still greatly influenced by de Gaulle who was active but out of power. De Gaulle fulminated against the newly created Federal Republic of Germany at Bonn, calling it a Fourth Reich and wanting to dismantle it. US diplomatic records show that the Americans and British followed Schuman's lead about creating German democracy.
Monnet who was in charge of the Modernisation Planning Agency seems to have been oblivious of the German steel problem until the last minute. Schuman was involved with this on a daily basis as it was subject to Allied diplomatic discussions. It was by Allied agreement that the steel ceilings for production were set.
Coming to the time of the Schuman Proposal, the BBC continues to propagate Monnet errors of fact. The anecdote that in May 1950 Schuman had to present a proposal on Germany and a European solution at the Allied conference in London is also fictitious. Schuman said the opposite at the time. It was not on the agenda. Schuman said other factors showed it was the time to act.
Monnet did not first attract Professor Paul Reuter to do some work by jumping into his taxi to the train station of Gare de Lyon. Why should he? The idea makes no sense. The phrase ‘A chance to save the world’ is also fictitious. Reuter's accounts show this is all false. Monnet had no concrete ideas at this stage, so he says in his Mémoires, p342. Reuter was the initiator not Monnet. Reuter took exact notes about what happened and wrote a detailed report later. Monnet’s Mémoires were written by friends because Monnet had a poor memory for details. Reuter wrote the phrase ‘World peace can only be safefguarded etc..' It is in his notebook written in pencil by his own hand. Reuter describes when he wrote it.
Reuter came to Monnet’s office and then got Monnet into a long conversation which ended in Monnet accepting the idea of helping write a paper. So it was Reuter who got the ball rolling (to use Reuter’s phrase). Monnet said of Reuter that he was a young professor that he did not know that chance had brought to his office. He was Schuman’s right-hand man in the Legal Department of the Foreign Ministry! He was known for clear thinking and writing. He arrived the day after Clappier, Schuman’s Director of Staff arrived to talk to Monnet and try to persuade him to write a paper. The reason why Monnet was brought in at all relates to internal French politics.
Reuter, not Monnet wrote the first draft. This was then typed in the office not at Monnet’s home. Monnet made minor changes to some of the subsequent drafts. Reuter re-introduced some phrases and thoughts that Monnet had cut out. Monnet did not know the background of Schuman’s ideas which were expounded at the Council of Europe.
The word ‘supranational’ is a precise legal and political term used frequently by Schuman. It was not used by Monnet before 1950 and very little after that as he did not like the term. It is not the equivalent of international as was implied in the play.
The term Authority was used by Schuman in the years before 1950 and Monnet. Several supranational Authorities were discussed at the Council of Europe. It was also used practically by the International Authority of the Ruhr.
The last draft of the Schuman Declaration was not finished on 17 April, as stated. The final typing was on just before the Cabinet meeting of 9 May and Schuman made last minute, hand-written changes as well.
Schuman’s Declaration included a page-long introduction that was never seen by Monnet and is far more important in many aspects. For reasons that the European Commission has yet to explain adequately, the Commission has never published it.
In the play the alleged absence of Clappier to receive 'Monnet's paper' in April-May 1950 was farcical. If Monnet wanted to speak to Clappier and his whole grand design depended on it, why did he not phone him? He was prepared to speak to Schuman directly. It is factually incorrect to maintain that Monnet went to the train station and breathlessly gave the paper to Schuman before leaving on the weekend of 6 May 1950. The Cabinet papers were given as usual to Schuman by Clappier a day before.
It is also nonsense that Schuman decided on the Monnet paper only over the weekend. The drafts of the paper indicate that Schuman made changes to them to correct errors in the earlier drafts.
The incident with Monnet and Dean Acheson in a restaurant is also pure fiction. Schuman specifically arranged the stop-over of Acheson in Paris. Schuman spoke to Acheson on the Sunday and explained to him what he said would be the greatest innovation in European politics for centuries. This shows Schuman's minute planning. The US Secretary of State does not end up in Paris by mistake. The BBC should check the interviews Michael Charlton did with Acheson’s team. The BBC published it as a book, The Price of Victory.
As for Monnet writing his ‘guarantee’ that the scheme did not involve a cartel on a napkin – this is just plain crazy. Would a scribble on a napkin convince Congress, given that the German cartels had financed Hitler and encouraged his dictatorship?
The Adenauer incidents are also laughable. Robert Schuman had met Adenauer several times and kept a correspondence with him. Monnet had no contacts. Robert Mischlich was a member of Schuman private staff and was sent with the documents secretly to Adenauer – two days in advance!
Monnet was not manning the phones for the message from Bonn as Mischlich had already communicated to Schuman the day before the Cabinet meeting. The reception book in Bonn and Adenauer's return letters prove this date. There was no break for lunch on 9 May with Schuman recalling the ministers to the Cabinet table. There was a long debate in the Cabinet as is clear from the books of those present – Auriol, Teitgen, PM Bidault, etc.
The remaining material about Great Britain was very badly drawn and gave entirely the wrong impression that it was a fait accompli by Monnet against the British. Was the purpose of the play to antagonize the British or present history? There is no point in writing false history that makes plots against the British. Schuman was anxious to have them on board and bent over backwards to do so. His idea of creating a European democracy would have been greatly helped had the British been there to support the French and others.
In the Documentary, The European Dream, John Tusa, and the academics Kiran Klaus Patel, Desmond Dinan, Piers Ludlow should be well aware of previous political designs for Europe. Schuman listed and addressed failed utopian schemes in his great speech in May 1949, before the Council of Europe actually met. There is a great deal of difference between the Pan-Europa ideas of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, which involved classical federation of States, and a supranational European Community of Coal and Steel. What do these academics teach their students? Schuman said these classical federalist ideas were unworkable and history had proved them so. That’s why he introduced the idea of a supranational union at his St James’s Palace speech in May 1949 with an audience of diplomats and foreign ministers.
Academics have to ignore a whole series of events to come up with the ridiculous idea that Schuman suddenly realized he needed to do something and luckily Jean Monnet 'turned up at his office with a solution'. Take the oft-repeated story of Churchill’s Zurich speech of 19 September 1946 on building Europe based on French and German reconciliation. What about Churchill's first postwar European speech that he gave in Metz, capital of Lorraine and home city of Schuman, on 14 July 1946 on the same theme with Robert Schuman at his side? What about Schuman’s role in organizing The Hague Congress of 1948?
What do the academics think was the origin of the supranational Community? When was the term first used? Why supranational? It was not coined by Monnet and was used many years before 1950. How did the Community stop war that had been the constant feature of European history for more than two thousand years?
Have the journalists and academics not read the documents which show that the plans for the European Defence Community were called the Schuman proposal before it was ever called the Pleven Plan and Monnet even knew a thing about it?

It is sad to see that what should be independent news organizations like the BBC being victims of a PR con trick and that so many academics go along with it. The world needs peace and a way to stop wars. Monnet did not have a clue how to do so.

The public deserves better. It is hoped that next year the full extraordinary account of Paul Reuter will be published written from his original notes made at the time. He had a few laconic remarks about the Monnet Memoirs which broadcasters, journalists and academics would do well to read.

EURO8: Why the present EURO soup will FAIL and inevitably a NEW EURO will be born

2011-12-14T03:47:00.000-08:00

Even if all the plans of the December European Council are passed into law, one outcome is certain: the Euro as presently designed will fail.

Even if all 27 Member States joined the Euro and tried to stay within the guidelines of the Stability and Growth Pact, one thing is certain: the Euro as presently constructed will fail.

Even if all the Member States scrupulously adhered to the Six Pack, with close inspection of national accounts by the European Commission, the Euro as presently conceived will FAIL.

Yet the vision of a European currency is not only reasonable. A solid European currency in a single market is inevitable. One day Europe will have a strong, single currency. It will be far stronger than anything yet discussed behind the closed doors of the European Councils and the hyper-secretive EuroGroup, now the main body dictating the guidelines for the European currency and the economy. The EuroGroup is a non-institutional body of the European Union and not subject to democratic control.

The Euro was badly designed from the start. It does not confirm to supranational principles -- open Community democracy. It is not based on a single supranational standard agreed democratically and enforced by law.

While the measures taken by the heads of government at the European Council to ensure fiscal responsibility -- including a new intergovernmental treaty -- might be useful to prevent and predict fiscal irresponsibility at the national level, they are insufficient. They place the instruments again in the hands of the governments and the politicians. These are the same ones who fiddle the books, overspend and then ask for 'understanding' from fellow politicians and chums. The cartel-like approach of the Council provides NO independent arbiter for the citizen to ensure fairness and justice.

"Nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for the purposes of an illusion; and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied." So wrote Robert Schuman (Pour l'Europe, p70).

What the politicians did was at a certain time baptise their national currencies the EURO but there was no repentence from fundamental monetary sins. From a European point of view its politicians are still immature and unwashed. How can I say that? The unwillingness of politicians to study revolutionary supranational principles has led to this disaster. Governments still continued their old way -- with deficits, government-induced inflation and budget overspending. Changing the name of national currencies to the EURO did not effect anything fundamental in the honesty of their governance systems. They counterfeited a European currency made up of a soup of their own inadequate currencies.

The public is not convinced by this renaming fraud. "Drachma, you are now a Euro. Lira you are now a Euro. Deutschmark you are now a Euro."

The markets are not convinced by this renaming fraud.

And now the politicians are beginning to realise that the jig is up. Everybody has found this conjuring trick out. The most deceived are not the markets or even the public, but the politicians themselves, some of whom are still deceiving themselves. They are only starting to wake up because of a series of law cases coming up about monetary fraud and corruption in high places.

The inability of politicians to install a proper European currency -- when such a currency was clearly needed -- has been thrown in sharp relief by the present crises exacerbated by hostile external forces and the dollar sub-prime political frauds and banking meltdown. Europe's crises are their own fault, the fruit of wilful blindness and refusal to deal with Europe's main problem over decades. Their mistakes are not lethal. Speculators are wrong. Breaking the present Euro will not break the European Community system. It will outlast the avarice or ignorance of any group of politicians.

The politicians constructed a currency based on some of the worst aspects of old politics -- that have always failed in the 2000+ years of European history. They counterfeited money. A little cheating, they said, won't be noticed. In the past governments shaved the edges of silver and gold coins. Today they do it electronically via inflation and overspending. They have no gold, no silver, no paper, just electrons. Now they are chipping the edges off the electrons.

Many politicians want to do this coin-clipping to help their economies. Some think they have a right to cheat to catch up with the stronger and more honest Member States.

The politician-creators of the Euro refused to apply supranational principles to an opportunity foreseen in the founding treaty requiring a supranational currency. Instead they made a soup of their own currencies and it has no solidity. They hoped against experience and history that it would work. It hasn't. They had an opportunity after the Euro's launch to reform the foundational structures. Instead they made the lax principles looser and ignored legal obligations and Court judgements. They undermined the European Commission and refused democratic obligations of the treaties and the citizen's rights of the Declaration of Interdependence (which they still refuse to publish!).

The founder-politicians and subsequent politicians can't see how they can run an economy without shaving edges off the currency. Yet they want to have a single market and that works best with a single currency. They had the arrogance to think they knew best. Experience has now shown they didn't.

Firstly, let us examine the present inadequacies. In the past the political chums turned their eyes away as other chums indulged in fraud and overspending -- even though they knew the consequences ate into their own economies. The Greeks were involved in frauds for decades, but so was France under de Gaulle and practically all the others.

Some like the Dutch complained so loudly that at one point the Commission even took the culprits to Court -- for breaking the Stability and Growth Pact. In the early days of the Euro in 2004 -- before the Lisbon Treaty --the Commission still had pretensions of being 'Independent' and the 'Guardian of the Treaties'. It wasn't entirely taken over by party politicians and national representatives. After much cajoling the Commission took the Council to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg because of open violation of the Stability and Growth Pact.

The biggest culprits against the Stability and Growth Pact were France and Germany. The Court made its judgement against the Council. What did the Council do? It laughed in their face, saying it was up to them if and how they would interpret the Law.

Today the questions Europe's citizens and democrats should ask are:

What has changed nowadays? If the Court came up with a similar judgement, would the politicians in the Council again thumb their noses at the judgement? The answer is probably, Yes. They would make a fudge AGAIN. But it is questionable if the rule of law and the Court would play a part. The penalties foreseen in a non-Community international treaty cannot be placed before the Court of Justice of the Communities or the EU. This form of 'solution' shows that the Council is acting like an illegal Cartel of power and despises the rule of law.
Would a legal case even be raised against a State? Probably not. Today the Commission is stuffed with politicians who quite shamelessly vaunt their party political loyalty. There are no Commissioners representing non-party citizens. They are all chums of the same people who violate European law.
Would the States influence the Commission to stop any exposure of manipulated statistics or hidden overspend, unrealistic assessment of inflation or other economic indicators? Probably Yes. Anyone who did so would not have his or her mandate renewed and be subject to vilification as a betrayer of the national interest. (That is why the Founding Fathers required in treaties that the Commission should not be composed of national representatives.)
Would the Commission turn a blind eye if they saw that the national banks or international banks on their territories were using as deposits worthless derivatives? What if the banks had again collected as assets something like bundles of sub-prime mortgage loans -- which common sense tells you are largely worthless -- but the credit rating agencies label as AAA? What if again the national governments would smile from ear to ear at the new revenues coming in from a property bubble or a dot com boom? Would the Commission's party politicians call them out and say 'You are living in Dreamland. This is unreal. This is pure cheating. You are colluding with fraud and hype.'? The Commissioners are nominated by States whereas the fundamental supranational principle is that the Commission should represent the overall European good and any direct communication or instruction is forbidden whether from the national governments OR political party OR any other body or association. Today it would be surprising if the Commission would ever take the Council to Court or raise embarrassing matters if they could be covered, whether quantitative problems of statistics or quality of banking. Events this year indicate that politicians still manipulate and cover inconvenient but illicit banking operations.

The present crisis derives from legal and technical problems that can only be removed if all politicians are simultaneously honest and law-abiding. Why? Because the present system has politicians as both the culprits and the guardians of rectitude. No independent checks and balances exist in the system devised by the politicians themselves.

Secondly, a major flaw exists in the design and structure of the present Euro itself. Under the present agitated state of the markets, any flaw in a system will be tested to destruction. It is inevitable that this will cause a rip in the fabric of the euro and unless immediate wise action is taken the European economy will suffer catastrophically.

The politicians have been unsuccessful in playing at speculation themselves. When Euro-candidate countries wanted to join, they took some action to clean up their finances, and the interest rates for their bonds declined as they were a better bet. When the markets saw that fraud and obfuscation was involved the interest spread increased between the reliable and the unreliable. The politicians in Council thought that they could play the same game. Instead of correcting the monetary system to a supranational one, they decided that they would make a counter-bet using the European institutions and national treasuries as the fodder. They thought that if the fast crowd in the City and on Wall Street used leverage, well why couldn't they do so too? They hopelessly underestimated both the nature of the game and the money required to do so.

The European Financial and Stability Facility was set up in what finance ministers had only recently denounced a tax haven, Luxembourg. Previously they said companies set up in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg, not to mention other exotic places, were defrauding their treasuries because national taxpayers were sending their money there and they couldn't trace it to grab it.

Now, all of a sudden, the ministers of finance are employees of such a company in the 'tax haven'! OH! What are they doing there? Speculating on the currency market! They thought that they would be able to make a nominal deposit of the States' money -- taxpayers' money -- and then leverage it. At first they said they wanted to raise only a few hundred billion Euros. Then they said they needed a few trillion. They did not succeed in raising anywhere near that sum. Not even one.

Which brings us to the second main reason why the present Euro will fail. There are many people betting against the Euro, more now than ever. At the centre of this, as the Schuman Project warned the Commission in 2001, are forces inimical to the existence of a united Europe.

Europe is at war, whether the politicians recognize it or not. Europe needs an impregnable currency.

But it does not require just one group or ideological cartel to be at war to cause major destruction. Many people with vast resources will use their money and also leverage it to bet against the Euro project when they think that it will inevitably fail. This is the herd instinct and the herd will include many European and American citizens who will be hurt far beyond their gains if the Euro collapses. These turkeys are voting for the slaughterhouse because they think they will gain from higher prices at the butcher's.

What sort of forces are the finance ministers in their Luxembourg company offices up against? No one knows for sure, even those responsible for future trading markets. The best estimate is that more than SEVEN HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS are involved in such Over the Counter (OTC) volatile money, according to the Bank of International Settlements. It is growing at a considerable rate -- 18 per cent in the first half of 2011.

What currency, what raw material, what future market, what derivative will not be affected by the collapse of the Euro or even by the default of one Member State? By comparison the entire EU budget is around 140 Billion euros -- one five thousandths of this sum. The entire EU combined GNP is a mere 12 trillion euros. A sum sixty times -- and now probably more -- bigger than the EU is being laid in hot money bets and its value depends on the stability of the Euro currency soup. How can our politicians -- now apparently turned hot-rod speculators and esconced in their little Luxembourg office -- compete with the big bucks?

The really big hot money is on the bet whether the Euro and the EU will survive. Now if you know that the Swedes would vote four to one against joining the Euro, how do you think the big betters should place a bet? Do you think it has a future? And if this was reinforced by the opinion of the Danes where only one in five also think the European Council's Euro package will solve its problems, do you add more money to you stake? Or do you bet on a Euro collapse? If many of the investment companies and pension funds found that big money was heading against the Euro, where do you think they would then go to stick their money? And then the masses of smaller money will be also headed in the same direction.

Let's be as wildly optimistic as the present politicians. Let's assume that the Euro survives the present struggle. Let us further assume that the mass of corset-tightening measures also work. Most Euro countries stick with a spending deficit limit of around 3 per cent, keep in line with designated inflation differentials and bring their debt below sixty percent. That means some Member States are shaving only 3 per cent off the currency income they don't have, but some others are shaving a little bit less and being a tad more honest. They hope this will be resolved by inflation. What happens then?

The smart hot money will then be bet more or less the same way. Some countries will be at 2.99 deficit and 59.99 debt. Others will be at 2 per cent deficit and 40 per cent debt. Some may be generating a good surplus. There will still be a differential in the bond market among the States. The huge mass of trillions of foot-loose money will then be bet on trying to split the strong from the weak AGAIN. This is just new apples in the game of apples for the rich men economics that exaggerates any difference in quality for equally exaggerated prices. The hot money folk will use their trillions to lever any holes in the system to break it up for the big, big prize -- the bets on the destruction of the Euro.

The two main practical consequences for Europe with the present Euro policies involve its lack of national freedom and the non-convergence of the economies. Years ago one European prime minister who was formerly a banker warned other leaders that to build a Euro this way and ignore hard reality by egotism would cause major problems in the future. He was right. The Euro-constructors did not listen but conditions were imposed, albeit reluctantly, on the headstrong politicians by some others.

They imposed the Stability and Growth Pact. It doesn't solve the problem but constrains all Member States to its own version of monetary chastity. But it is no chastity at all with an arbitrary chiseling of the currency by 3 per cent deficits and resultant inflation and credit card limit of 60 percent. (These conditions never applied for the budget of the European Communities, or the EU, where book-balancing is absolutely necessary and no debt hangover is allowed.) The 27 Member States and the 17 Euro zone members all have different potentials for growth and these are also squelched by the EuroGroup policies.

The supranational system for a common currency gives national governments complete freedom to choose what they want to do. It provides freedom to grow, especially in times of crisis. However it establishes a single standard for all. It does not make an unsatisfactory mixture of strong, weak and weaker currencies but a standard that all currencies can attain to. Schuman recalled that it took a thousand years for Europe to develop its democracy. It will also take time to develop the moral qualities and civic courage among leaders to build a European currency fit for all.

A Supranational currency is far superior to a currency soup. It will therefore inevitably replace the very expensive mistakes of cartel politics. Politicians had better think about how this can be done before they reach the edge of the cliff. Time is short.

One essential ingredient is humility. Europe is not about defending without question one's nation or one's currency. Its supranational purpose is making it a better nation, a better place by providing a more useful service for both the nation's and the Community's citizens. The politicians in Council have temporarily blocked the democratic imperative for both the Parliament and the Consultative Committees. The latter provide for non-political discussions and collaboration across all groups, associations and enterprises thus boosting growth and career opportunities.

A supranational currency will show up the faults in all the currencies but it will also provide a sure path to improve the nation's, Europe's and the global economy.

Budget12: Fiscal Union? No thanks! Open Letter on Openness to President van Rompuy and Parliament President Buzek

2011-12-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

Some government leaders and commentators are advocating what they call a FEDERAL fiscal authority to tax everyone and spread this money to governments. Some call this a supranational authority. It is not. It involves reinforcing secretive, cartel-style politics.

But would a FEDERAL fiscal union and a new "authority" help at all? It would tax more money from the public to help those who are already convicted by the facts and public opinion to be

untrustworthy,
crooked,
distorters of statistics,
in collusion with each other in fraud,
liable to criminal prosecution under the treaties.

Nearly all governments have shamelessly violated the treaties such as the Stability and Growth Pact to control budget overspending and inflation. (In a Community system overspending and inflation involves stealing from Member State partners as well as deceiving national citizens.)

A fiscal union without openness or proper democracy is a fraudulent fiscal compact or a cartel compact.

In the face of a European Court judgement a few years ago, they shamelessly thumbed their noses at it and said it was up to them to decide whether they -- France and Germany in this case -- would be punished for this violation or not.

The European Central Bank has shamelessly violated specific articles of the treaties -- and done the exact OPPOSITE of what it was supposed to do, because an unelected, technocratic President of the ECB decided -- without asking the public -- that it was necessary to deal with the long-term fraud committed by politicians over decades.

Will a 'normal' FEDERAL-style fiscal union stop fraud among European politicians involved in tax and statistics scams? No. The guardians are the politicians themselves! The Commission has been shorn of all independence. It is a politicians' club.

Will it open up the present secrets of what they discuss behind closed doors? No.

Will it stop the international cartel of political parties acting in their own interests? Hardly, it will only encourage it.

ALL THE LEVERS OF POWER WOULD REMAIN IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE PROVED THEIR UNRELIABILITY IN THE PAST! -- THE POLITICAL CARTEL OF MAJOR PARTIES, COLLUDING TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE CITIZEN! No checks and balances but reinforced cartel-power!

Supranational means international democracy. Robert Schuman defined supranationalism in terms of democracy and openness -- which is precisely what the Council and the European Council or the EuroGroup are NOT practicing. They want more secrecy now to hide the past and present scandals and political collusion.

What is proposed has nothing of democracy or light about it. If they wanted a supranational institution, it would be dead easy. A complementary supranational institution already exists that would instill HONESTY supervised by taxpayers. But it is in cold storage -- thanks to the Council.

A supranational Community system is a democracy of democracies. We have 27 member democracies at present. WHY should the governance system of European Union be typified by the hyper-secretive EuroGroup or the European Council whose main characteristic is that they do not let the public know what they are discussing, let voters listen to what is said, let companies, associations, trade unions hear what their reasonings are or how the so-called democrats propose to tax and spend the citizens' money?

In the case of the EuroGroup it is not even an official institution of the Community or the EU and it is the EuroGroup that is now ruling the roost. Its chairman says he has to lie for Europe. So the citizens cannot trust even his information about when it will meet. It makes secret treaties, sets up a shady company in Luxembourg that employs government ministers and tries to lever money as if they were a bunch of Wall Street derivative crooks. They lack the expertise. They are already far from the 1.4 Trillion that was boasted about after they set up this ramshackle operation. (That is more than TEN times the annual budget of the EU!)

They lack open confidence of saying whom they are acting for (their parties or their nationals in Europe?) and even their identity (democrats, ministers or perhaps pseudo-bankers, or even conspirators against the too powerful markets?). The dog's tail of the parties is wagging and shaking the nations. The Euro Zone Heads of Government now meet in an huddle or conference that is in NO WAY DEFINED OR REGULATED BY TREATIES. They are not sure whether to call themselves a European Summit, the European Council (which they are not! They exclude the ten non-Euro Member States) or a Council of Ministers (which they are NOT, even though they fraudulently use its letterhead paper to say they are all honest!)

How can Europe get honest finances again? Supranational democracy requires that the Consultative Committees -- the bodies for democratic associations in Europe like the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of Regions and the equivalent body in Euratom -- be elected based on (1) a reference list of relevant European associations (2) elections within the list of those properly registered associations for a smaller number of seats in the appropriate bodies. (This was part of the Founding Fathers' grand design for Europe and is still active in the body for NGOs in the Council of Europe but has been blocked by Council in the Communities.) The elected body would establish the rules for defining what is a democratic association and what is to be excluded as an unrepresentative lobby.

The Consultative Committee of the European Coal and Steel Community -- even though not properly elected on a European basis because European associations did not yet exist -- was able to control the finances and the budget of the pioneer Community and make sure that housing for miners etc paid out of the European tax did not involve corrupt practice and that the European tax of the Community was properly collected from all firms in the Community. Europe had a real European tax until 2002 -- but this was stopped by the politicians when they decided not to renew the Coal and Steel Community Treaty for another fifty years.

At the start of the first Community politicians delayed the implementation of the changes to make the Consultative Committee a truly European body. They preferred to choose the members themselves which was the interim agreement. Then de Gaulle tried to move the European government system of the Communities to French control inside the Council with its closed doors. De Gaulle is long gone but his undemocratic deformations remain. Can they be reversed? Yes. They will be when we have Europeans with moral courage and honesty. The process of justice and democracy is ineluctable.

We, the citizens, are still waiting for the present Consultative Committees to produce plans for THEIR European elections. Don't hold your breath. The European Parliament took decades to fulfill the minimum electoral requirements in the treaties and still has not once had a proper Europe-wide election under a single electoral statute as required by treaty law.

Such Consultative Committees -- if active -- would have prevented the decades of corrupt and fraudulent practice among Member States, the bad construction of the euro and the present mortgaging of the future planned behind the closed doors of the European Council and the EuroGroup. (See the budget series on http://democracy.blogactiv.eu and the commentaries at http://www.schuman.info/news.htm )

The Consultative Committees should have specialized subcommittees on monetary affairs, representing various types of associations of taxpayers. These would be open and would eliminate much of the comitology -- which is neither open nor democratically approved.

Meanwhile both Parliament and the European Council make sure that Budget matters are dealt with the doors closed to the public.

What is to be done? I wrote to both presidents asking for justification, morally and legally, for what is clearly UNdemocratic practice. The following is the latest correspondence.

5 December 2011
Mr Herman Van Rompuy
President, European Council

Dear President van Rompuy,
A year ago I sent a letter asking for the legal and moral justification that the European Council closed the doors on meetings on the taxation of European citizens and budget expenditure matters. This is in opposition to the articles of the Lisbon Treaty. The treaty says clearly that all such matters, especially those dealing with the earliest consideration of legislation, should be dealt with openly. Morally, all Member States adhere to the principle that there can be no taxation without fair and open representation, which is then the basis for public awareness and public consultation. Consultation is impossible if the consideration of such vital financial matters is presented cut and dried by politicians, without public access to the debate so they can employ the means in the treaties to influence the decisions, to ensure control and provide adequate inspection of the results through properly elected Consultative Committees.

The public is showing increasing distrust of politicians and so are markets. This lack of open responsibility has now resulted in proposals for trillion euro operations mortgaging the future of the next generations. Even before the European Council was designated an institution in the Constitutional and Lisbon Treaties, it had the moral obligation to have open meetings. It did not. That was the reason that a decade ago the principles of openness were written into the treaties. Half a century ago Robert Schuman said that "the Councils, the Committees and the other organs {of Europe} should be placed under the control of public opinion."

Secret political 'deals' of the past are now paralyzing Europe. Why is the principle of openness and democracy still not being respected? European finances are not the property of politicians.

I am therefore sending this reminder, as I believe the public has a right to know the legal and moral opinion why the European Council deems it can close the doors while attempting to extract tax money and design its plans for spending public money.

Many thanks for your help in this matter.

Yours etc

A reminder letter was sent to President Buzek of the European Parliament with this complaint introduced to the European Ombudsman for non-response.

The Parliament has not replied to my letters. They deal with my exclusion, press exclusion and exclusion of the public to matters of primary importance to all, namely, holding secret, closed door meetings on taxation of European citizens and use of the budget.

I was excluded from meetings as noted in the correspondence. President Buzek's earlier argument made for exclusion is not logical or consistent. The Parliament excludes journalists and the public whether or not the Council is involved.

The Parliament says it upholds the principle of open meetings. As for the Council setting the rules in prima facie violation of the treaties, there is a simple way to resolve any potential 'bullying' of the Parliament by the Council. That is to get a ruling by the Court of Justice on such articles as Article 15 TFEU and general principles of taxation and open representation.

For decades the institutions involved which are supposed to be independent and sovereign have refused to do so, being submissive to Council. The public which is the most important partner in the taxation debate should under no circumstances be excluded from discussions among politicians who have their own agenda and interests that are not identical with their electors (the voters are a minority of the electors who increasingly refuse to vote) or the public in general. All the institutions were created for the citizens, not for the political parties who are now (often contrary to the treaties) firmly ensconced in all the institutions, save the Court.

Budget 11: FAIR and SUPERVISED Economic Governance applies to everyone EXCEPT the EU, says the Commission.

2011-11-23T14:55:00.000-08:00

The European Commission's new proposed Regulation 2011/0386 for monitoring draft budgetary plans of Member States applies to everyone in the Euro area but not the European Union. For the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament OPAQUE rules apply.

WHO MONITORS THE MONITORS?

"Strong public finances are best ensured at the planning stage and gross errors should be identified as early as possible,' the Commission's proposed Regulation tells Member States. What of the EU's own budget? That is secret. The Budget meetings of the Commission with the Parliament are secret. And of course the meetings with the Council are secret. The 'gross errors' as far as the public are concerned are also SECRET. The European Council is extremely secret. The Eurogroup -- an unofficial body -- is hyper-secret.

No journalist was allowed to enter the room of the Parliament as the Commission divulged its proposals for the Multiannual Financial Framework 2013-2020. Why? If the public could, it would point out at this early stage the 'gross errors' in the taxation system that it proposed. Not least is the undemocratic procedure attempting to tax European citizens without proper representation and openness. The Commission wants to change wholesale the method of raising the EU budget? Fine. BUT let it discuss the matter openly. Saying Yes and abstaining from a No to a fait accompli is NOT democracy.

The Commission has the sauce to write in the proposed Regulation Article 5 that 'Member States shall submit annually to the Commission and the Eurogroup a draft budgetary plan .. no later than 15 October. The draft budgetary plan should be made public at the same time.'

It continues: 'Where the Commission identifies particularly serious non-compliance with the budgetary policy obligations laid down in the Stability and Growth Pact, it shall, within two weeks .. request a revised draft budgetary plan from the Member State concerned.' And then it adds sauce to sauce by saying: 'This request will be made public.'

What about the public getting the first view of the European budget as the same time as the ultra-secretive Eurogroup? What about the public asking the Commission to redo the European Budget, conceived secretly in mischief against all principles of equity and democracy? If they do not come to their senses one fine day the European Court of Justice will give them a serious knock on the head: Taxation without proper consultation is illegal.

What right has the Commission to consider any type of taxation without a treaty justification and the full consent of the public? What is clear is that the whole Lisbon/ Constitutional Treaty operation got the resounding No of several countries until Member State politicians STOPPED allowing referendums.

'Members States should benefit not just from the setting of guiding principles and budgetary targets but also from a synchronised monitoring of their budgetary policies,' the Commission tells the Member States. Yet no one is allowed a synchronised look at the EU budget proposals BEFORE it has been politically massaged, manipulated and polished for public relations.

Above all, the Commission wants to stop the public having an opportunity to object and criticise the Commission's 'gross errors'. What if the Member States and taxpayers began to tell the Commission No Taxation without full Representation? They are presently already objecting that the Lisbon Treaty lacks any sort of democratic legitimacy. That is why popular support for the European institutions has sunk to the lowest ebb.

No citizens' groups are marching up and down the streets demanding more taxes. There is no legitimacy for raising new taxes that lack any discussion in the appropriate institutions, for example a fully elected Consultative Committee representing organised civil society.

In the proposed Regulation, the Commission tells Member States that there is 'strong evidence showing the effectiveness of rules-based fiscal frameworks in supporting sound and sustainable fiscal policies.' Fine. Why doesn't the Commission begin to respect the rules and in particular the rule of LAW? Why did it not insist that when it presented the 7-year budget plans it was AT FIRST presented to the public? What motivated the Commission to present it secretly ELSEWHERE? Why did the Commission -- a body composed entirely of political party cardholders -- desire above all to present its plans to its political cronies to get their comments (which where not divulged to the public or the press?) Making the Commission 'political' rather than independent of political parties is contrary to the letter and spirit of the treaties and common sense.

If the European Union has totally undemocratic budgetary methods how does the Commission expect the member State governments to respect the Commission? They will laugh in their face ( in the privacy of the next secret meeting of Member States and the Commission on the European Budget). They will say, 'Come off it comrade, or old pal,' as the case may be. 'You know perfectly well how we shut out the public on the Conciliation Committee on the Budget'. This so-called Conciliation Committee is actually the most important debate on the budget. It combines in a single discussion the political parties in Parliament, the politicians in the Commission and the politicians in the Council of Ministers -- all 27 member States -- have their representative there, sometimes the minister or prime minister. Why should the fireworks show be private?

The Commission will be told: 'We are all politicians together and mainly from the three big parties. Just a wink and a nod is all we need. That is how we always did it in the past.'

When the Commission tries to explain that the markets are making mincemeat out of the euro and its constituent crooked parts, they will have little credibility.

When the Commission quotes the Regulation saying, 'this gradually strengthened surveilance will further complement the existing provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact and strengthen the surveillance of the budgetary discipline in Member States' the other politicians will raise their own question or two.

For example today, we had the spectacle of two Commissioners preaching austerity, self-discipline and this firm economic governance (as they now call it). A few minutes later in the same Commission press room, at the same podium, we had another Commissioner announcing that the Commission was about to increase one programme by a whopping 70 per cent and another by 37 per cent. Wow! Some people thought the Commission was preaching budget restraint!

The European Commission needs to increase its credibility and at a faster rate than 70 per cent per annum.

How should it go about it?

1 It should insist that all its budgetary meetings are OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AND THE PRESS.

2. The Commission should STOP having secret, closed-door, meetings with the Parliament on the Budget.

3. It should INSIST that all other budget meetings including those with the Council and the European Council are OPEN.

4. If the Council refuses, the Commission should take the Council and the European Council to the European Court of Justice and ask for an interpretation of Article 15 of the Lisbon Treaty -- the politicians' treaty.

This states 15 para 1 The Union institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies shall conduct their work as openly as possible.

(para 2) The European Parliament shall meet in public, AS SHALL THE COUNCIL, when considering and voting on a draft legislative act.

The act of primary importance for the Community is the raising and the spending of money from the taxpayer. The Commission must ask the Court: does this mean that taxation by the institutions must be open and that there can be no taxation and spending of a budget without open discussion and consultation?

The right way to deal with budget is to use the FIVE democratic institutions.

The Commission needs to put its own house in order before its starts preaching at the other states, however ruinous their national budgets are and how crooked their politicians.

Budget 10: The EU Cartel's dirty Trillion-Euro Game of Hide-and-Seek with Taxpayer's money

2011-11-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

Did you read about the passionate debate about the 2012 Budget? Did you hear about the how Parliament minutely and forensically interrogated the Commission about taxpayer's money? Did you see how the Commissioner cowered as MEPs tore into the illogicality of its proposals? Did you cheer on seeing the riveting television when Parliamentarians shredded the arguments of Council of Ministers, declaring that they could not raise a cent of YOUR tax money without proper OPEN, DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION?

Are you now fully aware about HOW and WHY the EU leaders take European tax from your pocket and HOW MUCH it spends on your behalf and WHERE? Did you see how 27 democratic States of Europe vigorously debated their common budget in the European Union?

NEITHER DID I !!!

The MAIN Debate on the 2012 Budget was IN SECRET! AGAIN!! The doors of the room 5G3 in the Spinelli Building of the Brussels Parliament were closed on 8 November 2011. I asked for admittance showing my press credentials. I also said that I was a journalist. I was asked whether I was part of the Council delegation. I said: No. I was then asked, if I was part of the Commission delegation. I said: No. I was asked if I was with the Parliament. I said: No.

I re-affirmed that I was a journalist and wanted to report about the raising of European taxes and the spending of taxpayers' money. I said it was a matter of the highest public interest. The Guardians of the Door who had a list of those who their bosses wanted to be admitted, refused to let me enter.

The European Union is now deep in the mire of a financial and monetary crisis. Both the finances and the money lack democratic legitimacy. At the heart of these problems is the illicit take-over of what are supposed to be independent institutions by a clique of politicians. Thus an oligarchic clique in Council dictates what 500 million citizens should do and how much they should pay. They also tell them what is good for them, whether they agree or not.

Consider. Who is in charge of the independent institutions?

When asked,

The Parliament says the meetings on raising and spending taxes should be open.
The European Commission says such meetings should be open.
The Consultative Committees don't reply but they have open meetings.
The Treaties say that all meetings from the initial consideration of tax and all stages about tax legislation should be open.
Taxpayers demand that all meetings about taxation should be open, fair and just.
The Council refuses to have open meetings.

There is a simple remedy in all the treaties from the founding treaty of 1951 to the Lisbon Treaty. ASK THE COURT TO DECIDE WHO IS RIGHT. Any national, regional Court or local tribunal where a civil association or even any individual is in dispute over European tax can have its judge ask the European Court for a judgment on the legality of the Council's 'secret taxation' system.

The European finances and the money system are controlled undemocratically by a coalition of the three major parties. Let us call it the Cartel. There is no real democratic Government and certainly no Opposition. The institutional independence required in the treaties is being systematically suspended by the Coup Leaders. The Cartel overrides the institutions.

The European Commission, which is supposed to be composed of totally independent personalities, is now EXCLUSIVELY composed of card-carrying members of the political parties. They are chosen in secret. No real European is allowed to put his or her name forward. No Call for Candidates is allowed to be published for the posts that are paid for by taxpayers. All 27 States act in undemocratic unison.
The Council of Ministers, which is supposed to represent national interests in a continuous open debate is now composed of a clique of party politicians who refuse to have proper discussions in the national parliaments or allow referendums. It is very far from its original role of initiating debate in the States with all the citizens that they supposedly represent. It is now a clique designed to stifle and stop debate at home.
The European Parliament, which is supposed to hold the Commission to task, having the power to fire the Commission for incompetence or dereliction of duty, has become the Chorus for the Commission, now the Cartel secretariat, and other stronghold of the cartel, the Council. When it agreed to the Lisbon Treaty -- without even publishing the full text -- the Parliament gave up its PRIME POWER. The Lisbon Treaty made it impossible for the Parliament to sack the Commission. The Parliament, needless to say, has NEVER had an election according to the specifications of the treaties: direct elections according to a single statute for all Member States, not 27 statutes which favour the Cartel and eliminate other voices of citizens.
The Consultative Committees, a vital debating and legislating chamber of organized civil society has NEVER been elected on a European basis. Schuman and Reuter (who was responsible for drafting the early treaties) declared the efforts of governments to prevent these elections ILLEGAL.

Who stopped the application of supranational democracy of the treaties? Who blocked a single statute for Parliamentary elections (when the Parliament had the courage to propose it)? Who stopped the Consultative Committees having elections for European organised societies?

The politicians in the Council of Ministers and now the European Council and its unofficial super-Eurogroup.

Why are the doors closed on Budget and Tax discussions? Who shut the doors?

A year ago I wrote to the President of the European Parliament about the closed doors of the Budget meeting of October 2010. I got no reply so I asked the Ombudsman to help.

On 1 June 2011, Mr Buzek replied:

As you know, the European Parliament's policy is one of full openness and transparency in such meetings. Our own plenary sessions are public, as well as, in principle, committee meetings (exceptions to this rule are rare and must be duly motivated). Equally, the Treaty of Lisbon established the principle that Council should deliberate in public on legislative matters.

In the light of these factors, a discussion is currently on-going within the European Parliament concerning the status of conciliation meetings. However, I must draw your attention to the fact that any decision concerning public access to conciliation meetings requires an agreement of all the institutions involved, which has not been reached yet. As you will understand, it is not possible for the Parliament to impose unilaterally an 'open door' policy for such meetings. We will continue to work to find a satisfactory solution...

Comment: The fact that the doors are closed must have the agreement of all those 'democrats' who are attending and are responsible to the public. The public demand open meetings, especially on taking tax and spending tax. Do the 'democrats' lack the courage of their convictions? Who has priority -- their electors or the politician-Cartelmasters in Council? Schuman and the Founding Fathers said the doors of European institutions including the Councils should be open so that the public can control what goes on. The Parliament has had SIXTY years from its foundational session on 10 September 1952 when it first met to resolve this problem of openness. How much more time does it require? Secondly the treaties provide a simple solution. The Court of Justice is empowered to decide on the interpretation of the Treaties -- in particular whether all matters of taxation should follow the same rules on open debates about taxation as all the democracies that make up the EU. The Parliament is empowered to initiate the case.

What happens at budget meetings when the Council is not present? They SHUT THE DOORS TOO. This happened at the meeting of the Parliament leaders and the Commission on the one Trillion euro multi-annual Budget for 2013-2020. It was held in Parliament on 29 June 2011, on the sixth floor of the Spaak Building. Paul-Henri Spaak, the first president of the European Parliament would have shot up bolt upright in his grave!

The supposedly democratic institutions want one TRILLION from Taxpayers -- but they were not going to tell them why, how they would go about it or whether there was any collusion between two institutions to do a dirty deal against the citizen!

Is the Council to blame for the secret Tax and Budget meeting when it is absent? Why was the meeting of the Commission and Parliament closed to the public? It is time for the so-called Democrats to clean up their act. It is the unseen hand of the Council that shuts the door -- and pulls the strings.

On 4 July 2011, I therefore wrote again to President Buzek.

Schuman Project
www.schuman.info

Dear President Buzek,
Thank you for your reply of 1 June 2011 to my letter of November 2010 concerning the exclusion of the press and the public from the Budget Conciliation Meetings in October and later on. (Ombudsman case 661/2011/RT) You mention that the Parliament's policy 'is one of full openness and transparency in such meetings' as the Budget. I am pleased to see your re-affirmation of Parliament's responsibility towards the public -- which is written into the treaties. The idea of a Parliament holding secret sessions is a contradiction of its purpose. Any exceptions must be reasoned with irrefutable logic, be properly motivated and democratically agreed and underpinned by law and jurisprudence. There should be no hint of political expediency. The principle must be that the public is also the partner of any democratic institution.

Because of past corruption, financial misappropriations and abuse of Wine Lakes, Meat Mountains and infrastructure funding scandals, the Lisbon Treaty spelt out clearly, as you say, the 'principle that the Council should deliberate in public on legislative matters.'

However I am at a loss as to why Parliament sees any question about the necessary public presence at the conciliation meetings. Nor do I understand why public access must stop when the Council acts contrary to what Parliament is convinced is the Treaty law for Europe. Public access and democratic debate is the paramount principle, not the whims and fancies of Council. Surely Parliament is an independent institution according to the law of the treaties and has been since the first session of the assembly on 10 September 1952 -- nearly 60 years ago.

You write that 'The status of the discussion in Council is a matter for which the Council, not the Parliament, is responsible'. Surely the reverse applies equally. The Council must respect the laws of the Treaties and rules of Parliament. If as you say the Parliament is convinced of the legality of its case, it should not hesitate an instant to defend the rights of the public, especially when a meeting takes place inside a building of Parliament, where you, Mr President, and the Members are legally sovereign.

Public access to meetings considering the collection and use of the citizens’ own money should not be in dispute anywhere. It should certainly not be a matter where Council bullies Parliament or any other body. If there is any doubt about the right of the public and the press to attend a meeting about their own money inside the independent European Parliament, there is a simple remedy in all the Treaties since 1951. The Parliament can ask the Court of Justice for an opinion on the interpretation of the treaties and validity of acts under article 267 TFEU and elsewhere. Any tribunal throughout the entire EU can do the same.
I would like to know why this has not been done.

The second question relates to Budget meetings where the Council did not play any part. On 29 June 2011, I was also excluded from the Budget meeting of the Parliament and the Commission. Why? The Parliament was considering the Commission's proposals for the Trillion euro multi-annual financial framework. It is huge money from the public's pocket. All political parties were represented at the meeting and their reaction was of primary public interest and concern. Article 15 of Lisbon Treaty TFEU states that all matters concerning the consideration of budget and legislation should be open to the public. I spoke to a member of Mr Barroso's Cabinet who was also present inside the meeting but he was unable to explain to me the reason for the press exclusion from the point of view of the Commission. On his recommendation I am therefore writing to you for an explanation.

In this case, blame for the exclusion cannot be sloughed off on the Council. The Commission says it is the Parliament’s responsibility.

The treaties and the jurisprudence state clearly that openness and consultation are required for legislation. The secrecy, the hidden political reactions and the refusal to consult the public throw in doubt the legality of previous 'legislation' because it is based on unjustly excluding the public presence and refusing proper consultation of the public and taxpayers in particular. Money cannot legally be taken from a taxpayer's pocket in a manner where the taxpayer is excluded from understanding how an exclusive group who will benefit highly from his money are proposing to seize it, what their first proposals are and the reactions among them. This is especially important when it comes to European matters involving vast sums, massive planning, specifics of revenue collection and taxation and principles of budgetary operations. It is all the more illegitimate when exclusion is decided by a coalition of people all holding party membership cards. They all have similar ideological motives. Party membership represents only about 2 percent of the population. The vast majority of electors refused to vote for any of the parties in the elections. The trend of party support is also continually downwards. It is this small but strong and persistent cartel of party members who refused press and public access in the Council and the Parliament. This is unjust.

Non-party political Civil Society and Organized Civil Society has now been excluded from the institutions where they used to be active in the Commission and in the Consultative Committees (which have legal rights about legislation). Tax and budget decisions are now exclusively made by party politicians contrary to the letter and spirit of the treaties. The Commission is also exclusively occupied by politically active national politicians whereas the original treaties say they should be independent, not maintain their occupation, paid or not, nor take instructions from any organisation or government. The result is that legislation lacks democratic legitimacy.

I am therefore asking you to also reply to the following:
1. The EP should make access for the public and the press permanently available via a physical presence inside the committee room and also for others via the internet and radio and television links.
2. It should ask the Court of Justice to review the legality of the previous acts where the budget discussions were held in secret, contrary to public interest and the Lisbon Treaty and other treaties. Public consultation, debate and democratic openness are legal requirements. The longer it is before this review is made, the more serious the outcome could be. A local or national court or tribunal in the EU will eventually ask according to article 267 for a European Court judgement, opinion or ruling determining the legitimacy of all such alleged legislation including the budgets under the Lisbon Treaty. The most chaotic outcome should be avoided.
3. The EP should, where possible, hold these same Budget meetings again in public so that they can be considered legal and so the public can be aware of the issues and discussions involved in the Budget and expenditures. The public needs to have an opportunity to object to any secret deals among party members and communicate their own opinions to their representatives. After all it is the public’s money that is being discussed. It is not the private funds of the political parties.
4. The Commission, Council and Parliament should review and propose how organized civil society in a properly elected Economic and Social Committee and other such consultative committees with a legal mandate can contribute to the budget proposals. The Founding Fathers intended and the treaties allow that the Consultative Committees should be elected among all registered European associations – as is presently the case in the Council of Europe. Direct elections for the European Parliament under a single mandate were also foreseen and legitimized in the treaties of Paris, 1951 and Rome, 1957 but this took decades to be even partially realized.

Mr President, I look forward to receiving your reply.

Many thanks for your help.

Yours etc,

Not having received a reply in the subsequent months, I have now written again asking for a reply.

Euro7: Who will stop euro crooks mortgaging the future? Not their buddies and comrades!

2011-10-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Parliamentarians in the UK are discussing a referendum -- promised by all three major parties. When the parties came to power, what happened? No referendum. It is still refused. The referendum would ask the public about the desire of some UK citizens to leave the EU or modify its membership. Why do so many Britons want to leave? Corruption of politics by what they see as an opaque, undemocratic cartel of power in Brussels. The parties at home who refuse their pledges also look like they have the same disease -- dishonesty.

The euro is just one example. Politicians, meeting in secret, want to mortgage future generations so grandchildren will have to pay off TRILLIONS of debt. These secret meetings in the eurogroup and in the so-called European Council of the euro States want to illegally use the Community framework to deal with amounts of money multiple times the entire EU budget.

Consider. The entire multi-annual budget for the whole EU for seven years from 2013 to 2020 amounts to ONE trillion euros. The secret politicians' cabal wants to use the EU framework to raise funds on the markets who are betting against them. They want many times the amount of that entire EU budget, two, three maybe more trillions. The comparatively tiny EU budget is not yet decided. Worse it is not subject to proper democratic control. Journalists and the public are refused entry to the deliberations of so-called democratic institutions on that EU budget.

The journalists and the public are even more restricted from Eurogroup meetings. They are given a briefing afterwards, if they are lucky, usually in the middle of the night. The trouble is the chairman of the eurogroup has said several times that he has to lie to journalists, when he is dealing merely with the timing of possible meetings on the euro. If he admits he is dishonest outside the meetings about their calendar, how can journalists and the public know that anything politicians say is going on inside the meetings is not also a lie?

A currency is based on confidence. Schuman who was faced with many currency problems, not only devaluations of the French Franc but secrets about the Pound Sterling and the Deutschmark and about launching the free gold market. He had to keep secrets, legitimately. He was surrounded by would-be saboteurs. Then he announced publicly to everyone the creation of the European Community. The Schuman Proposal gave birth to the European currency as a likely product.

He had a horror of lies. He was asked at the end of his career: 'Do politicians have the right to lie?' He said: 'You must not lie, not even in politics.' (Rochefort, p22).

It was part of his success as a Minister of Finance and Prime Minister. However, he added: 'People say that I am honest. Being honest, for a minister of finance, is not sufficient.'

Today Schuman's Europe has meetings called 'Councils of Ministers' with heads of State and Government. Are they European Councils? How can they be with only 17 of 27 Member States present? Are they just ministers holding a Council of Ministers or are they rather more as presidents and prime ministers? They are masquerading as EU official meetings. Is that honest? These are not official meetings of the EU under the Lisbon Treaty or any other treaty.

The so-called European Summits of these government leaders dealing with the euro have also nothing to do with official meetings of the treaties. It is a multinational conference meeting INFORMALLY in the EU offices. The Council of Ministers must have representatives of 27 sovereign States.

The politicians even try to make out it is part of the legal frame by fraudulently using Council letterhead paper. Supranational democracy has five key institutions. Any attempt to create counterfeit institutions is a sure sign both of fraud outside and mischief inside.

You can see why the democrats including a large number of Britons are fed up and some are enraged at the unethical management of mega money in the EU. If any politician thinks that by amassing a few more trillions in the betting game against the markets, he will convince anyone that no fraud is involved, he is gambling with public money in the wrong game at the wrong moment. And without the public's assent.

It is high time to come clean and put in REAL democratic reform.

Is it possible for government leaders to clean out corruption in government accounts, even throw out member States in the euro for fraudulent practice? The European cabal in the European Council says NO. No Member State can leave the euro, they say!

It is extraordinary that all the clever lawyers in Brussels say that it is impossible for EU delinquent countries to leave the euro zone. They have come up in the past with some pretty contorted interpretations of law to suit their political masters. Leaving the EU is possible but leaving the euro is impossible?? even for mega fraud involving fixing national and European statistics, corruption and thereby secretly indebting the whole Union? This view encourages moral hazard for the future, that is corruption.

Think. The clever lawyer-politicians could use the same 'exit clause' to clean up the game. They won't. If a tennis club has admitted a bunch of crooks who are taking all the resources and hogging the finances, it has two alternatives. One it can ask the crooked partners to leave. If they refuse then the honest members can all leave and reshape a new Community based on law, moral and ethical principles that have to be observed by all.

The European Council will not do this because there is a political clique that takes mega fraud– that is fraud at the government level with public money — as fundamental to the rules of their club. Example: All governments want to go on a spending spree BEFORE elections — not with party money but with State money, that is, taxpayers’ money. Is this a politicians’ perk or is it plain fraud, corruption and bribery? Companies would be taken to court for this. What sanction have the public against crooks in government who see public money as pocket money to get votes?

Some States have clean booking. The Community must learn that what applies to the honest nation States also applies to a Community of sovereign, democratic States, their governments and their peoples. We are now in clean up time for Europe.

EuroStat, the EU's statistical organ, long warned about fraudulent practice. Politicians had many such reports before, dating from when Commission President Roy Jenkins warned that Greece had serious problems even before it elbowed ahead of other candidate States to enter the Communities in 1981. It had buddy-buddy power not ethical purity. Inaction before obvious moral hazard became ingrained in the Council of Ministers with their buddy-buddy and comrade-comrade culture.

The so-called reforms of finances and debt with the six pack still suffer from the main defect: they leave all the levers of abuse in the hands of the perpetrators of excess debt and fraudulent accounts and statistics — the political clique or cartel. Only card-carrying members of the main political parties — the cartel — are power brokers. The reaction is similar to what commercial cartels normally do — ask for more power to regulate themselves, while refusing independent control to the citizens’ groups over the accounts.

At present the EU is not only NOT dealing fully with correcting the abuses of politicians by instituting proper measures of control of finance through elections of organised civil society through the Consultative Committees, it is refusing the most obvious ways to stem massive and continuous mega-fraud on VAT for example. Hundreds of billions are involved in ‘carousel fraud’. It is refusing to stem energy blackmail where oil / gas rises from 9 dollars /barrel in 1999 to 146 dollars in less than a decade. That price hike is typical action of a cartel too, OPEC and friends. The EU needs to develop proper energy INDEPENDENCE.

The life of the Community is at stake. The Warning about the jihadi attempt to DESTROY Western capitalism was made on 9/11 and recorded in 2001 at the European Commission and re-published as http://www.schuman.info/energypol.htm .

The politicians have had a decade to do some REAL reform. They have worsened the problem. They have had thirty years since Greece joined and it and others began to misspend Community money. Instead of insisting on reforms in the 1980s they gave more public money. If Greece is serious about reform it should look at the examples of Slovakia and Latvia. They work.

If the politicians are serious they should start the reforms by empowering independent, non-party organised civil society to act as their supervisors for their moral and ethical conduct, not party buddies in the European Parliament and the Commission where non-party, independent people are now banned.

A party oligarchy controlling all the institutions will expose Europeans to never having a referendum again. They may have no say at all as the reckless politicians fritter away money they do not have in a bottomless blackhole of debt.

Future generations will be the slaves of the debt masters.

Euro6: Greatest crisis in EU history? I don't think so! Greatest BUNGLE perhaps!

2011-10-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

'We are facing the the greatest challenge that I believe our Union has ever faced in its history.' That was what the President of the European Commission told the European Parliament in what he called the State of the Union message.

Is it true? I don't think so, unless Mr Barroso is hiding some utterly disastrous facts from everyone. He was not talking about the destruction of the Community system. The challenge did not involve the elimination of supranational democracy.

It only involved, at worst, the postponement of plans for a single currency called the euro. The euro plans are not yet tossed into the bin. It is yet to be seen whether Statesmen can reform the present euro system on a more rational and moral basis, rather than cover up of what some politicians call 'skyrocketing debts and falsified statistics'.

The destruction of plans for a European currency has already happened once before. It was very painful. But Europe survived it. Trillions have already been lost because of political duplicity.

Imagine! Now politicians want to borrow a few more trillion. Have they learned their lesson? Have they ensured that 'skyrocketing debts and falsified statistics' have been stopped by democratic supranational control? Or do they want more secret 'governance'?

The earlier debacle involved:

turning huge European trade surpluses into mammoth debts,
the loss of multiple trillions of euros or dollars,
major upheaval to the European commerce and the world economy and
the loss of European leadership in the world emphasizing moral, European values,
an imposed delay of more than a decade in re-starting the effort for a single currency
destruction of major industries, galloping inflation, massive unemployment. Industries stopped production because of energy shortages. Motorways were empty of traffic because of fuel legislation. Rampant inflation destroyed capital and pensions. The West contemplated going to war against the perpetrators.

Are we facing a greater challenge today? I don't think so.

Let's be clear. If the currency fails, a better one can be built. It is not a case of 'It's the currency, stupid'. It is more the case of 'It's a stupid currency'. Politicians should be saying: 'Sorry we got it wrong, folks. We messed up. We did not follow the Community rules.' Honesty must replace duplicity.

The euro is not solidly built on democratic supranational principles. It is not worthy of 27 countries which are supposed to shine as democratic examples to the world.

'Europe must be built on a democratic foundation,' Robert Schuman said. That goes also for the currency. (Pour l'Europe, p145).

What was the greatest challenge the European Community and the later European Union? I assume Mr Barroso includes the Community in his history, as it is the origin of modern Europe, the unification of the Continent. It is the origin of the European Commission for which he stands as the latest president.

WHY did not the President's advisers remind him of the FACTS about Community history? Were they not concerned that such a statement makes the President of the European Commission look ignorant or deceitful?

In its history Europe has faced THREE past challenges, far greater than anything we face today. The Euro crisis is far from being the most severe. Even with a multi-trillion euro debt overhang, it does not stack up to Europe's biggest problems that leaders have had to face in the past. In most of them they succeeded in finding the right solution of solidarity and moral justice. In the last one in the 1970s and 1980s they were less successful and the problems are now coming back to haunt us. Serious thought, cooperative action and solidarity of all the people is required.

First, what were Europe's most serious crises, the Continent's most severe postwar challenges? Unless we are aware of them, Europeans are less likely to solve the present crisis. They are more likely to go through the same problems again in a more painful form.

The first major challenge to a democratic Europe was perhaps its most subtle and underhand one. The Eden Plan was introduced in September 1952 soon after the first Community, the European Coal and Steel Community, was under way. The British wanted to undermine the supranational principle which involves INDEPENDENT democratic institutions. They suggested that instead of the Community being independent with its own FIVE independent democratic institutions, the Coal and Steel Community should be subject to the political control of the Committee of Ministers.

What Committee of Ministers? This was and is the body that is part of the Council of Europe. In those days it was often called the European Union and was meant to be the main democratic framework for the new Europe. It does so by ensuring Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of all individual and is able to criticize European States for not adhering to democratic principles.

If the whole apparatus of Europe were controlled by the politics of a Committee of Ministers -- that met behind closed doors -- then it would become a Europe of ministerial apparatchiks, an oligarchy of politicians. It would have been a similar system to that behind the Iron Curtain. We can be thankful that Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak recently elected as President of Europe's supranational Assembly of the Community and Jean Monnet, together with a host of other European democrats refused to let that corrupt idea happen.

What would have been the consequences? Nothing short of dismantling the supranational idea of democracy and replacing it with political squabbles. The Committee of Ministers would issue its own politically compromised deals -- totally lacking in any democratic support or legitimacy.

Instead of the longest period of peace and prosperity in Europe's 2000 plus years of existence, Europe would have soon degenerated into conflict and probably war.

If the British plan had succeeded Europe would have had no peace and its hopes for peace might have been dismantled. We would not be experiencing the unity of two halves of Europe, the western and the Communist-controlled systems. German nationalists would have been plotting the Kremlin to try to unify their country. We would probably be at war or recovering from another destructive, ruinous war, probably a world war!

That is why this first crisis was far more important than the present currency crisis. PEACE is far more important than the currency. Peace is far more important than immediate prosperity and gratification of consumer desires. Without peace it is difficult even to discuss a common currency.

When the democrats stood firm, the five key institutions of the European Community were able to be built. They are by no means fully developed today. They are still exhibiting infantile and immature tantrums. However, this first crisis was the most serious because without a solid foundation of those institutions, democracy would have disappeared from some of Europe's countries and some under dictatorship such as Spain, Portugal and Greece would never emerged so soon from authoritarian regimes. Britain did not immediately join the first Community but became an Associate Member in its first years.

The SECOND crisis of Europe was the attempt by France's General de Gaulle to take over the Community institutions by stealth and make them become the instrument of his undemocratic power. His intentions were published later by his spokesman, Alain Peyrefitte. His aim was ‘to suffocate supranationality.’ He wanted to boycott all Community collaboration as far as possible and to ‘deactivate the treaties of Rome’ and specifically to ‘chloroform Euratom’. (Peyrefitte: C’était de Gaulle, vol 1 pp66ff).

De Gaulle revealed his hand in two open strategies, the Fouchet Plan to turn the European Commission into a Secretariat for which the French would assume political primacy. When this did not succeed the second plan was the Empty Chair Strategy when French ministers refused to participate in European decision-making. De Gaulle hoped this would bulldozer Community Europe into the ground and he would remain in the driver's seat. It did not work either. French ministers came sheepishly to the table some six months later after the more democratic States had given the would-be bully the face-saving measure of the so-called Luxembourg compromise. The lesson was that democratic European law prevails not arm-twisting in secretive ministerial councils.

The Community cannot allow one strong nation that thinks it is superior to dictate the policy for all the others. That is the lesson Europeans should have learnt from their history. The States are equal in a Community Europe. (We do not have a hundred or more Germans or French in the Council of Ministers compared to one Maltese or one Luxembourger.)

The next, the THIRD crisis should be a burning lesson for all politicians. Europe partly succeeded and partly failed. Europe's economy was cut to ribbons. Europe should be aware of those failures because they lie at the core problem of the present currency crisis. This third crisis was an external one. It attacked two aspects of the Community: solidarity and its resistance to blackmail threats. It also destroyed the basis for a European Currency. It attacked at an area where the Community had not developed a competence -- its Achilles' heel: ENERGY. It had disastrous consequences on the FIRST attempt at a European currency, the Europa.

Yes the first attempt at European currency were set back decades because of this crisis. If the present crisis means that the currency will have to be started again from scratch, it is not the worst thing in the world The Community system will not crumble. It has already happened once before. Europe survived.

Heads of State and Government decided in 1969 on Economic and Monetary Union. The Council of Ministers defined a programme of structural reform, indicators and economic guideposts on 27 January 1970. The Monetary Committee had been set up in 1958 under article 105 of the EEC Treaty (in conjunction with articles of the Euratom and Coal and Steel Community treaties). With the adhesion of UK, Ireland and Denmark, the Commission and the Council reconfirmed 1980 as a goal for introducing a single currency, the Europa. However USA devalued by 10 percent in February 1973 after having closed gold sales earlier. Worse was to come.

First the context. Western Europe should have been the centre of gravity for world monetary affairs. The Communities' trade with the world was three times bigger than the USA. Europe had built up huge surpluses. The Communities represented 37.2 percent of wold exports and 35.6 percent of imports. America had 11.9 percent exports and took in 12.9 percent of imports.

They were hit nearly lethally by the Oil Weapon. Under de Gaulle, France had recklessly discarded the idea that the Community must become energy-independent to avoid energy blackmail. Then Arab exporters struck. In conjunction with other oil producers like Iran, they quadrupled the oil price. Israel-friendly countries were most heavily targetted. A total embargo was applied. Europe and its democracies were to be taught a lesson about the need to lie in foreign policy.

Instead of a further surplus, 1974 brought a triple-size deficit. Developing countries were hit by a bill greater than all the aid the received from OECD countries. They got little help from the mega-rich oil cartel that had pillaged the world. Instead Africa descended into worse problems of debts, corruption, wars and the murder of myriads. Terrorism proliferated. Inflation raged worldwide.

This hammer blow had many consequences. One of these was the abandonment of the plan for a single currency by 1980. Arab militants and jihadis in OPEC found that blackmail worked against Europeans! In 1979 the OPEC cartel again quadrupled oil prices. They got Europe to sign up to the 1980 Venice Declaration.

Europe had to wait twenty years before it got to the stage where a single currency could be substituted to support what is today the world's greatest economic and commercial power.

The Treaties created supranational institutions. That does not mean international. It does not mean that the European Commission should be composed of NATIONAL representatives. The early treaties forbade that. It means the Commissioners should be fully competent with (1) expertise in relevant European affairs and (2) proven independence of thought and action.

That means according to the original treaties that they should have no further links with political parties or other such lobby groups, national governments, industries, finance house, trades unions, consumer activists or any body in sectors where they will legislate. All European institutions should be democratic. All should be independently democratic. Only that way will the contagion of corruption be stopped.

Party membership has been the common thread in the present financial scandals that involves taxpayers' money issued and spent without proper control, skyrocketing debts and falsified statistics. Party politicians have been the ones that have continuously tried to block the free and open elections of the Parliament across the entirety of the EU area.

They have blocked the Europe-wide elections of Europe's organised civil society in the Consultative Committee of the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of Regions and the Scientific and Technical Committee. These Committees, if independent of national governments and party politics, would be the principal vehicles, outside the Court of Justice, for seeing that fraud did not take place with European budgets and national accounts.

The Commission cannot be the guarantor of fairness if it is composed of people tied by loyalty to Nation States and political parties. It will not work if the Commissioners are constantly taking instructions from political parties and Member State governments, the principal culprits in the euro crisis. The Commission, under the Lisbon Treaty is no longer accountable to the European Parliament. The Lisbon Treaty annulled Parliament's vital and primary powers to be able to sack the European Commission.

When a politician says that this is the greatest crisis in history, democrats should beware! That generally means that the political class is going to try ot pull a fast one! They should be warned that democrats, in the spirit of Robert Schuman and Paul-Henri Spaak, need to rise and denounce acts to take further money from public coffers, to mortgage the future, to make children and children's children pay for their folly and corruption.

Why do politicians try to deny the THREE major crisis involving far bigger challenges that what we have today? War, political oligarchy, energy blackmail are far more serious. Does it indicate that they do not want to enter into a democratic dialogue with the citizens. Don't they wish to debate with democrats? Do they want to adopt scare tactics to introduce UNDEMOCRATIC methods? When did anyone hear a Commissioner explain how the supranational system works and how it stopped wars in Europe?

Public apathy and ignorance will lead to ambitious and unscrupulous people trying the same dirty tricks again. Vigilance is eternally needed to protect freedoms.

Imagine, if in the past Europe had not faced up to its greatest challenges. Consider what dangers Europe would have faced.

Imagine, secret committees of 'democratic' ministers making deals about TRILLIONS of euros, without any democratic supervision! Does that remind you of anything today? Imagine politicians meeting in secret trying to cover up each other's skyrocketing debts and falsified statistics. Imagine, instead of an independent Commission, it would be entirely composed of political NATIONAL nominees from each of the Member States. Does that ring a bell? Imagine if possible that this change in the fundamental structure of Europe had been done without any democrat able to object, in the darkened corridors of the European Council. (Such a change is strictly forbidden in the treaties).

The Commission is supposedly the 'guarantor of fairness', yet its members are best described as a political cartel. They are chosen in the most discriminatory way possible by excluding every citizen who is not a paid-up member of the political clique. Imagine how 'fair' Commissioners could be selected not from Europe's best qualified people for the job but be only party nominees and sometimes the throw-outs of the political parties!

Imagine. Does that remind you of any dangers we face today?

Eretz2: How to tell an obvious fraud -- Call a "nation" PALESTINE!

2011-09-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

Calling for the creation of a State of Palestine in 2011 is an obvious incitement to political FRAUD. It has all the hallmarks of what Robert Schuman warned democrats would lead to a disaster. 'Nothing is easier for political counterfeiters to exploit good principles for an illusion, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles that are badly applied.' In that he was agreeing with two French philosophers, Bergson and Maritain.

In 1948 the government of the Holy Land changed its name from 'Palestine' to Israel. Previously it was the Jews who mainly bore the name Palestinians. The Arab population preferred to call themselves simply as Arabs, or Bedouins but more often villagers of a certain place. Nationalism was not a factor.

After World War One, the lack of any strong national identity presented western nations with a problem. When the victorious Allied powers divided up the Ottoman empire and freed the peoples from the yoke of control from Istanbul, they had to carve the borders according to lines on a map, not natural or ethnic boundaries. Ancient Persia had also lost its geographical identity. The other nations had had their boundaries completely changed by the invasion of the Huns, Mongols and Arabs. Massive migrations of populations took place in the first millennium.

The only indigenous people who were sure about boundaries were the Jews. Western people educated in history were also familiar with the boundaries of ancient Israel.

Some of those living in Palestine called themselves southern Syrians. Then there was a large influx of Arabs in the nineteenth century from neighbouring countries who wanted to benefit from the economic revival under the Jews. Many accounts speak of how barren and bare the land was before the immigration of educated Jews.

In this post-Ottoman period after WW1, when the world powers agreed legally to a Mandate to return the land to the Jews, the term Palestine was used. This was because it was the 'normal' but anti-Semitic term that Europeans had used for the land of Israel since around the time of emperor Hadrian in the second century CE. Many in the so-called 'Christian' West did not consider that the term Palestine was abusive.

It was a Latin word used of a long-extinct troublesome mini-state of the Philistines in the extended area of Gaza. The use of iron instead of bronze was known in ancient times, but the Hittites in what is now eastern Turkey were among the first to produce iron goods on an intensive scale. Iron was previously found in meteorites, the mysterious stones that fell from the heavens. They had religious significance. The Egyptian pharaoh, Tutankhamun, had a magnificent steel dagger obtained by his father from the Hittites.

Iron technology is quite different from copper or bronze. The early iron was an oddity. It was brittle and of little practical use, unless special and secret techniques were applied. It also required higher temperatures. It was later found iron ore could produce the same results if special furnaces funneling the prevailing winds could cause the charcoal to blaze extra hot. A range of other trade secrets were developed by the iron-smiths who learned how to make the metal stronger than bronze.

The Philistines in the Gazan towns seemed to have made a cartel agreement with the Hittite empire (or Hatti). That way they could deal with the Egyptians and traders to the east. While the Philistines were not particularly numerous, they were powerfully backed and the iron monopoly gave them power over the Israelites and far beyond in the Grecian islands. They were able to forbid the Israelites from even owning iron tools at the time of the Israelite judges such as Samson. With more abundant iron they could not only make swords but chariot wheels and other armoury that helped them easily to subjugate the surrounding nations.

The cartel power was however as fragile like the early, unskilled iron. The Philistines were also the weak point of this international military-industrial complex. It is there that the Samson, a Danite judge, attacked and brought the cartel-complex down.

Archaeologists have discovered that Philistine houses were often supported on central pillars. Samson destroyed the assembled Philistine leadership by demolishing the two central pillars of the crowded temple of Dagon (Judges 16). With hundreds or thousands of the leaders killed, Philistine power collapsed and they were reduced and eventually exterminated by the Assyrians. The Hittite Empire which also had a highly central administrative structure was invaded and collapsed around this time. The surrounding nations that had suffered cruelly under this oppression made sure that the Philistines disappeared from existence.

The Romans applied the term Philistia or Palestine to the land of the vanquished Jews because of the enormous efforts the Roman Empire had had to destroy Jewish freedom of thought under Vespasian, Titus 67-73 and Hadrian 132-4 CE. The Roman name Palestina implied that it was the land of a totally extinct empire. It had been dead a thousand years. It could be interpreted to mean Dead-as-a-Dodo land.

The Roman enemy name, Palestina, applied only to the land. Nearly all Jews were cleared out. The land reverted to the name of the state of the Philistines that had existed a thousand years before the Roman-Jewish Wars. The state and all its people, the Palestinians or Philistines, were long extinct. Nobody in Roman times called themselves Palestinians even though the land was called Palestina. It was just a bad, anti-Semitic joke. The people called themselves Syrians the name of the Roman province. Some of the Jews who managed to live there were also called Syrians. There are gravestones of 'Syrians' around the Roman Empire, some witness to the fact that some of the 'Syrians' were Jews.

The use of the term Palestine for the Mandate of the League of Nations was bizarre and insensitive. Yet that was how the League and the United Nations created an international legal system to return the land of Israel to the Jews. Palestine was the name of an extinct race, dead for 2800 years. Geographically it defined what must be returned to the Jews, not "Palestinians".

If there were no Palestinians in Roman times how can there be ethnic Palestinians today? Did the people who were dead for the best part of a millennium, spring up and beget children?

If nowadays people call themselves Palestinians it shows (1) they are ignorant of history (2) they are a complete fraud because the Palestinians or Philistines were extinct in 800 BCE; (3) they are anti-Semites because the name of Palestine since Roman times is anti-Semitic abuse. We can add a fourth conclusion: They think that the rest of the world are as ignorant and fraudulent as they are.

Anyone who claims a Palestinian State is an utter fraud and anyone who says he sincerely supports them is foolish. The Europeans set on this self-delusion when after the massive deployment of the Oil Weapon it agreed to the Venice Declaration of 1980. Oil prices in the 1970s were quadrupled and quadrupled again by the oil cartel. A total embargo of oil was targeted on European States who refused to trade the truth for lies under these blackmail conditions. The Europeans agreed to pay for the 'Palestinians'. They began to pay, and pay, and pay. Now European taxpayers are paying for more than half of the cost of all Arab Palestinian refugees, their children and their children's children. All Jewish Palestinian refugees arising from the illegal invasion by Syrian, Egyptians, Jordanian and other foreign armies that were registered under UNRWA have been re-settled more than sixty years ago. The displaced Arab Palestinians were refused a proper home in Arab countries.

Consider an equivalent potential fraud case. The Celtic Britons have been in the British Isles about three thousand years. When the Romans left, some Anglo-Saxon tribes were originally invited to support the Britons in the fifth century. They called the native Celtic Britons the Welsh. What does Welsh mean in Anglo-Saxon? It means Foreigner!

Now consider someone who arrived in the last few years and says I am owner of the British Isles and I can prove it. I am of a tribe which calls itself, Foreigner! That is a double fraud, the use of a name initiated by a later arrival and the name itself obviously fraudulent for an indigenous people.

It is obviously a fraud to claim to come from an extinct nation. Anyone who calls himself Palestinian is a fraud who does not know where the name came from -- the Romans.

If a group, a would-be nation, does not have a history, then it is not a nation. It does not deserve to be considered a nation. It is merely a group of peoples, some who have lived there plus many who arrived only a year or two before 1948.

If this type of fraud becomes a common place other nations had better watch out. Turkey for example. Maybe some group will claim they are descendants of the Hittites, another empire that disappeared from history. No Hittite appears to have been around for more or less the same period. There is no genealogical connection. No trace of continuity. No trace of the blood-lines. How would Turkey react if some Arab migrants now said they were ancient Hittites and claimed all of eastern Turkey? What if they bought favours with oil largesse and blackmail and took the case to the United Nations? Would the other nations in the United General Assembly know or care that the Hittites, and their empire disappeared 3000 years ago?

The reason the nations of the world decided that 'Palestine' should be returned to the Jews was simple. Jews had continuously prayed that they would return to the land during the two thousand years of exile. They mourn the loss of the Temple many times during each year. They remembered the loss of Jerusalem and Israel for more years than most of the States of the world have existed.

Those who managed to move to their ancestral land despite massive persecution tended the graves of their patriarchs, there. Joseph's and Joshua's tombs were tended at Shechem. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Israel and other patriarchs were honoured near Hebron, and Rachel's near Bethlehem. They kept up the rituals for celebrating their forefathers that had with extreme difficulty been handed down over centuries by courageous Jews who returned. The presence and the claim for the land of Israel has been continuous for two thousand years.

King David is also commemorated in Hebron as he is in the city of David, Jerusalem. Under David the cartel was broken and iron was produced in abundance, 1Chron 22. The earth of the land is full of archaeological treasures proving this Israelite connection, including seals of personalities mentioned in the Bible. The 2000-year old Dead Sea Scrolls containing parts of nearly all the books in the Hebrew Bible were found in the Judean desert, on the so-called 'West Bank'. Today some Hebrews can trace their genealogies back to the twelve tribes of Israel. It is an obligation and condition for priests, Levites and Israelites when they participate in some the synagogue rituals of the community worldwide.

There were no finds of Philistines dating more recently than 2800 years ago! Palestinians and Philistines are extinct.

Eretz1:Democracies Beware! The Declaration of a SECOND Palestine is a Declaration of War!

2011-09-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

If the European Union leadership supports the recognition of a new State called Palestine, it will be co-responsible for further conflict and war. The area has already seen too much death and destruction, hate and ignorance.

The Government of Palestine already exists. Its name is now Israel. Making a SECOND Palestine is a recipe for disaster. It will bring rivalry, conflict and a war of legitimacy. Encouraging this folly is encouraging a bloody catastrophe!

If European or other leaders recognize a SECOND Palestine, based on Saudi-style Sharia law and excluding Jews, Christians, Baha'is and other religions, it will initiate an endless conflict. It could well end in embroiling the EU and North America in a new Middle Eastern war. Ignorance is no excuse. Two Palestines cannot claim the same land. One is legitimate and the other is an outright fraud. One is tolerant, the other praises its martyrs or suicide bombers.

Which Palestine is the real one? Like the two women who came to King Solomon for judgement, only one can be the real mother of the baby that they disputed, 1Kings 3:16. Is it the one whose charter would eliminate all Jews and Christians?

Look at this document.

Note the letterhead: GOVERNMENT OF PALESTINE ! Note the city : JERUSALEM.

Before the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948, a Government of Palestine existed with its capital at Jerusalem. This is a British Mandate official document. Note the British seal. The Mandate of Palestine was set up by international law to return the government of the Land of Israel to the people of Israel, who had been scattered, persecuted, tortured and terrorized for around 70 generations.

The text reads:

Dear Mr Erlanger,
This is to introduce Mr Josef Pollak a young Palestinian Singer who is to visit Paris.

It is signed by an official called Salomon.

Mr Josef Pollak is Jewish and a Palestinian. At this time everyone in Paris and in Europe understood the term Palestinian to mean Jewish citizen under the Mandate living in the former Land of Israel.

What does PALESTINE mean? It is a Roman term. It is the Roman way of pronouncing Philistine. It was applied after the Roman Empire had wiped out the last effort at Jewish independence in the second century. It is anti-Semitic abuse. It was used to show that the land was cleared of Jews. Israel or Judah became Judenrein, (to use Hitler's term). That is Jews were for a time cleared out and banned from entering the own home territory. However over the succeeding centuries, the Jews re-entered and always maintained a presence there, not only in Judea and Samaria but also Gaza, the home of some Jewish sages.

Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, nowadays called Istanbul. The Roman Empire finally fell when its capital at Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. In Europe people still used the term Palestine. It is found on old maps and those in many Bibles. It is not a Biblical name. The Christian 'New Testament' uses the term Land of Israel, even when the Romans were in control with the Herodian dynasty. (See Matthew chapter 2 v21).

Who were the Philistines, the Palestinians?

They were a small group of a few tens of thousands of people who occupied four or five towns in what is now the Gaza strip. They gained their power because of alliances with Egypt and some other Mediterranean powers because they sat on the gateway of the trading route between Mesopotamia, via Israel to Egypt. They also maintained a monopoly of the iron industry which was then the latest war technology. They succeeded in creating a cartel system in iron production with the Hittite empire in what is now Turkey, but this empire also disappeared from later history.

After wars with the Israelites and others, they were wiped out or absorbed three thousand years ago. The remaining Philistines living in the towns of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, Gaza and Ekron were killed in the time of Joash king of Israel in the eighth century (see Amos 1:8). This was accomplished efficiently by the brutal Assyrians when they invaded from the N.E.

'I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza ... and I will cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him that holds the sceptre from Ashkelon, and I will turn mine hand against Ekron and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish.'

Today there are no Philistines in Ashdod or Ashkelon, nor Gaza or Gath. The Philistines no longer exist. Nor had they existed for centuries before Rome itself was founded. The Romans had to dig far back into history to find a insult big enough to abuse the Jews.

Why? Because the Jewish revolt in the first and second centuries involved the mobilisation of many of the Roman legions and a huge amount of imperial resources. That a small people could defy the Roman Empire was a huge insult to the imperial Caesars. It was not enough to slaughter them and render the remainder slaves of no worth. They chose to name the land after a small trading people of a few thousands that was a cause of irritation by their culture and war over the centuries.

The term Philistine still exists as an insult. It means uncultured person. Perhaps it derived its force from the fact that the Philistines ate dogs and pigs as archaelogy shows. The masses of drinking vessels show they were enthusiastic beer-drinkers, which was probably also a source of trouble.

In the same way the abusive term Palestine, that is, Philistia still existed as an insult until the last century. It is no surprise that Jews did not want to keep this vile name. There was never a State called Palestine nor a Government -- until the British revived the term and used it to create the Government of Palestine for the Jewish Homeland.

The British passports before the end of the Mandate are stamped
Palestinian Citizen.

That is exactly how the family of Moshe Dayan are classified. Information is written in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Both parents of Moshe Dayan, Dvora and Shmuel, and General Dayan himself were classified by the British under international law as Palestinians.

When foreign armies tried to invade the land, Dayan and other leaders resisted. (The black eye-patched Dayan lost an eye in Syria during WW2 fighting under British command.)

In 1948, the new government changed the name of their beleaguered country officially to what it had been two thousand years ago: ISRAEL.

Like the previous Government of Palestine, it comprised Jews and Arabs, Baha'is, Druzes, Muslims, Christians, atheists and agnostics and other religions in a multi-cultural Jewish State. It became the State and Government of Israel by the proclamation of a name change on 14 May 1948. The idea of tolerance comes directly from the Torah and the rest of the Bible.

You shall love your neighbour as yourself, Leviticus 19 v18.

Democracy, said Schuman, derives from exactly the same Biblical principles.

Some, perhaps most of the 'Arab' Palestinians as Ben Gurion observed were actually Jews who had for generations been in the land and had been forcefully converted to Islam. Recent DNA tests and analysis of their customs indicate it may be the majority of the residents.

Thus the Government of Palestine is now called the Government of Israel. This was the original intention of the Mandate system. After WW1, it was set in law by the Allies and agreed by nearly all the States of the world, who became members of the the League of Nations and then members of the United Nations. It is written in the UN Charter. Other States such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq which were part of the Ottoman Empire owe their legitimacy to these legal agreements as much as Israel.

The only thing that was not clear was the final designation of the name of the State. The choice of the name Israel was hardly a shock as it had been published by the British and other States for decades.

Thousand or millions of paper and metal documents attest to it. The identity of the Palestine with Israel was long recognized since the 1920s by the British and world authorities. How can Europeans, Americans and others know today? How can the leaders of the democracies be absolutely and legally sure that Palestine = Israel?

All they have to do is to look at any stamp or any coin of the Mandate period. There you will find Palestine in English, Hebrew and Arabic. You will also find two Hebrew letters Aleph Yod. This stands for Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.

Every coin and every stamp of the period is living proof that Palestine Mandate territory and the Land of Israel are identical.

Monnet8: Is Jean Monnet to blame for the euro crisis and the EU's financial black-hole?

2011-09-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

Is Jean Monnet responsible for the euro debacle? Did a flaw in the 'Monnet Method' bring about today's financial crisis and the black hole into which billions of taxpayers' money are being poured? That's what one Eurocrat implied, as quoted in the Economist newsmagazine: 'The European Union was not designed to deal with a crisis'. Blame Jean Monnet, says the Economist's columnist, Charlemagne.

Eurocrats should know better. They should know more about the institution they work for, its values and its real history. Unfortunately Monnet and his over-enthusiastic fans and publicists set Europe on a false track. What exactly IS the 'Monnet Method'? You need to know: your bank balance may depend on understanding the facts!

Some politicians still believe that Jean Monnet was the architect behind the European Union. This is false, as any competent historian knows. Monnet did not invent the European Community; it was in existence before he even first uttered the term on 21 June 1950, regardless of the false claims of his Memoirs. Schuman announced the European strategy at the United Nations in 1949!

States can form international currencies with other States either by force or by means of a solid agreement. Alexander the Great used the first method 2300 years ago when he conquered the Medo-Persian empire and imposed his own monetary system, based on gold and silver. In nineteenth and early twentieth century some States agreed to the gold standard. But the Latin Monetary Union (1865- 1926) fell apart on disagreements about silver. Then first the UK (with the Sterling zone) and later the US, 1971, took their currency off the gold standard.

Any bad management of the dollar -- which is designed mainly for a domestic electorate -- has worldwide implications, and that includes wars and bloodshed. So does any other corrupt currency. (Monetary dishonesty encourages internal and external opponents to exploit the politicians' vulnerability.)

The depreciation of the dollar meant that Arab oil producers gained a little bit less for a barrel of oil. The Americans got the same barrel of oil. Although they were already hyper-rich, the oil sheikhs wanted more. They used this as one excuse to launch an attempted war of annihilation against Israel. The Arab exporters then realised that Americans and Europeans were 'hooked' on petroleum. They nationalised the oil companies. From then on they formed a cartel and succeeded to blackmail by the oil weapon and oil embargoes throughout the decade. Now Europe's Human Rights values are under threat by such States that wish to establish a Christian-free and anti-Semitic entity based on Saudi style Sharia law that they would call Palestine.

(Palestine is actually the name of the Jewish State that all the world's governments agreed to after WW1. It was a mandate given by the League of Nations to Palestinian Jews and confirmed by the United Nations in its Charter. The government of Palestine changed the name to Israel in 1948 when a State of Israel was proclaimed. When false or depreciating money reigns, Truth more easily becomes 'lies' and lies become the 'truth'.)

Thus any weakness or fraud in a monetary system has untold and often mammoth implications in politics. The reverse of this is also true. A solid, well-founded monetary system, based on sound ethics, has a major decontaminating and purifying effect on politics. Robert Schuman used to quote the Baron Louis, Finance Minister under France's Second Empire:

Make sound finances for me and I will make for you a sound policy.

Schuman confirmed this truism from his own long study of the monetary history. Based on those principles, a new system was introduced in world history with the creation of a supranational Community system. Without it, Europe would be in no position even to think of a common currency.

IF it is properly implemented, this Community approach provides the best hope for the future. The idea of a new European currency was announced by Robert Schuman in his Declaration of 9 May 1950. Schuman had great expertise in finance and monetary affairs and stabilized France's ruinous finances as Minister of Finance and Prime Minister. He criticised Hitler's ramshackle financial and monetary sysyem of the 1930s. Before the war he helped Austria defend itself financially against Nazi aggression. It nearly cost him his life when later he was arrested by the Gestapo. After the war he helped create the European Payments Union in July 1950. The politicians later abandoned this but had to try to re-invent it when they wanted to create the euro.

The creation of a supranational monetary system depends on fully understanding a supranational Community system. It is based on trust, that is democracy writ large. Here Monnet made a grave mistake.

Monnet's flawed action is another proof that he did not conceive of the idea of a supranational Community. When Paul Reuter, Schuman's legal aide, presented him with a draft document of the Schuman Declaration he crossed out the word, supranational, saying he did not like it. Nor was Monnet able to explain how the European Community was able to bring peace to nation States that had been at war almost continuously for 2000 years. Schuman could and did.

Some politicians say they are proceeding on the basis of the so-called 'Monnet Method'. What is the 'Monnet Method'? No one can properly define it. It is pure PR -- public relations hype. It is foisted on a public by a political class that did not want to deal with the spiritual fundamentals of democracy. It is a chimera that allows politicians to do what they like, without principles or even democratic accountability. That makes it an international system, not a supranational democratic one.

The supranational Community, in contrast, is a scientific discovery, to use Schuman's term, that requires education, training and another quality, humility, listening to others. It does not involve foisting treaties on people who have refused them in many referendums. Democracy, said Schuman, is at the service of the people and acts in agreement with the people.

What is a more serious accusation than aggrandisement is: Was Monnet responsible for the mess we are in? Was it his lack of understanding of the Community system that has led to the financial and monetary loopholes and hence the abuses now costing hundreds of billions of euros?

Monnet was only at the Commission (High Authority) of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) for a couple of years. His responsibility there was to see that the Treaty of Paris was fully implemented. It was not. He was to serve the people, all the people, including organized civil society. His period there was long enough to cause a loophole that the politicians made into an entrance and climbed in to do damage and get their fingers on to European money.

Monnet was instrumental in cutting out (in collusion with the politicians/ ministers) the democratic representation of organized civil society in the consultative committees. This was one of five essential organs for supranational Community.

In Monnet's time the first European Community had a Consultative Committee which was designed as its successors to be in close liaison with the Commission. It was divided into three sections: consumers of coal and steel products, entrepreneurs and trade unions working in the sectors. They kept a close watch on the money, how it was raised and how it was spent. They made sure that the budget was balanced. In those days there was a European tax and it was spent according to the wishes of the taxpayers.

The Treaty of Paris said that the Consultative Committee should be elected on a European basis. However, there were no European associations in some areas. The treaty said that the first Consultative Committee could create a system especially for this in the near future. In the interim the Committee was composed of a mixture of various national organisations.

European organisations were formed. But the Commission/ High Authority under Monnet never changed the system or encouraged the responsible people to do so. The politicians were happy at this because it meant that they nominated or decided who should be on this crucial debating chamber. They also managed the membership to the European Parliamentary Assembly. That way they could control the criticism by electing more placid members. The three great seats of European democracy will eventually all be independent: the Council representing national States, the Parliament representing the individual and his or her rights and the Consultative Committee representing all organizations in the sectors.

Any professional organization, whether a professional organization of steel makers, or an association of steel consumers or an association of European trades unions, has democratic rules. They are not the same as parliaments but not inferior to them as they have to be agreed by votes of the membership. This is an essential layer of democracy that should be independent of political parties and, amongst other tasks, can keep an eye on them.

De Gaulle and many other politicians did not like the idea of consumer organisations, together with entrepreneurs and labour unions holding politicians to their word. That is why de Gaulle arrested their development. He did not stop them developing, merely froze them for a time. Schuman and Reuter (who wrote the Schuman Declaration), declared ILLEGAL the politicians' subterfuge aimed at not having a fully democratic consultative committee with its own European elections. And sure enough, de Gaulle got away with illegal and corrupt measures such as Wine Lakes and Meat Mountains.

In the Gaullist period of European stagnation, the Parliamentary Assembly was nominated by a clique of politicians, its revisions to legislation ignored. The Consultative Committees including the Economic and Social Committee and the Scientific and Technical Committee of Euratom, were frozen and ignored. They are still at the infantile level of development that the European Parliament was until around 1980.

If Monnet had set up the Consultative Committee on a fully democratic European basis, a powerful democratic institution would have existed that would have resisted de Gaulle's attempts to destroy and freeze the Community system. We would be living in a much more successful and prosperous Europe, even than ours today. And it would have been a shining example of democracy to the world, including the States on the south bank of the Mediterranean. Democracy and higher civic standards would have flourished across the whole Mediterranean zone and as far north as the Arctic. Instead under nationalists and Gaullists, Algeria -- which was part of the European Coal and Steel area -- entered a period of bloody strife and warfare.

None of the euro crisis would have arisen if the members of a currency zone had proper civil society scrutiny of the fraudulent statistics and toxic buddy-buddy deals that the politicians come up with at the closed door Council meetings and eurozone rencontres.

Schuman also said that these meetings should all be open. The Lisbon treaty also says this but the politicians do not care a hoot when they close the doors. The next step is to use the European Court -- one of the five institutions that Schuman said was essential. Some actions in the 27 national courts could also stop much of this abuse. Discussions on the Budget -- that is taxation -- are also closed to the press, something which is both illegal and would be totally intolerable in any of the democratic Member States. (see www.schuman.info/budget8.htm ) No taxation should take place without FAIR representation and OPEN debate. That is central to European civic values.

There are three main types of international currency systems. (A fourth involves the informal use of a national currency like the US dollar by external trading partners.)

Firstly there is the international system (agreement of States) that Europe now has, thanks to Monnet's indecision. There is the imperial currency system of a non-democratic authoritarian system like the ruble of the Soviet system or the closed system of Mao's China. The banknotes cannot circulate much beyond the borders of the empire, because they are artificial. In the 1930s Hitler had a similar system where the Nazi party dictated the monetary policy on its neighbouring or trading partners. Europe has aspects of this monetary authoritarianism, because the euro rules are made and then ignored by a small cartel of politicians. The politicians think that they alone should impose their choice on who runs the system, not the public, nor the companies or workers, nor the buyers, traders and consumers.

Thirdly there is a real supranational currency. Supranational means a European democratic system, not imposed authoritarianism. It is so defined in the treaties and by Schuman -- see www.schuman.info/supra5.htm . Solid monetary policy will be made once this democratic foundation is followed. It involves agreement at three levels: the States that is not just the Council of Ministers but their 27 national democratic systems PLUS organised civil society (the Consultative Committees entrepreneurs, workers and consumers, of the treaties which need to be democratically elected as the treaties say) PLUS the individuals' interest (through the EP and Court petitions and judgements).

The euro crisis will not be solved by a further smoke and mirrors approach of eurobonds involving either the ECB or some other artificial institution without democratic legitimacy. Moritz Kraemer, Standard & Poor's managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa sovereign ratings, speaking at the Alpbach European Forum, said, “If we have a euro bond where Germany guarantees 27%, France 20 and Greece 2% then the rating of the euro bond would be CC, which is the rating of Greece." That applies also to shuffling the cards in a new card trick or rather paper con trick.

Politicians have already tried to dispose with elements of the supranational system. Now some want them back, having seen their great utility. At the beginning, the supranational European Community system had not only its own European tax system with democratic control down to a local level but also a European loan system. This was not based on a fiat system of some politicians acting within the secret chambers of the Council or the 'informal' eurozone committee. In the 1950s the loans were raised on world markets based on real economic achievement and a real programme. That delivered real goods for the future. The loans were based on solid evidence of economic progress, improved employment data and general economic integration with real cost benefits.

The ECSC loan system -- which was a bigger operation than the European Investment Bank -- had outline supranational democratic control. The politicians did not like it. Around 2000 they egotistically got rid of this loan system and the European tax system by deciding not to renew the ECSC treaty. They wanted tax, loans and money without proper democratic representation. Their word would be enough, they said. Then the politicians abused their own buddy-buddy system. The markets saw its toxicity. They had been doing dirty deals for decades. Banks of course did the same thing, saying that if the politicians could get away with fraud, so could they in a property bubble and financial market fraud.

The way forward is to put the democratic control and the support of half a billion Europeans behind a reform programme. Only thus can a solid European money be agreed, formed and circulated.

Euro5: TRUST is the key to a strong European currency. Schuman gave the plan for sound policy.

2011-08-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

The European leaders are learning the lesson known to all monetary authorities throughout the ages. The main foundation of all money is trust. Once trust evaporates the currency collapses. It is like chasing after a wild animal let loose out of a field.

Is the European currency doomed to failure? No. The supranational European Community system is far more robust than any flawed plan for a currency. European unity is a powerful and ineluctable force, stronger than any politicians or self-serving group.

There is a plan for the European currency that will get the approval of all major sections of Europe. It would also make it extremely difficult for blackmail operations by speculators -- that is those who try to use the markets for immoral, selfish purposes.

On 10 February 1953 the European Coal and Steel Community introduced Europe's first Single Market. With a single market it was necessary that eventually a single currency would have to be built on the five institutions. The first Community had its own European tax, based on production, not currency or accountant-adjusted profits.

The idea of a currency was already implied in the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950. When the time was ripe, it should be built on the principles of supranational democracy.

When they created the euro, the European leaders did not follow the concept of a supranational democracy backing up the European currency. They thought they knew best. The naive or willingly ignorant politicians made an international currency based on so-called 'good intentions' and their equally faulty theory of human nature. They made their decisions in secret, relying on their own instincts and personal and political attachments to each other.

'Just make all the currencies relatively stable,' they said, 'convert the name to euro and, Hey Presto! you have a European currency!' They seem to think if they invited some darker culprits to join the euro gang, then they would appear white in comparison. It does not work that way!

And it was inevitable that the markets would test their theory and practical failures to destruction if they could. That is the nature of markets. It proved a vapour of self-deceit. The political 'partners' cheated on each other. They used the coffers of the 'own' States as their own party campaign funds. They cooked the statistics.

In a commercial company if such things were done, it would not only mean that the executives were fired, they would enter the gates of the local prison for a long stay. It's called embezzling. For some reason, politicians think that they are above such justice.

With the introduction of two further European Communities a broad range of other goods had to be brought into as Single Market, from fissile material to agricultural products. In the 1960s intra-Community trade was based on units of account later known as the ECU, the European Currency Unit. At a time when no one imagined the US dollar would be devalued, it was defined and set at parity with the dollar in terms of gold.

Then President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. So the politicians decided that they would remain on the gold standard. But France's Franc proved to be weak and de Gaulle did not want to be shown up. He was concerned about his rural and agricultural voters. Solid, honest money proved too hard for other light fingered politicians.

They fudged the matter. They brought in a highly complex system of compensatory funding. They were supposed to be temporary. Guess what? These handouts of tax money to the politicians' favourites became permanent and more and more complex.

The second fudge was not to use any standard at all but to make the currency up as they went along. Look ! No Hands! The European Currency was not based on US dollars based on gold. It was not based on gold. It is not even based on GDP. It is based on crooked statistics!

When the ancient kingdom of Lydia (now western Turkey) created a coinage that was used far and wide as a trading aid, it did so by assuring that the coins had

a standard weight
a standard purity, either of gold, or silver or of electrum, a natural mixture of the two.

Coins replaced the earlier system of just weighing out a specific quantity of metal as a means of exchange. That required a system of standard weights. Some people cheated with the balances.

The earliest known legal code -- the Laws of the old Babylonian kingdom of Eshnunna which predates Hammurabi -- showed that wheat and barley were considered much more prized as exchange than money. The interest rate on the cuneiform tablets show barley had an interest rate of 33 percent while silver had only 20 percent. Food was more valuable and it was also perishable. Food is real. You cannot eat gold.

Two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and royal tutor, warned that there was a big difference between economics (dealing with running the household) and chrematistics, the immoral (and ultimately senseless) hoarding or accumulation of wealth. There were three goods, an external good, a good of the body and a good of the soul.

Some of these principles were applied by his Macedonian student, Alexander the Great. Millions of coins were struck across his empire with a specific image and of standard weight. The museums and private collections of Alexander's silver tetradrachm indicate the fine detail of the coin production. It created a common external good. They circulated from Britain to Afghanistan, in Africa and beyond. The gold coins were known as philippi, after Alexander's father.

They were not easy to forge. At least in those days. Later generations shaved the rims of the coins, or forged them of inferior materials. That is what some European leaders are trying to do electronically today.

Everyone seems to be at it. The modern Greeks were the most flagrant. They probably did not have to learn much from the others. But they took the cheating a bit too far. Some politicians wanted to ignore the common politicians' problem and they persuaded them to let the fiddling go on for years. The others tried to put an end to it.

Remember the politicians were the people who gave you the Meat Mountains and Wine Lakes. Monetary fraud was less obvious and more devious. It is easy for one or more (in this case, many) States to illegitimately exploit the huge benefits of a common currency. They let the others keep the rules, remain honest and keep their books straight. False statistics didn't really fool anyone but no one wanted to cause a scene and shout: 'CHEAT!' at fellow politicians. They knew that once the blame game started all would be found guilty ins some sort of dubious practice.

And if they kept their mouths shut as many did, they would also be found guilty and irresponsible towards their own electorate because they had promised to keep their own currency solid and follow the common rules for the euro. Guilt by fact or guilt by collusion and association, that is the outcome of secret meetings without public accountability. That's why Schuman said that the Community democracy should be open with open meetings subject to public control.

Then the European Statistical service, Eurostat, put in the knife.

The reliability of Greek government deficit and debt statistics has been the subject to continuous attention for several years. The Greek general government data reported by the authorities have been persistently contested by Eurostat, far more frequently than for any other Member State.That's what the European Commission had to admit in the end. The Commission published a report about the fraudulent Greek stats in January 2010.

On 2 and 21 October 2009, the Greek authorities transmitted two different sets of complete Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) notification tables to Eurostat, covering the government deficit and debt data for 2005-2008, and a forecast for 2009. In the 21 October notification, the Greek government deficit for 2008 was revised from 5.0% of GDP (the ratio reported by Greece, and published and validated by Eurostat in April 2009) to 7.7% of GDP. At the same time, the Greek authorities also revised the planned deficit ratio for 2009 from 3.7% of GDP (the figure reported in spring) to 12.5% of GDP, reflecting a number of factors (the impact of the economic crisis, budgetary slippages in an electoral year and accounting decisions).

Why are budgetary statistics different in a electoral year? Why do they 'slip'? Aren't governments managing the budget properly regardless of what year it is? Or are they bribing the voters by giving them goodies from money they do not have? Would the executive committee of a tennis club coming up for re-election be considered ethical if it took out a loan to give free tennis balls to the membership before they voted?

Politicians do not want to discuss when governments are guilty of crimes that would send company executives to prison. Yet we are talking about sums of money larger than those of most commercial corporations. The leaders have to have the courage to treat finances as a non-ideological matter. They have responsibility beyond their parties to the people. And the people should have their say in the management of the monetary system, according to supranational democracy.

A common currency cannot be built when one or many States refuse to keep honest accounts. A Community must be built on values that include honesty to each other. This has huge advantages. An honest interchange builds a Community that cannot be broken. Honesty, the 9th of the Ten Commandments is a fundamental Biblical value on which European democracy is founded.

'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour'

Schuman wrote:

‘This idea of ‘Europe’ will reveal to everybody the common bases of our civilization and will create little by little the bond similar to that which in ages past has forged our home countries. It will be a force that will breach all obstacles.’

Unless they realise the futility of any other path, the politicians are doomed to get deeper into a maelstrom of disaster.

The financial realist Robert Schuman -- who as Finance Minister and Prime Minister rescued France from widespread corruption and financial chaos after the World War, stabilizing the currency, balancing the budget and attacking galloping inflation -- had this additional warning:

'Ideology or dreams will not change the facts about finances, whether in the State budget or that of the family.'

Stealing other people's property was wrong in the time of the Laws of Eshnunna and it is wrong today.

Euro4: Eurozone leaders repeat: You must be honest! But honest practice brings honest money.

2011-07-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

A euro based on supranational democracy would not fail to gain the highest credit ratings in all rating agencies worldwide. That is evident because it would have already been examined and rated that way by European civil organisations, businesses, workers and consumers, via their controlling chamber. Yet EU politicians want to do it their way: party political internationalism. They are fighting a tide of adverse criticism that says it will not work. Despite their efforts at the Euro zone summit, US credit rating agencies have downgraded Greece because of the long-term loan swaps are considered a selective default.

The answer? In a phrase, honest conduct for an honest currency. Honest conduct does not come from words alone. Nor does it come from a system where the policeman is a paid up member of a gang. The control must be public and legal, not political.

Amid the multi-billion euro deal at the Euro zone Summit on 21 July 2011, all the leaders appealed their fellow politicians to be honest. They had in mind Greece, which they said posed a unique problem. They were not addressing the public, that is the voters. The voters are hardly relevant at this stage when elections are not in sight. They were addressing the markets. Their audience for this section was headlined Private sector involvement.

In other words, forget the voters. What they are interested in is the private sector and if it is going to loan any more money to a bunch of people who clearly cannot trust each other.

The top Eurozoners said:

'As far as our general approach to private sector involvement in the euro area is concerned, we would like to make it clear that Greece requires an exceptional and unique solution.'

The Statement they issued adds:

'All other countries solemnly reaffirm their inflexible determination to honour fully their own individual sovereign signature and all their commitments to sustainable fiscal conditions and structural reforms. The euro area Heads of State or Government fully support this determination as the credibility of all their sovereign signatures is a decisive element for ensuring financial stability in the euro area as a whole.'

So the leaders are saying: Do not consider what has happened in the past about what we said to the voters. We are now telling you bankers, financiers and capitalists, we will be honest.

Is there any reason why the bankers, speculators and financiers should not believe the government leaders? Aren't they all honourable people?

Well, it only takes a brief look at what the leaders have said in the past to have some doubts. Did they say that their signatures could not be trusted? No. They said the opposite. The reality was somewhat different. They had to continue to repeat this when news leaked out that raised doubts.

Only on 25 March 2011 the European Council had already

'underscored the need to give priority to restoring sound budget and fiscal sustainability. ... Fiscal policies should aim to restore confidence by bringing debt trends back onto a sustainable path and ensuring that deficits are brought back below 3% of GDP in her time frame agreed by the Council.'

On 25 March 2010, the Heads of State and Government of the euro area issued a statement on unheaded paper:

'We reaffirm that all euro area members must conduct sound national policies in line with the agreed rules and should be aware of their shared responsibility for the economic and financial stability in the area.'

The paper is unheaded because the euro zone meetings are not officially part of the legal framework of the EU. Protocol 14 of the Lisbon Treaty allows them to meet 'informally'.

I do not know why the Statement issued on 21 July 2011 was published on paper headed Council of the European Union as it was not a meeting of the Council of Ministers. Hardly honest. Why this subterfuge? Is it illegality-creep because the case needed shoring up? At least they hesitated to call it a European Council to avoid prime-ministerial objections from the British, Poles, Hungarians, Danes, Swedes, Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Bulgarians and Czechs who were absent. Did the absentee States protest that the Euro zone Statement was a false-flag communication of the Council of Ministers?

It is a pity that, when the Heads of State and Government of the euro zone 'reaffirm their inflexible determination to honour fully their own individual sovereign signature', they do so in a fraudulent document. Worse, they say that 'the credibility of all their sovereign signatures is a decisive element for ensuring financial stability in the euro area as a whole.'

On 17 June 2010 the European Council said in its conclusions:

'The crisis has revealed clear weaknesses in our economic governance, in particular as regards budgetary and broader macroeconomic surveillance. Reinforcing economic policy coordination therefore constitutes a crucial and urgent priority.'

The government leaders were therefore obliged to present their accounts for inspection in the so-called 'European Semester'. This involved preventive and corrective aspects of the Stability and Growth Pact, a pledge central to the euro. It is a legal requirement in treaties since Maastricht.

Yes, yes, but who checks up on all the politicians and their sums? The European Commission -- but it is now composed entirely of politicians, not independent, competent personalities as the treaties require. The selection of the Commissioners is made by the governments who they are supposed to check. Hardly a guarantee of independence. The goverment ministers insist that all candidates should be party members! The Commissioners also insist on retaining party membership and attending party meetings. The outlaws are now the sheriffs!

Nearly all the States had distorted, corrupted or just ignored the Stability and Growth Pact. Among the first guilty Member States to do this were France and Germany. The French and German ministers immediately said that they should be let off the hook. The honest Dutch and others protested -- in vain. The Dutch said they were now paying for the Franco-German deficits. Other States got caught out later when the level of their statistical fiddling became apparent.

The Council added that new measures were necessary,

'ensuring the quality of statistical data, essential for a sound budgetary policy and budgetary surveillance; statistical offices should be fully independent for data provision.'

The 23/24 June 2011 the Heads of government and State in a full European Council noted:

'the clear determination of all Member States to do everything that is required to fully implement the Stability and Growth Pact.'

Why do government leaders need to keep repeating the same old thing? Firstly because they have been found out not adhering to the solemn pledge they had all made. Secondly even after they had repeated this pledge for growth and stability, some of the politicians still wanted to overspend their budgets -- especially just before elections. And the others said nothing.

Is that an honest mistake or it because they wanted to be free for political or social bribery for votes?

It can be statistically shown that this was electoral bribery and not honest statistical mistakes. How? Because the errors in the statistics are all in the same direction. They are all hidden deficits. Deficits increase before elections.

So what should the leaders do about it? How can these addictions to bad habits be resolved? In a Community moral values must be agreed by all. The honesty of politicians' decisions is exposed when times turn rough. When they were considering monetary union in around 1999, the price of oil was around 9 dollars a barrel. That was the free market price. Times and morals were easier. Countries like Italy had a huge surplus. Then energy blackmail recommenced. The twelve-fold rise in oil prices in a dozen years not only strained the economies but exposed corrupt practice and speculative bubbles.

Consider what would happen if your local tennis club, commune or parish had a group of politicians who were accused of corruption. One may have been a worse culprit than the others but they were all in it together. Would the local parishioners or voters agree that the secret meetings should continue? Would they be happy that in the many subsequent secret meetings of the clique of culprits, the group issued the same sort of communiques on offically headed paper saying: 'Don't worry, the entire Tennis Club is insisting on being honest'?

Probably not. What may be happening was that the politicians were dividing up the spoils amongst themselves or inventing new ways to hide the corruption. They might be insisting on meeting in private so that the more corrupt members were putting pressure on the least corrupt members so that they would comply with their wishes. In some States, the politicians are now facing legal cases in the courts.

That is why Schuman and the other more politically honest Founding Fathers insisted that the Council should be open. Schuman wrote that

'New Europe needs to have a democratic foundation. Its Councils, Committees and other organs should be placed under the control of public opinion, a control that should be efficient while not paralysing action nor useful initiatives.'

It is hard to argue that the current behaviour of politicians passes the democratic criterion.

The solution for the euro is ultimately:

to establish its foundation as full supranational democracy
to include the full participation of organised civil society
to establish a fully independent European Commission.

The definition of the European currency should be based on a full meaning of what is the common European good, not as happened what seemed good to a handful of politicians. The Stability and Growth Pact -- which was not observed by Member States with few exceptions such as Luxembourg -- is a poor approximation of what should be done.

Openness is not impossible in monetary matters. It is only impossible when for years politicians have been making cushy deals between themselves. On Greece it covers a lax period of thirty years. The questions arose when a cushy deal was made by politicians that it should leap forward from the least qualified candidate to join the EU -- according to the then Commission President Roy Jenkins -- to be the first. The questions remained unanswered when lots of EU money went missing. They were reinforced when in spite of huge and constant increase in its deficits and its past history, the politicians agreed to let Greece join the euro. It got even deeper into murk when statistical fiddling in many of the new euro States was exposed.

Who is in charge of monetary policy the central banks or the politicians? If it is the central banks that are by treaty law independent, why do politicians still have secret meetings on the monetary fundamentals? Are the central banks so secretive? Good banking practice is to publish the minutes of the monetary committee a few days after the decisions are reached. That way openness and protection of the currency from speculation is guaranteed. The Bank of England and the Riksbank of Sweden, which are not part of the euro, do this.

So why does the European Council refuse to have open sessions on what should not be their business? Why does it refuse to publish anything that resembles minutes, even though it is obliged to by treaty law? Is it something to do with their concept of honesty and honest practice?

The question of honesty has now been raised in the context of a global financial calamity. It is for the Member States to show they are serious. It they are, they will implement the treaties that call for independent institutions, not continue to fill them with compliant politicians.

Euro3: How to pay the huge bill for Euro Frauds and 'political' fixes

2011-07-14T18:08:00.000-07:00

Many of the EU States are now in deep debt and looking for a bail-out. Too often this is due simply to government overspending for ideological or "political" reasons. Too often these debt problems are accompanied by fraudulent national statistics or fiddling the books. Some of the secrets have not yet seen the light of day and public discussion. Yet the European Community system is vibrant and resilient. It can correct abuse.

Europe needs honest government and a solid economy. But it will take time to bring it in. In the meanwhile it will cost hundreds of billions of euros to shore up failing systems. Europe needs a breathing space to overcome this mismanagement and get a democratic and fully open system into place.

The road is clear. Any viable monetary system for Europe needs to have full participation of organized civil society in the institution designed for it. It needs the trust and confidence of ordinary people. That can only come from their active involvement -- especially when and where the politicians fail.

Non-political civil society has been cut out by 'egotistical and selfish' politicians. Before Europe can get on its monetary feet, politicians will have to learn humility and provide for the election of this major Community institution for organized civil society.

In the meanwhile how can Europe pay the bills? Two basic imperatives are required. One is to stop the secret deals of politicians deciding matters behind closed doors, thus thumbing their noses at civil society. The other imperative is to mobilize civil society to new goals that will make Europe a continent fit, prosperous and comfortable for our children and grandchildren.

Here are some examples. You can make a list of similar ones for yourself.

The European Union budget amounts to some 130 or 140 Billion euros. It is still discussed in secret by a cabal of politicians -- who think they know best about (1) How to raise the money (2) How to spend it.

Are they efficient in their secret deals? A recent report reveals that perhaps an amount equal to between half to three-quarters of this annual amount is lost to the European economy -- by politician-induced FRAUD. According to a recent report by MEP Bart Staes the fraud due to Value Added Tax (VAT) 'carousel fraud' amounts to 80 to 100 Billion euros EACH YEAR. Mr Staes says that the fraud is entirely avoidable. It is merely the lack of political will that has failed to introduce the counter-fraud measures. This is not all. Fiscal fraud altogether may amount to twice the entire EU budget around 250 Billion euros.

Ask yourself: 'If the people were in charge, rather than politicians meeting in a secret Council, would the taxpayer allow fraudsters to get away with stealing what amounts to the most of or even the double the entire EU budget? Would they say "Yes OK, you can take 100 Billion euros from my pocket and give it to fraudsters who are laughing in my face on the beach.'?'

No, they would certainly be active to stop the matter as soon as possible. There is one thing worse than paying tax and that is that someone else is not only refusing to do so but is in effect taking your tax money and living high on the hog at your expense. That is worse than government waste. It is encouraging criminal activity -- except that the people involved in the carousel operations are not yet in gaol. They aren't convicted criminal criminals -- yet.

Politicians too often are not willing to take hard decisions for ideological reasons or for lack of guts. If they made a mistake in the system they should correct it. If they have introduced a system that works only partly then they should repair it. An active Chamber for organized civil society, the Consultative Committees, would make sure this was done rapidly. All members would be tax-payers and represent all Europe's taxpayers.

Carousel VAT works by the same fraud well known to politicians -- spin. This time it is geographical spin. It uses the benefits of the Single Market to extract VAT refunds from governments while the fraudster spins his base of operations from one country to the next. The fraudsters 'sell' easily items like microchips, hi-fi, perfumes, mobile phones and carousel from one State to another while the tax officials run around wildly trying to catch them by their fleeing coat-tails.

Mr Staes says:

'The removal of internal administrative borders and the failure to introduce an effective system of fiscal control within the EU has created massive opportunities for fraud. The absence of any EU-level co-ordination of VAT rates and the deficient systematic co-operation and information exchange are two major issues that have facilitated this fraud. They make it more difficult for authorities to effectively tackle cases.'

Mr Staes says politicians' irresponsibility extends to other aspects of taxation.

'Another major shortcoming is the absurd absence of any formal or official definition of this particular form of fraud within the EU. A clear and uniform European definition of VAT carousels is absolutely necessary and a crucial step towards addressing the problem and allowing for better enforcement. A comparative European {study}, including the authorities of 25 member states, shows that there are almost no coinciding formulations of the coordinated directive on VAT.

Eurofisc - a new initiative, providing for voluntary fiscal co-operation between member states - has so far failed to emerge as a meaningful platform for co-operation. Despite an annual reporting requirement, the deliberations of Eurofisc remain secret. Transparency on Eurofisc is a necessary step to improving its effectiveness.'

A supranational Consultative Committee is a Treaty-based organ. It was designed to be a powerful network of democratic associations with regular statutes recognized at the European level, all paying tax honestly, represented in the chamber for organized civil society. It would make sure such nonsense never happened.

That is why the politicians in the Council arrested its growth and wanted to kill it off or freeze the three Consultative Committees in the treaties. The Council acted illegally ever since the first Consultative Committee in the 1952 Treaty of Paris and was so condemned by Schuman and Paul Reuter. The Council then decided that the members of the European Economic and Social Committee should be not be properly elected. They would chose who would be members of this 'independent' institution. The membership is decided by the political elites in their party cartel, in the secrecy of the Council of Ministers. Civil society needs to have a chamber with democratic legitimacy.

The long reform of the Parliamentary Assembly into the European Parliament -- still far from complete -- shows the path for the Economic and Social Committee. It took nearly thirty years before MEPs were able to be directly elected. All that is lacking is civil courage -- to stand up against what is wrong and what is fraudulent in the political cabal that believes in secret 'economic governance'. Time will tell.

Now reflect on an example of what could be done positively with a revived supranational democratic system comprising the five active institutions in the energy sector. This is far more democratic and powerfully productive than the present political internationalism that passes for governance in the EU.

First consider how much money is lost on foreign energy supply. Last year the rise in gas and oil prices -- not the actual cost but just the rise in price -- cost the EU as much as HALF the EU budget. The total cost amounts to more than twice the cost of the EU budget. The Founding Fathers warned that reliance on external energy sources was bad for Europe. It was bad for the economy and also bad because with Middle East oil in a cartel like OPEC Europe would lose its ability to have an independent foreign policy. They warned Europe to get off oil addiction. De Gaulle and other self-willed politicians did not listen. Europe has already lost trillions of euros.

This warning has proved to be accurate. Oil and gas prices are set to rise and rise. The time to start doing something sensible and intelligent is NOW. Oil is not only vital for the engines of cars and freight vehicles, it is also necessary for building the roads themselves. The price of tarmac is now sky rocketing too.

Why use tarmac or bitumen on the road? Habit, bad habit. Europe and North America have been doing it for more than a century. But in the last four years the price of a ton of bitumen rose from $175 to over $1000. Tarmac (tarring McAdam roads) may have seen a good idea in 1901, but is it a good idea today? Hardly. It was then a means to improve roads for horse drawn carriages to smooth and waterproof them for cars. Until then the speed of travel on roads differed little from the time of the Romans -- or for that matter the ancient Persians. Bitumen was sold off as a waste product from the people who gave you the oil cartel. They also set up an infrastructure of petrol pumps and roads that made it difficult for Europeans, who have little oil, to kick the addiction.

It is time to move on. What is the solution? One innovative scheme getting US funding is solar roadways. The idea is to use a whole range of new industrial developments and intelligent innovations to create solar panels made of reinforced glass. Glass? Well, if glass can withstand bullets and bombs it is no problem to withstand the weight of a large lorry or multi-wheeler truck. Made from sand, glass has been developing technological refinements since 3500 BCE in Babylonia.

Modern glass can also have safety features unheard of and even undreamed of last century. Glass embedded with high tech microchips can not only supply electricity to the electric vehicles as they travel and powerfeed into to nearby homes, it can turn the highways into an intelligent system with warning lights, ice and snow melting system and human safety features. A parking area could power an entire office building.

If the USA had these panels in place today it could generate THREE times its entire electricity supply needs with enough for most of the rest of the world.

Europe needs to mobilize this present generation to create new ideas that will make Europe a place fit for the next generation. A system of solar roadways could pay for itself in 20 years. The pay off would come that much sooner if Europe really set itself the goal of energy independence by 2020 through an Energy Community based on democratic supranational principles.

Let us assume that this is a proven, technically feasible idea that would save the EU trillions of euros, create new industries, provide a European IT nervous system, an intelligent backbone across the Continent and help share intelligent grids systems and cut costs of power, how shold the EU proceed?

Do you think that the politicians would understand the technicalities of changing a centuries old infrastructure into one fit for the future? Would they have the courage to introduce it? Not much hope. Many of the career politicians with backgrounds in politics and the law would be afraid of derisive laughter from the media and maybe from their electors about a fragile glass road.

But if you asked a chamber composed of highly technical associations of industries, workers and consumers they could tell you how to change from a petroleum based economy to one based on creating an intelligent electrical infrastructure. They would all gain, in products, services and work so they would be highly motivated to succeed. They could call on the greatest expertise in computer networks, highways, in glass, electricity, safety, vehicle production and a whole range of other leading edge areas that need to be coordinated to make it a success. Europe's confidence in its future must similarly depend on the solidarity of expert experience and trust of all our citizens.

A Consultative Committee would force competing lobbies to work together. Why? because they would have to vote in a tripartite consultation of industries, consumers and workers, on all the important legal measures. It acts like a comprehensive, continent-wide think tank, a network of expertise. This would ensure that instead of wasting an ever-increasing amount of resources on petroleum, the Energy Community projects would use the money on creating employment and expertise for Europe that it could then help the rest of the world with in the inevitable transition to the sustainable, non-polluting, non-oil economy.

Europe has the brains, the industries the workers. What it lacks is the will to get its supranational act together. Schuman designed it as the most moral solution. A humble Statesman brought in a solution based on humility and pragmatic wisdom. After two thousands years of continuous war, European nations implemented the first stage of a system that made war 'not only unthinkable but materially impossible'.

Today politicians want to forget that lesson. When will they come to their senses? That time might come, unfortunately, when the politicians have been shown the futility of all the other cul-de-sac policies that they are presently trying.

A supranational Europe with a fully functioning system of Consultative Committees would also have a major purifying effect on monetary fraud. Their specialized committees would make sure that the politicians did not get their fingers into the national and European piggy banks. They would be subject to the proper supervision and control.

Thus Europe could enter on the next exciting stage of democratic solidarity that Schuman predicted.

Budget9: Is the EU Budget Illegal? You and any tribunal can ask the European Court!

2011-07-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

Can a Parliament and any other allegedly 'democratic institution' ban the public and journalists from their meetings? Do they have the legal right? Once they have shut the doors, can they then make a deal to IMPOSE a budget on taxpayers who are not present? Is its secretive procedure LEGAL? If it is not, is the budget illegal, void and invalid?

In October to December 2010, the Council, Parliament and Commission held a series of meetings on the 2011 Budget. The public and journalists were banned from setting foot in any of the meetings. A guard was put on the door. Only people on a special list were allowed to enter. On the agenda was the means to collect and spend around about 130 Billion euros defined in their 2011 budget. At the meetings were the Belgian Prime Minister and others representing the Council. The meetings included the President of the European Parliament and a score of his MEP colleagues and the European Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski, responsible for the Budget.

What did they get up to? We know that the Commissioner accused the politicians of behaving like a 'kindergarten'. It was not an edifying spectacle. Each side claimed the budget was their toy. Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski characterised the whole affair as ‘self-centered and egoistical'.

Whose toys, or rather, whose money were they arguing over? It was the group that was refused entry to all the meetings -- the public. The politicians did not only refuse to include them, they banned them outright. The political 'leaders' did not deign to have any REAL representative of the people from whom these 'democratic' leaders were about to extract their Billions! No member of the press was officially allowed to observe and report the politicians' infantile behaviour. No outsider was invited who would criticize this dangerous clique's discrimination and predatory action against the citizen.

I call these political juveniles 'dangerous' because they follow the pattern of President de Gaulle and others who refused to have open Council meetings that Robert Schuman said was essential. In the secrecy of the Council of Ministers, they created a vast pattern of corruption for votes with their Wine Lakes, Meat Mountains, faudulent, regional infrastructure projects that never happened.

The next generation of politicians did not open the doors either. They paid huge amounts of European taxpayers' money to party comrades in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, winking at the money that disappeared into boltholds and their subsequent fraudulent statistics. Those monetary falsehoods are now being exposed as Europe falters on the edge of a euro collapse.

The politicians today are committing similar immoral acts against European citizens in their secret sessions. Their arrogant offences would not pass in most of their home parliaments where a national press has free comment. Don't they think that secret budget discussions in Brussels must be wrong? Or do they just think: 'If we can get away with it here, why not?' They now want economic governance, another term for cartel dictatorship of their parties, by their parties for their party cartel.

Then in June 2011, not content with this trivial amount of hundreds of billions of euros, the European Commission proposed that a TRILLION euros should be levied from the European public, industries and workers. It is to be a combined seven-year plan. The public need not worry their silly, little heads over watching this unsavoury performance every year. It would be done in one quick stroke!

The Commission said it would speak about it to the people's representatives, the European Parliament. And so, the European Parliament quickly closed the doors on the people and the press! What happened behind closed doors? How did the party leaders react to this further money grab from European citizens? Did they rub their hands with delight? Did they yell 'Sock it to the public! We will bleed them dry!' We do not know the facts because the press was thrown out!

Why? Why did these very privileged people -- all of them obviously considered themselves very privileged -- feel it necessary to impose secrecy? Why did they ban the public? Why did they ban the press?

What is common with all these people? What unites those who have the only say-so in the European budget? They are all card-carrying members of political parties. Isn't that normal? NO it is not. They will tell you it is. Don't believe them. The European Community had a much more balanced democractic system where non-political civil socity plays an important part.

These 'closed-door politicians' represent ... what and whom exactly? Those in Nazi Germany were told the true German party members were those who decided matters for them. In fact they were kleptocrats and gangsters, stealing from the people. Those in Communist-controlled East Germany, Czechoslavakia, Poland and Hungary were told: 'The Worker's party is in charge!' Those in Mao's Communist China said the Party must control not only the Budget but every aspect of life.

Some systems banned non-Aryans, others businessmen, or capitalist running dogs from entering their 'parliaments' when deliberating the budget. All these diverse systems had one thing in common. They did not like a free press.

Are Europeans free? Those in control in the EU all have party cards. They are a tiny minority. All party card-holders amount to about one in fifty of the entire population. And the parties are increasingly unpopular. In the European elections more people who can vote refuse to vote for any of them. The majority in the EU is not the parties but an entity called 'None of the above' that should appear on the ballot.

At one stage in history party affiliation had some importance. Now they nearly all act together in a continuous coalition or a cartel of parties. It makes no difference who the electors vote for, they get the same result -- more expenditure and luxurious padding for the parties. When corruption is exposed, confidence in the parties plummets again. Public support has been declining for decades.

Yet this small but powerful cartel plans to extract more and more money from the other 98 percent of the population. They are all generally in favour of having more projects and subsidies which they feel will buy them support. These bribes are just tax money being returned diminished under new conditions set by the political parties. For themselves they want nothing but higher salaries, more assistants, help for friends in the same party wherever they are, expansion of agencies and dubious employment initiatives such as the 'External Action Service', overseas aid which corrupts and anything else that supports the ideologies of the parties.

Now consider if the European leaders were all identified with another small group. What if the Commission, Parliament and Council were composed entirely of Freemasons? What if they were all Catholics or Jews or Shi'ite Muslims or Europeans of Chinese origin? What if they were all paid up members of the FBSS, the Fraudulent Bankers' Speculation Society? What would be the public's reaction if the controlling class in the European institutions all believed in Ju-Ju?

It is obvious that the secret and secretive control of the budget by any one tiny group raises questions of motive and propriety. When they close the doors the public would immediately presume that they are making some underhand contributions of tax money to the furtherance of Ju-Ju. No moral person would allow himself to get into such an dubious situation and be enthusiastic to keep the ban on outsiders and the press. A well run parish or tennis club would ensure their meetings would always be open. Are the EU's leaders moral? They have no qualms about secret sessions on the budget. They insist on them.

The party cartel who seized control of the institutions have included those bodies which the treaties say should not be political. What should the citizen do if the public remain banned from budget meetings because they do not have a Ju-Ju membership card?

Should the citizens ask for a Ju-Ju card? Or would they ask: Is it legal? Is the Budget legal? Is the discrimination against the citizen legal? What can we do about it?

We can go to Court! But how?

The Founding Fathers, you will be happy to know, put adequate safeguards in the Treaties. If any institution feels that another is not acting democratically according to the treaty, there is a recourse. That institution can take the other to the European Court of Justice.

But what if all the main institutions are in cahoots? What if all the leaders of the main institutions are all members of Ju-Ju and they ban anyone who isn't?

Don't despair! The founding Fathers provided a powerful solution. They said that any citizen who feels that he or she is being discriminated against can go to the European Court. And it won't cost a cent more. If the European institutions bring in legislation -- such as the Budget -- and the citizen feels it is unjust or discriminatory, then he can go to any local court or tribunal in the land and have redress.

If it is a matter of paying taxes and the citizen refuses to pay European taxes, then the citizen can explain to the judge that the European tax is unjust because it was decided in secret without democratic control. As part of the case the judge is then allowed and encouraged to ask for an opinion of the European Court of Justice, to see whether it is so and whether it is legal. The citizen should cite article 267 of the Lisbon Treaty which reproduces the article from earlier treaties.

A few hundred million citizens can do this. So can all companies, trade unions and consumer groups of civil society.

Article 267 states:

The Court of Justice of the European Union shall have jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings concerning:
(a) the interpretation of the Treaties;
(b) the validity and interpretation of acts of the institutions, bodies, offices or agencies of the Union;
Where such a question is raised before any court or tribunal of a Member State, that court or tribunal may, if it considers that a decision on the question is necessary to enable it to give judgement, request the Court to give a ruling thereon.

The service of the European Court is open. If not today, then maybe tomorrow an individual or an association will bring a case complaining that raising taxes without the knowledge of citizens and in secret meetings is illegal.

The judges would be sure to check Article 15 of the Lisbon Treaty. It was added by civil society group specifically because of M. de Gaulle's bad habits. It states:

In order to promote good governance and ensure the participation of civil society, the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies shall conduct their work as openly as possible.

The next paragraph is especially relevant:

The European Parliament shall meet in public, as shall the Council when considering and voting on a draft legislative act.

There are few legislative acts as important as the Budget.

If the Court agreed that

consultation with citizens is pre-requisite for any legislation to pass,
a minority cannot oppress the majority,
all legislation must be conducted in the open from the first consideration to the final vote,
the press must be allowed access to report any political chicanery,

then the law in question could be annulled on any one of these grounds. The whole of the EU budget and all its programmes would be thrown into confusion until it could be sorted out.

That recourse to justice can happen at any time, by any citizen or association. For the cartel it is like a time bomb that will one day explode against them.

It would be far better for the Parliament and the Council to begin to act like democratic institutions TODAY.

Budget8: The underhand, one trillion euro budget -- Parliament breaks Lisbon Treaty law again!

2011-06-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

The time has come to start re-aligning EU financing with the principles of autonomy, transparency and fairness and equipping the EU to reach its agreed policy objectives.' These are the words of European Commission's 'A Budget for 2020' -- its proposals for a multi-annual financial framework (MFF) 2013-2020.

The proposal was presented by Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso IN SECRET in the European Parliament on 29 June 2011. Again!

So much for TRANSPARENCY. So much for FAIRNESS for citizens. It is a strange idea of transparency for the press and the public to be firmly excluded from hearing exactly what goes on at a meeting of two democratic institutions. It is a bizarre idea of fairness to exclude taxpayers from a room full of people planning to seize their money.

The doors were shut and guarded to stop any ordinary taxpayer from entering the sixth floor chamber of the Paul-Henri Spaak building. In it were assembled, besides Commissioners Barroso and Lewandowski, all the presidents of the political party groups plus legal and other officials. What a sauce! A secret budget meeting would be a major scandal in any national parliament. Here it involves BIG money, European taxpayers' money.

The Commission has proposed that taxes for the EU should rise from around one percent of Gross National Income to 1.11 percent by 2020. Whichever way you slice it that represents a substantial increase in the taxes or levies that European citizens have to pay. The calculation has also shifted from GNP figures to GNI. GNI is the same thing as GNP but with indirect business taxes deducted. A trillion euros is involved in the budget plan under consideration.

I haven't seen the citizens massing on the streets demanding a 11 percent rise in money that should be taken from their pockets! I haven't seen them massing for the projects that the politicians have devised. What is the explanation?

Possibly what the Commission Budget Document meant was not Autonomy, that is free-spending of taxes by the parties machines. That includes setting their own salaries and perks. What they meant was AUTOCRACY of the political class (in the EU and governments) to raise taxes at will.

All the institutions of the Community that were created by the Founding Fathers to express NON-POLITICAL, Organized Civil Society have been suppressed or taken over by the new political class. That is why this autocracy should be referred to as a political CARTEL because it suppresses the free market of ideas and democratic accountability of the parties. It refuses to treat the citizen seriously, making politicians autocrats not servants. Politicians have just two demands of the people: money to run their party machines and acceptance of the policy they hand down to them without proper consultation.

The cartel has distorted the meaning of democratic representation, which involves free-speech and accountability, not party machinery running roughshod over the citizens.

The European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek is reported as saying: 'The Commission's proposal on the long-term budget for the EU is an intelligent starting point for negotiations. The next MFF will be one of the most important in the EU's history. It will set the direction for the Union at an exceptional time when the European project is under pressure from the sovereign debt crisis and from external instability.'

The sovereign debt crisis is largely a problem of the politicians, by the politicians about money for the politicians and party funding, involving soaring national debts and falsified statistics. The countries that kept their budget books straight and where the parties did not accept 'funding' from rich people and associations in return for a tax-free break, are not in a 'sovereign debt crisis'.

At the core of many of these 'sovereign debt' countries is the need for parties to get funds and they are willing to bend the rules to get them for the voters, the public and large corporations. When this dishonesty becomes exposed at the local, regional and national level, Europe seems to them the next level to be exploited. This is an old and growing scam that brought wine lakes, meat mountains in the Gaullist era and useless or non-existent infrastructure in southern Italy thanks to the corrupt regional policy. It was followed by massive infusions of cash to Greece in the 1980s, agreed by Europe's party politicians, much of which subsequently 'disappeared'

We now have political theatre without legitimacy or substance. The Commission has thrown off any veneer of independence. It is composed exclusively of national politicians. They are apparently in a debate with politicians of the same parties in the Council -- representing national governments. The Parliament is also composed of nationally elected politicians of exactly the same controlling parties. They refuse to hold Europe-wide elections as required by the treaties for sixty years.

This is not democracy because the most important element, individuals in civil society and organised civil society who ultimately have to pay are left out in the cold, because the doors are locked. The press is barred. The debate inside is about a fait accompli.

Mr Buzek continued: 'A system of real own resources would be fairer, more transparent, simpler and equitable. We should also see an end to rebates, exceptions and correction mechanisms that have accumulated within the current system.'

That gives the game away. It is transparent only for the politicians. The citizens -- including the non-political majority of the EU -- have not accepted or even had a say in the Commission/ Council budget and its assumptions. A democratic budget is supposed to relate to citizens' demands and citizens' needs -- expressed in fully functional Community institutions. It should not be fixed according to the whims of the political barons themselves. The present procedure -- which is inherited from the Gaullist autocratic system -- lacks any semblance of real democratic legitimacy. It has more in common to the so-called People's Democracies of the Soviet era.

The chairman of the EP's Budget Committee had something to say about secrecy. Not the Parliament's secret meeting but another institution. He said that 'a debate of such importance should not be held in the secrecy of ministerial meetings behind closed doors. This should become the subject of as wide a possible public debate, including a conference with full involvement of national parliaments. In the coming days we will make an effort toward realising this.'

A closed door Parliament is telling the closed-door Council of Ministers not to be secret! Herumph! The Commission's presentation in secret in the Parliament was illegal under the Lisbon Treaty. This bogus treaty was passed by politicians in spite of citizens voting in referendums that they did not like the system.

Article 15 of the Lisbon Treaty's TFEU deals with institutional consideration of financial legislation. It states: 'The European Parliament shall meet in public, as shall the Council when considering and voting on a draft legislative act.'

It also makes clear who should be in control of the budget: civil society, not the political class. The first paragraph of Article 15 states:
'In order to promote good governance and ensure the participation of civil society, the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies shall conduct their work as openly as possible.'

It is not difficult to open the door to one or two reporters or provide a video feed. Yet this was refused -- ILLEGALLY.

The Lisbon Treaty generation of politicians is now embarking on a vast misadventure of illegitimacy. They suppressed referendum results. They refused to accept those that took place until the voters were forced to vote again under threats. They have embarked on internal policies without the full participation of non-political civil society. They have established massive aid and development programmes based on political ideologies -- without the participation of civil society. And after some sixty years the European Parliament and the Civil Society institutions have still not had the electoral framework for free and open elections.

This dereliction of democracy is compounded by the false road-maps. What the Budget document called 'agreed policy objectives' are anti-democratic policies that the party cartel gave themselves. The participants in both the 2020 and 2030 reports were given strict instructions that they were not to deal with European democracy. The political class are afraid of more referendums. They will inevitably come!

The 'agreed policy' reports said nothing about the 'Arab Spring,' global financial piracy, the Japanese Tsunami, drought and religious strife in Africa and elsewhere and other world-changing events that they would not or could not foresee. When such surprises occur the only solution seems to be to throw money at them. Will that work with a nuclear-armed Iran and Pakistan? In many cases the cartel policy of naivety and their pacifistic answer to blackmail may just make matters worse more rapidly. Who is controlling European money going to the wrong forces in potentially violent societies?

The present policy objective of encouraging jihadi and anti-Semitic actors in the region is pure madness! When did the public agree to creating, intolerant Jew- and Christian-free states, giving control to groups that still proclaim terrorism as part of their 'party policies'??

Why do they omit to say that foreign policy should draw from the positive outcome of Europe's great democratic experiment that Schuman proclaimed in 1949, his declaration of 9 May 1950 and founding Fathers' Great Charter of 18 April 1951? Nothing!! It brought peace. The 'agreed policy objectives' applying the parties' wilfully ignorant ideologies WILL NOT!

No public mandate exists from the people for the EU budget. The politicians may want to try to fool themselves by this dishonest, underhand window-dressing. It does not fool the public who know that the system is unfair and not transparent for democracy. A system that refuses to discuss democracy and improve what they call democracy is not only suspect, it is obviously not democratic at all. Schuman said the test of a real democracy was the desire to improve itself.

In referendums several nations voted into oblivion a Constitutional treaty. A democratic Europe requires unanimity among free democratic States otherwise it is imperialism. Supranational democracy has to unite democracies not compel them by force. The people gave no mandate to the Lisbon Treaty. Proper referendums were refused.

The politicians disagreed with the people. The politicians in a totally disreputable move brought this rejected treaty back with a new name, the Reform or Lisbon Treaty. Who is trying to fool whom? Without democratic control the Lisbon Treaty is an uncontrollable money machine for the party politicians. It exploits the people who cannot yet escape from the main parties because they always act in coalition, a cartel. The EU budget provides money for their party cadres that they cannot get by honest means at the national level.

This self-deceit has serious effects on the politicians themselves. The underhandedness makes it seemingly impossible for European leaders to listen institutionally to taxpayers. They believe in their own 'smoke and mirrors' that gives them power to thumb their noses at public opinion and even their own script -- the Lisbon Treaty sham.

Supranational democracy could help resolve the euro crisis and set realistic goals for the budget. The politicians however are locked in a vicious downward spiral of declining public confidence, increasing financial black-holes, knowing full well that more democratic accountability will result in them losing control and maybe their political heads too.

In a supranational Community, greed for public money and power is a recipe for disaster.

Euro1 : Why is the European Central Bank President still the politicians' plaything?

2011-06-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Should EU's politicians, in the middle of a great financial crisis, still be trying their old dirty tricks? At the centre of the euro is the European Central Bank. The chief executive, the president or governor, is its guardian. The treaties say that he represents the bank in his or her person. All citizens using the euro have an interest in his integrity, experience and wisdom. This implies that the ECB president must personify the integrity of European money for the European economy and far beyond the eurozone.

How then is the ECB president selected and confirmed in office? Should he be both nominated and chosen by the politicians? Think about the mischief politicians get up to in fiscal fiddles, bribing the electorate for votes and dissembling the statistics. I am not just referring to the Greek and Latin problems of the Mediterranean countries. At the June European Council the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said his country's (previous) government was involved in 'skyrocketing debts' and 'falsified statistics'.

Thus even at the European Council announcement of the ECB presidency, one politician throws the spotlight on the untrustworthy nature of this political class and the disastrous effects they have on sound money policy. Politicians are not the sort of people that can be trusted with the monetary printing press. Non-party guarantees are required for a real democracy. This is why Robert Schuman and the Founding Fathers designated key institutions as being independent and run by independent personalities to ensure democratic freedom of choice.

The main political parties acting as a cartel have tried to take over the democratic supranational Community system by substituting their party members in places designated for non-political organized civil society. Wherever possible in the key institutions they camouflaged their take-over.

A bank should be run honestly based on agreed technical rules, not according to a political ideology or a egotistical whim that 'runs up skyrocketing debts' and 'falsifies the statistics.' The euro was built to stop this. Membership requires discipline -- hands out of the till. There should be a clear demarcation between the European Bank for the euro and politics. We should also emphasize here that all eurozone States must agree by law that the governors of their national central banks must be selected independently. It is not an option. It is treaty law. National Central Bank Governors in the eurozone must be free to act with total independence of the politicians, governments and 'any other body'.

In general governments do not wish to be seen placing as head of their national bank a party hack responsive to party orders. They should advertise the vacant post in the press. They have a separate Statutory Board that selects the most experienced and independent banker for the task.

What happens at the European level -- that is the stratum of big, big money? The politicians think that they can totally discard this rule of independence. A candidate is chosen in secret, maybe in the ultra-secret Euro Group meeting. Who are the members of the Euro Group? They are all politicians. The chosen name is then passed on to the Council of Ministers. Who are the members of the Council of Ministers? Yes, they are all politicians! Then the name is confirmed by the European Council. Who are the members of the European Council. Right again, they are all politicians!

The secretive system of a political cartel is the opposite of what citizens expect in a democracy. Secrecy encourages lying and that encourages speculation. It is now well known that several members of the Euro Group built up and hid 'skyrocketing debts' and colluded in 'falsifying statistics'. A more open, supranational system would calm the markets and encourage trust and growth. Who knows more about the dirty little secrets of all the other Member States than the 27 intelligent men and women of the European Council?

According to the Lisbon Treaty, the same legal requirement of absolute independence applies to the President of the European Central Bank, as it does to the national bank governors. It is all specified with clarity in articles 130 and 131.

The politicians try to wrap the election of the ECB president in language to ensure thick opacity and murkiness. The dirty little political trick is called 'pass the parcel'. The wrapping is a distracting colour that turns the public's eye away from its contents. (It is announced amid many much 'hotter' issues at the European Council.) Who defined the contents? No one can be sure. The parcel has been quickly passed from one committee or council to another. When a journalist asks: where did the parcel originally come from? The one who has it last -- the European Council -- points to the person on his left, a Council of Ministers. But everyone is sitting in a circle and the parcel goes round and round until it stops at the heads of government. These top politicians are most probably the real culprits who wrapped up the contents in the first place. They have the motive, the opportunity and the machinery. They will gain from the crime. Politicians want to control the money supply, the statistics and the definitions of the currency.

The 17 May Council of Economic and Financial Ministers had this to say:

"The Council adopted a recommendation on the nomination on Mario Draghi (Italy) as President of the European Central Bank, to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet...'

Who recommended the candidate? Was it the finance ministers? It does not say. Was it someone else? If they are referring to 'a recommendation' of the Euro Group, why don't they say? And whoever it was making the recommendation, what were the criteria for the choice? When were they published? How did they choose this one person from among Europe's 500 million? There must be a lot of bankers with Wall Street or City experience who would like to apply for the job. Why weren't some honest bankers considered? Did the ministers have a list after a public Call for Candidates in the Official Journal? No one saw the advertisement. If the post of ECB president is paid from taxpayers' money and public funds, it should come under the usual rules for selecting and hiring civil servants. Surely the politicians would not want the public and the markets to think they are involved in political patronage and nefarious nepotism?

If the politicians did not act impartially to choose an independent governor, are we to assume the new ECB president is not impartial and has as a covert task the mission to save the politicians' hides? How can anyone know if the politicians are concerned that a governor shows no favouritism to any Member State? In other words: is his nationality irrelevant? The sole criteria for the appointment should be independence, experience and integrity.

The president should have enough strong character and experience to deal with dire situations where politicians gang up against him to try to bastardize the currency. The ECB president should have metal to resist the politicians. He should not be the politicians' plaything. The new candidate has several stripes against him, deserved or not.

It is educational to recall what happened at European Council in 1998 and the first selection of the governor of the Central Bank. The site of the ECB was chosen as Frankfurt. What has that to do with the choice of governor? A lot in Gallic eyes. The French president of the Republic said that as the ECB was in Germany the governor should naturally be French. (Don't you love the way the French use naturellement?)

But hang about! Aren't there a few more States besides France and Germany. Aren't there a few States who have an economy even sounder than France's? Doesn't France get involved in some dubious monetary practice from time to time?

France did not get its way and Wim Duisenberg, who had headed the pre-euro European Monetary Institute, was confirmed as the first governor. He was previously governor of the Dutch central bank and had ample experience. Before Duisenberg, the EMI was headed by Hungarian-born Alexandre Lamfalussy, a respected economist and international banking adviser, from Belgium.

The Germans, the Belgians and Dutch said NON to the French. They told them that they wanted to have a strong euro. They did not want someone who 'bent' the rules and did not defend the ECB's independence. A nasty fisticuffs occurred. In the end the French lost.

The French declared afterwards that a compromise had been reached. In the margin of the European Council they said that all agreed that (1) Mr Duisenberg could stay on -- but only for a bit and he should resign half way through his 8-year term (2) their named French candidate, M. Trichet, should then take over.

To any rational observer this would fail logic and fairness tests. It assumed that (a) Mr Duisenberg would want to resign and in fact he stayed on rather longer than the French wanted, until November 2003; (b) that M. Trichet would also be around, healthy and capable and hadn't in the meantime wandered off to Wall Street to make a private fortune; (c) that the "gentleman's agreement" (that is the outcome of the European CouncIl wrestling match) would bind the still future European Council with slightly different political wrestlers; (d) that no other candidates from the 25 other Member States would be allowed to place their name forward; (e) there would be no public call for candidates in the Official Journal from all the aspiring European bankers. In other words the heads of government were convinced that this illegality could continue for a few more years.

In the end the French managed to hold this conspiracy together. How? Possibly because it was a political cartel agreement -- held together by party political secretariats. M. Trichet was eventually made the ECB governor. Imagine a private Bank with 27 major shareholders where the CEO was fixed in this way. What an uproar would ensue at the shareholders' meeting. What court cases there would be!

The European Council's 'fix' says more about the secret forces holding this particular political dirty deal together and total lack of free choice in the way the head of the ECB is chosen. It says rather less about democracy and the high-minded principles that should be involved and the financial legalities.

I asked earlier: Who knows more about the dirty little secrets of all the other Member States than the 27 intelligent men and women of the European Council? The figures about debts and fraudulent statistics are coming to light. Yet the European Council is perpetuating the same sort of secret system in choosing the ECB president.

It bodes ill for the public because it is a clear indication of the corrupt nature of EU politics -- even when faced with a horrendous crisis of the euro and the financial future of several Member States.

It is not the sort of behaviour that reassures the markets, the speculators and the private bankers. Only a democratic, supranational monetary system can do that. It will take some time to remedy and solid democratic institutions are needed ... or the Court.

Budget7: How EU's Council of Ministers stole YOUR money in the E Coli scandal!

2011-06-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Council of Ministers just slid a stealthy hand into your pocket -- and stole a euro. Think about it. Act 1: a score of people die in Germany from E Coli bacteria poisoning. Many more are hospitalized. Curtain for intermission. Act 2, the Council of Ministers quickly doles out 210 million euros of taxpayers' money to many countries around the EU. What happened in the intermission?

Who is to blame for the infection? An authoritative German source says it came from Spanish cucumbers. Let us call this source Herr Schmidt so we do not have to be personal. Many irresponsible people are involved. Herr Schmidt is a minister, an elected democratic representative.

Herr Schmidt says Spanish cucumbers are to blame. The Spanish farmers protest. Nonsense, they say, there is no trace of infection here. To no avail. The market collapses. No one will buy Spanish cucumbers, nor in fact any vegetable or fruit from Spain.

Then under questioning from the press and the agricultural interests, Herr Schmidt retracts his remark about Spain. But it is really a bit late, all fruit and vegetable markets around Europe have been hit. The public does not want to eat them out of fear of ending up horizontal in a morgue.

We now have a European crisis. What should we Europeans do? The Community is built up on the principle of solidarity. So would it not be a good idea to help the farmers from Community funds? In the meantime Herr Schmidt has gone on to blame bean sprouts, also without proof, and, who knows, a meteorite shower of bacteria from space!

But hang on! Who is responsible for the debacle? I would say Herr Schmidt is largely to blame for the scare. He did not say:

'What all consumers should do with all fruit and vegetables is to wash them well and cook them well as required. Bacteria die in boiling water. Wash your hands too! Eat safely like your mother taught you!'

No, Herr Schmidt started to blame an innocent party, causing hundreds of millions of euros damage. If any one is responsible it is Herr Schmidt. It makes better TV to blame and accuse rather than advise people on hygiene. If he was speaking for the German government as an official or employee then the German government -- and their budget -- is responsible too.

So how did the Council react? Does it lay the blame where it lies -- on Germany? No. It decided that all taxpayers in the whole of the European Union should pay for this German mistake. Why?

Like the quick movement of the magician's hands comes this very old trick. It has been done many times in the past. It is called political collusion. They call it Solidarity. They assume the people will be so dumb to think it means solidarity of all the citizens. In fact it is not that at all but solidarity of the political clique acting against the citizen, his money and his rights.

Consider the implications. The politicians are set to blame the citizen and say 'Collectively all the citizens are responsible financially'. That is rubbish. The politicians are responsible for the rumour. The politicians, so-called democratic representatives, do not honestly represent the citizen because they can point to no link of blame between the citizen and the agricultural market loss. In this case most of the citizens' real rights are best represented by consumer groups, taxpayers' associations or economic analysts and health-care groups, not the politicians. That is why Schuman and the Founding Fathers declared that organized civil society, such as these associations, should be a formal part of Community governance.

Financially there is a causal, financial and legal link between Germany, that is Herr Schmidt, bridging (1) the cause of deaths and injuries by E Coli and (2) the collapse of the market for cucumbers and other products across the EU and probably much further afield. There is no link with the taxpayer in the Outer Hebrides and the problem. Why then should a Hebridian crofter pay?

As far as I know, the Scottish crofters had personally nothing to do with it. They did not export lethal E Coli. They did not spread rumours or accuse anyone. Why should anyone in the Hebrides, or Rumania or Bulgaria compensate for a German problem? Why not the real culprit who started an authoritative but false scare?

Notice how the political class in the Council of Ministers defends themselves and takes YOUR money. Very quickly before anyone can reflect, all is decided. No debate in public. They decreed that 210 million euros should be taken from the European budget -- the taxpayers' money -- and be given to those farmers in Spain and elsewhere who were hit by the scare. Did the Council of Ministers ask the citizen? No. Did the European consumer express an opinion through the institution set up for this?

The body that should be defending the citizen and the consumer as well as the taxpayer, the Economic and Social Committee, is asleep on the job. In a supranational Community, democratic debate and legal opinions are required for all financial decisions. That involves governments, organised civil society, regions and the European Parliament. Under de Gaulle the Council tried to short-circuit this system. It is quite illegal and immoral to do so.

E Coli caused the initial problem. The rest is a man-made problem. More precisely, a politician-made problem. It has nothing to do with the weather, a flood or drought. Solidarity can legally be expected there and is welcome to help the hard-pressed farmers. But this case involves a single origin: ministerial 'foot in mouth' disease by Herr Schmidt. There is a clear causal relationship to Herr Schmidt for the real blame.

The Council compounded this problem with a crime. They stole money from the citizen, big time. They took money from all the citizens and gave it to someone else without asking the citizen. They took a euro from your purse or pocket! With 500 million citizens, 210 millions represents practically all the adult wage earners in the European Union. They stole one euro from just about everyone contributing to the European budget.

It is hush money. A bribe for silence. Just consider how unethical this is. What about the EU's neighbouring counties? Many countries, perhaps candidate countries for EU membership, also suffered from a loss of appetite for vegetables and fruits. They could not export into the EU. Many of them also suffered financial losses when all of a sudden the EU citizens said: "No vegetables on my plate and certainly not cucumbers!" Russia blocked its imports of EU agricultural products. Many exports were affected. This caused a problem for EU farmers but also the Russian consumers. They had to pay higher prices. Should the Council of Ministers -- who are very free and easy with other people's money -- send them a subsidy too???

Why, if this 210 millions subsidy was a just and fair policy, did the Council of Agricultural Ministers not spread taxpayers' money much further abroad? Why did they not send European cash around the world to places in Africa, South America and elsewhere -- which also took a financial hit as the German cucumber falsehoods were taken seriously?

The conclusions we should draw:

Ministers and governments officials whether elected or not should keep their mouth shut on matters they do not understand. (That should save a lot of TV time! Public education about bacteria on TV is lacking.) The job of politicians is not to fill the airwaves with nonsense but to do their job. Sometimes this means keeping quiet. They should hush. The political class must be held responsible for what they say if it causes damage.
Legal blame should be placed where the fault lies, according to the law. If some one is wronged he has access to the court. Why did the Spanish government not take Germany to Court? Each farmer has the right to take a case to Court in Germany. Now the Council has made a decision, they can also go to the European Court. The treaties say that European Court of Justice in Luxembourg is open for such cases, whether by the individual, an association, another European institution or a government.
It is not the business of the Council of Ministers to short-circuit due legal process.
It is not their job to give other people's money to resolve the problem of Herr Schmidt.
Taxpayers’ money of the Outer Hebrides crofter or the Rumanian farmer should not be used as a bribe. The Council does not have a right, without democratic approval, to use the budget and give it to other governments to dissuade them from taking legal action against Germany or any other Member State in such circumstances.
The Council should ensure as soon as possible that the Economic and Social Committee is elected on a European basis as a representative body for consumers, producers and workers. A non-party elected body is needed to give democratic legitimacy to any Community decisions so that a political clique is stopped from abusing Community funds.
Government controls should see to it that irresponsible rumours are not started or if they are by accident, a quick denial should be published immediately.
The media should act responsibly and not propagate rumours from irresponsible sources. They should analyse what shenanigans the politicians are up to.
The German government should be responsible both financially and democratically for correcting the spread of rumours that cause Europe-wide or worldwide problems.
Bacteria are not political. Scientists, not politicians, should determine the origin of E Coli strains. Impartial European scientific bodies should handle the scientific questions.
The Council of Ministers is not authorized by the citizen to pay out European money to deal with problems that should be handled by national governments according to proper democratic systems.
The Council of Ministers should investigate how they can recover the money they have wrongly distributed from the citizens' purse for non-European problems.
The Council should stop acting as if the budget they have before them is their private money. It isn't. It is not to be used for resolving the political embarrassments of fellow politicians.
And most importantly of all. The Council of Ministers should remember they are only ONE of the FIVE major European institutions that have to be engaged in a real Community decisions. It is not for them to act like a political cartel abusing the public.

The ministers of agriculture in the Council should limit their appearances before the television cameras to one comment:

'Keep your cucumbers clean. In turn we will keep our hands clean!'

Truth 15: EXPOSED! The citizen's most Fundamental Right that Politicians are hiding from YOU!

2011-06-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

What is the most Fundamental Right for citizens in any society? You won't find it in the Lisbon Treaty's Charter of Fundamental Rights. It just isn't there. It is far more fundamental than any 'Fundamental' human right in Lisbon's Charter of Fundamental Rights. It's easy to explain its absence. The Charter of the Lisbon Treaty was written or supervised by politicians who did not want citizens to be aware of their most fundamental right.

Yet once upon a time, the most Fundamental political Right was agreed and recognized by politicians ... or rather by real Statesmen. They were the Founding Fathers. Today's politicians are trying to bury that fact. They are trying to blot out all memory that it once was recognized by governments and in treaties.

The Council of Ministers would be horrified if you or any other citizens knew about it! They fear the case against their dictatorial attitudes will be lost -- not only in the Court of Public Opinion. It could be lost and reversed against them in the European Court of Justice! This is also the reason that the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the somnabulent Economic and Social Committee refused to recognize the Great Charter was 60 years old on 18 April 2011. It is the reason that the Great Charter of the European Community has never been publicized by the politically submissive Commission.

The politicians and more specifically the political parties want 500 million citizens to forget that they can do far more than just kick them right out of power -- all of them. Elections are not much use if all parties are corrupt or aquiesce to the corruption of others, as a recent case showed. What power does the consumer have if a cartel or a multinational lobbyist is simultaneously subsidizing and wining and dining all the major parties? Political parties are Europe's biggest unregistered lobbyists. They can hide unsavoury lobbying of the powerful, as can goverment ministers. An election only changes one set of faces for the next but the policy bought by an industrial cartel stays the same. The cartel is laughing all the way to the bank.

Because parties have their own agenda, their own ideologies, but also a shotage of funds from the public, they lack public support. It is that distrust between the people and their supposed representatives that the Fundamental Right of the Great Charter addresses. In the People's Democratic Republics of the Soviet era, the people were allowed to vote for a variety of parties but it made not the slightest difference about freeing themselves from the Soviet orbit. Nor did they have freedom of thought, for example in religious matters or anti-Marxist criticism.

Today what is most important is for the citizens to retain the right to decide what type of democracy Europe should have. The major parties form a political cartel of power against the 98 percent of the population who refuse to join a party or even vote. A system run by a political cartel defending their super-privileged power structures is another form of dictatorship.

It can refuse to recognize any and all national referendums against their proposals (such as the Constitutional Treaty).
It can refuse to allow referendums in other countries where they know the cause is lost before they start.
It can call a treaty by another name, refuse to publish the text and force it through parliament because they have a whipping system to ensure party obedience.
It can then increase their own salaries and expenses without any controls -- such that the 'expenses' are far more than the average wages of ordinary citizens.
It can hold budget meetings in secret, excluding the press.
It controls the purse-strings of the budget, jobs, committees and policies.
It can ignore public opinion. Policies are often simplistic as politicians are unable to deal with the complexity of modern life and all too often they impose ideas at variance with public opinion (who often know better).
It can contort healthy economic policy to stay in power. Politicians encourage property booms and financial bubbles because they provide instant cash for their State projects. They refuse to balance the budgets preferring to try to bribe voters with money they do not have. The public then pays for the consequences.

In short, the Lisbon Treaty EU is becoming more like the German Democratic Republic of the early postwar period. They had parties called Socialist, Christian Democrats and Liberals, but in reality they were counterfeits controlled by the Communist party of the Soviet Union. The proof is in their deceitful and fraudulent attitudes to referendums.

Today we do not have supranational democracy but intergovernmentalism by a party cartel. What is important, as in 1989, is the right of citizens to change the whole system. And that right to choose and change is not given by politicians -- it is a God-given right -- but it was recognized by governments as a citizens' right at the beginning of the European Community system in 1951. Schuman and Adenauer were aware that the Soviet Union would collapse before the end of the twentieth century.

Choosing the FORM of Democracy is the most Fundamental of all Fundamental political Rights. Not all forms are equal. Each nation, however, has the right to choose its own democratic system. Robert Schuman, the Father of Europe, recognized many different forms of democracy. Unusual for a Frenchman from Republican France, he observed pragmatically that some constitutional monarchies respect democratic practice more than some republican forms of governments. The choice, however, is up to the citizens of each country. The main mission of all is to make each more democratic and fair.

If that is the case for each Member State, then do Europeans have the right to choose how democracy is organized at a European level? Schuman said emphatically: Yes. Furthermore he put that right as one of the first, one of the most fundamental of rights, into the very first agreement of governments right at the beginning of the modern Europe. He got every minister at the Treaty signature ceremony to sign it. It was also presented to the public so that all the parliaments of the six founder States could ratify it. And so they did.

It is called the Great Charter of Europe. It was signed sixty years ago. Isn't it curious that that date was not celebrated by the Council of Ministers?

It was the sixtieth Birthday of the first meeting of the Council of Ministers.

Isn't it amazing that that date was not celebrated by the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Consultative Committee and the Court of Justice?

It was the sixtieth Anniversary of the governmental decision that brought them into existence as INDEPENDENT institutions. How forgetful they are! How ungrateful!

The Community is an act of faith in the solidarity of peoples and nations that are persuaded that the future holds no place for war amongst themselves and corruption that exploits their neighbours and themselves. The Great Charter fundamental right of being 'free to choose' assures the means to clean out corruption from oligarchic and cartel powers.

Maladministration can be addressed to the European Ombudsman. The following is my reaction to the inadequate excuses of the European Commission -- that is supposed to be the Guardian of the Treaties -- as to why they have not published the Great Charter or even the correct version of the Schuman Declaration. It is not just a matter for the European Ombudsman but for European citizens. It is their Great Charter. It is everyone's Fundamental Right that is being challenged and buried.

TO THE EUROPEAN OMBUDSMAN

Schuman Project

Ref: Ombudsman refs 1200/2010/RT and 663/2011/RT

Dear Ombudsman,
This is to clarify my dissatisfaction with the Commission's non-reply to the main issues for which I requested a response, together with lack of figures and details of hierarchical responsibility. I have already sent you a copy of my letter back to the Commission DG Communication (also included below).

1. NO financial figures were given about how much was spent on the Schuman Declaration activities in 2010, by which I mean directly relevant Schuman Declaration activities, not cocktails and publicising other people's activities. A comparable case was the 'Together since 1957' programme which had a logo. What activities had a '60 years of the Schuman Declaration' logo or equivalent? What was said, what was published, what was broadcast about how the Declaration and the treaty provided for a peace system that gives present citizens the longest period of peace in more than 2000 years of history?

2. The Commission DG says that the Commission will correct what it has till now wrongly called the FULL text of the Schuman Declaration. It has been clear for half a century it is not the FULL text. The present Commission has for more than a decade facsimile copies of the originals, as I pointed out. The Commission still has not said what it means by FULL text. This needs to be spelt out as it already has its own 'flexible' definition of 'full' -- equivalent to what normal people call 'abridged, uncorrected and incomplete'. I request the Ombudsman to ask for clarification from the Commission.

Nowadays, due to this persistent error of the Commission and other EU institutions, nearly every other private and public publication including school textbooks and academic material, as well as European organisations and political parties, now use the wrong version. How and when will the Commission make the corrections and will it give conferences about it? Will all the institutions signal it widely with a prolonged programme? This situation has arisen because of the wilful Commission action in publishing the inaccurate version, prolonged incompetence in not checking the readily available facsimiles and the authentic sources, and inertia and refusal to reply to many letters and correspondence from the public over the years pointing out the errors. How does it propose to clean up the errors in publications and on the Web?

3. I asked who was responsible for the outright refusal to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the day the Founding Fathers called the 'true foundation of Europe'. The non-answer was 'it was not selected by the institutions.' ! This is an evasive circumlocution. I know, and you will be aware from the absence of even a press release, that it was not only NOT selected but the persons responsible deemed the true foundation of Europe should be ignored to such an extent no one should hear a whisper about it from the institutions. Why? and Who? The Ombudsman should also be aware that besides the daily televised press conferences, briefings on legal, political and other matters, the dozens of daily press releases, the Commission also publishes each Friday a 5 or 6 page 'Calendrier' (CLDR series) of the coming week. It includes all the meetings of the Commissioners for the coming week plus 'previsions' of the main events and meetings for the month. A competent staff instructed to provide diary and anniversary information must have been told by their political masters and mistresses to ignore and omit any mention of what should be the most important date for the existence of the Commission -- the day when governments signed it into existence in the treaty, 18 April 1951.

The circular answer from DG Communication is aimed at hiding political responsibility. It is gross mal-administration because the public, including the tax-payer, is not able to call to account through this anonymity those responsible for misuse of public funds and distorting political influence. Names should be named on money matters and no policy of hiding political responsibility for misleading propaganda should be countenanced by the Ombudsman. The silence and the blotting out of the historical facts about the 'true foundation of Europe ' contrasts starkly with the millions spent subsidizing and campaigning for the false 'Birthday' of 1957 -- a pure fiction, subscribed to by none of the Founding Fathers. A bureaucracy should not be allowed to cloak what is politically or administratively embarrassing on such a serious matter as multimillion euro budgets and public education about European democracy. In this case the political action aims at hiding the legally agreed Human Rights of citizens recognized at the time of the foundation of Europe by (a) Member States (b) the European institutions about to be created and set in action as European governance. Furthermore who, might I ask, was responsible for spending 4 million euros and possibly much more on false propaganda about 'Together since 1957'?

4. The same goes even more for the Charter Declaration on Europe by the Founding fathers. What is the Commission's plan to correct this omission in publications, on the Web and also in the legal databases? How is it planning to make citizens aware that the 'right to choose' about Europe's organisation is fundamental and that the Founding Fathers considered that supranational democracy was the TRUE FOUNDATION of Europe rather than the present deformation of the system (intergovernmentalism)?

5. There are urgent and far-reaching reasons that the 1951 Great Charter should be published widely and be the primary and key part of the legal corpus of the Communities and the present EU. Some of these reasons are given in my letter to DG Communication. The right of citizens enshrined in the Charter goes beyond the 54 'fundamental rights' of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Lisbon Treaty. In articles 53 and 54 of the latter it is clear that earlier rights such as specified in the Founding fathers' Great Charter are not abrogated in any way. One of the rights in the Great Charter is more fundamental that any of the 'fundamental rights' of the Lisbon Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Great Charter gives all citizens the right to choose how Europe should be organised democratically, describes the initial 5-institution framework to be developed and says it can inspire democratic impulsions beyond its frontiers as a totally new type of foreign policy. It specifies that systems such as the People's Democracies of the Soviet era are not acceptable as Member States of the Communities or the EU. This exclusion requires and provides the means to define democracy more accurately than it is being used nowadays and refine the Community system to make it develop more fairly in the future. The publication of the Great Charter and its legal use are therefore of major importance both for the Courts and for the Ombudsman.

The 1951 Great Charter is a legal document at the heart of European Community and EU law, so defined by Robert Schuman in his writings and the other Founding Fathers. The 1951 Great Charter is a concomitant part of the Treaty of Paris, signed by governments and ratified by all 11 chambers of parliaments in the Six Member States plus a number of other bodies such as economic and social committees of Member States. Like all treaties, all charters and all laws, it obliges the signatory powers and all others affected by it to publish it so that it may be fully applied. In the last paragraph the Charter as a legal document says succinctly:

that all governments have a public responsibility to interact, explain and interpret in their national contexts,
that all parliaments and other organisations should be actively participating in public debates to elucidate the supranational democratic principles involved and
that the European institutions must have the support of public opinion for their functioning and be willing to interact fully within the agreed structures as their service to Europeans for peace and prosperity.

Should you have any questions on the above. please do not hesitate to contact me.

Many thanks again for your service.

Yours etc,

Truth 14: The Right to Choose is at the foundation of Human Rights

2011-05-31T06:08:00.000-07:00

Having received a reply from the European Commission again refusing to publish the Great Charter of the Founding Fathers of the European Community, I was invited by the European Ombudsman to give my reactions.

Background The Founding Fathers of Europe defined 18 April 1951 as the day which was the Birthday of Europe. Their signatures of the Treaty of Paris and the commitment of Six Founder States, they said, was the 'REAL FOUNDATION' of Europe. It was to be based on supranational democracy. They provided a Great Charter defining as the principal right of citizens the right and freedom to choose. This is necessary to distinguish TRUTH. This excluded the so-called 'People's Democracies' where the political parties were in control and free organized civil society was banned or gagged. It excluded religious autocracies. It excluded any form of political dictatorship. Recently European politicans European politicans refused to recognize referendums saying NO to their shoddy Constitutional Treaty designed to give parties more power. They changed its name to the Lisbon Treaty and parties forced it through. They have spent more than 4 million euros (plus untold millions indirectly) in deceitful propaganda like the 'Together since 1957' programme. The aim was to try to convince European citizens that the European Community began in 1957 with the treaties of Rome. They mention only one treaty -- the Economic Treaty -- and say that all the EU today derived from the Market. This is FALSE. First came reconciliation then Europe's democratic political structures. Europe began with the European Community system in 1951, the first Community being the European Coal And Steel Community. It created Europe's first Single Market in 1953 and created the need for further democratic Communities. Since the time of de Gaulle in the 1960s these Communities have not been able to function democratically because of the centralizing position of the Council of Ministers and now the European Council.

Here is my reply.

Schuman Project
David H Price, Editor

30 May 2011
To
Director General, Communication
European Commission

Re: Ombudsman refs 1200/2010/RT and 663/2011/RT

Dear Mr Sørensen,
Thank you for your letter of 15 April 2011 relative to my long correspondence about the EU’s plans for celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the European Union on 18 April 2011.

I am glad to receive confirmation that Mr Robert Schuman’s Declaration of 9 May 2011 will be published in its full form, that is, the Commission publications will be corrected. That implies correction according to a certified copy from the original held by the French Foreign Ministry. Does this ‘corrected’ Commission publication include the preliminary, strategic paragraphs placing the French government decision in its world political context? I would be grateful to know if you have received an official copy from the French Foreign Ministry. If so, I would be grateful to receive a copy.

I wish to renew my request for the immediate publication of the Charter of the Founding Fathers, the Declaration made on 18 April 1951. Notwithstanding the remarks of the Ombudsman in 1200/2010/RT, I believe it is the Commission’s legal responsibility to publish Europe's great Charter, establishing the ‘true foundation’ of Europe, based on supranational democratic principles. The argument about its absence in the archive of EUI at Florence is irrelevant. This is based on a misunderstanding of the dating {it starts officially in August 1952} and mission {it covers internal bureaucratic files only}of the Florence EUI Archives, as I described in my letter of 16 February 2011.

The reasons the Commission is legally and morally obliged to publish the Charter include the following:

The Declaration of the Founding Fathers acting as Plenipotentiaries of the Six is an official document of the European Community. It is a concomitant part of the foundational Treaty of Paris that was ratified in all parliamentary chambers of the Founder States.
The Commission believes it right to publish the foundational Treaty of Paris, even though it does not possess an authentic copy from France in Brussels or in its archives at Florence. France gave official copies only to Member States. The Treaty is the original basis for European law. All the Community institutions should publish this Charter as a concomitant part of the Treaty. The Charter is also part of Community law, defining rights and duties of States, organisations and individuals, as well as those of the European institutions. The principles of the Charter are not time-limited in any way.
This legally important Charter contains elements and principles dealing with Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of all citizens. There is no excuse as to why it has not been published by the Commission. This is a major oversight. It denies citizens proper knowledge of how the European States and institutions have recognized their rights.
Being published on an unofficial Luxembourg website (which is not always working properly) is not an argument to relieve the Commission of its dereliction. The Commission has legal responsibilities to publish it as a founding document. It is a legal responsibility of the Commission and the other institutions to make known to citizens their rights and privileges as being part of the Community. This Charter document is a succinct legal document describing those rights. One of the obligations spelt out prominently in the Charter is that it must be properly published, specifically by the governments and others organs. (See inter alia the first paragraphs and the last line of the Charter.)
Other documents such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Lisbon Treaty have been published. Yet this 1951 Great Charter is the foundation for those rights in the Lisbon Treaty Charter. It is all the more reason why the Commission should not only publish it but give it great prominence.
It is a legal document of the Community signed by Plenipotentiaries, and ratified by Parliaments. It should also be introduced into the legal database of documents of the EU such as EurLex.
It defines the conditions by which the two halves of Europe, divided by the Iron Curtain, or military occupation such as Cyprus can be fully active members of the European Community. It provides the philosophical basis for the Community’s foreign policy. This is of major importance in relation to the ‘Arab Spring’ and events in the Middle East, Africa, China, Russia and elsewhere.

You write that ‘The celebration of other important historical dates, such as the 60th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration or of the Treaty of Paris, were not selected by the European institutions as communication priorities.’ {My emphasis} Can you tell me how this was decided? Who authorized spending ɛ4.2 million on the ‘Together since 1957’ project and that this date should be acclaimed as Europe’s 50th birthday – when clearly it was not? Which committees were responsible for checking, controlling and passing a multi-million euro programme based on false historical information?

How much was spent on the Robert Schuman Declaration celebration in May 2010, how was it selected, who authorized how was it spent?

Who decided that the real 60th birthday of Europe, as defined by the Founding Fathers, 18 April 2011 should not be ‘selected’? Which officials decided that nothing should be spent on it and that not even a press release should be issued? Who was on the committee? Were the concepts in my long, two-year correspondence saying that it should be the major celebration of recent years discussed? Mr Schuman declared that his great initiative ‘would make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible’. That has happened. Europeans are now living in the longest period of peace in more than 2000 years of history. Why was this date, not only not selected but being a hugely important and well-known calendar date, DE-selected from any celebration, mention or the slightest communication? I enclose a recent article I wrote about it, published on several websites in Europe and North America. http://democracy.blogactiv.eu/2011/04/18/mr-barroso-where-is-europes-celebration-of-the-first-real-peace-and-democracy-in-2000-years-today-18-april-2011-is-the-60th-anniversary/

Thank you in advance for your replies to these questions. I am enclosing a copy of this letter to the Ombudsman as the above questions were raised and not answered or dealt with even after the above referenced complaint.

Yours sincerely,

David Price

Research1 FP8. Is the EU too proud, too atheistic, to scientifically research its origin and Europe's future?

2011-05-10T00:31:00.000-07:00

What is the scientific topic that is of most vital interest to the entirety of European research? What is the European scientific discovery that countries around the world look for with green envy and wish they had it?

It is a scientific achievement that has the world gazing in open-mouthed wonder.

Clue: it is the topic that the present European leaders refuse to fund as part of the Framework programme for research. Not only in the present programme, but I know of no funded research in any of the multibillion euros programmes in the past.

That intellectual question, of course, is:

How did Europe create a system that brought PEACE to the warring, bloody states of Europe? After exporting its quarrels and creating two world wars, how is it that today Europe is now living in the LONGEST PERIOD OF PEACE IN 2000 years? Why are there continuous wars and violence, authoritarianism and misery to the north, south and east of the European Union? How did the European Community become a prosperous ZONE of PEACE?

Robert Schuman called it Europe's great SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT. The Framework Programme for research, however, has become an iron box constraining all research into the materialistic scientism of our deformed educational system and the economic egotism of politicians. Politicians want to set the goals of research -- and in the 2020 and 2030 programmes they want no more talk of democracy! They have other goals wrong too, by any impartial analysis. Research by its very nature should be open to new ideas. The European Union, if driven by these false motives and fed by billions of taxpayers' money, is directed to goals away from the noblest achievement of European history.

Why? Because both the atheistic educational system and the vanity of politicians is scared of addressing the miracle of our times.

How did nations and peoples who for 2000 or more years have for every generation killed and conquered each other, how did these warlike people suddenly embark on PEACE?

Robert Schuman attributes it to two factors: a scientific study of the history of humankind in various sectors and the revelation of Christianity. It is the latter -- or rather the combination of science and religion that that sends the politicians and the scientists into a tizzy.

Their reaction is irrational, emotional and unscientific. Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of modern times, acknowledged as such by Einstein and others, spent more of his time studying the Bible in Greek and Hebrew than he did on the experiments and theories of gravitation, optics and the creation of mathematical tools like calculus. Why? Because by studying the Bible he drew inspiration for solving the deepest mysteries of the physical world. His motives were not scientific discovery alone but the quest of personal truth and understanding his place in the Creator's universe.

The same is true for Michael Faraday, the chemist and great experimenter of physics who discovered electromagnetism and its invisible fields. Without his work on electric motors and dynamos, modern society could not function. The theoretician of electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell, also drew his inspiration from the Bible and his belief and faith in his Creator.

These men made great discoveries. Their faith taught them humility and they often refused honours and decorations. Humility and the search for truth is necessary in establishing scientific facts from myths and errors.

They described physical processes that had escaped the wisest men of antiquity. Our universities teach Aristotle, Plato and many other ancient pagan philosophers. They were undoubtedly smart, perhaps they were even cleverer than any of the present generation. Yet they never discovered the physics of gravity or were able to apply the principles of electromagnetism. Without a spiritual revelation the material characteristics of the physical world around them remained a mystery.

In our times a great mystery has been revealed. Yet when it comes to the miracle of our times -- the means to make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible -- the EU is silent and dumb. It wants its research to pursue dumb projects that have nothing to do with Man's purpose on this planet. Where did Schuman gain his insights? Is it a coincidence that he also studied the Bible on a daily basis? Is it not worth scientific study that if the greatest innovators and scientists of our age say they drew their inspiration from the Bible, then we should study whether this is coincidence or divine revelation? To dismiss the remarkable 'coincidence' is a sign of prejudice not science. It is a manifestation of the pervading religion of our times -- arrogant, materialistic scientism with its own atheistic dogmas and ideologies.

What did Schuman say about the philosophers he had studied at universities and which he continued to read in the original Latin and Greek? 'The Book of Proverbs in the Bible is richer in sense than all the vast tomes of philosophy.' Was it practical? Was it useful for a statesman and Prime Minister who had steered France through its greatest external post-war threats (Soviet expansion, an attempted Communist coup d'Etat and the resurgent German problem), resolved its financial crises (massive inflation combined with enormous deficits), and set the foundation for a new age of peace in Europe? 'My long experience allows me to confirm how correct it is,' he told his colleague Rene Lejeune.

If this phenomenon is thus proven, if the results are confirmed by the greatest scientists, including Schuman, shouldn't Biblical philosophy be studied? Shouldn't it be part of the European research programme?

Woaah! That would shock the advisers and experts of the FP8! Why? Because the scientific research programme of the EU is not scientific. There are No Go areas. Set by whom? An anti-religious minority. The entire programme it would seem is in the control of atheists or sympathizers who do not call them out, who ban any research into the study of any philosophy that is not atheistic or comes from pagan Greek philosophers. These experts apparently are cleverer than Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein and Schuman combined!

Pagans? OK! Christianity? You will get NO money, only ribald laughter. Jewish philosophy and the Hebrew Bible? Huh. Do not even ask the question! Yet there are proportionally more Jewish Nobel prize winners than any other race or religion.

Why does the EU exclude what it despisingly calls the 'religious' that is non-pagan philosophy from the techniques and requirements for scientific discovery? Prejudice. Totally unscientific. One in five of the around 800 Nobel Prize winners have Jewish blood. Yet Jews amount to only one in 500 of the world's population. They make a extraordinarily disproportionate, rich and varied contribution to the scientific culture of the planet.

They come from all countries of the world. Babies start with zero education. Surely there must be something in the Book and culture that the Jews have preserved in all these environments for three or four thousand years. Even in the USA, those of Jewish origin gain 27 percent of the Nobel prizes, (3 % of the population) Protestant origin 72 percent and Roman Catholic 1 percent (with a quarter of the population). Einstein had a passionate zeal for ancient Jewish Solomonic philosophy in his youth and interestingly his theory of relativity draws on concepts of time and space long exposed in ancient Jewish writings.

With the EU's outdated, false ideas of the war of science and religion, it is no wonder that Europe's research is entering an impasse of its own making, and that of its unenlightened political leaders.

The Research and Innovation Directorate General of the Commission is requesting opinions on their latest Framework Programme and a Green Paper. Here are the replies of the Schuman Project.

Consultation on the Green Paper –

"Towards a Common Strategic Framework for EU research and innovation funding"

The name of my organisation is

Schuman Project on the origin, purpose and future of the supranational European Community system and Robert Schuman's thought and action

Have you or your organisation received funding in the last three years from EU FP7, CIP or other EU programmes?

... None of the above

Have you or do you intend to submit a separate written response to this consultation

... Don't know

Working together to deliver on Europe 2020

1. How should the Common Strategic Framework make EU research and innovation more attractive and easy to access for participants? What is needed in addition to a single entry point with common IT tools, a one stop shop for support, a streamlined set of funding instruments covering the full innovation chain and further steps towards administrative simplification?

The European Commission's 2020 paper and the 2030 report have major flaws which are outlined in commentaries at http://www.schuman.info/2020-1.htm and /2020-2.htm plus /2030.htm dealing with the Gonzalez Report. These analyze the inadequacies of the Commission's position in relation to (1) democracy in a supranational Community of Europe (2) Energy security and the need for an Energy Community based on supranational democratic lines outlined by Robert Schuman and others in the past plus the need to set energy independence as a strategic goal. The criticism of the Gonzalez Report deals with (a) the lack of research in Security and Defence and in particular how the European Community system developed a security Community that 'made war not only unthinkable but materially impossible'. Those are the words of the Schuman Proposal of 9 May 1950. Schuman said his proposal was like 'a scientific experiment'. He had proved the theory and applied it. The result? Western Europe now has the longest period of peace in 2000+ years while neighbouring States still go to war. http://democracy.blogactiv.eu (b) the Energy problem and supply blackmail (c) democracy (d) the financial crisis and supranational solutions. The major question for the Commission is whether it wishes to get involved in the supranational question since it has avoided this research over the last decades. This is bizarre as the supranational system has produced the most beneficial outcomes in Europe's entire history