18 March, 2013

Debate20: Desperately seeking Dishonest or Illiterate Citizens for Commission Jobs

All normal, honest citizens who can read and follow the treaty laws should be excluded from future EU Commissions. That, in effect, is what the present Commission-politicians have recommended. All those high-paid Commission posts will be reserved for political friends, they say. Only Top Citizens (members of their parties) can become Commissioners. It is completely contrary to the letter and spirit of the Community Method.

How should the Commission be elected honestly and openly from the treaties? Europe's founding Charter of 1951 requires the free assent of Citizens. The principles are clear and were published in an open letter to all Member State Delegations and Commissioners in 2008.

Ironically this present outrageous proposal comes in the year that the politician-Commissioners self-proclaimed as the Year of the Citizen. That is typical of what Robert Schuman called a political counterfeit. Isn't every year the Year of the Citizen? And how can anyone proclaim that this year, 2013, is the Year of the Citizen before he or she has asked all the citizens?

When President Nixon and Henry Kissinger announced the Year of Europe for 1973, European politicians reacted with fury and disgust, asking 'Why are we being treated like children? Isn't Europe important enough to be considered priority every year?' It opened up a year of discord and then, exploitation in a Mid-East war, from which Europe has not yet recovered or drawn the lessons. It is a dangerous matter to proclaim a Year of the Citizen -- while at the same time stealthily withdrawing and stealing the rights of Citizens!

The action of the politicians today parallels the deceit of the Communist regimes that Schuman called 'hypocritical'. They called their Soviet-controlled regimes People's Democracies. In reality they were controlled by a similar party political Cartel. It was called a Politburo. Politicians now want to subvert the 'independent' and 'impartial' Commission into a Politburo, contrary to law, morality, historical experience and logic. The Community is based on universal or supranational values. They expose purloined political superiority of the party representative over the Citizen.

The Commission was set up to be the honest broker for Europeans, not a political secretariat. A special problem rises with the latest bit of antidemocratic fraud. The future Top Citizens to be parachuted into the Commission have to be extra-special.
  • They have to declare that they will be dishonest or
  • They have to maintain that they cannot read the Treaties which give the the job description and qualifications for Commissioners.
  • They can say they are 'mentally challenged when it comes to law'.
  • Failing that, they can use the old fall-back, 'I am only obeying orders,' when they are chosen by political party machines thinly disguised as governments of nations.
The present Top Citizens of the Commission are all parachuted in from the three major political party families. No one elected them. They want to retain political parachuting as voter confidence drops continuously. Even taking into account the burgeoning protest parties, more electors refuse to vote than vote for what they see as an increasingly corrupt system.

The present Commission were not even properly and legally chosen by the member governments acting for their nations. How is this clear? Because the governments -- all of them -- failed to advertise for the best candidate across their populations. Instead they chose a close political friend, or someone they owed a favour to, or even a disgraced politician or political enemy in their party they wanted to send far away to Brussels. In short all 'governments' chose a politician -- not as the treaties make clear, an experienced, independent, honest citizen from any profession, including a scientist, a lawyer, an engineer, a diplomat, an academic, an ex-entrepreneur or ex-trade-unionist.

The present Commissioners are acting in a cartel as Europe's unelected, unrepresentative and highly partisan Politburo. The Commissioners are supposed and required by law to be INDEPENDENT and take no instructions from national governments or parties. Yet 27 Commissioners sit in Brussels, each one selected by their Member State government.

That turns Europe into secretive internationalism, not democracy. They are supposed to be few in number and European, yet there is exactly one Commissioner per nominating government! This overstaffing was 'temporarily' introduced by the closed-door European Council in order to pressure the second Irish referendum to agree to the Lisbon Treaty.

The Community Method requires that the Commission is to be impartial and the opposite of a partisan. The Community Method requires open government and open procedures. Only if Commissioners are really impartial as just judges in a court of law can the citizen hope that a fair and just policy be agreed by enterprises, workers, consumers, individuals and nations.

Now the Commission-Politburo are asking all future candidates to ignore any Treaty articles dating back to the Community's foundation up to and including the politicians' own Lisbon Treaty. For instance Article 10 TEU says:
10 para 3. Every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen.
No more! From now on these politicians want the Commission to be exclusively controlled by the party cartel. They 'recommend' only party politicians can fill these posts -- for ever. Whoever asked them? The posts are open to all Citizens. That is the law. To act otherwise is outside the legal power of the politicians.

There is absolutely no article in the Treaties that says that the Commission posts are reserved for politicians. Nothing. Some articles are misinterpreted by politicians to try to say that politicians have powers to become Commissioners. A closer examination of these shows that in fact they say the opposite.

No politician is a super-citizen. The party cartel are therefore urgently seeking dishonest citizens or those who cannot read such articles and know nothing about the Community Method to pose their candidatures for the post of Commission President or Commissioners. The fallacies in the politicians' arguments and the illegality of their 'recommendation' will be examined in coming commentaries in this debate.