Celebrate! Rejoice! This year 2013 is the Year of European citizens! Europe’s Politburo, its Top Citizens, has declared it to be so, without asking anyone. Did you agree to it or even know about its multimillion euro budget?
Yet hypocritically the politicians have not allowed citizens their rights for more than 60 years. Take the Euro as an example. It is a system devised by incompetent politicians (or ignorant of Community democracy), run by incompetent politicians to the advantage of politicians. Surely citizenship means more than European passports — that is changing the colour and size of national passports.
Europe’s citizens have still no means to control the politicians, nor how they raise taxes and spend them. Most citizens therefore refuse to vote. The citizens have no say in the extraordinary number of treaties, compacts, Stability Funds and Tax Haven companies cooked up by and for politicians in the margins of the Community and too often totally outside it and in flagrant contradiction with Community and democratic principles.
If anyone should consider the word ‘hypocritical’ too strong, remember the Year of the Citizen celebrates the twenty years of the Maastricht Treaty. That ‘EU’ system precipitated a major rejection of Community principles. Democracy.
In its 1992 referendum Denmark with a turnout of 83 % said No to Maastricht. Again the Top Citizens moved in and told them that this was not acceptable. The Danes were told to vote again in 1993. Robert Schuman himself warned about such political counterfeiters. These political counterfeiters are now involved in counterfeit currency. The Gaullists declared names of recipients of the CAP ‘top secret’. Now all currency deals are done in the dead of night behind closed doors. We have secret companies in Luxembourg, declaring themselves above the law.
The Politburo who decided to celebrate this year of citizens for Europe’s 500 million citizens also decided in 2012 that they would not celebrate the sixty years of the Community institutions, Commission, Council, Parliament. The year 2012 was a NON Year. It took the Nobel Prize Committee to remind the Presidents of these institutions who eagerly took the prize in Oslo that 2012 should have been a major anniversary.
The European Founding Fathers set out the preconditions for a Community currency. This requires democratic legitimacy, not technocratic centralism. It should not be run by politicians. It requires a democratic means to root out political and statistical corruption.
Warnings were studiously ignored in the 1990s when the Euro was created.
Firstly, the political leaders — encouraged by de Gaulle’s ideas — have blocked the articles of the treaties and the Great Charter of 1951 (see http://www.schuman.info ). The Gaullist system ignored European citizens. Instead it made them pay for the Wine Lakes and the Meat Mountain scandals to buy farmer votes in France and elsewhere.
Secondly the post-Gaullist politicians decided to retain closed door Councils and the package deal system. It shut out all citizens from seeing or hearing about how European tax was being shared out among national politicians for their own pet projects. It rejected any elections to Community bodies — until the Court of Justice ruled they were acting illegally. The European parliamentary elections have NEVER been conducted according to Treaty specifications. The EP holds 27 national elections. They always favour of the national government politicians. That is a cheat.
Thirdly we now have the monetary equivalent of the Gaullist Wine Lake system. This time it is currency liquidity. The European Politburo is using THEIR Euro to paper over the cracks of the national currency abuses. This Euro was not originally designed for the corruptions of Greece, Spain and Portugal but for the corrupt practice in Italy, France and Germany.
The Gaullist Franco-German Axis powers were among the first to thumb their noses at the Growth and Stability Pact and ignore the judgements of the European Court of Justice when exposed.
How should a European Supranational Economic and Currency System be structured? The Founding Fathers insisted on democratic control for any currency — because it had to have:
- the people’s support in its creation;
- the democratic means to correct any systemic imperfections for countries, regions, businesses, workers and consumers, for tax systems and for migration policies;
- the powers to innovate fully across the Community and to consider global responsibilities;
- the powers to supervise what politicians might do;
- the means to root out corrupt practice.
For example the Economic and Social Committee should have elected representatives from European Business, Workers and Consumers associations. They should not be chosen from national groups at the whim of politicians for political favours back home. A really European Consultative Committee would supervise any plans for a currency. They would use their powers given them in the legislative process.
A properly elected Committee of Regions would supervise and actively be part of legislation about regional and national disparities and unemployment, as well as migrations issues. These bodies are still the play things of politicians, whether national or European. They are not independent bodies.
Instead the euro has been foisted on the public without the necessary democratic development repeated in all the treaties from that of Paris to Lisbon. Who created the euro? Politicians! But as any student of monetary economics knows the management of the money system should be run by an independent institution, supervised by another independent body, and should NEVER be put in the hands of politicians especially those who have shown themselves unable to balance their own budget or run the economy according to the rules.
