Britexit3 : What the UK must do BEFORE its referendum to leave the EU

FIRST Build Supranational Counter-Instruments!  (Part three of series)

What would be the nature of the instruments that would be needed for the negotiations? Here are some of the issues needing action BEFORE the UK Government sends its letter of withdrawal. The strategy requires implementation as soon as possible, even before the referendum.

If not the institutions may make implementation more and more difficult for serious negotiations. The eventual goal must be borne in mind.  The negotiation has to provide honest and fair solutions.

A bitter barter deal won’t cut it. It will be subject to endless renegotiations like the British rebate and the common fishing policy. Iceland has always maintained that sustainable fish stocks were the rock of its policy.

Not the EU. Secret political deals in Council ignored scientific assessments. Fish stocks were wiped out. Britain needs sustainability or it could be decimated by secret attacks at the Council of Ministers like the fish stocks. 

How can UK negotiate with Brussels when the institutions are not impartial? Take the Commission as an example. It has to act for 27 Member States plus the UK at the same time. Which side will it Commission favour since one member will leave and 27 will stay? How can it be impartial? Can the UK trust it? 

The Commission should provide an impartial overview of UK’s needs within Europe’s needs and interests. It doesn’t. How then can it be impartial when later it represents interests of States who are trying to displace UK and assert its supremacy?

In a recent outburst against the British Conservative group, President Jose Manuel Barroso said that unless they conformed to his idea of pro-European policy, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) would become the ‘first force’ in British politics for Europe.

Mr Cameron retorted the Commission is not respecting the UK’s government party and lecturing it. The strategy must counter the negative proclivity of the Commission thinking that it alone is right. It must do it before and not try to change the highly political Commission during negotiations.

Then there is the Council.  Britain has Europe’s strongest banking and financial sector – which many would like to see moved to the Continent. How can British multinationals be assured that they have fair and open access to the European Single Market without being coshed again?

The Council takes its instructions from the European Council of heads of governments. So what lessons are to be learned their about impartiality? After the 28 June 2013 summit, P.M. Cameron denounced as ‘unacceptable and ‘frustrating’ the one a.m. ambush on the UK rebate issue, supposedly finalized in February. “I just think this is no way for an organisation to conduct itself.” he added. 

The atmosphere could become far worse. The UK should not forget the de Gaulle’s NON. He refused Britain’s entry. Not once, but twice. He caused havoc to international negotiation. He did not discuss it in the Council of Ministers. Or his own Cabinet! Nor by formal letter or in an international conference but at a press conference! He ran the Community like it was his own backyard to exploit for agriculture and bribing politicians and voters.

Then there is the European Parliament. De Gaulle considered it a cipher. Today has gained powers with major financial powers of codecision from the Lisbon Treaty. This could wreck a carefully sculpted negotiation made with the Council. Anyone watching the debates in the EP can scarcely believe that it will take the negotiation lying down and with a benign smile. The Council’s Legal Service concluded that the Financial Transfer Tax was not legal. This did not seem to deter MEPs.

One political group declared in a press release:

Appealing to governments to stick to proposals for the introduction of a financial transaction tax (FTT), despite 'cynical' legal manoeuvring, Portuguese MEP Marisa Matias said the EU has a clear choice:
"Either we rescue politics and our society from financial markets or we can start to say goodbye to a common European project." 

The Court is another hidden danger. An appeal to a Court that favoured integrationist and ratchet federalism could years later strip off key decisions of the negotiation result. All hard, detailed work would be in vain if, years later, the Court reversed key aspects.

The EU has hardly improved democratically since de Gaulle’s day. The fruit of de Gaulle’s corrupt anti-democracy was the misdirection of Community funds into Wine Lakes, Meat Mountains, and Cheese Bergs. Millions of Europeans’ money were wasted on local politicians’ pet infrastructure projects of bridges and autoroutes that went nowhere. 

The entire budget system which takes taxpayers’ money and spends it as the political Politburo decides lacks transparency and control by taxpayers. Today we have airports that have no passengers and other much more expensive wastes of taxpayers’ money.

Even worse the politicians’ ill-founded Euro project (intended by many southern States to get Community funding for governmental mismanagement) costs around seven times the entire EU budget by its European Stability Mechanism ESM, European Finance and Stability Facility, EFSF and other dubious operations of the Fiscal Compact. It is often said that ‘EU is not prepared to make changes.’

It has continuously lost public trust as it has changed from the original idea of a democratic Community of equal partners, equal governments, equal enterprises, unions, consumers and equal individuals. Today it run by party political machines, who are lobbyists for who knows whom. It is a political club run in secret by a politburo in the closed-door European Council and the EuroGroup.
It chooses the Parliament president in secret.
It makes Foreign Policy in secret.
It names the European Central Bank president in secret.
It appoints the Commission president in secret from among its own, ignoring 98 percent of the European population.

But the UK has real Membership leverage to bring reform BEFORE the Exit Letter. How?  The second key aspect of the negotiation is the pre-reform of institutions to make them really democratic.  Only when the basic conditions are settled for a democratic discussion, should the UK government think about sending its official letter about leaving the EU.

Ukraine2: Stupid Europeans! Ukraine and Syria are part of Global Blackmail against you!

Ukraine and Syria are part of the global battle in which Europe is the target, victim and the source of blackmail revenue. Europeans have been behaving stupidly since the 1950s, when the Founding Fathers of the European Communities warned them of the dangers. They ignored the warnings.

What would you call it if you were getting oil at a dollar-and-a-half a barrel and the supplier was making such a profit from it they were living the life of Reilly? You might call it free trade. Both parties are happy.

What do you call it when the supplier raises the price FOUR times and also says that you have to change your foreign policy if you are to get anything at all?

That is blackmail. Stupid Europeans have been grinding their teeth and paying through the nose ever since the 1973 Oil Weapon was deployed.

It only works if the buyer --the Europeans -- think that they are incapable of producing energy themselves and must rely on suppliers who turn out to be a cartel or multiple cartels. With all their science and technology can't Europeans produce energy and electricity and maintain their independence from financial and political exploitation? Who is persuading them to stay on the oil drug? Maybe we should look where oil drug profits are going.

Yesterday it was the Middle East -- where Europe got entangled in Arab wars and hatreds. Today Europe is not free from that bowl of spiders. It has also got involved with the Russian energy cartel which works on the same principles of extortion. Now they are competing with each other. The Joker in the power game is shi'ite Iran which could try to block the Mid-East transport routes for oil and gas out of the Gulf. It can also play nuclear blackmail among the neighbouring States. Iran has been fighting in Syria. Qatar, a mere pimple on the east of Saudi Arabia, has the largest Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) operation and one of the biggest gas fields in the world. How will it get its gas delivered if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked? Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States have broken off diplomatic relations with Qatar over its 7.5 billion dollar support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and refuse to allow it a pipeline across to the Mediterranean.

What plans do the Saudis have if the Gulf is blocked? What if there is again trouble in Egypt and Suez? The Saudis too would like a pipeline to the Mediterranean. But what happens as these players approach the Mediterranean's eastern coast? They are met first with Jordan, run by the Hashemite family expelled from Mecca, an unstable State carved out of the Jewish Homeland Mandate territory, composed of former PLO refugees and now Syrians. Then the pipeline must find a port -- either (horrors!)  in Syria which was run by the pseudo shi'ite Alawite clan as a secular dictatorship or -- horror of horrors! --  Israel.
For all the players the competition is about who can leach the most blood from the Europeans before the whole world goes down the tubes.

Europe turned to Russian gas and oil as an alternative when it was still the Soviet Union. Now Russia, troubled by sunni terrorism at home has its own 'understanding' with Iran and nuclear exports.
Crimea is a vital warm-water naval base for Russia. (Its other ports are frozen in winter.) It gives it access to Syria. It is is also vital for control of the Mediterranean. In the early 1970s NATO was worried that the Mediterranean was becoming a Soviet lake. The USSR was the main arms supplier to the most populous Arab country there, Egypt. It also controlled the Suez canal. The Soviets had bases along the North Africa coast and in Syria.

Today Egypt has washed its hands of Obama's USA (that supported the Muslim Brotherhood and undermined Mubarek).  It is now getting arms supplies from Russia. The Saudis, who fiercely oppose the Muslim Brotherhood's way to establish Islamic global dominance, are changing their long-established policy towards USA. They are pumping tens of billions of dollars into the anti-Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian regime. For a century a religio-industrial compact allowed the USA, the world's prime capitalist, industrial power and a desert-bound religious sect in Saudi Arabia to dominate world affairs together. The world is now in flux.

In 1973 Europeans were getting oil at under two dollars a barrel from a wide variety of suppliers throughout the Middle East and North Africa. When Arab armies attacked Israel while the nation was fasting on the Yom Kippur holy day, the Arab suppliers, formed their own cartel. With their Oil Weapon, they placed a total embargo on Europe and the USA. They demanded that the West cease from henceforth to support Israel. They declared that any country that did not change its foreign policy would get zero oil. President Nixon considered declaring a state of war.

Thanks to the European Communities each with an energy component (Coal and Steel, Euratom and the 'Common Market') Europe was able to survive. It did not have a real common foreign policy nor did it create an energy policy (we still don't have one!). In 1959 the three Communities had formed an 'Inter-executive Group' to coordinate national energy policy. But General de Gaulle not only froze such initiatives he reversed France's Middle East policy for the sake of cheap Arab oil. That only encouraged the setup for blackmail.

In 1973 Europe was able, however, to buy oil on foreign markets and swap it between Member States in the nascent Single Market to help them survive. Denmark and Holland (who saw no reason not to support the Jewish State of Israel) imported mainly from the Middle East.  Faced with a total cut-off, they were in dire straits. Oil was shared with the other EC countries who imported from elsewhere.

In December 1973 the European Summit in Copenhagen was disrupted by an uninvited delegation of Arab oil exporters. They were determined to see that their Oil Weapon had maximum effect and no 'European solution' that favoured Israel and democracy in the Middle East was undertaken.
The effect of the oil embargo was devastating on the economies. Factories closed or went on short time. Motorways were bare of cars and vehicles. There was mass unemployment.

The Arab Oil Exporters quadrupled the price again in 1979! This was the Second Oil Shock. It exercised the ratchet mechanism to boost prices, not untypical of all cartels. The Economist opined on 22 December 1979:

"OPEC's interests are increasingly inimical to those of the west. ... Their underlying interests will push them into actions that harm the rest of the world. ... Unrest in the Middle East often takes the form of austere reformist Islam, yet further reducing production. .. OPEC's existence, as a device for producing a floor (for minimum prices) under past gains, while leaving 'free market' forces which are nothing of the kind to push prices further upwards, does indeed reflect the interests of its members. .. When people talk or write about OPEC, in this materialist age, they turn first to the tools of economics. But politics is also a necessary part of the solution to the problem. The west's governments have to muster political weapons both to achieve their aims at home and to constrain OPEC's power abroad."

Cartels benefit from time to time when prices fall. Why? They wipe out any alternative supplier. Energy infrastructure takes time and investment. When oil prices crash, these programmes are binned. As the same article in the Economist prescribed, Europe needs to pass on the full price of oil to the consumer. Even more, it needs to maintain high prices for the long-term, by tariffs if necessary, so that conservation will become a way of life and native energy-making inside Europe is common.

That requires a fully-fledged Energy Community with democratic institutions and powers. How can this be done? It could start by placing solar panels on all buildings, public and private. Europe needs a common, intelligent grid. It could stop using tarmac for roads and replace them with safe, solar panels made out of reinforced glass. What's glass made of? Sand and we have plenty of that! Europe could thus become a major exporter of electricity to the world! I am sure our scientists can come up with many technologies if given half a chance. Freedom of thought is the great asset of European culture. Other nations with lots of sand seem in a cultural timewarp.

An Energy Community as a new SUPRANATIONAL institution would help resolve the dilemma over Ukraine. About 16 percent of Europe's gas comes via Ukraine. It could immediately become a member. But it requires major revision of the present EU to make it democratic according to the treaties.

It took nearly two decades for the oil price to fall to anywhere near 'free market' levels. That was due to squabble among the Arab OPEC members and world competition but little effort was made by Europeans to gain energy independence to avoid future blackmail. The Shah of Iran one of the most enthusiastic proponents for higher oil prices was replaced in 1979-80 by the shi'ite leader ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran promptly got into a war with secularist Iraq. The sunnis were not to happy about the revolutionary terrorism of the shi'ites but both were in agreement of squeezing the Western lemon till the pips cracked.

So what did stupid Europe get? More blackmail by the cartel! By 1999 oil prices had fallen to around 9 dollars a barrel. The Economist magazine with its extensive intelligence and expertise forecast a long-term price of FIVE dollars a barrel. It was not alone. Western oil companies like BP and Shell said the same thing. But they were no longer in control of the game, or the taps. The Arab oil suppliers had nationalized the oil supplies, so many western companies were merely helpers and exporters of this Arab oil. The guys who could turn the taps off at will were at OPEC. When prices rose, they cut off supplies so that oil prices stayed high and rose higher. The others like the subservient western oil companies were left with their own cartels on downstream operations and financial operations. The oil-producers recycled their profits using short-term financial instruments like derivatives or bonds. At compound interest the petro-profits must now amount to a financial bubble multiple times the size of the real economy. (The US Treasury long ago identified five cartels operating in the oil industry at various chokepoints. Today we seem to have more.)

So what happened with the new century? The price tripled immediately in 2000. It then took a rocket trajectory upwards. This was the THIRD oil shock. Oil went from nine dollars to 147 dollars a barrel -- an increase 1633 per cent! At that price the oil exporter were extracting around 10 percent or more of world GDP for a product worth a couple of dollars in a free market. The International Energy Agency shows this THIRD oil shock is the most serious one. Oil prices have never been higher in real terms since the modern oil industry began in 1859. No wonder the EU is in the economic doldrums.

It is not only this generation of politicians that are acting stupidly. Immediately after the initiation of the Community system, politicians went into a nationalist relapse. International cartels pick off nation States like minnows! By not acting for decades Europeans have compound interest on their stupidity. Europe is still sleep-walking in a dreamland with its plans for 2020 and 2030.

Today  the implications of this ignorance has moved from amber Stupid to Red DANGER.

The Russian take-over and military invasion of Crimea is part of Russia's strategy to survive its own uncertain future. Russians are a highly educated people. They are capable of great achievements. But hindered by their own stupid ideologies, from atheistic Marxism to the present Putinism, they have been unable to compete with the West. Dimitry Medvedev wanted to turn Russia into a high tech society -- but that requires a free society with open democracy. Instead their economy and all political power is based on the export of gas and oil.

Putin knows the implications full well. He is an expert in oil and gas prices. His whole policy is based on these strategic raw materials. Properly applied these raw materials can lever Russia back to great power status after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He called it the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe' of the last century. It was a geopolitical disaster, not a communist one. Russia was a centre of a world ideology -- communism. It gave the USSR world clout. Putin was the clever KGB officer that thought up the Plan B to restore Russia's fortunes. He wants to control not only Crimea, but access of non-Russian oil and gas that drives the world economy.

The new key for Russia as a world power is not ideology but energy. Today the EU imports more than half its energy with a third of its gas and oil coming from Russia. Some countries are 90 percent dependent on Russia. Germany is a main customer.

As a KGB officer in Germany he was well aware of Europe's dependency on imported oil and gas. In his time of secret service office, the 1980s, a major trans-Atlantic row broke out between the USA and Europe about financing Russian pipelines. It nearly tore NATO apart. Mrs Thatcher joined with her French and German colleagues and opposed Ronald Reagan. The Soviet pipeline row became one of the biggest political crises of the West since WW2. (See my book, Russia and the danger for the European Union, pp88ff second edition, published in 2000 and first edition 1995. It proposes a pan-European Energy Community that would drive the democratisation of both the European Community members and the Former Soviet Union and its former satellite States.)

Why did Putin act now? He is in a race against time. Previously Russia had pledged its great support for the international rule of law. Now he has permanently lost any claim to that. The population of Crimea may be pro-Russian. There may be unsavoury characters in Kyiv. Khrushchev, acting as the Dictator of the Proletariat, may have acted foolishly to declare Crimea Ukrainian. But to move in Russian troops, to take-over all the communications, to force a referendum without a debate and then sign it off as a legal act in the Kremlin won him the condemnation of all other countries as a patent lack of legitimacy. Putin retorted that NATO had also broken its promises not to expand. The colour of the Russian policy is clear from the fact that it took over a gas plant outside the area of Crimea.

Acting like a bandit State is a severe loss to Russia's prestige -- after the Sochi Olympic games that won it acclaim. Why did he do it? He faced open hostility with the Saudis over the outcome in Syria, even threats of terrorism at Sochi. Instead Putin moved his armed forces to protect Sochi from terrorism. It turned out (coincidently?) to be very handy for taking over Crimea.

The rapid and smooth turn of events that caught the west by surprise indicate strategic planning. Without the exorbitant price that Europeans are paying for its gas, Russian economy would crash, its people starve. The Russian State and its budget depends on the viability of the huge energy monopoly, Gazprom. For President Vladmir Putin it is now a race against time to save his country. Two factors threaten Russia's future: price and the bust-up of a cartel operation.

Russia fixed its gas price in parallel with the oil market. Why? This was the highest price Russia could get. When the Netherlands was under total oil embargo, it found it had huge gas deposits. So taking a leaf from OPEC, it set the price as high as it could to be able to survive. Russia merely copied this ploy, although there is no good reason why European consumers should support another cartel dictating prices.

There is no real free market in oil and gas. It is run by numerous cartels. This has been going on for more than a century. In the 1950's the US Treasury identified FIVE cartels that worked in conjunction to control high prices to the customers. They ranged from exploration cartel, to down stream retailing and we can now add a financial cartel that recycles vast amounts of oil and gas profits through banks and derivatives that are multiple size of the 'real economy'. You can control the price by stopping research, drilling, turning off the oil taps, creating refining bottlenecks or applying the massive oil profits to control the economy. Some analysts estimate that Goldman-Sachs boosted the price of oil by 30 dollars a barrel before the 2008 crash.

Russia's gas price is now threatened by shale gas. The USA is producing massive quantities and this has hugely cut price of gas. If Europe produces its own gas in such quantities in a free market or imports gas from the USA -- bang goes the Russian-based gas cartel. Today European industries pay more than twice as much for electricity as the USA, and pay four times the price for gas, according to BusinessEurope, the companies lobby group! That is the measure of a cartel vampire.

US President Obama wanted to declare red lines over the dubious origin of poison-gas weapons in Syria. However Putin took his 'smart pills' and made Obama and the State Department with its close links to Saudi oil look stupid. The greatest scandal is religious persecution and ethnicide that is happening by the invaders. Syria used to have vibrant Christian communities since the time of Christ. The Jews, who were there even longer, preserving precious manuscripts over many centuries, have now disappeared.

Meanwhile the massacres of Christians in Syria go unreported by the West. Why is the media muted? The destabilization of all countries in the eastern Mediterranean is only part of a global power game. The revolutionary Islamists who want to 'free Syria' behead Christians and those who are unable to pay the ransom after kidnapping. Christians who don't convert or agree to become dhimmis (subject peoples) and pay the dhimmi taxes are treated in the same way.

The West's leaders are numbed into silence at Islamist atrocities by decades of blackmail. They need to start taking anti-stupid pills.

Britexit2: How to avoid poisonous myths and a calamity after UK's Referendum

If a UK Referendum to leave the EU succeeded, Britain would have to deal with a complex, new set of negotiations. They would have to deal both with facts of commerce and economy but also with myths that would reinforce treating the UK as an unreliable partner. Material loss from a poor negotiating stance would only be part of the story. If Britain was left with an unfounded reputation as a wrecker and trouble-maker it would be far worse for its future.

Britain’s entry negotiations into the three European Communities (Coal and Steel, ‘Common Market’ and Euratom) were not happy. High rancour was engendered by de Gaulle’s veto in 1962. It has coloured subsequent relations by creating great suspicion among the British of French and its partners’ intentions.

Europeans are still being fooled by Gaullist propaganda and myths. On the French side, many have imbibed Gaullist propaganda for generations. And not only the French. De Gaulle tried to destroy the Community system yet as recently as 2013 Charles de Gaulle received a jubilee triumph. It was if the Gaullist idea of the Franco-German axis was the opposite of his concession of failure. The real Gaullist policy was to annex parts of Germany. He advocated this policy during the war and right up to the moment he seized power and several years later. The Franco-German motor is his myth.

The Community idea involves the opposite to a bi-national motor. Cooking up deals in private is the opposite to open democracy. The Community does not involve fooling the public by fraudulent Beef Mountain, Wine Lakes and useless infrastructure projects to buy local votes. It calls for real, equal partnership and solidarity of all Member States and all sections of society in supranational democracy. The present euro is the latest anti-European Gaullist fraud.

De Gaulle opposed pro-Europeans and above all Schuman’s ideas for peace and prosperity. He had long advocated French annexation of parts of today’s Germany such as the Saarland and other territories up to the Rhine river. He wanted the Ruhr to be placed under French and Allied control.That would make France and in particular, Charles de Gaulle the new emperor of the Continent. There were enormous rows with the Americans and the British who saw de Gaulle as a man of the nineteenth century. Indeed his nationalist policy was based on the past not the future.

De Gaulle only changed this policy after he failed to stop the establishment of the German government in Bonn and the operation of the three European Communities. He called the Federal Republic of Germany the Fourth Reich.

He only changed his mind in 1963 — more than a decade after the supranational Community system had begun. It was after a decade and a half of positive German experience of democracy that started with votes in the Laender.

When he seized power in 1957, pro-European parties such as the MRP and the Socialists, made an agreement that they would support de Gaulle’s temporary powers to solve the Algerian crisis as long as he did not attack the Community idea, vocally or in politics. He reneged on that. His policy of boycott of the institutions typified by the empty chair in the Council of Ministers and his attempt to turn an independent European Commission into a political secretariat (the Fouchet Plan) met with resistance. When he ruled out any future of the Community system in May 1962 by saying ‘There can be no other Europe than the Europe of Nation States,’ he was opposed by French Europeans and those in other States. The MRP ministers in his government resigned.

So if de Gaulle fooled most of the European people and still does, how can Britain create a better impression and reputation once the Referendum affirms that Britain should leave the EU?

The blueprint of the ‘Supra-Solution’
The proposed solution (which we will call the Supra-Solution) will not only deal with such often forgotten complications of the Communities but also enable the negotiations to boost British trade with the EU and the world. It will safeguard this solution against any complications from the Scottish referendum (or possible Welsh or N. Irish ones). The proposed blueprint for the exit will ensure that the UK is not placed in a weak negotiating position that allows the remainder of the EU to blackmail it. This occurred in the 1972 Heath negotiation. In 1961 the Macmillan application was subject to unilateral and humiliating rebuffs.
The plan’s outcome will leave both the EU and the UK stronger.

Requirements
Britain’s negotiations must comprise five strands

1. Moral: The UK needs to tackle the negotiation from a high moral ground. The strategy must be adequately prepared before negotiations.

2. Economic: The UK should ensure that it does not lose out economically both during negotiation and afterwards. The potential for providing for positive outcomes both for the UK and the EU requires careful preparation, implementation of successive stages and follow-through to the final operation.

3. Political: The negotiation should leave the UK with friendly relationships across Europe and elsewhere.

4. Social. It must maintain human rights of all British citizens and associations and their political voice in the negotiations according to best social teaching of the common good.  Negotiations cannot be top down like Bismarck but need to integrate society’s various interests. Even a referendum for exit does not mean that the rights of referendum minorities can be trampled on. The solution must bring social justice for all.

5. Legal: How can negotiations take place without being tied in legal knots? Will the result be legally permanent? The competence of and for the EU’s competence (Kompetenz-Kompetenz) lies with governments or more specifically national sovereignty.
It needs to have a smooth negotiation process so not to cause disruptions to the economy and legal/social order. It also has to be future-proof.  It therefore needs to set up long-term instruments for future relations with the EU Member States, (MS) and Brussels.

Those instruments are not only the key to Britain’s future after the Referendum but also for the other Member States of the EU.

Euro11: Ombudsman condemns European Council cover-up on legality of euro's Fiscal Compact

Maladministration on a grand scale! Who controls multi-billion funds that dwarf the EU’s annual budget by three or four times? Who ultimately controls the multi-trillion stranglehold that the Brussels institutions have on the budgets of national governments in the EU?  Who controls the Bank? Why are such mega projects excluded from Court action for fraud and crimes that the euro crises have already exposed across the whole euro zone?

If you thought some fiddling by MEPs or even small States like Greece, Portugal, Cyprus or Ireland was of concern, take a stiff coffee before reading on.

The European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has condemned the European Council and its secretariat in the Council of Ministers of maladministration for a cover-up and refusal to provide promptly legal information for public discussion on the  Fiscal Compact Treaty controlling Europe’s multi-trillion euro economy. The documents, essential for a proper democratic debate and consultation were requested two years ago in January 2012.

In spite of the Ombudsman’s ruling, the documents in question have still not been provided.

The Fiscal Compact is an international treaty and has not been signed by two Member States. Both the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom refused. Its relationship to the EU justice system is therefore questionable. For the European Court to act all Member States must have the measures agreed by democratic vote in a European treaty of all Member States. Then all the European institutions have their right to discuss and amend the treaty. The Council, Parliament, Consultative Committees all elected by democratic vote have to have their imput and rights on individual decisions and measures undertaken. The Commission should have clear independence. It should not be treated like a skivvy or slave of the Council of Ministers. It is not their Secretariat! Then the European Court of the EU can make its judgements when their is a complaint from any citizen, organization or State.

Signatories of an international treaty conversely, for example, NATO or the Council of Europe, cannot ask the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg to make judgements for them.

So what is the status of the Fiscal Compact?

It spends nearly half of its many pages with a Preamble with many indents or tear-jerking appeals of its Europeanness: Conscious of this, Desiring that, Recalling this that and the other of European goals and even institutions. The truth is it is not a part of the European Union or the Community. It is a separate international treaty, fixed up by some politicians in a fix. They have used all the lawyers’ skills and deceits to give a facade that it is part of the European legal system, as best they can. But they can’t. There are two members missing and only treaties inside the Community system embracing all members are EU legal treaties.

How can outraged European citizens or duped Member States appeal if other States do not comply with the Compact’s strictures? What can anyone do if some politicians treat the other States as financial patsies? That is just what the monetary crises in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland and others are all about. The public’s conclusion is obvious. Some politicians are not honest, nor do they act honestly with the people’s money. Money deranges their judgement. They treat it as a slush fund to dole out to people they hope will vote for them. If they can’t get away with it at home or run out of money they tap into the prosperous countries that keep their books in order and have a surplus.

The full title of the Fiscal Compact is Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. It tries to add additional bandages on the badly conceived and crisis-ridden Euro project.

The euro was made by politicians for politicians, hoping they would get away on a European scale with overspending and hidden financing they had all been doing since the 1970s. Then surprise, surprise, the public found out that the politicians cooked the books, not only in Greece but practically everywhere. In a commercial company that sort of duplicity and malpractice would have been considered criminal. But politicians say it is normal for them. They are only dealing with public money!

No wonder that the politicians’ main scam, the Euro, has experienced only 7 or 8 years of stability and convergent national bond interest rates.  That is a blink of an eye in the lifetime of a solid, stable currency. Why did interest rates explode again? It does not have solid monetary or democratic foundations.

The euro’s worth has fallen to a quarter or  fifth of what its value should be worth against stable stores of value. Its conception and management by the secretive EuroGroup, which is not an institution of the EU, flies in the face of any real Community democracy. A Community currency requires Community democratic control.

The other bandages that the Council politicians concocted in the privacy of their meetings, the European Stability Mechanism and the European Finance and Stability Facility with half a trillion euro and its Mechanism that leverages a few more billion from the EU budget. This created a company in Luxembourg to draw billions of loans and liabilities from international financial markets. Who is this money for? Why, the same States that are already seen as betraying the public’s trust in cooking the statistics and overspending their budgets. In other words the taxpayers will have to pay for any mismanagement in these operations too.

And what do we find in these treaties? Surprise, suprise! We find an assurance by the same politicians that anyone involved in these multi-billion operations, when seen to be obviously guilty of malpractice, is offered total legal immunity from prosecution!

Not only that no document will be available for public scrutiny. No document will be able to be controlled and judged by any court of law whatsoever! This is what the relevant article of the ESM says about its staff and their paper trail:

“ARTICLE 35
Immunities of persons
1. In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents. ”

Who are the governors? Why, the politicians! That is a paradise for crooks and crooked practice. It is an invitation to mega crisis.

The Background with my last commentary on this case can be found at Euro10.
The Ombudsman’s judgement on the Fiscal Compact cover-up can be found at
http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/decision.faces/en/53191/html.bookmark

Britexit1: If Britain exits the EU, where will it end for the UK, for the EU and the world?

What will be the repercussions if UK citizens vote to leave the EU? This series of commentaries, Britexit, deals with various aspects of problem. First some major economic implications and what you are not being told by dishonest bureaucrats and ignorant or willful politicians.

The EU is the world’s largest trading unit. Its GDP represents 23.2 percent of world GDP. This is far bigger than the USA. In 2012 EU-28 had a combined GDP of $16.72 Trillion. The USA was then $15.68Trillion. The UK has a GDP of some $2.44Trillion, rather small in comparison. India’s GDP is $1.62Trillion.
These figures come from the World Bank given in Wikipedia.

Whatever may be said about China’s economy, it should be recalled that EU is twice the size of China’s GDP which is at $8.36Trillion.

In global terms the UK has 3.5% of world GDP.

That is relatively small but changes to the present structure, if not handled with care, could cause serious global disruptions. Major transatlantic trade negotiations with the USA are under way to create a free trade area. What if the UK pulls out of the EU? How can these trade vectors continue to Britain’s advantage? The EU says that each family budget will gain 500 euros at the end of the negotiations. Will Britons lose out? Will it have enough political beef to conduct its own negotiations to at least the same level of success?

The great danger is that EU renegotiation of the UK might well cause major disruption to world trade and international legal agreements, unless far-sighted measures are undertaken to make the process as smooth and as problem-free as possible.

How can UK avoid looming challenges elsewhere? Take a look inside the UK. Two referendums are on the books, one for membership of the EU, the other in Scotland for independence from the UK. Others might come fast and furious after this, once the voters have a taste for referendums as a means to redress the balance against unpopular politicians who seem to ignore public opinion.

British exit from the EU might exacerbate national tensions within the United Kingdom. Will Britain break up? The UK might be reduced to separate regional nations of England, Wales and N. Ireland. The Scottish government has declared it wishes to remain inside the EU. No solution for Whitehall that does not take into account the possibility of an independent Scotland remaining inside the EU (or for that matter an independent Wales, and N Ireland separately or as a single entity) is acceptable.

While the British government in London’s Whitehall might have to calm fears at home, it needs also to pour oil on troubled waters with Brussels. No solution that leaves Britain and the EU as antagonistic forces after negotiation can be judged successful. How can peace and harmony be assured? Articles 49 and 50 on entry and exit of the EU in one of the two Lisbon Treaties are full of traps and complications to wreck the unwary. (These can be discussed later. )

The first vital priority for both British politicians, bureaucrats and the public is to get informed about what the European Community is and what the European Union is and what it isn’t.


Major technical and legal problems for exit are too often ignored. The European system that Britain entered in 1973 did not include the European Union (EU). The latter is an expansion, and a grossly deformed and distorted one at that, of just one of three European Communities, the European Economic Community or Customs Union. It came with the Maastricht Treaty that was rejected by the Danish electorate. (It had to vote again but many Member States did not even get that chance of one referendum.)

The very first principle of the supranational Community system is that the publicly expressed opinion on the constitution and exercise of powers is sovereign. Politicians buried that document they all signed up to in the French Foreign Ministry archives for half a century! What sauce! Robert Schuman‘s main aim was to create a peace-enhancing European economy. He provided the means for a thorough-going Democracy. Charles de Gaulle who seized power in France in 1957 put that on ice but did not destroy the potential to construct real European democracy.

The supranational Community system was first blocked by de Gaulle with his policy of wrecking it by stealth then a policy of the empty chair (boycott), followed by closed-door arm-twisting of small States, until the Council of Ministers became his poodle. Today too many government leaders act like ‘little Gaullists’ as they cut ‘package deals’ for themselves behind closed doors without public approval or knowledge.

The British still feel riled by Continental attitudes typified by de Gaulle looking down his long nose and saying ‘NON’ to the UK, very undiplomaticly at a press conference as a minor question of French policy. Today’s politicians have yet to reform the anti-democratic measure Europeans were forced to swallow at that time with its wine lakes, beef and butter bergs as de Gaulle and other national leaders took European taxpayers money to subsidize their own national policies. The Euro is the latest scam by nationalist politicians who corrupt decent politics and debase money as a store of value.

Britain’s policy was also typified by ignorance and antagonism by its bureaucrats in London, Whitehall. (That is not unusual for bureaucrats. The French ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, were among Schuman’s greatest opponents. Both were happier with the status quo, treating all other Europeans as foreigners to be exploited for the national interest that they, the bureaucrats, defined.) Schuman’s democracy should give free voice to European industry, workers and consumers, to regions and national parliaments.

Whitehall has shown its profound ignorance about the European Community system in the past, especially when it comes to referendums.

In June 1975 the voters were asked:

Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (Common Market)?

That borders on criminal neglect. What catastrophic ignorance! Or was it Soviet-style deception and disinformation? Whitehall civil servants are supposed to be intelligent and well-educated.

The Common Market was just ONE of THREE Communities that the UK was a member of. The UK joined all THREE in 1973! The Coal and Steel Community, Euratom and the Economic Community. The latter is called in UK the ‘Common Market’ as if it were the place to buy vegetables with soil still attached.

If Whitehall had told the truth (then and now) they would have to explain how the Community system was supposed to work and why there were THREE. And vitally politicians and civil servants would have to discuss European Democracy and the Gaullist corruption of it. That would expose to all Europeans (not just the British)  the wholesale scam of the Council of Ministers closed door deals. At this time the Labour government boycotted the European Parliament as a totally undemocratic institution that de Gaulle had sidelined with his poodle-powers.

In 2002 politicians decided — without any referendum even whispered or suggested — not to renew the founding Treaty of Paris that defines the principles of European democracy. This is one reason that the European iron and steel industry has suffered spectacular decline. Where is European Energy policy? Where is Europe’s defence against foreign threats to its existence?

Today in 2014 a similar SHOCKING level of ignorance is apparent in the proposed question for the upcoming UK referendum — even after it had been corrected by the Watchdog Electoral Commission:

“Should the UK remain a member of the European Union?“

To thoroughly leave the system, the UK must also leave the remaining Community, Euratom. It is quite separate from the European Union. The UK could possibly leave the EU. Then the UK will find itself an uncomfortable reality. The UK will still find that it has membership of Council of Ministers. It will be obliged to be represented in other bodies such as the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee, the Court of Auditors and the Court of Justice. (Euratom and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) never had the European Council as an official institution.)

Only recently the UK reaffirmed its membership in Euratom. The last modifications to the ECSC and Euratom treaties were made in the Treaty of Nice of 2001 for purposes of enlargement. Some protocols of the Lisbon Treaty (rejected by referendums when it was called the Constitutional Treaty!) were added to the Euratom treaty and thus the UK confirmed Euratom as an active treaty. Article 208 says it is ‘concluded for an unlimited period.’

British politicians, bureaucrats and the British public need to get the facts — not to mention all those in Brussels who are living myths!

How can UK exit both the EU and Euratom too? Keep reading these commentaries regularly and find out! Check out the facts on Schuman Project website !

Eretz4: The EU corruptly underwrites the Palestinian Mafia

Mafias and criminal gangs often demand of their young, would-be adherents commit an act of theft, violence or even murder. Mafias represent the opposite to civilized society because they rule by violence and by a central violent leadership.

So what should we expect from the European Union whose foreign policy is supposed to encourage Human Rights and the Rule of Law? It should denounce murders. It should expose any operation that glorifies murder as an entrance ticket to Mafia power. Instead the EU is acting exactly in opposite way. It is acting as the scared victim of violence that cannot or will not speak out against injustice and crime.

After vicious arm-twisting by the US Obama administration, the Israelis recently released 26 murderers. Why did the Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Hussein Obama want a democracy to distort and interfere with the judgements its Courts of Justice? Because the Arab Palestinians refused to talk peace with the Israelis and set pre-conditions. To anyone with a couple of brain cells, that should signal a corrupt peace-process.

Why should genuine peace-seekers set pre-conditions? What sort of pre-condition is 'Get my gang of convicted murderers out of prison first!'?

Did the European Union denounce this travesty to disrupt court-based justice? Not at all! Would any European State or its politicians release convicted murderers in similar circumstances?

What do normal civilized European States do when murderers are released from jail? Two things. They try to rehabilitate them but make sure that the population in general is protected from further crime and violence.
What does a Mafia do? It promotes them. What does the Arab Palestinian Authority do when 26 convicted murderers are released? What would YOU do if you had to decide on what to do with

• murderers who dressed as women to kill the female driver who took Arabs to work,
• murderers who threw grenades, set off bombs and helped organize other deaths
• murderer of a man caring for flowers in his greenhouse,
• murderers who stabbed passengers on buses,
• murderers who kidnapped and killed hikers
• murderers who attacked a car and killed its passengers when it entered their village,
• an axe-murderer who killed a 79-year old man reading a book in a park
• murderers who stabbed an orchard-owner with a knife and a pair of pruning shears,
• a murderer who killed a French woman tourist in a restaurant where he worked,
• a member of a gang implicated in the terrorist murder at the holy site of Machpellah cave, the burial place of Abraham, Sarah and Jacob, the patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel. ????

So what did the Arab Palestinian Administration do? The unelected president of the PA Abbas/ Abu Mazen called the released murderers 'HEROES'!! He celebrated with fireworks. Then he took action.

What?
He divided up the the murderers into two groups. The more vicious killers had been given sentences of more than 25 years by the Courts. Abbas gave all of them 50,000 dollars. That's not all. They were given high paying jobs. They had the choice of becoming Deputy Minister in one of the many Palestinian ministries. Or if they were especially vicious killers they were given the rank of major general in the army also with a fat salary. Those Palestinian terrorists who were sentenced to 15 to 25 years were given the position of Deputy Director at the ministries or a military rank of brigadier general.

'The prisoners are part of our fighters and therefore deserve money,' said the Palestinian Authority. Ahem. Whose money would that be?

How does the European Union recruit its Directors general? Do they look for people who were convicted of murder? Is that the critical condition?

Clearly the PLO want the convicted  murderers -- now generals or policy-makers -- to train other young people to murder other innocent citizens. Isn't this terror game clear to everyone? On recent figures the PA has 75,000 officials and pensioners --twice the number of the EU's officials!

When asked repeatedly, the Commission refused to give any comment at all on this outrage. Why is the EU acting like a scared dog?

The answer is oil. The EU will grind to a halt if the Arabs and OPEC cut off petroleum supplies. They already did this in the 1970s when an oil embargo was placed on all its nations with total embargo on the Netherlands and Denmark. The oil-exporters applied the Oil Weapon to get  Europe to change its foreign policy towards Israel. Blackmail.

The exorbitant profits between the minimal cost of collecting from oil wells, now compounded over forty years amounts to a Money Weapon. It is the source of great global instability. 

The only way Europe can free itself is to become independent in its energy production. Part of the illegal, closed-door deal was that Europe would financially support the so-called Palestinians who mysteriously sprang into existence in 1964. The EU has spent billions on the 'Palestinians' without result whether under Hamas or Fatah. Three out of four 'Palestinians' say the whole administration is corrupt. It doesn't take a genius to work that out. Apparently the EU -- the wealthiest grouping in the world with 500 million brainy citizens -- has no one up to the job.

A report to be published soon says that the 'Palestinians' have squandered some TWO BILLION of EU aid -- lost without proper trace. Why should the hard-pressed European taxpayer put up with it?

So scared is the EU that it only denounces Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. Its EU foreign policy chief denounces the building of garages, kindergarten and homes in Israel's capital Jerusalem. Some 1100 international jurists and professors of law from around the world have written to the EU saying that Israel has every right according to international law to build there and in Judea and Samaria. Instead the misnamed European External Action Service takes a politically prejudiced view that politics trumps international law.

Where is Europe - the defender of Human Rights? Where is the defender of the Rule of Law?

Jihad8: Before acting 'like a monkey with a grenade,' EU should get facts straight on Syrian poison gas attacks

Why is the United States rushing to take military action in Syria BEFORE it has ascertained the facts from the United Nations chemical warfare specialists? The US alleges that the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has exploded chemical weapons with poison gas just a few kms east of Damascus at Ghouta in disputed suburbs of Jobar, Zamalka and Ein Tarma and possibly several others to the south. What will more deaths by US missiles achieve among those like al Nusra/Qaeda who say they 'love death more than life'?

There is no doubt, said US Vice-President Biden, that the Assad regime was responsible. They have the weapons and the means to deliver them, he said. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said that the US military was ‘ready’ to attack. ‘I think the intelligence will conclude that it wasn’t the rebels who used it, and there will probably be pretty good intelligence to show that the Syria government was responsible,’ he told the BBC. This conclusion was reached before the UN inspectors were given safe passage to view the site and collect materials. Secretary of State Kerry said on Monday 26 August that there was ‘undeniable’ evidence of a large-scale chemical weapons attack on several towns in the Ghouta area. U.S. intelligence, he said, strongly points to Assad’s government as the guilty party. Even if they have intercept correspondence, does this mean that only one side is responsible for poison gas? What are the facts?

1. The timing is suspicious. This latest chemical attack took place on Wednesday 21 August at the time when UN chemical warfare experts had just arrived there to investigate another alleged chemical attack dating back to March. Assad had agreed to talks with rebels. Now they are off. That does not appear to be to Assad’s benefit. The USA said military action was needed immediately. Then Assad agreed to open up the path for inspectors on the 21 August attack. This did not change US policy. The US and UK do not appear to want the results of the UN inspectors investigations.

2. The alleged culprit is dubious. Carla Del Ponte, member of the UN investigating panel on Syrian war crimes, former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, uncovered evidence from casualties and medical staff pointing to ‘strong, concrete suspicions‘ that the rebels, not Assad, were responsible for this March attack. ‘This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.’ A White House spokesman for President Obama disagreed. He said it was likely that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, not the rebels, were behind any chemical weapons use. After this debunking by UN Senior investigator Carla Del Ponte, the US ceased its insistence on a military attack as response to the loss of life by the poison gas attack.

3. Both sides have chemical arms. Assad’s ambassador told the UN in July that rebels had captured chemical stock. Russia supplied the UN with 80 pages of evidence that can be analyzed. Videos show the Free Syria Army using sarin or poison gas and Saudi chemicals uncovered earlier at Jabar by Assad forces.

4. Neither side are Sunday school teachers. They cheat, lie, and ruthlessly kill opponents. Christians are being crushed. The rebels include foreign jihadis, funded heavily from the Sunni oil States. EU-banned terrorists such as Lebanon’s HezbAllah and Iranian forces like the Revolutionary Guards help Assad while vicious, infidel-hating al-Qaeda groups like Jabhat al-Nusra lead the rebels. Qataris have poured some 3 billions dollars to aid the rebels and Saudi Arabia has supplied arms. The Saudis are now the biggest funder of the rebels. The Assad regime is non-sectarian and various religions have cohabited in Syria.

5. The haste is uncalled for. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin warned the West against acting like a ‘monkey with a hand grenade.’ The Russians also warn against action that has no known forensic evidence to condemn the alleged perpetrator and without UN Security Council accord.

6. Facts are weak. Estimates of fatalities at Ghutta are uncertain. They range from 100 to 1300 people. Why such a hugely uncertain body count? Where are the bodies buried? Russian Foreign Minister Lazrov criticized US impetuosity and scorn for facts: ‘They cannot produce evidence, but keep on saying that the ‘red line’ has been crossed and they cannot wait any longer,’ he said Monday, 26 August. Russian State TV has shown Syrian videos of actors playing the part of victims, being daubed with blood, before shots were taken of the ‘dead’.

7. The timing is politically suspicious. The outcome of this latest chemical weapon attack was the postponement of peace talks between Assad and the mixed-bag ‘Free Syrian Army’. It plays into the hand of the hardliners, paid for by Qataris and other oil-rich Sunnis who want to use every means to remove Assad and his clique. ‘No compromise’ plays into the hand of violent extreme jihadis.

8. The outcome could be catastrophic for Europe. The EU is the world’s largest economic power. It will be deeply affected by Jihadis igniting the Syrian-Lebanese tinder box which will then explode across Israel, Gaza and Egypt. Why has the EU not at least had proper debates in national, European parliament and in the United Nations? Western experts have diverse views on the video evidence some pointing to obvious fraud. The conflict has all the nature of a sectarian dispute between Sunnis, Shiites and the numerous Islamic sects that Jihadis cannot tolerate. These include Ismailis, Twelver Shias, Sufis, Druzes, Yazdis and Bahai.
Syria has a delicate balance of religious populations. The ruling clique is Alawite, a secretive Islamic sect associated with the Shiites. It makes up around 11 percent of the people.  However 60 per cent of the population are Sunni. Christians of various persuasions amount to 13 percent. The Jews which were numerous for thousands of years now reduced to a few hundred.

9. The motivation of the US is unclear. The American leaders are not religious illiterates. President Obama was raised a Sunni Muslim in Indonesia. His father and step-father were both Muslims. His brother Malik Obama is actively propagating Islamic ‘da’wa’ that is the conversion of infidels and infidel countries to Islam. He works with President of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, classified by the USA as a State Sponsor of Terror. Key figures in the Obama security administration have served in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries.

It seems bizarre that the USA is rooting now on the side of just one faction in the Syrian civil war. That side involves Jabhat al Nusra a jihadist Sunni organization, a clone of Al Qaeda. Why on earth would USA support al Qaeda-led rebels against the Shiite Alawite regime of Bashur al Assad?

The EU is founded on religious tolerance, free speech that extends to critical analysis of religious opinions.

The Middle East has been devastated of its Christians from Iraq to the Palestinian Authority and Gaza. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the leader of the worldwide Anglican church, said we are living in ‘terribly, terribly dangerous times‘. He warned that military intervention could have catastrophic unseen consequences. There are ‘numerous intermediate steps’ between doing nothing and regime change, said Welby who has toured the Middle East and Africa seeking paths for reconciliation.

• Western experts have questioned video that shows unreal white foaming at the mouth. They say that poison gas would produce a yellow retching foam or one covered with blood.
• Victim do not show characteristic pinpoint eyes after poisoning. Sarin is doubted. Little evidence of convulsions or secondary contamination.
• No people attending ‘poisoned’ people had protective clothing.
• No doctors seem affected by poison gas with no reported fatalities among doctors or medical staff.
• Some videos were, according to Russian authorities, broadcast before the  alleged time of the attack!
• Body evidence and numbers remain untestified.

How can the EU cut through the disinformation to the real facts? The European Community system set up by Robert Schuman initiated a scientific centre so that scientific facts can be distinguished from political and ideological narratives. Science is one of those supranational values on which the European Community is based. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has been called in to investigate frauds in all areas of European life. An escalating Syrian and Middle Eastern religious war will cost all Europeans dear. The JRC should be asked immediately to investigate fraud in video evidence, in medical evidence and chemical analysis. European citizens require this action!