Elections1: Democratic Disconnect arises because Governments never obeyed treaty law in 60 years

 The key problem facing European institutions is the Democratic Deficit, Disconnect and Disaffection with its citizens. Those words were addressed by the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, to Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Parliament President Schulz, sitting on the platform with her. She was speaking at an Interactive Event that she called on Your Wish List for Europe, held in the European Parliament 4 March 2014.

For sixty years the European Parliament has never held an election according to the rules specified in the Treaties! Voters should be asking one question above all: when are governments going to follow the democratic rules of the treaties they signed?

The legal rules for elections are clear and simple. Anything that diverges from them is a fraud and a cheat. The rules were set more than half a century ago. The founding treaties (Paris 1951, Rome 1957) make it clear how the European Elections should be run in a fair and just manner.

Article 138 of the Economic Community treaty and article 108 of the Euratom treaty say the same thing. The same words exist in the present treaty of Lisbon. The words were also retrospectively added to the founding Treaty of Paris, 1951. That was to clarify what should have already have been clear to any true democrat in the Paris Treaty’s article 20. That says the Assembly should consist of the ‘representatives of the peoples of the member states of the Community’. (High Authority translation). Representatives of the peoples should of course always be elected on a basis of equality. Note that the main principle is Representation of the Peoples, not of the States or governments or governance systems.

That vital obligation of governments has never been carried out in all Europe’s history. Europeans are left with a distorted and biased system created by and for the governments, that is political party élites.
The Rome treaties say: ‘The Assembly shall draw up proposals for elections by direct universal suffrage in accordance with a uniform procedure in all Member States.’

Universal suffrage, that is a direct vote for members of the European Parliament, only took place in 1979.
The politicians did an extraordinary thing. It indicates their mentality of fraud. They cut the sentence with the requirement in TWO! They followed the first half but not the second.

The second part of the sentence — a uniform procedure for all of Member States — has NEVER yet been passed. We have today 28 national elections not one European one. Each State fixes its own elections!

Some States block opposition parties and make its restrictions. Some States get the equivalent of ten or twelve votes per voter compared with other Europeans!

The 1979 direct NATIONAL elections arrived three decades late. Previously the MEPs had been nominated by the national parliaments. It had advantages and disadvantages. In practice this meant that governments could control who was supposed to speak out for European democracy. A strong autocrat like De Gaulle made sure that the prestige and effectiveness of the Assembly was reduced to a minimum. That way the Council of Ministers became the illegitimate single controller of the budget. And the European budget could be used to subsidize French farmers, industries and others – who then voted enthusiastically for de Gaulle’s rip-off of the other European taxpayers.

Voters wanting something like democracy had to wait some 30 years from the time of Europe’s first assembly in 1949. That happened only after maximum pressure on the political oligarchy. When in government, political parties wanted to retain the maximum unfair advantage. The mills of God grind slowly but they grind small. The anti-democrats will get their come-uppance.

First we should ask the question: What is the purpose of a Parliament in a supranational Community? The treaties say that before any legislation could be passed, Parliament has to give an Opinion (as do the Consultative Committees). An Opinion is an extensive criticism of the Proposal of the Commission. A key feature of the system is that only an independent and impartial body can introduce legislation. That avoids corruption by political interests.

The Commission makes the first step by suggesting an impartial draft law. To do this effectively, it enters into a permanent and close dialogue with all members of organized Civil Society. They have a debating chamber called the Consultative Committee (the Economic and Social Committee and Committee of the Regions).

This was specifically created to avoid the plague of shadowy lobbyists we have today. Lobbyists may outnumber all the bureaucrats. Once the law is drafted, the Parliament representing the people, the Consultative Committees (representing organized Civil Society) and the Council representing Member States are to give their own analysis of the measure and point out any shortcomings. Such a system is the most intelligent way to deal with unintended consequences of legislation by bureaucrats.

The Commission is required to be as independent, impartial and as well-informed as possible and act like a just judge. The treaties forbid acting for any interest, whether paid or not, including political activity. Scandalously government political parties thumb their nose at this. They see raw power and want to have it.
The European Commission is not a European government as it has only the option of making a proposal where the treaties give it the right. It has management of the consequences of such regulations, only where Member States (and civil society and affected individuals, according to the treaties) say it has.

It is essential that such a system exists in today’s world of increasing complexity. It also avoids the Commission membership becoming corrupt by rabble-rousers, political interests or hidden cartels. Its task is to expose to the full light of open debate any lobbyist bias towards big business, labour, consumer groups or industries or a region.

Under the centralizing fancies of General de Gaulle, it was unthinkable for his grandeur that the French government should be reduced to a mere commentator on a draft European law. How could Brussels bureaucrats meddle with French cheeses? He poured scorn on the whole idea of the supranational European Community. He ‘chloroformed’ the institutions. Then he started a major power grab, insisting that only the Council of Ministers could decide the legislation and the money questions. That’s not what the treaties say. It is arrogant to assume that politicians with their limited background can foresee all the problems of all the citizens. And be aware of the real needs of the future.

Thus the secretive Council of Ministers began to dominate often with the active collusion of the Gaullist and nationalist-dominated Commission. While the Commission still received such legal Opinions from the other institutions like the Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee, it promptly ignored them. The Council and the Commission (which served as its secretariat) may not even have bothered reading them. The Council of Ministers thus tried to convert the Communities to something like an uncontrolled and secret intergovernmental organ. What’s more, the European Communities produced plenty of taxpayers’ money to play with, including customs tariffs. Thus the vote-hungry national politicians could do secret budget deals with no controls. The result? Pouring European money into a vote-gathering machine that had no democratic power. It became an addiction. Voters had no control of the resultant meat mountains and wine lakes and massive corruption in southern Italy.

The Parliament had no moral authority. Why? Because the members were nominated by the governments. Just like the Consultative Committees today, (the EcoSoc and the Committee of Regions), they were not legitimately elected. Nor do they represent a European level. The Council in its power grab devalued the other institutions to the point in the 1960s that they looked like a useless appendix. The Community system thus experienced democracy theft. Governments blocked elections in the Parliament and in the Consultative Committees. And slowly the governmental parties tried to turn the Commission into their secretariat.

When in 1973 the British, Irish and Danes joined the Communities, the abuse was so flagrant and the system so undemocratic, the Labour Party boycotted the Parliament. That gave the right-wing parties a majority. Not that it mattered at all. No one cared what the Parliament said in its legislative Opinions. They just filled the waste bins at the Council.

Some Continental MEPs however were not only furious at this undemocratic stitch-up, they acted. They appealed to the institution created for this. Then the Council went too far. It passed legislation without even getting the proper Opinion. Some MEPs took the matter to the European Court. Schuman’s legal colleague, Pierre-Henri Teitgen, then an eminent professor of law, ably assisted them.

The upshot of all these scandals was that the governments were then forced to review the ‘chloroformed‘ question of direct elections. As anyone can see from the treaty article quoted above, the governments decided they would only fulfill the first part of the sentence and leave the other half. Curious affliction of partial blindness. That way they could retain the remaining undemocratic powers that General de Gaulle had foisted on the Communities.

De Gaulle had distorted the system but it takes a really honest Statesman to correct it. He made an undemocratic power grab. He is now dead but the levers of abuse and corruption remain.

Most are content with his unjust gains and ‘de-activated‘ institutions. Who will be the first to say: ‘Fellow Prime Ministers, the system is not fair. We and our political party machines are profiting illegally from this distortion. Let us correct it and give more power to the people and organized civil society as the Founding Fathers intended. All our States agreed to this at the beginning when we signed and ratified the treaties.’

So today the world’s largest economic and peace-enhancing union has a governance system unfit for such global responsibilities. It has been sold a Mickey-Mouse substitute. That is like a cheap and nasty child’s watch versus a precision-made Swiss one. Europeans have a fraudulent system that deliberately deactivates what is the best system of democracy yet conceived.

The first questions for voters to ask the political parties are: ‘When are we going to get a single electoral system? How do you plan to go about it? When are you going to reinstate democratic powers for organized civil society? ’ I would be interested to know if there is a single political party or government that raised the question. So far I have not found one.

Circus1: Commissioners leave Commission to be elected to Parliament, to then resign, in order to become Commissioners again! Illegal Nonsense!

What a tangled web of moral corruption and irrational nonsense the political class has got itself into trying to defend political nepotism! Seven Commissioners have declared they will take leave of the Commission and stand or support parties for the European Parliament. Why? To be active in Parliament? Not at all! They
want to be re-assigned to the Commission!

Then we have the European Parliamentarians demanding that the present President of Parliament resign!

Why? Doesn’t he want to stand again in the May 2014 elections again? Yes he does. But he wants to resign once elected to become the President of the Commission !!

Then we have a former prime minister of Luxembourg who the voters rejected at the polls. He too wishes to become the President of the Commission. What is he doing about it? He has put his name forward for the European Popular Party group for the European Parliament elections. He too will resign if ‘successful’ to become the President of the Commission!! Famously he was chairman of the ultra-secret Euro-Group that controls the major finance of the euro catastrophe.  He said several times to journalists that he has to lie to defend the euro! Is he to use the same principles to defend the Politburo politics of the Commission — which is supposed to be impartial?

Have they also taken leave of their senses? The European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament were set up as INDEPENDENT institutions. It makes as much sense for Commissioners to leave to get elected in their national parliaments.

How can members of the Commission be independent and impartial by wanting to be part of another institution?

Then comical becomes farcical. As soon as they are elected they will resign!

It gets more ridiculous! The body they chose to be active for, the European Parliament, should completely disqualify them from any post in the Commission. Its main function is PARTISAN, to represent, analyse and support partisan interests.

It is nonsense! The Parliament is a representative body. So is the Council. But the Commission is different. It is supposed to be impartial and an honest broker for all Europeans. It is supposed to embody supranational values, like fairness, honesty and impartiality. It is not a political secretariat for the governments. It articulates the common good beyond political parties.

If you don’t think this is an absolute farce, consider the next step.

Being elected to the European Parliament or not, taking leave of absence from the Commission or not, even resigning or not, has nothing to do with if they will make it to the European Commission for 2015.
No, the people who really decide who will be in the Commission, will decide who this is to be, regardless of all this leave-election-resignation circus. The European Council behind closed doors will do as they have done in the past. They will pick a politician (yes they always choose one of their own) in complete secrecy.

They are responsible to no one. Their whole aim is to reinforce political nepotism. They always choose a member of the main political parties. They thumb their nose at anybody among the EU’s 500 million people who is not a member of their club — even though the treaties say it is ILLEGAL to choose a politician active in his party. They can chose a person who was never in the Commission or the Parliament.
So this political circus, this political theatre, is only there for one purpose. It is to distract the public, the audience, while the government ministers politically pick the pockets of the public.

This process is not only illegal but highly detrimental to democracy. The European Commission is especially important in the Community system as it was designated as being totally IMPARTIAL from any government, political group or business, trades union or consumer interests. It is there to represent the common interests of ALL citizens without any exception. Beyond them it is supposed to be able to propose what is right and just for our children in the future. Children don’t vote!

That role has been written in the treaties since 1951 and the founding Treaty of Paris. It is still is in the Lisbon Treaties verbatim. What does any rational member of the public understand when the Lisbon treaty says:

‘the members of the Commission may not during their term of office engage in any other occupation, whether gainful or not.’

What is party political activity? Clearly membership of political parties is in violation of this article. It is an occupation which previously brought in a lot of money. Would you expect a businessman to retain his business while working as Commission President? Some Commissioners believe that their continued membership of a political party will again bring them a lot of money when they leave the Commission — either for government office again or some other activity dominated by party or governmental networks.
Governments do not like a body that must be honest and fair. This is especially the case if crooked deals are being cooked up in the Council of Ministers. So bit by bit they government ministers insisted that Commissioners could be politicians. Then they went further. Today all Commissioners are politicians! Now they say ONLY politicians can be members of the Commission. That contrasts with the early Commission when there were none!

Clearly party political membership is partisan. An independent, impartial honest person would shun any activity that impugned his or her reputation of impartiality. Would a judge who was involved in a corruption case involving billions of public money being misused go off and discuss who-knows-what in private and dine with the very people up before the Court?

Today a large group of governments — nearly all of them — are known to be guilty of fraudulently fixing statistics for the euro, spending money to bribe voters and hoping that rich members of the EU will bail them out. The Commission is now expected to act as judge to see twice a year that the national budgets are properly managed. So any member of the public would expect extra care for choosing every and all Commissioners. They should distance themselves from party operations which lay at the faulty construction of the euro.

What happens in practice? The Commissioners travel Europe and attend party political conferences. And astoundingly they bring with them their personal staff and ‘their’ civil servants. All are paid at the taxpayers’ expense! No voter in the European Union agreed that.

According to this Treaty article the Commissioners are not allowed to have an occupation as party politicians. They must resign from any party they formerly adhered to. Why? The Founding Fathers are clear. To show their independence.

Can you be independent and a member of a political party? Clearly not. The word partisan — adhering to a party as distinct from the common interest — shows the two occupations are at loggerheads.

Now we have the spectacle of 7 Commissioners standing for Parliament!  Is the job of European parliamentarian a gainful one? I should say so.

Why this circus? Nowhere do the present Lisbon Treaties say that the Commission should be chosen from politicians elected to the European Parliament. It merely says in Article 17 TEU that the Commission should be named by the governments after the results of the elections are known.

‘Taking into account the elections to the European Parliament and after having held the appropriate consultations, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the European Commission.’

This is not an invitation for politicians in government to nominate their buddies or their political enemies they wanted to send far away to Brussels!

The governments are to put forward candidates who have proven impartiality. The public can then examine their record. This is the principle established at the beginning of the Community process. Several candidates were refused because they were seen by others to be too partisan, too nationalistic or representing special interests.

Nowhere does any treaty say that the governments — who are one and all composed of party politicians — should nominate someone appointed by their party machines to be a candidate. That is electoral fraud. Political nepotism will only act as further lead weight to lower public trust and confidence in politicians. The Lisbon Treaty TEU article 10) in fact says that

‘ALL citizens have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union.  Decisions shall be taken as openly as possible.’

Decisions are not taken openly as to who can be the Commission candidate because the governments have so far refused to implement such a system. It requires the public to choose who is impartial. The party machines are sources of potential and actual corruption because they are the biggest Lobbies in Europe. How they make policy is usually cloaked in mystery. Who pulls their strings? In the past parties were paid for and controlled by cartels, trusts, or unions.

It might be worth asking how party machines chose their candidates, not only for this post but simply being an MEP. Too often, admitted one MEP, the party leader says: ‘You, you and you will be are our MEPs!’ That is the party list system. So much for democracy. Meanwhile the national governments put up a barrage of restrictions so that no individual free of such party political apparatchiks can stand as a candidate. The EU has 28 national elections. The treaty itself calls for ONE election with ONE statute for all the EU so that a citizen can vote for any person he or she wants to.

Then they nominate an out-of-work, or a failed politician to be the party candidate for the Commission! This is called parachuting. Only party members are allowed to be eligible for parachuting into the lucrative Brussels postings.

Only two percent of the population has membership of a political party. So that means 98 percent of the population is ruled out and eliminated by the political nepotism of the governments acting as a Politburo. They could offer non-political academics, professors of law or morals, diplomats, former leaders of NGOs.
Even those who formerly had experience in small business and know the hard realities of economics and were no longer running businesses would make good candidates.

Now who would make the best impartial, experienced members of the Commission? It would be someone who is experienced with the Brussels bureaucracy, fights corruption committed at the European level and has the interests of all citizens at heart.

Consider the European Ombudsman who fights mal-administration in the European institutions.

One of the biggest outrages of mal-administration today is just that. The present Ombudsman is not a member of a political party. But the Council’s Politburo rules make party membership their essential  factor of choice.

The experienced, non-partisan, impartial Ombudsman cannot become the President of the Commission. She is not a member of a political party!

What a circus! What egotistical corruption!

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 !