Good read on current EU/Ukraine situation

[LootOP]

Warning, long read, so I'm expecting the obvious, 'too long, did not read' posts.

Recently the Dutch had a referendum in which they voted (61%) AGAINST an 'association treaty’ with Ukraine. The referendum had a clear YES/NO vote.

Government coalition PVDA/VVD parties basically told Dutch people they will go ahead and talk about the treaty anyway, which means they'll politely ignore the voters. Some background here: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/433755/dutch-hit-back-eu-ukraine

But what I wanted to share is an excerpt from Noam Chomsky excellent book ' How the World Works' which was written back in 1986. The European association treaty with Ukraine is basically a new, European version of the infamous NAFTA/GATT treaties the USA set up earlier.

This is an excellent background read which will put current development in Europe in the right perspective:


The new global economy
I was on Brattle Street [in Cambridge, Massachusetts] just last night. There were panhandlers, people asking for money, people sleeping in the doorways of buildings. This morning, in the subway station at Harvard Square, there was more of the same.
The spectre of poverty and despair has become increasingly obvious to the middle and upper class. You just can’t avoid it as you could years ago, when it was limited to a certain section of town. This has a lot to do with the pauperization (the internal Third Worldization, I think you call it) of the United States.
There are several factors involved. About twenty years ago there was a big change in the world order, partly symbolized by Richard Nixon’s dismantling of the postwar economic system. He recognized that US dominance of the global system had declined, and that in the new “tripolar” world order (with Japan and German-based Europe playing a larger role), the US could no longer serve—in effect—as the world’s banker.
That led to a lot more pressure on corporate profits in the US and, consequently, to a big attack on social welfare gains. The crumbs that were permitted to ordinary people had to be taken away. Everything had to go to the rich.
There was also a tremendous expansion of unregulated capital in the world. In 1971, Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods system, thereby deregulating currencies. That, and a number of other changes, tremendously expanded the amount of unregulated capital in the world, and accelerated what’s called the globalization (or the internationalization) of the economy.
That’s a fancy way of saying that you export jobs to high-repression, low-wage areas—which undercuts the opportunities for productive labor at home. It’s a way of increasing corporate profits, of course. And it’s much easier to do with a free flow of capital, advances in telecommunications, etc.
There are two important consequences of globalization. First, it extends the Third World model to industrial countries. In the Third World, there’s a two-tiered society—a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people.
That division is deepened by the policies dictated by the West. It imposes a neoliberal “free market” system that directs resources to the wealthy and to foreign investors, with the idea that something will trickle down by magic, some time after the Messiah comes.
You can see this happening everywhere in the industrial world, but most strikingly in the three English-speaking countries. In the 1980s, England under Thatcher, the United States under the Reaganites and Australia under a Labor government adopted some of the doctrines they preached for the Third World.

[LootOP]

continued:



Of course, they would never really play this game completely. It would be too harmful to the rich. But they flirted with it. And they suffered. That is, the general population suffered.
Take, for example, South Central Los Angeles. It had factories once. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, Indonesia—where you can get peasant women flocking off the land. But the rich did fine, just as they do in the Third World.
The second consequence, which is also important, has to do with governing structures. Throughout history, the structures of government have tended to coalesce around other forms of power—in modern times, primarily around economic power. So, when you have national economies, you get national states. We now have an international economy and we’re moving towards an international state—which means, finally, an international executive.
To quote the business press, we’re creating “a new imperial age” with a “de facto world government.” It has its own institutions—like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, trading structures like NAFTA and GATT [the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, both discussed in more detail below], executive meetings like the G-7 [the seven richest industrial countries—the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Italy—who meet regularly to discuss economic policy] and the European Community bureaucracy.
As you’d expect, this whole structure of decision making answers basically to the transnational corporations, international banks, etc. It’s also an effective blow against democracy. All these structures raise decision making to the executive level, leaving what’s called a “democratic deficit”—parliaments and populations with less influence.
Not only that, but the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know. One result is a kind of alienation from institutions. People feel that nothing works for them.
Sure it doesn’t. They don’t even know what’s going on at that remote and secret level of decision making. That’s a real success in the long-term task of depriving formal democratic structures of any substance.
At Clinton’s Little Rock economic conference and elsewhere, there was much talk of economic recovery and restoring competitiveness. Political economist Gar Alperovitz wrote in the New York Times that what’s being proposed is “not likely to make a dent in our deeper economic problems. We may simply be in for a long, painful era of unresolved economic decay.” Would you agree?
I haven’t seen that piece yet, but the Financial Times [of London, the world’s leading business newspaper] has been talking with some pleasure of the fiscal conservatism shown by Clinton and his advisors.
There are serious issues here. First of all, we have to be careful in the use of terms. When someone says America is in for a long period of decline, we have to decide what we mean by “America.” If we mean the geographical area of the United States, I’m sure that’s right. The policies now being discussed will have only a cosmetic effect. There has been decline and there will be further decline. The country is acquiring many of the characteristics of a Third World society.
But if we’re talking about US-based corporations, then it’s probably not right. In fact, the indications are to the contrary—their share in manufacturing production, for example, has been stable or is probably even increasing, while the share of the US itself has declined. That’s an automatic consequence of sending productive labor elsewhere.
General Motors, as the press constantly reports, is closing some 24 factories in North America. But in the small print you read that it’s opening new factories—including, for example, a $700 million high-tech factory in East Germany. That’s an area of huge unemployment where GM can pay 40% of the wages of Western Europe and none of the benefits.
There was a nice story on the front page of the Financial Times, in which they described what a great idea this was. As they put it, GM doesn’t have to worry about the “pampered” Western European workers any longer—they can just get highly exploited workers now that East Germany is being pushed back to its traditional Third World status. It’s the same in Mexico, Thailand, etc.
The prescription for our economic problems is more of the same—“leave it to the market.” There’s such endless trumpeting of the free market that it assumes almost a myth-like quality. “It’ll correct the problems.” Are there any alternatives?
We have to first separate ideology from practice, because to talk about a free market at this point is something of a joke. Outside of ideologues, the academy and the press, no one thinks that capitalism is a viable system, and nobody has thought that for sixty or seventy years—if ever.
Herman Daly and Robert Goodland, two World Bank economists, circulated an interesting study recently. In it they point out that received economic theory—the standard theory on which decisions are supposed to be based—pictures a free market sea with tiny little islands of individual firms. These islands, of course, aren’t internally free—they’re centrally managed.
But that’s okay, because these are just tiny little islands on the sea. We’re supposed to believe that these firms aren’t much different than a mom-and-pop store down the street.
Daly and Goodland point out that by now the islands are approaching the scale of the sea. A large percentage of cross-border transactions are within a single firm, hardly “trade” in any meaningful sense. What you have are centrally managed transactions, with a very visible hand—major corporate structures—directing it. And we have to add a further point—that the sea itself bears only a partial resemblance to free trade.
So you could say that one alternative to the free market system is the one we already have, because we often don’t rely on the market where powerful interests would be damaged. Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free-market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful.
For example, the US has always had an active state industrial policy, just like every other industrial country. It’s been understood that a system of private enterprise can survive only if there is extensive government intervention. It’s needed to regulate disorderly markets and protect private capital from the destructive effects of the market system, and to organize a public subsidy for targeting advanced sectors of industry, etc.
But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system. Internationally, the Pentagon was an intervention force, but domestically it was a method by which the government could coordinate the private economy, provide welfare to major corporations, subsidize them, arrange the flow of taxpayer money to research and development, provide a state-guaranteed market for excess production, target advanced industries for development, etc. Just about every successful and flourishing aspect of the US economy has relied on this kind of government involvement.
At the Little Rock conference I heard Clinton talking about structural problems and rebuilding the infrastructure. One attendee, Ann Markusen, a Rutgers economist and author of the book Dismantling the Cold War Economy, talked about the excesses of the Pentagon system and the distortions and damages that it has caused to the US economy. So it seems that there’s at least some discussion of these issues, which is something I don’t recall ever before.
The reason is that they can’t maintain the Pentagon-based system as readily as before. They’ve got to start talking about it, because the mask is dropping. It’s very difficult now to get people to lower their consumption or their aspirations in order to divert investment funds to high-technology industry on the pretext that the Russians are coming.
So the system is in trouble. Economists and bankers have been pointing out openly for some time that one of the main reasons why the current recovery is so sluggish is that the government hasn’t been able to resort to increased military spending with all of its multiplier effects—the traditional pump-priming mechanism of economic stimulation. Although there are various efforts to continue this (in my opinion, the current operation in Somalia is one such effort to do some public relations work for the Pentagon), it’s just not possible the way it used to be.

[LootOP]

continued:

[quote]
There

[LootOP]

And more precise NAFTA/GATT:

[QUOTE]NAFTA and GATT

[LootOP]

Also:

Brussels tells Dutch MPs they CAN'T debate referendum result as it may fuel Brexit

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/661195/Dutch-referendum-Brussels-ban-MPs-Ukraine-deal-Brexit-EU

BRUSSELS has effectively banned Dutch MPs from discussing their country's historic referendum result because it is exposing the EU's undemocratic core and boosting calls for a Brexit.

The European elite have gagged elected politicians in the Netherlands, ordering them to suppress the Dutch people's democratic voice until after our own referendum is done and dusted on June 23.

In an astonishing statement delivered to the Dutch parliament this week Prime Minister Mark Rutte admitted he had been ordered by other EU leaders not to mention the referendum for the next two months.


:oldlol: 'democracy'

[StephHamann]

:oldlol: 'democracy'

Nothing new in the EU, it will eventually finally crash like the Soviet Union.

Nobody wants this union, except for the elites.

[LootOP]

http://www.politico.eu/article/imf-fears-brexit-talk-will-prevent-eu-from-helping-greece/


IMF fears Brexit talk will prevent EU from helping Greece
WikiLeaks quotes two Fund officials discussing walking away from Greek bailout without a debt relief deal.

[iamgine]

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hnaWj-rI2G8/VcwlC8eCt1I/AAAAAAAAFKI/wAxHnWDrjrc/s1600/useparagraphs%2521.png


Sum it up bro.

[LootOP]

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hnaWj-rI2G8/VcwlC8eCt1I/AAAAAAAAFKI/wAxHnWDrjrc/s1600/useparagraphs%2521.png


Sum it up bro.

You're an idiot, and we're all ****ed.

[iamgine]

You're an idiot, and we're all ****ed.
Good sum up. Thanks bro.

[LJJ]

It actually is democracy in action.

Most countries in the EU are still run by the same old political parties who laid the groundworks more than 60 years ago. People say they don't like that a bunch of old trade agreements turned into this giant geopolitical machine which rules unchecked and autocratically, but come the next election they don't hold anyone accountable. The populace just isn't informed and doesn't care.

[Dresta]

http://www.politico.eu/article/imf-fears-brexit-talk-will-prevent-eu-from-helping-greece/
lol @ the IMF becoming just a pr mouthpiece for the European Union; pathetic. People who think that there is such a thing as an independent institution are truly naive, and these bloody things have been multiplying like the plague.

[fiddy]

It actually is democracy in action.

Most countries in the EU are still run by the same old political parties who laid the groundworks more than 60 years ago. People say they don't like that a bunch of old trade agreements turned into this giant geopolitical machine which rules unchecked and autocratically, but come the next election they don't hold anyone accountable. The populace just isn't informed and doesn't care.
:kobe:

"Most" means less than the half of the current member count, right?

[NumberSix]

Nothing new in the EU, it will eventually finally crash like the Soviet Union.

Nobody wants this union, except for the elites.
Yup. We all await the downfall of the tinfoil curtain of the EUSSR.

[LJJ]

:kobe:

"Most" means less than the half of the current member count, right?

Absolutely not. All the big power players are. France, UK, Germany. All led by old political royalty who are largely responsible for forming the EU. I could care less about the situations of the small fish, they have absolutely zero power in the EU, they are little more than vassal states.