|
European Council On Foreign Relations: EU Needs To Use
Crisis For Greater Power
Renowned financial commentator denounces "fiscal
fascism"
|
|
|
Several more autocratic international voices have added their
weight behind proposals to vastly empower the EU with greater
authority to govern over nation states in Europe, in the wake
of the sovereign debt crisis. Meanwhile, one leading commentator
has described the move as "fiscal fascism".
Proposals
tabled yesterday by the European Commission, the
legislative arm of the EU, would greatly diminish the ability
of nation states to set their own fiscal policies, in favour
of a move toward a centralized european treasury.
"There is still a long way to go. We have opened the gate.
Now we have yet to go through it," said Ulrike Guerot,
an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.
"The crisis has shown us we need to animate moves toward
closer political union as well as monetary union and we need
a quantitative jump." Guerot added in comments
to Reuters.
"The EU has used crises in the past to make that kind
of jump and this is what is needed now." the German researcher
concluded.
"This could be the fuel injection needed to put Europe
on course toward closer political and economic union, the goal
that drove its founding fathers and leaders a generation ago
such as Germany's Helmut Kohl, France's Francois Mitterrand
and former European Commission President Jacques Delors."
notes Reuters writer Timothy Heritage.
The
European CFR is a vehemently pro-EU outfit made
up of hundreds of influential corporate and political figures,
perhaps most notably including George Soros. It was initiated
three years ago primarily to push for an expanded role for the
EU as a global superpower. Inevitably, the group is consistently
vocal when it comes to the question of greater political integration
in Europe.
The European CFR is not related to the U.S. CFR, however support
for mass centralization in Europe is shared. On the prospect
of a central European treasury, CFR
Senior Fellow Marc Levinson notes:
"Countries cannot have it both ways. Either they're in
the eurozone or they're out. If they're in, they have no control
over their monetary policies, period. If they want to leave,
fine, but then they will probably have to leave the EU as well,
and to remain out of the EU and the eurozone for a very long
time. And leaving the eurozone, by itself, will solve none of
their economic problems."
Other voices echoing support for sweeping integration measures
include Hans Martens, chief executive of the European Policy
Center think-tank in Brussels, who notes "This is the last
chance to still be relevant in the world... It's clear to everyone
that Europe is becoming marginalized."
"Europe faces a critical choice between greater integration
and disintegration," Simon Tilford, chief economist at
the Center for European Reform think-tank, also wrote this week.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Former U.S.
Treasury Secretary John Snow have also advocated
the move toward a fiscal union.
“Will economic and financial distress finally be resolved
by looking toward more integration in a closely integrated Europe,
politically as well as economically?” said Volcker. “I
do have my hopes, as a believer in the euro.”
“For the euro to be able to survive long term, fiscal
consolidation of some kind -- tax policy consolidation, fiscal
policy consolidation -- is probably necessary,” Snow said.
As we outlined in
our report yesterday, in addition to opening up
supervision of countries' national budgets to the EU, the proposals
also call for the creation of a European Monetary Fund or EMF
- a permanent bailout mechanism.
The new rules will apply to Britain and Denmark, even though
those countries are not part of the existing European Monetary
Union and have retained their own national currencies.
London Telegraph international business editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
has penned an empassioned piece in today's newspaper in which
he describes the move toward a federalized union in Europe as
"fiscal fascism", comparing it to "the Gold Bloc
fallacy of Continental Europe from 1931 to 1936, the policy
that led to Bruning’s destruction of Weimar."
"Just when you thought the EU could not go any further
down the road towards authoritarian excess, it gets worse."
Evans-Pritchard
writes.
"Fonctionnaires and EU finance ministers will pass judgement
on the British (or Dutch, or Danish, or French) budgets before
the elected bodies of these ancient and sovereign nations have
seen the proposals. Did we not we not fight the English Civil
War and kill a king over such a prerogative?" he continues.
"Yet again we are discovering the trick played on our
democracies by Europe’s insiders when they charged ahead
with EMU, brushing aside warnings by their own staff economists
that monetary union was unworkable without fiscal union."
Evans-Pritchard notes, adding that the European elites behind
the EU single currency knew that it would eventually lead to
a crisis they could use to "force sovereign parliaments
to submit to demands that they would never otherwise accept."
"The enterprise has become illegitimate – it is
starting to exhibit the reflexes of tyranny." Evans-Pritchard
concludes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alex
Jones LIVE, A Fourth Hour Of Streaming TV Now Added To The Infowars
Radio Show
Click here to get your subscription today!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
