STOCK MARKET WATCH, Wednesday, December 14, 2011

[Demeter]

14. The People vs. ‘Europe’ By Alexander Cockburn

http://www.nationofchange.org/people-vs-europe-1322922848

It looks as though the eurozone may be in a decisive meltdown, which is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better...The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They're different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in the latter...At the moment, the European Union has virtually no tax collecting powers. Its annual haul is about 1 percent of the EUs gross domestic product. By comparison, the U.S. government collects about 20 to 24 percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis, there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what's needed is a lot more centralizing. In the words of Wolfgang Munchau at the Financial Times on Nov. 28, the EU needs "a fiscal union": "This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well."...I've read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enterprise needs is an impregnable fortress of Eurocrats dispatching its disciplinary legions — first technocrats and then, if necessary, NATOs shock troops to crush all resistance...As Serge Halimi, the director of Le Monde diplomatique, put it recently, "There is no reason to believe that Francois Hollande in France, Sigmar Gabriel in Germany or Ed Miliband in the U.K. will succeed where Obama, Jos Luis Zapatero and Papandreou have failed.... In the current political and social situation, a federal Europe would strengthen the already stifling neo-liberal mechanisms and reduce the sovereign power of the people by handing it over to shadowy technocratic bodies."

The EU "project," a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with "iconic," "meme," "parse" and "narrative," is a potential outline of a totalitarian nightmare. Down with federalism! Remember Simone Weil's hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to Europe's cultural richness and diversity: "If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the barbarian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Mediterranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State." As Weil's biographer, Simone Petrement, comments, "The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspiration that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn." But as Halimi concludes, "But when the people cease to believe in a political game in which the dice are loaded, when they see that governments are stripped of their sovereignty, when they demand that banks be brought into line, when they mobilize without knowing where their anger will lead, then the left is still very much alive."