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The EU--such a promising development at one time--has turned out to be the mafia.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I think smaller countries NEED to band together for collective protection and economic/political clout. I have applauded them for doing so in organizations like UNASUR (South America) and ALBA (Central America/Caribbean) but Europe is evidencing the hazards. I suppose that STRICT REGULATION OF BANKS ought to be a requirement of membership and an enforcement duty of the over-arching organization, for starters, rather than the banksters running things.
The United States has also evidenced some of the hazards of "union" especially as the federal government has become so autocratic (Patriot Act, "war on terra," "war on drugs," war on Iraq, war on Afghanistan, vast secrecy) in the current era, so corporate/war profiteer dominated (trillions looted from federal and state treasuries), and so remote from the interests and will of most Americans. All balance has been lost between local power and federal power. All are ruled by transglobal corporate/war profiteer power, with the federal government as the enforcer.
I'm reminded of a decision of our Founders, which may have seemed benign at the time but has grown into our modern nightmare of Corporate Rule. Thomas Jefferson thought that the chartering of business corporations ought best to be left to the states--closer to the power of the people. He feared the power of business corporations even then, when they were not considered "persons" and could be, and were, easily de-chartered--and were considered merely temporary associations to accomplish some public good. Our Founders had the example of the British East India as to the evils of national/corporate-joined power. De-centralization--and having many small business corporations in competition with each other, each regulated by democratically-run local/state governments, seemed best, at the time. And it may well contain the seed of reform, since the public's right, through state governments, to charter corporations remains on the books. Theoretically, a populist state attorney general could start attacking Corporate Rule by de-chartering and dismantling these monstrosities--what were once local business corporations grown into transglobal conglomerates--charter by charter, a movement that might spread from state to state.
What Jefferson didn't reckon on was the monstrous growth of both federal power and predatory capitalism which have simply run right over the powers of the states to charter corporations and regulate business. Nor did he reckon on "globalisation"--U.S.-taxpayer funded, U.S.-grown corporations now headquartered in Dubai or Singapore or powerful banksters in Europe or China dictating to the U.S., nor mechanisms like the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank also dictating to everyone for the benefit of a multinational rich elite. The power of the states to do anything about the particular octopus arm of a corporation like Chevron, or Exxon Mobil, or BP, or Bank of America or Citigroup, or Blue Shield, or multinational logging or retail corporations, or outsourcers of jobs, etc., has been completely stripped away, by the power of these entities to corrupt state political leaders but most of all by the powers of the president, the congress and the supreme court, ever acting to bolster transglobal corporate power that is not accountable to anyone, nor even loyal to any country or people.
A collection of smaller entities--states or countries--CAN act to counter the power of "organized money" (as FDR called it) but they, a) have to stick together, and b) find the ways to keep the collective, over-arching institution (the EU, the U.S. federal government) accountable to its members. How difficult a matter that is can be seen in the EU's treatment of Greece and Ireland, and in the U.S. government's treatment of the people of the Gulf Coast in relation to BP.
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