Category: European Union

The Solution to this Problem is Democratic Legitimacy

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Didier Reynders, the European Union’s justice minister is arguing that challenges to EU law on the basis of national law threaten to break up the organization.

That nations in the EU are taking these steps is no surprise.  The EU has no democratic legitimacy.

It has been, since its origins as the European Coal and Steel Community, a profoundly undemocratic institution.

The European Parliament is about as ineffective as the Roman Senate under Caligula,* and posesses far less power than said august Roman institution.

Ordinary voters still have a voice in their local government and in their local judiciary, while they have none (by explicit design) in the EU.

As such challenging EU dictum through the local courts is a logical, and likely popular, strategy, particularly in the face of German hegemony within the The European Commission:

The EU’s justice commissioner has vowed to fight back against a proliferation of legal challenges and rulings by member states that have attacked the supremacy of EU law, warning that they could destroy the union itself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Didier Reynders said that this increased questioning of the primacy of EU law — and the right of the European Court of Justice to have the final word — created a “spillover effect” that had emboldened others to follow suit.

In a sign of the perceived threat, the European Commission this month launched legal proceedings against Germany in response to an explosive ruling by its constitutional court last year that the ECJ had acted beyond its competence in a case related to European Central Bank bond-buying.

This ruling is actually an artifact of German hegemony.  Bashing the lazy and profligate south has been a winning electoral strategy in Germany since the adoption of the Euro as a currency.

The next big legal challenge Brussels is bracing for is a decision by the Polish constitutional tribunal, which could come on July 13, on whether certain elements of the EU’s treaties are compatible with the constitution. The case, brought by Poland’s nationalist government, is regarded by legal experts as the most serious challenge yet to the EU’s legal order.

If the EU, and the Eurocrats, fail to realize that without political legitimacy through meaningful democratic processes these problems will only get worse.

Democracy is inconvenient, and a pain in the ass sometimes, but absent a muscular application of this concept to EU governance, the EU may cease to exist.

*The real history of Caligula appointing his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the Roman Senate is actually saner than is commonly represented. He threatened to appoint the horse to the Senate in order to demonstrate just how dysfunctional the body was.

It was a prank intended to humiliate the Senate.

Frau Merkel (Horses Whinny) Is at It Again

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The day after the Biden Administration said that it supported suspending IP rights on the Covid Vaccine, Angela Merkel comes out against this.

I think that her motivation is pretty simple:  Covid response is going pear-shaped in Germany, with Covid cases spiking, and by ginning up a controversy, she can avoid scrutiny of her handling of the pandemic.

This is not the first time that she has done this, it’s behind the whole policy of “othering” southern Europeans and spreading misery throughout the EU during and after the financial crisis.

She knows that if she’s seen as doing something, anything, with the argument that she is protecting Germans from the undeserving “other” she, and her CDU Party, can benefit, even if it provides no benefit to Germans, and may kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Merkel is despicable:

The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.

The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.

Any WTO decision on a waiver would have to be by consensus, so Germany opposition is a major obstacle to intellectual property rights on vaccines being suspended.

The Biden government’s announcement on Wednesday that it would back a waiver on vaccine patents was welcomed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a step towards greater global equity at a time when poor countries have little access to vaccines and south Asia has been hit by a devastating outbreak. India accounted for 46% of the new Covid-19 cases recorded around the world over the past week, and there are signs the wave is spreading to Nepal, Sri Lanka and other neighbouring states.

But Angela Merkel’s government came out against a waiver on Thursday.

“The US suggestion for the lifting of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines has significant implications for vaccine production as a whole,” a government spokeswoman said.

“The limiting factors in the production of vaccines are the production capacities and the high-quality standards and not patents,” she added, arguing that the companies were already working with partners to boost manufacturing capacity.

This argument about the difficulty of vaccines is patently false, as I noted yesterday. 

You can mass produce mRNA viruses in a space smaller than the file room necessary to store the quality control documents, and Angela Merkel knows this; she got her PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

Unfortunately, there is no one in politics in Germany who is willing to call her out on her lies.

The Natives are Restless in Euro Land

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It looks like a number of the periphery countries in the EU are unamused that decisions about a response to the Brexit are being made without consulting them:

Janos Lazar’s shock revelation on Thursday afternoon came as a growing number of EU members have joined a queue to back leaving the bloc after Britons voted to leave last week.

The Minister for the Prime Minister’s office, said: “I couldn’t vote whole-heartedly for Hungary to stay in the EU.

“Europe does not equal the EU. The EU is not able to protect the rights and values of Europe.”

He said it was his own opinion, and not the government’s.

Mr Lazar voted for Hungary to join the EU 12 years ago, but said he has been very disappointed ever since.

Mr Lazar added: “The Hungarian government is not planning on holding a referendum on leaving the EU.”

Hungary, which joined the EU in 2004, has become part of a core group of rebels, including Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who threatened today to draw up their own plans for a less centralised EU.

Poland, which also joined in 2004, is leading the rebellion by nine former communist countries after accusing the old guard – Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – of monopolising EU discussions after holding private talks in Berlin over the weekend.

Of course, people like the head of the right wing Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, is calling for Holland to leave the EU, but they have been (rightly) dismissed  as cranks.

Now they are being viewed as a threat.

The real danger of the long standing dysfunction of the EU is that it is increasingly empowering people like Wilders and granting legitimacy to their hatred.

This is not going to end well.

Looks Like the EU Just Threw a Roadblock in Front of CETA

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The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada now must be approved by individual parliaments, and not the European Council and European Parliament:

The European Commission performed a startling U-turn on its landmark trade agreement with Canada on Tuesday, succumbing to pressure from France and Germany by deciding that national parliaments would have to ratify the deal.

 The need for approval from almost 40 national and regional assemblies not only threatens to scupper the Canadian deal itself, but delivers an ominous signal to British politicians who insist that the U.K. could negotiate a quick post-Brexit trade accord with the EU.

 Speaking in Strasbourg, Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the EU had decided to call the Canada deal a “mixed agreement.” This means that the bloc’s most significant trade deal to date is now hostage to hostile lawmakers in parliaments ranging from Romania to the Belgian region of Wallonia.

I think that this development is being driven by two things:

  • Concern that the British Brexit vote is spreading to other EU members, particularly on the periphery.
  • Setting a precedent of allowing every member of the EU to have a potential veto over the conditions over which the UK would negotiate its leaving the EU.

I think that this also means that the trade deal, which is a kind of mini-TTIP will not happen in the next 12 months or so, if at all:

The decision, taken during a meeting of the EU’s commissioners in Strasbourg, represented a surprising volte-face because the Commission had hoped to treat the accord as an EU-only deal, meaning it would require approval only from the European Parliament and national governments in the Council.

The Canadian deal has stoked sensitivities across Europe primarily because it is seen as a precursor to the far more contentious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the U.S.

Matthias Fekl, France’s trade minister, said it was “unbelievable” that Brussels had been planning to treat the deal as an exclusively EU competence.

“I find it even more hallucinatory only a few days after the result of the British referendum that one could envisage this type of procedure at the level of the European Commission,” he told the news agency AFP in an interview.

The tortuous path to approve the deal will sound alarms in London, where politicians are pinning their hopes on a quick settlement with the EU after Brexit. Debates in national parliaments could potentially add years of delay to the Canadian accord, which has already taken seven years to finalize.

It isn’t often that you get a diplomat using the adjective hallucinatory.

This also does not bode well for the TTIP.

Considering the impacts of such trade deals, inflated pharmaceutical prices, destructive capital flows, increased financialization of economies, etc.  This is a good thing.

I Called This

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A few days ago, I made a comment on a Facebook post in response to the an assertion that the British have no leverage in negotiating the Brexit.

I noted that Britain is by far the most EU migrants of any nation in the organization, and that they could use that as leverage in negotiations.

FWIW, the numbers are pretty stark: 1.2 million Britons living in other EU countries versus 3.3 million EU citizens living in the UK.

I would also argue that a larger proportion of the British expats are pensioners than the EU expats, because people don’t tend to move to England to retire, they move to England to work.

In any case, the Conservative Party has announced that any decision on the status of EU citizens living in the UK would be the product of the negotiating process:

British immigration minister James Brokenshire told the House of Commons Monday that the government cannot make any promises about the future of EU citizens in the U.K.

It would be “unwise” to tell them they can stay before the U.K. has negotiated with other EU countries about the rights of British nationals living elsewhere in Europe.

Brokenshire added that if the government made a promise now, that could trigger more migrants to come to the EU.

He also said that “EU nationals continue to be welcome here in the meantime.”

“EU nationals can have our full reassurance that their right to enter, work and study in the U.K. remains unchanged.”

………

The debate came after Home Secretary Theresa May, who is in the race to become the next Conservative party leader, on Sunday said that the position of EU nationals remains unclear.

The irony here is that May is an opponent of Brexit, while her opponents for party leader, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom, are both saying that expelling EU nationals in the UK should not be on the table.

Needless to say, the status of EU nationals in the UK has to be on the table, particularly if Article 50 is invokes, as Brussels has no reason to negotiate in good faith otherwise, and every reason to allow the clock to run out, so as to punish the UK for leaving.

This is Good News, Not Bad News

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It appears that in response to the Brexit vote, house prices in London have fallen.

This is actually a good thing. Ordinary people have been priced out of London by overpaid parasites from the City of London (investment banking), and foreigners who are using London real estate to as a way to hide and protect their ill gotten gains:

Thousands of London homes have had their prices slashed since the Brexit vote a week ago amid warnings of a slump in the stunned housing market, the Standard reveals today.

An Evening Standard analysis has found a huge spike in nervous home owners cutting their asking prices after the surprise result of the referendum last Friday morning unleashed what was described as “a perfect storm” by one leading investor.

The impact is expected to be most severe in the new luxury development along the river from Vauxhall to Docklands where falls of as much as 40 per cent are feared.

One central London branch manager at one of the capital’s biggest firms said: ”The whole thing is a disaster. The uncertainty will cause the markets to crumble and who knows when that is going to get better.

This is things getting better.

Rich people lose money, and ordinary people may be able to shorten their commute a bit.

Like a Dog That Has Finally Caught the Car

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As more political fallout from the Brexit vote accumulates we have another supporter of leaving the EU is calling it quit.

The head of UKIP, Nigel Farage is stepping down as head of the party:

He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave.

 Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party, saying, “I’ve done my bit.”

 Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back.”

 But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the self-made insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters.

 ………

 But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015.

I don’t think that any of them expected to win the referendum, and now they don’t know what to do.

This is rather ironic.

Read Taibbi

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He makes what should be the obvious point, “If you believe there’s such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably don’t believe in democracy at all:

In 1934, at the dawn of the Stalinist Terror, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel offered a daring quip at the International Writers Conference in Moscow:

Everything is given to us by the party and the government. Only one right is taken away: the right to write badly.

A onetime Soviet loyalist who was eventually shot as an enemy of the state, Babel was likely trying to say something profound: that the freedom to make mistakes is itself an essential component of freedom.

As a rule, people resent being saved from themselves. And if you think depriving people of their right to make mistakes makes sense, you probably never had respect for their right to make decisions at all.

This is all relevant in the wake of the Brexit referendum, in which British citizens narrowly voted to exit the European Union.

Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fueling the campaign of Donald Trump, a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons’ own good.

Social media was filled with such calls. “Is it just me, or does #Brexit seem like a moment when the government should overrule a popular referendum?” wrote one typical commenter.

On op-ed pages, there was a lot of the same. Harvard economics professor and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff wrote a piece for the Boston Globe called “Britain’s democratic failure“………

………

I would argue that voters are the critical ingredient to save elites from themselves, but Sullivan sees it the other way, and has Plato on his side. Though some of his analysis seems based on a misread of ancient history (see here for an amusing exploration of the topic), he’s right about Plato, the source of a lot of these “the ancients warned us about democracy” memes. He just left out the part where Plato, at least when it came to politics, was kind of a jerk.

The great philosopher despised democracy, believing it to be a system that blurred necessary social distinctions, prompting children, slaves and even animals to forget their places. He believed it a system that leads to over-permissiveness, wherein the people “drink too deeply of the strong wine of freedom.”

………

You have to be a snob of the first order, completely high on your own gas, to try to apply these arguments to present-day politics, imagining yourself as an analog to Plato’s philosopher-kings.

………

“Too much democracy” used to be an argument we reserved for foreign peoples who tried to do things like vote to demand control over their own oil supplies.

………

It doesn’t mean much to be against torture until the moment when you’re most tempted to resort to it, or to have faith in voting until the result of a particular vote really bothers you. If you think there’s ever such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably never believed in it in the first place. And even low-Information voters can sense it.

He’s right.  As political philosopher and political prankster Dick Tuck once said, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

At the end of the day, an fair election is a fair election.

Quote of the Day

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It seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

—Chris Arnade

The comment is about the Brexit, but I think that it can be applied more generally.

Good Point

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While there is a lot of finger pointing about the Brexit vote, there is a point to be made that the elites who support the EU and the Neoliberal agenda:

Over the past decade, elites broke the world, and were unrepentant about their failure. They created the conditions for the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, and made sure that their elite friends at the top would scoop up the post-crisis gains, stranding the vast majority of people. They decided their project of globalization and liberalization mattered more than democracy. Brexit is among the first tangible responses.

Yes, the victorious campaign to leave the European Union won on the basis of xenophobia and the demonization of immigrants. For anyone of a cosmopolitan bent it’s a terrible outcome. And those with long enough memories to remember the last time European nations broke apart instead of coming together will be pained by the outcome.

But if you tell people you know what’s best for them for years and years while their prospects wither and their lives are immiserated, at some point you should expect some kind of reaction. Practically all of the U.K.’s elites—including the leaders of both major political parties—supported remaining in the EU, and couldn’t convince enough of their citizens to go along. Democracy was the poison pill that halted the European project. And now, its architects have a choice to make: admit nothing is wrong with their abhorrent excuse for leadership and lose the rest of the continent, or change course and embrace the views of their citizens instead of ignoring them.

Consider how Europe acted after the 2008 financial crisis. They demanded balanced budgets and even surpluses from member countries that had no ability to both run them and provide for their citizens. They viewed every appeal from those countries, assembled mostly in southern Europe, as a personal affront. They turned a global recession into a morality play, so they could scold the weak sisters of the Eurozone as lazy slugabeds who deserved to suffer.

And they didn’t just do this out of spite: they explicitly wanted to empower multinational conglomerates at the expense of independent domestic producers. Last year’s list of demands for the Greek economy from the “troika” (the European Union, European Central Bank and the IMF) had little to do with preventing corruption and furthering economic opportunity. They were mostly about breaking the power of the local publishing industry, journalists, olive oil makers, mom and pop retailers, and so on. The goal was to make way for outside corporations and throw over the internal political and social culture.

………

But you must pair that with the arrogance of the elites, both in London and Brussels, to the growing desperation in the countryside. The technocratic administration of policy in the EU is obtuse to the average Briton or Italian or Frenchman. They viewed democracy the way most people view mosquito bites, as a nuisance rather than a collective voice worth listening to. Euroskepticism grew amid this neglect. For all the talk of burdensome migration, Leave did best in rural communities with few, if any, immigrants. These are the cities and towns that lost out from globalization, where deindustrialization has wiped them out and left them flat. Anger at economic stagnation played as much of a role in Brexit as anger at faceless foreigners allegedly ruining British society.

………

What Leave offers, a toxic stew of isolation and racism, isn’t any good either. But when elites spend this long doing nothing for large swathes of the population, they’re willing to listen to anyone with a different idea.

I would also note that these elites, with their “Rising Tides Lift All Boats” rhetoric have been consistently wrong for the past 50 years, and disastrously wrong over the past decade.

The rule by the “Technocrats” leads to not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic actions, and a complete lack of accountability.

This is how we ended up in our current state of affairs and how the EU ended up being run by people who are blithely wrong, because there are never any consequences to them or their policies when they are wrong.

The strength of democratic institutions is that if those making policy have screwed up badly enough, that they get tossed out and replaced.

Absent this, those in power will continue pursue failed policies, because they have no incentive to admit failure and fix things.

The Blairites Strike Back

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The Blairites in Labour have taken advantage of the Brexit vote to attempt to remove Jeremy Corbyn as head of the party:

Jeremy Corbyn will attempt to confront the crisis facing his leadership on Monday morning as he enters emergency talks with the deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson, amid a series of further shadow cabinet walkouts and a likely vote of no confidence from his MPs.

The Labour leader, who was left reeling after his decision to sack the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, was followed by the resignations of 11 senior shadow cabinet members, said he would not “betray the trust” of the people who voted for him by stepping down. He vowed to stand against anyone challenging him for the leadership.

But Corbyn has come under huge pressure from the resignations, which will pitch politicians against Labour party members who elected Corbyn by an overwhelming majority in a battle for the heart of the party.

………
Arguing that his focus was keeping his party together through turbulent times, Watson said: “It’s very clear to me that we are heading for an early general election and the Labour party must be ready to form a government. There’s much work to do.”

Corbyn responded late on Sunday, saying he regretted the resignations but was determined to reshape his shadow cabinet over the next 24 hours. “I was elected by hundreds of thousands of Labour party members and supporters with an overwhelming mandate for a different kind of politics … I am not going to betray the trust of those who voted for me– or the millions of supporters across the country who need Labour to represent them.

“Those who want to change Labour’s leadership will have to stand in a democratic election, in which I will be a candidate,” he added, arguing that the referendum result underlined how shut out of the political system millions felt.

Writing in the Guardian, Len McCluskey, the general secretary of the Unite union, warned MPs tweeting and briefing against their leader that they could face mandatory deselections if they continued with their disloyalty. “Those Labour MPs plunging their party into an unwanted crisis are betraying not only the party itself but also our national interest at one of the most critical moments any of us can recall,” he wrote.

The grassroots movement Momentum also began mobilising to protect Corbyn, with phone banks being set up to contact up to 100,000 supporters ready for another leadership battle. A petition had attracted almost 200,000 signatures to save the leader, and a protest is being planned outside parliament on Monday evening at the same time as the leader will face the vote of no confidence.

They have been waiting since his election to stage this.

I hope that the folks opposing Corbyn lose, and that its aftermath will be the removal of Blairites from senior positions in the party.

Your Brexit Update

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It’s been close all night, but the trend has been clear


The geographic divide is pretty clear


The history of EU elections mitigates against this coming to fruition

I’ve been following EU Referendum Results.

There were 46,501,241 votes cast, with 15,203,370 leave votes and 14,157,273 stay votes counted at this point, which means that Brexit leads by 51.8% to 48.2% and the stay votes will need to get 56.1% of the remaining vote to win.

So, my prediction appears to have been wrong, and Britain will vote for a Brexit.

Rather unsurprisingly, there was a significant geographic divide, with England and Wales going Brexit, and Scotland going stay. (middle pic)

The question, of course, is what it all means.  I’m inclined to believe, as Moon of Alabama posits, that neither Cameron, nor the EU, nor the City of London will meekly accede to this vote as the bottom pic clearly shows.

I rather expect that we will be talking about “When the Brexit finally happens” 10 years from now.

The pics will pop up if you click on them.

OK, so Now the Brexit Polls Have Closed

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My money is still on a close race, where the not-England parts of the UK have the Brexit rejected.

That being said, I think that there are some in this election, and when taken in juxtaposition:

  1. When ignoring the political opportunists (Hi, Boris), I think that the pro-Brexit campaigners have overwhelmingly relied on nativism, bigotry, and anti-immigrant sentiment in their campaign.
  2. The substantive complaints made about the EU by the pro-Brexit forces are essentially correct.
  3. Because of items 1, item 2 has simply not been a meaningful part of the campaign.

Personally, I believe that if the EU continues as it does, (An undemocratic font of German political hegemony and German economic mythologyz) it will lead to another war in Europe.

We can see the tensions deriving from the EU inflicting pain and suffering on the ordinary citizenry in order to protect the elites, and this (along with there being no meaningful leftwing opposition to the EU) has led to the rise of reactionary and bigoted parties across Europe.

The UK pulling out of the EU could be the dick punch that it needs to realign itself from an unelected (the European Parliament is a glorified debating society) imperial bureaucracy unto a real democratic institution.

As an aside, there are some secondary benefits to a Brexit:

  • It should reduce the incidence of foreigners using London real estate for “in case of popular uprising” bolt holes, which would make the city more affordable for ordinary Brits.
  • It should reduce the size, and hopefully influence, or Britain’s bloated and corrupt financial sector.

What a Surprise, the Swiss are Running away from the EU

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After have been in process to join the EU for 24 years, Switzerland has withdrawn its application:

The upper house of the Swiss parliament on Wednesday voted to invalidate its 1992 application to join the European Union, backing an earlier decision by the lower house. The vote comes just a week before Britain decides whether to leave the EU in a referendum.

Twenty-seven members of the upper house, the Council of States, voted to cancel Switzerland’s longstanding EU application, versus just 13 senators against. Two abstained.

In the aftermath of the vote, Switzerland will give formal notice to the EU to consider its application withdrawn, the country’s foreign minister, Didier Burkhalter, was quoted as saying by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

So not a surprise.

What the F%$#?

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British MP Jo Cox was just assassinated by a pro-Brexit terrorist:

An MP has died after she was shot and stabbed in a “horrific” assault in her constituency, police have said.

Jo Cox, Labour MP [Member of Parliament] for Batley and Spen, was left bleeding on the ground after the attack in Birstall, West Yorkshire. A man was arrested nearby.

One eyewitness told the BBC they heard her attacker shout “put Britain first” at least twice beforehand.

Tributes flooded in from politicians including David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Mrs Cox’s husband Brendan said she would want people “to unite to fight against the hatred that killed her.”

………

Mrs Cox, 41, is the first sitting MP to be killed since 1990, when Ian Gow was the last in a string of politicians to die at the hands of Northern Irish terror groups.

An assassination in Britain, with a firearm?

I think that England may be hanging around with the wrong sort:  A mindlessly violent bloke with a firearms fetish:  the good old US od A.

Here Is the Latest Scare Story about a Brexit

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It appears that a French economist with close ties to the government is makign dire predictions about what would happen if the UK votes to leave the euro:

Eurozone economies would gain at the expense of Britain if the UK voted to leave the EU, a leading French economist has predicted, with a relocation of financial activity out of London causing sterling to plummet.

Mathilde Lemoine, a prominent member of the French government’s budgetary watchdog and chief economist of the Edmond de Rothschild private bank, said sterling could rapidly fall 34 per cent against the euro.

The report by the private bank demonstrated how European finance houses could profit from Brexit if the Leave campaign wins the referendum on June 23.

Ms Lemoine, also a former adviser to the French prime minister, wrote that the rapid relocation of financial activity would add to the “brutal drop” in sterling she expects after a vote for Brexit.

Such a vote, she said, would “immediately” reopen the question of the location of clearing houses for eurozone business, which are mostly in London after the UK government won a case last year in the European Court of Justice. It ruled against the European Central Bank’s requirement that clearing houses of euro-denominated business between European banks had to be based in the eurozone and regulated by the ECB.

After a Brexit vote, “it is certain that the grounds for the European Court of Justice’s decision would no longer exist,” Ms Lemoine wrote. “As a result, the European Council could immediately require clearing houses handling euro transactions to be located in the eurozone. On our calculations, sterling would fall 34 per cent against the euro in the space of three months”.

It’s enough to make one want to invoke the proverbial briar patch.

If  Lemoine’s predictions are true, this win for the UK:

  • Finance moves out
    • Should reduce insane real estate prices in and around London.
    • Restructuring of the economy from finance is better for 99+% of the people with less inequality, and more productive industry.
    • The corruption influence of finance and other rent seeking industries on the political system is reduced.
    • Intellectual capital that is otherwise wasted on finance and banking returns to productive pursuits.
  • Pound falls.
    • Trade balance improves, because imports are more expensive, and exports are cheaper.
    • Inflation increases, which solves the UK’s current disinflation, which will make recovery better, because people are less inclined to hoard money, and inflation devalues debts.

This horror story really isn’t particularly horrible.

    And the EU Implosion Continues Apace

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    The Austrian right wing Freedom Party just scored a surprise win in its Presidential elections:

    Austria is braced for political turmoil with fears that the landslide victory for a rightwing populist and gun-carrying candidate in Sunday’s first-round presidential vote could trigger snap elections.

     Norbert Hofer, of the rightwing Freedom party (FPÖ), defied pollsters’ predictions to beat the Green party’s Alexander Van der Bellen into second place, gaining 36% of the vote. The two candidates will go head to head in a run-off ballot on 22 May.

     While the presidential post is mainly a ceremonial role, Hofer has threatened to make use of a right to dissolve parliament before the 2018 elections, warning other candidates in a TV debate that “you will be surprised by what can be done [by a president]”.

     Hofer, a youthful 45-year-old who is partially paralysed after a paragliding accident, has campaigned for disability rights and is seen as having lent a friendly face to a party that balances virulently anti-immigration and Eurosceptic messages with leftist stances on welfare issues, led by firebrand Heinz-Christian Strache.

     Hofer, who claims to protect himself in the “uncertain times” of the refugee crisis by carrying a Glock gun, scored overwhelming victories in all of Austria’s states apart from Vienna. In Styria, Burgenland and Carinthia – border states most affected by the refugee trail from the Mediterranean to central Europe – Hofer managed to gain 40% or more.

    Let’s ignore the racism right now.*

    The policies of the FPÖ are support for the welfare state, which the German dominated EU is trying to minimize, and it is skeptical of an increasingly anti-democratic structure and culture in Brussels.

    It’s not surprising that this party is popular. Their positions are popular.

    Meanwhile the mainstream parties have stapled themselves to EU policies that are based on delusional economics that are causing pain and misery for the vast majority of the population.

    It’s no wonder that the 2nd place party was the Greens, with the two mainstream parties getting absolutely demolished:

    ………

    Austria’s two main parties, which clung to a majority in the last national elections in 2013 after having run the country for most of the past 70 years, have seen approval ratings slump as they flip-flopped on the migration issue. The government’s inconsistency added to simmering domestic discontent about rising unemployment and economic stagnation.

    The presidential candidates running for Faymann’s Social Democrats and Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner’s People’s Party took 11 percent each, and were eliminated from the run-off. They managed to beat only Richard Lugner, an octogenarian shopping-mall operator and socialite famous for his appearances at Vienna’s Opera Ball together with celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

    The European experience has not yet failed, but it has been digging itself into a hole for decades.

    It has become detached from, and disdainful of, the people that it is supposed to serve, ad its response to increasing hostility from ever larger segments of the populations is to build the walls higher on their fortress mentality.

    *Apart fromthat Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?