Europe: Crisis? What crisis? Let's hit Syria
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - The heads of state and government of the European Union (EU) just got together in Brussels for their Spring fashion show, sorry, politico-economic summit. No Gucci/Prada glam here; instead, a stuffy Sartrean huis clos. No pesky, noisy citizens allowed; only these Masters of the (European) Universe. And this after three horrendous crisis years affecting the eurozone.
Welcome to the way "democracy" really works in Europe; all major decisions in economic policy, budget and finance, which directly affect over 500 million mostly disgruntled (and millions of unemployed) people, are taken in a cozy heart of darkness...
... For insiders though, everything is fine and dandy. Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for Economic Affairs, said with a straight face that, "If the six-pack and the two-pack were in place when the euro was launched, we would have never reached such a crisis." So why didn't any Brussels technocrat with a fat salary for life think about it then?
On the other side of the divide, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the formerly heroic Dany Le Rouge and current co-president of the Greens in the European Parliament, defined the racket as "technocratic austerity". Better yet; the great German philosopher and certified European federalist Jurgen Habermas dubbed it "post-democratic autocracy".
From Paris to Scandinavia, there have been howls of angst about Europe having fallen into a black hole. One just has to hit the streets - and listen to the noise - to see which way the wind is blowing; populism (as in the latest Italian elections), and fascism (in Denmark, for instance, a new poll shows that the extreme right-wing DF party, anti-immigration and anti-EU, is already more popular than the center-left coalition currently in power; horrible news for current Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt).
Facing this Armageddon, the best the technocrat-infested EC can come up with is that we must "reintroduce people" in "the machine". It won't do; the machine has already run amok...
/... http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-03-180313.html
Well worth the read. Things will indeed fall apart down here in deep S. Europe, and spread from here, unless some neo-Keynesian stimulation spending comes in soon, which could easily be focused on very useful projects such as developing the vast renewable energy resources widely available across the region, and rationalising transport and settlement and manufacturing distribution... We need financial investment flows to transfer capital and liquidity from the rich North to the needy South of Europe targeted on job creation and long-term climate-change-aware sustainable socioeconomic development projects that will quickly return great benefit to Europe as a whole. - GD
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