Following monday’s announcement of a €750bn EU bailout fund, the EC head and Bilderberg darling José Manuel Barroso announced details of the plan for further European integration.
“Europe has dealt with the immediate emergency but we must also show we are serious about the more fundamental reforms needed. We must now get to the root of the problem.” Barroso stated at a press conference in Brussels.
Currently, the European Central Bank sets interest rates for the euro zone, while national governments set their own fiscal and economic policies. It is this imbalance, which was enforced upon member states with the creation of the EU and a single European currency, that Barroso and his ilk say has led to the escalation of the financial crisis in Europe.
The new proposals centre on three main initiatives.
Firstly the national budgets of member states would be opened up to supervision, scrutiny and pressure from all other EU nations operating under the central body.
Secondly, there would be increased monitoring of macroeconomic imbalances and “competitiveness” between countries.
Thirdly, the proposals call for the creation of a European Monetary Fund or EMF – a permanent bailout mechanism described by the EU’s monetary affairs commissioner Olli Rehn as “a last-resort mechanism of financial assistance in the form of loans, with interest rates that would be so unattractive that no one would want to use it voluntarily.”
The proposals have emerged quickly following Barroso’s comments earlier this week when he noted “In the end, we cannot have a monetary union without an economic union,”
Another Bilderberg kingpin, EU president Herman van Rompuy, reiterated Barroso’s statements, telling the media that “We can’t have a monetary union without some form of economic and – er – political union.”
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England echoed these sentiments yesterday, telling the media that he believes the European Union will not survive unless financial power is centralized and a federal fiscal union is formed.
“I do not want to comment on a particular measure by a particular country, but I do want to suggest that within the Euro Area it’s become very clear that there is a need for a fiscal union to make the Monetary Union work.” King stated in a press conference at the BOE yesterday.
“But if that is to happen there needs to be also a mechanism to enable other countries that have lost competitiveness to regain competitiveness. That requires actions, probably structural reforms, changes in wages and prices, in the countries that need to regain competitiveness. But it also needs a solid and expansionary state of domestic demand in the stronger economies in Europe.” King added.
A centralized fiscal union would essentially mean the formation of a eurozone treasury, with the power to tax and spend, issue its own debt and manage the budgets of its member states.
As noted by leading economists earlier this week following Barroso and Van Rompuy’s €750bn EU bailout, the move toward a fiscal union would mean the loss of even more national sovereignty for member states.
Morgan Stanley’s European Chief Economist, Elga Bartsch noted:
Like the ERM crisis in the early 1990s spurred on political initiatives to bring about the long-planned monetary union in Europe, it seems that the sovereign debt crisis could be acting as a catalyst for an ever closer union of European countries. The decisions taken this weekend first by European leaders and then by finance ministers mark a big leap towards a fiscal union in the euro area, we think.
Not only have countries agreed to stand in for each other in an unprecedented extent, they have also agreed to foregoing some of their fiscal sovereignty and submit to rigorous fiscal consolidation programmes should they require financial assistance.
In other words, European nation states are literally signing over their economic independence to a vastly empowered centralized system under the threat of economic obliteration.
For many years critics have warned that the EU has been slowly morphing into a federal superstate governed by unelected powerbrokers, who have increasingly sought to undermine the national sovereignty of member states. There can be no doubt that this latest proposal represents such a move.
What will the people of the member nations gain from this mass centralized union? They will simply see more of their earnings and their savings siphoned off to Brussels to prop up a failing paper currency they had never asked for in the first place. It will also mean their national vote counts for even less as unelected foreign bureaucrats are provided vastly more influence on the national economic policies of their governments.
This is a classic case of problem, reaction, solution – the very same European powerbrokers that brought us a major crisis, via enforced destabilizing monetary integration, are now offering up the final piece of the jigsaw, full integration as a means of stabilization.
Steve Watson
sursa: Prisonplanet.com