I don’t normally wade out into other topics besides awakening, it’s true, but this is something that I have had an interest in, which involves transnational unions. I think that it is important to know as much about them as possible since they can have so much impact on our lives as well as our culture(s) going forward. They can also be shrouded in mystery, or may have origins that we know little about. Considering how much effect that they can have on our lives it seems important to know as much about them as possible.
I am of an age where I was able to watch for many decades as the European Union was talked about and developed over time. I have also since heard rumblings about other countries attempting similar types of unions like a North and South American Union, and an African Union. I mean, what’s the point of these unions, really? Easier travel? A common currency? Extras for supranational corporations bent on taking over the world? Right, that sounded a bit paranoid, but you wouldn’t be wrong if you asserted that, because in many ways this is just what they do. I have often said that people have souls and corporations have branding. The problem is that branding isn’t exactly tied to honesty but is mere image. A magician can make you believe just about anything is possible, just as the billboards promise a better life by owning the latest television set, or shoes, or just about anything. Both attempt to deceive you or to convince you that something you might have never considered could be of great interest. That’s just the innocuous part: “buy our jewelry, how about these lovely radial tires!” How about how corporations control the levers of power, or how they set up a dual system where they don’t pay taxes, or how they are able to pressure governments to go to war so they can lay claim to resources that they badly want. Oh yes, now we are going down a dirty rabbit hole indeed. The result of my interest in issues related to the supranational controlling body of the soulless corporation has really gotten me into the weeds on this topic. I wont apologize for my rhetoric because I find that without it I am prone to falling into the depths of hopelessness. Okay, I am being dramatic but hopefully to drive a point home.
In the process of this journey, I found a piece a number of years ago written by journalist Lyndsay Jenkins whose piece The European Union Unmasked. Her piece was included in a publication of articles and investigative pieces on little-known facts about everything from Vatican gold and the Nazi’s to how the European Union sought to destroy the sovereignty and national integrity of its nation state members, titled Everything You Know Is Wrong (©2002 The Disinformation Company, published by MJF Books, 322 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 100001).
Lyndsay’s piece opened my eyes to what was taking shape in Europe in regards to the E.U., and it was one of the first alarm bells at a time when there had been trial balloons floated about an American Union (and currency) that all was not well on the continent. It is now almost twenty years after her piece first came out and I have to say that it has aged very well, and can still serve to inform and warn us about what happens when corporations become involved in government. Okay, when corporations ARE the government.
I tracked Lyndsay down a number of years ago and requested permission to reprint her piece online, to which she agreed. For now, this blog post, though, will be looking at how the E.U. began and its history. I will follow this post with her piece as it first appeared in Everything You Know Is Wrong. It is as important as ever to retell the story that she uncovered.
I was surprised when people, even Europeans, were unaware of the history of the E.U. I was once there myself, but once I had learned about it I wondered how its history was always kept so quiet.
The European Union emerged originally conceived in the late 1940’s, designed and effected in the 1950’s onward as a cartel consisting of heavy industry. Its original name was the European Community of Coal and Steel. The manufacturers in this sector in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Eastern France, and Northern Italy became one organization. This was done under the stewardship of the United States as a post-war effort of helping to organize Europe. This cartel was created to regulate competition in order to keep prices consistent, which is a way of saying they got rid of competition by agreeing to cooperate. From there, this union went on to expand to co-opt the French farmers (the Common Agricultural Policy), then the bankers, and hen they expanded geographically. It was a technocracy that would allow them to make decisions separate from the governments where they were conducting business, with its own governing body, which was located in Brussels. (1)
This formulation led to a common currency and now a need to keep that currency stable so that it could be used across state boundaries. This is itself a problem which leads to what amounts to a manipulated currency in order to keep a level field across the cartel member states. By the time that this group was looking at a common currency, there grew a deeper relationship with the nation states with a desire to broaden what this union meant for all involved. What began as an effort to cooperate between large businesses, turned into an extra-governmental body which then became the E.U.(2)
There are problems with this model which I will deal briefly here but will expand on in a future post which involves the E.U.’s lack of awareness concerning the sovereignty of its member states.
The problem with this, though, is that the interests of large corporations are very different from those of the citizenry of the member states that would enter into the Union. The core of the E.U. has demonstrated a lack of real interest in democracy, giving it lip service in order that its own agenda may continue to move forward. After sixty years, the E.U. has itself evolved beyond its roots of a cartel model, but it still maintains a type of control established from its beginning that has had the effect of serving to erode the sovereignty of its member states. It was this type of abuse that led Britain to put forward a referendum for leaving the E.U., which it did successfully on Thursday June 23rd 2016.(3)
What Americans and others outside the E.U. who tend to be more or less oblivious as to the finer point of what is known as “Brexit” should appreciate about what caused this referendum in the first place was a growing inability for Britain to decide its own laws and its own future. With the real head of the European Union consisting of unelected officials, Britain began to realize that the country was dealing with a trading block that was unresponsive to their needs as a country and which was showing every sign of seeking to undermine the sovereignty of Britain by stealth by the way that the governors in Brussels where the E.U. governmental body is located were operating.
This is where I will leave off for now, and it is where Lyndsay Jenkins’ piece will pick up, all with her kind permission, or course.
Notes
- Europe is Kaput. Long Live Europe! – Slavoj Ziziek, Yanis Varoufakis and Julian Assange – full event https://www,youtube.com/watch?v=yjxAArOkoA0 (see 46 minute mark)
2. Ibid.
3.https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/eu-referendum
Waking The Infinite 