It’s Wednesday, and as usual I scout around various issues that I have been thinking about rather than write a consolidated analysis on one topic. Today, I consider the question of why the EU elites are spending billions supporting the Ukraine government against Russia. They claim that Russia poses a major threat to European freedom but given the superior Russian military machine has not taken much territory after 783 days of war I conclude that such narratives are fanciful and deliberately being advanced to hide true motives. I also consider the situation in the Middle East and then offer today’s music segment to restore our peace of mind.
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As you read below, the US Congress has a bill before it which effectively accuses South Africa of being a terrorist state because it had the audacity – in the eyes of the Western (wealthy) establishment – to call Israel out in the International Court of Justice for serial human rights abuses (including genocide).<\/p>\n
If it passes, the Bill will allow the US to impose funding cuts to aid and all sort of other bullying initiatives to bring the poor African state to heal.<\/p>\n
This quote from the Al Jazeera Op Ed (April 16, 2024) – It is time for a democratic world order<\/a> – sums up the problem that the progressive politics has fallen into:<\/p>\n \nWhen pressed on the necessity of taking this course of action, one of the common off-the-record responses activists, policy analysts and scholars receive from government officials around the world, including South Africa, is: \u201cWe want to pursue more meaningful direct action to help the Palestinian people, but we cannot withstand a punishing reaction from the US.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was thinking about that as part of one of the three major projects I am working on at present – this one being to revise my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale<\/a> (published May 2015) – to take into account Brexit, Ukraine and the Middle East situations, which, arguably, have altered the outlook for Europe in irrevocable and significant ways – none good.<\/p>\n As I think through the issues it becomes more obvious what the agenda in Europe is about and it goes beyond the neoliberal dimensions that have created the dysfunctional architecture of the common currency system.<\/p>\n I have been thinking of how I weave the Ukraine disaster into the book about Europe.<\/p>\n Clearly, the European Commission and the US have spent a massive amount supporting Ukraine’s attempts to win back its border.<\/p>\n That financial and military support appears to be hitting roadblocks now as politicians start to question the hype that Ukraine’s President has been pumping out.<\/p>\n If we examine recent election results, there have been successes by those not keen to continue supporting the Ukraine effort and domestic issues like inflation have localised the political debate somewhat.<\/p>\n My understanding of the Ukraine situation is that it has demonstrated how dependent Europe is on US military support through NATO despite the rather inflammatory rhetoric from, say the French President who wanted to send European military troops into the War.<\/p>\n On March 14, 2024, Emmanuel Macron claimed on national TV that (Source<\/a>):<\/p>\n \nIf Russia were to win, the lives of French people would change … We would no longer have security in Europe.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Similar statements have come from other leading politicians in Europe and elsewhere.<\/p>\n Claims that Putin will run through Finland, Poland, and beyond are regularly rehearsed to support the demands for ever more weapons and armaments for Ukraine.<\/p>\n I am not military expert but we are now in day 783 of the Russian assault on the East of Ukraine and the Russian military machine has superior weapons, air craft, many more troops, and other advantages and they have not really succeeded in capturing much territory at all.<\/p>\n They have caused some terrible destruction and killed a lot of Ukraine soldiers but have not demonstrated any capacity to penetrate into Europe proper or take back control of the former Soviet satellite states.<\/p>\n So all the talk of Russia becoming a threat to NATO seems to be obfuscation and one wonders why the European leaders are so intent on spending billions of euros supporting the Ukraine when they are busy resuming the fiscal straitjacket on Member States in the face of rising unemployment and on-going inflationary pressures on households.<\/p>\n The progressive politics surrendered to the neoliberalism of the EU Project long ago because they claimed they were cosmopolitans and the Europe was transcending the pettiness of state boundaries and opening up the continent.<\/p>\n It was a faux agenda of course given that the European elites allowed people to drown at their borders – so cosmopolitanism had boundaries it seems.<\/p>\n Except now, I am thinking the Ukraine issue is not a reflection of any genuine fear that Russian forces will not stop at Ukraine, but rather a grand scheme to create a larger Europe and extend the control of Brussels out to the Russian border.<\/p>\n The whole common currency march was a reflection of that sort of mentality – a desire to create a giant corporatist state independent of what the people within the Member States really thought, wanted, or would benefit from.<\/p>\n Elites out of control.<\/p>\n They have effectively supported Zelensky because they know he will be compliant and feel bigger because he will bring the Ukraine into ‘Europe’.<\/p>\n Similar sentiments drove the Greeks and Italians into the euro.<\/p>\n The former was an expression of dissent against the military dictatorship and a hope to be protected by European membership, while the latter reflected disdain for years of corruption among the Italian elites and the desire to force wider scrutiny on Italian politics.<\/p>\n The question I am dealing with as I draft new chapters in the revised book is how is all this going to be legitimised?<\/p>\n In our 2017 book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World<\/a> (Pluto Books, September 2017) – the issue of identity came up.<\/p>\n Towards the end of that book, we evaluated the various options that the then 19 Member States of the Eurozone had to get out of the dystopic neoliberal austerity machine that they had created when they went into the common currency and surrendered their own sovereignty.<\/p>\n I also delved into that issue in my 2015 book.<\/p>\n One option was clearly to create a true Federal Europe, which was the only way the earlier processes that explored further economic integration (the 1970 Werner Report and the 1977 MacDougall Report) considered would be viable.<\/p>\n The – Werner Report<\/a> – for example, concluded that for EMU cohesion “transfers of responsibility from the national to the Community plane will be essential” (Werner Report, 1970, page 10).<\/p>\n Moreover, the (p.11):<\/p>\n \n… transfer to the Community level of the powers exercised hitherto by national authorities will go hand in hand with the transfer of a corresponding Parliamentary responsibility from the national plane to that of the Community. The centre of decision of economic policy will be politically responsible to a European Parliament.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a similar vein, the – MacDougall Report<\/a> concluded in relation to the need for a mechanism to cushion “short-term and cyclical fluctuations” (p.12) that:<\/p>\n \n… because the Community budget is so relatively very small there is no such mechanism in operation on any significant scale, as between member countries, and this is an important reason why in the present circumstances monetary union is impracticable.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The current design of the Eurozone determines that the Member State governments are not ‘sovereign’ in the sense that they are forced to use a foreign currency and must issue debt to private bond markets in that foreign currency to fund any fiscal deficits.<\/p>\n Their fiscal positions must then take the full brunt of any economic downturn because there is no ‘federal’ counter stabilisation function.<\/p>\n The EMU is a federation without the most important component.<\/p>\n The decision by the Delors Committee in 1989 to ignore these recommendations reflected two realities:<\/p>\n 1. The neoliberal ideology had become dominant and they didn’t want a major fiscal role for government in the new system.<\/p>\n 2. But, relevant here, the decision to leave fiscal policy responsibilities at the Member State level reflected the diverse cultural, historical and language differences across the 19 Member States.<\/p>\n In particular, Germany’s dominant position in the European economy allowed it to dictate terms and there was never going to be a system established where permanent fiscal transfers could be made between states, which in the European context would have meant transfers from Germany to the South (mainly).<\/p>\n There was simply no European ‘demos’, which could force the creation of a truly federal Europe.<\/p>\n Which led me to conclude in – Eurozone Dystopia – that the option for Europe to create an effective federal system was not viable.<\/p>\n That led me to recommend various orders of exit starting from the politically impossible orderly dissolution of the currency sharing to different forms of unilateral exit.<\/p>\n The Ukraine situation has brought these issues into relief.<\/p>\n How can Brussels convince the Member States and the people to support Ukraine, which is not part of Europe at a time when they are intent on invoking harsh austerity on many Member States within the EU?<\/p>\n There are all sorts of narratives going on at present but the overriding storyline appears to be the classic struggle between good and bad.<\/p>\n The political elites in Europe keep telling us that this is a struggle against those that would denigrate and destroy the European values of freedom and democracy and justice.<\/p>\n The same elites ride roughshod over democratic outcomes in the Member States whenever it suits them and it is well documented that the structure of the treaties and the behaviour of the technocrats in Brussels have created a gaping democratic deficit within Europe.<\/p>\n But it suits the elites to spin the virtuous line that the Ukraine stands for European values against the ‘Eastern monsters’ who are no better than roaming animals.<\/p>\n Already the common currency states have pushed the integration beyond what we might consider to be legitimate.<\/p>\n Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) helps us understand the capacities of the currency-issuer and the consequences of using those capacities.<\/p>\n But it only goes so far.<\/p>\n It says that the imposition of a tax liability drives the demand for the currency.<\/p>\n Yes!<\/p>\n But that begs the question – how does the government get the tax liability to stick?<\/p>\n And the answer goes well beyond the capacity of the state to lock people in prisons for failure to pay taxes.<\/p>\n The point was that currency sovereignty is only legitimised if there is a demos that accepts that sovereignty and all that it implies.<\/p>\n My assessment after years of detailed study of European history, sociology, economics, culture, language etc is that there is no such demos to support a wider Europe.<\/p>\n Nation states still define cultural, language and other boundaries that define the various demos in Europe.<\/p>\n Thinking that there will be widespread support to integrate Ukraine into this supranational state is fanciful.<\/p>\n That will be Europe’s unravelling.<\/p>\n I stand by the analysis in the 2015 and 2017 books.<\/p>\n Neoliberalism is a state-driven project rather than an abandonment of the nation state.<\/p>\n It has relied on convincing the demos in each nation state that they would be better off.<\/p>\n The EU Project was superimposed on that with lies, deceptions and bullying.<\/p>\n The political developments in Europe tell me that that agenda is losing support.<\/p>\n I will write more about that in later posts.<\/p>\n Apparently it is okay for Israel to infiltrate a nation (Syria) and then bomb a foreign embassy (Iran) there thus murdering several people who were working inside, but if Iran does anything in response it is held out in the Western press as “unprovoked” and “unprecedented”.<\/p>\n And Israel then tries to take the high moral ground and demands the rest of the world strengthen sanctions against Iran.<\/p>\n Meanwhile back closer to home, the genocide of the Palestinian people continues in Gaza and illegal Zionist occupiers in the West Bank continue to murder Palestinians there and steal there homes.<\/p>\n Israel is now killing women and children in refugee camps<\/p>\n And the US, which is continually claiming it has a massive debt problem and has to cut spending, ratifies the Israeli actions and spends around $US1 billion on rockets to thwart the drones coming into Israel from Iran.<\/p>\n This is the definition of madness.<\/p>\n And while I am no fanboy for Iran, the actions of the Israeli defense forces amount to war crimes and all the leadership should be punished in international courts accordingly.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the US, the Republicans and Democrats have combined to submit a new piece of legislation, the so-called – H.R.7256 – U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act<\/a> – which effectively seeks to punish South Africa for taking a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice accusing it of genocide.<\/p>\n The US Congress is now being asked to revise the relationship between the two countries because South Africa is apparently supporting a terrorist organisation (Hamas).<\/p>\n One of the bill’s proponents claimed that he is “greatly concerned with South Africa\u2019s alignment with China and Russia and embracement of Hamas in the wake of the devastating October 7th attacks” (Source<\/a>).<\/p>\n While that is disgusting in itself, the fact that the Democrats also chose to co-sponsor the legislation makes it doubly so.<\/p>\n So we have come so far in this madness that calling out human rights abuses on a massive scale is siding with terrorists.<\/p>\n It is almost beyond one’s imagination how sordid the US has become on this issue.<\/p>\n This is what I have been listening to while working this morning.<\/p>\n I discovered a box of records the other day that had not been dealt with in my recent house move and within the box was some of my favourite records.<\/p>\n Among them was the great album – John Wesley Harding<\/a> – released in 1967 by – Bob Dylan<\/a> – and is, in my view, one of his best.<\/p>\n This song – All Along the Watchtower<\/a> – has always been among my all time favourites.<\/p>\nMiddle East<\/h2>\n
Music – All Along the Watchtower<\/h2>\n