by Bob Adelmann
03 February 2014
from
TheNewAmerican Website
A graduate of Cornell
University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular
contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at
www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. |
Viviane Reding, the vice president of
the European Commission, has made it abundantly clear that
her vision is to create and enforce a
United States of Europe, and the upcoming election of 751 delegates to the
European Parliament in May is just the time to accomplish the task.
Said Reding,
"We need to build a United States of Europe,
with the Commission as government, and two chambers: the European
Parliament, and a 'Senate' of Member States."
Once enacted, the commission would reign supreme
over the governments of the once-sovereign nations of Europe, and the
European Parliament members (MEPs) would supersede the authority of
parliament members of the various national governments.
And now is the time, declared Reding:
This debate is moving into the decisive
phase now. In a little more than four months’ time, citizens across
Europe will be able to choose the Europe they want to live in.
There is a lot at stake. The outcome of these elections will shape
Europe for years to come.
And then she acknowledged why such a big push
for a supranational regime is needed: the growth of the Euroskeptics who see
what she is planning and don’t like it one bit.
"This will be our best weapon against the
Euroskeptics: to explain to our citizens that their vote really
matters," Reding noted.
It’s going to be close.
The harder Reding and her comrades push toward a
political union with teeth, the more her efforts are being resisted. Major
media mouthpieces for internationalism are getting nervous and are devoting
massive resources not only to explore the breadth and the depth of the
euroskeptic movement, but to begin to mount counterattacks to neutralize it.
For example, Huffington Post turned loose five of their journalists to
explore the extent of the Euroskeptic movement across Europe and had them
report back to headquarters what they found.
What they found wasn't pretty.
Peter Goodman, the leading light among
them, titled his report "Skepticism
and Contempt" and noted that his researchers found strong
sentiments of "suspicion and even contempt" for Reding’s plans.
He added:
Given abundant signs of Euroskepticism from
London to Berlin, this once-every-five years electoral exercise appears
to be shaping up as no less than a referendum on the merits of
continuing on with the European Union itself...
Distrust about the treaties and conventions that hold together modern
Europe appear[s] to be at an all-time high... [which is] fueling a drive
to reclaim national identities.
The Economist devoted nine pages to that growing
unrest in its January 4 article, "Turning
Right," noting that parties expressing skepticism in,
-
France
-
Great Britain
-
the Netherlands,
...could take as much as a quarter of the 751
seats up for grabs in May.
Said The Economist:
"Across Europe disillusion with the EU is at
an all-time high: in 2007 52% of the public said it had a positive image
of the EU; by 2013 the share had collapsed to 30%."
As if on cue, Bloomberg took pains to quote
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, who is concerned
that the May elections could turn into,
"a festival of unfounded reproaches against
Europe."
He added,
We are seeing, in fact, a rise of extremism
from the extreme right and from the extreme left. I hope we’ll have a
more profound European debate and the European project will be more
strongly defended than before.
I hope, namely, that the mainstream political forces will... no longer
consider European unification as a given.
The British tabloid The Telegraph gave
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier plenty of ink in his
counterattacks against those favoring retaining their sovereignty:
We must not avoid confrontation with
populists, nationalists, with these brainless people who call themselves
Euroskeptics. They all promote anything national [but] without making
proposals of their own.
I’m concerned about the situation in our union. [These] forces could
prove dangerous to the European Union as a whole.
As Reding has pushed forward with her view of
how her world should work, she has unapologetically expressed her plan to
use force and the threat of force to accomplish the task.
In November 2012 she even called her vision
"powerful" and explained,
"If we want a budget policy that is sound in
the long term and also a force for solidarity, we need a European
finance minister who... has clear powers of intervention."
Reding said that all this cannot be accomplished
immediately, but she envisions the steps that must be taken to turn Europe
into a total state:
To do so we shall certainly need new
treaties, and Germany will probably have to amend its Basic Law. We
shall have to find out whether all member states, or only the euro-zone
countries, want to embark on the venture of a Federal Europe.
Reding explained in her "Vision for a
Post-Crisis Europe: Toward a Political Union" that citizens will have the
freedom to vote for the new law, or not, but opting out altogether isn't
going to be possible:
Citizens should be given two alternatives:
either to accept the new Treaty; or reject it and then to remain in a
close form of association....
For this, we need to be more united than ever and take our citizens with
us.
Time, says Reding, is on her side. In at least
two presentations promoting the wonders of coerced unification, she ended by
quoting the authors of This Time is Different, economists Kenneth
Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart:
"The pressure of the crisis may unleash a
dynamism that we cannot imagine in our wildest dreams. In the end the
United States of Europe may come about much faster than most people
think."
It could also collapse much more quickly.
The harder she and her comrades push for their
elitist socialist dream of a perfect society with them in charge, the
greater the mounting pushback from citizens who increasingly see what’s
coming.
The elections in May, while not definitive,
could be indicative instead of that mounting resistance to tyranny. The
clock is ticking.
The disintegration of the dreamers’ dreams
could,
"come about much faster than most people
think."