A Lying Lot
From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Tue, 2008-01-22 10:32
A quote from Lord William Rees-Mogg in The Times, 21 January 2008
I'm in favour of a referendum [about the Lisbon Treaty], not only because it was promised by Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats at the last general election, but also because it would be the best way to ratify - or reject - a big constitutional change. The people should be consulted when their powers of self-government are being given away. […] The Government's handling of the referendum issue has been shameful, because that, too, has been anti-democratic. The advantage of a referendum process is that it imposes a regard for public opinion on European politicians. […]
In the case of the European negotiations the original constitution, which led to the Lisbon treaty, was hijacked by Brussels federalists – contrary to the wishes of the people of Britain, France and the Netherlands. Having hijacked the negotiation, the federalists then found that their idea of a supra-European constitution was deeply unpopular. They could not face any more referendums in Europe because they would lose them. […]
The negotiations for the Lisbon treaty were, therefore, designed from the beginning to get round the need for referendums, except in Ireland, where the Irish constitution requires one. Naturally, this underhand process was designed to avoid the British having a referendum. The Labour Government was a co-conspirator in avoiding the need to fulfil what had become an awkward election pledge. The plot certainly involved Tony Blair, whose last public decision was to agree to the new treaty. He was not acting in order to fulfil his election commitment but in order to evade it. After some initial show of reluctance Gordon Brown accepted this deceitful subterfuge. The British people know they are being manipulated; they resent it. […]
[A referendum] is, after all, something that all three large parties promised at the past general election. The Government cannot honourably avoid it. House of Commons select committees with Labour majorities have found that the Lisbon treaty, on which a referendum is being refused, is really the same as the original constitutional treaty on which a referendum was promised.
One of the many reasons to reject Lisbon
Submitted by Marvin Brenik on Tue, 2008-01-22 15:57.
is to decrease the chance of a global financial crisis.
"The Australian Business: Soros: Worst finance crisis since WWII"
"He said that politics had been guided by some basic misunderstandings over the past few years, stemming from something which he called “market fundamentalism” - the belief that financial markets tended to act as a balance.
“This is the wrong idea,” he said. “We really do have a serious financial crisis now.”
However, the facts known by economists:
Financial markets - when not manipulated by gigantic speculations such as those typical of Soros- are the reflection of the state of an economy. When an economy suffers from maladies like inflation and recession or both (normally only one of the two), it can be fixed by the appropriate macroeconomical intervention (monetary and budgetary intervention), which could and would make an economy tend to act as a balance, exactly because the proper interventions are designed to push an economy towards equilibrium.
However, whenever the exact opposite of the appropriate monetary and budgetary measures are taken, such hostile interventions - as it is done both in the US and in the Eurozone as well - and the artificially high energy prices trigger stagflation (recession and inflation) which makes an economy radically shrink, creates extra high unemployment combined with extra high prices.
One of the main reasons why the Lisbon process should be stopped, the monetary and budgetary independence of all EU countries should be regained, and the entire market manipulation system should be regulated by law: otherwise both the US and Europe will be centrally driven into a fatal financial crisis.