Showing posts with label Walter Funk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter Funk. Show all posts

Secret History of the EU Project

 June 10, 2016

Pew research data released a few days ago indicates a growing dissatisfaction with the EU even in countries like France and the Netherlands, founding members of the Union.

It would be easy, of course, to blame the spread of euroscepticism on Brexit, on the 2008 financial debacle or last year’s migration crisis. In fact, as I will attempt to demonstrate further, it is the design flaws inherent in the European project that now undermine its survival.

This project – involving “an ever-closer union” of European nations – originated on the other side of the Atlantic and had started as a covert operation of the then newly-formed CIA. These essential details were hidden from the public for decades. Even I, as an historian, was made aware of them thanks to the interventions on French TV of Mrs. Marie-France Garaud, the eminence grise of presidents De Gaulle, Pompidou and Chirac.

Recently declassified CIA-OSS archives also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that men whom we have considered for years to be the EU’s founding fathers (Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and so on) were in fact paid to impose the CIA’s European project on an unsuspecting public opinion.

The CIA’s project was chiefly inspired by former OSS boss “Wild Bill” Donovan and by John Foster Dulles, former CIA director. Together with a small group of other lawyers, they elaborated the mad project of an “United States of Europe”. It was supposed to be realized in stages, by stealth and without European nations being fully informed about the ultimate shape or objectives of the EU institutions created in the mid-fifties.

Its original design flaws reflected the founders’ lack of grasp of European history, geography and geopolitics. Donovan and Dulles, steeped in European clandestine operations during WWII instead, had also developed an unhealthy admiration for existing Nazi blueprints to unite the continent’s countries and/or of Nazi high-ranking officials like Walther Funk. Their ideas by and large were incorporated into the CIA project, with the consequences only now made apparent by the financial and sovereign debt crises of the past decade.

However, had the initiators of the CIA project taken into consideration their own, American geopolitical scholarship concerning the organization of Europe after the war, Germany would have never been included into NATO but had been kept neutral instead, possibly undivided and under military occupation. Nicholas Spykman, the founder of American geopolitics, writing in 1941 considered that:

 

Any proposal for the unification of Europe would tend to put them in a subordinate position to Germany (regardless of the legal provisions of the arrangement), since Germany, unless broken up into fragments, will still be the biggest nation on the continent. It is hardly conceivable that countries now fighting for their freedom would turn around and voluntarily submit to any such arrangement. It is equally improbable that the United States, after having made such tremendous sacrifices to help free these countries from the German yoke, would consent to the restoration of German domination.” (Nicholas Spykman,“The Geography of the Peace”, 1944)

 

 

 

Today when we look back at the crucial 1947-1957 decade, we can start to understand why the EU Commission and institutions are manned by an opaque bureaucracy unresponsive to public scrutiny, which is hell-bent on advancing the agenda of global corporations at the expense of the European citizen. Being a covert project inspired and financed by the CIA, the EU is indeed unable to fulfil the aspirations for progress of the European nations, although for a few decades it has seemed to function in that sense.

Towards the end, however, the central tenets of the project – the creation of the United States of Europe, Brussels’ centrally-planned economic and fiscal management, the common currency – became the foremost priorities of the subservient EU bureaucracy and of some EU political leaders alike. But this was also the point where European nations could not continue to support the project and started having serious doubts about the whole construction.

In hindsight, after two devastating world wars, the creation of NATO and the Marshall Plan would have been sufficient to keep the peace on the continent and return it to prosperity. The CIA on the other hand, which during the same period also financed the creation of the Bilderberg club, wanted to make sure that American multinationals and later global corporations can fully profit from European reconstruction and the accompanying economic development. Hence the adoption of an European union project and the creation of European institutions which were from the outset under the influence or management of people vetted and approved by the CIA/Bilderberg bosses.

The un-European nature of the entire EU project is its major flaw, although there are others, as well. No such project originating in the New World – even if elaborated with the best of intentions (which of course is not the case) – could ever be expected to work for long on the old continent. And vice-versa.

The EU’s apparent fleeting success had more to do with European reconstruction efforts and with the ubiquitous desire for peace after the two devastating wars. During the past two decades, unfortunately, CIA-sponsored politicians and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic have overplayed their hand and the entire edifice is crumbling as a result. While it is hard to gauge right now what alternative structures and arrangements will ultimately replace the EU, what’s for certain is that European nations should never again go to war with each other or allow outside powers and institutions to make vital decisions on their behalf concerning their collective future.

Why the Berlin Consensus is Toxic for the EU

 August 31, 2015

Over the past fifteen years, quite a lot of criticism has been levelled by the “MIT gang”° against what has become known as the Washington consensus. Very little or no public discussion, however, has taken place about its close European offshoot, the Berlin consensus.

Sure, there are some differences between the neoliberal economic thinking underpinning the Washington consensus concept and the Berlin consensus. For better or for worse, the pitfalls in promoting mass privatizations, currency and capital markets liberalization around the globe are too well-known to all to insist upon here. What the Washington and the Berlin consensus have in common, on the other hand, is the “one-size-fits-all” approach to solving economic problems.

The policies shaping today’s Berlin consensus have appeared during the nineties in connection with the introduction of the common currency. The main tenets of the Berlin consensus are derived from the German economic doctrine of ordoliberalism and the project of Walther Funk, Hitler’s minister of the economy.

Alas, what works for Germany does not work for the rest of the eurozone. The Maastricht Treaty, the budgetary and public debt rules and limitations, as well as the accompanying austerity measures have been enshrined, following the sovereign debt and euro crises, into the constitutions of most eurozone member countries. The six-pack and the two-pack compacts have also become part of the financial legislation of the eurozone.

And here lies the problem. The rigidity or inflexibility of the rules and principles on which the Berlin consensus is based, whilst it might favour an export economy like Germany’s, is playing havoc with economies like France’s and Italy’s, to mention but a few. The German obsession with very low inflation, low wages and zero budget deficit targets has provoked the stagnation of most eurozone economies. In the normal order of things there are surplus countries and deficit countries, since it is not possible to transform the whole continent into a global exporting powerhouse. This is the main reason why imposing the Berlin consensus on all of the eurozone’s member states is proving not only wrong, but downright catastrophic.

Still, compliant governments from France to Greece have made huge efforts to cut government expenditure, freeze or diminish wages and transform their consumer-led economies into export champions. Some, like Portugal and Spain have temporarily succeeded in doing so, but only by repressing internal demand, cutting wages and tolerating high unemployment rates.

The German way, unfortunately, is that of adapting the economy to the needs of price stability, and not the currency to the needs of the economy. For German policymakers, the flexibility has to come from the workers, not from the rules governing the economy. The fact that the eurozone has ceased to work – following the imposition of the Berlin consensus – is by now clear for all to see.

As it always happens when the groupthink phenomenon manifests itself, however, EU leaders prefer to justify the unjustifiable and to delay needed changes in policy until it will be too late to save not only the common currency area, but the EU as a political union as well. (The Eurogroup is a textbook example of groupthink.)

Accordingly, it is time for knowledgeable insiders – such as Yanis Varoufakis, for example – to clearly and concisely explain to the European layman why the Berlin consensus is toxic for the eurozone and what can be done about it. Surely, one cannot expect such a demanding intellectual effort to be undertaken by the likes of Wolfgang Schaeuble, Jeroen Dijsselbloem or say… the German Council of Economists. And, who knows? A timely and well-written book on this subject might even become a best-seller here in Europe.

°Note: The “MIT gang” is a group of leading American and French economists, such as Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard, Maurice Obstfeld, who have studied economics at MIT at about the same time and have continued to promote Keynesian macro-economic remedies, as opposed to supply-side economic remedies, in addressing economic downturns.

FROM ATLANTIC WAVE TO REVOLUTIONARY CONTAGION

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