A guest post from Chris Snuggs, a long-term supporter and author on Learning from Dogs.
Chris Snuggs
EU QUESTIONNAIRE – C Snuggs, 26 November, 2010
This questionnaire is designed to test your knowledge and opinions of the EU. Your answers will be collated and go towards the production of a report to present to your MEP (Member of the European Parliament)– if you can find him or her. Please give your opinion by ticking either T (true) or F (false) for each proposition.
a
THE EURO
1 Greece falsified its statistics in order to “qualify” for entry to the euro.
2 EU leaders KNEW this (like almost everyone else), but ignored it.
3 The EU’s OWN economists had told them that Greece and others could not live in the Eurozone alongside Germany.
4 Ergo, the EU elite connived in a LIE about the finances of Greece and the future of the euro..
5 Once Greece was in the Eurozone it spent money wildly and wastefully with many people retiring at 50, a bloated and overpaid civil service, civil servants who often didn’t bother to turn up, pensions bequeathed to relatives and so on.
6 The EU elite knew all this but DID NOTHING EFFECTIVE about it.
7 Now European taxpayers are having to pay BILLIONS to bail out feckless countries that vastly overspent.
8 The EU elite that lied and ignored these deep problems have been utterly incompetent guardians’ of EU taxpayers’ money. More than incompetent, they have been party to DEFRAUDING many millions of taxpayers for their own ambitions and political ends.
9 The VAST payouts of taxpayers’ money to bail out Greece, Ireland and soon Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Italy DO NOTHING TO FIX THE UNDERLYING PROBLEMS as highlighted in 3 above. This policy therefore represents an appalling further waste of money and merely postpones difficult decisions that EU leaders must make, and should in fact have made YEARS ago.
10 According to the EU’s OWN RULES it is ILLEGAL to “bail out” a bankrupt country. Despite this, the EU countries have bailed out Greece and now Ireland. Mr Van Rompuy was charged with finding a way that this could be done legally. Frau Merkel has suggested that the Lisbon Treaty be amended to allow bailouts to be done legally. How she proposes to amend this Treaty without the consent of member countries is a mystery.
11 The EU elite, knowingly having illegally bailed out Greece and now Ireland should be arrested en masse for illegal use of public money. The EU is very strong on law, except apparently for itself when it suits it.
EU FINANCE, SPENDING & REMUNERATION
12 The EU has failed to get its accounts signed off for the nth year in succession; NO PRIVATE CONCERN COULD GET AWAY WITH THIS.
13 At this time of economic crisis the EU wants to spend SIX BILLION EUROS on a new diplomatic service, including the placing of FORTY-SIX “diplomats” on Barbados and over FIFTY on Madagascar.
14 The number of EU citizens demanding this vast expenditure must be microscopic; though nobody knows for sure since the EU would never dream of asking its paymasters their opinion.
15 Europe is going through the worst period of financial chaos since WWII. Jobs are being lost almost everywhere; many EU countries are technically bankrupt; people’s living standards and public services are being drastically cut, except it seems in the EU in Brussels.
16 The EU has just won a court case against the people that finance it, the national governments. As a consequence, EU workers will receive a payrise backdated to last year with interest of 3.7% at a time of desperate economic hardship for many millions of EU citizens.
17 The head of the vast new “diplomatic” organisation is a Brit who has NEVER BEEN ELECTED to any post of significance and earns more than TWICE as much as ANY European leader, plus very considerable expenses. She is far from unique in the EU circle of the elite.
18 EU workers receive extraordinary perks (benefits) and also pay around 8% income tax. Very few of their electors (who pay their wages) benefit from anything like this sort of remuneration.
19 Peter Mandelson RESIGNED from his post as Commissioner to become an English Lord. Since his ludicrous remuneration for this was LOWER than his EU income the EU is paying him around £62,000 of taxpayers’ money for FOUR years to make up the difference, EVEN THOUGH HE RESIGNED.
20 The above-mentioned practice amounts to institutionalised THEFT of taxpayers’ money.
21 The EU has just created an English-language website to inform us of how wonderful they are. In other words, WE are paying to have EU PROPAGANDA shoved down our throats.
22 The EU paying some 300,000€ for a dogs’ home in Poland at a time when millions of people in Europe are suffering real economic hardship is just one example of frivelous use of taxpayers’ money.
THE RATIONALE OF THE EU
23 Mr van Rompuy, unelected “President” from a failing and disintegrating state (is this the reason for his obsession?), has said that “The nation states are dead.”He and the EU elite seek the creation of a European “superstate” controlled from Brussels.
24 Mr Van Rompuy has presumably informed President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and other EU leaders personally that their states “are dead”. Their reactions have not been published so far.
25 This agenda was denied by the EU elite for many decades, which of course represents yet another LIE.
26 This unelected “President” earns more than any national leader in the EU. This is to give the impression that he is more important, since clearly the more money you are paid the more important you must be.
MEPs & DEMOCRACY
27 MEPs have just demanded a near 6% increase in the EU budget.
28 In this they are certainly not reflecting the wishes of the majority of their electors.
29 Many turn up in Brussels, sign on to qualify for their attendance allowance and then go away.
30 I do not know of any other profession where you get paid a vast salary and expenses and then EXTRA MONEY just for attending a meeting.
31 Most people haven’t got the foggiest idea who is supposed to be “representing” them in Brussels.
32 The EU as it stands is a top-down decision-making organisation whose leaders have a degree of self-righteousness (“Only we know what is good for you.”) that has to be suffered to be believed.
33 MEPs do not take their electors wishes into account.
34 The EU hates referendums since they give an opportunity to the people to express their opinion and actually make a decision. Naturally they can’t be trusted with decisions.
35 When a referendum goes against the EU the usual reaction is to oblige the country involved to do it again and again till the “right” answer is produced. In this the EU is a laughing stock, but the elite do not care as long as they get their way
36 MEPs periodically flog up and down from Brussels to Strasbourg. Sitting in Strasbourg is supposed to be some sort of symbol, but I don’t know of any voters who were asked if they wanted to pay through the nose for a symbol at vast expense, not least in carbon emissions.
CONCLUSIONS
37 The modern world is characterized by greed, arrogance and incompetence. These are qualities that the EU elite has demonstrated in abundance.
38 The EU elite has totally and utterly FAILED the people of Europe and is not fit for purpose.
39 Most people believe in cooperation within Europe, but not in a European superstate ruled from Brussels, a country both disintegrating and vastly endebted.
40 The EU elite has completely destroyed the faith that many ordinary people had in the EU as primarily a “common market”.
My overall reaction to the EU elite and its management of the EU is as follows. (Please tick ONE box.)
A) In general I am very pleased with the EU leadership.
B) I am quite pleased, even if some things could be improved.
C) I don’t care much either way. They can get on with it as far as I’m concerned.
D) I am not very pleased with the way the EU is run.
E) I am very dissatisfied indeed about the way that my money is being spent.
F) It is such a corrupt, wasteful and undemocratic shambles that we have to abolish it up and start again. My country is certainly better off outside the EU AS IT IS CURRENTLY RUN. I am profoundly disappointed.
F) I am disgusted at the EU elite’s arrogance, incompetence, dishonesty and venality.
[NB. If after reading the above, you really would like to submit your answers to the above questions to your local MP or MEP, then Chris has a form you may use that may be downloaded from here. Ed]
This is a guest post from an old regular (as in frequency, not age!) contributor to Learning from Dogs, Chris Snuggs. He has written in response to the guest post from Patrice himself that was published on the 31st October.
Patrice AYME – WOW!
First, an amazing post – lots to talk about. Secondly, (get the bad news out of the way first) the fact that you warmed to Brown when he became Prime Minister worries me, principally because the man was at best totally incompetent and at worst a moron, having totally messed up almost every aspect of British life one can think of but in particular the economy. It is only the fact that we started out from a better position that prevented (or prevents) us from “doing a Greece”. The waste and delusions were humungous; the basic management skills non-existent. I note that Mr Brown is going to make a speech in the House of Commons soon; I wonder if he is going to apologize for the appalling shambles he left behind or whether he is going to accuse the new government of not spending enough. His finest hour came when “saving the world” by encouraging governments everywhere to borrow vast amounts of money to save money. Had the overall consequences of his previous policies not been so disastrous this could almost have been funny. Well, it was funny for the banks, who of course were laughing all the way not only to the bank but at it.
CHINA: I’ve been to China – (wonderful people) the problem (if there is one) is not their economy per se but the fact that it is a dictatorship. There have been and indeed are worse dictatorships, but it is one nonetheless. As their economic power increases so does their sabre-rattling. Have there ever been any cases where mighty economic power has not been followed by territorial expansion? Patrice will know this; his overview of history in these matters is extraordinary. N° 1 Satan the USA may be, but without their umbrella free, democratic Taiwan would most likely already have been invaded by mainland China.
The YANKS? Humans are – in my humble opinion – often extremely conservative. Americans have been used for decades if not centuries to believing that their country is “the greatest in the world”. (they are not the only guilty ones, the French and Chinese run them close). It is going to take them some time to realize the junk value of that particular belief. While they are slowly internalising it we should be patient, remembering that they did save us from Hitler and/or Stalin. No doubt of course for their own selfish reasons, they did the same in Kosovo, too, (the Europeans – except those anti-European, Anglo-Saxon Brits of course – having done SFA) though I’m still trying to work out why – perhaps EXXON had geological surveys indicating vast oilfields around Pristina?
To save the US it will take someone with a lot more steel than Obama; that is the problem, and WHERE is this person coming from?
FRANCE: If there is any country mired in self-delusion apart from the USA it seems to me to be France ….. I am NOT anti-French – far from it. I lived and worked there for ten years ….. however, Patrice’s observation that most French people understand the need for change but most also support the strikes is revealing. This is the crux – they cannot make up their minds what they want – for too many in positions of power the status quo is too good – a bit like in the USA with the plutocrats. Thus they stagger about getting into a worse and worse situation, much like Britain did under Gordon Brownosaurus. The STATE in France is TOO BIG and SELF-IMPORTANT. Sarko realizes this, but his attempts to rein it in (forced by budget constraints) have been feeble and in any case the inertial resistance is stupendous. The phrase “reality-check” comes to mind.
THE EU: As for “STATE TOO BIG”, the EU is overreaching itself, having just committed to spending over €5 BILLION on a fatuous new diplomatic service run by a nonentity earning TWICE as much as the British and French leaders and which will give the EU FORTY-SIX “diplomats” on the island of Barbados. Nothing against the Barbadians – jolly good chaps and chapesses – but are they REALLY that important to the EU taxpayer? We’ll also have over 50 in that economic colossus of the universe, Madagascar. Meanwhile in Brussels, a new building is to be leased at a cost of a piffling £10,000,000 a year. It is said by the great and good in Brussels that this new diplomatic service is needed to “compete with the Chinese and Indians”. Absolute rubbish of course. The idea that a black-African country will trade with the EU and not the Chinese just because we have fifty odd “diplomats” in a spanking new building downtown is ludicrous. What the Africans want is good value (i.e. cheap) and reliability. Europe is getting past the stage of being able to offer much of those, bogged down as it is by 100,000 pages of European Law and mindless regulations designed à la française to improve the lot of “workers” but which in fact gradually destroy all their jobs.
I personally think the EU is doomed; destroyed by greed, arrogance and self-delusion. The British are already very anti-EU, NOT because we are anti-European; we are just anti venality, greed and overweeing self-delusion. However, in true EU spirit, we are denied the referendum we were promised on the Lisbon Treaty. Anyway, in the EU if you vote “No” in a referendum you just keep getting referenda over and over again until you say “Yes”, so what is the point?
EU TREATIES? A tremendous FARCE of course. Did you know that it is ILLEGAL for members states to bail each other out? But what happened with Greece? And now they have a NEW cunning plot to bail out the next failing economies: Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland must already be licking their lips at the thought of getting free German money. So, bailouts are ILLEGAL, but not apparently if we actually want to do it. So they are only illegal in THEORY then? So it seems. Now Frau Merkel and the usual stitch-up-the-rest suspects (France) have worked out their plan there remains the niggling little detail about it being ILLEGAL. So what is the solution? The humungously-overpaid and fatuous EU President (has he got his presidential jet yet?) has been asked to look at the problem and “see if he can find a way to bail the countries out legally.”
Of course, despite spending thousands of man-hours on the problem he won’t find a way that will stand up in court so the increasingly-fragile and erratic Frau Merkel is talking about “amendments to the Lisbon Treaty”. More hilarity – this took ten years to thrash out, agree and pass and yet she wants to muck about with it already. I find all this both hilarious and criminally venal, treating the European taxpayer with contempt. How do they get away with it? VOTER INERTIA – the same problem as in the USA, where they have a POOR choice of parties and lurch from one dinosaur to the other without ever seeming to explore alternatives. EUROPE? Do YOU know who your MEP is? Does he or she LISTEN to what you say? With Europe in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since WWII when EVERYONE in the real world (not Wayne Rooney of course) is cutting back, jobs are going, projects abandoned the MEPs voted for a 6% INCREASE in their budget. One wonders who their PR people are, but in truth they don’t have to bother much about PR since their accountability is about zero.
The EU initiatives are INSANE – power-mad. It is so transparent as to be laughable. As the British learned from “Yes Minister”, the bigger your budget the more important you must be and therefore the more you must pay yourself. This is the rational for EU top-brass being paid double what NATIONAL LEADERS get. (Oh, and for the “inconvenience” of living abroad of course, even though they get a whole raft of vast expenses including free schooling for their kids). Cameron knows it, but the Brits are so used to being slagged off by the Continent (especially statist France, which is always very glad to get its bills paid by someone else – will the Germans bail out France when their economy collapses?) that Cameron has to tread a tricky line. At heart, the Brits are FREE MARKETERS and NOT willing to be an outpost of The United States of Europe, which is of course what they want over the Channel. France wants that because it believes it can control it;, they could be deluding themselves – monsters one creates often become uncontrollable. And the Germans of course are kept on a leash because France still plays on German guilt for WWII, but is that ploy now looking a bit sick? It certainly can’t last for ever so milk it while you can, eh?
THE EURO: The recent EU jolly came up with a plan to “save the euro”; they were all happy as sandboys about this, but do they REALLY believe that Greece can EVER repay its debt without MORE vast donations from Germany? Do they think Germany will continue to bail out the feckless Mediterranean countries (plus Ireland …)? Some of these countries shouldn’t BE in the euro, unless of course the EU can control their economies. AHA, THERE WE HAVE IT! That is the agenda of course … more central control = more power and in particular more “harmonisation” of taxation. Don’t you just love that word; it sounds so PC. ‘harmony’ = balance, peace, contentment ….. all the right marketing vibes … but what it means of course is “harmonisation” UPWARDS to match the preposterous tax levels in Germany and France. The Germans are so efficient that they seem to get by with such high taxes, but they are crippling France. Despite their fatuous 35 hour week – introduced to create more employment (why didn’t they make it 10 hours per week – surely that would have created even MORE employment?) – their unemployment rate is still way above the average, and this for DECADES.
Well Patrice, I agree with much of your analysis of the USA, but I suspect Yanks will be up in arms. (the “greatest country in the world” syndrome). I am reminded of the importance of education; is it SO difficult to learn from the past? Apparently so – humans are so deep-rooted in the immediate present and so few take a long-term view, especially in our “democratic” systems of government where Obama has only been going for two years yet is effectively starting the next election campaign. And as we know, British politicians will do and say anything to gain power and having done so very often ignore much of what they promised. I myself do not remember the British Labour Party promising to ruin the country in 1997, yet that is what they have done in many areas.
Where I disagree is with the impression I have from your post that Europe is doing much better than the USA. I don’t think we are. I think we are in a tremendous mess and have NOT yet understood what faces us – see strikes in France for a start. One bright light? the economic performance of Germany, the only “serious country in Europe – apart from those magnificent Scandinavians of course. Another bright light? The performance so far of the British Coalition, at least having the courage not to take the easy but long-term catastrophic path of “Spend, spend, spend” so honed and perfected by the previous bunch of charlatans.
Learning from Dogs 