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Monday, July 20, 2015

Conversations Between Schauble and Varoufakis

     Varoufakis is at it again in his blog telling is that the reason there was no good deal between Greece and the EU is because his counterpart in Germany never wanted their to be.

     He asserts that Schauble has intended there to be a Grexit all along-and evidently we would be there today already if not for Donald Tusk's last minute 'heroics'-I give them scare quotes as I'm not so sure they were to the good.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/we-have-no-one-to-blame-but-donald-tusk.html

   "The reason five months of negotiations between Greece and Europe led to impasse is that Dr Schäuble was determined that they would."

   "By the time I attended my first Brussels meetings in early February, a powerful majority within the Eurogroup had already formed. Revolving around the earnest figure of Germany’s Minister of Finance, its mission was to block any deal building on the common ground between our freshly elected government and the rest of the Eurozone.[1]"

   "Thus five months of intense negotiations never had a chance. Condemned to lead to impasse, their purpose was to pave the ground for what Dr Schäuble had decided was ‘optimal’ well before our government was even elected: That Greece should be eased out of the Eurozone in order to discipline member-states resisting his very specific plan for re-structuring the Eurozone. This is no theory of mine. How do I know Grexit is an important part of Dr Schäuble’s plan for Europe? Because he told me so!"

   http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/17/dr-schaubles-plan-for-europe-do-europeans-approve-english-version-of-my-article-in-die-zeit/#more-9296

  So what is Schuable's plan? A European Constitution that will be able to reject the budgets of national governments. This is what they've been doing anyway, but this would codify it into law.

  This is what France voted against 10 years ago.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_referendum,_2005

  "The Schäuble-Lamers Plan rests on two ideas: “Why not have a European budget commissioner” asked Schäuble and Lamers “with powers to reject national budgets if they do not correspond to the rules we jointly agreed?” “We also favour”, they added “a ‘Eurozone parliament’ comprising the MEPs of Eurozone countries to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of decisions affecting the single currency bloc.”

  "The first point to raise about the Schäuble-Lamers Plan is that it is at odds with any notion of democratic federalism. A federal democracy, like Germany, the United States or Australia, is founded on the sovereignty of its citizens as reflected in the positive power of their representatives to legislate what must be done on the sovereign people’s behalf."

  "In sharp contrast, the Schäuble-Lamers Plan envisages only n egative powers: A Eurozonal budget overlord (possibly a glorified version of the Eurogroup’s President) equipped solely with negative, or veto, powers over national Parliaments. The problem with this is twofold. First, it would not help sufficiently to safeguard the Eurozone’s macro-economy. Secondly, it would violate basic principles of Western liberal democracy."

  "As Varoufakis says, this would leave citizens of the various nation states in the worst of both worlds:

  "Consider events both prior to the eruption of the euro crisis, in 2010, and afterwards. Before the crisis, had Dr Schäuble’s fiscal overlord existed, she or he might have been able to veto the Greek government’s profligacy but would be in no position to do anything regarding the tsunami of loans flowing from the private banks of Frankfurt and Paris to the Periphery’s private banks.[2] Those capital outflows underpinned unsustainable debt that, unavoidably, got transferred back onto the public’s shoulders the moment financial markets imploded. Post-crisis, Dr Schäuble’s budget Leviathan would also be powerless, in the face of potential insolvency of several states caused by their bailing out (directly or indirectly) the private banks"

  "In short, the new high office envisioned by the Schäuble-Lamers Plan would have been impotent to prevent the causes of the crisis and to deal with its repercussions. Moreover, every time it did act, by vetoing a national budget, the new high office would be annulling the sovereignty of a European people without having replaced it by a higher-order sovereignty at a federal or supra-national level."

  Of course-when has the EU project been in any way democratic? Herman Hoppe claims that democracy is 'The God That Failed' but yet he claims that the EU isn't a tremendous success in that very vein. I mean Europe is his model whether he admits it or not-there is no democracy there whatsoever.

 http://mises.org.br/Article.aspx?id=1325

The EU is a libertarian paradise. Here, Morgan Warstler is more perspicacious.

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