Europeans on this date in history:

1903 – Flor Peeters, a Belgian composer, organist and teacher, was born (d. 1986)

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Here it is!

Writing in the the current print issue of Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi exposes Goldman Sachs, the "world's most powerful investment bank", for the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" that it truly is.

In "The Great American Bubble Machine", Taibbi outlines how Goldman Sachs has either influenced, shaped, or simply created five market bubbles since 1929 and how now, the bankers are planning to use the greenhouse gas emissions cap-and-trade scheme as their penultimate bubble.

While I do not agree with some of the conclusions he makes, there is enough in his 9,700 word essay that can make the blood boil.

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere," he begins. But, "any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything."

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The other day, Germany's highest court rendered a decision as to the constitutionality of the Lisbon Treaty, and news reports responded, as the Salon of the day so aptly documented, a veritable psychedelic lightshow of metaphors:

German leaders hail court's green light for EU reform treaty | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 30.06.2009

A ruling by Germany's highest court that the EU's reforming Lisbon Treaty is compatible with German basic law has been received in Germany and Europe as an encouraging step forward. 

The court rejected complaints from Germany's far-left party and a maverick conservative member of parliament that the treaty would transfer too much power to Brussels.  It said the reforms were fundamentally in line with the country's constitution, but it set conditions.

Yellow Light from Constitutional Court: Germany Cannot Ratify Lisbon -- Yet - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Germany's highest court has ruled that the Lisbon Treaty is not fundamentally incompatible with the country's constitution. However, it has called a halt to the ratification process until the German parliament changes a domestic law to strengthen the role of the country's legislative bodies in implementing European Union laws.

With the process of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty hitting one speed bump after another, many would have expected that at least Germany would have given the treaty safe passage. However, an attempt by some German legislators to block its ratification has led to delays even in the European Union's biggest country.

With such reporting, one can well understand why interested readers were left plaintively wondering:

ThatBritGuy:

Er - so was the light green, yellow or some other colour?

Actually, this ruling might best be described as a victory for due process.

Front-paged with a slight edit by afew

Europeans on this date in history:

1948 – Birth of Tarmo Koivisto, a Finnish comics artist and writer, cartoonist, and graphic artist. He is best known for his ongoing comic strip Mämmilä.

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Hello there.

Henning Meyer, writing for Social Europe argues that over the last twenty years or so politicians have abdicated their responsibility to shape the globalisation process. The current disaster is a result of that:

But far from realising their political mistake politicians were ill prepared for this seemingly impossible scenario and reacted more than they guided. Caught on the wrong foot about the extent of the predicament of the financial sector and the beginning global recession, national governments had to prepare emergency landings for financial institutions and enacted stimulus packages to strengthen economic demand using dizzying amounts of taxpayers’ money. The irony therefore is that it was the ordinary citizen, who used to have little say over how the global economic system was governed, that in effect had to provide the means to prevent a disaster and was left with serious risks and liabilities.

Against this backdrop, it is crucial for political leaders to realise that what is needed now is not just basic repairs of a broken system. Above all politicians must comprehend that giving up the scope of action to shape economic Globalisation was a big mistake and part of the reason why the crisis could happen in the first place. Politics must not surrender democratic control over the global economy again but insist on setting the rules of the game in the future. This would also help to make Globalisation more democratic, accountable and responsive to citizen concerns taking into account their new role as risk-bearers of last resort. If political leaders, however, simply move back to pre-crisis business as usual there is a good chance that the next crisis is just around the corner.

Global free trade and free movement of capital needs global regulation and probably global taxation and redistribution.

“Current market disruption in financial markets and the more heavily regulated environment that is likely to follow can also be expected to have a permanent negative effect on potential growth, e.g. through reduced availability of capital for R&D and innovation activities.”

This is from a new European Commission study quoted by the FT but which I have been unable to find so far on the EU website and it makes for depressing reading - not because it warns of yet more Europe.Is.Doomed economic conditions, but because it still considers that unregulated high growth followed by massive crash is somehow better than a slower, steadier version and because it blames the worsened economic conditions of today on the cleanup of the financial mess, and not on the mess itself. It's truly depressing.

[Yesterday], a small country in northern Europe [took] charge of the large and unwieldy European Union. Our protagonist is the bold (and bald) Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister or Sweden, and his merry band of ministers and assorted political lackeys. Will he succeed, and what constitutes success in the European presidential ring? Will he increase the prestige of our small country? Ah, yes, and what will he actually attempt to accomplish while in charge?

(photo and logo courtesy of se2009.eu, the official site of the presidency)

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Europeans on this date in history:

1865 – Lily Braun, a German feminist writer, was born. (d. 1916)

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Everyone happy with your new Swedish overlords?

Europeans on this date in history:

1646 – Birth of Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher and mathematician, a a polymath who made significant contributions in many areas of physics, logic, mathematics, history, librarianship, and of course philosophy and theology, while also working on ideal languages, mechanical clocks, mining machinery..." "A universal genius if ever there was one, and an inexhaustible source of original and fertile ideas, Leibniz was all the more interested in logic because it ..." (d. 1716)

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LQD Taken from a TUC press release

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber today urged pension scheme trustees and trade unionists to guard against employers using the recession as an excuse to take a slash and burn approach to occupational pensions.

The recession is the perfect time to make redundancies, alter terms and conditions, avoid equalities obligations, bully and harass workers, decrease pay and fiddle with pensions.

Ostalgie was a word coined in the late nineties in Germany, for the nostalgia felt by part of the East Germans towards the lost artefacts, style, certainties, relative safety, and identity in the "German Democratic Republic". Something that was difficult to fathom for those in West Germany who saw it as nothing else but a big temporary prison -- and former East Germans who felt it like a big temporary prison. Hence, it is cause for emotional debates ever since.

A new poll released yesterday by the federal government's Commissary for the East, Wolfgang Tiefensee (the federal transport minister; himself from Saxony) again raised the alarms of the second faction: 57% think that the GDR had more good sides than bad.

Europeans on this date in history:

1963 – Yngwie J. Malmsteen, a Swedish guitarist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and bandleader, was born.

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Who's not distracted by the weather?

Take one sober, informative article by two journalists (Nick Meo and Patrick Hennessy) on the state of play in the Lisbon Treaty ratification process - that says, essentially, that Germany is about to ratify, leaving only presidential signatures from Poland and the Czech Republic, and an Irish referendum likely to be favourable, to go - while the contradictions and difficulties of the UK Conservative Party in this regard are given a fair assessment.

Imagine you're an editor at the British newspaper, the Telegraph, and this article comes up on your screen. You have to headline and illustrate it. FULL STEAM AHEAD FOR LISBON, you type, along with a photo of fireworks/celebrations/Eurohugs? More quietly RATIFICATION MOVES INTO FINAL PHASE..? Well, no...

The eye of the casual reader picks up the photo of burning flags and the big lettering: FLAMES OF DISSENT ACROSS CONTINENT. Ah, so everywhere people are rising up against Lisbon.

A slightly less casual reader may read the photo caption: these are Catalan regionalists. So presumably regionalists are against Lisbon.

How many readers will go through the article to find there are no flames of dissent at all, and particularly to read what follows?

European Union's Lisbon Treaty fuels flames of dissent across continent - Telegraph

leaders of some of Europe's separatist movements are celebrating the progress of the treaty towards full ratification. They are convinced that the more powerful the EU's own institutions become, the weaker the nation state - and the stronger the case for granting breakaway regions their independence.

So: take one report; ignore what it says; stick in a photo; make the headline about the photo.

The Telegraph is about news? Information? Or Eurosceptic propaganda?

Europeans on this date in history:

1922 – Vasko Popa, a Serbian poet of Romanian descent,was born. (d. 1991)

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Some green shoots