It seems ironic that the quality of EU leadership appears to be going down just as the Lisbon Treaty was passed. Merkel does a solo run on Financial regulation just as the US is debating an extensive bill on the subject and where a joint approach might have strengthened both Merkel's and Obama's hands. Sarkozy appears to be imploding. Berlusconi was always a joke. Zapatero is destroying his own base. Eastern/central Europe has yet to produce a leader of substance. Europe moves right as the US moves left and both pass each other out without so much as a wave by way of constructive engagement on global financial recovery, regulation, stimulus, or mid-east peace.
Were Blair/Brown, Chirac, Schroder, Aznar et al any better?
We've had it easy laughing at the US during the Bush years. Now perhaps we have to start crying about ourselves? What evidence is there that there is a more capable or less antlanticist wave of European leaders on the way up? (Ireland used to pride itself as punching above its weigh in world/EU affairs. Now we can't even punch at our much diminished weight). Index of Frank's Diaries
Even facebook's face Zuckerberg didn't take Cameron seriously, calling the british government "you guys" how many times?
On another note, simply for comparisons sake, could someone please provide a list of US "relationships" which are working? Not counting the "relationship" with too big to fail. "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
good diary Frank! and good point, CH.
it was squirm-inducing watching brown and berlu sucking up to obama, i am not surprised he's not very interested in europe right now. bigger fish to fry.
like many here i am so ready to de-atlanticise europe's priorities, unless and until the u.s. military industrial complex stops hegemonising the planet.
who knows how things will shake out for all the west? we should stop carrying america's water, and support the ideals obama paid such excellent lip service to while campaigning. what the us admin is most obnoxiously codependent about with europe is fobbing off GM and military adventurism in return for our fawning adulation and soldiers' lives.
enabling the empire may seem a short term winning strategy, but i think we'll rue it ere too long. many of us already do...
obama has his hands full without worrying about us, we are the least of his problems. what i hope won't stand any longer is our subservience to the bushist, new world american century mindset that has caused so much pain and destruction.
equally we should focus on smartening up here for all of our sakes, instead of always reaching out for approval from the likes of obama, who janus-like, embodies simultaneously the best and the worst of america.
and as long the us admin admires barroso over rompuy or ashton, we know we have a problem, though the latter two haven't made any serious positive waves as far as i can see yet.
if the usa can dump bolton, surely we can dump barroso to return the favour... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
as for a russian partnership, it'd be a gaz, gaz, gaz...
hey, i know, we'll trade our deathware/gizmo/technotope/ideology for their commie markets!
now we just need to source another 7 planet earths to resource despoil...
maybe the whole rest of the planet can just say no, if they get fed up enough of being unca-sammed into oblivion.
or we're all haitians, down the road. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
In practice there is a Euro-Russian partnership over gas and, increasingly, over a wide range of other goods and services as well.
But do the Americans realise this? They didn't realise the development of the EU from a "free-trade" zone to a confederal entity until it was too late to block it, after all. And most of the positive EU-Russia relations take the form of commercial deals (which American agit-prop may have indoctrinated them to view as 'apolitical') and takes place in funny languages like German and Russian. Meanwhile, the 51st State of the Union (complete with its state press) is busy telling everybody how Euro-Russian relations are going to Hell in a handbasket.
It wouldn't be the first time the Americans drank their own koolaid.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
E.g., Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, etc. E.g., U.S. troops in Germany, 65 years after the war.
Possibilities discussed include:
Of course it could be simply that the Fed can set prices for T-bills and not for T-bonds...
The US grows more food than is consumed domestically and China has a lot of people to feed and their per capita food production is heading south.
The EU is the same. If anything the EU is slightly ahead of the US in that the techniques and practice of horticulture are still twitching, barely.
In China, they're screwed. They can't feed themselves now, there's no hope of increasing food production domestically, and they will go through the transition period with falling per capita food consumption.
I expect minimal deaths from starvation in the US and EU. I expect mega-death in China from starvation and external and internal conflict (war) stemming from food scarcity.
Notrogen fertiliser is only a part of the array of products used in the "modern agriculture" I see all around me, and they are mostly composed of oil-derived fuels and petrochemical substances (pesticides). And, until the industry has been totally revamped, ammonium nitrate etc are petroleum products.
Thomas:
even in the most pessimistic of all possible futures, the world simply ends up buying fertilizer from places like Iceland and New Zeeland.
Because in your oh-so-evident future, it is sustainable to go on running agriculture the way it is (but with a differently-powered support industry)?
.. and as for the actual machinery.. even if it proves impossible to build a battery sufficiently powerful to power a tractor - well, post peak oil does not mean no oil, and what is available or synthesized is going to get allocated to critical applications like heavy machinery first, and the car loving public can putter around in electric minis and like it.
No-till, genetically engineered crops, soil databases linked to computerized and GPS/gallieo enabled farm machinery - all of this increases yield
"No-till"
Fine, but in what way does this necessarily link with
"genetically engineered crops"?
Which currently produce lower yields than non-GM cultivars...
"computerized and GPS/gallieo enabled farm machinery"
Why do we bother with this if we're doing no-till? Just to get rid of a harvester driver or two? Just so everything sounds hi-tech like the world you imagine?
If you have the right to produce this catalogue of wonders of an imaginary future, organic, peasant-farmer agriculture has every right to present a view of the future that some qualify as "unrealistic".
More specifically, what makes you labour under the delusion that organic farming cannot be industrial farming with comparable yields per land area to what you can get with conventional farming?
I think the likelihood of a failed auction is pretty low, and even if it weren't, it isn't the huge embarrassment people think it is. We've seen failed auctions in Britain, Germany, and many others over the past two years. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
So maybe China uses U.S. paper to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, which uses it to buy wheat from Ukraine, say, while the greenbacks used in daily U.S. transactions are devalued in accordance with the economy... I have no idea how you would make the division, though...
Currencies make it a damn sight easier to trade but they aren't necessary for trade.
Even if, during a panic, a flight to the US$ is a flight to junk, US$ denominated assets are useful in such a situation.
i'd love to understand why, if you don't mind taking some time to explain... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Less flippantly, if most major market actors "know" that the US$ is "safe" then that is what they will buy during a panic.
Moreover, if everybody knows that everybody else "knows" that the US$ is "safe" then the US$ really will be safe during a panic, at least compared to everything else. That's an unstable sort of "safe," though, because any time a sufficiently serious actor decides to call the emperor on his nakedness, it stops being safe.
Oh, and then you have the fact that most transcontinental trade is denominated in US$, and it takes time to change denomination on all your trade contracts, so you want to have a war chest in order to avoid being squeezed between short-term contracts with your suppliers and long-term contracts with your customers, if the reference currency goes down (or vice versa if the reference currency goes up, but for the US$ that does not seem a serious prospect...).
Speaking of Delors, I noticed recently that Martine Aubry is now roughly tied with Sarkozy in at least one poll, however I haven't seen any commentary on this here at ET.
How about it? Is there a real chance that in the near future the Socialist Party will make a comeback with Aubry?
Which brings us back to a longstanding debate on ET about the EU institutions and their treaty-imposed increased powers: are they a bad thing because they impose by fiat nd without democratic control neolib policies from the top, or are they a good thing because they create the capacity for EU-wide policies, which could be something else than neolib if we did not have a majority of rightwing or neolib-captured governments pushing for such policies? Wind power
