Compare with Goldman Sachs, NATO, EU, ...

Planet wide events are normally catastrophes (meteor impacts, volcanos, ...).

There are things like butterfly effects and so on, but they are mostly unpredictable (and generally with bad effects).

Extreme interconnectedness will inherently destroy diversity. That is the same as destroying life.

The very name of the EPP is a give-away : they conceive of Europe as a federation of peoples, rather than as a federation of people.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

I opposed the Constitution on procedural grounds. The unreadability and the undemocratic process. Only now I think I understand the extent to which it was wrong (and I have suggested that the lyrical left rightly opposed the Lisbon treaty but for the wrong reason). But, then again, a lot of was wrong in the Constitution was in there since the early 1990's Treaties of Amsterdam and Maastricht, and Jerome did point this out. The reforms we were being asked to vote about in the Constitutional referenda were not actually for the worse, all things considered. The rot was already in.

However, the EU has had positive effects. For going on 25 years the Erasmus programme has been a formative experience for academically deserving youths from all over the continent. Within 15 years this generation of people will begin to dominate European policy. Too bad they will inherit a smoking ruin.

Economics is politics by other means

we just have a better approximation of it than anywhere else, (which when you include, as you must, the real knuckle dragging nations where it's only just beginning to dawn on their populaces that it exists,) doesn't leave the bar very high...

we had cheap oil, that gave us a middle class, a social luxury that had never previously scaled up beyond a thin slice of professions, doctors, lawyers and such who were just middlemen between the elite and the plebs.

without a middle class you can't have centrist party politics, the issues are too nakedly stark to fudge around much with, and ideology is atavistically tribal.

many voted christian democrat in yurp hoping that the pols would cleave (more) closely to humanitarian concerns, respect for the downtrodden, charity etc, the 'cleaner karma' krew, but in tandem with the church's moral pedestal fissuring, this is a fast-weakening attractor to voters, save the most crusty, rosary in hand, who still believe that choirboys like Casini in Italy are somehow closer to what Mother Mary would want for the nation.

simple folk to whom lighting an electric candle in their parish church is at least as effective as their vote, especially when as happened often, it was the priest himself who told them whom to vote for!

centrist parties lack passion, yet are (only too) familiar with realpolitik and compromise, yet extremist ones are more unbalancing, though harder to hollow out of meaning, since people have to be passionate to inhabit the colder political peripheries and not apathetically give up their drive to better their worlds.

as a person interested in the spiritual, personally i believe the karma we europeans are carrying has a lot of purifying to do, we're on a financial high horse of our own making, and anyone who's read even the first pages of Zinn's masterpiece of history, knows that we didn't adhere to any of our vaunted christian principles as we raped and killed, enslaved and plundered our rapacious way to power starting in the 15-6th centuries. yes we trumpeted them as if they were going out of style, we missionarised the 'heathens' into our black-crow austerity of an already derelict and degenerated religion, there was no crime we didn't stoop to in order to swell the coffers of the ancestors of those greedy creeps whose addiction to power and influence are now holding a financial gun to europe's collective head, accountable to no-one as they have eliminated any alternative, consciously and methodically that might threaten their grip on the levers of the machine they have crafted to ensure their continues survival as cream skimmers, managers-of-workers, and rentier-boys.

so in a nutshell, in my bones i know this europe i love has moral dues to pay, as do many of us here, who support the EU's efforts to be charitable to those countries we impoverished, and still continue to do so with our giant multinationals making a wreck out of Nigeria. are we offered a pol to vote for who will help us change that, or even pretend to, to vote for?

noooo, so people go to greenpeace or avaaz because they have integrity to get things done.

global organisations!

so that's the silver lining... the EU may be about to endure the fate so many predicted from the start, far too much of a pipe dream... but if it fails there is only a global federation to look forward to, an idea that doesn't scare me as much as seem inevitable, just logistically, just as english being ipso facto agreed world language and chipping of everyone and everything. emotionally i am on the side of thise who will try to delay these changes, but i wouldn't have wanted buggy whip makers to go out of business in the advent of the auto age either. shit happens...if euope fails we take the best of the ideas it tried to enshrine and we go for a global union, maybe it was just a rehearsal.

or...breathless hush... the young people who have grown up without the shrill toxins of patriotism so drilled into them, who have experienced the freedom of getting on a bus one night in florence and wake up in amsterdam without being woken up 5 times to produce their passports, who have combined their studies in different countries pretty seamlessly, who speak several languages effortlessly, these people who after swallowing their parents' hopeful bromides that working hard at your studies would guarantee you'd sup with silver and not have callused hands now see soup kitchens and breadlines on the horizon, just behind the robothugs with the tazers, all because the precious gamesters and their lust for power waxed to fat on their gluttony they bought and enslaved whole political systems designed to keep them in check (democracy!) and revealed how distorted a noble ideal can become once inveigled with bad faith actors and slippery sophistries. their numbers combine withose other diasaffected, the pensioners already squeaking by, the cuts in public transport and care for the sick, while the bonuses keep rising for banksters and accomplices whose consumption of luxury goods is rising to the stars. it's paris 68 all over again, but his time for real, all over europe, not giving up till the elite's relationship with the social pact changes fundamentally, not just half measures.

it's a recipe for revolt, and some very stupid, shortsighted people seem completely unconcerned about it all. more champers, dahling?

we are about to be taken down several pegs, and we deserve it. the good in us will prevail, or not. we can work at it, step by step, because that's all we can do to ensure the former. Greece is the sacrificial goat. as she goes, the others will follow, and europe will fail.

if she defaults, and italy, spain, portugal and ireland all stand up and do an argentina on the ECB and IMF, who's going to win? argentina's economy improved immediately when they punched the IMF in the nozzle, the change we need is mostly in our minds, methinks. the banks hold a gun to all of our heads, don't play nice and we shut down the ATM's, play nice and we rob you blind, screw your women and salt your fields.

gotta go to do some real work now
:)

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

And I would wait another six months if the current high is permanent.

By name, you have one each in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, so you need to indicate that you won't use the nominal sense.

A traditional christian democratic party is catholic social conservative, pro property, especially small and middle business-owners, pro rural, anti-market, protectionist and has christian union wing.

So in your definition, the Catholic part excludes ND; I'm not sure what everything doesn't fit about Spain's PP and Portugal's SD. Regarding Ireland, didn't you think of Fine Gael rather than the liberal Fianna Fail? Back to Spain, what about Catalonia's UDC?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

I certainly don't see any desire to engage the established political process.

I don't know if that makes them revolutionary.

Economics is politics by other means

Seats on the board is a cute ambition. But I've been the Humphrey to a middle manager, so I know how easy boards of directors are to get around. Not that we ever did deliberately run circles around them. But given the fact that we had all the numbers and all the modelling capacity and they, well, didn't, we certainly could have.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

The goal would be to put workers inside each enterprise in the collective position of receiving the surpluses they produce in that enterprise. That would, of course, position them also as the distributors of those surpluses.

What about housing? How would they buy them?

There are many questions here:

• Do productive enterprises make a  lot of profit?
  
• If some of the workers capture the real estate, would other workers pay them rent?
  
• What about banking? Will workers collect interest?
  
• Banks create credit, inflate real estate, push down production, rewards rentiers, forces forclosers... what changes?
  
• And the basic theory says that rents have a force to capture all surplus from increasing productivity. There is not much benefit for industrial workers when all the surplus is captured by real estate and resources.
  
• That system to work demands monopoly production, where industrial monopolies capture surplus. No individual entrepreneurship? How is then capital allocated?

The goal would be to put workers inside each enterprise in the collective position of receiving the surpluses they produce in that enterprise. That would, of course, position them also as the distributors of those surpluses.

This argument is flawed. Surplus is not only profit and wages, but rents (the "pure surplus," without any costs.) The article seems only talk about distribution of profits, not surplus.