Frightening Economic News From Europe

For better or worse, the world economy is tied together. Thus what happens in Europe or China is indeed of importance here in this nation. And what is happening in the European economy is frightening indeed. This from The Telegraph:

Here’s an astonishing statistic; more than 30pc of all government debt in the eurozone – around €2 trillion of securities in total – is trading on a negative interest rate.

With the advent of European Central Bank quantitative easing, what began four months ago when 10-year Swiss yields turned negative for the first time has snowballed into a veritable avalanche of negative rates across European government bond markets. In the hunt for apparently “safe assets”, investors have thrown caution to the wind, and collectively determined to pay governments for the privilege of lending to them.

So Europeans are expecting such a bursting bubble in their economy that they are willing to invest money and lose several percent just for the guarantee that, at the end of the time period, the majority of the corpus will still be there. That is chilling, particularly when one realizes that the European Union members are, collectively, our largest trading partner. Not only does this mean trouble on the economic horizon generally, with the cost of borrowing so low, it also means that European stock markets will be seeing a bubble forming, making any potential downturn even worse. The great European experiment in socialism may well be coming to a cataclysmic end, though you can bet your bottom dollar, literally, that the US under Obama will race to shore them up for awhile. It is not a good idea, but we may be looking at a real depression otherwise. China's economy, the other big world driver, is likewise built on smoke and mirrors. Honest to God, this is 2005 all over again, only this time there isn't enough money in the world to prop up Europe, let alone Europe and China, if they both go belly up at the same time.

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Wolf Bytes

Do you mean to tell us that anti-democratic socialist technocracies are not the wave of the future?: The EU Experiment Has Failed

Multiculturalism is the opposite of assimilation: Boris Johnson on the cultural and political dilemma revealed by an application to put up a satellite dish

Just finishing the job he started: Gov. Scott Walker makes Wisconsin a Right to Work state.

Is there actually an upper limit?: How Wrong Can The Guardian Be [On Climate Change]?

Schadenfreude down under: The Left Eats Its Own . . . and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy

In the target rich environment of Democrats who should be prosecuted, there is a reason Bob Menendez is about to be indicted: If you stand with the Jews, Obama is going to get you

A Good Idea Decades Overdue: How Regime Change Works and Why We Should Pursue It In Iran

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Socialism's Nightmare In Greece

"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

PM Margaret Thatcher, 5 Feb. 1976, This Week on Thames Television

What could possibly be worse for socialists than taking over a country that has already run out of other people's money? I'm not sure, but you could ask the newly elected left wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece. His happy talk during the election of feta cheese in every pot and ouzo on everyone's lips has already met the reality of needing to borrow other people's money, and the lenders don't have any intention of paying for Greece's free ride.

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Obama Admin. To The UK - No Need For A Referendum, Just Stay In The EU

When former PM Gordon Brown made the UK a vassal of the EU, he did so without holding a referendum for the citizens of the UK, even though one had been promised. The referendum was never held because the Brits likely would have rejected giving up their sovereignty to the anti-democratic, socialist bureaucratic edifice that is the EU. There are, today, runblings in the UK about leaving the EU before it totally destroys their nation.

The left on this side of the pond dreams of having the dictatorial powers of the EU. And indeed, acting through an extra-constitutional, unconstrained regulatory bureaucracy, we are quickly coming to resemble a nation under the EU yoke. Thus it is no surprise that the Obama administration has taken a public stand - that holding a referendum of UK voters on EU membership is problematic and the U.S. wants the UK to stay in the EU. It is outrageous. As reported by the BBC:

The Obama administration has publicly expressed concern about the impact of a UK referendum on its future relationship with the EU.

Philip Gordon, a senior official in the US State Department, said it was in America's interests to see a "strong British voice within the EU".

"Referendums have often turned countries inwards," he added.

. . . he added: "We have a growing relationship with the EU as an institution, which has an increasing voice in the world, and we want to see a strong British voice in that EU. That is in America's interests. We welcome an outward-looking EU with Britain in it."

Autonomous Mind has composed a fine response to Mr. Gordon and the Obama administration:

. . . The President of the United States is considered by many to be the leader of the free world, and the United States itself considered to be a beacon of democracy. So it is profoundly disappointing to see the United States administration endorsing and encouraging something that is fundamentally undemocratic. I would like to ask you the following questions.

- Would it be acceptable to you and your fellow United States citizens that over 70% of the laws and regulations they were forced to comply with across all 50 states were created by a supranational government comprising layers of complex political and judicial structures, mostly unelected and unaccountable, and made up of delegates from not only the US, but Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru?

- Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and members of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were routinely handed diktats from the various bodies that make up the supranational government and were bound by law to implement the directives or be fined or dragged into a supranational court operating an alien form of judicial code and process? Further, that Congress was denied the ability to draft, and the President sign into law, other legislation of national interest whenever the supranational decided it was not appropriate?

- Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and the Justices of the Supreme Court that decisions made by the bench, the highest court in your land, could be appealed to a supranational court overseas with the hearing presided over by foreign judges and if overruled the Supreme Court would have to accept that as a binding ruling?

If these scenarios do not sound very democratic or judicious to you and your fellow Americans it is because they are not. Intentionally and by design. But this is the reality of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union and its associated bodies and institutions. UK membership of the EU has entailed a substantial loss of power from our democratically elected Parliament as it has been quietly and steadily transferred to unelected and unaccountable bodies abroad – all done without the people of the UK being asked to give their consent for it to happen.

While it may be in the geopolitical interest of the Government of the United States for the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union, opinion polls show this anti-democratic situation is opposed by a majority of British citizens. Membership of the EU dilutes the voice of the United Kingdom. Seats on various world bodies held by the UK have been given up so the EU can supposedly represent the competing and disparate interests of 27 countries in a wholly unsatisfactory fudge that frequently fails to serve British interests. . . .

No one who believes in democracy – people power – would endorse and encourage a continuation of this anti-democratic situation for the United Kingdom. That is what this issue is about. So, Mr Gordon, please do not presume to meddle in our affairs and wish on us that which you would aggressively oppose for yourself.

Yours sincerely,

Autonomous Mind

Well said. Now, Brits, show us some of your anti-Americanism - give Obama the finger and vote your way out of the EU.

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And Now, A Comic Interlude - The EU Wins The Nobel Peace Prize

Oh, those Euro-lefties, always good for a laugh - and the occasional rewriting of history:

The crisis-hit European Union celebrated in surprise today after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for its historic success in transforming Europe from a “a continent of war to a continent of peace”.

Handing down the award, the judges of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the EU had done more than any other institution to foster reconciliation after the Second World War and bury age-old enmities for good.

That is a rewrite of history that would make Stalin blush. If the Nobel lefties really wanted to award the prize to those responsible for the peace in Europe since WWII, the EU would be well down on the list. Either they need to lay that award on the grave of Gen. George Marshall or they need to send it to the American and British tax-payers:

Daftest of all is the notion that the EU itself has kept the peace. It was the Allies led by the Americans, the Russians and the British who defeated and disarmed the Germans in 1945. The German people then underwent the most extraordinary reckoning, transforming their country into an essentially pacifist society. The EU had very little to do with it. Throughout that period it was Nato, led by the Americans and British, which kept the peace in Western Europe. The American taxpayer picked up most of the resulting tab, and the British paid a significant part of the bill too.

Or as Ambrose Evan's Pritchard writes:

The EU's high priests draw on a caricature version of history that must be challenged. The post-war national democracies – nurtured by the Marshall Plan, Nato, and benign American influence, nota bene – are not the problem, they are the solution. They have been the foundation of Europe's peaceful order for 60 years, even if some are not yet fully anchored and secured.

This award to the EU is pure leftie propaganda written at a time when the EU is falling apart under its own weight, both as an economic and as a political model. The EU is the world's largest experiment in socialism. It is an attempt to thoroughly bury the "nation-state" model and substitute continent-wide government by a cadre of unelected, unaccountable technocrats. As Ian Martin at the Telegraph explains:

Under [NATO], the federalists who wanted to reconstruct the notion of Carolingian Empire which dominated 9th century Europe, created what we have come to know and love as the EU. Of course there are advantages in what they constructed – the single market and easier travel, making the South of France and Tuscany more accessible. But they also built an appallingly designed single currency, a horlicks of an agricultural policy and rapacious bureaucracy determined to stifle the nation state in the name of utopian, unachievable continent-wide homogeneity. And at every turn those driving it looked for ways to outwit the democratic will.

At any rate, this one gave me a good laugh this morning. I wonder how long it's been since the Nobel Peace Prize stopped being a prize for actual efforts to promote peace in the world and became a full time propaganda tool of the Euro-left. I would have to mark the full tilt to 2005, when the committee gave the award to Mohammed al-Baradi of the IAEA for his work in thwarting efforts to stop Iran's push to a nuclear weapon, with subsequent awards being made to Al Gore and Obama.

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The EU Grows A Pair?

The EU has voted to extend its targeting of Somali pirates to their land based beach support operations, in addition to extending their joint counter-piracy mission for at least a year. I am not aware of a single effective EU military operation, but this one just may be the first. Barking Moonbat has the whole story.

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Should Britain Leave The EU & Join NAFTA?

Between Obama - whose first act in the White House was to send Churchill's bust back to Britain - and the Boy Wonder, David Cameron - who renigged on a promise to allow his countrymen a referendum on their membership in the EU - there seems no chance at the moment that Britain and America will become much closer in their relationship, economically or otherwise. But they certainly should. That is the proposition of Iain Murray and James Bennet in an op-ed at the WSJ. They believe that Britain and the U.S. would both benefit significantly if Britain were to minimize its ties with the EU and in its stead join NAFTA.

Britain joined the EU in 1973, when it was nothing more than a loose economic union. Over the next four decades, the EU grew to become an anti-democratic, socialist monstrosity. Yet Britain stayed the course with the EU, even going so far as to jettison Margaret Thatcher when she stood athwart greater ties to the EU. But Britain's legal and political system, the culture, language and traditions, they are all at home in North America. They are not, as Murray and Bennet point out, at home with the nations of continental Europe. And today, the Brits are at a crossroads, whether to surrender the last vestiges of their sovereignty to the EU, or whether to turn towards North America. An attempt by Cameron to keep Britain at arms length from further EU integration has been met with a cold shoulder from the EU members:

. . . French President Nicolas Sarkozy helpfully summed up the results of this month's summit. He told Le Monde that there are now two Europes, one that "wants more solidarity between its members and regulation, the other attached solely to the logic of the single market." The Europe of regulation wants to press forward with deeper integration, stringent budget rules and a transition away from nation-state democracy.

The problem is that no one asked the peoples of Europe whether they wanted this. Nationalism is on the rise. Budget rules have been flagrantly ignored in the past, and the Franco-German plan does nothing to deal with the euro's structural problems, which make southern European countries grossly uncompetitive.

It is obvious to most outsiders that the euro zone's problems remain. The rating agencies have been unimpressed, and downgrades of most euro-zone members and their banks are now more likely than ever. This meant that Mr. Cameron was left with two choices: strike out for the shore or drown with the rest.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Mr. Cameron's decision is the way he made it. It is now clear that he made an attempt—as he had promised British voters—to repatriate powers away from Brussels. This attempt was rebuffed with some prejudice. Given the outright hostility to Britain now evident in the European Union establishment, any further attempt at repatriation will be a non-starter. The implications are considerable.

The European Economic Community (EEC) for which the British signed up in a 1975 referendum—a community of free trade and cooperation, not supranational bureaucracy—is long gone. Worse, even today's less-palatable EU will soon no longer be on offer. Sometime in the next few years at most, Britain will likely face the choice between immersion in a powerful centralized European mega-state and full exit.

Most probably, the choice will be made in an atmosphere of crisis, with dramatic media coverage proclaiming impending doom for Europe. Britain today needs to think seriously about a Plan B, so that it does not have to take an option it will regret for lack of coherent alternatives.

Britain does have other choices. To find the country's new role, British leaders should look to North America.

Alone among EEC members, Britain narrowed some of its major trade networks when it joined. It also traded ordinary Britons' right to virtually bureaucracy-free movement, temporary or permanent, between the U.K. and British Commonwealth nations. This meant losing easy access to prosperous places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which enjoy plentiful jobs and high standards of living, for the largely theoretical right to take a job in Düsseldorf or Lille. While much trust was lost between Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth because of this move, strong personal, cultural and economic ties remain and could be revived. Ask the average Briton where he'd feel more at home, Paris or Toronto.

Canada and Australia have well-managed, vibrant economies. Both countries sit on huge deposits of natural resources of ever-increasing value. Britain's top-tier financial sector and still-excellent technical capabilities already play a role in Canada's economy. These ties could be much strengthened.

Britons also feel at home south of the Canadian border. Contrary to an oft-repeated myth, links between Britain and the United States are not reducible to the personal relationships between presidents and prime ministers. The U.S. and the U.K. have always been each other's primary financial partners. A few simple measures could substantially deepen this relationship, especially once Britain no longer needs to adhere to EU rules.

Foremost among these would be to admit a post-EU Britain to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nafta is not a perfect vehicle, but it has the enormous advantage of already existing, with a nearly 20-year track record behind it. And unlike the EU, Nafta would not seek to impose a single social vision on its members. For example, Nafta has had no effect on Canadian social policy, which is very similar to Britain's—except for Canada having more revenue to pay for it all.

The ongoing euro crisis will not be resolved any time soon, and America will continue to be impacted by bank write-downs and declines in U.S.-European trade. Increasing U.S.-U.K. trade would be one relatively quick and effective way of taking up some of the slack.

Up to now, however, the U.S. has pursued a policy of propping up the euro while discouraging British independence from Brussels. This is incredibly short-sighted. Using the vehicles of the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund to try to fill the gaping hole in Europe's finances will get everybody nowhere. Instead, British, American and Canadian policy makers (along with their Nafta partners in Mexico) should be taking the long view and preparing for a future in which the unsustainable euro zone inevitably collapses. Welcoming Britain back into the North Atlantic economic community would be a win-win for all involved.

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In Norway - An "Extreme Right Winger"

This is now what passes for "radical right wing" in the world today - a person standing up for their native culture in their native land.



As the left tries to remake their world into a socialist nirvana, opening the flood gates to immigration from Islamic countries has been both a tool and a Faustian bargain. The Islamists are, for now, a key part of the secular left's power base. This will not end well, however it ends.

(H/T Crusader Rabbit)

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Compare and Contrast: Allen West In America, Geert Wilders In Europe

In the video below, a member of CAIR tries to score points on Congressman Allen West regarding the peacefulness of Islam - and gets an earful from West, who happens to be very well schooled on the history and dogma of Islam. Enjoy this bit of red meat.



The fact that we have intellectually honest people in our government, such as Rep. West, and that our Constitution gives them the freedom to express that honesty, give some small measure of hope both for our future and the future direction of Islam. As I wrote here, unless people like Rep. West and people inside the religion of Islam are able to change the current trajectory of Islam, we are all on course for a bloody, existential collision.

In Europe, however, speaking with intellectual honesty about Islam is not merely repressed, it is repressed with the police power of the state. Were Rep. West to have given this same short soliloquy in, say, the Netherlands, he could have well found himself on the wrong side of that nation's interpretation of its 'hate speech' laws, much the same way Dutch politician Geert Wilders has.

Wilders, currently on trial for hate speech, addresses Islam and the European repression of free speech in a WSJ editorial today:

"The lights are going out all over Europe," British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked on the eve of World War I. I am reminded of those words whenever I read about Europeans being dragged into court for so-called hate-speech crimes.

Recently, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, had to stand trial in Copenhagen because he had criticized Islam. Mr. Hedegaard was acquitted, but only on the technicality that he had not known that his words, expressed in a private conversation, were being taped. Last week in Vienna, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian human-rights activist, was fined €480 for calling the Islamic prophet Muhammad a pedophile because he had consummated his marriage to a nine-year old girl. Meanwhile, my own trial in Amsterdam is dragging on, consuming valuable time that I would rather spend in parliament representing my million-and-a-half voters.

How can all this be possible in supposedly liberal Europe? . . .

Early in 2008, a number of leftist and Islamic organizations took me to court, claiming that by expressing my views on Islam I had deliberately "insulted" and "incited hatred" against Muslims. I argued then, as I will again in my forthcoming book, that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology aiming for world domination.

Last October, my former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, wrote in these pages of the way in which Islamic organizations abuse our freedoms in order to limit them. "There are," she wrote, "the efforts of countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference to silence the European debate about Islam," citing their strategy "to pressure international organizations and the European Union to adopt resolutions to punish anyone who engages in 'hate speech' against religion. The bill used to prosecute Mr. Wilders is the national version of what OIC diplomats peddle at the U.N. and EU."

Indeed, in 2008 the EU approved its so-called "Council Framework Decision on combating Racism and Xenophobia," and the EU's 27 nations have since had to incorporate it into their national legislation. The decision orders that "racist or xenophobic behavior must constitute an offence in all Member States and be punishable by effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties." It defines "racism and xenophobia" so broadly that every statement that an individual might perceive as insulting to a group to which he belongs becomes punishable by law.

The perverse result is that in Europe it is now all but impossible to have a debate about the nature of Islam, or about the effects of immigration of Islam's adherents. Take my own case, for example. My point is that Islam is not so much a religion as it is a totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion. To avoid misunderstandings, I always emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam, recognizing that there are many moderate Muslims. But the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions; the Koran orders Muslims to establish the realm of Allah in this world, if necessary by force.

Stating my views on Islam has brought me to court on charges of "group insult" and incitement to racial hatred. I am being tried for voicing opinions that I—and my constituents—consider to be the truth. I am being tried for challenging the views that the ruling establishment wants to impose on us as the truth. . . .

I should be acquitted. My trial in Amsterdam is not about me, but about freedom of speech in Europe. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, Europe's liberator from Nazism, once warned, freedom "must be daily earned and refreshed—else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die." Today in Europe, freedom is being neither earned nor refreshed.

George Washington once said, "If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." When it comes to Islam, and particularly Islam in Europe, where Islamic minorities are not merely failing to integrate, but actively undermining traditional society, Washington's quote rings true indeed. The Islamist's are aided and abetted by left-wing governments wholly immersed in the toxic philosophy of multiculturalism. I thank God that our founders had the foresight to craft the First Amendment. While in America, we still might be able to influence the trajectory of Islam because of our rights to free speach, Europe is in a much more precarious state.

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Revolutionary Agitation - It Isn't Just For The Middle East

We are moving to a period when politics no longer matters, when it has no relevance and bears no further analysis. These people are not our people. We have nothing in common with them or they with us.

There is no discussion, there can be no discussion – there is no common ground, nothing we can relate to. We use the same vocabularies but we speak different languages. Our politics have been stolen. The process started a long time ago, and the theft has been incremental. But it is almost complete.

Now, we have to get it back. And this is no longer a question of changing the government, in the hope of getting something new and different, something closer to our way of thinking. That is not going to happen. We need something more fundamental. There is a name for that ... revolution.

Here, there is the hard way and the easy way, the violent way and the peaceful way. We have to continue trying the latter, in order to stave off the former. But either way, let's call a spade a spade. We are no longer interested in politics. We are revolutionaries now.

So sayeth . . . Britain's Dr. North of EU Referendum. The gulf between rank and file Brits and their political leadership seems deep and the problems causing it systemic. Representative democracy is at least one, if not two steps, from the electorate, leaving the nomenklatura free to do such things as transfer the nation's sovereignty to the EU without a promised referendum for the British voters. That was a bloodless coup, and the Brits are paying for it in many ways, from open borders immigration to green policy to fisheries policy, trash refuse and many more. Let's hope there is something the Brits can learn from the Egyptians.

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An Untenable Situation

(H/T Crusader Rabbit)

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Obama Tries On A Centrist Fig Leaf

Reading Obama's op-ed in the WSJ today, the cognitive dissonance almost made my head explode. In his op-ed, Obama promised to make our regulatory bureaucracy business friendly by making some cosmetic changes. It was surreal. It was tragic-comic. It was like reading an op-ed from Kristin Davis on the benefits of virginity and chastity. It was like reading an essay from Carol Yager on diet tips.

When Obama came into office, we were already one of the most regulated countries in the world. The costs of complying with the massive regulation effected all aspects of our economy and, in the words of Jeff Pope, "destroyed our manufacturing sector." Last year, the SBA estimated that it had cost each small business in America in excess of $10,000 per employee to comply with our regulatory scheme. And not a dime of that added any value to the goods or services those businesses produced.

That regulatory burden has only gotten worse under Obama. More importantly, Obama has waiting in the wings a regulatory tsunami ready to wash over us. First up is The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, which does everything but address the causes of our financial melt-down. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, it gives:

. . . the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace. Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks, but just about everyone — including, as noted in one summary (the Wall Street Journal), “storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, homebuyers and credit bureaus.”

And that of course pales in comparison to Obamacare, which not only creates a massive new regulatory scheme, but also places it beyond challenge in the Courts, making the administrators into petty dictatorships:

The new law creates 68 grant programs, 47 bureaucratic entities, 29 demonstration or pilot programs, six regulatory systems, six compliance standards and two entitlements.

Getting that massive enterprise up and running will be next to impossible. So Democrats streamlined the process by granting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the authority to make judgments that can’t be challenged either administratively or through the courts.

And that is only the new regulatory bureaucracies. The old one's have been no less radical under the guidance of Obama. The EPA, with their decision to regulate carbon dioxide despite Congress's refusal to pass cap and trade, is now threatening our energy infrastructure and, with it, our entire economy. The FCC, with their decision to take over regulation of the internet on the ostensible grounds that, at some point in the future, there might be problems with internet access, threatens to choke off economic growth in that nascent sector. Then there are the agencies under Sec. of the Interior Ken Salazar. He is using their regulatory power to destroy our domestic oil industry and to put ever more of our land and coastal regions off limits to mining and drilling. Given that we rely on coal for most of our electricity and given that our purchase of foreign oil accounts for 62% of our annual trade deficit, that seems suicidal.

So how did we come to this? Art. I Sec. I of our Constitution provides that "all legislative powers" of our federal government are "vested in . . . Congress." The Constitution makes no provision for regulatory agencies, let alone the unilateral creation of regulations by those agencies that function with the force of law. This is not to suggest that such agencies are unconstitutional; clearly, after a century of jurisprudence, that question has been asked and answered. But in our current situation, Congress is no longer the sole - or arguably even the most important - federal legislative body. We now far more resemble the EU, an anti-democratic socialist bureaucracy, than we resemble America circa 1783. It is an extra-constitutional travesty.

Obama, in his op-ed today, indicates no intention of changing this trajectory for massive new regulations. He indicates no intention of reigning in the EPA, the FCC or Ken Salazar, regardless of how destructive they are to our economy. So just what is he doing? Obama used the op-ed to announce that he has issued an Executive Order directing his vast regulatory bureaucracy to . . . :

. . . ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It's a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.

This as the centerpiece of Obama's effort to portray himself as a new found centrist? It defies belief. It is throwing a new coat of paint on a rusted out 1980 Yugo and trying to sell it as a 2010 Ferrari. It is pure con job from a shameless scam artist. It was like the sales job he tried to do on us two years ago, when, after signing the $787 billion Stimulus, he held out his decision to order the minuscule savings of $17 billion as proof that he was a deficit hawk.

Nothing is going to happen to turn around the business climate in America until Obama is voted out of office in 2012 - and God help our country if he is not. That said, there are two steps that Congress should take immediately to reign in the out of control regulatory bureaucracy. Step one is a law requiring Congress to affirmatively approve each and every new regulation before it becomes binding. Step two is a law that sunsets every regulation every ten years, requiring Congress to debate them and vote on whether to reauthorize them. Only that would restore us to the balance that our Founders had in mind when they drafted our Constitution.

Others Who Have Posted On This Topic:
Q&O - Just words? Obama on a “21st Century regulatory” regime
JustOneMinute - One Of These Is Not Like The Other
Legal Insurrection - Obama Brought The EPA To Joe Manchin's Cap & Trade Fight
Michelle Malkin - The Mother Of All Job-Stifling Regulations
Patterico - Obama Announces "Smart" Regulations
The Foundry - Obama on Overregulation: Less than Meets the Eye
Stop the ACLU - Obama Now A Regulation Slayer? Hardly
City Journal - Backdoor Big Government

Welcome, Larwyn's Linx readers.

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A Bill Of Indictment Against The EU

At Brits At Their Best, Iris Binstead of Save Our Sovereignty has nailed her 95 theses to the door of the EU castle. It is a damning bill of indictment enumerating the many ways Britian is being harmed by the EU.

Unfortunately, the political system of Britain is becoming ever more dysfunctional. As I pointed out here, the Brits practice a form of democracy that no longer gives substantive voice to the will of the people. Labour's decision two years ago to transfer the sovereignty of Britain to the EU without a promised referendum of the people of Britain should have resulted in open warfare on the streets of London. It did not. And indeed, David Cameron, the leader of the Tory party, who initially ran on a platform of holding such a referendum, later gave indications that, even if Tories were elected, he would not allow such a referendum to be held. And now Britain is ruled by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition that has ratified Labour's actions.

As Ms. Binstead writes in her preamble:

THOSE READERS who voted at the recent general election for a Conservative Government believing it to be eurosceptic must be feeling utterly betrayed. They were led to believe that Mr Cameron and Mr Hague would not allow the European Union to take further powers away from this country without a referendum. But already there is talk of new financial regulation and supervision, member states’ budgets being supervised, new powers for EU police forces, EU control over immigration and asylum matters, and much more.

Was Mr Cameron’s euroscepticism just a ploy to get votes or has he now been forced to co-operate by the extremely pro-European Union Liberal Democrats with whom the Conservatives are in coalition? Whichever is true, the Sunday Telegraph, 18.7.10, reported that he tried to intervene in the election of eurosceptic MP, Bill Cash as Chairman of the Parliamentary European Scrutiny Committee in an attempt to head off a Tory rebellion on Europe. Many members of the Tory Party were angered by this. There are also doubts about William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, who has vowed to increase Britain’s influence in the European Union by boosting the numbers of UK nationals in the Brussels Civil Service. (UK Press Association, 1.7.10.

Do read the entire post. And as Richard North at EU Referendum recently wrote:

[Co-Prime Minister] David Cameron is happier sharing power with the Liberal Democrats than he would be with an all-Conservative government, according to "one of his inner circle".

If this is true, and it could very well be, it sort of confirms a lot of what we have been saying – the man is not a Conservative, never has been and never will be. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he would be more at home with his own kind in the Lib-Dims than with a Tory majority. . . .

And yet the British people have no say in the choosing of their chief executive. That is certainly one of the principal reasons that their form of democracy is not responsive to the will of the electorate.

At any rate, all of this comes after last week's announcement that our British cousins were about to start suffering something with which we in the U.S. have some historical experience - "taxation without representation." This from Mary Ellen Synon writing in the Daily Mail last week:

. . . The European Commission has decided to fire up the powers of taxation given to the EU by the Lisbon Treaty. Thanks to David Cameron's refusal to fight the transfer of sovereignty the treaty makes, the British people can now be subject to taxation direct from Brussels, with the Commons -- indeed, with the Chancellor -- having no control over the tax at all.

Today Janusz Lewandowski, the commissioner in charge of the EU's £116bn budget, announced he intends to press for a new EU tax. The euro-elite want to be able to get their hands on your money without having to ask your Government even for a perfunctory agreement. All this talk about belt-tightening around Europe is making the euro-elite edgy: they have their luxurious pay and pensions and travel allowances, and all their empire-building to protect, after all.

Britain and every other member state is going through terrible budget turmoil, with spending cuts and citizens furious about increases in taxation -- yet now Brussels is getting ready to activate Art 311 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (part of the Lisbon bundle -- the euro-elite don't want to make it easy for you to find it).

It says, 'The Union shall provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies.'

The 'means.' That means money. Your money. Taken away by an unelected single party government (the commission) enabled by politicians over whom the British voters have no political control (the council). The British will have to pay the tax these people demand, but can never vote them out. The commission wants to start with a tax on all bank transactions, or perhaps air travel. It doesn't really matter which. Their point now is to establish the power of Brussels to tax the populations of the countries of the EU without any control by national parliaments. Once that power is in place, the taxes can be ratcheted up.

There you have it, people forced to pay taxes by people they did not vote into office, and whom they cannot vote out of office, and over whom they have no control.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, a lot a determined men on board a tea ship in Boston Harbour, a lot of other brave men at a green in Lexington, and plenty other men with much to lose, all decided long ago they would not tolerate such a thing. They could not tolerate taxation without representation.

Question: will the British tolerate it? Or will they let themselves be humiliated in a way that even the small ragtag population of 13 British colonies would not allow in 1776?

Given the systemic failure of democracy as practiced in Britain, I think it really will take a "tea party" or two to make their governing class see the light. And I use the term "tea party" in both its historic and modern political contexts. As to the former, in the absence of actual tea to toss in the Thames, perhaps they can start by tossing in David Cameron and William Hague.

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Symbols Of Our Socialist Overlords

Here are two stories, one from the U.S., one from Britain, with an interesting parallel. It seems that the UK has recently been fined a very hefty sum, £150 million pounds, for failing to prominently fly the EU flag at the location of projects that receive some of their funding from the EU. Similarly, in the U.S., Obama has ordered that, at every project funded by his stimulus, a symbol needs to displayed showing the source of funding for the project.

This from the Daily Mail:

Our masters in the European Union are apparently fed up with our insolence and ingratitude. They are fining us £150 million for failing to display the EU flag with sufficient regularity, prominence and enthusiasm.

The Eurocrats provide grants for assorted regional development projects – usually with matching funds from the British Government – and it is true that these grants amount to big money.

But our apparent lack of appreciation should not be all that hard to fathom. We are paying £10.2billion a year to the European Union – and less than half that sum comes back to us.

We have a situation of the EU giving us back some of our money and telling us how we are allowed to spend it (often on some wasteful project). They then foam with indignation that we fail to parade our allegiance to the EU. . .

And whilst that is occurring in the UK, we have on this side of the pond:

There's no better definition of government waste than the estimated $192 million President Obama is forcing cash-strapped state officials to spend on road signs touting his failed stimulus program. Even so, with a critical congressional election coming in November, Americans will see a proliferation of these politically self-serving signs in coming months as Obama tries to convince voters who think his "Recovery Summer" is just an economic Potemkin village.

. . . [S]timulus fund recipients they must display the newly designed ARRA logo. According to the memo, the logo is "a symbol of President Obama's commitment to the American People to invest their tax dollars wisely to put Americans back to work." Instead of "symbol," a far more appropriate word to describe this would be "propaganda."

The memo is wrong on both counts. It's not a wise expenditure of tax dollars when government spends as much as $10,000 apiece for propaganda signs, especially when unemployment remains near 10 percent. And the president's stimulus program has not put Americans back to work, as the latest jobless figures make starkly clear. A bunch of expensive road signs won't change the fact that only 6 percent of Americans believe that the Obama stimulus program has created new jobs, according to a New York Times/CBS poll.

. . . Meanwhile, here's another sign, this one from Tea Partiers who are sick and tired of government profligacy, that has a more accurate description of Obama's policies: "Central Planning: Destroying Human Prosperity Since 4000 B.C."

Actually, I think that last sign would apropos on both sides of the pond.

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What Labour Hath Wrought

LIke the RMS Titanic, the UK's ship of state is sinking. British journalist William Shawcross, writing at the NRO, tells why in a damning indictment of Labour and its 12 year stewardship of Britain. This from Mr. Shawcross:

A Foreign Office diplomat’s proposal to mark the Pope’s visit to Britain with Benedict condoms and by having him bless a gay marriage, open an abortion clinic, and set up a hotline for abused children is a perfect example of the ruling Labour party’s degradation of Britain. Former ambassador Sir Ivor Roberts said on Sunday, “I cannot think of a papal visit anywhere in the world where the host government has had to apologize so profusely and abjectly…for the appalling behavior of one of its officials.”

The truth is that the Foreign Office is no longer fit for purpose after 13 years of New Labour dogmas and a succession of weak if not feckless ministers, in particular the incumbent, David Miliband. Under New Labour, the idea that the Foreign Office should actually fight for British interests is considered passé, if not racist and imperialist. Instead, New Labour has forced Britain to become a mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights (except in Muslim lands) and man-made climate change. . . .

Charles Crawford, a distinguished ambassador who retired early in despair at New Labour’s destruction of British diplomacy, says that in Euroland, “religious pieties plus national identities and symbols, and thus the role of national embassies, are all essential targets of postmodern pastiche.”

He is right — “postmodernism,” the disastrous creed that there is no objective truth and that everything is relative, is the defining characteristic of New Labour. The only force of which Labour (like most E.U. ruling parties) seems to be in awe is Islamism. No Foreign Office official would have drawn up a document mocking Islam. “Postmodernism” is in effect a form of appeasement.

And Gordon Brown has been a disaster for this country. As the all-powerful chancellor, he spent the first ten years of New Labour undermining what might have been sensible Blairite reforms to education, health services, and welfare. Brown and his allies wanted no success for Blair — instead, they simply threw money at unreconstructed and inefficient structures. Billions upon billions of taxpayer money is still being squandered. Perhaps most tragic is the lack of welfare reform. Brown has perpetuated the growth of a wretched, demoralized underclass, unwilling and increasingly unable to work.

At the same time, Labour has continually expanded its client state (70 percent of the workforce in Northern Ireland), which produces nothing. Every person in the U.K. now has £40,000 of national debt to his or her name.

The list of horrors is endless: Brown sold our gold at about the lowest price imaginable, he destroyed the country’s strong pension system, he broke Labour’s promise for a referendum on the E.U.’s Lisbon Treaty, and he has mortgaged Labour back to the trade unions. Harold Wilson had more courage.

Unforgivably, Brown has treated our soldiers with contempt. He has never given the armed forces the resources they needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many men have died in battle because of inadequate equipment. Recently Brown was forced to correct a lie he told the Chilcott Iraq Enquiry when he claimed that under him, defense spending had risen every year.

Labour boasts that 3 million new jobs have been created — but most went to immigrants. Labour deliberately let immigration rip but never put this controversial policy before the voters in a manifesto. Some leaked Labour documents suggest this was a deliberate policy “to dilute Britishness” and create a new class of voters grateful to Labour.

It is an outrage that the British people were never told the truth about Labour’s immigration free-for-all. Instead, Labour apparatchiks denounced anyone as racist if he or she complained. Those who hate the rise of the British National Party should blame Labour, not the poor white voters whom Labour abandoned and whose lives have been changed forever by uncontrolled immigration. Last week, two London taxi drivers told me that they were going to vote BNP because it’s the only party that cares at all about them.

It’s not just about immigration that they complain. People are grossly offended by the drunken anarchy that Labour has encouraged in so many town centres, with 24-hour drinking, the litter that everyone now feels free to throw, the noise, the anger, the increasing incivility. The quality of millions of peoples’ lives has really suffered.

This government has made countless attacks on our civil liberties and has constantly, carelessly undermined our constitution, which has been carefully crafted over centuries to protect us. The Lord Chancellor has gone, the Law Lords have gone, now the House of Lords, one of the last bastions of independent expertise, is also threatened by Brown, who wants to create an elected clone of the Commons. Nick Clegg would do the same.

Labour’s bullying “multicultural” ideology has been a catastrophe. The government has cosseted extremist Islamist preachers of hatred to a shocking degree. No wonder French security officials talk of “Londonistan.” At the same time, under New Labour’s “progressive” laws, ordinary Christians have been persecuted for their views. Gordon Brown boasts of being “a son of the manse,” but he cares far more about leftist ideology than he does about the religion of his father. Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has now taken up the cudgels on behalf of Christianity, its followers, and the fine tradition of British tolerance. It is a measure of the illiberalism of this government that he should have to do so.

“Orwellian” is an overworked phrase, but at least everyone knows that it means something destructive to society. It is a fitting description of the debasement of language, the ignorance of history, and the oppressive culture of “postmodern progress” controlled by thousands of highly paid apparatchiks that Labour has forced upon us. . . .

In his conclusion, Mr. Shawcross calls for people to vote for the Tories as their best option to right Britain's sinking ship of state. Perhaps if anyone heard from David Cameron words similar to Mr. Shawcross, they might be able to do so with some confidence. But by all measures, David Cameron is nothing more than a base political opportunist himself who has, once having promised a referendum on EU membership, reversed himself not long ago. Unfortunately, it appears that the only real conservative party in Britain, the UKIP, is rudderless at the moment. The upcoming election will no doubt be interesting, but I seriously doubt indeed if it will result in a positive change in direction for Britain.

Just to highlight one other point, note that Mr. Shawcross credits "Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury" as being the nation's best defender of Christianity, That is because the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, elevated to his current position by nomination of Labour PM Tony Blair in 2002, has proven utterly worthless in standing up for Christianity and the Anglican Church.

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The UK Through Labour's Looking Glass

Its official. Britain is now a caricature of its once great self.

Once the most powerful nation on earth, Britain strode the globe like a colossus. Britain's legacy to the world has been the most important of the past millennium. The most free and rich nations in our world - from the U.S. to Canada to Australia, India and many others, have all emerged from a period of English colonialism. When the revolutionaries fired the first shots in 1776, what they were fighting for was the rights of free Englishmen. And when our founder's wanted to limit the power of the state, they dusted off the English Bill of Rights, made a few tweaks, and ensconced it as our Bill of Rights.

Yet today, the English Bill of Rights is not but a historical document of no legal worth. The rights of British subjects earned over a millennium of revolt and revolution are circumscribed by a modern Parliament that wields unchecked power. The most insidious restriction of those rights today is the right of a British citizen to be free in their speech. Want to feel the police power of the state, say disparaging things about homosexuality, Islam, . . . or now, vegans. Yes, that's right, vegans are one of only several newly minted victim classes by Labour in their Marxist laboratory that is the UK. This from The Times:

Vegans and teetotallers are to be given the same protection against discrimination as religious groups, under legislation championed by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister.

Members of cults and “new religions” such as Scientology, whose supporters include the film stars Tom Cruise and John Travolta, would also be offered protection, as would atheists.

A code of practice explaining the legal implications of the equality bill states that religions need not be mainstream or well known for their adherents to gain protection. “A belief need not include faith or worship of a god or gods, but must affect how a person lives their life or perceives the world.” . . .

This is nuts. Labour has once again taken the failed theory of multiculturalism and doubled down on it. A vegan diet now classifies as a religion? There is damn good reason to criticize those who eat a vegan diet. The simple fact is, on a pure vegan diet, you can't get enough B-12, thus inviting health problems. It is not a natural diet - rather, it is by definition an unhealthy and unsafe diet. The people that eat vegan - and scream from the rooftops that everyone else needs to start doing it also - are bonkers. And those who believe in abstinence from alcohol are now placed on equal footing with Christianity? Spare me.

If you are not living in the UK or are not following all of this closely, it is difficult to understand just how insidious all of this is. The practical reality of legal protection as a victim group under UK law is to give those newly minted victims carte blanche to push their avant garde life style into all four corners of British society on one hand, while the protection is used as huge cudgel to beat British society into silent submission on the other. If one of the Queen's reckless subjects has the temerity to object, they stand a real chance of inviting all sorts of negative consequences. Follow the link here to get a feel for those negative consequences. This is a cycle we see over and over again, with favored victim classes of the UK's left being held beyond not merely legitimate criticism, but lawful criticism.

If you are a white male in Britain, you are under attack from the Labour government. If you have a problem with radical homosexual agenda being pushed in state schools, better not say anything or you too will feel the discrimination. If you challenge the insane open doors immigration policy in the public sphere, you are treated as a pariah. And of course, if you are a Christian in Britain, you are under attack from the Labour government. That last is important because this latest decision of the Labour government is not merely multiculturalism taken to insane heights, it is also part of Labour's century old war on Christianity. Labour is raising every avant garde lifestyle choice to be the equal under the law with actual religion, thus calling the fundamental worth of Christianity into question. The PC culture of Britain is insane. It's Alice through the looking glass across the pond.

This once great country is now gone so far off the rails that, from an ocean away, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize the UK as a Western democracy. It is certainly moving into the sphere of soft totalitarianism. Moreover, with the vast majority of power transferred from Parliament to the EU, the fact is that it really no longer is a functioning democracy. The people of Britain can still vote, but their Parliament no longer has all that much to do. That of course came about after Labour refused to hold a promised referendum on the issue of transferring Britain's sovereignty to the EU. It was despicable - as is the current Tory position, that they will treat this Labour coup as a fait accompli. One wonders if the great ship of British state can ever be righted?

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The New EU Superstate's Ramifications For The U.S. & For Our "Special Relationsship" With The UK

After eight years of popular rejection, political cajoling, and endless hand-wringing, the EU has finally ratified the Lisbon Treaty without a shred of democratic legitimacy or public support.

The Treaty contains all the essential components of an EU superstate, including a single legal personality, a permanent EU presidency, an EU-wide public prosecutor, and the position of foreign minister in all but name. The Lisbon Treaty shifts power away from nation-states to Brussels in critical areas of policymaking -- such as defense, security, foreign affairs, criminal justice, judicial cooperation, and energy . . . It restricts the sovereign right of EU member states to independently determine foreign policy and poses a unique threat to the Anglo-American Special Relationship. Above all, it is a treaty that underscores the EU's ambition to become a global power and challenge American leadership on the world stage.

Testimony of Sally McNamara To The Committee on the Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Europe, of the U.S. House of Representatives, 15 Dec. 2009

The EU Superstate -the result of the world's slowest coup - became official within the past month. As I have written before, it is the world's largest experiment in anti-democratic socialism. It is an experiment that is destroying the UK demographically and, quite likely, irreparably, through open borders immigration. Britain's socialist Labour government has further contributed to the mass immigration in order to shore up their power base and, through multiculturalism, to destroy the traditional foundations of British society. Melanie Phillips, in an article a few months ago, called Labour's acts nothing less than "treason." That said, both Labour and the "conservative" Tory party have been fully complicit in Britain's national suicide. And as recent as last month, the Tory leader, David Cameron, all but announced that he will not challenge Labour's coup in transferring British sovereignty to the EU without a promised referendum of the British voters. For the rank and file of Britain, neither major party offers actual representation. There is a near complete disconnect between the ruled and the rulers that British democracy, as currently constituted, is systemically unable to cure.

But the deal is done. We no longer can deal individually with the UK, France, Germany, or any of the other 24 EU members. All are now provinces of the EU - (and as an aside, the UK has actually been subdivided into two separate provinces). This is problematic on many fronts. First and foremost is the fact that this EU superstate is no more a legitimately elected democratic government than is the Ahmedinejad regime in Iran. And that is the tip of the iceberg, as Ms. McNamara, quoted at the top of this post, explained in her testimony to Congress:

The Lisbon Treaty was born from the twice rejected European Constitution, which was voted down in public referenda held in France and Holland in 2005. The Lisbon Treaty itself was rejected in a referendum held in Ireland in 2008, until Dublin was forced into holding a second referendum in October 2009. Ireland's EU Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy stated that if the Lisbon Treaty had been put to a public vote across the European Union, it would have been rejected by 95 percent of EU member states.

In one of the biggest acts of political betrayal in modern British history, the Labour Party denied the British public a long-promised referendum on the Treaty, despite overwhelming support for a public plebiscite. The widespread lack of public support and legitimacy suffered by this Treaty should be of concern to all institutions who uphold the democratic values of openness, honesty, rule of law and transparency.

As with past EU treaties, one specific policy area has been heralded as critical to further European integration. The Single European Act brought about the Single Market and the Maastricht Treaty instituted the single European currency. Undoubtedly, the major success of the Lisbon Treaty will be the EU's power-grab of foreign and defense policy, which is vital to realizing the EU's ambition of becoming the world's first supranational superstate.

The EU boasts that the Lisbon Treaty compels member states to speak with a single voice on external relations, and with a single legal personality Brussels will now sign international agreements on behalf of all member states. The Treaty formally abolishes the EU's pillar structure that provided for nation states to maintain the lead role in foreign affairs. Brussels' elites are claiming to finally have one telephone line to Europe.

All of this may sound enticing to the United States, which has long called for Europe to shoulder a greater share of the burden for global security. However, it is worth considering what has taken place to date as a forewarning of what is to come.

Prior to the Lisbon Treaty, the EU already had an extensive sanctions arsenal through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) but has repeatedly chosen not to use them. The EU has consistently frustrated the prospect of tougher sanctions against Iran, and has acted, in the words of Joschka Fischer, as a "protective shield" for Tehran against the United States. The EU even rolled out the red carpet for brutal Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe in 2007, officially suspending its own travel ban to welcome him to Lisbon. In Afghanistan, the EU has been nothing more than a bit-part player with a police training mission criticized by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly as too small, underfunded, slow to deploy, inflexible, and largely restricted to Kabul. . . .

The Lisbon Treaty's ability to rein in its members from taking independent action should also concern Washington. Under the Lisbon Treaty, EU member states are now required to consult the other members before undertaking international action and to ensure that their decisions are in line with EU interests. Giving the EU the ability to supersede the autonomy of its member states in areas of foreign policy--such as the decision to join the United States in military action--will seriously impair the ability of America's allies in Europe to stand alongside the United States where and when they choose to do so. It will see America isolated and facing hostility from an organization which is designed to serve as a counterweight to American "hyperpower."

The Lisbon Treaty poses the biggest threat to national sovereignty in Europe since the Second World War. It erodes the legal sovereignty of European nation-states and hands power to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and foreign-service officers far removed from member states. It duplicates NATO's role and function and decouples America from Europe, killing the concept of indivisible security which has kept the peace in Europe for 60 years.

The institutional and political constraints imposed by the Lisbon Treaty will severely limit Britain's ability to build international alliances and independently determine its foreign policy. The biggest damage would be done to Britain's enduring alliance with the United States. . . .

Further, the imposition of qualified majority voting in 40 new areas represents a significant loss of sovereignty for member states, and a removal of Britain's ability to block the most egregious aspects of EU policy. For example, French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully removed the EU's policy commitment to free and undistorted competition from the Lisbon Treaty. Sarkozy did not even attempt to hide his intention in doing so: "The word 'protection' is no longer a taboo," he said. The EU has already been described by the International Herald Tribune as the "global antitrust regulator." The Lisbon Treaty confirms the EU's move away from the Anglo-American free market economic model, toward a statist sclerotic Rhineland model.

It is vital that the United States recognize the value in dealing with its enduring allies on a bilateral level. On issues of foreign affairs, defense, security, justice, and home affairs -- including counterterrorism cooperation and intelligence sharing -- bilateral relations are especially important to the U.S. However, in its desire to create a United States of Europe, the EU has pursued policies which downgrade the possibility of traditional alliance-building by the United States. Replacing individual European allies with a single EU Foreign Minister means inevitably, even if unintentionally, American interests will lose in the discussions that matter most. . . .

Europe doesn't need a constitution. The European Union is not the United States of Europe. The EU is a grouping of 27 nation-states, each with its own culture, language, heritage, and national interests. The EU works best as an economic market that facilitates the free movement of goods, services, and people. It is far less successful as a political entity that tries to force its member states to conform to an artificial common identity. The Lisbon Treaty will bring Europe much closer to the French vision of a protected, integrated European Union than the British vision of a free-trading, intergovernmental Europe. It will do huge damage to American interests in Europe; and contrary to any democratic tradition it is a self-amending treaty which can aggrandize power not explicitly conferred on it by the Treaties. As Lady Thatcher states in her seminal book Statecraft: "That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.

That the citizens of these 27 countries have allowed this coup to occur after repeatedly voting against it utterly mystifies me. I do not understand - and likely never will - why there is not blood filling the streets over this.

I don't know if I agree with PM Thatcher. The suicidal policies of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd - embraced by the EU as a means to accrete power (and even written into their constitution as settled fact) - may in fact give the EU a run for its money in the competition the most "unnecessary and irrational" projects of our era.

I would add a further note. Everyone should study how the EU coup came about. It was incremental movements towards the accretion of power over a period of decades. I see exactly the same thing being attempted by the UN through their "balls to the wall" push to see international treaties signed on AGW that are to be administered by and through the UN. I am anything but a conspiracy theorist. That said, my belief is based on the obvious parallels between how the EU accomplished its anti-democratic coup, slowly accreting power over six decades, and how the UN is pushing AGW. These people are dangerous.

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Is Taps Appropriate?

Accross the pond, the United Kingdom, as a sovereign nation, passed from history today. The Treaty of Lisbon, the EU's Constitution, has come into force, creating a single European government with sovereignty over all member states. This was not the will of the people of Europe, and certainly not the will of the people of Britain. Despite promises from Labour, Brits were never given a say. Instead, this anti-democratic socialist empire came about as the result of the world's slowest coup.

Dr. Richard North at EU Referendum provides a short obituary for his once great country:

From today, as the Lisbon treaty comes into force, we are no longer masters in our own house. Our prime minister, as a member of the European Council, is obligated under this new treaty to promote the aims and objectives of the European Union, over and above those of the UK, and is bound by the rules of the Union.

Of course, this will make no immediate difference. It simply renders de jure what has been de facto for several decades, but the coming into force of the treaty marks an important symbolic turning point. We are no longer an independent country, de jure. Our prime minister and his government are now working for an alien government, based in Brussels.

In effect, that makes us an occupied country, . . .

The worst of it is that, in the streets today, nothing will appear to have changed. Everything will look much the same as it did yesterday. In No 10, a man by the name of Gordon Brown will still be calling himself prime minister. In the Houses of Parliament, there will still be MPs and peers, and the Union Jack will adorn the building.

But everything is different. We are a satellite state of the Greater European Empire, ruled by a supreme government in Brussels. And things will stay different until we have regained our freedom. Until then, as I remarked before, we owe this government neither loyalty nor obedience. It is not our government. It is theirs. It is our enemy.

This is indeed a sad day.

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Europe's Suicide

The socialist left, now largely in control throughout Europe, has warred on Christianity and made common cause with Muslims - in many cases radical Wahhabists - as a means of gaining political power and remaking Western society. An ever increasing Muslim population in Europe inevitably votes for the socialist left. In exchange, the left provides lax immigration, permissive public benefits, and pushes multiculturalism - a thoroughly bankrupt philosophy that denigrates the traditional foundations of Western civilization, including Christianity, and that actually encourages Muslims not to integrate into their respective Western societies. The end result is an ever growing population of Muslims who are, in many cases, even more radicalized than the general populations in their respective countries of origin. And a sizable portion of these individuals wish to see their European homes converted, forcibly if necessary, to Muslim rule and Sharia law. The process is very far along in many cases - with, for but one example, Brussels, the capital of the EU, now dominated by Muslims. And there is this today from the Telegraph:

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe's indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts.

Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time.

The UK, which currently has 20 million fewer people than Germany, is also projected to be the EU's most populous country by 2060, with 77 million people.

The findings have led to allegations that policy-makers are failing to confront the widespread challenges of the "demographic time bomb".

Experts say that there has been a lack of debate on how the population changes will affect areas of life from education and housing to foreign policy and pensions. . . .

To say that there has been a lack of debate on this issue is, in the UK in particular, a laughable understatement. In 1968, a Tory Shadow Minister, Enoch Powell gave a speech, commonly called today the "Rivers of Blood" speech, where he warned against allowing large scale immigration. Powell was utterly demonized by the socialists in Labour and kicked from the Shadow Cabinet by the Tories. And since his speech, the socialist left has made any criticism of the UK's permissive immigration policy sheer political suicide, while the Tory leadership has cravenly capitulated to the left on the issue. Indeed, so radioactive has the left made this issue and so thoroughly have the Tories put their tails between their legs that as recently as two years ago a Tory candidate for Parliament was forced to withdraw from his bid after he merely made an approving reference to Enoch Powell's speech.

The aftermath of Powell's speech is telling. While socialists demagogued and conservatives cowered, polls at the time immediately after Powell's speech showed public support for Powell rising to 75% of the electorate. This demonstrates that there was then, and very much still is today, a true disconnect between Britain's political elite and the rank and file. The rank and file of Britain were then and are now very concerned about the deconstruction of their society. The ruling elite have utterly refused to take heed of their concerns. And indeed, that is true on many of the critically important issues confronting Britain, including most recently the turn-over of British sovereignty to the EU without a promised referendum of the electorate. The rank and file, however, seemed like sheep - content to disagree vehemently while doing naught else but a shrug of their shoulders. It appeared until very recently that the blood of Cromwell lay dormant in their veins. That is not necessarily so today.

The demagoguery of the left on this issue was already starting to loose its force as the real problems facing the UK as a result of this mass demographic change became increasingly obvious and painful. More importantly though, the political landscape of the UK has changed drastically in the past months. The British rank and file exploded in Cromwellian fashion with real, seething anger - and MP's acted with real fear of the electorate for the first time in perhaps centuries - over the recent revelations of widespread and outrageous abuse of expenses by MP's. We have yet to see whether the rank and file anger at the MP's over expenses also resonates to the truly critical and existential issues facing the UK, one of which is clearly immigration - an issue also inextricably bound up in EU membership. Let us hope so, as it is not an overdramatization to say that the future of Western civilization in the UK and on the Continent hangs in the balance.

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