Europe’s corporate coup d’état

The long-running corporate coup d’état being carried out in Europe has intensified with new treaty proposals that would impose a common EU austerity policy across the Eurozone.

Having removed the elected governments of Greece and Italy and installing corporate gauleiters, the EU junta is seeking to grab control of the budgets of all member states trapped within the Eurozone.
This Franco-German lash-up even includes a ‘golden rule’ that the private sector will never again take any losses stemming from the catastrophic economic crisis created by the euro.
Under the proposed European Stability Mechanism (ESM) national parliaments would be effectively transformed into cash machines to indemnify capitalism and the private sector.
The euro elite needs this new treaty in order to save both the banks who own the odious debt created by the euro and the single currency itself.  The objective is to undemocratically (how else?) force through a fiscal, monetary and economic union of the 17 euro member states.
German chancellor Angela Merkel has long-argued that the euro crisis is the “opportunity” to turn the federalist screw and enforce full political union.
“We have to view the crisis as a motive, to make up for failures – failures that were not remedied by the Lisbon Treaty,” she said back in May 2010.
Now Berlin wants EU institutions to act as judge, jury and executioner of any eurozone state that break the fiscal rules.
The ESM will be based in Luxembourg with a board of Governors appointed by eurozone states and operate outside the EU. Article 27 and 30 of the ESM Treaty grants the institution and the officials "immunity from every form of judicial process". The ESM and staff will be exempt from taxation and normal rules for financial institutions. In other words the ESM will be a law unto itself and a parallel government to the EU in Brussels over the eurozone and national budgets normally the prerogative of parliaments.
Clearly the proposed treaty is fundamentally undemocratic and outside EU treaties. The Lisbon Treaty makes clear there cannot be a bail out of any of the 27 member states. So back in March 2011 the European Council agreed to add a third paragraph to Article 136 to the EU Constitution: "The Member States whose currency is the euro may establish a stability mechanism to be activated if indispensable to safeguard the stability of the euro area as a whole. The granting of any required financial assistance under the mechanism will be made subject to strict conditionality".
This is a fundamental change and that is why EU elites are pushing to amend the Lisbon Treaty and putting the ESM in place. Alongside the existing bailouts, the ESM is the proposed solution to the dilemma and specifically designed to finance what is in reality a slush fund.

In other words the ConDem government knew about these moves but have refused to explain them to either parliament or the electorate. The ESM is part of the two-tier 'Europe' which the ConDem government not only accepts but openly promotes.
At a meeting in Berlin in early November, Tory leader David Cameron complied with German demands for these strict new neo-liberal fiscal rules for the Eurozone.
In return for bringing full political union a step closer, Merkel threw the Tories the bone of a vague revision of the EU’s Working Time Directive in return.
The deal sets up a fake debate between pro-EU elements in the labour movement and the Tories around the WTD while obscuring and preserving the status-quo of “ever closer union”.
Tory UK Chancellor George Osborne led calls for fiscal union within the euro to ‘resolve’ the Eurozone's debt crisis. He admitted on BBC radio that there was a “remorseless logic“ that within a single currency you must end up having a single budget policy.
“You can't have one without the other," he said.
Tory grandee Michael Heseltine was dragged out to claim that France and Germany would push fiscal union forwards and Britain should join the ailing euro.
Former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown went further by claiming that if Britain had joined from the start it would have forced austerity measures and spending cuts onto British citizens sooner. Former TUC general secretary Lord Monks played his part, backing euro membership along with economically illiterate journalists like Will Hutton.
Yet the escalating Eurozone crisis reveals the most powerful member states protecting their debt-laden banks by demanding vicious austerity measures in the eurozone states starting with Ireland, Greece and Portugal and spreading rapidly across the entire EU.
The illusory concept of ‘Social Europe’ launched 25 years ago to sell 'Europe' to the unions has served its purpose and is disappearing as fast as it appeared. Attacks on jobs, workers’ rights and the welfare state are escalating across Europe.  Amorphous claims of a ‘Social Europe’ are being rapidly replaced by a distinctly real ‘anti-Social Europe’ characterised less by social partnership than by social dumping as EU rules and ECJ judgements drive a race to the bottom.
As European TUC General Secretary Bernadette Segol admitted in June: “cuts in salaries, cuts in public services and weakening collective bargaining rights are all on the agenda”.
Yet another crisis EU summit this week may well see the Treaty being ratified by March without any meaningful discussion in the 17 parliaments. But it will not resolve the EU’s financial problems.
With the bailout, which is still a loan, further pressure is being exerted by Germany, France and the IMF on Greece, Ireland and Portugal for further austerity and privatisation. At the same time the interest to be paid on loans is currently 15 per cent and their economies are shrinking not growing.
This article was written on the eve of the adoption of the new agreement by 26 of the 27 EU member states. The agreement has, however, yet to be ratified, a process which may require a referendum in a number of countries.

For a real solution the euro must be dismantled and states must retrieve the democratic sovereign right to control their own budgets, interest and exchange rates. The Labour movement and MPs need to break with the political class in this country, stop bailing out the bankers and stand up for taxpayers, workers and their communities. It is clear we need the referendum on EU membership promised by the Lib Dems in the last election.