ThyssenKrupp in Alabama and Prof. Kerber's Carriers, both pose worrying questions.

The CNBC Squawk Box morning TV programme this week sent a reporter across America on a feature dubbed 'Opportunity USA'. Yesterday morning they were in Alabama and did a feature on the new ThyssenKrupp $5 Billion investment in Calvert, read here or view the actual report from that link.

Given the history of ThyssenKrupp, read here, and that Company's known use of slave labour during the second world war (a quote from the linked report "Krupp Industries employed workers conscripted by the Nazi regime from across Europe. These workers were initially paid, but as Nazi fortunes declined they were kept as slave workers. They were abused, beaten, and starved by the thousands, as detailed in the book The Arms of Krupp"), is it not quite extraordinary that the parent group is sufficiently insensitive to its own fairly recent past to have named this subsidiary  'ThyssenKrupp Steel USA' especially when reflecting on the huge investment involved? What is the mindset, I wonder, of those who could make such a decision?

Another question it is pertinent to pose as Europes' leaders today meet in Brussels to consider further subsuming all their economies into that of Germany, what exactly does Germany intend for this drastically restructured EU?

Professor Markus Kerber, mentioned before on this blog, is a remarkable German defender of the German Constitution, which itself was put in place, originally to forestall any repeat of Nazism, by constitutional experts from the allied nations after the defeat of Nazism in World War Two.  Yet even Professor Kerber seems to suggest a potentially eventual imperial role for the EU, as may be seen at 11 minutes 35 seconds in to Part 2 of a France 24 TV debate, linked here.

Two examples, which tend to indicate to this observer, that in the ThyssenKrupp case there is no longer the intense desire in modern Germany to put the stain of the past to rest once and for all, and in the second that some in Europe are unable to bury ambitions for imperialism, the projection of force beyond the borders of a peaceful trading group of countries supposedly being unthinkable, yet for what else do navies exist? I quote Professor Kerber from the video:

Europe cannot afford to have a European aircraft carrier. France has one, France won't purchase a second  - France isn't able - Europe as a whole is not able to have one or two aircraft carriers, we don't have a European fleet, a navy an embryo of a european navy, at the same time shipyards go bust..."  

Major steps are being considered in Europe, supposedly only to dampen minor bush fires, in small countries, all of which have been easily foreseeable for years. Many signs are in the wind, our leaders will ignore them to the great peril of all!

The deep anger behind the French strikes

The media in France and abroad talk of the present protests and strikes in the country as being directed against a perfectly reasonable sounding requirement for an increase in the retirement age from 60 to 62 years.

It would be unlikely for the french oil refinery workers to have shut down all 12 of the nation's refineries and put their hands round the jugular of the nation's oil product distribution if such were the case.

On TV interviews the reality of 41.5/42 years full contributions are stated as unfair by students facing a working life only beginning at 24 or 25 years of age. Unskilled workers, some of whom claim to have started a life of hard manual labour as young as 15, complain they will now be expected to continue their drudgery until they reach 62. Contrast this with the vast army of paper pushing fonctionaires many of whom after a life of pen-pushing will still expect to draw their own privileged pensions at the age of 55. High among the list of other grudges is the annual withdrawal of more and more routine medications once paid for by the state.

Yesterday an example of this health cost factor arrived in the mail, it advised that a tax of 50 centimes would be imposed on every sheet of paper churned out by the hugely bureaucratic health administration, this came from a mutuelle (health insurer) offering to insure against this extra cost. English speakers may best imagine the effect of such a move by considering their tax authorities slapping a 50 pence or 75 cents charge for each page of paperwork they issue then accompanying their tax forms, in future required monthly, with a 500 increasing to 2000 pages completion explanation all charged and taxed to the unfortunate recipient. It smacks of the kind of scheme dreamt up by Brown or Darling for the entire benefit of their Scots constituents at the sole expense of the English taxpayer!

In the background, however, and always just beneath the surface in most conversations here along the Atlantic seaboard and from there, well inland into the heart of France, is the corruption of the Government, clearly involving the very minister chosen to push the reforms through and the treachery of both main poltical parties over the EU whose own budget appears about to be increased, an event which will surely be the final straw in many other parts of the EU now watching as France quite literally runs down!

The voters of France clearly rejected, by referendum, any further EU Constitutional Treaty, yet such was signed and enacted as the Lisbon Treaty. At the subsequent Presidential election, neither candidate, neither Nicolas Sarkozy nor Ségolène Royale, offered a platform respecting the clearly stated 'NO MORE EU' views of the electorate.

How entrenched is the EU in france? Pretty much totally, to illustrate this fact let me point out something that few english speaking people seem to know, the replacement for Ségolène Royale, as First Secretary of the French Socialists, is none other than the daughter of Jacques Delors, known under her married name of Martine Aubry, by such means are the EU familydynasties planned to be formed! Thus if Sarkozy goes what we get is Jacques Delors Mark II!

Sarkozy appeared alongside Angela Merkel on French TV last evening and his body language shouted defeat, pleading to the French to accept his reforms as the Germans had already enacted the same rules hardly seemed the soundest argument. Asserting that democracy should not permit the kind of demonstrations France will witness again today, as Sarkozy jerkily attempted last evening, is similarly unconvincing in a situation where he and his EU Council colleagues and his own Presidential forerunners have thrown all of Europe's democracy to the wolves, thus hardly seems likely to cut much ice either!

Amusingly the Belgian sausage dachsund Van Rompuy chose the same moment to announce for his mysterious comptrollers that a solution for the economic governance of the EU in the future had been found, such were the words that scrolled along the TV screen. What is meant of course, as always in the EU, is that a form of words had been found to which all the corrupt attendees at the meeting could agree in time to depart for some grand and expensive tax payer funded dinner - the chance of it ever achieving any kind of solution being as distant as any chance of ever re-floating the Titanic.

German Constitutional Court complaint extended to full 440 billion package

Open Europe reports this today with their main links all in German. A good explanation appears on their blog however and that is linked from here.

Two items I would like to highlight are quoted herewith:

Firstly a written Council Answer to Question H-0237-09 7th May 2009 regarding what is now Article 122/

"The Council recalls the terms of the Declaration on Article 100 of the Treaty establishing the European Community, which is attached to the Nice Treaty. According to this declaration, "decisions regarding financial assistance, such as are provided for in Article 100 and are compatible with the 'no bail-out' rule laid down in Article 103, must comply" with the provisions of the inter-institutional agreement on budgetary discipline and financial perspectives."

Secondly the third point raised by the blog but apparently not included in the German complaint:

...the EU Treaties clearly specify that any decision that involves the EU’s budget must be taken by unanimity, meaning that individual member states have a veto over any agreement. The stabilisation fund clearly does involve the EU budget, as the loans are backed by the budget and any defaults will be covered by the budget (there are even p.m. lines in the EU budget for the fund) – and yet it was decided by majority vote. Moving from unanimity to QMV is a transfer of power which needs the approval of national parliaments.

The decision taken by Qualified Majority Voting on the stabilisation packages should therefore have been subject to non-eurogroup Council Member veto, had any the courage to wield it!

Meantime the vote on the "Economic Government" of the EU, code for full federalisation has been deferred until September, praise be, by which time the real problems of the euro currency and multiple defaults may have perhaps been faced making the matter moot. The Irish Times has the report, linked here.