Conclusions to AEP's 2011 predictions in the Telegraph

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's world economic predictions for 2011 are linked here and conclude as follows:

It would be a mercy if the German constitutional court brought this unhappiness to a swift close by ruling in February that Europe’s rescue machinery is a breach of EU treaty law, and therefore of the Grundgesetz. But it cannot happen, can it? A court order forcing Berlin to suspend payments would drive a stake through the heart of German foreign policy, and for that reason the eight judges must recoil, and the law be damned. One presumes.
Alas, there may be no neat solution, no division into two currency blocs with the South keeping the euro and the North launching the euro-plus, no brave decision by Germany to get out, revalue, and let others recover. Instead, there will be month after month of catfights, and flashes of hatred.
The EU will do just enough to prop up the edifice, but too little to restore lasting confidence. The German bloc will not confront the elemental point that either they agree to pay subsidies – not loans – on a scale equal to Versailles reparations, for year after year, or the South {will} stay trapped in slump until electorates blow a fuse.
Norway will sail on serenely.
Happy New Year.

Will Germany trash its cunningly crafted Constitution?

None in the world should under-estimate the gravity of the situation that would arise should the German Constitutional Court rule that recent breaches of the EU Treaties will be given legality in Germany.

On 7th September, at the invitation of Open Europe, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hankel – one of the five German Professors who have challenged the legality of the eurozone bailout of Greece at the German Federal Constitutional Court, gave a presentation in London during which he argued as follows as described here:

Hankel argued that the €1 trillion eurozone bailout package agreed jointly by the EU, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund are illegal on three grounds: it violates the “no bailout” clause in the EU Treaties, it violates the ECB’s own rules (through the ECB’s decision to buy government bonds) while the IMF also violates its own rules through its involvement.

He also warned that the “ammunition” of the €1 trillion rescue package “may not be sufficient” to sustain the eurozone in the long-term. If also private depositors in the weaker eurozone economies begin to put their money elsewhere, “we’re looking at a far greater amount”, he said.

Professor Hankel said that the chances that the German Constitutional Court would rule the bailout illegal were good. He said that “contrary to the last complaint [made against the euro in the 1990s], now the court has accepted the complaint from the first minute, it has not been rejected.” He said that while the Constitutional Court has a political composition, it is still wary of its reputation, and will fear public opinion. He said that “Nobody can deny what has happened…in the case of the European treaties it’s a clear cut break of articles and paragraphs, it was forbidden to bail out…and therefore I think the limits for a political judgment are very narrow, at least narrower than ten years ago.”

As I argued in my novel 'Millennium Blitzkreig' written in the mid nineteen-nineties, the danger to Europe's peace and democracy from the institution that has now become the EU, only becomes live should a re-united Germany sacrifice its own democracy and the protections cleverly crafted into the original West German Constitution as drafted by the Western Allies.

Prof. Hankel concluded that his court case was ultimately about democracy, as the creation of the new EU rescue mechanism represented a clear move “from a federation of states to a federal state”.

The former wartime Allied powers should not stand idly by in the event that the Court rules (as it has recently tended to do) that these further erosions of democracy are acceptable to the new united German state. They have an historical duty so to do made especially poignant this week given the passing of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of London which was also noted last Tuesday. It would be imperative that the leaders of those powers demand a meeting with the German Chancellor to determine the changed objectives of his/her country especially given Germany's overbearing role within the structure of the powerful and non-democratically constructed European Union.

Professor Hankel to German Chancellor Merkel,

Here is Professor Wilhelm Hankel's letter translated into English.

Honored Federal Chancellor,

unfortunately you have not answered my first letter dated March 27, 2010. For this reason I have to repeat my concerns as the problem approaching Germans and Europeans has become worse meanwhile.

Both the "Greek Aid Law" from May 7, 2010, as well as the following "Emergency Umbrella Law" from May 7, 2010, do not only constitute strong offences against EU law, but also against our own German constitution.

You know the situation due to the legal action introduced by 5 university professors at the German constitutional court. Your assistants have informed you of this as well.

This is a case of breaking the law in the most severe way. This is even more dangerous than the economic consequences. Europe is the homeland of states ruled under the law. The Euro will not regain its former strength but it will be relegated into a European soft currency.

Those countries close to a state default, especially the southern, but also the western Eurozone, will neither get out of debt nor will it change their past behaviour. After all the money of the rescue fund does not flow to the states but to their insolvent banks. And the governments of these countries will not fulfill the conditions coming with the rescue funds, as doing so would endanger their political and economical stability.

It is highly implausible when your finance minister announces austerity packages while allocating 70% of annual federal tax revenues for rescue packages whose failure is already written on the wall.

Germany and the few other still economically stable countries in the Eurozone are sinking money into a barrel without a bottom. This money, that the German taxpayers will have to come up with, will be lost for German citizens and their future. By now you had to acknowledge that our country can neither fulfill its social obligations, nor satisfy its promises to keep and create jobs. I am confident you will live to see that this austerity policy will lead to similar effects as we see them nowadays in Greece: protesting people, burning cars, shattered windows and maybe still worse actions. Can you account for this?

I appeal to you to repeal these laws before the constitutional court will nullify them. Your oath included "to fend off damage for the German people" - with this you stand the chance to do so. The emergency umbrella from Brussels will not save the common currency.

This is my and our public call to the German sovereign and to you. Realize it!

Kind regards

Wilhelm Hankel

Germans, Napalm and the Euro Currency.

Sixty-five years ago this week 1200 Flying Fortress bombers of the US 8th Air Force dropped napalm bombs on the last pocket of German troop resistance along the Gironde Estuary and the French town of Royan. Napalm is a form of jellyfied gasoline which sticks to surfaces such as skin and burns! Howard Zinn was a bombardier in these raids and subsequently wrote extensively on this raid, much of which, with other source material, may now be read on the internet.

I have been researching a book (finally due for publication next month) in this region of France for much of the past year and have been pondering the motives behind this dreadful bombing raid for many months. Within days of the raid Hitler committed suicide and the Russians were already on the brink of obtaining total and unconditional surrender. La Rochelle, just north of Royan, which hosted the U-Boat pens of Karl Dönitz, who succeeded Hitler after his suicide, escaped total destruction by surrendering after the war was over. I have been left with the only logical conclusion as to the motives that the raid was intended to send a message to the German Officer class, along the lines of "look at that of which we are capable, do not mess with us again".

A tough message for free democracies to convey, but a necessary one considering that twice in the preceding thirty odd years the German officer class had unleashed bestiality and brutality across the Continent of Europe on a nowadays, thankfully, almost unimaginable scale.This terror raid was later to be followed with the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, where I believe the message was also roughly the same. (Napalm had been used with devastating effect on the suburbs of Tokyo the month before, so the effects were already known).

Some may question my conclusion, Howard Zinn suggests it may perhaps have been considerations of promotion in senior Air Force ranks, I doubt that, for such a raid, at such a moment, a political message must have been intended and the raid was thus launched with political intent.

I probably have less problems grasping the motivations as I was born in 1944, and the history is more immediate than it would be to those of a younger age. At sixteen I served in my first oil tanker, the Chief Officer then recounted to me how he had been rescued from the freezing North Atlantic on three separate occasions having been torpedoed by Dönitz's mass murderer U-Boat Commanders, once having been plucked from a sea of blazing gasoline within inches of his life. I suspect that in 1945 he may well have been in agreement with the message the napalm attack on the Royan Pocket conveyed to the Nazi leadership, whose jackboots had lain so long upon the throat of Europe.

To the West of Royan at Berneuil, in the Charente Maritime is the German Cemetry in which lie the graves of 8,342 dead German servicemen. Not all died in the war or its final raids. Some died in mine clearance others untended in a Bordeaux suburb during a post-war cholera epidemic receiving back, no doubt sometimes undeservedly, some of the hatred their comrades in arms had sown. Further west still near Limoges, at Oradour-sur-Glane 642 inhabitants of one village, men, women and children, had been massacred in cold blood by a German Panzer division yet another illustration of the terrible price innocents always must pay when others believe they know what is best and have a better way!

Last weekend, it has been variously reported, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was bounced by the Presidents of France and Italy - Nicolas Sakozy and Silvio Berlusconi respectively, into agreeing to accede to requests to bail out Greece.

Such an action, as has been vigorously argued in Germany throughout the past week, would apparently be contrary to the carefully crafted constitution of the German State. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that the Greek political class appears to be begging for such aid, it would be a disaster should it be provided. (A blog posting regarding the unacceptability of such action, even by the IMF, given the pension disparity between Britain and Greece is linked here).

Yesterday the European Commission, issued a Press Release marked "Rapide" demanding Economic Governance for the EU to be run by the unelected Commission and the appointed EU Council President Van Rompuy.

The EU is detested across the union by its own people as has been made clear in referendum after referendum. It is supported mainly by those in its pay or the inner circles of those in power in its former nation states and all their hangers-on. It is widely known as non-democratic and corrupt. Its Parliament is a mass of time-serving, expense gobbling pygmies who consistently regulate in matters they do not understand for want of anything better to do. We cannot allow the EU to impose the views of the economically strongest states on the less economically adept states, as such can only ultimately be imposed by force.

Europe does not want another jackboot on its throat as ALL Europeans must now remember the price to be paid in removing it. Read all there is in the raids on Royan! Consider the German launched missile attacks on Southern England when Germany already faced certain defeat!

This blog begs the good people of Germany and democrats everywhere to work to prevent a subsided, strings attached Eurozone or EU bail-out for Greece or any other of the PIIGS.

Devaluation under IMF control, following Euro withdrawal, can save Greece just as it did for Argentina.

The Euro is not worth saving when despotism is the certain price. The Euro, in fact cannot be saved now anyway, the economic facts are too stark. Therefore throwing away the freedoms of the people of Europe will be thus even more pointless. Instituting economic control across the EU, as demanded by the EU Commission yesterday will require force? They forget they have no consent nor any votes from the citizens of the EU!

German Parliament approves its Special Status under Lisbon Treaty

The BBC reports the passage of the legislation through the German Lower House as follows:

German lawmakers have approved legislative changes paving the way for ratification of the EU's Lisbon Treaty.

The lower house (Bundestag) backed the legislation with 494 votes in favour, 46 against and two abstentions.

The changes should give parliament a bigger say over EU matters that concern Germany. The country's Constitutional Court called for these changes in June.

Wake up Europe - special provisions applicable only to Germany?????