An interesting leftist perspective on No to the EU
"The EU functions as a cheerleader for unconfined monopoly capitalism. It cannot be reformed, it can only be opposed, writes Brian denny
THE European Union is currently negotiating a secret trade deal which would institutionalise irreversible mass privatisation of public services.
This treaty, currently known as TTIP with the US and CETA with Canada, would create secret courts that would allow transnational corporations to sue nation states for huge sums of money for any breaches of this charter for finance capital.
This Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedure is already being used in other trade agreements to suck billions from nation states and into the coffers of the world’s largest companies.
Regardless of the names of these trade deals, the ISDS model is clearly a strategy for world domination by the world’s richest people and, not surprisingly, there has been a public outcry as these secretive plans become known more widely.
Yet the European Commission has just rejected a two-million signature European Citizens’ Initiative against these trade deals — despite the fact such petitions are written into the Lisbon Treaty.
That is because EU institutions and treaties broadly concur with this model of corporate domination. Directive after directive has poured out demanding the same thing of different industries and sectors: mass privatisation and so-called “free-market competition,” which is actually institutionalised monopoly capitalism.
The EU has also been openly financing a junta that has violently grabbed power in Ukraine and which is led by fascists and revanchist groups promoting a cult around former Nazi collaborators.
This cult focuses particularly on Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which joined forces with the nazis during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Numerous monuments to Bandera have been erected, particularly in western Ukraine, including a statue in the city of Lviv, site of one of the largest anti-Jewish pogroms in WWII.
The Kiev regime even saw fit to pass a law under which wartime nazi collaborators, who carried out these mass murders, are officially recognised as “fighters for the freedom of Ukraine.”
At the same time it banned communist symbols and socialist thought across Ukraine.
This repressive, anti-democratic far-right regime is enthusiastically backed by its EU allies. Meanwhile Dmitry Yarosh, the neonazi leader of the Right Sector fascist party, has just been appointed as advisor to the chief of general staff of the armed forces.
This is how the EU projects its power externally on the international scene.
German Christian Democratic Union MEP Elmar Brok spoke frankly at a conference in Brussels about why Berlin and its EU have such a strong interest in Ukraine.
Ukraine is “a country with great economic possibilities,” with “a well-educated population” and with “good agricultural prerequisites.”
Internally, EU policies have decimated entire industries. The Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) has laid waste to entire countries. Before Lithuania joined the EU it was largely agriculturally self-sufficient. Today millions of acres of farming land lie unused as the Cap is designed to control prices within the EU and to protect farmers in Europe’s most powerful member states, including France.
As a result, Lithuanians young and old have been forced leave their country in order to join the huge reserve army of labour created by the EU’s “free movement” rules which lift all control on the movement of capital, goods, services and labour, all for the benefit of the richest people in Europe.
The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is an insane recipe for overfishing and waste which has destroyed many fishing grounds and is destroying many more around Africa, leading to many more to flee that region.
The eurozone is a world economic black spot which is destroying entire economies. Greece and many states would be better off outside this neoliberal torture chamber.
The relentless rise in unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, in the majority of the eurozone member countries in recent years is one of the most dramatic consequences of the capitalist crisis in the area. Over a quarter of young Europeans have no job.
Ultimately, the EU is a Tory project. The Tories took us in, campaigned to stay in, virtually wrote the 1986 Single European Act and supported the Maastricht Treaty and every right-wing, neoliberal treaty ever since.
Europhile Tory leader David Cameron claims that he wants to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership before holding an in-out referendum, probably next year.
But after a private meeting with the prime minister, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said Cameron wants to use the upcoming EU referendum to “dock” Britain permanently to Brussels.
Cameron has no intention of fundamentally changing Britain’s relationship with the EU, mainly because finance capital does not want it altered.
There is no sign that he will end the supremacy of EU law over British law or even that he will keep Britain out of the eurozone in the long run.
Cameron is already building an alliance for his strategy which stretches from the CBI to the more unhinged parts of British Trotskyism.
But, ultimately, by campaigning for a Yes vote you are effectively endorsing all of the above crimes inflicted on Europe and further afield by fundamentally anti-democratic EU institutions.
Some on the left will argue that regardless of the corporate nature of the EU, another Europe is possible. It is not, and that is rather like arguing another Nato is possible.
The EU is fundamentally unreformable. It was designed to be that way. To those who say we can’t survive outside the EU, we should be pointing out that this is a colonial mentality and, in the end, what on Earth is wrong with self-rule?
Vote to get out and into the world.
Brian Denny is a No2EU spokesman"
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-7e3d-EU-referendum-Vote-to-get-out#.VYpDd0bfq-c