Explain the impact of Brexit to a clueless American

[OneFootInTheGrave]

You are not yet, but on the way, you are already converging with Portugal, Czech, Slovenia and Slovakia, (Slovenians actually passed you) soon you will be catching up with us and Poland, and countries like Romania and Bulgaria are reaaaaallly far away... hope you do not go that far?!? however given the remedies from the centre, this is certainly on the cards.

[BeBMan]

No, you do not have to give more power to EU in order to move the powers already within it's realm to an elected body, just move it away from EU bodies

that are not elected into the Euro parliament, ie the elected body where voters have a say.Surely this would have to be discussed, but it is not on anyone's agenda as it would be the end

of their political life.

Its not relevant to my argument that stuff would be moved from one unelected EU body to the another, elected one, but that you reduce or even abolish precisely those bodies or mechanisms where the member states have their say. For example you mentioned the The European Council with heads of state or government. It does not make EU laws, but it is important for the long-term direction or agenda-setting of the EU. Which is no surprise, given that it's the member states that form the EU, not vice versa.

Taking that away means automatically that the member states have less influence vs. Brussels, similar for your other points. Those in favor of "more Europe" might say it's a good thing, but again: my argument was that such changes are difficult, because the members might not want them, and not because "unelected guys in Brussels" are somehow blocking all this.

At the end of the day I'd say if the EU finds a way to be more democratic and make everyone happy - fine, but this is not something which can just be designed somehow on the drawing board without looking into the political realities.

For the other topic "EU trying to destroy the social model" - take Greece - it may be extreme, but it shows what the institution is about. In this case it is obvious, it is one of the

central aspects of "restoring competitiveness" that EU targeted. This is just the most visible one.

Another example are current French labour reforms which are basically driven from the EU

, with expected future consequences.

or would you rather have Spanish labour reforms of 2012 - this time from and "official" review.

You can see current results:

The reform has not contributed much to the creation of employment. Despite a clear improvement, especially during the past year, the unemployment rate was still 22.4% in the second

quarter of 2015 compared with 24.8% in the third quarter of 2012 when the reform came into force. Most of the sources consulted agree that the reform has not succeeded in diminishing the

duality in the labour market (permanent versus temporary employees) or reducing employment precariousness (the proportion of temporary employees has remained stable since 2012). On the

contrary, working conditions have tended to deteriorate (in terms of salary or working time), particularly for those workers who have had to change jobs (often after a period of

unemployment). In that sense, there is an increase in salary inequality.

Saying that EU is not out to significantly weaken, if not outright destroy (ala US) the old European social model, is just not being informed well enough. (certainly not in popular

media's best interests though, so not surprising really)


Here is a bit more detail for the rest of the EU. (by a German no less)

edit: just to add Portugal, results (or the lack thereof) you can check, as I cannot be bothered at this time, but it

is pretty clear that this did not bring Portugal much, if anything, other than the proof of what EU is about with regards to "social model".

Unemployment in both Spain and Portugal is down http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...April_2016.png

Por ca. 12%, Spa ca. 20%, both had significantly higher numbers 2013/14. (yes, one might say it's still too high, but that just as an aside)


As for the whole media-blitz that overwhelms me with lotsa stuff, while coming up with gems a la "Saying that EU is not out to significantly weaken, if not outright destroy (ala US) the old European social model, is just not being informed well enough" -- IMO you clearly defeat me in digging out links, esp. such that smell of a good deal of confirmation bias at work, but you could certainly improve in doing more critical examination of said links. Thanks to you and the intarweb I have no lack of information, but I simply arrive at different conclusions in certain areas (outrageous, I know)

Because digging out x examples of EU measures which you find bad does not support a far-reaching claim like "the EU wants to destroy the European social model". That's sloppy thinking. The success or failure of these steps does say nothing about the intention in which they were done. And you seem to completely ignore the fact that most of them were first and foremeost reactions to a heavy economic crisis. That does not mean anyone has to like them (as said, ppl might have a lot of legitimate stuff against them indeed), but basically constructing a narrative (the EU wants...) does indicate a need for ideologic justification. It's usually done in the political arena to rally support. But taking it all at face value is rather shady IMO.

[ZEE]

Don't worry you guise. Nigel Farage will fix the world.

[BeBMan]

Don't worry you guise. Nigel Farage will fix the world.

[Bereta_Eder]

I have long said that numbers lie.

Let's take austria.

5% unemployment.
It's not doing too badly economically

yet the far right is almost in government.

Numbers lie. Obviously there is some dire hardship in order for the far right to be so strong. maybe "the fruits of neoliberalism have not been adequally distributed"

yeah, anyway, numbers lie

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Its not relevant to my argument that stuff would be moved from one unelected EU body to the another, elected one, but that you reduce or even abolish precisely those bodies or mechanisms where the member states have their say. For example you mentioned the The European Council with heads of state or government. It does not make EU laws, but it is important for the long-term direction or agenda-setting of the EU. Which is no surprise, given that it's the member states that form the EU, not vice versa.

Taking that away means automatically that the member states have less influence vs. Brussels, similar for your other points. Those in favor of "more Europe" might say it's a good thing, but again: my argument was that such changes are difficult, because the members might not want them, and not because "unelected guys in Brussels" are somehow blocking all this.

At the end of the day I'd say if the EU finds a way to be more democratic and make everyone happy - fine, but this is not something which can just be designed somehow on the drawing board without looking into the political realities.

Without a doubt this is correct, that it will take a lot of effort to change the way EU functions, I did not dispute it. I only pointed out that it is not being addressed at all, and just gave my view on what could be done to make it more democratic. Surely the final solution which I may find acceptable would not have been exactly as I prescribed, but really this was an illustration on what a better setup could be.

The issue is that democratization of the EU is not on the agenda, and will not be in near of far future, precisely so that you could get things "done", by the current interest groups driving the EU.

So you get this kind of mode of operation for the institution.

The European Commission has sent the final draft of the EU-US Privacy Shield to national representatives and expect to get a yay or nay next Monday with a view to “adopting the implementing act” one day later on July 5.

Sources from the Article 31 group told Ars last week that they did not want to be rushed, but the Commission clearly has other ideas. The text, seen by Ars, has also been sent to the European Parliament who can give their opinion, but can’t actually block it.

Particular law and requirements from the commission are not yet discussed anywhere in press either, and the only info out there (not actually mainstream), is not very favourable about the proposed agreement.

Point being is that you have a bunch of unelected bureaucrats sending directives, and you are fine with it given that it is "hard to change".

I agree. It's hard to change. However that does not excuse the functioning, and in my opinion this is the hard faultline in the org which is causing the slow collapse, yet there is nobody doing anything to address it, and the public is oblivious.

Unemployment in both Spain and Portugal is down http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statist...April_2016.png

Por ca. 12%, Spa ca. 20%, both had significantly higher numbers 2013/14. (yes, one might say it's still too high, but that just as an aside)


As for the whole media-blitz that overwhelms me with lotsa stuff, while coming up with gems a la "Saying that EU is not out to significantly weaken, if not outright destroy (ala US) the old European social model, is just not being informed well enough" -- IMO you clearly defeat me in digging out links, esp. such that smell of a good deal of confirmation bias at work, but you could certainly improve in doing more critical examination of said links. Thanks to you and the intarweb I have no lack of information, but I simply arrive at different conclusions in certain areas (outrageous, I know)

Because digging out x examples of EU measures which you find bad does not support a far-reaching claim like "the EU wants to destroy the European social model". That's sloppy thinking. The success or failure of these steps does say nothing about the intention in which they were done. And you seem to completely ignore the fact that most of them were first and foremeost reactions to a heavy economic crisis. That does not mean anyone has to like them (as said, ppl might have a lot of legitimate stuff against them indeed), but basically constructing a narrative (the EU wants...) does indicate a need for ideologic justification. It's usually done in the political arena to rally support. But taking it all at face value is rather shady IMO.

The reaction to a heavy economic crisis can be different than what was done within the EU. EU acts even harsher than IMF. I gave you a few examples and you are calling this confirmation bias.

After all, my main point is that this is a result of the democratic deficit, and the "philosophy" of the EU would have been adjusted if it was possible by the voters.

It's not.

If the voters will chose (like the Brits will be able to again) their own position - that will work itself out over time. However this is actually not possible in the EU as is, and will cause institutions undoing, as we had plenty of time to see since 2008. Disintegration of the social model is just a side-effect, (as we were discussing the nature of "EU" economic policy), but if EU was somehow socialist, which it is not - it would fail just the same with the same lack of governance that it has been designed with.

Sum total, UK did well to get out on time, and in the short term there will be difficulties due to "decoupling", but in the long run once EU burns out UK will be in much better position to protects itself from it, assuming that their politicians make decent choices going forward. Either way they have just given themselves the power back over their own destiny, and I cannot see how is this not a positive over the long run.

[C0ckney]

kudos to onefoot, bebro and pakitis for the debate. great stuff, guys.

[C0ckney]

jon pilger's take.

Why the British said no to Europe

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain's ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.

Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East - irst Iraq, now Syria - are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and Nato. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern "globalisation", with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants.

All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The most effective propagandists of the "European ideal" have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even "cool". What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as "neoliberalism".

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain's second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, "experiencing the effects of extreme poverty" and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about "leaving Europe", as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. "Well," he said to "Lord" Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, "why do these people want it so badly?" The "these people" are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson "European" class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Blair as "mystical" and has been true to his "project" of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. "Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain", said the headline over his full-page piece. The "we" was unexplained but understood - just as "these people" is understood. "The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more," wrote Kettle. " ... the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again."

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought "better terms" with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Cameron, his comrade in the "remain" campaign. Corbyn fulsomely praised Cameron's "dignity" and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Cameron's divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about "protecting" the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin's speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory - at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces - won the Second World War.

Putin likened the current frenzied build up of Nato troops and war material on Russia's western borders to the Third Reich's Operation Barbarossa. Nato's exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering "peace and security" if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and Cameron, Osborne, Corbyn, Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

this part I did not even see in the press, but it is telling

The Guardian once described Blair as "mystical" and has been true to his "project" of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. "Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain", said the headline over his full-page piece. The "we" was unexplained but understood - just as "these people" is understood. "The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more," wrote Kettle. " ... the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again."

(+ this is the allegedly "leftist" graudian)

We have new overlords, while we scoff at unscrupulous US politics, they are strangling us over here slowly, but surely.

[Bereta_Eder]

nice article.
I would have some remarks to make but it surpasses me so I'll shut up

[Bereta_Eder]

Just some minor, insignificant ones

The kind of ruthlessness Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought "better terms" with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. they were betrayed,

we did the best we could

[Bereta_Eder]

Only, we were not the privilieged, nor affluent. We were the ones that had always refused to partake in the two party system, who always refused and didn't partake from all the perks of the previous political system and we always only relied on our abilities and ethics.
Syriza has a country to run and millions of lives on its hands.

Tsipras was given a mandate by the people.
He respected the referendum.
He got back in the arena and did the best he could according to his abilities and ethics.

He then had a re-election to ask the people if they still wanted him at the helm and the answer was yes


Post - modern relativity... it IS a post modern world.

There are fractions who don't espouse it. But what exactly does that mean?

If it's the communist party then yes it is a modernity child. But it has 4%-5%.

Syriza is not sold out. It has decimated the previous political status quo.
The people elected tsipras and he had the responsibility.

You know who are the privileged that have grown up with a golden spoon in their mouth? The spin off "hardcores" from syriza.

I respect the people. If at whatever time and place they think syriza must leave, it will leave.
But bare in mind, we stoped dead on its tracks the golden dawn, we pushed the right wing kilometers behind.
If however people want it gone, it will be gone.
But they don't.