financeguy
ONE love, blood, life
Other examples that THIS european construction is now way socialist at all is the project of European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. I remember somethings that I have already posted on this forum about the Lisbon Treaty and the project of European Constitution. I'm going to do copy/paste of a post I did in November about this subject:
- It's a liberalist constitution;
- When it's approved it's not possible to change it;
- The word "bank" appears 176 times (in more than those 800 pages), "market" 78 times, "competition" 174 times... And "social progress" 3 times... "brotherhood" or "fraternity" appears... 0(!) times;
- "Public service" is reffered... Only 1(!) time and only to talk about transport coordination;
- "The right to have a job", "the right to a minimum salary, income or retirement pension", "the right to health" are reffered... 0(!) times. There no "right to accomodation", but only the "right to be accomodated";
- It reffers that "public services must be privatized and oppened to competition" and it says that "public help funds" must be restricted;
- The European Parliment has no right to propose laws, that's a function of the European Commission which is not directly elected in the european elections;
- The priority of the EU is to fight - not unemployment, not poverty, but... - inflation;
- European Central Bank is... completely independent, it has no control, which means that the UE is not allowed to define its own monetary policies;
- In case of war, the priority is - not the UE intervention to stop it, not an appeal to United Nations, but instead... - to avoid turmoils in the financial markets;
I admit, I was not aware of much of this. I have never read the treaty, I voted no to it but for fairly broad and fundamental eurosceptic reasons (I never wanted the EU project to be anything more than a free trade zone, with perhaps some co-operation on defense and security matters tacked on, given that we live in a post 9-11 world. I don't think it should even have a constitution) rather than based on any in-depth political analysis of the details of the treaty. That said, I may have to re-assess my analysis of the EU project.