The Daily Bell
Anthony Wile
Anthony Wile
The Telegraph has carried an article entitled "The Great Euro Swindle" by Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver who have written a book on the subject (Guilty Men) from which the article is excerpted. They ask a good question, which is why those who have backed the unraveling euro – especially Europe's and Britain's leaders – are not exposed to more criticism and professional and personal ramifications from what has occurred.
One might think, given the extent of the disaster and the chaos it is causing, that there would more of an outcry to examine who was really behind the thing. In fact, as the euro and perhaps the EU continue to crumble, there will be attempts made to hold people accountable. But I will state for the record that these attempts will not be complete. Somebody, or perhaps several, will "take the fall" for everyone else. Oborne and Weaver, despite their evident sincerity, are seemingly feeding into this meme.
Unfortunately, from what I can tell, as furious as they apparently are, they are not willing to extend the blame to those who truly need to be held accountable. Instead, they are focused on what might be termed the "enablers" – those who carried out EU and euro policies and backed them but were not responsible for the concept itself, or its realization.
This is an old game. The Anglosphere power elite – a group of impossibly wealthy families that controls the world's central banks – is evidently and obviously responsible for much of what has gone wrong. But as the Euro project continues its decline, we will no doubt find blame is being laid elsewhere ... on highly placed functionaries. Of course, it's important, nonetheless, and a contribution to how things work. So let's review them before returning to our main thesis.
The first example is the Financial Times. Oborne and Weaver state that something went wrong with this prestigious mainstream newspaper about 25 years ago when it was captured by a "clique of left-wing journalists." As a result, the FT "has been wrong on every single major economic judgment over the past quarter century."
The biggest error was the support of the EU project itself, support that Oborne and Weaver call "religious." They cite the paper's Lex column, circa January 2001, as an example of how wrongheaded the paper could be. "With Greece now trading in euros, few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability."
The paper also attacked euro-skeptics directly, claiming that those who differed with the paper were "immature." When the euro and the EU began to become undone in 2008, and countries like Ireland were suddenly exposed as failing, the FT continued its defense of the union. "European monetary union is a bumble bee that has taken flight," asserted the newspaper's leader column. "However improbable the celestial design, it has succeeded in real life."
What's the verdict, according to Oborne and Weaver? "For a paper with pretensions to authority in financial matters, its coverage of the single currency can be regarded as nothing short of a disaster."
Then there's the high-profile lobbying group, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the mission of which is to help create and sustain the conditions in which businesses in the United Kingdom can compete and prosper for the benefit of all.
The CBI claims to represent a broad cross-section of businesses. But according to the article, "by the mid-1990s a small clique of large corporations were firmly in control, and they had the director general they wanted in Adair (now Lord) Turner, later to become chairman of the disastrous Financial Services Authority (FSA). [This clique] claimed an overwhelming majority of British businessmen backed the single currency – a vital propaganda tool for pro-euro campaigners."
The CBI lobbied hard for Britain to join the single currency, even though it soon became obvious that most of its smaller, entrepreneurial business members were opposed to the CBI's position on the euro. Apparently, not representing the majority of its members on the EU issue did not deter the CBI leadership.
The BBC, England's "progressive" monopoly media, is perhaps the largest culprit in Oborne and Weaver's view. "The BBC betrayed its charter commitment and became a partisan player in a great national debate – all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality. For example, in the nine weeks leading to July 21, 2000, when the argument over the euro was at its height, the Today programme featured 121 speakers on the topic. Some 87 were pro-euro compared with 34 who were anti. BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme." Here's some more:
As Rod Liddle, then editor of the Radio 4's Today programme, said: "The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes." He recalls one meeting with a senior BBC figure over Eurosceptic complaints of bias. "Rod, the thing you have to understand is these people are mad. They are mad."
In truth the Eurosceptics were only too sane. Margaret Thatcher, John Redwood, David Owen, William Hague and Bill Cash were mocked. But they grasped the problems the euro would bring. Speaking in the House of Commons in 1936, Winston Churchill said: "The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present."
So what should we learn from the argument over the euro? First, we should cherish that British trait, eccentricity. Study of the public discourse at the height of the euro debate shows how often pro-euro propagandists isolated their critics by labelling them cranks. Take Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley's column on January 31, 1999: "On the pro-euro side, a grand coalition of business, the unions and the substantial, sane, front rank political figures. On the other side, a menagerie of has-beens, never-havebeens and loony tunes."
Of course, given what's going on with the euro and the EU these days, the loony-tunes all seem to be located in Brussels, fighting a never-ending battle to save the euro from a default that is seemingly inevitable. In fact, the air of unreality is such that top euro-leaders are apparently moving ahead with a facility to allow Brussels to issue EU-wide euro bonds even though a German constitutional court in a recent ruling has made such issuance doubtful indeed.
All this is interesting but, nonetheless, the people at the very top of this flawed project are again escaping identification. The politicians, media and business leaders that want the EU to succeed are an important part of the mess, but they were not the founders.
Who were? Some have suggested the EU is an outgrowth of some sort of German/Nazi plan, but that doesn't seem very feasible. The Anglosphere elite was very evidently in charge of a post-war world, and the EU would not have come to fruition if the Anglo-American powers-that-be didn't want it to occur.
No, the EU is evidently and obviously a project of the Anglosphere power elite that seeks regional building blocks on the way to a one world government. The central banking economy initiated and implemented by this power elite is responsible for the current economic crisis; but the elite banking families have many enablers including the politicians clustered about Brussels.
If there is to be a movement aimed at holding people responsible for the euro disaster, I would hope for once that it would at least explain more fully how the pyramid of leadership actually works. The people at the very top are responsible for the ongoing economic crisis, just as in the 1930s the central banks they set up crashed the world's economy. At the time, the blame was shifted away from central banks and their controllers and toward the securities industry (Wall Street, etc.).
Now, the same meme shall be played out when it comes to the euro and the EU. Somebody will be made to pay, but it won't be the real elites, the impossibly wealthy central banking families. They never seem to get blamed.
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Excellent.
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