Of course. My mistake. But yeah. Pro Europe until he works in Europe.
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That is the other side of MEP experience. The others observe the gravy train. Hard to blame them, the money that can be made by an unscrupulous MEP is astonishing.
I think it’s more he saw the ineffectiveness of the EU. It’s a mess. All off it.
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Ah, but the EU is very effective at commission, ECB and ECJ level, they just don’t want the proles actually steering the ship.
This article is such bullshit. Two weeks? Institutional racism? Of course, it will be spun into another “oh the horror” story about the EU. I have to take two trains to come to Strasbourg. Oh the horror.
have pitched my tent in Brussels in the neighborhood of Kuregem, a neighborhood between Anderlecht and Molenbeek, on the outskirts of the city center.
Online, the reviews were strange: People said “it’s not safe,” there are “scary people everywhere,” and so on. But when I arrived, I realized those reviews only meant that there are people of diverse backgrounds living there.
Molenbeek has the dubious honour of being a community with the highest number of ISIS terrorists per capita and is a national security problem for Belgium .
And yes, Molenbeek is scary.
At least the EU didn’t force you to fire an ambassador.
That it does.
We aren’t Italian, we don’t fire officials because the EU technocrats said so.
I could not agree more.
And here in lies my MAIN issue with the EU. A progressive MEP has arrived in what he thought to be a progressive Nirvana and found it to be nothing of the sort. And he is now exposing the prejudice of the EU system in an attempt to make it better.
If this was any other government the world over - leftist parties the world over would be in total agreement with Magid. They would be rallying behind him in an attempt to fight the injustices he faces.
However he’s the chump here. He’s a bad man for lying about the nice EU.
I’m sorry if I’m being a dick but honestly; what does it take for Europhile to see the faults that keep coming up in the management of the EU? I genuinely do not get it.
When a committed Europhile MEP says:
“I felt duped: Making a tangible impact on constituents’ lives is apparently not what being an MEP is all about”
And
“MEPs live in a bubble — one where we celebrate politicians who bailed out bankers, blamed migrants and imposed crippling levels of austerity”
And
“But instead of reaching out, people here are burying their heads in the sand.”
But no, comment on his living arrangements and his commute. Sorry dude. You need to reply to the important bits.
BTW the EU has ruined entire countries let alone careers. And it was not the USA or Trump that forced him out it was Boris the Berk and his refusal (as most likely to become PM) to back him in his job.
Because Boris is a. I’m not sure I should use that word on T-Nation.
I guess I missed the part where you’re voting for your new PM
Which countries? Serious question.
Common misconception - the UK never votes for the PM. We vote for a party who’s leader becomes the PM.
Greece.
Fucked by the EU austerity.
Most of the Eastern States.
Fucked as uncontrolled migration of the working ages has lead to a population thats far to old. Parts of Poland have lost 80% of their 20-50 year population in the last 10 years.
The Southern States tied the Euro.
Do I need to explain?
Europe is a mess. Only France Germany and the UK are okay. The rest is on struggle street.
The Greeks have fucked themselves over. As the late baroness Thatcher put it, the problem with socialism is when you run out of othe people’s money. And that’s what happened to Greece - massive subsidies to the bloated public sector, overreliance on tourism, the list goes on and on, including the billions spent on the Olympic Games in Athens.
This below is the graph of Greece’s GDP through the last five decades. See how that EU destroyed Greece since 1981 when they became members?
Which ones? Poland’s massive GDP growth competely coincides with EU membership. The same for the Baltic states.
That’s one of the basic four freedoms of the EU - free movement of goods, people and capital inside the EU, which in turns drives labor wages up, and as was the case with Spain, labor migration inside the EU is reversible.
Yes, it seems that you need to.
Fuckin’ Romania is “struggling” with 4-7% of annual GDP growth. Again, EU membership was when the growth kicked off.
Perhaps GNP growth, but accompanied by unsustainable debt.
That interest sword cuts both ways - no?
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You can’t get those growth numbers exclusively by Keynesian public spending (and increased debt) - unimpeded access to a market of 500+ million consumers in crucial. Here’s Romania debt for example, see that the GDP growth chart from the post above and this external debt charts are not correlated.
Romanian exports per year, which bring the hard currency. It’s obvious they drove the GDP growth. Again, all that due to EU membership.
I mean, it’s just one country I’ve chosen at random, but it wildly differs from cherry picked sensationalist articles with an agenda or anecdotal evidence based on “the feels”
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Point of order, the EU knew of Greek debt, and ignored it. It seems rather inequitable to award them any good favour for the fact that they chose to make an insolvent country a member, then complain about it once their banks are exposed to danger.
This is correct. There’d be no issue whatsoever in Tory leader selection were they in opposition. Gordon Brown became PM in the same manner.
The Uk also tends to decisively toss governments out when they get sick of them. Coalitions are rare.
Edit: I’m also deeply uncomfortable with an ECJ that can decide it has powers that weren’t envisioned in the treaty, or a commission that authorizes bail outs in direct contravention of its own founding treaty.
Now, we can both probably agree that the bailouts were pragmatic, but it was a flouting of the rule of law to do so.
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No question vis a vis the above. UK trade, however, has not changed much as a percentage during the entire time it has been a member, it has been declining for years.
https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/EU_and_other_exports_over_time_v1.png
Commonwealth trade has taken a hammering since joining, but its undeniable that it was declining anyway.
A little aside, @Legalsteel, @loppar and @carlbm…
What made Margret Thatcher so “unique”?
Or was it much like Reagan…“Being at the Right Place at the Right time”?
Depending on whom you ask, she was far from unique.
Letting Greece into the EC back in 1981 was a purely political decision - protecting NATOs southern flank. They’ve just gotten out of dictatorship a few years earlier and there were fears in Western capitals that due to the Greek tradition of radical communism a Soviet Trojan horse will appear in the south.
Of course, the Greeks abused the lower interest rates stemming from their EC/EU membership and borrowed like crazy, even trying to create a small economic colonial empire in Southern Europe.
No one would have cared much about this particular bankrupcy (one of many in the 180 years of Greek independence) had they still used the drachma.
Unfortunately, you cannot have a common currency without a common fiscal policy and the latter is not possible nor advisable.
I completely agree. However, I think our vantage points, not to mention the bar for success of that political project, differ.
I’m looking at that ossified, bureaucratic structure that is the EU as a Pax Romana of sorts, that has brought immeasurable benefits to millions of Europeans. Are the Germans benefiting massively from an influx of cheap, educated labor from Eastern and Central Europe? Of course.
I don’t mind that the UK is leaving - after all, you guys voted for that, I just don’t like all that talk about “EU tyranny” and how horrible you had it - it makes Leavers sound like a spoiled teenager leaving their parents house because “it’s the worst place in the world”
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Back in the day when UK Tories focused on the economy instead of saying “fuck businesses”
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With the ready and willing support of German banks who wanted a new credit market. It does take two to tango. Your NATO assessment is interesting, and most likely correct.
Indeed not, but they did use said bailout to save French and German banks from the exigencies of their largesse. It also is, I believe, the first debt collapse without corresponding debt forgiveness, something admitted by the IMF at the time.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I dislike the extreme language on both sides, quite frankly. The leavers and remainers doth protest too much, as do the commission members.
I dislike the EU because it runs a truck through the common law and Magna Carta, and would leave it on that basis alone. I am, however, sad that EFTA membership was off handedly discarded as an option.
Alas, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you did.
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