F1 Insanity
24-03-2007, 03:12
There are some very pervasive myths about the EU. The most common one of these is that according to many, the EU was founded to keep the peace in Europe. The real reason was quite different.
Many of these myths are succesfully challenged by Christopher Booker and Richard North in "The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?".
Jean Monnet (the socalled founding father of the EU) and his fellow travellers dreamed of a European federation ruled by a self-appointed elite of politicians. This was the goal in itself. And it still is, to some extent.
The EU's founder Jean Monnet described the EU's method: "Europe's nations should be guided towards a super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation." The single currency was the most important of these steps: as Monnet said, "Via money Europe could become political in five years."
Gutting the national parliaments and governments was a specific and deliberate part of this.
Another popular EU-myth is that its flagship policy, the CAP (common agricultural policy), was drawn up to adress food shortages. The real reason was, it was a cynical attempt by France at not having to reform but instead get everyone else to help pay farm subsidies to French farmers. By a significant margin, France is the #1 profiteer of the CAP.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/03/getting-it-wrong.html
Far from there being any shortage of food at the time the Common Market came into being, the countries of western Europe, and particularly France, were awash with surpluses. They had overcome the immediate post-war difficulties and benefited from the explosion in agricultural productivity that took place in the late forties and early fifties.
In France, this productivity had been fuelled by massive state subsidies which, in insulating farmers from the realities of the market, meant that by 1961 – just before the CAP was to start coming into force – the farming population still accounted for 25 percent of all her employment, against only four percent in the United Kingdom.
As the surpluses grew, they had led to persistent downward pressures on prices, which in turn threatened the economic viability of the mass of French farms, many of them small, inefficient peasant holdings. And herein lies the true genesis of the CAP.
For France's politicians, this presented a nightmare: the thought of millions of small farmers being displaced from the land and gravitating to towns and cities which could offer them neither jobs nor housing.
...
To that effect, the then Fourth Republic had no option but to spend ever-increasing sums on farm subsidies, to the point where this expenditure threatened to bankrupt the state.
Yet the subsidies themselves only exacerbated the problem. They drew into production marginal land, while increased income encouraged investment in machinery. In 1950, the number of tractors in the Six as a whole had stood at only 370,000. By 1962 the number had grown to 2,300,000. Wheat production in the mid-1950s increased eight-fold. Sugar and wine production rose by over 300 percent. This necessitated ever-larger government-funded stockpiles and export subsidies.
By the early 1960s production was still increasing at a rate of 20 percent per annum. Eleven million of the 24 million dairy cows in the Six were French, each producing less than a quarter of the milk yield of Dutch animals. Dairy subsidies alone were costing the French taxpayer 1.35 billion francs (equivalent to £3 billion a year at 2003 prices), of which 70 million were used to dump powdered milk on the Indian and Mexican markets. Huge further sums were spent on storage and processing, while the surplus "butter mountain" stood at 200,000 tons. French farm policy was clearly unsustainable. Politically, however, it was essential.
So it was that, when de Gaulle took power in 1958, France's farm surpluses had already reached crisis point. Attempts to reform the subsidy system had met with stiff opposition, which presented a dangerous threat to his electoral base. De Gaulle was being forced to continue payments on a scale the French government could simply no longer afford.
At a crisis Cabinet meeting in August 1962, with the Algerian crisis now largely over, he was to call the "stabilisation" of agriculture the "most important problem" facing France. If the problems are not resolved, de Gaulle declared, "we will have another Algeria on our own soil".
De Gaulle and his advisers realised there were only two possible remedies: to find new export markets, or an additional source of finance for the subsidies. The answer to both might lie in the EEC.
What had become vital, they concluded, was to use it to set up an agricultural policy which could give French farmers access both to external markets and also to additional funding, primarily from Germany.
But it was vital that such a policy should be framed above all to meet the needs of France. Thus, despite his overt dislike of supranational institutions, de Gaulle came to regard the EEC as the most essential instrument in furthering France's national interest, the main aim being to put in place the Common Agricultural Policy.
As we can see, the CAP became not an instrument to promote the production of food or solve food shortages. It was first and foremost a mechanism to finance the surpluses and to manage the retreat from the land, brought about by the huge gains in agricultural productivity. More fundamentally, it ended up as being a means by which first German and then UK taxpayers paid for the transformation of French agriculture.
The CAP therefore, is a cynical and succesful attempt by France to get others to help pay its generous farm subsidies to its farmers.`
Germany ended up paying the lions share of them.
Many of these myths are succesfully challenged by Christopher Booker and Richard North in "The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive?".
Jean Monnet (the socalled founding father of the EU) and his fellow travellers dreamed of a European federation ruled by a self-appointed elite of politicians. This was the goal in itself. And it still is, to some extent.
The EU's founder Jean Monnet described the EU's method: "Europe's nations should be guided towards a super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation." The single currency was the most important of these steps: as Monnet said, "Via money Europe could become political in five years."
Gutting the national parliaments and governments was a specific and deliberate part of this.
Another popular EU-myth is that its flagship policy, the CAP (common agricultural policy), was drawn up to adress food shortages. The real reason was, it was a cynical attempt by France at not having to reform but instead get everyone else to help pay farm subsidies to French farmers. By a significant margin, France is the #1 profiteer of the CAP.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/03/getting-it-wrong.html
Far from there being any shortage of food at the time the Common Market came into being, the countries of western Europe, and particularly France, were awash with surpluses. They had overcome the immediate post-war difficulties and benefited from the explosion in agricultural productivity that took place in the late forties and early fifties.
In France, this productivity had been fuelled by massive state subsidies which, in insulating farmers from the realities of the market, meant that by 1961 – just before the CAP was to start coming into force – the farming population still accounted for 25 percent of all her employment, against only four percent in the United Kingdom.
As the surpluses grew, they had led to persistent downward pressures on prices, which in turn threatened the economic viability of the mass of French farms, many of them small, inefficient peasant holdings. And herein lies the true genesis of the CAP.
For France's politicians, this presented a nightmare: the thought of millions of small farmers being displaced from the land and gravitating to towns and cities which could offer them neither jobs nor housing.
...
To that effect, the then Fourth Republic had no option but to spend ever-increasing sums on farm subsidies, to the point where this expenditure threatened to bankrupt the state.
Yet the subsidies themselves only exacerbated the problem. They drew into production marginal land, while increased income encouraged investment in machinery. In 1950, the number of tractors in the Six as a whole had stood at only 370,000. By 1962 the number had grown to 2,300,000. Wheat production in the mid-1950s increased eight-fold. Sugar and wine production rose by over 300 percent. This necessitated ever-larger government-funded stockpiles and export subsidies.
By the early 1960s production was still increasing at a rate of 20 percent per annum. Eleven million of the 24 million dairy cows in the Six were French, each producing less than a quarter of the milk yield of Dutch animals. Dairy subsidies alone were costing the French taxpayer 1.35 billion francs (equivalent to £3 billion a year at 2003 prices), of which 70 million were used to dump powdered milk on the Indian and Mexican markets. Huge further sums were spent on storage and processing, while the surplus "butter mountain" stood at 200,000 tons. French farm policy was clearly unsustainable. Politically, however, it was essential.
So it was that, when de Gaulle took power in 1958, France's farm surpluses had already reached crisis point. Attempts to reform the subsidy system had met with stiff opposition, which presented a dangerous threat to his electoral base. De Gaulle was being forced to continue payments on a scale the French government could simply no longer afford.
At a crisis Cabinet meeting in August 1962, with the Algerian crisis now largely over, he was to call the "stabilisation" of agriculture the "most important problem" facing France. If the problems are not resolved, de Gaulle declared, "we will have another Algeria on our own soil".
De Gaulle and his advisers realised there were only two possible remedies: to find new export markets, or an additional source of finance for the subsidies. The answer to both might lie in the EEC.
What had become vital, they concluded, was to use it to set up an agricultural policy which could give French farmers access both to external markets and also to additional funding, primarily from Germany.
But it was vital that such a policy should be framed above all to meet the needs of France. Thus, despite his overt dislike of supranational institutions, de Gaulle came to regard the EEC as the most essential instrument in furthering France's national interest, the main aim being to put in place the Common Agricultural Policy.
As we can see, the CAP became not an instrument to promote the production of food or solve food shortages. It was first and foremost a mechanism to finance the surpluses and to manage the retreat from the land, brought about by the huge gains in agricultural productivity. More fundamentally, it ended up as being a means by which first German and then UK taxpayers paid for the transformation of French agriculture.
The CAP therefore, is a cynical and succesful attempt by France to get others to help pay its generous farm subsidies to its farmers.`
Germany ended up paying the lions share of them.