[Steve_American]

noemon, you keep attacking me because America has elected neo-liberal Gov. since Eisenhower or Kennedy.
As if that is my fault, or as if that changes the situation in Europe one iota.
We, my responce is that as far as I'm concerned American vote overwhelmingly for one just a few years ago. he Pres. had himself, control of the House and a veto proof Senate. Too bad he lied in the campaign and turned out to be a sell-out Dem. America even voted for him despite many not voting for him because he is/was half Black.

Nevertheless America did vote for a Progressive who campaigned on a Progressive platform. Hope & change. It sucks that he was a liar.

I see you have replied.
You wrote, "Personally I think the SGP rules combined with the general EU laxity on the matter is a good compromise and a good rule that can prevent over-spending and massive debt accumulation."
Well, being in the EZ is the only thing that makes debt accumulation in your own currency a bad thing. The US national debt is just the accumulated savings of America's private Sector.

[BTW --- I hope you have seen the threads where I point out that the US debt can never be paid off. It is impossible. Taking $20T out of the US economy more in taxes than the Gov. spends over any number of years would destroy the US economy. It would be austerity on steroids. It would cause never ending Great Depression. And so, it is a good thing that the US never needs to pay off its natl' debt.
. . . The EZ is totally different. Unless the ECB finds a way to give euros away for free to the people of Europe instead of its bankers, the EZ will have the current endless Recession.]

The problem nations like Greece have is they import more than they export plus tourist income. So, they need foreign money but have no way to get it.*
Italy is the 3rd biggest economy in the EZ and should not have a problem with national debt. But, it is in the EZ and so doesn't have its own currency.
Economies do best when the money supply keeps growing without the growth coming from bank loans that create new currency. This has mostly been done by Gov. deficit spending. The euro complicates things hugely.

.* . Note: I posted 2 stories about this. 1] Greece was stopped from using a new plan or system to catch tax avoiders and collect the back taxes, stopped by the IMF & ECB; why did they do this? 2] Fr. & Ger. banks bought old Greek bonds because they assumed that they paid 25% interest but no longer had the same risk. In the story it wasn't clear but since those bonds were from before Greece joined the EZ they could not have been in euros but in the old Greek currency. They were mostly owned by Greek citizens. So buying them pushed euros into Greece. The Greek people used them to buy German stuff. Then Greece needed those euros to pay off the bonds, but because of tax cheating the Greek Gov. didn't have them.
. . . Why did the ECB find a way to loan Greece 68B euros? Because without those euros being lent several of the biggest Fr. & Ger. banks would have been bankrupt.
. . . Why was there a huge problem? Because the GFC/2008 had happened. A crash or crisis that was supposed to be IMPOSSIBLE given neo-liberal theory. Since it was impossible no nation can be faulted for not seeing it coming.
. . . So, if the problem was that Fr. & Ger. banks NEEDED for the loan to be made and the crisis was caused by American banks and that tax cheating that the ECB facilitated after the fact had a hand; why should the retired Greek citizens have their pension cut? Why not fine the banks? It was their own damn fault. The retired people were not at all at fault. The bankers were made whole and the retired people dumped on when there were alternatives. Utter BULLSHIT.

But, I'm trying to disengage from you. And failing.

[Rugoz]

your source wrote

Whether the guardian or anyone else agrees with that particular ruling is beside the point.

Since you are not part of the EU, I highly doubt you know anything at all about the scapegoating of the EU by national politicians purely for populist reasons.

LoL what? I read German newspapers on a daily basis. Occasionally British and French.

Funnily enough, I find Swiss newspapers to be more informative about EU matters, mainly because we're in constant negotiations with the EU and the results thereof are always subject to controversial referendums. A lot of that stuff slips under the radar in Germany.

[noemon]

noemon, you keep attacking me because America has elected neo-liberal Gov. since Eisenhower or Kennedy.
As if that is my fault, or as if that changes the situation in Europe one iota.

Stating that the US is extremely neoliberal is to show you that you do not need the SGP rules to have neoliberal governments. It goes to show that the SGP rules are irrelevant to neoliberal parties and politicians getting elected. It is not a personal attack against you, however it is a bit hypocritical to be using neoliberalism to attack the EU while at the same time ignoring the US neoliberalism which is a lot more extreme than the EU's.

Well, being in the EZ is the only thing that makes debt accumulation in your own currency a bad thing. The US national debt is just the accumulated savings of America's private Sector.

You need to elaborate here because I do not understand what you want to say.

[BTW --- I hope you have seen the threads where I point out that the US debt can never be paid off. It is impossible. Taking $20T out of the US economy more in taxes than the Gov. spends over any number of years would destroy the US economy. It would be austerity on steroids. It would cause never ending Great Depression. And so, it is a good thing that the US never needs to pay off its natl' debt.

I have not seen these threads but to a banker it is irrelevant if you pay off the entire debt because as long as you keep paying your monthly/yearly instalments and interest rates and you have the ability to always do, the bankers are always happy.

. . . The EZ is totally different.
Italy is the 3rd biggest economy in the EZ and should not have a problem with national debt. But, it is in the EZ and so doesn't have its own currency.

The problem with Italy is that the bankers who hold Italian bonds were/are worried that they might not receive their yearly or 5 yearly payments with interest and that is why the markets and not the EZ have raised the spreads on Italian and Greek bonds. Italy and Greece faced these problems in the past even before they joined the EZ and EU. I also need to remind you that the Rating Agencies who downgraded the Greek and Italian economies and raised the spreads are all American and not European.

Economies do best when the money supply keeps growing without the growth coming from bank loans that create new currency. This has mostly been done by Gov. deficit spending. The euro complicates things hugely.

Where do you get money to spend for deficit if you do not borrow these money?

.* . Note: I posted 2 stories about this. 1] Greece was stopped from using a new plan or system to catch tax avoiders and collect the back taxes, stopped by the IMF & ECB; why did they do this?

First of all, I am not aware of what exactly you are talking about and it seems quite fishy. The IMF and the ECB have been collaborating with the Greek government to collect as many taxes as they can from the Greek people. Second, I do not know why you, supposedly a progressive consider squeezing poor Greek people that have been paying huge amounts of tax as a % of GDP, one of the highest in the world actually even before the crisis(OECD PDF) as a good thing. You are arguing for austerity here.

2] Fr. & Ger. banks bought old Greek bonds because they assumed that they paid 25% interest but no longer had the same risk. In the story it wasn't clear but since those bonds were from before Greece joined the EZ they could not have been in euros but in the old Greek currency. They were mostly owned by Greek citizens. So buying them pushed euros into Greece. The Greek people used them to buy German stuff. Then Greece needed those euros to pay off the bonds, but because of tax cheating the Greek Gov. didn't have them.

The lie of Greek tax cheating was the excuse neoliberals used to squeeze huge amounts of money out of Greek people and impose austerity to squeeze even more. Are you a closet neoliberal? This whole paragraph makes no sense at all.

why should the retired Greek citizens have their pension cut? Why not fine the banks? It was their own damn fault. The retired people were not at all at fault. The bankers were made whole and the retired people dumped on when there were alternatives. Utter BULLSHIT.

I absolutely agree with you.

But, I'm trying to disengage from you. And failing.

Look mate, you posted a video here with Varoufakis, I liked your video and then you called me here and told me off for not replying to your video. I then replied to your video and post and you told me off again that "you do not like me", I ignored your post and you made a second one, then I replied to that and you told me off for replying. It seems to me that regardless what I do, I am damned if I do and damned if I don't.

Whether the guardian or anyone else agrees with that particular ruling is beside the point.

Illegally and preferentially subsiding specific companies against other companies is bad and it is within the ECJ's mandate to arbitrate these matters. It was British companies that brought this case to the ECJ and they won. Nothing bad or weird about such a thing.

LoL what?

It is quite evident and obvious that you are totally unaware of the anti-EU populism within EU countries and I am not blaming you because you are not a member of the EU so your Swiss politicians I would assume do not use the EU as a punching bag, like everyone else does.

[Steve_American]

Steve_American wrote:
noemon, you keep attacking me because America has elected neo-liberal Gov. since Eisenhower or Kennedy.
As if that is my fault, or as if that changes the situation in Europe one iota.

noemon replied:
Stating that the US is extremely neoliberal is to show you that you do not need the SGP rules to have neoliberal governments. It goes to show that the SGP rules are irrelevant to neoliberal parties and politicians getting elected. It is not a personal attack against you, however it is a bit hypocritical to be using neoliberalism to attack the EU while at the same time ignoring the US neoliberalism which is a lot more extreme than the EU's.

noemon then quoted Steve again:
Well, being in the EZ is the only thing that makes debt accumulation in your own currency a bad thing. The US national debt is just the accumulated savings of America's private Sector.

noemon then replied:
You need to elaborate here because I do not understand what you want to say.

noemon then quoted Steve again:
[BTW --- I hope you have seen the threads where I point out that the US debt can never be paid off. It is impossible. Taking $20T out of the US economy more in taxes than the Gov. spends over any number of years would destroy the US economy. It would be austerity on steroids. It would cause never ending Great Depression. And so, it is a good thing that the US never needs to pay off its natl' debt.

I have posted several threads in Economics especially about MMT. If you don't understand MMT the you are not alone but you should really look into MMT.
. . . I'll try to explain what I meant. --- When a nation has its own fiat currency [MMT claims] the situation is quite different from nations on the gold standard. With a fiat currency the nation MUST spend the currency into the economy before the people can use it or pay their taxes with it. Gov. spending must come first.
. . . When this nation deficit spends it is leaving some of the money it spends in the hands of the Private Sector. [Note: the Sector theory divides the total economy of every nation into 3 sectors; the Gov. Sector (incl. local & state govs.), the Private Sector (incl. all people living in the nation and all its corps too), and the Foreign Sector (incl. all foreign people, corps., and Govs.)] The money that is left in the hands of the Private Sector is that Sectors savings.
. . . As you said bankers don't much care if a debt is paid off in general if you keep making all the payments, even if you just borrow from someone to make your payments. When a nation has a fiat currency it doesn't really need to borrow with bond sales to pay other bonds as they come due. The nation can just create currency to make the payments. Yes, this may cause inflation, but MMT claims this is the only bad effect. MMT suggests that when there is inflation then taxes should be raised on that part of the Private Sector that has the excess cash and is spending it and so driving up prices. [BTW --- MMT specifically rejects all attempts to define the word 'inflation' as being equal to a rise in the money supply.
. . . OTOH, when any nation has a surplus it means that nation is collecting more in taxes than it is spending. What this must do it reduce the cash in the hands of the private Sector. Because spending equals someone's income. A Gov. surplus means that because if spending is reduced and taxes are unchanged, then someone's income is cut but his/her taxes are not reduced; therefore he/she must draw down their savings to pay the taxes. Therefore, a surplus reduces the savings that are left in the Private Sector.
. . . I said taking $20T to pay off the natl' debt out of the US economy [no matter how slowly it was done] would cause a recession. If the Gov. maintained its surplus budget situation then the recession would become a Depression, and it would get deeper and deeper over time. The only way out of a Depression is to deficit spend, either by borrowing or by so called printing money and spending it into the economy. [In the pre-WWI past hard economic times have caused wars. If the nation won then it could end the Depression by stealing from the looser. Wars don't make a profit any more (weapons & ammo are destroyed and cost too much) and wars are illegal as well as risking nuclear escalation.]

In the case of Italy the ECB should buy its bonds to keep its interest rate low to very low. The euro allows bond buyers too much power to punish Govs. for the EU.
noemon wrote the the ECB has promised to d "whatever it takes", but this promise can be ignored. And it will be if the EU wants to punish Italy for having progressive program that calls for raising the debt in order to give its people more money to spend(as if it had a fiat currency). The current situation is that the EU rules forbid direct buying of national bonds by the ECB. They also should forbid the ECB from buying them from bond holders on the secondary bond market, but here is where they bent the rules to allow this. But, the ECB can make up excuses to explain why it isn't going to buy Italian bonds to keep Italy's interest rates low.
. . . I can't follow the news as well as I should being in SE Asia and too old to be internet savvy. However, it seems like Italy tried to deficit spend and it was slapped down. It caved. You say it wasn't punished because no fine was imposed. I say it was threatened and told the ECB would not buy its bonds (it being against the rules to do so); so it caved because the threats were serious enough and believable enough. So I claim that you are wrong when you say "no nation has ever been stopped from going forward with its progressive program."

[redcarpet]

I think Steve_American point is about like the EU Constitution with an official commitment to capitalism and competition. Obliging the breakup & privatisation of state services, monopolies, etc.

[Steve_American]

I think Steve_American point is about like the EU Constitution with an official commitment to capitalism and competition. Obliging the breakup & privatisation of state services, monopolies, etc.

While what you say is also a problem, it is not what I'm talking about in any of my replies.
Sorry for the one line post. But, I hope it is clear enough. It helps that all pronouns used have clear antecedents.

[Rugoz]

Illegally and preferentially subsiding specific companies against other companies is bad and it is within the ECJ's mandate to arbitrate these matters. It was British companies that brought this case to the ECJ and they won. Nothing bad or weird about such a thing.

Again, completely beside the point. The question was whether the EU enforces economic liberalism throughout the EU.

It is quite evident and obvious that you are totally unaware of the anti-EU populism within EU countries and I am not blaming you because you are not a member of the EU so your Swiss politicians I would assume do not use the EU as a punching bag, like everyone else does.

It's not evident or obvious at all, I have not said anything that would suggest so. Anti-EU populism is partly justified, partly a way for national governments to deny responsibility (even though they are responsible). In the latter case the EU is still part of the problem, because it's designed in a way that makes it easy for national governments to do so.

[Beren]

it's designed in a way that makes it easy for national governments to do so.

Which may be because it's designed by national governments themselves.

[noemon]

Again, completely beside the point. The question was whether the EU enforces economic liberalism throughout the EU.

a) No it wasn't, the question was about neoliberalism not liberalism.

That is absolutely false. Nothing about the EU treaties is neoliberal. Liberal indeed, neoliberal no. What is neoliberal in the EU treaties and how does it prevent the election of progressive parties?

b) The EU does not enforce anything unless citizens, or governments or private companies request from the ECJ to arbitrate a matter, just like in the examples you brought here.

It's not evident or obvious at all, I have not said anything that would suggest so. Anti-EU populism is partly justified, partly a way for national governments to deny responsibility (even though they are responsible). In the latter case the EU is still part of the problem, because it's designed in a way that makes it easy for national governments to do so.

Next time Trump blames something or someone for populist sake, remember the moment when you said that governments are partly justified to scapegoat others for their own decisions.

[Steve_American]

@noemon,
you asked me to explain what I meant when I said that the US nat'l debt is just the savings of the Private Sector.

Today I found this Youtube video from 6 mo. ago. In it Dr. Stephanie Kelton [an MMTer] explains it for you.
It is 50 min. long, but the 1st 2 are an introduction of Dr. Kelton and last 10 are a Q&A. She explains the savings thing in the 1st 20 min. though.

She does a really good job here of creating a 33 min. talk that explains MMT's way of looking at Gov. spending.
However, noemon, you in the EZ can't do this. You-all are users of the euro. Greece or France are not at all like the US, Japan, or Aust., etc.

The text printed under the video itself is ---

But How Will We Pay for It? Making Public Money Work for Us - Oct. 15, 2018

"Our nation’s finances are a blistering topic. Democrats blame Republicans for "blowing up the deficit" with tax cuts, while Republicans insist that programs such as Social Security and Medicare are the real drivers of our fiscal mess. As politicians fight over who’s at fault, an important debate is getting lost in the fog.

Professor Kelton casts a different light on these fiscal feuds and the budget deficit, arguing that both sides are missing the bigger picture when it comes to paying for our future.

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. Before joining Stony Brook, she chaired the Economics Department at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, where she taught for seventeen years. She served as chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee (Democratic staff) in 2015 and as a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. She is a former editor-in-chief of the top-ranked blog New Economic Perspectives and member of the TopWonks network of the nation’s best thinkers."

BTW --- she talks about asking lawmakers in DC if they would want to eliminate the nat'l debt magically, and they all said yes.
Then when she asks if they would magically eliminate all the US Treasury Bonds, they all go "whoa, I don;t understand what the question is."
I would say --- OK would you want to force all bond holders to take the cash instead right now? Again, many would worry about inflation in this case. But, it would be better than destroying all those bonds which sounds exactly like defaulting on the debt. Which WOULD BE A DISASTERIUS THING TO DO.

[Rugoz]

a) No it wasn't, the question was about neoliberalism not liberalism.

I avoid the word 'neoliberal' for a reason. It's a label people put on liberal policies whenever they disagree with them.

b) The EU does not enforce anything unless citizens, or governments or private companies request from the ECJ to arbitrate a matter, just like in the examples you brought here.

It rules at request, like every other court ever. But it's not a court of arbitration.

Next time Trump blames something or someone for populist sake, remember the moment when you said that governments are partly justified to scapegoat others for their own decisions.

Straw man. Anti-EU populism that is justified is not scapegoating, obviously.

[noemon]

I avoid the word 'neoliberal' for a reason. It's a label people put on liberal policies whenever they disagree with them.

That is wrong and regardless of that your argument is a straw-man because not only am I not disputing of that being liberal but I stated it before you did so your point is entirely moot.

Straw man. Anti-EU populism that is justified is not scapegoating, obviously.

Anti-EU populism that is justified is not anti-EU populism, once again you are projecting your own straw-men onto me.

[Rugoz]

Anti-EU populism that is justified is not anti-EU populism

Hilarious.

[Steve_American]

@noemon,
Did you find the time to watch Stephanie's video?
What did you think?
Remember nations in the eurozone don't have soverign fiat currencies and so are totally different from the US and other nations that she is talking about.

[Atlantis]

It's so simple that even the populists could understand it, IF they wanted to.

[Steve_American]

@Atlantis,
Two points ---
1] IMHO your meme is way overstating the unity among the independent nations of Europe. They do not have a single foreign policy.
2] Your meme completely ignores the economic damage being done to the nations of Europe. Of course, the nations mostly have Gov. that believe in neo-liberal economic theories.
But so does the US, and yet the Repuds a year ago passed a new tax law that increased the deficit big time. No nation in the EU or EZ can do that because of the EU rules. Now, it would have been better to cut the taxes the working poor pay like the FICA tax, but what they did will stimulate the economy some.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

For our leftists.

The EU is a default empire of nations in denial

Streeck argued last week on LSE Brexit that the EU was a ‘liberal empire’ that is about to fall. Peter Ramsay (LSE) suggests that the EU is a very particular type of empire, one that has arisen from the political decline of the nations that comprise it, and that this explains the tortured politics of Brexit.

Wolfgang Streeck does the Brexit debate a service by reminding us of the imperial character of the EU. British Remainers have claimed that Brexit is all about nostalgia for Britain’s maritime colonial empire. They have conveniently forgotten that the European continent is familiar with a different tradition of land-based multinational empire. Remainers would very much like the UK to Remain a part of this type of empire. Streeck calls the EU a ‘liberal empire’ because it is explicitly committed to constitutionalism, private property, and competition. It is imperial nevertheless because one of its member states – Germany – has become hugely dominant over the others, and because EU institutions have progressively constrained the democratic process at the national level in the interests of the markets’ big players. Streeck’s account of the EU as an empire tells us much about its operations. Nevertheless, we should be wary of creating a left-wing version of conservative Euroscepticism, in which we replace bossy Brussels bureaucrats with greedy German capitalists as our image of EU overlords. It is not that there is no truth in either story, but they both tend to obscure the most significant aspect of the EU.

If the EU is an empire then it is exceptional in being a legally voluntary empire. However much German or EU officials may connive to punish Britain economically and diplomatically for proposing to leave, Britain’s right to leave is not contested in Berlin or Brussels. Rather it is in London that Britain’s right to leave is bitterly contested by a British ruling class that is fighting to Remain. If Germany has acquired the position of an imperial hegemon, it has not been by conquest or through an overweening sense of national destiny or racial superiority but rather by default, a result of the weakening of national loyalties within all of the EU’s member states.

The EU’s liberal empire is a type of government improvised by national governing elites that are reluctant or no longer able to rely on the political authority provided by democratic politics. Instead of the nation within, those governing elites look outwards to supranational intergovernmental arrangements for their authority. It is this peculiar characteristic of the EU’s ‘liberal empire’ that explains the tortured political process in Britain following the Brexit referendum. The electorate voted to ‘take back control’ of politics and the state. In response, the bulk of the political class has been united with the civil service, big business and academia in a shared determination to resist that. The British elite prefers intergovernmental collaboration to assertions of national sovereignty. Its preference for this way of governing is so ingrained that the government has been unable to imagine adopting a robust negotiating position with the EU, and even the weak negotiating efforts of the executive have been relentlessly, and very publicly, undermined by Parliament and other politically influential figures. The effect has been to create a situation in which the options now available to the UK are so unattractive that a sense of emergency can be manufactured. In this climate, it might be possible, one way or another, to nullify the effect of the original vote to Leave. While, as Streeck argues, the German hegemon and its ally France have an interest in making the British people pay a high price for daring to defy the EU, their most effective ally in that endeavour has been the British elite itself. The British ruling class finds in the EU an effective and attractive way of asserting its interests. And this is so even if Germany is the major gainer from the arrangement. The British elite’s repulsion from the claims of the nation is much stronger than any downsides it may experience from playing economic second fiddle to Germany. The EU is a voluntary empire made up of states that are in denial of their national character: in denial of the fact that the state’s authority derives from the political nation.

This turn by Europe’s ruling classes against the nation has transformed the terrain of politics in Germany’s ‘liberal empire’. So Streeck observes of Brexit, that in so far as the decision to leave the EU ‘was driven by nationalist…concerns, it may amount to a historical mistake’. The reason for this, he suggests, is that Britain is likely to lose international influence in Europe and the world while France will gain what the UK loses. His prognosis may be right but, as any observer of the Brexit debate will have noted, it is British Remainers who have repeatedly bemoaned this likely loss of British international influence resulting from Brexit. As Richard Tuck has shown, the case made in the 1960s for the UK joining the European Economic Community was dominated by concerns over how to maintain Britain’s global influence as the British Empire declined. Similarly, contemporary Remainers reject nationalism, the better to ensure Britain’s global influence. The laughable post-Brexit fantasies of the UK’s current Secretary of Defence only underline the fact that Leaving the EU will radically limit Britain’s remaining imperial ambitions. For this reason, Brexit is welcomed by true internationalists the world over. The point to grasp is that the ruling classes of the EU’s former imperial states have stopped trying to project their influence at home or abroad by mobilising nationalism. Instead, they do it through participation in the supranational empire of intergovernmental cooperation and by opposition to the alleged nationalism of others (particularly of Russia and of their own populations).

Streeck declares that the liberal empire is ‘about to fall’. He points to the EU’s current evolution towards still more authoritarian and now militaristic politics, driven by tensions that may yet bring it down. So far, only the populist right has really understood the distinctive aspect of the EU’s liberal empire – the denial of the nation by the imperial ruling classes of Europe. Democrats and internationalists urgently need to catch up. Against the claims of imperial cosmopolitanism, we need to reinvigorate the idea of the nation as the site of the authority of the people and of solidarity with the nationhood of others. Against the identity politics of both the populist right and the woke left, we need to popularise the idea of the people as a citizenry of self-determining persons.


This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE.
Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics.

[snapdragon]

I don't see the point in posting links to maundering opinions that aren't based on anything except the prejudices of whomever the author admires.

I hate all blogs on principle. Same goes for highly edited youtube videos.

I can't be arsed with them. I was going to add nobody gives a shit, anyway, but obviously that's not true, as some people do.

I'm not in any way criticising you, heisenberg, or anyone who likes that sort of thing, by the way.

Whatever floats your boat.

That is just my opinion and opinion is mostly wank, which is why I seldom post.

Having read this thread from the beginning ( or rather skimmed through it), I can see how completely wrong brexiters are.

I don't believe that's opinion.

They're just plain wrong in all their arguments.

Remainers have been wrong, too, only not so much.

I don't know a single fucking Brexiter who ever makes any sense about the EU and how it's run.

Back to definite facts.

Nobody who is in a position to do anything about sorting out this complete and total clusterfuck is going to be impressed by anything anyone posts on here, or however many helpful links to blogs and /or videos are supplied.

Brexiters or leavers, all they care about is their own political careers and keeping or getting their party in power , but especially clinging onto their seats, no matter what.

[B0ycey]

Great Meme there Atlantis.

Two points

1) IMHO illustrates that for Europe to compete competitively with other economic superpowers they can only do so as a united union and not as individual nations.

2) Your Meme illustrates why the US and China cause economic damage to the rest of the world and the only way to prevent then doing likewise to Europe is for Europe to unite so they are not dependent on the US for security or China on trade.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

I don't see the point in posting links to maundering opinions that aren't based on anything except the prejudices of whomever the author admires.

Says a person posting on a forum.