The Duran Podcast
EU war economy utopia, Eurobonds and direct taxes
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the European Union's push towards a war economy, or is it a push towards more centralization of how war? Is that what this is really all about? What are your thoughts? Because we are getting a stream of articles and statements connected to how the European Union needs to ramp up the manufacturing of weapons and needs to invest in weapons manufacturing and needs to increase their military budgets and their military spending, and all of this has to be done from a European, from an EU level. It all has to be coordinated from the offices in Brussels. What are your thoughts? Well, I should say straight away that there's been a brilliant article about this by Tom Longo, and he points out that really all this talk about rearmament serves a completely different agenda, because rearmament within the EU is industrially, for all practical purposes, impossible. EU industries are in decline. The manufacturing capacity to transform the EU into a military superpower does not exist if the EU got all together and appointed the right planners and did a job of pulling together all the universities to churn out STEM graduates and things of that kind. That happens in 20 years with a complete change of industrial policy. They might get themselves to the kind of position where the United States was 30 years ago in a situation where they could start producing a convincing amount of weapons, but that's not going to happen and nobody really expects it to happen. But talking about this all the time, harping upon the Russian threat, saying that there has to be this big increase in military production, and also saying that it has to be centrally coordinated from Brussels by the EU, and that this is another project that the EU should run. As Tom Longo correctly says, it looks like another device to start to launch Eurobonds. Now Eurobonds are bonds, loans in effect, issued by the European Commission. The European Commission floats bonds to raise money on the financial markets to carry out its various projects. That's what governments do. The European Commission is not a government. It is not a government of a sovereign state. It is not backed by a Treasury Department. It doesn't have direct taxation powers. It depends entirely on the member states to provide tax funding in order for the European Commission to be able to do its work. The European Commission has always been extremely dissatisfied with this. They've got the single currency, the euro. They've got the central bank, the European central bank, in order to complete the project of European economic integration, as they call it, economic unification. In order to make themselves a real government, a European government, they need to be able to float bonds. If they could float bonds, sooner or later, they will come along and say, in order to service those bonds, we need to have the same power that all governments have. We need to be able to raise tax revenue. That means that we need to be empowered to impose direct taxes on EU citizens. They've been yearning to do that. The original treaties, the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty, expressly prohibited the European Commission from doing that. They've been trying to find ways round. They found a way during the pandemic. They said, "We need to do this during the pandemic." Angela Merkel agreed. They floated bonds during the pandemic. It was supposed to be a one-off emergency measure. We discussed at the time that one-off emergency measures. If you're talking about the European Commission never exists, they will treat that as a precedent. Tom Longo points out that this bond has been, for anybody, unwise enough to buy it, an absolute catastrophe. It doesn't drain very well people that like it, but they are now using it as a precedent, and they're saying, "Look, we did that during the pandemic. Now we have to do it on a much bigger scale so that Europe can rearm and face down this terrifying, supposed threat from the Russians." What this is all about, what this tells you, is that the European Union, the Commission, has a vested interest in keeping the war in Ukraine going and in hyping up the Russian threat, because from their point of view, it accelerates the process of European centralization of the conversion of the European Union into a state in which the Commission acts as the government, which has been, to be absolutely clear, the project all along. Let me see if I've got this right. The European Union wants to keep the war going. They want to annihilate Ukraine, continue the suffering and the casualties in Ukraine so that eventually they can tax Europeans in a word exactly right. Germany has been resistant towards Europe. As you mentioned, Angela Merkel, she gave her blessing, but one awful leap. What does Germany say or do about this? What do people in the European Union do about this? I mean, I'm in the European Union. I don't want to be taxed by the EU. Another tax? I mean, does your country's tax go away or is this going to be very much like the US system where you have a state and a federal? Well, they wanted to be, in effect, the US system, but a degenerated version of the US system. Because remember, the European Commission is not elected. There's no elections to vote for the European president. And it's difficult to imagine how that could ever realistically happen. I mean, that's the first thing to say. But let's go first to Germany. Germany has resisted, but Germany is in the grip of a hysteria at the moment. And of course, within the German government, there are political, there are political figures. Harbeck, Anna-Lena Bevork, fervently anti-Russian, passionately pro-EU. They would back this thing. So, German resistance is no longer as solid as it once was. The one way, perhaps, to persuade more Germans to accept this is to, you know, conjure up the specter of Russia. So, you could see why they're playing it up relentlessly there. And I think there would still be opposition. And there might eventually be it a big backlash. But for the moment, they got their wind in their cells. They feel that the mood in Germany is probably more conducive to doing this thing than it has ever been at any point since the euro was first created. So, that's the first thing to say. Now, what do you, as a EU citizen, what rights do you have? How can you oppose this thing? The answer is, of course, you can't, because this is not an institution, the EU, that is susceptible to elections. The EU commission itself, as we've said many times, is unelected. And we have seen repeatedly that EU governments can come along, they can protest, they can complain. All Barn did it over the 55 billion euro package for Ukraine. They get threatened. They have, you know, pressures exerted on them. There was all that blackmail exerted on Aud Barn a few weeks ago, you know, that they would make life impossible for Hungarian citizens. All that kind of thing, that we've seen how in Poland, Donald Tusk, how aggressive he's been against the law and justice party on behalf of the EU and how that he's come back to power. To all practical purposes, there is virtually nothing that most EU citizens can do about this. Only in two states, perhaps, might such resistance. Math count, the most important of it seems, Germany, which is still around 40% of the EU's GDP. The second is France, but France has an enthusiastic, a passionate true believer in the EU project as its president, Emmanuel Macron. He might be bitterly unpopular, but his solution to every problem is more Europe, as he says. And if you're looking to the next election in France, it's not going to happen before 2027, which is three years away. So they've got the time, they've got the space, electoral obstacles, don't really stand in their way, and they're going to push hard to do it. They may come up against some resistance from Germany, but don't come to it this time. Yeah, and they've got the market on replacement already picked out, so they've got that set up as well. And now everyone understands why the European Union decided to give 50. White was so important for them to give 54 billion to Project Ukraine, and why it is so critical for them to keep the war going. They have to keep the war going, they have to keep the specter of Russia and Putin ramped up, because we're talking about a lot of money, taxation without representation, and a lot of money for all of these techno-crats and bureaucrats to make. From each member state, all of them are going to win out from this. You're absolutely correct. I think Tom Longer, by the way, we should thank him for writing such a clear article about this point. But can I just also quickly say that we've been talking about this for a very, very long time. The EU Commission has always been on the project to get Eurobond's established. This has always been their load start ever since, specifically the 2008 financial crisis. And for them, Eurobond's is the gateway to everything else. And if they have to crash the European economies to do it, if they have to sacrifice Ukraine, these people who are pretty fervent about all of this, they're real passionate believers in this whole enterprise. They will probably say to themselves, these are sacrifices worth making, because the project to create this great new Europe, who's such a great and wonderful one, a few bumps in the road like that, a shattered Ukraine, a massive economic recession in Europe, deindustrialization. Well, these are just bumps in the road to the great new beginning, which will be the EU state that we are intent on creating. So they probably don't think of themselves as cynics in the way that they appear to be to you and me. Their calculations may be cynical, but in their own self-conception, they're idealists and visionaries, which is, by the way, true of everyone, all revolutionaries who embrace utopian revolutionary projects. Yeah, they're religious fanatics, they believe in the cause. Yeah, absolutely. One final observation. It's interesting that this is happening with regards to the war and military and ramping up military production, because in a way, can you make the claim that this kind of kills two birds with one stone in that they get to Eurobans, they get to the taxation part? But they also open the door to this EU army that they've been trying to create as well, which is not an army. I think this is now clear that this is not going to be an army to replace NATO. I think this has been understood by all of these officials now, but this will be more of like a national guard, which I imagine will be an EU army turned inwards, while NATO will be the the outward-focused army. Is that a safe, is that a correct assumption to make? That is an absolutely correct assumption. That's exactly what this is all about. So, you create, you know, you're a government, you have an army, which is, as you rightly say, more about internal security than anything else. You can move, shuffle this army around Europe if you need to. And of course, if you have an army, you also have, you know, the usual security and intelligence agencies that states must have. And you see, you already have all kinds of policies and legislation about controlling information. The EU is, let me say it straightforwardly, a pioneer in this kind of thing. I mean, they're right there at the cutting edge of it. And you could see, and of course, given, and I, what has to say this, the way in which this project is being conducted without consent, and I'm public consent, and I'm thinking my words very carefully here, you could see why they would need all of those things. Yeah, the EU citizens, I would like to think that the EU citizens would not accept such things, more taxation, stuff like that. But, no, I think, I think the past has shown us that the EU citizens will accept all of this. That's just my hunch. Yes. I would be surprised. I would just, this is, we've brought up Tom Long, though. I would, I would just quickly say that he also argues that they have to do this anyway, because with a very high interest rates, it is very difficult to keep the whole board on the road anyway, because funding is becoming tighter for the EU financial system, for EU banks, and all of that kind of thing. And that acts as an additional spur. I'm no doubt that he's right, but I would say, being somebody who's lived at the EU, and as you are, that the key driver behind all of this is ideological. It always has been, right from the very first day. Yeah, well, we'll see if this plan works. You know, I don't know. We'll see. Well, it will work. It will work in the same way that the parasite, which ultimately kills the host, gorges itself for a very, very long time, because that is what is happening. That is how it's turning out. The EU is increasingly the parasite that is killing the host. Trouble is the host, as is often the case, has no real response to this. Yeah, and doesn't even know that this is happening. Most people don't understand this at all. They don't really, they don't really, because all this is very arcane and complicated, what are Eurobuds? Most people ask them, what are Eurobuds? They won't know, and they won't understand. Or put it bad. Are you a put in stooge? Exactly. Well, that's, that's the thing. That's a much easier thing to get across, but explaining to people what is the danger from Eurobuds, that is much more difficult. That is much, much harder. All right, we will end it there. The Duran.local.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, but shoot Telegram, Rockfin, and Twitter X and go to the Duran shop. 50% off. All t-shirts. Take care.