“If voting achieved anything, they would make it illegal,” the rebel and anarchist Emma Goldman, who knew something about freedom and liberty (having been deprived of both a few times), once sardonically remarked.
Well, Emma, on June 23rd, 2016, Brexit, the shorthand for the British referendum to leave the European Union, by a stunning vote of 52% to 48%, achieved something important, historic: the first breach in the EU prison walls. Cheers, Britain! Hip! Hip! Hooray!
Like the Soviet bloc of countries who high-tailed it to freedom when the Berlin Wall collapsed overnight in 1989, many of the other 27 EU member countries may (indeed, should) soon take their cue and flee this political and economic prison.
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The “United States of Europe” aka the European Union, was an immaculate misconception, a unicorn, a blue sky daydream become a nightmare. The original European kumbaya idea was open borders, free flowing trade, finance, goods & services, eventually a common currency and no more European wars. Welcome to Paradise.
This politico-economic union consisted of 6 original founding signees in 1960 (trivia quiz: name them*). Since the demise of the Soviet Union it had become a bubbling gumbo of 28 countries (trivia quiz 2: name them**) with different cultures, histories, languages and currencies (at least until the Euro was instituted in 1999). What could possibly go wrong among that happy family of nations?
Brussels, the capital of bland, became the bureaucratic ground zero of this continental concoction, along with the accompanying sense that national sovereignty and identity was silently slipping away from the member countries as Brussels technocrats and commissioners, for the benefit of private corporate and financial interests, engineered a continent-wide deindustrialization and jobs drought. Whatever era of good feeling there still was lasted until the Euro gobbled up the national currencies in 1999 and the insatiable economic monster neoliberal Globalization began to debt bomb the entire world.
The EU, in effect, has morphed over the years into the European branch of the international criminal enterprise of banksters, corporate cannibals, aiding and abetting bureaucrats and crooked politicians that represent the true nature and essence of Globalization. Gluttonous greed!
In addition to moving European manufacturing to the poverty lands of the Far East, throwing homegrown workers to the wolves and essentially breaking the historic Social Contract, the EU Brigands - the sociopathic European banksters of Frankfurt, Paris and primarily the City of London (not to mention Wall Street!) - peddled their poisoned financial products freely across Europe while a reunified powerhouse Germany not surprisingly threw its considerable financial and industrial weight around refighting World War 2 by checkbook across Europe and this time getting a different result.
“Shut up and drink your dose of austerity! You owe us money!” EU elites nobody elected, the IMF, ECB, Deutsche Bank and the gnomes of Brussels (with Goldman Sachs, Chase, B of A and their pals lurking in the wings), declared from on high after their debt bombs exploded across Europe in the 2008 economic crash they helped cause.
Consequently, the gen pop of the member nations have become nothing more than collateral damage in the war of the 1% against taxes, labor, living wages, pensions, health and human services, infrastructure maintenance, education, a functioning and fair manufacturing and industrial base and the commonwealth in general.
An unintended consequence of this piracy was a wave of migration across those open borders from the poorer member countries of the southern and eastern tiers to the bright lights and big cities of the richer members, Britain, France, Germany and Holland. The disgruntled Brits referred to it as the invasion of the Polish plumbers!
(More recently, the EU has experienced a tidal wave of migrants and desperate refugees from the deadly destructive wars unleashed on the Islamic world by Rogue Nation USA and its NATO sidekicks. NATO being another essentially European organization, dancing to America’s militaristic tunes and dedicated to weapons-buying and war-mongering, whose sell-by date has long expired and should be nixed, or rather, Nexited.)
Turns out that Welcome to Paradise was merely a tantalizing sales pitch and cover story for what has become the massive looting of the European continent’s national identities, assets and treasures. And it’s not against the law because the plunderers themselves wrote the laws.
Of all the EU member countries, Britain had enough financial common sense to retain the pound sterling and was never in the chokehold the banksters had on the Euro countries when the 2008 financial crash occurred. However, the Brits were not spared the thin gruel of austerity.
One of the prime movers and architects of this grotesque and heartless neoliberal economic philosophy was UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Another UK PM, who sold out to Globalization, was the repulsive and rapacious huckster Tony Blair. The ruling Tory Party and Prime Minister David Cameron, the Oxford twit, instituted their own crushing austerity program on national industries and community services in 2009. Indeed, the very idea of a Brexit referendum was a cynical political ploy of Cameron, who imagined it would be a slam dunk victory for remaining in the EU. He resigned in tears the day after his humiliating defeat.
So what now?
For the moment there is the inevitable sore loser lamenting by the have mores in the UK that their golden goose has been cooked by the British have nots and the nostalgic little Englanders, whose Brexit votes carried the day.
There is also a bit of buyers’ remorse from some Brexit voters susceptible to the “It’s The End Of The World” fear campaign immediately mounted by the Brussels Brigade.
It should also not be forgotten that just last year, the cadaver formerly known as Greece, voted 3-1 against the evil austerity program imposed on it by Brussels and the European finance ministers and banksters for its failure to repay the impossible debts these same banksters had hamstrung the Greek people with. In cruel revenge for this popular NO vote (“OXI”), the EU Capos, led by the smug and censorious German PM, Angela Merkel, simply ignored the referendum vote, knee-capped Alexei Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minster, and slammed the hapless country with an even more crippling austerity masquerading as a financial bailout, which was, in fact, merely the banksters paying themselves back from one account to another for their dirty business.
There is no doubt the Eurocrats will fight to maintain their diabolical dictatorial grip on the power and purse of Europe, the world’s largest single market. Their business plan of plunder, looting, thievery and fraud is deeply embedded like deathwatch beetles in the EU structure. They and their co-conspirators around the world still own the propaganda megaphone and the rigged wheel of fortune. But despite what the greedheads of Globalization believe, “too much is never enough” is not a law of nature.
Speaking during the first Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill declared: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” He was not referring to a handful of debt-collecting greedy banksters and bureaucrats.
The Brexit Batallions have won the current Battle of Britain. It remains to be seen who will emerge as their Churchill.
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Trivia Quiz Answers:
*Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands
** Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom (!)
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