My Convoluted Politics

European Declaration of Sovereignty

2011-03-24T19:18:00.001Z

Popular Sovereignty defines democratic polities and applies to each Member State of the European Union: in Substance if not in Form, as in those States that are Constitutional Monarchies; and as a matter of Right if not always, or fully, of Fact.

However, the Principle of Popular Sovereignty fails to apply to the European Union, either in Substance or in Form; nor does it apply either as a matter of Right or of Fact. The European Union is thus a Polity that lacks a legitimate Sovereign.

When the sovereign citizens of the Member States are required to cede increasingly large parcels of their Sovereignty to the Union, such parcels do not devolve on an equally legitimate European Sovereign; nor are they shared, as alleged, with the Peoples of other States, since no State’s electorate is represented in the democratically elected Institutions of any other State.

Sovereignty devolves, instead, on lobbies, technocracies, bureaucracies or, at best, on political institutions so far removed from the original sources of their legitimacy as to become, for any practical purposes, illegitimate. This inchoate, anonymous and unnamed pseudo-Sovereign is free to impose its Treaties, Laws and Directives upon each citizen of each Member State; to deliberately cloak these Treaties, Laws and Directives in such opaque language as to render them incomprehensible even to highly educated and well-informed Europeans; and, worst of all, to impose them on each Member State, by means that circumvent and defraud the known or presumed will of the Sovereign.

In so doing, the present leaders of the Union betray the original purpose of its Founding Fathers. Prosperous and decent societies seem increasingly out of reach; and even the avoidance of War on European ground appears increasingly uncertain.

The preceding considered:

We, the Peoples and the People of the Union, constitute Ourselves Sovereign over Our common Polity, as We already are over each Member State;

We remind Our elected officials that their powers are exercised in Our name, and not in anyone else’s;

We demand the establishment of such Institutions as are needed for the good and legitimate governance of the Union, namely:

A full-powered Legislative Branch consisting of two Chambers, through which the Peoples and the People of the European Union can exercise their Right to adequate Representation;

An Executive Branch accountable to the Legislative;

And a proper Judicial Branch with the full powers and competencies attendant to a democratic Polity.

We remind the Union’s non-elected officials of their non-elected status; the Common Good which they serve is defined and determined by the Sovereign through its elected bodies; any professional, scientific or theoretical authority which Our Public Servants bring to their functions is to be used in the pursuit of the Common Good as a political given, not in its definition or determination.

Namely, the Economic Governance of the Union shall pursue the Common Good as defined by the Sovereign. Macroeconomic considerations are to be regarded as a means to this end, and not as ends in themselves. Much less shall a single macroeconomic criterion, such as the control of inflation, be isolated from the others and regarded as the sole purpose of all economic governance. Human Laws govern matters of Right, not of Fact; no scientific or theoretical proposition, however contested or uncontested, shall be subject, to its detriment or benefice, to any form of legal or constitutional validation. This prohibition applies to Economics as much as to any other branch of Knowledge.

We declare null and void, and denounce as usurpations, all Treaties, Laws and Directives, as well as any isolated clauses thereof, that violate the Spirit or the Letter of this DECLARATION, defy the Sovereignty of the People, or seem designed to circumvent, defraud or thwart the Will of the Sovereign; and announce Our determination to fight and disobey, either individually or collectively, any such norms.

The Signataries,

The illegitimate governance of the EU

2010-12-16T16:51:00.005Z

The leaders of the EU refuse with dumb obstinacy to legitimize themselves. They represent a notional constituency of 500 million people but they resist the creation of any economic, political and democratic institutions that would make them accountable to the public: they have other masters to serve. Democracy at the European level (or indeed the mere formalities and procedures of democracy) has never been a consideration: it was deemed sufficient that each member state be acceptably democratic within its own borders.

The lack of democratic legitimacy in the EU as a whole would not be a very serious matter if a juxtaposition of democracies had turned out to constitute a democracy in itself, as expected; but democracy at a national level can only be maintained if each government's accountability to its own sovereign electorate prevails over its allegiance to the unelected bureaucracies of the Union - and this turned out to be not the case.

Europeans are no longer sovereign in their own countries; and this loss has not been counterbalanced by a corresponding sovereign status as European citizens. Europe has turned Orwell's dystopia into a reality by creating the first virtual sovereign in history: and so the directives from "Brussels", that ghostly capital, prevail in every instance over the will of the people, even in matters where there is no legal basis for any such prevalence.

Despite the generalized perception that the elected governments of Europe grovel before unelected bureaucracies, this is not primarily a matter of brute dominance and slavish subservience. It is rather a matter of mutual convenience, where both sides stand to gain: the bureaucrats get the power they crave and the governments get the impunity they crave in no lesser degree.

"Brussels made me do it" has become the standard (and childish) excuse whenever a European government does something that goes clearly against the public interest or violates the mandate, no matter how clearly expressed, given to it by the electorate. Political decision is outsourced much in the same way corporations outsource their operations; the aim is in both cases the avoidance of accountability.

The present leaders of the EU have never bothered to promote a European social contract. On the contrary, they have colluded with the governments and the oligarchies to void whatever social contract was recognized within each member state. The 500 million inhabitants of the EU hunger for the security of a comprehensible social contract, be it national or European in scope. In the absence of such a contract, there can be no rule of law; citizens (who are no longer citizens) owe no allegiance to rules that no longer seem to apply in the real world.

We can expect to see more and worse riots, more wild strikes, more protest votes in extremist political parties. Many demonstrations will be ad hoc, unauthorized affairs and more informal organizations - some legal, some just within the border of legality, some openly illegal will appear when and where they are least expected.

The EU needs a working model for its political and economic governance. But not just any model: it must be a government of ordinary Europeans for ordinary Europeans. In other words: it has to be legitimate and perceived as such. The increasingly plausible alternative is deepening injustice, intolerable poverty and, just possibly, another war.

The Ballad of Julian Assange

2010-12-12T18:10:00.000Z

(borrowed from "Pimenta Negra")

I heard the news just yesterday that they've taken you away
to be extradited to the USA
They say that it's to Sweden that they're gonna take you first
but the Yankees are pressing hard - for revenge is what they thirst

They persecute your website and they kill your funding too
There simply isn't anything they'd hesitate to do
They've used bullets, napalm, bombers to get rid of who they hate
and they're willing to use all these things to seal up your fate

They'll be doing all they can to lock truth up in jail
but what their efforts will come down to is one big epic fail

They claim that you're a rapist but we all know it's not true
Instead the cause for all this is what you and others do
to spread the word 'bout nasty deals, to spill their beans big time
to tear the veil of secrecy that's covering up their crime

If you lived in China we all know what that would mean
you would get a Nobel prize and your own limousine
and lots of good publicity for doing the right thing
but you've taken on Amerikkka - and that's the biggest sin

They say that you're a menace to society for delivering them a blow
revealing what the ruling class don't want us to know

These Huckabees and Palins they all wish that you were dead
but even if they succeeded in cutting off your head
they couldn't turn the tide, their system's cracking at the seams
you can always kill a man but you can never kill our dreams

The chief irony in this is that in an American movie Assange would be the hero

2010-12-09T02:20:00.001Z

American cinema loves solitary heroes. That's why the persecution of Australian Julian Assange has a certain flavour of the flicks - with all the trimmings. Banks, governments, police forces and big corporations from all over the world, plus two crazy blondes, are all after a single fugitive who stands accused of "sex by surprise" (which goes to show that Swedish gymnastics has been dethroned by the Pilates method).
Any resemblance to a story by Philip K. Dick will be no mere coincidence

The Portuguese original of the text above can be found here. The responsibility for any deviation from the author's intent is, of course, mine.

Sweden, China and Julian Assange

2010-12-07T19:41:00.000Z

Sweden is clearly much more advanced than China. When China wants to imprison someone for political reasons, a charge of sedition is trumped up. In Sweden they trump up a charge of sexual misbehaviour.

European General Strike

2010-11-29T19:05:00.000Z

The idea of a European general strike is getting some traction, I think. The Irish demonstrators invented a wonderful slogan for such a strike: "We are the people, we have the votes". It can be easily translated into most European languages and has a powerful impact in all of them. It is a reminder, but for the oligarchies and the common people, that economic policies and labour issues are political, and must be pursued either in a democratic or a tyranical way: there is no middle ground in this matter.

The strike could be supplemented by other actions: a consumers' strike, for instance, with people boycotting large shopping centres and using the corner stores nearest to their homes; or not using their cellphones, not watching commercial TV, and so on.

Cavana's suggestion that we take all of our money from the banks is obvious nonsense and can't have been meant seriously; but it could be a starting point, in a brainstorming sort of way, towards something useful. - like ranking financial institutions according to their worker-friendliness and societal value, so as to give consumers a further criterion to choose their bank or insurance company.

Small Government

2010-11-02T15:58:00.002Z

It isn't a lean government they want: it's an anorectic society.

Do we trust the markets?

2010-11-02T11:30:00.006Z

Portugal had to deserve the trust of the markets, or so we were told. To deserve their trust, the two centrist parties were suposed to deliver a state budget that empoverished the populace in order to reduce the deficit.

If we didn't deliver, the markets would punish us with high interest rates.

So we delivered. But the interest rates went up instead of down.

What is your plan B, Mr. Passos Coelho? What is your plan B, Mr. Socrates?

Another way to serfdom

2009-03-11T18:57:00.005Z

If you want to keep human beings in a state of servitude, the first thing you have to do is take away from their consciousness the dimension of time. When the past is deleted, the present becomes the only reality; it becomes eternity. Change becomes unthinkable except in the terms your masters define: the masters own the future and thus they own you.

I think of this whenever I see another cut in the teaching of History in schools, but the problem goes deeper than this. Chronology can be suppressed in the teaching of other subjects as well. Socrates and Shakespeare become nothing but dead white men. The intellectual adventures of Gallileo, Leibniz, Newton, their genius and their work become trivial pursuits unworthy of our attention.

But the supression of History and chronology is not the only way you can limit minds. Make Maths too easy and most people won't be able to tell when you are lying to them with statistics. Take grammar away and they won't be able to articulate their grievances. Reduce their vocabulary. In France, it has been proposed that the subjunctive be retired from language teaching because people don't use it anyway: so much for any notion a French young person might have of ever reading Montaigne, Flaubert, Baudelaire. But if they live in the suburbs they will still be able to call out attention les flics: you don't need the subjunctive for this.

Do away with Philosophy. Avoid critical thought. Blurr the distinction between opinion and knowlwdge, and then tell kids their opinions on any subject are as good as anybody else's. Don't give them an education: qualify them instead for jobs that may be obsolete a decade from now.

Don't just put them in a ghetto: put the ghetto in them. Make their mental landscape as narrow and ugly as their neighborhoods. This way, they will never escape.