Fireside Chat 6: On Government and Capitalism (September 30, 1934)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Three months have passed since I talked with you shortly after the adjournment of the Congress. Tonight I continue that report, though, because of the shortness of time, I must defer a number of subjects to a later date.

Recently the most notable public questions that have concerned us all have had to do with industry and labor and with respect to these, certain developments have taken place which I consider of importance. I am happy to report that after years of uncertainty, culminating in the collapse of the spring of 1933, we are bringing order out of the old chaos with a greater certainty of the employment of labor at a reasonable wage and of more business at a fair profit. These governmental and industrial developments hold promise of new achievements for the nation.

Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity with respect to industry and business, but nearly all are agreed that private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left without assistance and without reasonable safeguards lest it destroy not only itself but also our processes of civilization. The underlying necessity for such activity is indeed as strong now as it was years ago when Elihu Root said the following very significant words:

“Instead of the give and take of free individual contract, the tremendous power of organization has combined great aggregations of capital in enormous industrial establishments working through vast agencies of commerce and employing great masses of men in movements of production and transportation and trade, so great in the mass that each individual concerned in them is quite helpless by himself. The relations between the employer and the employed, between the owners of aggregated capital and the units of organized labor, between the small producer, the small trader, the consumer, and the great transporting and manufacturing and distributing agencies, all present new questions for the solution of which the old reliance upon the free action of individual wills appear quite inadequate. And in many directions, the intervention of that organized control which we call government seems necessary to produce the same result of justice and right conduct which obtained through the attrition of individuals before the new conditions arose.”

It was in this spirit thus described by Secretary Root that we approached our task of reviving private enterprise in March, 1933. Our first problem was, of course, the banking situation because, as you know, the banks had collapsed. Some banks could not be saved but the great majority of them, either through their own resources or with government aid, have been restored to complete public confidence. This has given safety to millions of depositors in these banks. Closely following this great constructive effort we have, through various Federal agencies, saved debtors and creditors alike in many other fields of enterprise, such as loans on farm mortgages and home mortgages; loans to the railroads and insurance companies and, finally, help for home owners and industry itself.

In all of these efforts the government has come to the assistance of business and with the full expectation that the money used to assist these enterprises will eventually be repaid. I believe it will be.

The second step we have taken in the restoration of normal business enterprise has been to clean up thoroughly unwholesome conditions in the field of investment. In this we have had assistance from many bankers and businessmen, most of whom recognize the past evils in the banking system, in the sale of securities, in the deliberate encouragement of stock gambling, in the sale of unsound mortgages and in many other ways in which the public lost billions of dollars. They saw that without changes in the policies and methods of investment there could be no recovery of public confidence in the security of savings. The country now enjoys the safety of bank savings under the new banking laws, the careful checking of new securities under the Securities Act and the curtailment of rank stock speculation through the Securities Exchange Act. I sincerely hope that as a result people will be discouraged in unhappy efforts to get rich quick by speculating in securities. The average person almost always loses. Only a very small minority of the people of this country believe in gambling as a substitute for the old philosophy of Benjamin Franklin that the way to wealth is through work.

In meeting the problems of industrial recovery the chief agency of the government has been the National Recovery Administration. Under its guidance, trades and industries covering over ninety percent of all industrial employees have adopted codes of fair competition, which have been approved by the President. Under these codes, in the industries covered, child labor has been eliminated. The work day and the work week have been shortened. Minimum wages have been established and other wages adjusted toward a rising standard of living. The emergency purpose of the N. R. A. was to put men to work and since its creation more than four million persons have been re-employed, in great part through the cooperation of American business brought about under the codes.

Benefits of the Industrial Recovery Program have come, not only to labor in the form of new jobs, in relief from over-work and in relief from under-pay, but also to the owners and managers of industry because, together with a great increase in the payrolls, there has come a substantial rise in the total of industrial profits – a rise from a deficit figure in the first quarter of 1933 to a level of sustained profits within one year from the inauguration of N. R. A.

Now it should not be expected that even employed labor and capital would be completely satisfied with present conditions. Employed workers have not by any means all enjoyed a return to the earnings of prosperous times; although millions of hitherto under- privileged workers are today far better paid than ever before. Also, billions of dollars of invested capital have today a greater security of present and future earning power than before. This is because of the establishment of fair, competitive standards and because of relief from unfair competition in wage cutting which depresses markets and destroys purchasing power. But it is an undeniable fact that the restoration of other billions of sound investments to a reasonable earning power could not be brought about in one year. There is no magic formula, no economic panacea, which could simply revive over-night the heavy industries and the trades dependent upon them.

Nevertheless the gains of trade and industry, as a whole, have been substantial. In these gains and in the policies of the Administration there are assurances that hearten all forward-looking men and women with the confidence that we are definitely rebuilding our political and economic system on the lines laid down by the New Deal – lines which as I have so often made clear, are in complete accord with the underlying principles of orderly popular government which Americans have demanded since the white man first came to these shores. We count, in the future as in the past, on the driving power of individual initiative and the incentive of fair private profit, strengthened with the acceptance of those obligations to the public interest which rest upon us all. We have the right to expect that this driving power will be given patriotically and whole-heartedly to our nation.

We have passed through the formative period of code making in the National Recovery Administration and have effected a reorganization of the N. R. A. suited to the needs of the next phase, which is, in turn, a period of preparation for legislation which will determine its permanent form.

In this recent reorganization we have recognized three distinct functions. First, the legislative or policy making function. Second, the administrative function of code making and revision and, third, the judicial function, which includes enforcement, consumer complaints and the settlement of disputes between employers and employees and between one employer and another.

We are now prepared to move into this second phase, on the basis of our experience in the first phase under the able and energetic leadership of General Johnson.

We shall watch carefully the working of this new machinery for the second phase of N. R. A., modifying it where it needs modification and finally making recommendations to the Congress, in order that the functions of N. R. A. which have proved their worth may be made a part of the permanent machinery of government.

Let me call your attention to the fact that the National Industrial Recovery Act gave businessmen the opportunity they had sought for years to improve business conditions through what has been called self-government in industry. If the codes which have been written have been too complicated, if they have gone too far in such matters as price fixing and limitation of production, let it be remembered that so far as possible, consistent with the immediate public interest of this past year and the vital necessity of improving labor conditions, the representatives of trade and industry were permitted to write their ideas into the codes. It is now time to review these actions as a whole to determine through deliberative means in the light of experience, from the standpoint of the good of the industries themselves, as well as the general public interest, whether the methods and policies adopted in the emergency have been best calculated to promote industrial recovery and a permanent improvement of business and labor conditions. There may be a serious question as to the wisdom of many of those devices to control production, or to prevent destructive price cutting which many business organizations have insisted were necessary, or whether their effect may have been to prevent that volume of production which would make possible lower prices and increased employment. Another question arises as to whether in fixing minimum wages on the basis of an hourly or weekly wage we have reached into the heart of the problem which is to provide such annual earnings for the lowest paid worker as will meet his minimum needs. We also question the wisdom of extending code requirements suited to the great industrial centers and to large employers, to the great number of small employers in the smaller communities.

During the last twelve months our industrial recovery has been to some extent retarded by strikes, including a few of major importance. I would not minimize the inevitable losses to employers and employees and to the general public through such conflicts. But I would point out that the extent and severity of labor disputes during this period has been far less than in any previous, comparable period.

When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to organize themselves for collective bargaining as embodied in Section 7 (a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Machinery set up by the Federal government has provided some new methods of adjustment. Both employers and employees mast share the blame of not using them as fully as they should. The employer who turns away from impartial agencies of peace, who denies freedom of organization to his employees, or fails to make every reasonable effort at a peaceful solution of their differences, is not fully supporting the recovery effort of his government. The workers who turn away from these same impartial agencies and decline to use their good offices to gain their ends are likewise not fully cooperating with their government.

It is time that we made a clean-cut effort to bring about that united action of management and labor, which is one of the high purposes of the Recovery Act. We have passed through more than a year of education. Step by step we have created all the government agencies necessary to insure, as a general rule, industrial peace, with justice for all those willing to use these agencies whenever their voluntary bargaining fails to produce a necessary agreement.

There should be at least a full and fair trial given to these means of ending industrial warfare; and in such an effort we should be able to secure for employers and employees and consumers the benefits that all derive from the continuous, peaceful operation of our essential enterprises.

Accordingly, I propose to confer within the coming month with small groups of those truly representative of large employers of labor and of large groups of organized labor, in order to seek their cooperation in establishing what I may describe as a specific trial period of industrial peace.

From those willing to join in establishing this hoped-for period of peace, I shall seek assurances of the making and maintenance of agreements, which can be mutually relied upon, under which wages, hours and working conditions may be determined and any later adjustments shall be made either by agreement or, in case of disagreement, through the mediation or arbitration of state or federal agencies. I shall not ask either employers or employees permanently to lay aside the weapons common to industrial war. But I shall ask both groups to give a fair trial to peaceful methods of adjusting their conflicts of opinion and interest, and to experiment for a reasonable time with measures suitable to civilize our industrial civilization.

Closely allied to the N. R. A. is the program of Public Works provided for in the same Act and designed to put more men back to work, both directly on the public works themselves, and indirectly in the industries supplying the materials for these public works. To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return. I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief rolls.

Those, fortunately few in number, who are frightened by boldness and cowed by the necessity for making decisions, complain that all we have done is unnecessary and subject to great risks. Now that these people are coming out of their storm cellars, they forget that there ever was a storm. They point to England. They would have you believe that England has made progress out of her depression by a do-nothing policy, by letting nature take her course. England has her peculiarities and we have ours but I do not believe any intelligent observer can accuse England of undue orthodoxy in the present emergency.

Did England let nature take her course? No. Did England hold to the gold standard when her reserves were threatened? No. Has England gone back to the gold standard today? No. Did England hesitate to call in ten billion dollars of her war bonds bearing 5 percent interest, to issue new bonds therefore bearing only 3 1/2 percent interest, thereby saving the British Treasury one hundred and fifty million dollars a year in interest alone? No. And let it be recorded that the British bankers helped. Is it not a fact that ever since the year 1909, Great Britain in many ways has advanced further along lines of social security than the United States? Is it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain than in the United States? It is perhaps not strange that the conservative British press has told us with pardonable irony that much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with English reforms that go back ten years or more.

Nearly all Americans are sensible and calm people. We do not get greatly excited nor is our peace of mind disturbed, whether we be businessmen or workers or farmers, by awesome pronouncements concerning the unconstitutionality of some of our measures of recovery and relief and reform. We are not frightened by reactionary lawyers or political editors. All of these cries have been heard before. More than twenty years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were attempting to correct abuses in our national life, the great Chief Justice White said:

“There is great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being the broad highway through which alone true progress may be enjoyed.”

In our efforts for recovery we have avoided on the one hand the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-embracing Government. We have avoided on the other hand the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. The course we have followed fits the American practice of Government – a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs – a practice of courageous recognition of change. I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that “The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

I still believe in ideals. I am not for a return to that definition of Liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of Liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.

RELATED:

FDR saved capitalism in eight days – Slate Magazine

It was Bill Moyers who used the expression “incestuous orgy” in this interview with former head of SIGTARP Neil Barofsky to describe the relationship between major financial firms and the Federal government. That beats the anodyne “revolving door” all day and I hope becomes part of the lexicon for describing the capture of Washington by Wall Street.
Read the Rest…

I thought that Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Convention was disgustingly dishonest, even for him. The simple fact is that both Parties are owned by the Oligarchs and nothing is going to change until the system is reformed. If Romney is so concerned about the “47%” eating and getting medical care, why isn’t he equally worried that government intrusion into private capitalism, orchestrated by a former CEO of Goldman’s, pretending simultaneously to represent the interests of all the Republic was bailing out banksters who weren’t allowed to lose. Hypocrites all.

When it collapsed, due in part to bank-friendly policies that Rubin advocated, he made more than $100 million while others lost everything. “You have to view people in a fair light,” says Phil Angelides, co-chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, who credits Rubin for much of the Clinton-era prosperity. “But on the other side of the ledger are key acts, such as the deregulation of derivatives, or stopping the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives, that in the end weakened our financial system and exposed us to the risk of financial disaster.”

“Nobody on this planet represents more vividly the scam of the banking industry,” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. “He made $120 million from Citibank, which was technically insolvent. And now we, the taxpayers, are paying for it.”

Rethinking Robert Ruben

Political Union must precede economic union, justly and democratically created, not enforced by fiat from Brussels.

Printing fiat Euros won’t solve Europe’s malignant problems.-J.B. Schuettler

ECB President Draghi Reaches for the Bazooka

By Stefan Kaiser in Frankfurt

AFP

A sculpture of the euro symbol stands in front of the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt: The ECB is pulling out the bazooka to save the common currency.

——————————————————–

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has taken a bold step this week to contain the euro crisis. The ECB is now planning unlimited bond purchases in order to prevent an escalation of the euro’s woes. The step marks a fundamental shift in efforts to save the common currency — and comes with plenty of risks.

No Limits

ECB President Draghi Reaches for the Bazooka

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has taken a bold step this week to contain the euro crisis. The ECB is now planning unlimited bond purchases in order to prevent an escalation of the euro’s woes. The step marks a fundamental shift in efforts to save the common currency — and comes with plenty of risks.

From Glenn Greenwald:
“These executives knew that they could take these huge risks and even break laws and pay no real price, and that’s what happened. It’s not just a travesty of justice that we haven’t punished them for past transgressions. The real danger is that we’re continuing to send the signal to the world’s most powerful financial actors that they don’t have any fear of criminal accountability when they commit these obvious crimes.”

On What Has To Happen:  We have to stop the dynamic that produces recurrent intensifying crises. This one devastated the nation. The next one will probably be equivalent to the Great Depression. Part of that is to hold folks accountable, especially the most elite. They did it through fraud – via the “C” Suites – as in the CEO’s and the CFO’s.  The absolute top.

On Fraud: Fraud is using deceit to steal something from someone. So the essence of fraud is I get you to trust me and then I betray that trust, for gain. As a result, there is no more effective acid for destroying trust, than fraud – particularly at the elite levels. And when you destroy trust, you destroy economies, families, democracies.

On The Legacy of Deregulation and The Savings and Loan Experience: It begins in the Carter administration. By the Reagan administration they supported deregulating everything, at the worst possible circumstances… when you had no one looking. The result was a disaster. It was the Savings and Loan Crisis. If it had not been contained, it would have been at least a trillion dollar crisis. It was contained despite the Reagan administration and despite a lot of prominent democrats as well.  So we acted against the president, against a majority of Congress, the Keating 5, and most of the media, what the political scientists considered the third most powerful trade association in America. And by the way, that’s why I have a message of hope. If we could succeed in those circumstances, it’s far easier to succeed now.

On Why There Have Been No Meaningful Criminal Prosecutions: It all starts with the regulators, which is why it never started here – because we have Bush’s wrecking crew, (what Tom Frank called them), in charge. And they stopped making criminal referrals. Our agency, during the Savings and Loan Crisis, made over 10,000 criminal referrals to the FBI. That same agency, in this crisis, made zero criminal referrals. If you don’t get people pointing the way and pointing to the top of the organization, you don’t get effective prosecutions. At the peak of the savings and loan crisis, we had a thousand FBI agents. This crisis has losses 70 times larger than the Savings and Loan Crisis. And the Savings and Loan Crisis, when it happened, was considered the largest financial scandal in U.S. history. So we’re now 70 times worse. And as recently as 2007, we had 120 FBI agents—one-eighth as many FBI agents for a crisis 70 times larger. And they looked not at the big folks, but almost exclusively at the little folks.

On Obama’s Record, How It Was Done in the 1990′s, the FBI’s 2004 Warning, and the Lunacy of Alan Greenspans Setting the Stage for Collapse and then Blaming Government: And we’ve been living for some years in the time of President Obama, and he has done absolutely nothing to reestablish the criminal referral process. And as a result, there are virtually no prosecutions of any elites. When people tell you this crisis couldn’t have been stopped… I will say two things about that: First, these liars’ loans that caused this crisis—and it is overwhelmingly lenders that put the lie in liars’ loans—they were big in 1990 and 1991. We killed them by regular regulatory means and stopped a crisis for a decade. Our successors—I mean, how hard is it to figure out that something called a “liar’s loan” shouldn’t be allowed? This was not tough. The second thing is that the FBI warned, in open testimony in the House of Representatives, picked up by the national media, in September 2004, that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and predicted it would cause a financial crisis—their exact words. And the regulators did nothing, because you had the Alan Greenspans of the world and the Harvey Pitts of the world, who were selected because they were the leading opponents of effective regulation in America. Well, you know, you create a self-fulfilling prophecy of regulatory failure, and then turn around and say, “Well, you can’t trust the government. It fails.”

On Occupy Wall Street: They don’t have official spokespersons with clear plans. They think of that as one of the great strengths of democracy now, right? That things bubble up, and they have different ideas. However, if you look, not just nationwide, but worldwide, you will see some pretty consistent themes developing. And those themes include: we have to deal with the systemically dangerous institutions, the 20 biggest banks that the administration is saying are ticking time bombs, that as soon as one of them fails, we go back into a global crisis. Well, we should fix that. Right? There’s no reason to have institutions that large. That’s a theme. That accountability is a theme, that we should keep—put these felons in prison, and there’s no action on that. That we should get jobs now, and that we should deal with the foreclosure crisis. So those are four very common themes that you can see in virtually any of these protest sites. And they have asked me, for example, to come to New York to talk about some of these things. So, I think, over time, you won’t necessarily have some grand written agenda, but you’ll have, as I say, increasing consensus. And it’s a very broad consensus. It’s not left, it’s not right; it’s not Republican, it’s not Democrat.

On Corporations as People (Citizens United): I’m a lawyer. It’s bad law.  One of the best ways to change this is simply to appoint better justices to the Supreme Court. And this is a five-four decision, so one justice could make an enormous amount of difference.

On the History of Corporations as People: It goes all the way back to the civil right era, civil rights amendments after the Civil War. Those amendments were supposed to protect the freed men and women. They were quickly perverted by the Supreme Court, which is a really ultra-right-wing, pro-slavery group for most of our history, into saying we’re not going to protect the slaves—freed slaves very much, but we are going to protect corporations. And so they interpreted the 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment, in particular, as giving due process rights to corporations as persons. Over time, they extended that under First Amendment cases that said they have not the same rights, but substantial rights that need to be protected in the First Amendment. And now they’ve gone whole hog in Citizens United and produced an atrocity. In a country that was already overwhelmed with corporate influence, they said all the restraints, essentially, are off, and you have almost complete constitutional protection to do anything. And so, the domination by corporations, and in particular by finance, which is now the biggest funder of both parties, is going to grow very substantially, unless we fight back.

On Current Public Policy: It just broke yesterday that affiliates of Bank of America—this is Merrill Lynch—with really bad derivatives, has been allowed by the Federal Reserve to transfer perhaps many billions, or perhaps even trillions—we don’t know—of these derivatives to Bank of America, which is where we come in as a federal guarantee, and it puts us on the hook as the government. This is obscene public policy, the kind that would have never been permitted in our era. And now, under a Democratic president that rails about excess influence and not putting the taxpayers at risk, that’s exactly what they’re doing. So, the story on the regulatory side, we had the leading failed regulator in a Federal Reserve Bank, Geithner, and they promoted him to Treasury secretary. We had the leading failed regulator in America, Bernanke, and he was reappointed. So that—and most of the wrecking crew was left on as temporary folks, so most of the wrecking crew is still in place. We have almost no effective regulation, and it’s showing up. They hid the losses by changing the accounting rules through congressional extortion of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. And these problems don’t go away. They just fester, and they pop up three years later. And they’re going to keep popping up until we start telling the truth. In terms of the student debt, this is a grand disaster in America. The one thing that you want for—almost everybody agrees with—for an international competitiveness, for simply just for our kids, is simply to have free public education, and that anybody with a talent, where it makes sense for them to go to university, should go to university and not be a debt slave for the rest of their lives. So this is insane public policy that is crushing the nation. We can change it at any time. It’s a perfect win-win in a Great Recession, because you want to spend to get out of the recession, anyway. So that’s one of the things we should spend on. And the fact that we’re doing it shows just how insane the policy paralysis has become.

On Geithner, Holder, and Bernanke: Well, Geithner should be fired, because you can fire him. Holder, who is the Attorney General, should be fired. They need to be replaced. The other folks running the banking regulatory agencies can be replaced by effective actings. You don’t have to go through the confirmation process to jumpstart that. Bernanke, you can’t fire, but you can ask for his resignation, and it’s long since time to ask for his resignation. And, you know, you can give him a nice ceremony and have him go.

More on Obama: But that is not where we’re headed, and that is a grave disappointment to folks who thought that—well, someone campaigned saying, “Yes, we can.” And now it’s become, “Well, actually we’re not even going to try,” on the prosecutorial side. Right? So, if he continues this way, it’s conceivable the Republicans will nominate someone so bad that he will be reelected, but he will destroy the effectiveness of his administration and do tremendous damage to the nation.

Bill Black: Fire Geithner, Fire Holder, Ask Bernanke to Resign, and Prosecute CEO’s and CFO’s

21st Century Economics: 1. Rampant fraud and reckless mismanagement in the financial sector, 2. Public bailouts of the worst actors in the financial sector, 3. Private debt and liability imposed on taxpayers, 4. Monetary policy aimed at recapitalizing insolvent and recidivist banks, 5. Promotion of business leaders and policy-makers who are chronically compromised, 6. Conglomeration of Systemically Dangerous Institutions into a more empowered menace.

One-hundred-thirty members of Congress or their families have traded stocks collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars in companies lobbying on bills that came before their committees, a practice that is permitted under current ethics rules, a Washington Post analysis has found.

The lawmakers bought and sold a total of between $85 million and $218 million in 323 companies registered to lobby on legislation that appeared before them, according to an examination of all 45,000 individual congressional stock transactions contained in computerized financial disclosure data from 2007 to 2010.

Members of Congress trade in companies while making laws that affect those same firms

The argument advanced by the historian Philip Bobbitt that a transition is occurring in world politics from the nation state to the market state has long appealed as a snapshot of what is occurring in world politics. It is, as with any thesis about a large subject, far too simple to reflect accurately all that is happening, but it is nevertheless a fine starting point. As we witness the political travails plaguing southern Europe, it gives us a useful analytic to trace the outline of what is happening.

That, at least, is what I used to think. I am starting to wonder if something very different is happening. Several tensions seem to be occurring that suggest that the transition to a “market state” is problematic at best. The first, and most obvious, is the resilience of nationalism, or at least approximations of it. Max Walsh commented in the AFR that the Europe experiment was designed to mitigate the effects of nationalism:

The EC is about buying time. This was the strategy originally favoured by Jean Monnet, the “founding father” of “modern” Europe. Monnet judged that unification between the previously hostile nations of Europe would never be delivered through the ballot box. Instead, he advocated, it could be achieved by incrementally transferring more and more government functions from national to European administrations.

The EC has been successful in increasing its writ by stealth.

The delaying is just papering over the absurdity of enforcing a union that does not have underlying cultural support, yet purports to be “democratic”. As the historian Anthony Beevor points out the rise of nationalism in Greece – anti Nazi slogans against Merckel, for example — is a gloomy portent. Europe is already falling apart and likely to revert to nationalism of some sort:

“The great European dream was to diminish militant nationalism,” he says. “We would all be happy Europeans together. But we are going to see the old monster of militant nationalism being awoken when people realise how little control their politicians have. We are already seeing political disintegration in Europe.

Finance and the Mafia State