Ireland and the EU: the groupie at the rock star’s hotel room

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Ireland and the EU: the groupie at the rock star’s hotel room

February 29th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

This is my column from Monday’s Irish Daily Mail. Scots who are leaning towards independence from the United Kingdom might want to read it, to learn from Ireland’s experience how little influence a small member state has in the EU.

by Mary Ellen Synon
27 February 2012

On Friday Enda Kenny went off to see the Italian prime minister at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome. Big deal. I’ve done it, too, walked through that enfilade of doors, under the vast frescoed ceilings, and into the prime minister’s office for 20 or 30 minutes of face time.

Two differences: different years, different Italian prime ministers. Third difference: I had the Italian prime minister to myself (one aide, one translator with us), and the piece I wrote for my newspaper in London was circulated around the world. It was quoted by the Italian national newspaper Corriere della Sera. Mr Kenny also had face time with the Italian prime minister and news of his visit went all over – oh, dear. Just all over the newspapers of Ireland.

When yesterday I asked a Milanese specialist in EU affairs how much coverage the Taoiseach’s visit received in the Italian press, his answer was: ‘I didn’t know he’d been to see Monti.’ Then I sent an email to the EU correspondent of one of the Italian national newspapers, asking the same question. Reply: ‘No news of your p.m.’ I did however manage to find brief mentions of the visit on the Italian wire service ANSA.

The point of that being – well, the point besides the point that maybe the Taoiseach needs tips from me on how to publicise a visit, but I’m not in the public relations business, not yet anyway – that our Taoiseach is internationally insignificant.

Which is obvious to most of us, but Mr Kenny uses the government jet to pose as if he has influence. He reminds me of a Donald Trump line about the former US Secretary of State, the ineffective Condoleezza Rice: ‘She waves. She gets off a plane. She waves. She sits down with some dictator. They do the camera shot. She waves again. She gets back on the plane. No deal ever happens.’

With Mr Kenny, no influence is ever apparent. It didn’t have to be like this, of course. If this Taoiseach, and the last Taoiseach, had stood up for Ireland in Brussels, the leader of our Government would now be treated with more respect. The EU elite would have realised they were dealing with a mouse willing to roar.

Or as I like to think of it, a rat willing to gnaw. Do you know, for example, just how much respect rats get among West African aviators, given the damage one rodent can do to the wiring of one Boeing? For Boeing, read European Project.

Instead, the insignificant Mr Kenny makes the rounds of the big players in Europe like a fan follows a rock band on tour. He waits at the stage door to snap a picture of himself with them on his iPhone. But no matter how many pictures the fan manages to get — ‘Look, here’s another one of me with half of Coldplay!’ – Chris Martin isn’t ever going to take notice of him at all.

Example: Mr Kenny had dinner with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday night, which sounds important, except he had to share the visit with the prime ministers of Latvia and the Czech Republic. I defy more than one in a thousand of you to name either p.m. if you are not Latvian or Czech.

What the Chancellor was doing was dealing with the euro-midgets in one evening. ‘Tick, done, three more off the To Do list. Now, Wolfgang, back to real work. Get me Tim Geithner on the phone.’

Mr Kenny told us he was there to make the case to the Chancellor for the need for a bigger firewall in the eurozone. And did he persuade her? Answer from the Taoiseach: she listened ‘carefully.’ Which sounds like she uttered no word of agreement at all. And since Mrs Merkel has already had several ear-fulls from US Treasury Secretary Geithner, along with plenty of others including the bosses of the IMF and ECB, about a bigger firewall, it is inconceivable anything Mr Kenny would say would carry any weight in the argument.

After Mr Kenny had his snap with Mrs Merkel on the Government iPhone, he flew to Rome to see Mario Monti.

Now, there are two reasons why no Irish politician ought to be spending time with Mr Monti. First, the man was outrageously parachuted into office by the EU elite when they wanted the democratically-elected Silvio Berlusconi out of office. The problem was, Mr Berlusconi would not take orders from them. Unlike Irish prime ministers, Mr Berlusconi did not feel it was his duty to capitulate to demands from Brussels.

I know, Mr Berlusconi was sexually sleazy, but the Italian voters put him in office anyway. His sexual antics were never much of a secret to any voter, and yes, now you ask, I was living in Rome during the last Italian general election.

When the EU wanted Mr Berlusconi out, the EU and the ECB rattled the bond markets enough to make the parliamentarians in Rome panic. With the (truly shocking) connivance of the president of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano, the EU managed to have Mario Monti, who was not even a member of the parliament but conveniently was a two-term former European Commissioner (‘one of us’), and who had not been elected to anything at all, made into a Senator by the president. Then Mr Monti was dropped into the office of prime minister. He formed a cabinet which included not one elected individual.

This was no change of government, this was a Brussels-directed coup. If our Taoiseach respected democracy, he would never shake hands with the unelected Mario Monti.

But there is even more reason than that for an elected Irish leader to avoid the Italian anti-democrat Monti. One of the greatest threats to our economic survival – which is to say, our 12.5 percent corporation tax — is the plan by the euro-elite to have corporation tax rates ‘harmonised.’ The pressure for this has been building for years. And it was Mario Monti who set off the pressure

It started when José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, asked Mr Monti in October 2009 to write a study of the single market. I covered Mr Monti’s plans in this column soon after: ‘It is no surprise to learn that the study will be nothing but an excuse for the former commissioner to showcase the “big idea” he now shares with the commission president: that the EU must suppress its competitive and liberal policies in order to insure social “redistribution.”’

How to do this? The Economist noted that ‘Mr Monti talks of curbing tax competition between EU countries,’ so that government can pay for social policies even while they try to fix their battered public finances. ‘This could mean agreed minimum tax rates, he suggests, notably on capital and corporate profits.’

But Mr Monti’s passion for harmonising taxes across the EU was evident years before this. In 1998, he called for the harmonisation of tax rates on VAT, energy and excise duties.

At the same time, as Christopher Booker and Richard North note in their book on the history of the EU, ‘The Great Deception,’ Yves-Thibault de Silguy, then the commissioner for monetary union, predicted that tax harmonisation would ultimately lead to EU-wide rates of income tax. Just look at the lurch towards centralised fiscal power the new inter-governmental treaty gives, and you will see that both Mr Monti’s plans for tax harmonisation, and Mr de Silguy’s, are firming up nicely.

The line the Taoiseach’s office put out on Friday was that Mr Kenny and Mr Monti were discussing the firewall and how the EU had to have more policies for growth. Mr Kenny has influence on neither, so you can reckon Mr Monti cared no more for what the Taoiseach had to say than did Chancellor Merkel the day before.

No, I’d say the only thing Mr Monti was interested in during his meeting with Mr Kenny was sizing him up for how much resistance he would offer to Mr Monti’s big idea on tax harmonisation. Answer, obvious to Mr Monti: on the past form of Irish prime ministers, none at all.

Or put it another way. When a groupie turns up at a rock star’s hotel room, what do you thinks the rock star reckons he can do to the groupie?

Note to readers: this is my last post, as I’m now going to be doing more journalism and less blogging.

Thanks to all the thousands of people who have visited this blog since it started in 2008.

Source: http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk