Tweet of the Day

So many members of the Cabinet ought to resign that none of them can. It's like the Three Stooges trying to get through a door.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) November 7, 2017

Yeah, pretty much.

Tweet of the Day

Another week, another round of #Brexit negotiations. Here's a handy guide for EU officials struggling to understand their UK counterparts. 😉 pic.twitter.com/1WVD2Ccxjc

— 🇪🇺Martin Mycielski (@mycielski) October 30, 2017

I've been told about similar cultural issues with various cultures.

H/T Links 10/31/17 | naked capitalism

I Have Got to Admire the Ingenuity Here

In response to the Teutonic sado-monetarism Italy has taken to using tax credits to allow the government to pay for some of the services that it needs.

The interesting point here is that they are a very short distance from actually creating money without coming hat in hand to the European Central Bank (ECB)

If the Italians take their program one more step forward, and they are creating money:

Italy is experimenting with giving tax-cuts to its citizens in exchange for public services―such as pulling weeds and cutting grass. Wow. What an amazing idea! The government issues a tax credit, and uses it to pay a citizen in exchange for the citizen’s services to the government. The government could even make this arrangement more formal by printing the tax credits on pieces of paper called “LIRIES” (or something like that) and paying for the weed-whacking services with this “cash.” That way the citizen who’s earned the “LIRIES” has the option of using them as payment to another citizen (who’d also like a tax-cut) for, say, a bag of potatoes. So, the first citizen pulls some weeds, gets paid in “cash” and then uses the “cash” to buy her dinner. If you thought about it, you could possibly run an entire economy in this fashion. The only thing you’d have to worry about, of course, is that the government might run out of the tax-credits it needs to pay the citizens to do the work! If that happened, where could the government possibly get more tax-credits? Could it collect tax-credits as “taxes”? Could it borrow them from all the street-sweepers and weed-whackers who’ve earned them? (In which case it would have to pay “tax-credit interest”―which just seems to exacerbate the problem!) Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about that one. But in the meantime, doesn’t this mean that any Eurozone country has the option to stay IN the Eurozone while at the same time operating its own local economy using its own local “sovereign” currency?

In a followup, it is explained how this can be used to essentially create money:

As I said, Italy, is now experimenting with paying for public services with tax credits. Presumably, this is happening because Italy doesn’t possess enough Euros to pay its citizens to provide all the goods and services needed to maintain and run the public sector of its social economy. And Italy can’t “create” the additional Euros it needs because that prerogative is the exclusive right of the EU Central Bank which Italy, even as a sovereign member of the EU, has no control over. But, as the news article explains, Italy still needs to have the grass mowed and the weeds pulled in its public gardens. So it has decided (out of desperation, the article implies) to pay the gardeners with tax-credits. The gardeners are willing to do the work in exchange for the government’s tax-credits, because it means the Euros they earn (in other ways) can then be used to purchase goods and services rather than for paying their taxes. So, in practical terms, it is “just like” getting paid in Euros.

This, in fact, is way more interesting than it seems. In fact, it might even be mind-expanding! Here’s why:

Presumably, the tax-credit payments described take the form of notations on the gardeners’ tax account. An hour’s worth of weeding is noted as 15 Euros worth of extinguished taxes. If the gardener has a tax liability of, say, €3750, her taxes would be completely paid after providing 250 hours of weeding and pruning. After that, obviously, she’d have no more incentive to provide any services in exchange for the tax-credits. So the amount of services Italy can obtain in this fashion is directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens.

It would be possible, however, to structure the tax-credit payments in another way which would have a very different outcome. Instead of making the payment as a credit notation on a citizen’s tax account, the Italian government could issue paper tax-credits and pay them to the citizens for their gardening services. To be specific, this would be a piece of “official” paper, signed with an important signature, on which was printed something like the following:

The Sovereign Italian Government promises the bearer of this paper ONE EURO of credit on taxes owed to the Sovereign Italian Government.

………

Now we have to ask an important question: Is the amount of services Italy can obtain by issuing and “spending” its paper tax-credits still directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens? In other words, if every Italian citizen theoretically has received enough PTCs to pay their taxes with—either having received them directly from the government for providing public services, or having received them from other citizens in exchange for lasagna dinners—will the citizens’ willingness to exchange real goods and services in exchange for the PTCs come to a halt?

Crucially, the answer is No. This is because the act of “embodying” the tax-credits in exchangeable pieces of paper has given the PTCs a usefulness in addition to their usefulness as tax payments: This additional usefulness, of course, is the ability to use them to buy goods and services from other Italian citizens and businesses. Thus, the number of paper tax-credits in “circulation” could vastly exceed, at any given time, the total actual tax liabilities of the Italian citizenry. The PTCs would continue to be accepted for lasagna dinners, because the Trattoria owners know they can use the PTCs they receive to subsequently buy Italian shoes and motorcycles— in addition to using them to pay their taxes.

It will no doubt have dawned on most every reader that what we’ve just created is “money.” Specifically, we’ve created what is called “fiat money”—which happens to be the kind of money the world has been using now for the past half century (ever since the U.S. formally abandoned the gold-standard in 1971). Having thus conjured a rudimentary image of fiat-money to life we should quickly make some important (and perhaps startling) observations about it.

………

Having made these observations, it appears the Italian government has stumbled on an actual solution to the “austerity” it has been forced to impose on itself by the European Union. Except we must now confront the fact that the rules of the EU do not ALLOW Italy to issue and spend its own sovereign fiat currency! The only “money” Italy is allowed to use is the Euro—and the only way the Italian government can obtain Euros is either by collecting them as taxes from its citizens, or by borrowing them from the European Central Bank, which has the exclusive prerogative of issuing them. And these methods of obtaining Euros to spend are falling short of what Italy needs to pay its citizens to do. So…. Italy has decided to pay its citizens with tax-credits, and then (why not?) with paper tax-credits. And then, presumably, the EU says, “Whoa, hold on here! It looks like you are printing your own money, which is not allowed by our rules!”

While I don't think that the Italians would have the guts to take this to the next level right now, but this would a good way to deal with the current problems with the Euro.  (Not as good as getting the Germans out of the Euro, but a pretty close 2^nd)

If you are paying attention, going the full Magilla on this is actually an application of MMT, and the British city of Bristol has been trying something rather similar with the Bristol Pound, which in accordance with Modern Monetary Theory, can be used to pay local taxes.

It really is fascinating.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Oh Snap!

In response to reports that the EU scientific report on the safety of its glyphosate (RoundUp) weedkiller, where large blocks of text were copied and pasted from Monsanto application for re-approval, the European parliament held hearings to investigate whether or not the agricultural giant exerted undue influence on the process.

Monsanto refused to attend the meeting, so banned Monsanto and its lobbyists from the European parliament:

Monsanto lobbyists have been banned from entering the European parliament after the multinational refused to attend a parliamentary hearing into allegations of regulatory interference.

It is the first time MEPs have used new rules to withdraw parliamentary access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings.

Monsanto officials will now be unable to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or use digital resources on parliament premises in Brussels or Strasbourg.

While a formal process still needs to be worked through, a spokesman for the parliament’s president Antonio Tajani said that the leaders of all major parliamentary blocks had backed the ban in a vote this morning.

“One has to assume it is effective immediately,” he said.

I'm a pessimist, so I expect that, after aggressive American lobbying, the EU will re-approve the chemical, but I'd really love to see them get slapped down.

And Then There's the German Elections………

The neoNazi AfD is now a part of the German parliament for the first time cince WWII, the so-called center-left SPD had its worst showing since that guy with the funny mustache abruptly left the Chancellorship over 70 years ago.

Also, the both "center" parties had their worst showing since before 1950.

On the other side of the populist spectrum, die Linke (the Left) which was already in the Bundestag picked up a few seats, as did the Greens, and the (kinda libertarian) FDP, which got back into parliament.

When people wonder why the "Center Left" in Europe is in trouble, they need to understand that it no longer exists.

The parties that were "Center-Left" in the 1960s and 1970s have decided that their defining position is unequivocal and unconditional support for the European Project, and the  European Project is a fundamentally reactionary program.

This is why when the SDP was in power, its leader introduced "Agenda 2010", with the justification that the European project demands it, which involved:

• Tax cuts.
• Cuts to unemployment benefits.
• Cuts to general social welfare programs.
• Cuts in pension benefits.
• Deliberate downward pressure on wages. 
• Reduced labor regulations.

It also resulted in an increase in poverty, and falling wages relative to GDP.

As is normal, the rising tide did not lift all boats, just the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting the shaft.

What it means is that the "Center-Left" is now about forcing down wages, tax cuts for millionaires, throwing poor people out in the street, and sucking up to media moguls.

The "Center-Left" has consumed itself on the altar of neoliberal dogma.

On the bright side, it appears that a bit of self immolation is occurring with the fascist AfD as well:

Germany’s rightwing nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland, in celebratory mode after coming third in elections, was delivered a bombshell by its co-leader when she announced she would not sit with the party in the Bundestag.
What the stunning success of AfD means for Germany and Europe | Cas Mudde
Read more

Frauke Petry walked out of a press conference on Monday morning at which the party leadership marvelled at its success, having secured nearly 13% of the vote and 94 seats in the federal parliament.

The departure of one of the AfD’s most prominent figures illustrates the splits in the party despite its attempts to show a united front during the election campaign.

Petry, who was on the moderate wing of the party, saw her role as that of uniting the AfD. But she has earned scorn from emboldened rightwing nationalists who have increasingly sidelined their opponents.

This is what happened to Ukip after Brexit.  It's like a dog that has finally caught a car:  The racist right doesn't know what to do next.

A Good Explaination of the Brexit

At its core, the Brexit vote was a political act, not an economic one, despite the arguments made by both supporters and opponents of the UK leaving the EU:

Defending Brexit is not the easiest thing to do at the moment when we have a government hell bent on delivering the worst case scenario. It also doesn't help that the Brexit groupthink produces pretty feeble economic justifications rather than looking at the issue as a whole. Fighting on the enemy's turf is always a loser and the mainstream Brexiter economic justifications are collapsing. 

I have argued for a long time now that the economy is a secondary concern - and as far as that goes, the aim of the Brexit process should be to minimise what is bound to be economically stressful. Something this government is failing to do.

But then, I repeat, this isn't an economic question and it never was. It is political, cultural and constitutional. It is said that Brexit has divided the nation but in fact all it has done is exposed a deep cultural chasm that was not being addressed by the status quo. There is a gulf of misunderstanding between the factions and it's time we dragged it all out for examination.

And then comes this bit, which I found particularly informative:

When we look at that we find that it stems from a collapse of trust in UK institutions. And that can hardly be a surprise. Every major increment in EU membership has been done by subterfuge and deception. Direct consent has never been sought and our interactions in the EU have been yet more deception. Cameron's phantom veto and the bogus attempts at reform were quite obvious pieces of political theatre from an establishment with no regard to the wishes of the public.

I think that this critique, when taken generally, is also at the core of the right-wing populist movements throughout the western world.

People feel that the sales pitch for increasing global integration have been dishonest, and I'm inclined to agree.

An Inevitable Result of Teutonic Sado-Monetarism

It looks like support is growing in Italy for establishing a parallel currency as an alternative to the Euro:

There have been some amazing Italian inventions over the centuries. The newspaper. The pistol. The radio. The stock exchange. The motorway. And who could overlook those staples of modern life, jeans (originally from the French word for Genoa: genes) or the pizzeria.

Few other countries have contributed quite as much to creating the world we live in.

Right now, Italy could be on the brink of another major innovation. A parallel currency to run alongside the euro. It already had the backing of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and the parties supporting it are steadily gaining ground in the polls.

Could it work? The mainstream economic establishment will no doubt heap scorn on the idea. And yet, in reality, a parallel currency could provide an elegant exit from the euro, maintaining some of the advantages of the single currency, while freeing the country from endless recession. If it ever gets off the ground, Italy could quickly become one of the most attractive economies in the world.

It is hard to find any words to describe Italy’s experiment with merging its currency with Germany, France and the rest of the eurozone other than “dismal failure.” Since it adopted the euro, Italy’s average annual growth rate has been zero, according to calculations by the Bruegel Institute. You read that correctly. Absolutely nothing, over almost two decades.
………

Italy’s unemployment rate is a crippling 11%, the highest of Europe’s three biggest economies, and youth unemployment is a scary 35%. The national debt has climbed to a giddy 133% of gross domestic product, not because the government is especially extravagant, but because that’s what happens in a zero-growth economy.

I've always said that the best way to fix the Euro is to kick the Boche out of the common currency, but a parallel currency as a way to create infrastructure for leaving the Euro is not an unreasonable tactic for dealing with the deep problems of the Euro as a currency.

Fasten Your Seatbelts, Europe

Because European regulators just shut down two Italian banks:

Friday, in another sign that the eurozone financial system remains vulnerable even as the economy improves.

The central bank said in a statement that Veneto Banca and Banca Popolare di Vicenza, both based in northern Italy, had failed or were likely to fail because they did not have enough capital to meet regulatory requirements.

They become the second and third banks to be declared effectively dead by the central bank, which acquired power to supervise eurozone banks at the end of 2014.

The first, earlier this month, was Banco Popular, Spain’s fifth biggest bank.

Shareholders of the two Italian banks will lose their money, as will investors in so-called junior bonds that are intended to absorb losses first.

But deposits in the bank will be protected, as will investors in so-called senior bonds.

After 3 years, 3 banks in a month.

I'm wondering what is going to happen when (and it's when, not if) the ECB actually tries to down a German bank.

Good Point

In discussing Brexit, Ian Welsh notes that it presents a conundrum for Labour, "You Can’t Stay in the EU or Single Market And Be For Labour’s Manifesto."

The EU is structured in an aggressively Neoliberal framework, and as such, is incompatible social democracy, which is why support of the EU by the left is fundamentally self destructive.

Money quote:

The EU is a barrier against horrible things the Tories want to do, but it is a roadblock against basic social-democratic policies that Corbyn wants.

One need only look at what has happened to Greece, where an entire country was sacrificed on the alter of neoliberalism to know this.

The EU can work, and the EU can progress, but it needs a healthy dose of fairness and democracy to do so, and the current structure, which cares more about  Deutsche Bank than it does about people, and sees democratic concerns regarding the EU expansion as something to be subverted.

It's a truly toxic mix.

The Germans are Getting Nervous

The Germans don't want a Brexit, but if it happens, they want to be sure that it is painful for the British, and they also want to be sure that it won't upset the existing political consensus.

I think that the disaster for Theresa May, particularly in context of the German dogma for austerity, has shaken the German establishment, which is why Wolfgang Schäuble is now talking about how all will be forgiven if Britain decides to forgo leaving the EU:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the U.K. would be welcomed back to the European Union if the British decided they no longer wanted to quit the bloc.

French President Emmanuel Macron also said the “door is open” for a return, but warned that it would be much harder to achieve once negotiations have started.

In his first public comments on the matter since the U.K. election, Schaeuble said that “it’s up to the British government to take their own decisions” on Brexit. He said he had discussed the surprise election outcome with Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond the day after the vote, and concluded that “we have to leave them some days” to decide on the way forward.

Asked if the government might reverse its decision to quit the EU, he said it “would not be helpful” to speculate whether that will happen or not. “The British government has said we will stay with the Brexit,” Schaeuble said in the interview during Bloomberg’s G-20 Germany Day. “We take the decision as a matter of respect. But if they wanted to change their decision, of course, they would find open doors.”

I think that they are afraid that if Brexit happens, and Labour ends up in charge, it won't be a complete clusterf%$#, and could lead to other countries to pulling back from the EU.

How Can You Govern a Country Which Has Two Hundred and Forty-Six Varieties of Cheese?*

Emnanuel Macron defeated Marine le Pen in the French Presidential elections, and it wasn't even close:

The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron has won the French presidency in a decisive victory over the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, and vowed to unite a divided and fractured France.

Macron, 39, a former economy minister who ran as a “neither left nor right” independent promising to shake up the French political system, took 65.1% to Le Pen’s 34.9%, according to initial projections from early counts.
………

Despite the wide margin of the final result, Le Pen’s score nonetheless marked a historic high for the French far right. Even after a lacklustre campaign that ended with a calamitous performance in the final TV debate, she was projected to have taken almost 11m votes, double that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, when he reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The anti-immigration, anti-EU Front National’s supporters asserted that the party had a central place as an opposition force in France.

Turnout was the lowest in more than 40 years. Almost one-third of voters chose neither Macron nor Le Pen, with 12 million abstaining and 4.2 million spoiling ballot papers.

In 2002, le Pen pere got 17.8% of the vote, so this is an improvement, but still a blow-out.

It's a loss, but it is a major improvement, and she picked up 15% from what she got in the first round, as versus a roughly 1% that Jean le Pen gained in the 2002 2^nd round.

I do not think that this trend has reached its high water mark, this will continue until the EU fixes some very serious problem:

• The EU remains an anti-democratic institution, and creating meaningful representative democratic functions.
• It remains in the thrall of neoliberal economics.
• German hegemony,  with the associated faulty German economics, and German punitive morality, is a petri dish for xenophobic nationalism among the rest of the EU.

If these flaws are not addressed, I expect to see the end of the Euro, and possibly the end of the EU.

As I've noted before,  many of the deep problems in the EU come from Germany's preeminent position in it.

^*It's a quote from Charles de Gaulle. He was talking about France.

Political Panic in France

L'évolution de l'ensemble des sondages, avec le dernier @opinionway :#Macron 22,4%#LePen 21,7%#Fillon 20,8%#Mélenchon 19,1% pic.twitter.com/J9XXVMa7WD

— mathieu gallard (@mathieugallard) April 17, 2017

Fasten Your Seat Belts

The French Presidential elections were predicted to be pretty ordinary.

François Holland, being about as popular as proverbial turd in the punch bowl, decided not to stand for reelection, and did so fairly late in the process, which left the "Socialists" in a lurch, and so it was expected that the right wing Gaullists would field a candidate which would face a runoff against the racist-nativist National Front, (FN) which has made it to the runoff election with alarming regularity in French Presidential elections in the past few decades.

Unfortunately for the Gaullists, they nominated François Fillon, who in addition to being fairly far right by the standards of French politics turns out to have made a habit of employing his wife and children in no show jobs, for which he is under formal criminal investigation.

As a result,  Emmanuel Macron, a former Economic Minister under the Socialist government, who was instrumental in implementing the anti-worker Neoliberal reforms for Holland, effectively sealing the current President's political fate, and is running under what is best described as a self-founded vanity party,  En Marche !, (with the space before the "!") became the favorite for contesting the runoff against Marine Le Pen of the FN.

So far, it's pretty normal:  You've swapped one stooge of the banksters for another, and they are virtually assured of beating Le Pen in the runoff.

Then something funny happened:  A former Socialist who left the party because he felt that they had sold out their principles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon made a charge in the polls, and HE is closely associated with the movement known as the "Left Front" in Europe.

As you can see from the polling numbers, we now have all 4 of the candidates within the margin of error, and Mélenchon appears to significant momentum.

The prospect of having a Euroskeptic racist facing a Euroskeptic leftist facing each other in the Presidential runoff is freaking out the establishment throughout the EU:

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In the latest plot twist in France’s highly contentious presidential election, Mélenchon — an outspoken 65-year-old leftist who often appears on the campaign trail via hologram and who has pitched his proposal to nationalize France’s biggest banks and renegotiate its relationship with the European Union via free Internet games and YouTube videos — is now soaring in the polls. With less than two weeks before the election, his meteoric and unexpected rise is already sending jitters through financial markets and shock waves through an increasingly anxious electorate.

For months, analysts have likened the upcoming French election to “Europe’s Stalingrad,” a crucial turning point that will determine the future of a country and a continent. But while commentators worldwide have focused on the steady rise of the far-right, fiercely anti-immigrant National Front of Marine Le Pen, few have paid any attention to the leftist fringe of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has vaulted into the picture in the past week and who shares with Le Pen the desire to drastically alter France’s relationship with the E.U., the 28-state bloc it once designed.

Mélenchon is running as the candidate of the Unbowed France political movement, in an alliance with the French Communist Party. The latest polls show him narrowly trailing Emmanuel Macron, long seen as the favorite, and Le Pen, expected to qualify for the final round of the two-round vote but to lose to Macron in the end. In the final days of a truly unprecedented campaign, Mélenchon’s unexpected surge is a reminder that radical change is in the air and that its extremist apostles — on the right or the left — may soon hold power.

Some have reacted with panic: Investors have begun frantically selling off French bonds, while the head of France’s largest trade union has decried what he described as Mélenchon's “rather totalitarian vision.”

………

Perhaps more than any of the other candidates, it is Mélenchon who best represents 2017’s potential rupture with history, or at least the status quo. Central to his platform is the promise to abolish France’s Fifth Republic, the system of government established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958.

What Mélenchon detests in this style of government is its monarchical presidency — designed for de Gaulle himself — which can dissolve parliament at will and is subject to few checks and balances. Mélenchon has pledged to found what he calls the “Sixth Republic,” a vision that would “take us out of this presidential regime, notably with proportionality in all elections.”

It is an idea that resonates widely — even among those who do not necessarily support Mélenchon’s other more radical proposals, including taking France out of NATO and imposing a 100 percent tax on all income earned over 400,000 euros ($425,000).

Just how freaked out is the establishment?

They are so freaked out that the nominal front runner, Emmanuel Macron, has been forced to tell the truth about the EU and the Germans.

He is explicitly saying that Berlin is gaming the system as a predatory exporter:

Centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron called for a “rebalancing” of Germany’s trade surplus in an interview with French and German media published Monday.

Even as he touted strong relationships with the German political leaders, Macron used the interview with Ouest-France newspaper and Germany’s Funke newspapers to call out German trade policy for hurting the Continent’s economy.

“Germany benefits from the imbalances within the eurozone and achieves very high trade surpluses,” he said. “Those aren’t a good thing either for Germany or for the economy of the eurozone. There should be a rebalancing.”

Macron, an independent, is facing fresh pressure from anti-EU candidates in the final week before the presidential election’s first-round vote. He has been running neck-and-neck with nationalist Marine Le Pen, ahead of three other candidates. However, recent polls suggest a surge for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who rails against Europe from the left.

This is true, of course, but it is also as close to heresy as you can get from the any EU supporter.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is to inflict austerity on the ordinary folk, and then wait for the confidence fairy to make growth magically appear, all while capital and finance f%$# the bottom 90% of society.

If it ends up a race between Le Pen and Mélenchon, I fully expect the powers that be to pull for Le Pen, because for them, racism is preferable to economic justice.

You Gotta Read This

It's an article on, "12 people, things that ruined the EU.

It starts with Zeus's rape of Europa, but my favorite item is number 2:

2. Edith Cresson

Going straight from Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus, to good old Edith Cresson may seem a bit of a stretch. But as a strong contender for the title of worst European commissioner ever, the Frenchwoman does have a claim to fame, too. In the early 1990s, Cresson was a French prime minister who quickly fell out of favor and was forced to resign after less than a year in office. That apparently qualified her for a high-powered job in Brussels. As commissioner for science, research and development, Cresson famously paid her dentist to be a scientific adviser. In 1999, allegations of fraud intended to target Cresson ended up bringing down the entire Commission. To put it crudely: Cresson did to the EU what Zeus did to Europa.

Read it all.

It may not mean anything about the future of the EU, but it is a hoot.

The Balloon Has Gone Up

Theresa May has officially begun the Brexit process:

Theresa May has told parliament that she accepts Brexit will carry consequences for the UK, as a letter delivered to Brussels began a two-year countdown to Britain’s departure from the EU.
The prime minister made a speech on triggering article 50 minutes after the European council president, Donald Tusk, confirmed he had received notification. He declared that “the UK has delivered Brexit” nine months after a bruising referendum campaign.

“We understand that there will be consequences for the UK of leaving the EU. We know that we will lose influence over the rules that affect the European economy. We know that UK companies that trade with the EU will have to align with rules agreed by institutions of which we are no longer a part, just as we do in other overseas markets. We accept that,” she said.

A number of MPs congratulated the prime minister on the tone of her letter to Tusk, which stressed Britain’s commitment to the continent as a close friend and ally. But others accused her of issuing a “blatant threat” to withdraw security cooperation if the EU27 fail to deliver on a trade agreement. The letter suggests that the government hopes to roll the separate issues together, claiming no deal will mean WTO rules but also that “our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened”. May’s spokesman repeatedly insisted placing security and trade relations alongside each other in the letter to Tusk was not intended as a threat. “It’s a simple statement of fact that if we leave the EU without a deal, then the arrangements we have as part of our EU membership will lapse,” he said.

This is going to be a bumpy ride.

The expectations on the British side are somewhat self contradictory, and there are elements of the EU establishment (and not just Wolfgang Schäuble) who want to make the UK an abject lesson for anyone else who is considering either an EU or Euro zone exit.

This is going to be nasty divorce ugly.

Headline of the Day

Nicola Sturgeon Announces Plans to Rebuild Hadrian's Wall, and England Is Going to Pay for It

It's from News Hump, a parody site, but it is a wonderful mocking of the Brexit, the Scottish independence movement, and Donald Trump.

Well done.

The Good News, Wilders Loses. The Bad News, the Germans and Belgians are Still Your Neighbors

Geert Wilders and his right wing racist Party for Freedom massively under-performed pre election polls:

The Dutch political establishment appeared Wednesday to fend off a challenge from anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders, according to initial vote counts, a victory in a closely watched national election that heartened centrist leaders across Europe who are fearful of populist upsets in their own nations.

The result was embraced by other leaders inside and outside the Netherlands as a major blow to anti-immigrant populism, breaking a streak of disruption that started with the Brexit vote and continued with the election of Donald Trump, a skeptic of European integration. Instead, as the Netherlands’ famed tulip season gets underway, Prime Minister Mark Rutte will remain in office as he tries to form a coalition.

The vote in the prosperous trading nation was seen as a bellwether for France and Germany, which head to the polls in the coming months and have also been shaken by fierce anti-immigrant sentiment.

Wilders nose-dived in recent weeks after topping opinion polls for most of the past 18 months, as Dutch voters appeared to turn away from an election message that described some Moroccans as “scum” and called for banning the Koran and shuttering mosques.

Wednesday is “an evening where the Netherlands, after ­Brexit, after the American elections, said no to the wrong kind of populism,” Rutte told a cheering crowd in The Hague. He said he had already spoken to other European leaders to accept their congratulations.

Note that Wilders STILL picked up a seat or two, and there is another story to this election:

With 84 percent of the voting districts reporting results early Thursday, Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy remained the largest party, but it was on track to lose nearly a quarter of its seats in parliament, forcing the prime minister to form a new, broader coalition across the political spectrum. His coalition partner, the center-left Labor Party, was wiped out as a political force, a punishing blow in response to cooperation with a longtime rival that had a sharply different approach to the core issues of working citizens.

(emphasis mine)

This is something that happens time and time again:  The "Center Left" gets wiped out, and to my mind, there is a simple reason for this:  as the consensus has moved rightward with the general adoption of the so called "Washington Consensus," the Center-Left has followed this consensus, and under those conditions, it can simply not deliver.

This is worse in Europe, because the EU, and even more so the Euro, are not just conservative institutions, but reactionary institutions, which favor capital over labor and finance over all, and the mainstream "left" in Europe is so wedded to the EU that they are effectively political conservatives.

To paraphrase Harry S Truman, people will chose a real conservative over a fake one every day of the week.

My hope is that that the far left prevails rather than the far right, but betting on the left getting its sh%$ together is a sucker bet. and history shows that the center right and center left will hitch their wagon to fascists before they partner with the real left..

Snark of the Day

May to send Article 50 letter strapped to a bulldog in a Spitfire

—The Daily Mash

They owe me a screen wipe.

It's Official

The objections of the Lords were turned back, and Parliament has authorized Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with a largely free hand:

Parliament has passed the Brexit bill, paving the way for the government to trigger Article 50 so the UK can leave the European Union.

Peers backed down over the issues of EU residency rights and a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal after their objections were overturned by MPs.

The bill is expected to receive Royal Assent and become law on Tuesday.

This means Theresa May is free to push the button on withdrawal talks - now expected in the last week of March.

This is not going to the path to prosperity that the Brexit supporters, nor the disaster that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris hope it to be, but will be a clusterf%$#, and it is going to be a mess.

In 5 years it will have sorted itself out, and, and other EU members will see that the UK isn't a post apocalyptic wasteland, and they might consider edging for the door, particularly if the Germans continue to run things.

He's Gonna Fold Like Overcooked Broccoli

Greek PM Alex Tsipras is insisting that he will go no further with austerity.

While I agree with his sentiments, Angela Merkel and her Evil Minions^™ have turned Greece into the world's largest debtor's prison, Tsipras has been saying this for years now, and when push comes to shove, he folds:

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras dug in against creditor demands for more pension cuts and tax increases before a meeting of euro-area finance ministers to unblock the country’s bailout review.

“There is no way we are going to legislate even one euro more than what was agreed in the bailout,” Tsipras said in an interview with Efimerida ton Syntakton, to mark the two-year anniversary since he was elected on an anti-austerity platform. “The demand to legislate more measures, and contingent ones, no less, is alien not just to the Greek Constitution but to democratic norms.”

Euro-area finance ministers will discuss Greece when they meet in Brussels on Thursday, with Greece and officials representing the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the European Stability Mechanism and the International Monetary Fund locked in a stand-off over how to complete the country’s second bailout review, now a year behind schedule. The IMF, in particular, views the projections shared by Greece and the European creditors that the country can reach a primary budget surplus of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2018 as too optimistic.

The IMF will make noises about the unsustainability of the program, but will then break its own rules and go along.

The Greeks will protest, and then capitulate.

Angela Merkel will use her "toughness" as a cudgel in the next round of elections.

The Greek people will continue to suffer.

Bet on it.

I Wonder How Brussels Will Coerce the Voters in Italy

Matteo Renzi, the latest technocrat Prime Minister to take power after the EU deposed Silvio Berlusconi, bet his career on a referendum on government changes in Italy and lost:

Matteo Renzi was roundly defeated in a referendum to change Italy’s constitution, marking a major victory for anti-establishment and rightwing parties and plunging the eurozone’s third largest economy into political chaos.

The prime minister conceded defeat in an emotional speech at his residence, Palazzo Chigi, and said he would submit his resignation to Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, on Monday afternoon.

“My experience in government ends here … I did all I could to bring this to victory,” Renzi said. “If you fight for an idea, you cannot lose.”

It was a not an unexpected defeat but it was nevertheless a humiliating one, with about 60% of Italians voting against the proposed reforms, which would have made sweeping changes to Italy’s constitution and parliamentary system. Pointing to the high voter turnout – about 68% of eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum – Renzi said the vote represented a “feast of democracy”.

………

The prime minister, who started his political career as the mayor of Florence and was the youngest-ever prime minister when he assumed office in 2014, made constitutional reform a central plank of his premiership and argued for months that the changes would make Italy more stable and likely to adopt tough-but-needed economic and labour policies.

For the uninitiated , the phrase, "Adopt tough-but-needed economic and labour policies," translates to "F%$# the ordinary working man like a drunk sorority girl."

And once again, the response of the ruling elites is to see how they can game the system to make sure that they don't have to face the fallout of their own failures, "The immediate task facing the current government – with or without Renzi – will be to pass a change in the electoral law that will make it far more difficult for either the Five Star Movement or the Northern League to win strong majorities in the parliament in the next election."

Once again, this is all about the "Brussel's Class" dividing up the spoils.

The EU has moved toward unification too quickly, it has decided that democratic opposition to its agenda is to be crushed, and the Germans are running the show.

It is a toxic and self-destructive mix, and it likely will force the collapse of the EU.