You're doing that thing where Conservatives blame something that's been in place since the 60s for recent problems. Student loans have existed in (as far as the schools are concerned) this exact form since 1965. And yet in 1970 we did not have this problem. Therefore one of two things is true 1) basic economic theory is total BS, 2) you do not understand basic economic theory.
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements. I think everyone agrees student loan reforms are needed. I think everyone agrees that the current method of paying for college is broken. But the ultimate result is not gonna be what you want (ie: no taxpayers subsidizing college at an level), it will probably be direct state/Federal funding of the University system. The Middle Class cannot afford these college expenses. They are not gonna vote for a candidate who promises to cut those expenses in the long term by screwing current 18-year-olds. You might be able to convince voters to force colleges to cap tuition, but that would not be a major reduction in Federal power. It would be the opposite.
I swear the right today knows a lot about getting people to show up in elections most ignore (ie: midterms), but just has no clue what to do to solve any actual problems. It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
!. Administrators. Quite a few of them work for public, state-funded, institutions and make more then Obama. He only makes $400k. Top Generals make $180k in base salary.Yet the President of a large state school you've never heard of (Wayne State) makes $470k. So their salaries are going up. They're also increasing the number of sub-administrators they have.
2. Buildings. There's always something to spend $50 million on.
3. Tax cuts. Seriously.
When your Governor cuts your taxes the money has to come from somewhere. Since he doesn't get blamed when an independent University jacks up tuition, he cuts the education fund and writes a pious press release about everyone having to sacrifice in these tough economic times. Then when the leaders of various higher ed institutions in the state jack up tuition
It's basically an evil cycle. The administrators can justify jacking up prices because their budget is cut, and they can get away with screwing professors by replacing every baby boomer tenured prof who retires with three part timers. This increases revenue (more students), and administrative workload (more profs and students to administer), so the administrator gives himself a raise and hires an assistant. Since his class size went down (more profs means a larger denominator), his US News ranking went up and he gets a bonus.
Professor is a fairly prestigious title, and the fields with the greatest number of adjuncts are "fun" fields like English and the Humanities. So of course a lot of very smart people are willing to work in a very fun field, in exchange for a prestigious title. They are also more then willing to vent about the parts of their job that suck (ie: pay), and since they're English PhDs they're quite good at it.
OTOH, I don't think it's good policy to pay anyone so little they literally freeze to death due to an inability to pay their bills. I don't think it's good policy to pay English profs so little, when you know they're gonna shout to high heaven that college degrees are over-priced; because that will result in high school kids choosing minimum wage jobs over the sucker's bet of college.
Most importantly I simply can't understand how it's possible to raise tuition every single year; and still justify cutting the salaries of the people doing the actual teaching. Teaching is what students pay for, not administrators.
I've never heard of a college with union faculty. Non-profesor-type instructors (grad students mostly) are generally unionized, but they aren't on the faculty. I'm sure somebody's got a union, but it just is not typical of the college experience in the US.
Hell, I've never heard of a prof who hasn't literally written the book on his subject getting a six-figure salary. Writing the book on the subject is generally actually the prerequisite to earning six figures, because it's very difficult to get near six figure territory without a lot of book royalties.
And now you're arguing that a bunch of dead guy's theory is more important the actual reality.
I'm arguing that a bunch of dead guys foresaw the problems we're having today with a strong centralized military due to their experiences in their own time, and the way they saw standing armies being abused. They seem especially prescient today only because we have lost historical perspective. Well, I say "we", but only because "we" includes both you and I, and you have lost perspective.
You're flat-out arguing that the expansion of military power necessary to eliminate slavery was tyranny, and I'm the one whose lost historical perspective?
There's stupid and then there's you, Mr. Poo.
You are a liar or an idiot. And then there's me. I am neither. Naturally, you must attack me so that you can feel better about yourself.
Precisely what occupation do you think Beyonce Knowles would be engaged in if Lincoln hadn't broken the Constitution? It sure as hell wouldn't be lead soloist in a church choir.
At 1% of GDP the EU would be spending $140-$160 Billion a year on defense. That's double the Russians and almost as much as China. Heck, the Germans, French, and Brits alone spend $160 Billion. Add in Italy and they've got the Chinese beat.
You seem to be operating under the delusion that:
1. China is being forthright about her levels of defense spending.
Whether you have to add in Spain to get past Chinese defense spending isn't really relevant to the argument.
The point is Europe does not have to spend 4% of GDP on defense to be able to overwhelm almost anyone else with technologically advanced stuff.
2. 1% of GDP would give the EU the ability to project hard and soft power. The United States spends close to 4% for that sort of capability, and even at those levels our capabilities are diminishing.
Scale is a lot more important then you're implying. Andorra could spend 5,000% of GDP ion the military and not have the ability to bomb Libya back to the stone age. OTOH, it's hard to conceive of a way Libya could resist 1% of a GDP that's in the 14-16 Trillion range.
3. That defense spending is the final arbiter of hard power.
#1 #3 are self-explanatory. For #2, what part of "They couldn't sustain a bombing campaign without American assistance" was so hard to understand?
You do realize that 110 million people spending 2% of their GDP will have a worse air force then half a billion spending 1%?
Look at it this way: Which plane/toy/etc. did the French and Brits not have that we did? It mostly seems to have been strategic bombers, ground attack aircraft, and naval assets. Europe has a lot of air forces. Most are small, with 25-60 F-16s or the equivalent. if you have an RAF and an Armee del Air already you don't need most of those planes. You flip a Danish squadron of the squadrons over to a Strategic bomber, two Norwegians over to Ground Attack, and a Hungarian to strategic transports and you've greatly increased the European Air Forces ability to project power without any new costs (except for the aircraft). Let's say you also scrap the Kabuki Theater "we have a carrier so we're important" carriers. You can probably build a real carrier battle group.
It's not major-war-on-two-fronts-at-all-times capability, but it does mean Libya better fucking behave, and Putin probably couldn't afford to equal that military even if he really wanted to.
Granted it would all take awhile, because they'd need new hardware, but it would be doable within a 1-2% budget. And now they have an actual reason to bump up to 2.5% because it will allow them to upgrade faster.
it's that if somebody did magically convince the Austrians to do so a) the world would be a better place, and b) the Austrians would not regret it.
Really? It's clear that both the world would be a better place and they wouldn't regret it? The man on the street already regrets the EU. The poorer countries regret it because they've lost control of their monetary policy. The rich countries regret it because they're now on the hook for the poor countries and have to accept limitless immigration from the underdeveloped east. The EU is a project of the elites, imposed on the common man, with consequences as yet unknown. From my perspective as an American with friends (local and ex-pats) all over Europe (Finland, Sweden, Italy, Greece, the UK, Germany, and Ireland) it's a house of cards waiting to fall in on itself. The sooner the better. You can't just draw borders on a map and call it a country. Well, you can, but it rarely ends well.
You sound like a lot of the opposition to the Constitution.
As for "drawing borders on a map and expecting it to end well," you'd be surprised. Almost every nation in the world has been created by precisely that process. Including us. It's not like in 1834 the people of Phoe
Whose going to spend the money if it isn't the government?
NASA's half-assing it at nearly $20 Billion a year. Every year. That means in ten ears the spend more then any human individual could ever afford to spend. No private corporation has ever had the kind of sustained profit to spend that kind of money. You can get a lot of interesting-looking stuff from a public-private-partnership to get people into space, but you just don't get the scale required to get an actual human to Mars. To get this kind of thing done you have to be willing to totally waste $3 Billion a year for a decade even tho space elevators may never be a practical technology. And only government's do that.
I generally agree on inequality.
The problem with all this stuff is that we're in decline, and we're starting to argue more about how to divide up the shrinking pie then how to change it so the pie grows. Partly this is caused by the old gentry's continued dominance of the US System -- if everything in your life has gone right, then reducing the deficit is the only long-term issue you care about; OTOH if you're the guy who borrowed $50k for a useless degree you ain't in the gentry no more, and your trenchant points about how borrowing makes a lot of sense when interest rates are near-zero are ignored -- but mostly it's just what happens when the ship starts to sink.
Do voters have any idea how the European Commission works? If they don't, they'll probably prefer my idea of a European Prime Minister and his/her cabinet to the current system. If you just rename the "Cabinet" "Commission" you don;'t even have to mess with most of the text of the treaties.
Upper Houses are much more common then you'd think. Almost every European country is already bicameral. It would take a few elections for voters to unde4rstand how their new EU Senate works, but it's not like France doesn't already have a Senate or the Germans don;t have a Bundesrat.
So when, precisely, in your opinion did the Italian Republic become "fascist," or "military-controlled"?
To sum it up in poor words, the point of Gladio was to replace a left-wing government with a fascist one. This was never needed however, because the Italians were good boys and never elected a left-wing government. This notwithstanding, the Italian military secret service supported right-wing terrorism with money, weapons and judiciary protection.
So the Italian government supports something evil, and it's all a conspiracy hatched in Washington DC? You do realize that the only country in which the stay-behinds started a terror campaign was Italy, which implies that the CIA was not behind the terror campaign?
The people who created Gladio were Italians elected by their countryman. They preferred a world where their country had a secret, Anti-Soviet Army directed partially by the CIA to one where it didn't. When those countrymen realized it was acting up they disbanded it.
Those countrymen were never aware of such activities, precisely because they were kept secret. In those cases when they become aware of them, the few persons identified as responsible for them had to spend the rest of their lives in South America or Africa to flee from Italian justice.
Italy had a government in 1946. That government was popularly elected. Operation Gladio was set up in 1948. The Italians must have been told of it's existence, because you just admitted they're the ones who decided not to tell the media when Operation Gladio troops started blowing shit up.
It is not the United States of America's fault when an Italian leader fails to tell his successor "gee, we have this secret stay-behind Army," and said successor fails to notice that his Military Intelligence people aren't telling him shit.
As for "terrorism-ridden," Italy has never had a year in which Gladio bombings made up the majority of terror attacks. There were leftists, and other Fascists active in the same period. Most of the time Gladio was third, behind the various leftists, and the Ordine Nuovo Fascists.
If we want to be precise, no bombing (or targeted murder) was ever set up by "Gladio". They were carried out by right-wing terrorists that were sponsored by "deviated" Italian secret services. But frankly, counting the victims of the "red" terror versus the ones of the "black" terror seems silly to me (others have done it, and in case you're interested, it's "a draw"). I can assure you that I despise the KGB-sponsored killings as much as the CIA ones. The point of this discussion was that the USA's only interest was a peaceful and boring Europe, and in my opinion terrorism is incompatible with peace and boredom.
And all right-wing terror attacks were done by Gladio agents? Because that's not what wikipedia says.
Your thesis is only correct if you assume that some guy in DC told Gladio agents to go rogue and murder people. If that didn't happen, and the Gladio agents did it themselves, then setting up the stay-behind Army would still be a rational way to preserve Europe's boring peacefullness because if the shit hit the fan it would allow us to restore said boring peacefullness by destroying the Soviets.
That's the thing people don't get. In real life when you make these decisions you do it with limited information. In 1948 how the fuck is the CIA supposed to know that 14 of Gladio's secret armies will work fine, but the Italian one will go crazy in 1969? Once the let the Secret Army go over to Italian Military Intelligence, how the fuck are they supposed to know it's gone crazy if said Italian Military Intelligence is keeping it secret from their own Courts? If the CIA do find out, then what the fuck can they do about it? A coup d'tat?
It's not exactly a surprise that a human-led agency would only have a success rate of 14/15.
They all say that now, but every single new member the EU's added could have been vetoed by any current member. Same with the Eurozone. If they hadn't wanted Greece in the EU they should have voted differently back in 1981.
But they're forgetting that, until very recently, the point of the EU was to unite Europe into a single economic zone so nobody in Europe would ever want to fight again. The EU they're describing is simply not big enough to fulfill that goal, because Germany, France, Italy, and the Low Countries are a pretty powerful military bloc. The argument is a rationalization intended mostly to stop them from feeling guilty when their news is dominated by some terrible story about the Greek economy.
Think about it. If Greece's economic strategy and Germany's economic strategy are different, and the former requires high inflation while the latter requires zero to no inflation; and they both agree to have the same currency; then the fair result is not "Germany gets whatever the fuck it wants." The fair thing to do would be re-tool everyone's economy so the same strategy worked for them all. In terms of simple outcomes what Germany has right now is not much different from the German Army coming in and trashing the Greek economy, and then vetoing any Greek attempt to fix it.
I'm not saying your coworkers in Germany are evil, or they're even unusually venal for ordinary voters. I'm just saying they are clearly misremembering history to make themselves look good.
Reconstruction, 1865-1876. Then you get Jim Crow until the late 60s/early 70s. That's not as bad as slavery, it only affects a fraction of the population, and it's still significantly better then the competition (there were a few categories: small states with good records; European Empires who had decent levels of freedom at home, but refused to allow it for the majority of the population which lived in Vietnam/the Belgian Congo/India/etc.; Latin American states with equally mixed racial records, and "uncivilized" states that were about to be finished off by the Europeans).
It should be noted that both periods were ended by the US Army coming in to enforce rulings from Washington that the current Court system would be extremely unlikely to rule Constitutional. For example, the Emancipation Proclamation would run afoul of the "takings" clause because it took property from slave-owners without payment. The Courts just gutted the Voting Rights Act. The entire Civil War effort would actually be in trouble, because it was paid for by an Income Tax, and the Constitution didn't explicitly grant the Feds the power to levy that particular tax until the 16th Amendment.
You're the only person I've met who thinks Russia cares one way or the other about EU Sanctions. Lavrov does not like it when he's banned from Paris, but considering that the West could easily have justified just about anything short of nuclear war when his boss annexed Crimea, he's got to be pleased with the result. What the EU needed was a quick way to get German tanks to Crimea. Since they're too cheap to buy expensive military equipment, they couldn't do that.
As for NATO, you don't mean NATO. You mean the US. European states refuse to buy military equipment, so NATO is the US. The only people who get have gotten those tanks to Crimea in time are the US Air Force because the USAF is the only Air Force in the alliance to have purchased multiple strategic transports. Since the US actually has a cozy, frenemy, type relationship with Putin and no appetite for a third major war, Europe was screwed. It's similiar to the NSA situation. You'll bitch about being spied upon, and you;ll be right. But you can't actually do anything about it or the US National Security Establishment, including our Air Force, might not decide to give you a free ride to your next adventure in Mali/Ukraine/Libya.
As for the number of states in Europe, you're using multiple definitions of the term. A "state" can either be a large subnational unit with significant autonomy (as in the US States or German Lander; Swiss Cantons are state-level, but are so small it's hard to justify calling them states), or it's a national-level government with the theoretical power to declare War on God. By the latter definition Europe has roughly 50 states. If my idea came to pass it would go down to roughly 23, because 28 states would have turned their power to declare War on God to Brussels, leaving 22 Eurorpean states plus the EU.
So when, precisely, in your opinion did the Italian Republic become "fascist," or "military-controlled"?
The people who created Gladio were Italians elected by their countryman. They preferred a world where their country had a secret, Anti-Soviet Army directed partially by the CIA to one where it didn't. When those countrymen realized it was acting up they disbanded it. As for "terrorism-ridden," Italy has never had a year in which Gladio bombings made up the majority of terror attacks. There were leftists, and other Fascists active in the same period. Most of the time Gladio was third, behind the various leftists, and the Ordine Nuovo Fascists.
In fact I think if you consult a dictionary, you'll note that "military control" is generally considered the opposite of having terrorists run around your country, so that Italy in the 70s and 80s was suffering from a distinct lack of military control.
Keep in mind that my proposal only actually changes two things:
1) It adds an EU Senate.
2) It gives whomever wins the EU Parliamentary elections absolute power over two more areas: foreign policy and military policy.
The context-level of a culture, ethics, and legal systems would not really change. Contract law would not be affected, except to the extent it's currently effected by EU treaties nobody made any of these countries sign at gunpoint.
I also think you're focusing way too much on the idea of the nation-state that was created in Europe in the Mid-19th century. Most countries today are diverse collectives of cultures that have no real connection to each-other beyond the simple fact that they were all conquered by the same European Imperialist in the bad old days when that was allowed. Almost no Sub-Saharan African state has a majority ethnic group. The plurality ethnic groups tend to be spread around in different countries. Yet almost all African states retain the exact same borders they did in colonial times, the sole exception being South Sudan. Given an ethnographic map it would be impossible to figure out the modern borders of the former British Empire in India.
Both the US and Canada have sub-national units where languages besides English dominate, and both have a non-Common Law Province/State. Generally it's very hard to tell the difference between one side of the border or the other, because the cultural differences that mean Canada can't really join the 50 states are all shit nobody talks about very much; ideas about the role of government, the monarchy, etc. As for the Czechoslovaks, the Velvet divorce wasn't inevitable. majorities of both countries would probably have voted against it. But the minority had the balance of power in Parliament, and everyone figured that they'd all be in the EU and NATO soon enough anyway.
In other words once you got this shit passed the problem would not be keeping it together. People might wax poetic about how nice having their own Army was, but when the shit hit the fan they'd all have the same vote, and they wouldn't insist on secession. The trick would be getting all this shit passed.
So if somebody told you that Wyoming had a smaller vote in the US then Cali you'd call BS on him because of the US Senate? Spoken like somebody who would make a big deal out the e in then.
As for the rest, I think you;re under-estimating a) how fucking big the EU is, and b) how being big changes the EU's military incentives. At 1% of GDP the EU would be spending $140-$160 Billion a year on defense. That's double the Russians and almost as much as China. Heck, the Germans, French, and Brits alone spend $160 Billion. Add in Italy and they've got the Chinese beat.
France can't actually afford all the things a real great power has, so they do a weird kabuki theater version, with a pint-sized aircraft carrier, some real fighter jets, and not much else. Same with the UK. Even if they tripled their spending they probably couldn't support a single carrier battle group, and a couple Stealth Bombers. OTOH, if they're together with the entire EU they have legitimate needs for flexible airpower on the Baltic, the Black, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic; which could mean carrier battle groups. They also have a need for strategic transports 9to get German tanks to Ukraine quickly), and a 10 Billion Euro bill for strategic bombers is much more doabable if your base defense budget is 192.5 Billion Euros.
As for the politics, I freely admit this is not likely to happen. At all. My argument isn't that I can magically convince the Austrians to give up their sovereignty to Brussels, it's that if somebody did magically convince the Austrians to do so a) the world would be a better place, and b) the Austrians would not regret it.
Let's say we create an EU Senate. Have it based in Strassbourg so the MEPs don't have to make that ridiculous trip one month a year. Give it the same language rules as the EU Parliament. We have now solved many of the problems small states would have with this arrangement. Then merge the various treaties governing the EU into a single document, with three changes:
1) The Senate and associated little EU state/big EU state powers are included.
2) EU states give up their sovereignty over foreign policy and military policy. This includes their vote as members of the UN, but they can retain non-voting representatives if they can convince the UN to go along with it.
3) The EU gets the right to tax to pay for the military and foreign policy. This includes procedures for fully integrating dozens of militaries. It also probably includes a specific tax (ie: VAT not to exceed 10%, plus an income tax if approved by 3/4 of the Senate, or whatever).
Everyone passes it as an Amendment to their Constitution. Then you heave EU-wide elections, and the new EU PM is the most powerful person in the world.
I will agree it's highly unlikely that all this would happen. But if it did it would make Europe much less dependent on US Military aid, make Putin much less likely to get frisky, and generally make the entire world a better place.
Actually, it did. We were literally not a free country until Lincoln centralized the government and created a large standing army.
You don't want to give the central government too much power, but if you give it too little you risk a nasty neighbor (such as us Americans) turning you into a private fiefdom for a Fortune 500 company. Just ask the former United States of Central America how well going their own ways has worked out for them.
Goddamn. Anti-American Leftists really have no clue what motivates US Policy.
What we actually want is a peaceful, stable, and extremely boring Europe. This has been policy since George Washington, but the tactics have changed from isolationism to muscular interventions that promote our vision of a democratic and capitalist world. We switched tactics not because we feared the left was about to take over Europe, we did it because the right (aka: Hitler) had actually already taken over Europe, and turned the continent into a real life Dystopian Nightmare. We stopped him by supporting the Soviets to the hilt, and later insisting that our European puppet states remained democratic (to our great discredit, we did not manage to make sure all our global puppets were free; but within Europe itself our record was quite good).
What we want is actually a federal EU with a huge Army. That way we could send our army home, and know that Putin couldn't get up to any shenanigans. Since democracies (especially capitalist democracies) tend to agree on almost everything, we'd probably end up fighting on the same side in any non-European War either of us got involved in.
The reason the government participates in pipelines between the regulated and the regulators is that there aren't a lot of alternatives. Seriously.
The government needs people who are experts in a lot of very specific fields. In this case you'd need somebody who knows a little bit about genetic engineering, a lot about food safety, a lot about government regulations, and (ideally) quite a bit about the business practices of the big agricultural companies he was regulating. Universities are gonna create people who are experts in one or two of these fields, but have no experience in an actual production environment. Activist groups tend to be dominated by part-time volunteers, and as a part-time volunteer there's only so much you can actually learn. Moreover as an activist it's likely you've done something to help a controversial ally, and/or are an activist on other issues; which will make it really hard to get through the Senate.
So the government tends to hire a Monsanto guy to regulate Monsanto, because nobody else is qualified to do that shit. Then when the president changes that guy gets replaced (probably by a new industry hand), and he needs a new job, and all he's really qualified for is helping industry evade the regulations he just wrote.
In the long term it's probably much better for Europe if Europeans decide to go the route we Americans did, and create a truly Federal state with it's own Army.
But the EU has been an anti-democratic power for decades, and it seems magic thinking to believe it could evolve in the right direction now. Giving more power to it is an attack on democracy. Giving it an army seems just foolish.
Problems with democracy in a democratic government are caused by two things: Since the EU is set up by a bunch of democracies, it should fit the pattern. And it does. the problems are:
1) Voters who don't know how they're supposed to do their jobs.
2) Institutions that make it really hard for voters to do their jobs.
1) is difficult to solve. The UK has done things one way for centuries. the voters have gotten very used to Westminster system/responsible government/etc. They can deal with that. Government-by-committee-Northern-European-style in Brussels is something they will not learn how to deal with for a few more decades, especially because of:
2) The system is fucking hard to understand. EU states won't give significant powers to the Parliament, so most actual important decisions are made in closed-door meetings between two-dozen Heads of Government. Instead of a potential Greece bail-out being determined by MEPs using their budget, it's determined at a ridiculous conference where dozens of politicians, many elected specifically because they hate the very idea of having an EU (I'm looking at you True Finns) get to bash the Greeks without actually contributing anything useful.
Then the EU Parliament uses it's miniscule power to tweak some regulation, which screws somebody somewhere in the EU because the EU is a fucking big place, and only true Euro-obsessives understand why any of that shit actually happened.
So let's say you're an Austrian voter, you think the Greek people were lied to by their government, and therefore deserved a slightly better deal at the bail-out. If you were a rational human being you'd assume that meant voting for some Europhile left-wing party in the EU elections, but in reality the EU Parlaiment could not do jack about Greece, so what you actually had to do was vote for the Europhile Left-Winger for Prime Minister.
You don't know much American history. As late as the 1860s almost everyone thought of their first allegiance as to their state, rather then the Federal government. Even today there's more difference in the perception of America's shared history and culture between regions of the US then there would be between many pairs of European states. The Low Countries have a lot more in common with each-other then Texas has with Maine, it's the same with Scandinavia, the Deutscher Sprachraum, etc.
As for military spending, you do realize that France and the UK would have a vote on the European defense budget? Combined they'd have a bigger vote then anyone else. And they'd have help from former Warsaw pact members who a) fear Russia, b) would probably disproportionately not pay for the military (because taxes typically hit richer regions harder, and the ex-Warsaw Pact is poor compared to Luxembourg), and c) would receive a disproportionate amount of the benefit (where do you think the front lines would be? Not in Brittany.). Moreover even 1% of EU GDP would be double Russia's current defense spending.
As for "shared culture" being required for people to die for a country, stop reading about 5 years in the 40s. Ethnic Romanian Transylvanians never had a problem dying for an ethnic German or Hungarian King of Hungary ads long as said king acted in what they perceived was a lawful and fair manner. Same with Bohemians and their German nobles, Shleswig and it's Danish King, etc. Conscription could be a problem, but if France joined a European Federation, and said federation went to war over Ukraine, nobody would bat an eye that volunteers in the Federation Armed Forces werer dying for a bunch of Orthodox Slavs.
The EU is a weird beast. It's got enough power to be a huge pain in the ass, but not enough to actually do anything. The result is it can't adequately respond to challenges (ie: Crimea, the PIIGS debt crisis), but everyone still hates it for cramping their style. It's somewhat analogous to the US Articles of Confederation, except that government had even less power then the EU (it was somewhere between the UN and NATO in it's ability to bully member-states).
In the long term it's probably much better for Europe if Europeans decide to go the route we Americans did, and create a truly Federal state with it's own Army. The economic advantages of national autonomy are irrelevant if the Russians have just conquered half of Poland, all of Belarus, Moldova, etc. If they paid the right bribe to any single EU or NATO member-state (ie: Bulgaria has had it's eye on a small chunk of Romania since WW1) they could paralyze every Europe-wide organization because on any issue that actually matters ALL member-states have a veto.
Europeans are incredibly good at convincing themselves a small (and in the context of a 7-billion-member human race, even Germany is miniscule), wealthy country is a major global player. You can pull that off if you're wealthy enough. If Nigeria, the Chinese, Indians, and a dozen-odd other states all get their economic houses in order you'll all be Luxembourg.
It assumed a lot of knowledge about how current EU GMO law works. I think that it was saying that currently the EU in Brussels approves GMOs in European agriculture, and then national governments can choose whether to let the crops into their countries. So the EU approved a strain of corn, and something else (it's mentioned in the article), and France/Germany/etc. have said those two crops aren't allowed within their borders. This just gets rid of the EU step. They'll be banned in Berlin and Paris, not Brussels.
The article also mentions that the nations would need a reason to justify banning a GMO, but given that the MEPs quoted were mostly from countries that enthusiastically enforce the ban and nobody was going "hey, but your government will be forced to let GMOs in," I strongly suspect that the list of reasons a state can give for justifying a ban is really long.
Dude, Tobacco companies can't bring a complaint against the WTO. Indonesia can, but tobacco companies can't.
As for why I think you're a troll, this post is an excellent example.
You didn't actually include any information in it, exact to repeat your already disproven claim that the US spied on Indonesian tobacco companies. It's your second response to this post. Both included ad hominem attacks. Neither included any reasoning, or information.
You're an ignorant idiot who sits in his PJs, and spends five minutes thinking up three flames every time I deign to respond to you. If I didn't get a kick out of logically proving that people like you don't know jack-shit about anything.
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Dude,
You're doing that thing where Conservatives blame something that's been in place since the 60s for recent problems. Student loans have existed in (as far as the schools are concerned) this exact form since 1965. And yet in 1970 we did not have this problem. Therefore one of two things is true 1) basic economic theory is total BS, 2) you do not understand basic economic theory.
More importantly you;re doing that thing conservatives do where they attack a major element of public policy but offer no replacements. I think everyone agrees student loan reforms are needed. I think everyone agrees that the current method of paying for college is broken. But the ultimate result is not gonna be what you want (ie: no taxpayers subsidizing college at an level), it will probably be direct state/Federal funding of the University system. The Middle Class cannot afford these college expenses. They are not gonna vote for a candidate who promises to cut those expenses in the long term by screwing current 18-year-olds. You might be able to convince voters to force colleges to cap tuition, but that would not be a major reduction in Federal power. It would be the opposite.
I swear the right today knows a lot about getting people to show up in elections most ignore (ie: midterms), but just has no clue what to do to solve any actual problems. It's all a bunch of wankers wet-dreaming that denouncing Federal power will magically result in Federal power disappearing.
!. Administrators. Quite a few of them work for public, state-funded, institutions and make more then Obama. He only makes $400k. Top Generals make $180k in base salary.Yet the President of a large state school you've never heard of (Wayne State) makes $470k. So their salaries are going up. They're also increasing the number of sub-administrators they have.
2. Buildings. There's always something to spend $50 million on.
3. Tax cuts. Seriously.
When your Governor cuts your taxes the money has to come from somewhere. Since he doesn't get blamed when an independent University jacks up tuition, he cuts the education fund and writes a pious press release about everyone having to sacrifice in these tough economic times. Then when the leaders of various higher ed institutions in the state jack up tuition
It's basically an evil cycle. The administrators can justify jacking up prices because their budget is cut, and they can get away with screwing professors by replacing every baby boomer tenured prof who retires with three part timers. This increases revenue (more students), and administrative workload (more profs and students to administer), so the administrator gives himself a raise and hires an assistant. Since his class size went down (more profs means a larger denominator), his US News ranking went up and he gets a bonus.
It's a weird problem.
Professor is a fairly prestigious title, and the fields with the greatest number of adjuncts are "fun" fields like English and the Humanities. So of course a lot of very smart people are willing to work in a very fun field, in exchange for a prestigious title. They are also more then willing to vent about the parts of their job that suck (ie: pay), and since they're English PhDs they're quite good at it.
OTOH, I don't think it's good policy to pay anyone so little they literally freeze to death due to an inability to pay their bills. I don't think it's good policy to pay English profs so little, when you know they're gonna shout to high heaven that college degrees are over-priced; because that will result in high school kids choosing minimum wage jobs over the sucker's bet of college.
Most importantly I simply can't understand how it's possible to raise tuition every single year; and still justify cutting the salaries of the people doing the actual teaching. Teaching is what students pay for, not administrators.
Union faculty?
I've never heard of a college with union faculty. Non-profesor-type instructors (grad students mostly) are generally unionized, but they aren't on the faculty. I'm sure somebody's got a union, but it just is not typical of the college experience in the US.
Hell, I've never heard of a prof who hasn't literally written the book on his subject getting a six-figure salary. Writing the book on the subject is generally actually the prerequisite to earning six figures, because it's very difficult to get near six figure territory without a lot of book royalties.
And now you're arguing that a bunch of dead guy's theory is more important the actual reality.
I'm arguing that a bunch of dead guys foresaw the problems we're having today with a strong centralized military due to their experiences in their own time, and the way they saw standing armies being abused. They seem especially prescient today only because we have lost historical perspective. Well, I say "we", but only because "we" includes both you and I, and you have lost perspective.
You're flat-out arguing that the expansion of military power necessary to eliminate slavery was tyranny, and I'm the one whose lost historical perspective?
There's stupid and then there's you, Mr. Poo.
You are a liar or an idiot. And then there's me. I am neither. Naturally, you must attack me so that you can feel better about yourself.
Precisely what occupation do you think Beyonce Knowles would be engaged in if Lincoln hadn't broken the Constitution? It sure as hell wouldn't be lead soloist in a church choir.
At 1% of GDP the EU would be spending $140-$160 Billion a year on defense. That's double the Russians and almost as much as China. Heck, the Germans, French, and Brits alone spend $160 Billion. Add in Italy and they've got the Chinese beat.
You seem to be operating under the delusion that:
1. China is being forthright about her levels of defense spending.
Whether you have to add in Spain to get past Chinese defense spending isn't really relevant to the argument.
The point is Europe does not have to spend 4% of GDP on defense to be able to overwhelm almost anyone else with technologically advanced stuff.
2. 1% of GDP would give the EU the ability to project hard and soft power. The United States spends close to 4% for that sort of capability, and even at those levels our capabilities are diminishing.
Scale is a lot more important then you're implying. Andorra could spend 5,000% of GDP ion the military and not have the ability to bomb Libya back to the stone age. OTOH, it's hard to conceive of a way Libya could resist 1% of a GDP that's in the 14-16 Trillion range.
3. That defense spending is the final arbiter of hard power.
#1 #3 are self-explanatory. For #2, what part of "They couldn't sustain a bombing campaign without American assistance" was so hard to understand?
You do realize that 110 million people spending 2% of their GDP will have a worse air force then half a billion spending 1%?
Look at it this way:
Which plane/toy/etc. did the French and Brits not have that we did? It mostly seems to have been strategic bombers, ground attack aircraft, and naval assets. Europe has a lot of air forces. Most are small, with 25-60 F-16s or the equivalent. if you have an RAF and an Armee del Air already you don't need most of those planes. You flip a Danish squadron of the squadrons over to a Strategic bomber, two Norwegians over to Ground Attack, and a Hungarian to strategic transports and you've greatly increased the European Air Forces ability to project power without any new costs (except for the aircraft). Let's say you also scrap the Kabuki Theater "we have a carrier so we're important" carriers. You can probably build a real carrier battle group.
It's not major-war-on-two-fronts-at-all-times capability, but it does mean Libya better fucking behave, and Putin probably couldn't afford to equal that military even if he really wanted to.
Granted it would all take awhile, because they'd need new hardware, but it would be doable within a 1-2% budget. And now they have an actual reason to bump up to 2.5% because it will allow them to upgrade faster.
it's that if somebody did magically convince the Austrians to do so a) the world would be a better place, and b) the Austrians would not regret it.
Really? It's clear that both the world would be a better place and they wouldn't regret it? The man on the street already regrets the EU. The poorer countries regret it because they've lost control of their monetary policy. The rich countries regret it because they're now on the hook for the poor countries and have to accept limitless immigration from the underdeveloped east. The EU is a project of the elites, imposed on the common man, with consequences as yet unknown. From my perspective as an American with friends (local and ex-pats) all over Europe (Finland, Sweden, Italy, Greece, the UK, Germany, and Ireland) it's a house of cards waiting to fall in on itself. The sooner the better. You can't just draw borders on a map and call it a country. Well, you can, but it rarely ends well.
You sound like a lot of the opposition to the Constitution.
As for "drawing borders on a map and expecting it to end well," you'd be surprised. Almost every nation in the world has been created by precisely that process. Including us. It's not like in 1834 the people of Phoe
And now you're arguing that a bunch of dead guy's theory is more important the actual reality.
There's stupid and then there's you, Mr. Poo.
Whose going to spend the money if it isn't the government?
NASA's half-assing it at nearly $20 Billion a year. Every year. That means in ten ears the spend more then any human individual could ever afford to spend. No private corporation has ever had the kind of sustained profit to spend that kind of money. You can get a lot of interesting-looking stuff from a public-private-partnership to get people into space, but you just don't get the scale required to get an actual human to Mars. To get this kind of thing done you have to be willing to totally waste $3 Billion a year for a decade even tho space elevators may never be a practical technology. And only government's do that.
I generally agree on inequality.
The problem with all this stuff is that we're in decline, and we're starting to argue more about how to divide up the shrinking pie then how to change it so the pie grows. Partly this is caused by the old gentry's continued dominance of the US System -- if everything in your life has gone right, then reducing the deficit is the only long-term issue you care about; OTOH if you're the guy who borrowed $50k for a useless degree you ain't in the gentry no more, and your trenchant points about how borrowing makes a lot of sense when interest rates are near-zero are ignored -- but mostly it's just what happens when the ship starts to sink.
Do voters have any idea how the European Commission works? If they don't, they'll probably prefer my idea of a European Prime Minister and his/her cabinet to the current system. If you just rename the "Cabinet" "Commission" you don;'t even have to mess with most of the text of the treaties.
Upper Houses are much more common then you'd think. Almost every European country is already bicameral. It would take a few elections for voters to unde4rstand how their new EU Senate works, but it's not like France doesn't already have a Senate or the Germans don;t have a Bundesrat.
So when, precisely, in your opinion did the Italian Republic become "fascist," or "military-controlled"?
To sum it up in poor words, the point of Gladio was to replace a left-wing government with a fascist one. This was never needed however, because the Italians were good boys and never elected a left-wing government. This notwithstanding, the Italian military secret service supported right-wing terrorism with money, weapons and judiciary protection.
So the Italian government supports something evil, and it's all a conspiracy hatched in Washington DC? You do realize that the only country in which the stay-behinds started a terror campaign was Italy, which implies that the CIA was not behind the terror campaign?
The people who created Gladio were Italians elected by their countryman. They preferred a world where their country had a secret, Anti-Soviet Army directed partially by the CIA to one where it didn't. When those countrymen realized it was acting up they disbanded it.
Those countrymen were never aware of such activities, precisely because they were kept secret. In those cases when they become aware of them, the few persons identified as responsible for them had to spend the rest of their lives in South America or Africa to flee from Italian justice.
Italy had a government in 1946. That government was popularly elected. Operation Gladio was set up in 1948. The Italians must have been told of it's existence, because you just admitted they're the ones who decided not to tell the media when Operation Gladio troops started blowing shit up.
It is not the United States of America's fault when an Italian leader fails to tell his successor "gee, we have this secret stay-behind Army," and said successor fails to notice that his Military Intelligence people aren't telling him shit.
As for "terrorism-ridden," Italy has never had a year in which Gladio bombings made up the majority of terror attacks. There were leftists, and other Fascists active in the same period. Most of the time Gladio was third, behind the various leftists, and the Ordine Nuovo Fascists.
If we want to be precise, no bombing (or targeted murder) was ever set up by "Gladio". They were carried out by right-wing terrorists that were sponsored by "deviated" Italian secret services. But frankly, counting the victims of the "red" terror versus the ones of the "black" terror seems silly to me (others have done it, and in case you're interested, it's "a draw"). I can assure you that I despise the KGB-sponsored killings as much as the CIA ones. The point of this discussion was that the USA's only interest was a peaceful and boring Europe, and in my opinion terrorism is incompatible with peace and boredom.
And all right-wing terror attacks were done by Gladio agents? Because that's not what wikipedia says.
Your thesis is only correct if you assume that some guy in DC told Gladio agents to go rogue and murder people. If that didn't happen, and the Gladio agents did it themselves, then setting up the stay-behind Army would still be a rational way to preserve Europe's boring peacefullness because if the shit hit the fan it would allow us to restore said boring peacefullness by destroying the Soviets.
That's the thing people don't get. In real life when you make these decisions you do it with limited information. In 1948 how the fuck is the CIA supposed to know that 14 of Gladio's secret armies will work fine, but the Italian one will go crazy in 1969? Once the let the Secret Army go over to Italian Military Intelligence, how the fuck are they supposed to know it's gone crazy if said Italian Military Intelligence is keeping it secret from their own Courts? If the CIA do find out, then what the fuck can they do about it? A coup d'tat?
It's not exactly a surprise that a human-led agency would only have a success rate of 14/15.
They all say that now, but every single new member the EU's added could have been vetoed by any current member. Same with the Eurozone. If they hadn't wanted Greece in the EU they should have voted differently back in 1981.
But they're forgetting that, until very recently, the point of the EU was to unite Europe into a single economic zone so nobody in Europe would ever want to fight again. The EU they're describing is simply not big enough to fulfill that goal, because Germany, France, Italy, and the Low Countries are a pretty powerful military bloc. The argument is a rationalization intended mostly to stop them from feeling guilty when their news is dominated by some terrible story about the Greek economy.
Think about it. If Greece's economic strategy and Germany's economic strategy are different, and the former requires high inflation while the latter requires zero to no inflation; and they both agree to have the same currency; then the fair result is not "Germany gets whatever the fuck it wants." The fair thing to do would be re-tool everyone's economy so the same strategy worked for them all. In terms of simple outcomes what Germany has right now is not much different from the German Army coming in and trashing the Greek economy, and then vetoing any Greek attempt to fix it.
I'm not saying your coworkers in Germany are evil, or they're even unusually venal for ordinary voters. I'm just saying they are clearly misremembering history to make themselves look good.
Reconstruction, 1865-1876. Then you get Jim Crow until the late 60s/early 70s. That's not as bad as slavery, it only affects a fraction of the population, and it's still significantly better then the competition (there were a few categories: small states with good records; European Empires who had decent levels of freedom at home, but refused to allow it for the majority of the population which lived in Vietnam/the Belgian Congo/India/etc.; Latin American states with equally mixed racial records, and "uncivilized" states that were about to be finished off by the Europeans).
It should be noted that both periods were ended by the US Army coming in to enforce rulings from Washington that the current Court system would be extremely unlikely to rule Constitutional. For example, the Emancipation Proclamation would run afoul of the "takings" clause because it took property from slave-owners without payment. The Courts just gutted the Voting Rights Act. The entire Civil War effort would actually be in trouble, because it was paid for by an Income Tax, and the Constitution didn't explicitly grant the Feds the power to levy that particular tax until the 16th Amendment.
You're the only person I've met who thinks Russia cares one way or the other about EU Sanctions. Lavrov does not like it when he's banned from Paris, but considering that the West could easily have justified just about anything short of nuclear war when his boss annexed Crimea, he's got to be pleased with the result. What the EU needed was a quick way to get German tanks to Crimea. Since they're too cheap to buy expensive military equipment, they couldn't do that.
As for NATO, you don't mean NATO. You mean the US. European states refuse to buy military equipment, so NATO is the US. The only people who get have gotten those tanks to Crimea in time are the US Air Force because the USAF is the only Air Force in the alliance to have purchased multiple strategic transports. Since the US actually has a cozy, frenemy, type relationship with Putin and no appetite for a third major war, Europe was screwed. It's similiar to the NSA situation. You'll bitch about being spied upon, and you;ll be right. But you can't actually do anything about it or the US National Security Establishment, including our Air Force, might not decide to give you a free ride to your next adventure in Mali/Ukraine/Libya.
As for the number of states in Europe, you're using multiple definitions of the term. A "state" can either be a large subnational unit with significant autonomy (as in the US States or German Lander; Swiss Cantons are state-level, but are so small it's hard to justify calling them states), or it's a national-level government with the theoretical power to declare War on God. By the latter definition Europe has roughly 50 states. If my idea came to pass it would go down to roughly 23, because 28 states would have turned their power to declare War on God to Brussels, leaving 22 Eurorpean states plus the EU.
So when, precisely, in your opinion did the Italian Republic become "fascist," or "military-controlled"?
The people who created Gladio were Italians elected by their countryman. They preferred a world where their country had a secret, Anti-Soviet Army directed partially by the CIA to one where it didn't. When those countrymen realized it was acting up they disbanded it. As for "terrorism-ridden," Italy has never had a year in which Gladio bombings made up the majority of terror attacks. There were leftists, and other Fascists active in the same period. Most of the time Gladio was third, behind the various leftists, and the Ordine Nuovo Fascists.
In fact I think if you consult a dictionary, you'll note that "military control" is generally considered the opposite of having terrorists run around your country, so that Italy in the 70s and 80s was suffering from a distinct lack of military control.
Keep in mind that my proposal only actually changes two things:
1) It adds an EU Senate.
2) It gives whomever wins the EU Parliamentary elections absolute power over two more areas: foreign policy and military policy.
The context-level of a culture, ethics, and legal systems would not really change. Contract law would not be affected, except to the extent it's currently effected by EU treaties nobody made any of these countries sign at gunpoint.
I also think you're focusing way too much on the idea of the nation-state that was created in Europe in the Mid-19th century. Most countries today are diverse collectives of cultures that have no real connection to each-other beyond the simple fact that they were all conquered by the same European Imperialist in the bad old days when that was allowed. Almost no Sub-Saharan African state has a majority ethnic group. The plurality ethnic groups tend to be spread around in different countries. Yet almost all African states retain the exact same borders they did in colonial times, the sole exception being South Sudan. Given an ethnographic map it would be impossible to figure out the modern borders of the former British Empire in India.
Both the US and Canada have sub-national units where languages besides English dominate, and both have a non-Common Law Province/State. Generally it's very hard to tell the difference between one side of the border or the other, because the cultural differences that mean Canada can't really join the 50 states are all shit nobody talks about very much; ideas about the role of government, the monarchy, etc. As for the Czechoslovaks, the Velvet divorce wasn't inevitable. majorities of both countries would probably have voted against it. But the minority had the balance of power in Parliament, and everyone figured that they'd all be in the EU and NATO soon enough anyway.
In other words once you got this shit passed the problem would not be keeping it together. People might wax poetic about how nice having their own Army was, but when the shit hit the fan they'd all have the same vote, and they wouldn't insist on secession. The trick would be getting all this shit passed.
So if somebody told you that Wyoming had a smaller vote in the US then Cali you'd call BS on him because of the US Senate? Spoken like somebody who would make a big deal out the e in then.
As for the rest, I think you;re under-estimating a) how fucking big the EU is, and b) how being big changes the EU's military incentives. At 1% of GDP the EU would be spending $140-$160 Billion a year on defense. That's double the Russians and almost as much as China. Heck, the Germans, French, and Brits alone spend $160 Billion. Add in Italy and they've got the Chinese beat.
France can't actually afford all the things a real great power has, so they do a weird kabuki theater version, with a pint-sized aircraft carrier, some real fighter jets, and not much else. Same with the UK. Even if they tripled their spending they probably couldn't support a single carrier battle group, and a couple Stealth Bombers. OTOH, if they're together with the entire EU they have legitimate needs for flexible airpower on the Baltic, the Black, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic; which could mean carrier battle groups. They also have a need for strategic transports 9to get German tanks to Ukraine quickly), and a 10 Billion Euro bill for strategic bombers is much more doabable if your base defense budget is 192.5 Billion Euros.
As for the politics, I freely admit this is not likely to happen. At all. My argument isn't that I can magically convince the Austrians to give up their sovereignty to Brussels, it's that if somebody did magically convince the Austrians to do so a) the world would be a better place, and b) the Austrians would not regret it.
You're creating problems that don't exist.
Let's say we create an EU Senate. Have it based in Strassbourg so the MEPs don't have to make that ridiculous trip one month a year. Give it the same language rules as the EU Parliament. We have now solved many of the problems small states would have with this arrangement. Then merge the various treaties governing the EU into a single document, with three changes:
1) The Senate and associated little EU state/big EU state powers are included.
2) EU states give up their sovereignty over foreign policy and military policy. This includes their vote as members of the UN, but they can retain non-voting representatives if they can convince the UN to go along with it.
3) The EU gets the right to tax to pay for the military and foreign policy. This includes procedures for fully integrating dozens of militaries. It also probably includes a specific tax (ie: VAT not to exceed 10%, plus an income tax if approved by 3/4 of the Senate, or whatever).
Everyone passes it as an Amendment to their Constitution. Then you heave EU-wide elections, and the new EU PM is the most powerful person in the world.
I will agree it's highly unlikely that all this would happen. But if it did it would make Europe much less dependent on US Military aid, make Putin much less likely to get frisky, and generally make the entire world a better place.
Actually, it did. We were literally not a free country until Lincoln centralized the government and created a large standing army.
You don't want to give the central government too much power, but if you give it too little you risk a nasty neighbor (such as us Americans) turning you into a private fiefdom for a Fortune 500 company. Just ask the former United States of Central America how well going their own ways has worked out for them.
Goddamn. Anti-American Leftists really have no clue what motivates US Policy.
What we actually want is a peaceful, stable, and extremely boring Europe. This has been policy since George Washington, but the tactics have changed from isolationism to muscular interventions that promote our vision of a democratic and capitalist world. We switched tactics not because we feared the left was about to take over Europe, we did it because the right (aka: Hitler) had actually already taken over Europe, and turned the continent into a real life Dystopian Nightmare. We stopped him by supporting the Soviets to the hilt, and later insisting that our European puppet states remained democratic (to our great discredit, we did not manage to make sure all our global puppets were free; but within Europe itself our record was quite good).
What we want is actually a federal EU with a huge Army. That way we could send our army home, and know that Putin couldn't get up to any shenanigans. Since democracies (especially capitalist democracies) tend to agree on almost everything, we'd probably end up fighting on the same side in any non-European War either of us got involved in.
The reason the government participates in pipelines between the regulated and the regulators is that there aren't a lot of alternatives. Seriously.
The government needs people who are experts in a lot of very specific fields. In this case you'd need somebody who knows a little bit about genetic engineering, a lot about food safety, a lot about government regulations, and (ideally) quite a bit about the business practices of the big agricultural companies he was regulating. Universities are gonna create people who are experts in one or two of these fields, but have no experience in an actual production environment. Activist groups tend to be dominated by part-time volunteers, and as a part-time volunteer there's only so much you can actually learn. Moreover as an activist it's likely you've done something to help a controversial ally, and/or are an activist on other issues; which will make it really hard to get through the Senate.
So the government tends to hire a Monsanto guy to regulate Monsanto, because nobody else is qualified to do that shit. Then when the president changes that guy gets replaced (probably by a new industry hand), and he needs a new job, and all he's really qualified for is helping industry evade the regulations he just wrote.
In the long term it's probably much better for Europe if Europeans decide to go the route we Americans did, and create a truly Federal state with it's own Army.
But the EU has been an anti-democratic power for decades, and it seems magic thinking to believe it could evolve in the right direction now. Giving more power to it is an attack on democracy. Giving it an army seems just foolish.
Problems with democracy in a democratic government are caused by two things: Since the EU is set up by a bunch of democracies, it should fit the pattern. And it does. the problems are:
1) Voters who don't know how they're supposed to do their jobs.
2) Institutions that make it really hard for voters to do their jobs.
1) is difficult to solve. The UK has done things one way for centuries. the voters have gotten very used to Westminster system/responsible government/etc. They can deal with that. Government-by-committee-Northern-European-style in Brussels is something they will not learn how to deal with for a few more decades, especially because of:
2) The system is fucking hard to understand. EU states won't give significant powers to the Parliament, so most actual important decisions are made in closed-door meetings between two-dozen Heads of Government. Instead of a potential Greece bail-out being determined by MEPs using their budget, it's determined at a ridiculous conference where dozens of politicians, many elected specifically because they hate the very idea of having an EU (I'm looking at you True Finns) get to bash the Greeks without actually contributing anything useful.
Then the EU Parliament uses it's miniscule power to tweak some regulation, which screws somebody somewhere in the EU because the EU is a fucking big place, and only true Euro-obsessives understand why any of that shit actually happened.
So let's say you're an Austrian voter, you think the Greek people were lied to by their government, and therefore deserved a slightly better deal at the bail-out. If you were a rational human being you'd assume that meant voting for some Europhile left-wing party in the EU elections, but in reality the EU Parlaiment could not do jack about Greece, so what you actually had to do was vote for the Europhile Left-Winger for Prime Minister.
You don't know much American history. As late as the 1860s almost everyone thought of their first allegiance as to their state, rather then the Federal government. Even today there's more difference in the perception of America's shared history and culture between regions of the US then there would be between many pairs of European states. The Low Countries have a lot more in common with each-other then Texas has with Maine, it's the same with Scandinavia, the Deutscher Sprachraum, etc.
As for military spending, you do realize that France and the UK would have a vote on the European defense budget? Combined they'd have a bigger vote then anyone else. And they'd have help from former Warsaw pact members who a) fear Russia, b) would probably disproportionately not pay for the military (because taxes typically hit richer regions harder, and the ex-Warsaw Pact is poor compared to Luxembourg), and c) would receive a disproportionate amount of the benefit (where do you think the front lines would be? Not in Brittany.). Moreover even 1% of EU GDP would be double Russia's current defense spending.
As for "shared culture" being required for people to die for a country, stop reading about 5 years in the 40s. Ethnic Romanian Transylvanians never had a problem dying for an ethnic German or Hungarian King of Hungary ads long as said king acted in what they perceived was a lawful and fair manner. Same with Bohemians and their German nobles, Shleswig and it's Danish King, etc. Conscription could be a problem, but if France joined a European Federation, and said federation went to war over Ukraine, nobody would bat an eye that volunteers in the Federation Armed Forces werer dying for a bunch of Orthodox Slavs.
The EU is a weird beast. It's got enough power to be a huge pain in the ass, but not enough to actually do anything. The result is it can't adequately respond to challenges (ie: Crimea, the PIIGS debt crisis), but everyone still hates it for cramping their style. It's somewhat analogous to the US Articles of Confederation, except that government had even less power then the EU (it was somewhere between the UN and NATO in it's ability to bully member-states).
In the long term it's probably much better for Europe if Europeans decide to go the route we Americans did, and create a truly Federal state with it's own Army. The economic advantages of national autonomy are irrelevant if the Russians have just conquered half of Poland, all of Belarus, Moldova, etc. If they paid the right bribe to any single EU or NATO member-state (ie: Bulgaria has had it's eye on a small chunk of Romania since WW1) they could paralyze every Europe-wide organization because on any issue that actually matters ALL member-states have a veto.
Europeans are incredibly good at convincing themselves a small (and in the context of a 7-billion-member human race, even Germany is miniscule), wealthy country is a major global player. You can pull that off if you're wealthy enough. If Nigeria, the Chinese, Indians, and a dozen-odd other states all get their economic houses in order you'll all be Luxembourg.
So I should probably be banned from Slashdot.
It assumed a lot of knowledge about how current EU GMO law works. I think that it was saying that currently the EU in Brussels approves GMOs in European agriculture, and then national governments can choose whether to let the crops into their countries. So the EU approved a strain of corn, and something else (it's mentioned in the article), and France/Germany/etc. have said those two crops aren't allowed within their borders. This just gets rid of the EU step. They'll be banned in Berlin and Paris, not Brussels.
The article also mentions that the nations would need a reason to justify banning a GMO, but given that the MEPs quoted were mostly from countries that enthusiastically enforce the ban and nobody was going "hey, but your government will be forced to let GMOs in," I strongly suspect that the list of reasons a state can give for justifying a ban is really long.
Dude, Tobacco companies can't bring a complaint against the WTO. Indonesia can, but tobacco companies can't.
As for why I think you're a troll, this post is an excellent example.
You didn't actually include any information in it, exact to repeat your already disproven claim that the US spied on Indonesian tobacco companies. It's your second response to this post. Both included ad hominem attacks. Neither included any reasoning, or information.
You're an ignorant idiot who sits in his PJs, and spends five minutes thinking up three flames every time I deign to respond to you. If I didn't get a kick out of logically proving that people like you don't know jack-shit about anything.