Blair Backs Move to Punish Spain and Poland

Tony Blair last night revealed that Britain has joined forces with France and Germany to demand cuts in the EU's budget that will effectively punish Poland and Spain for blocking agreement on the draft constitution at last weekend's Brussels summit.

Though no mention was made of punishing Warsaw and Madrid for insisting on keeping near-parity of EU voting rights with the "big four," the move to cap EU spending at 1% of the union's gross income will make it harder to fund aid to poorer regions, notably in Poland and Spain, as well as Greece and Portugal.

In a statement to the Commons, where the EU's failure was greeted with a mixture of despair and delight, the prime minister expressed sympathy for both sides in the weekend's voting row, and said Britain could live with either formula.

(snip)

But the prime minister also made a low-key announcement that he had just signed a round robin letter with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, plus Austria, Sweden and Holland, the main contributors to the EU's budget.

more…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1107806,00.html

It's getting hard to keep track of who
likes who for what lately...

. . interesting what ya can find "googling"

THE TV IS WATCHING

If politics makes strange bedfellows, then the war on terrorism has made some that are even stranger. A recent story in the online magazine Salon.com detailed what happened when a reporter stumbled on an apparent (albeit brief) alliance between the U.S. Justice Department and….the Fox TV network!?

It all came to light when a Salon writer from Philadelphia by the name of Dave Lindorff tried to sign up for the Justice Department’s proposed TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) network. TIPS, in case you hadn’t heard, was one of the brainchildren of Attorney General John Ashcroft. It proposed, in the TIPS Website, a "national system for reporting suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity." The system would be made up of "millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places." People like postmen, meter readers, cable installers, and, I suppose Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. You know, the type of people who are always going door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood. If they noticed swarthy people doing suspicious things, like lighting their shoes on fire, storing large amounts of anthrax spores in their garages, or speaking in strange foreign tongues, the TIPSters could alert the proper authorities, and, perhaps, foil another major terrorist attack. Or so the theory ran.

/snip/

Here’s the thing: Americans may enjoy watching their fellow Americans, but they hate the idea of someone else watching them. Especially if that person is working for the guvmint, even on a freelance basis.

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When I heard about Spain/Poland I immediately thought
US throwing a spanner in the works.

With Blair coming out against S&P, it's WTF?

As TomBrokaw would say, "It's not immediately clear..."

instead of Madrid. Surely, they won't even consider setting foot in Greece next year for the Olympics. Just more $ for Jeb's economy.

:eyes:

it's more a question of where EU subsidies go - agricultural and others. This is 'he who pays the piper calls the tune' - the net contributors to the EU budget are pissed off that they pay, but Spain and Poland want a large influence in the control of the EU.

Some of my colleages from Europe, have related real horror stories of being subjected to abuse by the toothless wonders, who work for "Homeland Security"

Spain is not a poor country.

note 9: All measurements are per capita, that is,
they indicate the average living conditions one
may expect to see in that country. They therefore
do not give bigger countries a systematic advantage
or disadvantage to smaller ones in terms of their
rank. For an example of what one may do to determine economic importance (and this might not be the best
way but it gives a rough idea of how many times as
strong than the other, a country's military, sporting
and other might is) one may take this list - the GDP
multiplied by the per capita income

Economic Importance, 1998 (GDP x PC Inc) figures in quadrillion people dollars

1. USA 197.9
2. Japan 57.1
3. Germany 26.0
4. The United Kingdom 22.2
5. Italy 20.4
6. France 20.2
7. Canada 16.9
(G7)
8. Australia 9.0
9. Spain 8.1
10. South Korea 7.7
11. China 6.5
12. Brazil 6.0
13. The Netherlands 5.9

http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/kaiswork.htm

the person who constructed it needs a little mathematical training. If you multiply GDP by per capita income, your units are square dollars per person. Why should that mean anything?

Straight GDP per capita is a more meaningful measurement of how rich a country is. In the present EU, Spain was 13th out of 15 (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html) - there is a bit of a gap between Italy at 12th and Spain.

How dare he punish those whom his Emperor* has exalted and singled out for stolen booty!

After all, in sabotaging the EU Constitution, Poles were merely reprising their historic role, intertwined with the "Golden Freedom" which was nothing of the sort, of course...

www.prisonplanet.com/ analysis_ronning_022103_historical.html