Today the Irishmen saved democracy for the people of the european union and stopped the empowerment law disguised as the lisbon treaty.
Sooner or later, the bureaucrats will waken up to realize that free thinking people do not wish to be ruled by an un-elected, ergo unrepresentative, body.
I seriously doubt it. The whole treaty is a disgrace and they seriously consider going through with it disregarding Irelands vote and international law. You just have to imagine, if this treaty went active, the european comission could establish laws in certain areas without the necessity of consent by national (or international for that matter) parliaments or supreme courts. This would in fact establish an oligarchy of the few members of that counsil. They effectively fuse the legislative and the executive branch and marginalize the judicial branch, since the european court is in fact not a court, only the national governments can sue there, or the comission, what a joke. Those bitches know damn well why they don’t ask the people, this catapults us backwards beyond the french revolution, where they established the principle of checks and balances.
It’s dead. They’ll have to come up with something else.
Can someone enlighten me , what is “lisbon treaty” please?
The latest joke from the European Union.
EU leaders will never consult us again
Daniel HannanWednesday, The Spectator, 18th June 2008Daniel Hannan, who predicted the Irish ‘No’ vote in this magazine, now says that the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty and never risk a referendum again
By ten o’clock on Friday morning, it was clear that the ‘No’s had it. Ireland’s Europhiles were struggling even in their affluent strongholds within the Pale. In the rest of the country, they were being pulverised.
A jubilant ‘No’ campaigner rang me from Galway, his words tumbling over each other. ‘It looks like a high turnout, too,’ he exulted. ‘The Eurocrats won’t be able to just carry on as if nothing has happened.’ Oh yes they will, I told him, sadly. They did when the Danes voted ‘No’ to Maastricht. They did when you boys voted ‘No’ to Nice. They did when the French and the Dutch voted ‘No’ to the constitution. Just you watch them.
We didn’t have long to wait. Even before the result had been declared, José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, announced tetchily that the ‘No’ vote wouldn’t solve the EU’s problems, so ratification would continue.
During the referendum campaign, Mr Barroso had declared that Brussels had ‘no Plan B’. Many Irish commentators innocently took this to mean that, in the event of a ‘No’ vote, the Lisbon Treaty would be dropped. But what Mr Barroso actually meant was that Plan A would be bludgeoned through, with or without popular consent.
Every EU leader outside the Czech Republic has since confirmed that ratification will continue. Some accompanied their declarations with heroic sophistry. David Miliband argued that Britain ought to ratify the treaty because it was up to Brian Cowen, not him, to pronounce it dead. Nick Clegg announced that his MPs and peers would connive at this revolting necrophilia because doing so would give Britain a stronger voice when it came to discussing where the EU should go next.
Others complained of Ireland’s ingratitude. ‘We think it is a real cheek that the country that has benefited most from the EU should do this,’ said Axel Schäfer, SPD leader in the Bundestag.
Yet others moaned that the little countries were getting uppity. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the Euro-Greens, snarled: ‘It is not truly democratic that less than a million people can decide the fate of nearly half a billion Europeans.’ Spot on, Danny. So how about letting the other half-billion have referendums, too?
Then there were the attempts to claim that the Irish had misunderstood the question. The Vice-President of the Commission, Margot Wallström, plans to run some Eurobarometer opinion polls to find out what the Irish were really voting against. Let me help you with that one, Margot: they were voting against the Lisbon Treaty. The giveaway was the ballot paper, which asked people whether they wanted to amend the constitution so as to, you know, ratify the Lisbon Treaty.
This is the same Mrs Wallström, incidentally, who, three years ago, opined at the Theresiendstadt concentration camp that ‘No’ voters risked a second Holocaust. Well, three countries have since voted ‘No’ and, so far, there have been no pogroms, no special trains, no invasions of one EU state by another.
My favourite was the reaction by the President of the European Parliament, the amiable Hans-Gert Pöttering. ‘The ratification process must continue,’ he declared, because ‘the reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and for transparency.’ Got that? The reason the EU is tossing aside the verdict of the Irish people is for democracy.
Listening to these statements, it suddenly hit me that the speakers didn’t expect to convince anyone. They were simply giving the party line, with all the perfunctory woodenness of Brezhnev-era officials.
Last month, when opinion polls were showing the ‘Yes’ side ahead by 35 points to 18, I wrote in this magazine that the sceptics would surge in the final week and that, following a ‘No’ vote, the EU would press ahead regardless. I likened the EU’s leaders to the apparatchiks of the Comecon states who, having given up on persuading their electorates, sought compliance rather than consent, acquiescence rather than approval.
Several people emailed me to complain that it was a tasteless parallel: the EU, after all, was an association of democracies. True. No one is suggesting that Brussels is about to take away dissidents’ passports or throw sceptics into gulags. But Euro-federalists, like Cold War communists, believe that their ruling ideology is more important than either democracy or the letter of the law. Eastern Europe’s leaders justified themselves on grounds of anti-fascism: when others had collaborated, they had resisted Hitler. Eurocrats use a similar excuse (see Mrs Wallström’s comments, above). Small wonder that the communist parties of the former Soviet-bloc states led the campaigns to join the EU.
If you think I’m being too harsh, watch what happens next. First, there will be an attempt to bully Ireland into falling in line. Ratification will go ahead everywhere else in the hope that the Irish will obligingly lie down. When this fails — and, as an Irish friend put it to me during the campaign, ‘sure we didn’t fight off the might of the British empire just to be bossed about by the Belgians’ — the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty.
To a large degree, this has already happened. One of the most contentious proposals in the text was the creation of a European foreign minister with attached embassies. Listening to the arguments of both sides, you would never guess that this is already in place. The EU’s diplomatic corps — the European External Action Service — was brought into being two years ago. Go to any non-EU country and you will find an EU mission that towers over the national legations.
As with foreign policy, so with the other institutions that were established in anticipation of ‘Yes’ votes: the European Armaments Agency, the Human Rights Agency, the External Borders Agency. None of these has a proper legal base, but no one is proposing their abolition.
Lisbon would have made the Charter of Fundamental Rights directly justiciable, opening swaths of national life to the rulings of Euro-judges, on everything from family life to strikes. The Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have all declared that they will treat the Charter as if it were already legally binding, even though three electorates have now rejected the treaty that would have authorised it.
The great bulk of Lisbon can be implemented through lawyerly creativity. And any disputes will ultimately be settled by the ECJ, which rarely lets the letter of the law stand in the way of deeper integration. Virtually the only things that can’t be shoved through in this manner are the new rules on representation in the Commission and Council. My guess is that these will be agreed at a miniature inter-governmental conference next year, possibly tacked on to Croatia’s accession treaty, since the increase in member states from 27 to 28 will require a rejigging of voting weights. We shall then be told that, since these are changes within EU institutions, rather than net transfers of power to EU institutions, there is no further need for referendums.
The leaders of the EU, in short, have resolved never again to consult their peoples. Public opinion, in their eyes, is an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction. See whether I’m proved right. And then tell me whether my parallel with the apparatchiks is far-fetched.
Taking Europe into the 21st centuryEurope is not the same place it was 50 years ago, and nor is the rest of the world.
In a constantly changing, ever more interconnected world, Europe is grappling with new issues: globalisation, demographic shifts, climate change, the need for sustainable energy sources and new security threats. These are the challenges facing Europe in the 21st century.
Borders count for very little in the light of these challenges. The EU countries cannot meet them alone. But acting as one, Europe can deliver results and respond to the concerns of the public. For this, Europe needs to modernise. The EU has recently expanded from 15 to 27 members; it needs effective, coherent tools so it can function properly and respond to the rapid changes in the world. That means rethinking some of the ground rules for working together.
The treaty signed in Lisbon on 13 December 2007 sets out to do just that. When European leaders reached agreement on the new rules, they were thinking of the political, economic and social changes going on, and the need to live up to the hopes and expectations of the European public. The Treaty of Lisbon will define what the EU can and cannot do, and what means it can use. It will alter the structure of the EU’s institutions and how they work. As a result, the EU will be more democratic and its core values will be better served.
This new treaty is the result of negotiations between EU member countries in an intergovernmental conference, in which the Commission and Parliament were also involved. The treaty will not apply until and unless it is ratified by each of the EU’s 27 members. It is up to each country to choose the procedure for ratification, in line with its own national constitution.
The target date for ratification set by member governments is 1 January 2009 – some months before the elections to the European Parliament.
I well remember Danny the Red from the 1960s when he went way beyond uppity and way beyond democratic in violently pushing the interests of an anarchistic minority. Like all of the self-important little revolutionary turds of that time who would never sacrifice principle for power, he did. Like most revolutionary leaders, he was just a frustrated dictator who couldn’t wait to get into power to start hanging his enemies from the lamp posts, in the interests of freedom. He’s just one who sold out his supposed principles to gain power by participating in the system he tried to bring down and, like all politicians, is incapable of seeing his own hypocrisy.
He is in no position to bemoan the Irish deciding the fate of the rest of Europe when he tried to do the same with a much smaller number of people who, unlike the Irish, would not exercise their conception of democracy through the ballot box because Danny & Co’s conception of democracy was that everyone was free to agree with them or be a class enemy marked for slaughter. Now he expresses pretty much the same, if less violent, view from the top of a system he tried to bring down.
Bring me a bucket.
I need to vomit! :evil:
I’m beginning to remember why I thought it was a good idea to resist these bastards at the time.
The late 1960s were a time of intense student upheaval around the globe, and 1968 was particularly tumultuous. In the United States, protests against the Vietnam War were marked by the takeover of administration buildings at Columbia University and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Protests erupted on campuses in Mexico, Belgium, Prague, and Switzerland, with hundreds of thousands of youths railing against the policies of their governments. But perhaps no unrest was more dramatic than in France, in what has come to be known simply as May 1968.
Leading the charge against university policies, societal norms, and government authority was a German student with French roots and a mop of red hair named Dany Cohn-Bendit. Better known at the time as Dany the Red, Cohn-Bendit helped launch an uprising that soon spread across France, causing university shutdowns, mass riots, violent clashes with police, and finally, a general strike that rocked the de Gaulle government.
Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France following the uprising. Back in Germany, he continued to pursue revolutionary activities, along with future German foreign minister and vice chancellor Joschka Fischer. Both were members of the Frankfurt “Sponti” scene, which espoused social change through squatting, street fighting, and agitating at such companies as Hoechst AG and the Opel automobile company.
http://www.cohn-bendit.de/dcb2006/fe/pub/en/dct/510
And “this one million decide the fate” garbage is a rediculous lie, if they’d ask the other europeans (which they don’t have the guts to do) they’d get at least another 250 million no’s. And this is not a no to the idea of a peaceful europe with as much cooperation as possible, but a no to the shitty implementation of that idea by arrogant hypocritical bureaucrats.
I’m having a bit of trouble working out how a union of supposed democracies ends up with bureaucrats making the decisions?
Isn’t anyone elected and accountable to their electorate?
What, exactly, is the problem with the Lisbon Treaty?
I guess that’s a ‘No!’ then? :mrgreen:
The treaty signed in Lisbon on 13 December 2007 sets out to do just that. When European leaders reached agreement on the new rules, they were thinking of the political, economic and social changes going on, and the need to live up to the hopes and expectations of the European public. The Treaty of Lisbon will define what the EU can and cannot do, and what means it can use. It will alter the structure of the EU’s institutions and how they work. As a result, the EU will be more democratic and its core values will be better served.
A guide to the European Parliament
The only organ that actually has something to say in the EU is the european counsil, in which each EU member currently has one seat. The counsil members are the heads of government or state, but in the actual work in progress besides nice summits there are just high ranking clerks who usually don’t even change when governments do.
So, what we end up with, from the British point of view, is the end of the sovereignty of parliament.
The implications for the future are pretty scary, for intance:
an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ Super- state dictating to its member nations;
the destruction of local economies;
a civil war between the State and any of its member nations which might wish to secede;
a European super-power which might be considered a threat to Russia.
A dramatic and dark vision, I know.
Is there an argument that as the world shrinks it makes more sense to move towards a world government, of which the EU is the embryo?
The progress of Europe has been from small and large principalities and monarchies into small and then larger states.
Henry VIII united England. Bismarck united Germany. Garibaldi is said to have united Italy, but that remains to be demonstrated 
.
Leaving aside the current structure of the EU, would it be so terrible if the rest of the world was subjected to a similar overriding control?
Would it be better than the UN?
The world may choose what it will, as for me, I like my country, and its form of government, just as it is. This sentiment is held by most Americans, and woe in the tenth degree to any who might seek to push something else upon us. The U.N. is not very welcome here,nor are their ways and ideas.
Mankind is not yet ready to govern without the practice of unrighteous dominion, until it is ready, there is no room for a world gov. The cost would be too great. (the forgoing is my opinion only)
I doubt it matters what we like, nor how ready we are. I think RS is on to something. The way we are using up the worlds resources and destroying its habitat, if governments don’t get together to find ways of overcoming the economic and environmmental problems then we’re all doomed 
One planet economy:
http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/publications/pdf/strategy/Chap%203.pdf