Is another European empire collapsing before our eyes?

By Wayne Madsen on May 21, 2011

Wayne Madsen – Strategic Culture May 15, 2011

The history of Europe is one of successive collapsed empires. Some, such as the Roman, Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, simply overextended themselves and collapsed due to nationalist uprisings coupled with domestic political and economic inertia. Others, like the German Nazi, Soviet, Italian fascist, Napoleonic French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires collapsed as a result of their military aggression and incessant subterfuge from external forces.

The European Union appears to be suffering from the same symptoms as those experienced by the first category of failed European empires: over-extension, a stagnant and bloated bureaucracy, and economic collapse. As Europe strives to become a more unified and federal union, there has been a backlash from across its member states, with a North-South divide and economic turmoil now threatening to bring down the whole house of cards.

The rise of nationalist political parties in some of the EU’s heretofore staunchest pro-EU member nations and the collapse of some EU national economies due to predatory banking policies and America’s flooding of the global financial system with cheap dollars – a central bankers’ contrivance known as “quantitative easing” — has created fault lines in Europe that not only threaten to bring down the euro and drive the European Central Bank into extinction but prompt some members to leave the EU altogether.

Although there have always been degrees of Euro-skepticism throughout Europe since the coming into force of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993, which transformed the European Economic Community into the European Union and created the euro, anti-EU feelings now run the full gamut from right to left. Anti-EU fervor has not only increased in the traditionally Euro-skeptic nations of Denmark, the United Kingdom, and France but has gained a strong foothold in the earliest supporters of European integration, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Finland, Greece, and most importantly, Germany…

Denmark originally failed to ratify Maastricht and a referendum on the treaty in France narrowly passed. Denmark, upon ratification, insisted on four exceptions to the treaty. In 1985, Maastricht was preceded by the Schengen Agreement, which dropped border controls between the member nations, including non-EU members Switzerland and Norway. However, the UK and Ireland never agreed to the Schengen Agreement.

With the rise of nationalist and anti-EU political parties in EU member state legislatures and the European Parliament, coupled with the increase in North African illegal immigration to Europe following the popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, Schengen is being challenged by nations from Denmark and Finland to France and Italy. The North African political instability was originally triggered by the economic downturn of North African economies caused by Western bank policies that resulted in inflation, food shortages, and high unemployment. Soon, the conniving forces of Western bankers and multinational corporations linked to Western intelligence agencies and the George Soros labyrinth of non-governmental organizations sought to capitalize on the North African political transitions by implementing the shock doctrine policies inherent in vulture capitalism, I.e., in every crisis there is a profit to be made and state-run enterprises to privatize.

One of the original Euro-skeptical EU nations, Denmark, was the first nation to announce it was re-introducing border controls to keep out North African immigrants escaping the civil wars and strife in their home nations. The EU bureaucracy cried foul but Denmark saw support for its move from Italy and France, which also saw an influx of illegal migrants.

Meanwhile, the EU economic bailout packages for Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain, resulted in more prosperous EU nations, such as Germany, Finland, Netherlands, and Sweden, complaining about rescue packages for member states that had been preyed upon by the global bankers, relegating their bonds to below average and “junk” status. Unpopular austerity measures imposed by the EU and International Monetary Fund on Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, resulting in lay-offs of government workers, a rise in retirement age, and reduced pensions and workers’ benefits, resulted in popular disgust with the bankers and bureaucrats of the European Central Bank, EU Commission, and IMF. In Greece, violent demonstrations by workers were harshly put down by paramilitary and police forces.

Unpopular austerity measures brought about by the pro-EU Conservative-Liberal Democratic government of the UK also saw mass student and worker protests in London and other major cities. Anti-EU feelings also swelled within the Conservative Party itself. In the newer EU members in eastern Europe, where membership was originally seen as a welcome change from their former communist systems, anti-EU feelings skyrocketed in Latvia and Hungary, which, along with Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and EU aspirant member Iceland, found themselves as much abused by the IMF and its affiliates as the midtown Manhattan hotel chambermaid who was sexually set upon by IMF chief and ardent European integrationist Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Euro-skepticism, which runs the spectrum from the hard line and right-wing anti-EU British UK Independence Party, French National Front and Austrian Freedom Party to the softer anti-EU British Conservative Party and leftist Danish and Swedish Greens, has steadily morphed into a movement that no longer seeks EU reform but complete EU dissolution or something just short of it. There have been popular calls for the dumping of the euro and a return to the lira in Italy, Deutschemark in Germany, drachma in Greece, franc in France, and peseta in Spain.

There have been reports that Greece may be the first nation to withdraw from the euro zone. Anti-EU and global banking feelings are running high in Greece and Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou sees little room to maneuver with dictates on Greece’s collapsed economy coming from Frankfurt — the headquarters of the European Central Bank — and Brussels. Germany, the European Central Bank, and IMF fear that a financially independent Greece would simply default on its debts. However, defaulting on debt obligations engineered by the very banks that are now subjecting countries like Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Portugal to punishing and draconian austerity measures is exactly what workers’, pensioners’, and students’ groups advocate. The newly-invigorated popular movements of the left in the EU see defaulting on the banking vampires and vultures as the first step to renationalizing utilities and other former state-owned enterprises and scrapping the multinational capitalist system of derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, mortgage-backed securities and other financial “alchemy” schemes dreamt up by eyeglass pinch-nosed financial gnomes who relish in rewarding the greediest multinational corporations and banks.

The recent electoral success of the anti-EU True Finns Party has pushed Finland closer to the anti-EU sentiment found in its Nordic partners of Denmark and Norway. Norway never joined the EU and its strong economy has its Nordic partners wishing they, too, had opted to remain out of the bureaucratically top-heavy and financially-draining EU.

The rise of xenophobic anti-immigration right-wing parties in the EU is not the only political development that threatens the EU and its plans for a federal Europe. In the heart of the EU bureaucracy, Brussels, the Flemish Bloc not only seeks independence for Flanders and the dissolution of Belgium but wants Flanders to pull out of the EU. The idea of a non-EU Flanders just a few miles away from the European Commission headquarters is no longer hypothetical. The recent success of the Scottish National Party in the Scottish election may see an independent Scotland entering the EU on its own terms with a more anti-EU England and Wales pulling away from the EU.

Turkey, which has been rejected over and over again by a more nationalistic and anti-Muslim EU, is now enjoying strong economic growth. Many Turks now ask the question: who will benefit more from EU membership for Turkey? A financially-deteriorating EU might be anxious to grab Turkey’s economic wealth to bail out failed economies in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. Turkey, which is now seeing new emerging markets open for its businesses in the Middle East and central Asia, could find itself constrained by an Israeli-influenced EU that might force Ankara to apply curbs on its economic relations with Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.

The United States has relied on the EU as a natural complement to the arcane NATO military alliance. The EU-US-NATO alliance, which helped craft virtual EU protectorates masquerading as independent states in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in the remnants of Yugoslavia, will be keen to maintain the status quo in Europe. However, with the peoples of Europe hitting the streets in protest and the fumes from Molotov cocktails and tear gas heavy in the air of Athens, London, and soon, other capitals, the United States, a declining “paper tiger” empire, will have little influence to stymie the breakup of the EU. Like it or not, the United States will soon see the collapse of an abortive European super-state based in Brussels and the subsequent return of sovereignty to the nations of Europe…

The bee catastrophe

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe


beesfordevelopment.org

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country’s estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed “Mary Celeste syndrome” due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. “We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies,” said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS’s bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the “irresponsible use” of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE’s director-general, warned: “Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster.”

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “The AIA survey doesn’t give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be.”

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. “Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers,” he said, adding that a solution may be years away. “Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms.”

In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain’s estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers’ Association, said: “Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none.” Results from a survey of the association’s 15,000 members are expected this month.

John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers’ Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. “There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances,” he said. “We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them.”
Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government’s National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees’ survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the “alarming” decline of honeybees.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be “ring-fenced” for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.

Why Bees Matter

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature’s natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse


Nearly ninety years ago  visionary and teacher Rudolph Steiner predicted the approach of the current crisis in bee keeping. Steiner gave a series of lectures on bees and ants to the workers at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland in the 1920’s. Among the audience was a professional beekeeper, Mr Müller, who contributed to these lectures in the form of insights and questions. However, he disagreed vehemently and showed no understanding when Steiner explained that the modern method of breeding queens (using the larvae of worker bees, a practice that had already been in use for about fifteen years) would have long-term detrimental effects, so grave that:

“A century later all breeding of bees will cease if only artificially produced bees are used (November 10). . . . It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other again in one hundred years, Mr Müller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point”.
http://www.beesfordevelopment.org/info/info/enviro/the-need-for-organic-beek.shtml