I opened up the No Agenda News Network as a Community River 2 weeks ago and its a big suceess!

Besides the hundreds of No Agenda producers linking and posting stories, we now have over 20 rss feeds that have been added to the river, all with relevant and interesting content.

People have been adding feeds from other news sites, but we also have a producer who is creating his links on the network by adding his twitter rss feed. Brilliant!

 12/9/2011; 3:22:09 PM.   .

Several months ago we deconstructed the EU proposal to introduce the European Stability Mechanism in 2013 on the No Agenda Show.

As predicted expected, this legislation has now been accelerated to be implemented a full year sooner, starting in 2012.

In today's 'Fiscal Compact' agreement, signed by all EU member states except the UK, there is an additional change to the ESM:

"In order to ensure that the ESM is in a position to take the necesssary decisions in all circumstances, voting rules in the ESM will be changed to include an emergency procedure. The mutual agreement rule will be replaced by a qualified majority of 85% in case the Commission and the ECB conclude that an urgent decision related to financial assistance is needed when the financial and economic sustainability of the euro area is threatened."

The emphasis in that paragraph is NOT mine, it is actually bold in the treaty document.

Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) was initially agreed to in the Treaty of Nice, and was intended to weigh voting rights in a manner that gave member states with smaller populations a fair share of any important vote.

So, instead of the ESM conditions (I'm getting to that) being changed by mutual agreement, only an 85% QMV is needed to make the desired changes. This means that Germany, France and just one other country could represent the desired majority. There are several that quality: Italy, Spain, Poland or a combo of two smaller states, like Greece and The Netherlands.

Clearly this ESM thing is important. So just what is ESM? I could summarize easily by saying that it is a loss of sovereignty for EU member states, direct levy of taxes that are paid to Brussels to bail out off-shore banks and more scary language, but this video (German with English subtitles) really does a great job of deconstructing the ESM in 3 minutes.

To the people of Europe I say; you are being robbed by technocrats and bankers. Unfortunately it is too late to stop them.

 12/9/2011; 9:23:13 AM.   .