The EU can’t fix Europe – but it can fund Kiev forever

NATO-EU Europe, that tense, unhappy realm of deeply unpopular yet aggressively doctrinaire centrist regimes, has many grifts.

Its elites, whether national or EU, in business, politics, and the mainstream media and think-tank sinecure system are stunningly inept when it comes to addressing the urgent, even vital problems of their subjects. They could not care less about critical economic decline and general impoverishment, crumbling infrastructure, withering education, and scarce, unequal health care, to name only a few.

But the same elites are endlessly creative and tirelessly busy when looking after themselves, from top to bottom. Recent and countless examples of this ever more shameless divergence between not doing their job of looking after the public interest, on one side, and extensive as well as exclusive “self-care,” on the other, are easy to come by.

Concerning the self-care, we have, for instance, just entered the umpteenth iteration of Ursula von der Leyen – the German boss of the EU doing double duty as US viceroy – illegally deleting the evidence of her very shady deals, from the Corona pandemic (‘Pfizergate’) to the Mercosur trade scheme to Ukraine and handling US President Donald Trump (the ‘Washington Group’).

In Germany, the second-most powerful man in the ruling (if barely) mainstream conservative party, Jens Spahn, has just been exposed as a long-time associate of a secretive network linked to US oligarch – and Antichrist obsessive – Peter Thiel. That’s a new one. Before that, Spahn was mostly known for his extremely suspect and certainly enormously wasteful wheeling and dealing during the pandemic.

Across the Channel, meanwhile, Great Britain is still one of the largest money laundries in the world. According to a fresh report, it is handling a whopping £325 billion of dirty money per year, equivalent to 10% of its GDP.