Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Have German attitudes in Alabama also sped the EU's downfall?


In February last year I raised some questions about German attitudes towards the outside world and questioned whether they would lead us all to disaster, that post may be read from here.

The ThyssenKrupp US steel plant mentioned in my comment as well as another in Brazil is now reportedly in deep financial difficulties as commented upon by Der Spiegel yesterday, read here, from which comes this telling extract:


 But now Claassen's questionable trips with journalists are the least of ThyssenKrupp's problems. It faces charges that billions in losses and bad planning were covered up for years, and that supervisory board members deliberately gave out false information. In fact, the very survival of the steelmaker, which has been around for more than a century, may be at stake.
In my 2011 posting the EU was in the opening stages of the financial collapse that is now quite clearly engulfing the supposedly peacefully inclined  and well-intentioned trading organisation, but the danger signs in German attitudes to the problems of the peripheral countries already appeared extremely ominous.

I had commented on theses dangers years before, of course, on Ironies and again during 2005, linked here, where this warning had been repeated:
 As was later pointed out on Ironies this compromise did little to overcome the fact that as the EU's most populace member state the voter in Germany has far more power to determine the future course of the EU than any others - this remained particularly true given the power of the Franco/German axis operating under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.
In light of the rapid descent of France into rudderless chaos under the hapless and daily more clueless President Hollande, even that necessity to coordinate decisions with the French has now disappeared. With Italy under the control of an EU puppet interim or resigned PM and its politicians intent upon entering a two month election campaign, Europe appears left with only the vapid and clueless David Cameron to pull it back from the abyss towards which it seems intent upon careering.

In true tradition to all his earlier decisions, the British Prime Minister has decided that this is the moment to force churches up and down the land to perform gay marriage ceremonies with arbitrary exceptions designed apparently to foster further widespread dissent. No doubt the UK media will need no second prompting to concentrate entirely on that matter over the extended Xmas holiday period, disregarding the growing EU chaos on their doorstep, of which, unhappily, Britain is very much a part!

Can nobody with the authority to act see Europe's destination and gather the leaderless European Council together this week to NOW call a halt?

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1 Comments:

Blogger Robert said...

From Spiegel
'Management Shakeup Has Bought Cromme Time

Cromme's tough action followed mounting pressure on him to sort the troubled company out. In recent months, the supervisory board chairman has often been forced to answer critical questions. Was he truly unaware of bad planning and corruption at ThyssenKrupp? Could he have been involved himself? Or did Cromme, with an eye to protecting his own career, apply different standards to ThyssenKrupp than to industrial group Siemens? He has been a member of Siemens' supervisory board since 2003 and a few years ago forced the then supervisory board chairman, Heinrich von Pierer, to step down following similar problems. Cromme now chairs the supervisory boards of both Siemens and ThyssenKrupp'.

This from the Slog re Siemens and German submarines to Greece:http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/greek-crisis-a-potted-look-at-the-berlin-legacy/

Siemens is the company that has been chosen to build the train sets for Cross Rail. The government knows that things are not quite right with Siemens.This contract has led to job loses at Bombardier in Derby.The Germans can be as corrupt as the worst of them. Things however are very bad in the steel industry at present. European demand is down 25% since 2007.

12:23 PM  

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