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?

ThyssenKrupp in Alabama and Prof. Kerber's Carriers, both pose worrying questions.

The CNBC Squawk Box morning TV programme this week sent a reporter across America on a feature dubbed 'Opportunity USA'. Yesterday morning they were in Alabama and did a feature on the new ThyssenKrupp $5 Billion investment in Calvert, read here or view the actual report from that link.

Given the history of ThyssenKrupp, read here, and that Company's known use of slave labour during the second world war (a quote from the linked report "Krupp Industries employed workers conscripted by the Nazi regime from across Europe. These workers were initially paid, but as Nazi fortunes declined they were kept as slave workers. They were abused, beaten, and starved by the thousands, as detailed in the book The Arms of Krupp"), is it not quite extraordinary that the parent group is sufficiently insensitive to its own fairly recent past to have named this subsidiary  'ThyssenKrupp Steel USA' especially when reflecting on the huge investment involved? What is the mindset, I wonder, of those who could make such a decision?

Another question it is pertinent to pose as Europes' leaders today meet in Brussels to consider further subsuming all their economies into that of Germany, what exactly does Germany intend for this drastically restructured EU?

Professor Markus Kerber, mentioned before on this blog, is a remarkable German defender of the German Constitution, which itself was put in place, originally to forestall any repeat of Nazism, by constitutional experts from the allied nations after the defeat of Nazism in World War Two.  Yet even Professor Kerber seems to suggest a potentially eventual imperial role for the EU, as may be seen at 11 minutes 35 seconds in to Part 2 of a France 24 TV debate, linked here.

Two examples, which tend to indicate to this observer, that in the ThyssenKrupp case there is no longer the intense desire in modern Germany to put the stain of the past to rest once and for all, and in the second that some in Europe are unable to bury ambitions for imperialism, the projection of force beyond the borders of a peaceful trading group of countries supposedly being unthinkable, yet for what else do navies exist? I quote Professor Kerber from the video:

Europe cannot afford to have a European aircraft carrier. France has one, France won't purchase a second  - France isn't able - Europe as a whole is not able to have one or two aircraft carriers, we don't have a European fleet, a navy an embryo of a european navy, at the same time shipyards go bust..."  

Major steps are being considered in Europe, supposedly only to dampen minor bush fires, in small countries, all of which have been easily foreseeable for years. Many signs are in the wind, our leaders will ignore them to the great peril of all!