From Common Market to People's Europe

Somehow I lost ALL the chapter references I added over the weekend to 2020. Now I'm re-doing the research all over again, and well, let's just say it's hard to get inspired to repeat drudge work. But, there are always rewards when we do things we don't want to do, and here's one of them. Americans and Canadians who study the evolving North American Union and the NAFTA-CAFTA trade agreements would do well to read the first paragraph below VERY carefully. THIS is how trade agreements become projects that develop "far reaching" rights.

From common market to people’s Europe, 02/01/08
http://europa.eu/50/news/article/080102_en.htm

Entering into force on 1 January 1958, the Treaty of Rome laid the foundations of the modern EU. Primarily an economic organisation at its inception, the EU has evolved into a project to guarantee high levels of social protection for its citizens.

In the much harsher climate of post-war Europe, the overriding priority was to secure Europe’s economic prosperity through a common market. As living standards improved, EU efforts to improve social rights quickly gained momentum, and greater importance was attached to promoting democracy, human rights and civil society, and combating discrimination.

Important achievements in this context include:

• gender equality laws on access to work, training, career advancement and working conditions, as well as equal pay, security benefits and the right to parental leave
• rules making EU bodies more transparent, such as free access to documents and more openness over EU spending
• a European ombudsman - an independent body set up to investigate complaints about maladministration by EU bodies
• the Charter of Fundamental Rights, bringing together the EU’s founding principles of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms
• European communication initiatives, designed to involve Europeans in EU law-making through debate, discussion and public consultation.

The EU is moving with the times, developing more far‑reaching rights – the right to a sustainable environment, consumer protection and data protection are now among its top priorities.

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"The good thing about not calling it a Constitution is that no one can ask for a referendum on it." Giuliano Amato - speech at London School of Economics, 21 February 2007
http://www.caef.org.uk/D104quotes.html

I was sending 2020 to the printer tonight... now I face just one more delay in this series of delays that are beginning to look like a phenomena my friend Maynard Ekan used to describe. He said when we start to do something for "good" reasons, sometimes all the forces of the universe rise up to stop us from doing it. Maynard said it may mean that what we are doing is so important we cannot be allowed to accomplish it unless we overcome great obstacles first.

This book has been nothing but grief for months, and now I'm planning on using our last cash to pay the new printer. It's still 25 below outside, we're exhausted from camping all winter, and suddenly I wish I were living in a place with running water, an inside toilet, and heat I can simply turn on with a button. Last night I was sick as a dog after eating some bad sausages, and this is not a good place to let that happen. So, in order to have ALL those creature comforts I'd have to move to a city, get a manual labor job and give up the TIME and energy I need to do ACL work. By choosing this rugged lifestyle I've been able to subsist on practically nothing, but it's a choice that has begun to cause me and my daughter much heartache and grief. While we have quite a few projects in the works that may bring rewards in about six months, right now we're barely living on what's left of the donations we got last month. Now that there's a baby to take care of, maybe it's time to re-assess our committment to exposing the communitarian government system. Once the book is back out there, do I really need to keep working to save a nation that doesn't care to know which of their presidential candidates are communitarians? I must be nuts to think it matters whether the ACL website is up-to-date or stays online.

I'm also currently editing a book written by a man who found our ACL work. It's beautifully written, and he's touched me in a way I rarely consider anymore. When I started this research in 1999, I did it because I believed it was what God wanted me to do. I spent months praying to Jesus for guidance, asking for the courage and stamina to keep going, even though I hadn't stepped foot in a Christian church in over a decade. I left the organized church a long time ago and today I won't even call myself a Christian. I don't know what I believe, as I have become suspicious of all religious writings and am now wary of anything based in Judaic-Christianity.

At the same time, it's obvious the goal of communitarianism is to destroy the modern Christian Church and replace Jesus with some hybrid Earth-Sun God religion that is absolutely repulsive to me. The New Age connection to the communitarian synthesis is well-documented by Bobby Garner. So, when I pray, who am I really praying to? Is there really a just God who directs my thoughts and actions, or is what I feel just a need I share with other good hearted humans for a belief in something greater than myself? I used to believe in our nation and our laws, which I thought was all based in Christian values. Then I read the truth about our founding fathers' affiliations with freemasonry and was left with the distinct possibility that the USA was created by them only to usher in their illuminated vision of a new world order. Then I was forced to look at the fundamentalist Christian ethics as practiced by Dave Hoddges of the Arizona Constitution Party (whose reaction to my accusation of plagiarism was to add me to the party's mailing list!) The Christian Right seems to be just as interested in keeping the dialectic going as the left.

Trying to figure out what was going on in 1787 between Hamilton and Jefferson is also wearing me out. All the praise for Jefferson and the accusations against Hamilton and the National Bank and the American system of economy always seem to leave out the American founder's written connections to the Jacobin Reign of Terror in 1789 France.

Even though I hate watching TV I still watch movies, and last night I watched Amazing Grace, the story of the man who wrote the bill in the English Parliment that outlawed the slave trade. What a fabulous propaganda film it is! The "heros" have shady connections to revolutionary Jacobin activities in France but, oh well, the movie didn't need to go into that too much, because we should only look at the wonderful thing the British accomplished and how we can ALL become "agents of change." After I saw how the whole film was designed to promote the communitarian ideology and teach it to us "sinners," it left me wondering what the REAL story is about the anti-slavery movement... because as we all know they were also VERY ACTIVE in promoting the American's civil war seventy years later. Didn't the Southern states sell their slave cotton to English manufacturers LONG after the British Empire declared the slave trade illegal? Didn't the British Empire continue to colonize the Middle East and Africa long after they became anti-slavery global naval policemen? And was the little English bill the abolutionists introduced during Napolean's wars the very thing that allowed Imperial ships to confiscate ships flying the American flag as a prelude to the U.S. - UK War of 1812?

What IS a People's government, really? Am I just another useful idiot defending an elaborate freemason plan to rule the world? Considering all the answers I still have, anything is possible.
So, back to book edits... guess I just needed to come here and dump all my angst so it wouldn't end up in the book..heh.