Greece, Italy, Portugal should leave ‘greater Germany’ while they can still get out.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/25/11

AFP reports: The European Union demanded Wednesday sweeping powers to override national budgets and proposed issuing joint eurozone bonds to help resolve and prevent a repeat of the debt crisis.

"Without stronger governance, it will be difficult if not impossible to sustain the common currency," EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said of his latest legislative proposals.

The head of the executive EU arm, Barroso presented radical plans that would allow him and Economy Commissioner Olli Rehn to decide to intervene in national policymaking, the article reports.

It is time for Greece, Italy and Portugal to think twice about the EU. It was all the fever ten, twenty years ago when the economic cycle was rising to its peak and Bill Clinton – he of the 50 gold watches - was just rising to status of world shaman. It was a giddy time; the Dalai Lama charmed the world and Bono was writing op-eds for the New York Times. Every individual, all people in the global village would be as George Soros saw in the rising karma, a kind of American; an American by degree.

But this was all the work of lurid, globalized pop culture and easy money. In fact, all of the great Mediterranean states will be a “kind of Germany.” As comes clear now as if through a glass darkly, what they offered up to the lure of globalized capital was their soul. Ten years hence, reports Niall Ferguson, Harvard economist, Greeks and Italians will be working as gardeners and carrying boxes for Germans. So how’s that going to work out?

The U.S. came to be as an economic and political union in 1776 in opposition to English dominance and no one expected trouble down the line. No one except Jefferson, who realized as early as 1797 that the rising industrial states in the cold climate would dominate the agrarian regions and warm places and they would never be allowed out, even though he had written an escape clause in Virginia’s contract (New York and Rhode Island had them as well). The cost of the felicitous union of 1776 would be signed in blood with more than 618,000 dead and the passage to conquest would begin when Jefferson was barely cold in the grave.

A new generation needs to take hold of this here, there and everywhere, before their future is gobbled up. The laws of nature are hard and fast: When times get tough, the strong economically will dominate the weak and in the EU, that means Germany. Greece,Italy and Portugal should head for the doors and strive to find their souls again. Form a like-minded Mediterranean alliance perhaps. But leave while it is still possible.