The Great Eurocrat Swindle Continues

The heads of state of the European Union's 27 member countries descended upon Lisbon today to sign a treaty that is supposed to bring the EU closer to common folk. The leaders are certainly off to a fantastic start. As Time notes:

[T]he whole event has been dubbed a diplomatic vanity trip and an environmental extravagance because, after the signing, the leaders (many of whom only spent only a few hours in the city) will then hop on planes — with their huge entourages and other hangers-on like the media — to meet the next day in Brussels for their regular December E.U. summit.

The reason for this flying circus? Portugal, which currently holds the union's presidency, insisted that the treaty be signed on Portuguese soil and enter the history books as the Treaty of Lisbon. But under the E.U.'s Nice Treaty in 2000, all formal summits must take place in Brussels, home of the E.U.'s main institutions. So the leaders are obliged to meet in the Belgian capital for their scheduled summit, due to take place the day after the signing ceremony.

E.U. officials failed to persuade either Portugal or Belgium to back down so that the hour-long signing ceremony and the summit could take place in a single city. ...

The carbon footprint from the signing rigmarole threatens to overshadow the E.U.'s own strong work in addressing climate change through emission caps.

Then again, none of this should come as a surprise, considering that the entire European Parliament moves from Brussels in Belgium to Strasbourg in France once a month, a pointless exercise that, in terms of carbon-dioxide generation, is the equivalent of more than 150,000 transatlantic round-trip flights annually. One of the parliamentarians, Daniel Hannan, has had quite enough, thank you:

"It’s not just the 732 MEPs who make the monthly peregrination, you see: it’s the chauffeurs, the committee clerks, the man who advises your secretary about her pension rights — oh, and some twelve tons of papers, shuttling back and forth in a dedicated train."

Due mostly to that entourage of yo-yo'ing mandarins, and to the off-the-scale wastefulness of the never-ending schlep, each of those 732 members of parliament costs taxpayers 2.5 million euros (more than 3.6 million dollars) a year.

Hannan is far from alone in his disgust. Plenty of his fellow parliamentarians are thoroughly sick of the trek to Strasbourg, too. Take Gary Titley, a resigning Euro-parliamentarian who literally couldn't stand it any longer:

"The plenary sessions in Strasbourg are ... for public display. We're condemned to these visits whether they are needed or not and they're often padded out with debates saying we are against sin."

Occasionally, there'll be a proposal to abolish the perversely unnecessary monthly trip. But the French have made sure that won't happen. Such a measure would have to be approved unanimously by all member states, and France has simply decided to hang tight, stick its fingers in its ears, and enjoy the prestige of having a Euro-capital within its borders — as well as the fruits of that big heaping helping of foreign porc.

Yeah, way to move closer to ordinary citizens!

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P.S.: For some tell-tale insight into how well the EU truly wants to listen to the commoners it claims to serve, check out this recent article from the U.K. Telegraph:

Referendums on the new European Union Treaty were "dangerous" and would be lost in France, Britain and other countries, Nicolas Sarkozy has admitted. The French president's confession that governments could not win popular votes on a "simplified treaty" — drawn up to replace the EU constitution rejected by his countrymen two years ago — was made in a closed meeting of senior Euro-MPs.

"France was just ahead of all the other countries in voting no. It would happen in all member states if they have a referendum. There is a cleavage between people and governments," he said. "A referendum now would bring Europe into danger. There will be no Treaty if we had a referendum in France, which would again be followed by a referendum in the UK."

The comments confirm suspicions that the real reason why Britain, and all other EU countries, apart from Ireland, were refusing to hold popular votes was because governments were afraid they would lose them.

Comments

[mk]

I'd like to recommend that, in the interest of communing with the common folk, the entire DC federal government move to Detroit for two months in the summer.

[mk]

Seriously though, what kind of money could we get for some of the federal buildings downtown? Wouldn't the Dept. Of Agriculture, if it must exist, be better situated in say Lawrence Kansas or Des Moines Iowa? We could probably save a lot of money by putting all those people there.

I think there was an episode of "Yes, Prime Minister" that featured the same idea. I remember that it was one of the better episodes as well.