European Round Table of Industrialists – the constructors behind the EU

The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has been at the forefront of encouraging EU integration for over 20 years.

But many Euro-realists seem completely unaware of ERT's presence. It is not mentioned in the media. The purpose here is to raise awareness of this influence in our time.

European Round Table of Industrialists - The influence of the hidden neoliberals on the EU

The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has long had a great influence on EU politics and economics. Despite this, many people are unaware of ERT
existence and its impact. By analyzing the ERT's role and actions, we can better understand how they have contributed to the EU's neoliberal transformation.

ERT has been an important actor behind the scenes in the EU
political decision-making process. They have lobbied for political reforms that favor big business and neoliberal policies. Their reports and recommendations have influenced many of the policy measures that have been implemented in the EU. For example, in 1986 the ERT presented the report "Making Europe Work", which proposed the abolition of minimum wages and central wage agreements, as well as increased flexibility in the labor market.

In the report "European Labor Markets" from 1989, the ERT argued that unemployment in Western Europe was not due to a lack of growth (ie to a lack of fiscal investment), but to structural rigidities such as social safety nets and labor market regulations. They suggested that wage differentials would increase, that job security would decrease and that new types of employment contracts would be introduced.
ERT: Strategy and Future

ERT's strategy has always been action-oriented, with a focus on creating a more flexible and deregulated financial environment. Their influence has contributed to the neoliberal upheaval of the EU
social structure. By promoting deregulation and privatization, they have shaped the European economy in a way that favors big business.

Cuts in public spending, reforming pension systems and social security systems

In the report "ERT's Vision for a Competitive Europe in 2025", submitted in 2010, ERT leaders called for cuts in public spending, reform of pension systems and social security systems. They also suggested that patients should take more responsibility for health care costs. These demands reflect ERT's continued pursuit of a neoliberal economic policy.

Criticism and Controversy

ERT has received widespread criticism for its influence and its secretive way of working. Critics believe that ERT
policies have led to increased economic gaps and deteriorating social security. Their strong connections to big business and their ability to influence the EU
politics without transparency has been questioned.

Disinformation about the 1973 oil crisis

ERT's influence can be traced back to the 1973 oil crisis and the disinformation which was spread by political leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher, as well as Sweden's bourgeois government about the impact of this crisis on the functionality of the welfare state. These leaders used the crisis to justify neoliberal reforms that favored big business and weakened welfare states. Neoliberal policies have consistently worked towards good working conditions and strong welfare systems.

ERT weakens labor law and social safety nets

ERT has actively worked to weaken labor law and social safety nets. They have advocated that wage differences should increase, that job security should decrease and that new types of employment contracts should be introduced. ERT has also argued that unemployment in Western Europe is due to "structural rigidities" and that social safety nets are one of these rigidities.

Per Gyllenhammar's and Curt Nicolin's Role

Per Gyllenhammar, former CEO of Volvo, played a key role in the formation of ERT. His speech in New York in 1982 before 1200 leading businessmen emphasized the need for a new "Marshall Plan" to save Europe from economic stagnation. Gyllenhammar stressed that the industry must push narrow-minded national politics aside and develop new strategies for growth in Europe.

Curt Nicolin, former chairman of SAF (Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen), also contributed strongly to ERT
work. Nicolin co-authored the report "European Labor Markets" from 1989, in which ERT argued that unemployment in Western Europe was not due to a lack of growth, but to structural rigidities such as social safety nets and labor market regulations.

The Effects of Neoliberalism on Productivity

The neoliberal policy that ERT also promotes has led to productivity has slowed in the world. Through social cuts, working conditions and work motivation have deteriorated, which has had a negative effect on productivity.

Clara E. Mattei points out in the economic history book "The order of capital"that austerity policies, as advocated by the ERT, often lead to more political extremism, including far-right ones. So the risk we see for right-wing extremism and they the crisis economies has a background in the work of neoliberal lobbyists such as ERT.

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Historical Background to the EU

Formation

Brief history of the EU

• • The formal start of the European Union was the establishment of a "common market" for coal and steel in six Western European countries. This constituted the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) signed in the Treaty of Paris in July 1951.
  • The real reasons for establishing the ECSC included the long-term political goal of a federal super-national state or the United States of Europe.

Previous attempts to establish a unified European state had been through Napoleon and Hitler.

• Bilderberg 1954. International reference group without transparency.
• EEC Treaty 1957
• EC Treaty 1970
• ERT group in 1982
• EU Maastricht Treaty 1992
• Sweden member in 1994
• ECB Bank 1998
• Euro 1999
• Treaty of Lisbon. EU state 2007
• The 2011 EU crisis

 

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.", says Deng Xiaoping laconically in China when it left the planned economy in 1989 in its transition to a neoliberal market economy. Communism and capitalism are based on the same philosophy of values ​​about people and society.

ERT's origins

At the beginning of 1980, the then European Economic Community could not respond effectively to the economic "stagflation" that Western Europe suffered through the 70s crisis, when the global currency system with Bretton Woods collapsed when the dollar's gold standard disappeared. The US gold reserve was depleted by the Vietnam War. The oil shock came in 1973 and currencies galloped against each other and through currency speculation.

At the same time, further steps had been taken for integration within the EEC. ERT was formed in 1982 as an industrial initiative to renew Europe. They currently have 50 members, representing companies from 18 European countries, including three states outside the EU (Norway, Switzerland, Turkey). The purpose is:

to favor EU-based transnational corporations with "a significant manufacturing and technological presence worldwide"

Its current chairman is Gerhard Cromme of ThyssenKrupp, with Alain Joly of Air Liquide and Jorman Ollila Nokia vice chairman. Other companies represented in the ERT include DaimlerChrysler, Ericsson, Fiat, Nestlé, Renault and Siemens.

Membership is personal, rather than corporate, and strictly by invitation. ERT members meet twice a year in plenary sessions, which determine the ERT work program and priorities, budget and publications. Decisions are made by consensus. Much of ERT's work takes place through working groups established in plenary.

• ERT can operate through another pressure group lobbying Brussels.
• ERT believes that "the industry has the right to ... an EU that functions as an integrated economic system with a single center for the entire decision-making process."
• ERT has consistently supported the abolition of vetoes and other forms of "fragmentation" within the EU
• ERT claims to be primarily interested in the economic consequences of further EU integration
• ERT designed the EU single market program which was completed in 1992.

Strong business interests are behind the EU's new construction

The big business lobby groups, led by the Roundtable group, have greatly contributed to the neoliberal restructuring that has taken place in the EU since the internal market project was put into effect.

"In the name of the single market, we have had things done that we never even dared to dream of," an adviser at Belgium's finance ministry explained to the Financial Times.

It started with the Volvo CEO's speech in New York in 1982 before 1 leading businessmen in the United States about the future of Europe spoke of a plan:

"We need a new Marshall Plan, figuratively speaking. The entrepreneurs must shake Europe out of its economic and political paralysis. The industry must push narrow-minded national politics aside and develop new strategies for growth in Europeto."

It was well received. Narrow-minded politics were the welfare policy, national mixed economy and society's social equipment. A speech in neoliberal terms, which breathes Milton Friedman's axiom of change via crisis - imagined or real. Crisis and paralysis came. We know that members are part of the fraternity of secret societies.

The head of Volvo (PG) and the vice-chairman of the European Commission, the industrial capitalist Etienne Davignon in Brussels and then agreed to form a closed society for Western Europe's top business leaders, European Round Table for Industrialists. The name reveals its origins and roots.

ERT is a subsidiary group of an international and large financial network and think tank "Round Table Group, which was formed as early as 1891.

The group works to conjure up scenarios, such as economic crises and war, which forced policies to maintain Britain's economic and political hegemony in the world. David Rockefeller was chairman of the board 1970-1985. This now applies to an American dominance in the world.

The group then created the powerful organizations

• Royal Institute of International Affairs 1919
• Council on Foreign Relations CFR (1921)
  • The CFR is the American branch of a society originating in England which believes that national borders should be obliterated, according to Carroll Quigley in the book Tragedy and Hope
  • ECRF is European
• The Bilderberg Group (1954)
• Club of Rome (1968)
• Trilateral Commission (1973).

Behind it is the South African diamond baron Cecil John Rhodes  His aim was to form a South African federation and British territory from Cape Town to Cairo. Since 1925, there has been economic strength from foundations and corporations such as Carnegie, the United Kingdom Trust, JP Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families and associates of Lazard Brothers

The American branch included a number of newspapers such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post

This with ERT would not be any ordinary pressure organization, explained Gyllenhammar:

- "Our strategy is action-oriented, not just another plea for help."

A tailor-made concept for large business owners called "the internal market" but also what the EU's future governance of Europe would look like.

The European Round Table (ERT) worked quite intensively on the white paper together with the European Commission," said Gyllenhammar at the time.

- "We also participated in its design."

With the internal market project, the upheaval of the Western European welfare states accelerated. Taxes and subsidy systems were rearranged, public institutions were privatized and markets and capital flows were let loose. Deregulation was also an instrument to uproot the positions that the working class fought for.

Most of the political mandates that in the mid-1990s were launched in beautifying rewrites as renewal of working life and the public sector can be traced back to discussions among the leaders of large companies ten years earlier.

In 1986, ERT presented the report "Making Europe Work" a list of necessary actions:

• Statutory minimum wages and central wage agreements must be removed and wage differences increased, "especially for young people".
• Employment security would be relaxed.
• The companies must be given the freedom to "offer a wide range of temporary employment contracts".
• The standard working day must be abolished: "There is great scope for more flexible working hours, as long as companies are not expected to bear greater costs as a result."
• Politicians were further urged to abandon any plans for a return to the full employment policy of the 60s.

In "European Labor Markets", a 1989 report prepared by, among others, former SAF chief Curt Nicolin, the European Round Table explained that mass unemployment in Western Europe is not primarily related to a lack of growth.

The most important reason is "structural stiffness". One rigidity is the social safety net, another the regulations of the labor market

Increased employment in the public sector is firmly rejected as a way out of mass unemployment, and the states must not issue any promises of work for all. Instead, the authors of the report emphasize individual responsibility. Unemployment is said to have its origin in people's reluctance to lower their demands for wages and working conditions. It is therefore necessary to "reduce the morally dubious part of the social safety net".

Wage differences will increase, shift work will be expanded and new types of employment contracts will be introduced. With part-time jobs and services in the homes, it will be easier for "newcomers and women" to find employment.

Beating the Crisis” from December 1993:

• "Only bold moves can set things right", explained Gyllenhammar and six co-authors from the board of ERT.
• "There is work, but not at current prices." It must become easier to hire temporary staff, and "new forms of work must be actively encouraged, instead of hindered by unnecessary regulations".
• The authors mention employment with flexible working hours, seasonal work, shared employment, part-time work and "a whole range of useful occupations that exist in the 'grey zone' between formal employment, self-employment and social work"

The EMU project includes the program of large companies, the economic and monetary union,
EMU. The then ABB CEO Percy Barnevik, also a member of the EU's advisory group for competitiveness, put these expectations in print in Dagens Nyheter 10 July 1995:

"EMU's greatest value for business is perhaps the fact that national governments get an external push to take necessary but not always popular measures."

The large European companies see in the currency union an assurance of continued neoliberal upheaval in social life. Michael Treschow, Svenskt Näringsliv's then vice-chairman, gave his voice to an accession in a speech at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in November 2002:

"There are several reasons for us to join, for example the imperative requirement for a balanced economy is good. When the politicians are then forced to make unpopular decisions, it certainly feels better to be able to refer to the fact that they have decided that in Brussels."

In 2002, the next ERT report will be presented. EU Governance, with the demand for a stronger European central power:

"There is a lack of a coherent budget policy for the eurozone as a whole, this is one of the most important issues from the point of view of business." The report suggests, among other things, that "at the draft stage, national budgets should be evaluated at Union level".

"ERT's vision for a competitive Europe in 2025"

In February 2010, the report "ERT's vision for a competitive Europe in 2025" was submitted, in which ERT's chairman Leif Johansson and vice-chairman Gerad Kleisterlee (CEO of the large company Philips) demand, among other things, that EU leaders must "ensure respect" for the EU's stability pact through "cuts in public spending", reforming the pension systems and the social security systems, for example by allowing patients to take "greater responsibility" for healthcare costs.

Today, the EU's political leaders are implementing the big companies' demand lists in the form of the EU semester, the Europlus Pact and the Six Pack.

To enforce and change consciousness, myths are spread. OECD and Eurostat show

• that Greeks work an average of 44,3 hours per week compared to the EU average of 41,7.
• that the Greeks have 23 days of holiday per year compared to the Germans' 30 days.
• that the EU average of labor productivity is 100, the Greeks are at 102, just behind the Germans at 104

So why then has the Greek economy crashed?

The biggest problems are corrupt politicians and clientelism. A system that allowed a large part of the economy to be black.

In addition, the rich pay almost no taxes at all. Tax revenue in Greece has been significantly lower than the EU average. Corporate taxation has been particularly low.

The profit share of GDP in Greece in 2009 was 54,2 percent compared to the EU average of 38,9.

Greece has the world's largest merchant fleet with more than 4000 ships. Right now
allows the Greek shipowners to build 600 new ships in China and South Korea and not a single one in Greece.

These shipowners pay 12 million euros in tax. It will be 3 euros [approximately 000 kroner] per boat. The comment "peanuts" is appropriate. So budget discipline in that sense would really be needed. Instead, the EU and the IMF are forcing Greece into wage cuts of more than 27.000 percent, cutbacks and the sale of government property at scrap prices. The EU holds several summits.

With incomprehensible sums of money, they want to create an emergency fund for the euro countries and an emergency institution to save the banks. They want new treaty changes that will give the EU almost total power over the democratically elected governments.

That the EU receives the Nobel Peace Prize arouses surprise in the state that has been created and with objectives that did NOT apply to people and nations but to transnationally operating companies where borders cease

Thorbjørn Jagland is awesome:

• Chairman of the Nobel Committee.
• On 30 September 2009, Thorbjørn Jagland was elected Secretary General of the Council of Europe
• Chairman of the Storting. 2005-2009.
• Prime Minister 1996-1997
• Minister of Foreign Affairs 2000-2001.
• Member of the Storting 1993-2009.
• He has previously been a member
  • Trilateral Commission of the Round Table Group
  • Council on Foreign Relations Round Table Group

Secretary General i Council of Europe ( French : Secretary General of the Council of Europe ) is appointed by the Assembly on the recommendation of the Committee of Ministers for a period of five years. He or she has been entrusted with the responsibility of fulfilling the objective for which the Council of Europe was established in London on 5 May 1949, namely to achieve greater unity among its member states in order to protect and realize the ideals and principles which constitute their common heritage and facilitate their economic and social progress. The goal is a union without borders.

The European Council summit took place on 28 and 29 June 2012 in Brussels. The meeting is chaired by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council.On 19 November 2009, Van Rompuy was elected by the members of the European Council as the first full-time President of the European Council under the Treaty of Lisbon. ^{[ 4} 

During the 1970s and 1980s, Jagland was seen as a "nice politician" and had a "secret contact" with Soviet KGB sources. His internal KGB nickname was "Yuri". With Referring to Wikipedia , asked a reporter for the Hungarian Broadcast HirTV on March 21, 2012, whether Jagland had been an agent of the KGB.

According to KGB sources from a former Soviet agent, he had been a useful source of political information. His reports had been used as a "channel for active measures", including in the matter of nuclear free zones for the Nordic countries.

REPORT KEY POINT IN NRK "KGB's last offensive" 14/12 2000

In the winter of 1990, Mikhail Butkov received another assignment from the KGB resident, Lev Koshliakov.

A telegram had arrived from the Center in Moscow asking the station in Oslo to try to resume contact with another high-ranking Norwegian politician, whom the KGB had included in its network as one of its confidential contacts under the cover name Jurij.

Torbjørn Jagland seg, at the time a powerful secretary in the Labor Party, hid behind the pseudonym Jurij.

The contact with the KGB

However, the contact with the KGB, which had given him a cover name and a folder in the KGB's archives, dates back to earlier times. Jagland had become cultured in the 70s, when he was the chairman of AUF and then was employed in Ap's party office. According to the telegram, he had been a useful source of political information. He had also been used as a channel for active measures - including in the issue of nuclear-free zones in the Nordics.

According to Koshliakov, the KGB had worked "closely" against Jagland. One of Arne Treholt's guidance officers, Vladimir Shishin, took part in the operation. He then became the KGB's youngest general and second-in-command of the entire foreign intelligence service.

After holding two meetings with Jagland and one of his secretaries at the party office, Butkov turned the contact over to his boss, Koshliakov – and reported it all to the POT.

Koshliakov, along with seven other KGB officers, was declared undesirable in Norway when Butkov defected.

...

When Torbjørn Jagland was interviewed about the same, he replied that he had only done his job, which involved regular contact with foreign embassy personnel, including Russians. Jagland said he had reported the contacts - not to POT, but to the Labor Party leadership and section chief Trond Johansen in the Defense E-stab.

 

Source:
http://www.caef.org.uk/
The EU and the union