Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Belgian PM Named as EU President
Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium's prime minister, has become the first president of the European Council.
Belgium's Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy arrives at a news conference after being elected EU President during a EU leaders summit in Brussels November 19, 2009. European Union leaders named Van Rompuy as the bloc's first president on Thursday and appointed Briton Catherine Ashton as its foreign affairs chief. (REUTERS/Yves Herman) Van
Rompuy, largely unknown outside his native Belgium, was named after a
consensus was reached at a meeting of the leaders of the 27-member
European Union on Thursday.
"I did not seek this high position, I didn't make any steps to achieve but from tonight I take on this task," he told a news conference.
The meeting also agreed to back the candidacy of Catherine Ashton, the British EU trade commissioner, for the foreign policy role.
Britain dropped its bid to to get Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, appointed to the presidency earlier in the day after it became clear that centre-right countries, who dominate the EU, were determined that the role should go to someone from their group.
"When it became clear that because of the various political considerations and varying views among the rest of the members, then the prime minister made the forceful step of proposing Catherine Ashton for the high representative's position," a spokesman for Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said.
Presidential role
The debate over the appointments had focused over what role the president of the European Council should play, with many arguing that the role should go to a technocrat who can build unity and consensus.
The Lisbon Treaty which created the new post was vague on its powers and obligations, saying simply that the president should "drive forward" the EU's work.
Van Rompuy will serve a two-and-a-half year term, which is renewable once.
Glyn Ford, a former Labour member of the European parliament, told Al Jazeera that building a political presence in Europe was one of the challenges a new president would face.
"Europe is bigger than the United States, its richer than the United States, it gives more to the developing world than the United States by far. But we don't actually have the political presence," he said.
"Now how do you develop that political presence?"
'Missed opportunity'
Marco Incerti, a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera that the appointments marked a missed opportunity for the European Union.
"Because it had been known for some time that Mr Van Rompuy would be appointed as president of the European Council people were hoping that for the foreign minister job we would get somebody a bit better known," he said.
"There is nothing wrong with Catherine Ashton herself, but she lacks international experience.
"For a post like that of foreign minister of the European Union having been in a comparable job for some time, having built networks ... could have been useful.
"I think there were many names on the shortlist that fitted the job description a bit better and I am afraid that this is one more case in which horse-trading has prevailed. It was matter of giving the position to a Socialist in turn of the president of the council to the centre-right."
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
11 Comments so far
Show AllThat Blair isn't a "centre-right" politico, and Aston is a "Socialist" are absolutely laughable.
We can expect little help in combating the Empire from the EU given its new team.
No mention of Blair not being chosen because he is a WAR CRIMINAL!
"Britain dropped its bid to to get Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, appointed to the presidency earlier in the day after it became clear that centre-right countries, who dominate the EU, preferred George W Bush's other dog, Barney"
THE Herman Van Rompuy?
OK, I never heard of him before, and frankly don't expect to hear of him again.
But in my heart, he'll always be the guy who put "paid" to Tony Blair's political career.
My hero!
· Yr Obd't Servant
Another Bilderberger ...
"In fact, the only real clue that Herman van Rompuy has won over the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers is due to his appearance alongside the somewhat sinister Henry Kissinger at a Bilderberger Club session. What a sad state of affairs it has become for democracy when a man’s chances for moving up the power vertical does not depend on exit polls, campaign buttons and other foolish tools, but rather on who he sips wine and sucks oysters with far beyond the public gaze.
“Van Rompuy met Kissinger at a closed session of international policymakers and industrialists chaired by Viscount Etienne Davignon,” The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday.
Who is Viscount Etienne Davignon, 77, you may be asking? He is described as a “discreetly powerful figure in Brussels who was vice-president of the European commission in the 1980s,” the newspaper continued.
“Discreetly powerful?” What exactly does that mean? And weren’t viscounts ceremoniously phased out and relieved of their privileges sometime in the 18th century?
Anyways, if all this doesn’t sound medieval enough, Davignon chairs the Bilderberger Club, the “shadowy global freemasonry of politicians and bankers who meet to discuss world affairs in the strictest privacy, spawning innumerable conspiracy theories,” as The Guardian succinctly put it. "
"Bilderberger and closed-door meetings: European Union gets medieval with ultra-secret elections"
by Robert Bridge
Global Research
~~~~
So now the Biderbergers have both sides of the Atlantic. Obama was anointed at the 2008 Chantilly, Virginia meeting where Clinton, Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Kissinger, Hank Paulson attended.
Of course WAPO was there, the WSJ, Time and Charlie Rose were all guests or should I say attending members as no news was published from the meeting by any of them.
Liveleak.com ...
Thank you !!!!!!! The first thing I did was check Van Rumpoy Bilderberg......and up it pops even in German.....I still consider Henry Kissinger the most powerful man in the world.....Imagine, being able to tell all Europeans who their leaders should be. We, the People of the World, are doomed!!!!
Duplicate of Below /cm
herbert r chersonsky et al.
... Moving right along now to David Rockefeller's/Bilderberger's plans for the ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT ruled by the Elite and FINANCIAL ESTABLISHMENTS.
The Bilderberger's have been meeting with great secrecy and privacy with absolutely nothing leaked as to their conversations and ponderings since the group's formal establishment in 1954 by Belgium Prince Bernhard. Seems fitting the first President of the EU is Belgian. We're almost there, I think.
Now I cannot imagine that for 59 years, these folks of aristocracy, mega-finance, mega-corporate ownership, mega-political ties get together once a year because they miss each other.
We have been had in increments. Don't look now but what many of my fellow citizens still think is the U.S. Democratic Process really died in the 2,000 selection, and then came, whammo, the "new Pearl Harbor" that was the scrupulously planned 9-11 event, which allowed for invasions, but also took care of the distribution and payback to the holders of paper security notes on gold due on September 12, 2001, backed by billions and billions of dollars worth of buried Japanese gold in World War II that was unearthed in the Phillipines and brought "Home" during the Eisenhower era ... of all things.
If that sounds like something out of James Bond, it is, and absolutely more complex and complicated with the roster of names and the transactions involved than Sean Connery as Bond would have been able to handle.
But after reading E.P. Heidner's absolutely compulsive researching and reporting, it all becomes more and more plausible. Truth IS stranger than Fiction ... often ... because that's where Fiction eventually comes from.
Must, MUST READ!:
www.scribd.com/people/documents/
2169400-ep-heidner?popular=1
Collateral Damage I & II
People who love money and power above all else and see themselves superior to the "masses" do not sit around twiddling their thumbs. They meet and discuss and plan - scrupulously plan - whatever it takes to achieve their decided-upon agendae for both their personal gain and/or how to "handle" the rest of us serfs so they can maintain
or achieve maximum global / national influence.
Believe it! -
David Rockefeller [the long-term BG chairperson until a few years back] admits media collusion with his one world plans: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings* and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the light of publicity during those years. But now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
Rockefeller writes on page 405 of his memoirs: "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
Ohhhhhhhhhh.
*Private/Secret annual Bilderburg Group meetings since 1954. Richest and most powerful people in the Western world, including selected guests and media people, and, of course, regular member, the oily Henry Kissinger, allegedly an excellent "go-to" member as assassination arranger for heads of government, elected or otherwise, who are truly trying to bring justice and fairness and equality to their people [e.g., Salvatore Allende, beloved president of The People of Chile, assassinated in 1972 during his second term.] or are just inconvenient figures to the Bilderberg plans. Everyone who attends the Bilderberg meetings are sworn to secrecy about what was/is discussed.
It's been fifteen years since David Rockefeller's quote in his memoir, and look at the "Progress" for us all to be governed by The Lords of the Manor. And obviously, the "new Pearl Harbor" helped to justify invasions and occupations of oil- and gas-rich nations, and Iran is likely next.
The People of the U.S. are in a truly precarious position, which includes the stalwart middle-class who have lost and are losing their homes and jobs in their industry-gutted nation; the farmers and their farms taken over or controlled by mega-Chemical Corporations and their mandatory designer-foods, including neutriceutical foods as Archer-Midland-Daniels [Skull & Bones folks] call it in ads. Will we all [global] get dosed with Prozac and other mind-altering drugs in our tomatoes, corn and peppers, for example, or has that happened already?
A few more things I'll leave for another time, but just a few more pieces to go before the puzzle is complete.
/cm
It is ironically appropriate that a Belgian, Herman Van Rompuy, is be the first President of EU. One of the founding fathers of the EU was Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak. Whether or not Van Rompuy remotely approaches Spaak's legacy remains to be seen. That the candidacy of Bush's poodle, Tony Blair, was foiled is a nice addition.
-- Mister Peabody, do you think Van Rompuy will try to copy the Nobel Prize-winning Brand Obama approach?
-- Oh, but he already HAS, Sherman. Haven't you ever seen a Belgian waffle?
· Yr Obd't Servant
Good news, the neocon neoliberal Tony Blair didn't get picked. Bad news, the EU is still a center-right, neoliberal body. It has a few token safe center-left socialists in positions of power. It needs to be scrapped. The center-right, corporate globalization, race to the bottom days of the 1980s to 2008 are over.