John Helmer — The Illegality Of Sanctions – Uk High Court Sends Rosneft Claim To European Court

Britain loses sovereignty. David Cameron upset.

The UK High Court has rejected a lawsuit by Rosneft challenging the legality of sanctions against its oilfield operations and international financing. 

The court has ruled that for testing the legality of the sanctions British law and British courts are subordinate to the European Union, and that Rosneft must try its case in the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in Luxembourg. The ruling, which was issued on Monday, contradicts the judgement of the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest court, which decided last March that sanctions against the Iranian bank, Bank Mellat, had violated British law. The new judgement makes no reference to this or any other case decided recently in London on the illegality of UK Government sanctions.

The ruling by Lord Justice Sir Jack Beatson (lead image) and Justice Sir Nicholas Green also flies in the face of the British Government’s promise to preserve the primacy of the British courts over the EU judiciary, and keep London’s market dominance for global litigation. Acknowledging that the issue will be tested in the parliamentary election due in three months’ time, embattled Prime Minister David Cameron has claimed: “We want to make the Supreme Court supreme”. Cameron has promised to introduce a new Act of Parliament to establish the superior status in law of UK courts over the European Court.” That hasn’t happened.…

According to The Lawyer’s review last month of “the top 20 cases of 2015: global disputes in the English courts”, the first and most important is Rosneft’s sanctions challenge. “In the judicial review application to be heard at the end of this month Rosneft will argue that the delegated legislation introduced by the UK to implement the EU’s sanctions – as well as the underlying EU regulation – is unlawful…As well as being closely linked to an ongoing political crisis between Russia and the EU, the case examines questions over the Government’s obligations when implementing EU legislation.”

That’s shorthand for the politically explosive issue of whether the UK should stay in the European Union (EU), or call a national referendum and leave. Four British judges have now issued public calls condemning what they are calling the “export” of sovereignty. In December 2013, the retired Lord Chief Justice, Baron Igor Judge (right), declared: “we should beware of the danger of even an indirect importation of the slightest obligation on parliament to comply with the orders and directions of any court, let alone a foreign court.”…

“Beatson and Green are no Wellingtons”, a British lawyer comments, referring to the Battle of Waterloo whose 200th anniversary will be celebrated in London in June. “This time the British have run from the battlefield. Napoleon finally wins.”

Dances with Bears
THE ILLEGALITY OF SANCTIONS – UK HIGH COURT SENDS ROSNEFT CLAIM TO EUROPEAN COURT
John Helmer

Zero Hedge — "Elections Change Nothing" Germany Admits Distrust Of The Masses Is The EU Way

Eurocrats (aka aristocrats) don't believe in democracy or sovereignty.

Zero Hedge
"Elections Change Nothing" Germany Admits Distrust Of The Masses Is The EU Way

Allison Gunnar — Economic War, BRICS, and the Power of Self-Sufficiency

Globalization is the hitherto pinnacle of interdependency, crippling any nation that falls foul of those sitting at the center of this entangled geopolitical order. There are many examples of nations that haven fallen foul including Cuba, Iraq, Iran and more recently Russia. In each case, respective economies depended heavily upon imports or exports or both. The response in defense against crippling economic warfare is self-sufficiency.

Self-sufficiency is anti-globalization. The neoliberal globalizers may be overreaching and throwing a spanner into the works as countries realize that they need to protect themselves from interdependence with self-sufficiency. On the macro level this is preferring resilience to efficiency.

First appeared:http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/20/economic-war-brics-and-the-power-of-self-sufficiency/

New Eastern Outlook

Economic War, BRICS, and the Power of Self-Sufficiency

Allison Gunnar

Marshall Auerback — George Osborne Is Right: Scotland Under Sterling Is Not Truly Independent

How about talking about currency independence being necessary for national independence instead of currency sovereignty being necessary for national sovereignty? 

"Independence" seems to me to be more forceful emotionally than "sovereignty."

Macrobits
George Osborne Is Right: Scotland Under Sterling Is Not Truly Independent
Marshall Auerback

If You Can't Mobilize Your Own Electorate's Fiat ... It's A Worse Step To Borrow Foreign-Denominated Fiat? Ya THINK?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

To denominate domestic transactions with domestic fiat, or with foreign fiat? That is the question.

Janet Tavakoli highlights a simple reality for sovereign nations. Organize, or cede sovereignty. If you can't coordinate and align your own citizen's efforts, and reap your own return-on-coordination then the alternative is ALWAYS WORSE. Far worse. You, your citizens and your country simply become another commodity coordinated by a foreign owner. Sayonara sovereignty.

The #1 rule is always ... NEVER borrow in foreign-currency-denominated terms. In short, never borrow foreign currency!

Yes, that sounds tough and unrealistic to some, but the conditions for such loans are always worse, as already illustrated. This truth implies that some little jurisdictions can't really be free, while others can. And that only the agile will survive. Read on, for more specific examples.

Banks and IMF Ganging Up on Sovereign Debtors

This is a very instructive article, a must read for all citizens in every country - and the hegemony described applies to EVERY bank in every country that does foreign loan sharking in it's own currency. That includes all of the traditional banking centers, from UK to Switzerland to Dubai.

How do YOU safely denominate freedom? And degrees of freedom?

Paul Volcker has Policy Exactly "Banckwards"

Paul Volcker says: "We are left with the certainty, however awkward, that active participation in an open world economy requires some surrender of economic sovereignty."

That is exactly, 100% backwards. When does innocent fraud become innocent treason?  Or become innocent assisted suicide?

Reality: Adaptive growth of existing aggregates requires active tuning of inter-aggregate trade.

An adaptive race is NOT open.  It is contested among competing models who may converge, but only after exploring different options and either fusing and/or observing one another.  Our model within the USA is open.  That does not hold either outside the USA or even in our own banking lobby.

If all you've been educated at is banking, every problem looks like a double-entry accounting book. Someone tell Paul that banking does NOT account for evolution, or aggregate wealth creation?

The famous Spanish phrase “you are more stupid than a amoebae” is losing credence because the social amoebas are an incredibly useful model for examining our own social behavior.  Does a billion year old species manage it's "currency" more intelligently that Paul Volcker seems able to grasp?  Of course it does.

I can think of no greater danger to the sovereignty of the USA and the hard-fought freedoms and welfare of it's people, than the narrow policies promulgated by overly isolated lobbies. 

Who would have predicted that the sovereignty of the USA would one day be ceded to the very banking lobby that we fought our Revolution to be free from? 

And the purpose of that lobby? To serve the narrow interests of merchants, not the general welfare of the people. Please recall the timeless words of Tom Jefferson, who noted the following. "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Paul Volcker or Tom Jefferson?   No competition.  I'm with TJ.   

Paul Volcker, there's a place outside Mayfield, Nebraska where you can deposit your message.  Give me liberty from banksters, or give me death.

Democracy only works with adequate checks & balances between existing lobbies. With all due respect to Volcker, he's remarkably unlearned about anything sans banking.  The moment of adaptation in the world today still lies WITHIN evolving countries as species, not ACROSS a collection of over 200 diverse countries.  And it definitely does not reside within the IMF.  Bankers & merchants do not yet rule the world, let alone wield anything even laughably close to full group intelligence.   If Paul Volcker only knew 1/1000th of what Americans know, he'd certainly never say say anything so preposterously ignorant, or harmful to the very country the purports to stand for.

There is no point of stability in the natural world that is not a dynamic equilibrium between conflicting forces.

What's the only way any ship of fools stays alive? They NEVER haphazardly yield total control of policy to any one fool alone.  Group intelligence, by definition, lies within the body of discourse generated by a collection of fools.

Let's not be in a rush to yield our policy apparatus to the banking fools.

Ann Pettifor calls rip-off

On May 15th, in what can only be described as an act of coercion, an impoverished and effectively insolvent Greece acceded to the handover of a bond payment – €436 million – to private financial ‘vulture funds’. The Greeks had little choice. However, in acquiescing to this handover - facilitated by its paymasters,‘the Troika’ - impoverished Greeks protected reckless private wealth from the consequences of their risks. Namely: losses and bankruptcy, and the discipline of market forces.

This is a perverse distortion of free market capitalism because, as Professor Kunibert Raffer has argued: “the most basic precondition for the functioning of the market mechanism (is) that economic decisions must be accompanied by (co)responsibility: whoever takes economic decisions must also carry financial risks. If this link is severed – as it was in the Centrally Planned Economies of the former East – efficiency is severely disturbed…. At a time when riskless decision making by bureaucrats is abolished in the East, there is no reason why it should be preserved in the West.” 

Today this new, distorted economic order is enforced, on behalf of private wealth (hedge funds, offshore ‘investment funds’ and private bankers) by unelected EU, IMF and ECB officials and elected EU politicians....

This economic order is the very antithesis of both democratic but also free market principles. However, it is at the heart of the neoclassical monetarist statutes of the European Union, the Eurozone and the ECB – and now the new EU Fiscal Compact....

This is the central purpose of neoliberal economics: to strip democratic states of sovereign economic power and transfer these powers to private markets....

As a consequence of what can only be described as a blatant financial "coup d’etat" financial vultures are not just circling and threatening Greece, Spain and Portugal. They now threaten Europe as a whole with the consequences of disintegration....

Read it at OpenEconomy
An open letter to the leaders of Europe: abandon the Euro's 'gold fetters'
Ann Pettifor | Director, PRIME (Policy Research in Macroeconomics)

Ann Pettifor provides a more detailed analysis of the problems leading to the global financial crisis and Keynesian-based solutions in Ann Pettifor: speech notes for presentation to the Just Banking Conference, Edinburgh, 20th April, 2012. Important.

Germany becoming the new old villain in Europe?

The Irish government has complained to European partners after confidential budget information shared with its EU-IMF lenders was leaked by German lawmakers, sparking a political storm at home.

The media and opposition reacted furiously at the fact that the details of the December budget were presented to German lawmakers before their Irish counterparts, heightening fears that its EU-IMF bailout has undermined Irish sovereignty.

"Germany is our new master," ran a banner front-page headline in the Irish Daily Mirror. Opposition leaders in parliament described the leaks as "incredible" and "unprecedented" and demanded the government explain.

New German laws give its parliament the right to be fully informed about bailout countries' progress before new trenches of funds are paid out and Ireland's main opposition party led cries Germany was now calling the shots in Europe..... (emphasis added)

Read the rest at Reuters

Ireland cries foul after German budget leak

by Conor Humphries
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Germany makes bid to gut national sovereignty of EZ states to save euro

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking to speed up reform of the European Union treaty and wants all 27 EU member states to give their approval by the end of 2012, government sources said on Sunday....

This would involve the right to challenge states at the European Court, to have their budgets declared void, without meddling further in the details.

Under the German proposals, the EU commission would also play a stronger role in monitoring budgets....

Read the whole article at The Huffington Post

Angela Merkel Wants To Reform EU Charter By 2012

The fly in this ointment is that in many EU countries, changes to the EU charter require a referendum, which may be difficult to pass.