Two years ago, in the film “Food, Inc”, Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation”, and Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, were featured by director Robert Kenner in a brutal expose of the deleterious practices of the food industry.

In one of the most disturbing segments of the film we see chickens crammed together in cages, hardly able to move, their feces dropping through the wire floor into spaces rarely cleaned. The buildings holding the chickens are hundreds of feet long, lit day and night, and dead birds are left to rot for days before anyone comes by to check on things.

Two years after a documentary vividly laid out the facts about industrial farming, the mainstream media is finally forced to report them because its practices have made large numbers of people sick – not to mention the money being lost by those having to recall their eggs.

This morning, a week after the recall of thousands of salmonella tainted eggs, CNN finally turned to Eric Schlosser and Dr. John Boyd, Founder and President of the National Black Farmers Association, who is a chicken farmer, for “insights” into this shocking state of affairs.

Alas, the excellent medical reporter Elizabeth Cohen, instead of being allowed to add her expertise on salmonella to the information provided by the chicken farmer, is there to exonerate the industry, pointing out that it is more difficult to be on top of things in industrial-size farms.

Instead of using the ‘teachable moment’ to suggest that industrial production of eggs is a bad idea, as eloquently demonstrated by a serious film two years ago, and explained today by the small producer and the investigative reporter, the message of the news channel that reaches into every household, is that salmonella is a minor matter compared to the (supposed) benefits of big agriculture.

The drill is the same for questions of war and peace – notably, this week, the growing threat of violence in our own streets over the building of a Muslim Community Center that will house a mosque. No meaningful information about Islam, its roots, its history, its brilliant scholars, etc.

But under the enlightening morning news features, the tiny crawler announced that Levi Johnson has filed papers to run for mayor of Wassila.

The idea is this: Can President Obama magically instill the fear of a dragon in Republicans bent on destroying the republic, or will a credulous, untutored America, like the Woolly Mammoth that required grasslands when climate change brought forest, lumber into extinction?

The back cover of the September issue of In These Times presents a tale that everyone should read: “The Manchurian President: Chicago’s Commie Liberal Puppet” by Chip Berlet. The title evokes McCarthyism for good reason. As Berlet says for openers: “America is in the midst of a 21st century witch hunt. A loose-knit network of right-wing ideological strategists, Republican Party operatives and media demagogues generate the odious smears. Their goal is to stymie the Obama administration’s policy initiatives, capture Congress in November and unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. This propagandizing echoes the scapegoating of liberals, union and community organizers, peace activists, gay people, Jews and people of color during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.”

Berlet recalls that flyers claiming Martin Luther King Jr. was the dupe of a communist conspiracy were distributed nationwide, depicting liberals as either tools or agents of a plot to build collectivism and global governance. FDR had been labeled a fascist, now Obama is tagged as both Hitler and Stalin. Yet Kennedy, who famously exhorted “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” was never accused of submitting the individual to the state.

A new book entitled: The Manchurian President accuses Obama of ties to communists, socialists “and other anti-American extremists”. According to its right-wing authors, Obama was “groomed for office by a nest of socialists, communists and other dangerous radicals based in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood that includes the University of Chicago.”

According to a public relations consultant quoted by Berlet, Obama’s opponents cannot attack him openly on race or on his qualifications, so they “map out ‘who-knows-who’”(known as guilt by association).

In these efforts, the conspirators stumble all over the fateful combination of “socialist” and “democratic”, boastfully condemning the idea of “social democratic organization based on the idea of local autonomy”.

The right-wing version of local autonomy is ‘it’s every man for himself’, while the social-democratic idea favors the basic notion of the solidarity of the group toward the individual. The two political currents criticizing Obama are like two careening bumper cars in a theme park, and we can’t foresee whether the left’s magic dragon will win out over the fate of the right’s woolly mammoth, the danger being that some in the public will confuse the two.

How far can knee-jerk professions of innocence go? (“Change? Who said anything about change? Change to what? Canadian health care??”)

How ruthlessly can our president – who showed he could be ruthless in Chicago, thereby reassuring us before we elected him, that he would put those indispensable political skills to good use Washington – throw us off the train instead?

With Gibb’s fatal words, the President metamorphosed into a clone of one of those right-wing homophobes who turn out to be gay. Trans-lation: Obama knows that the forces arrayed against him are invincible, to the extent that his life is on the line if he makes one false move (Fidel Castro is not the only one who fears for his survival). He cannot follow in FDR’s footsteps and submit legislation to Congress while wielding a big stick; he can only survive if he pretends that he wouldn’t consider imple-menting his progressive promises to those who elected him.

The worst of it all is that this is a forty-year-old story. Read Andrew Bacevich’s new book: Washington Rules and you’ll find this, page 32:

“What Americans mistook for politics – the putative rivalry that pitted Democrats against Republicans, the wrangling between Congress and the White House – actually amounted to little more than theater, he implied. Behind the curtain, a consensus forged of ambition, access, money, fevered imagination, and narrow institutional interests determined the nation’s actual priorities. Although Eisenhower was about to surrender his office to a handsome young successor who promised dramatic change – neither the first nor last president to make such a commitment – he knew that John Kennedy’s personal qualities, however attractive, counted for little given the forces arrayed against him. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” the outgoing president warned. “We should take nothing for granted.”

Kennedy’s election marked the fatal moment when the left gave in to Washington’s consensus that America should maintain its superpower status through war. Kennedy got sucked in first to the Bay of Pigs, then to the Cuban missile Crisis, and finally to Vietnam. The same forces that manipulated “the most powerful man in the world”, saw to it that the left survived only as a convenient tool of ‘fevered’ imaginings of (always) ‘clear and present dangers’. Now it is probably too late for Americans bereft of their homes and jobs to organize to obtain the rights that were grandiloquently included in the Constitution, a hundred years before the word socialism was invented. The populist but not for the people Tea Party is beating them to it.

There is no “professional left” but there is a professional class of writers and pundits who, in exchange for upper class salaries, occupy a niche reserved for those who do not wish to be called conservatives – or even liberals. most of them do not even wish to be called progressives! Oh, there is a progressive caucus in the congress, and Raul Grijalva does it proud. But without Wellstone, it doesn’t amount to the hill of beans that Robert Redford immortalized in The Milagro Beanfield War.

While European Marxism has renewed itself into an green, decentralized, no-growth movement, our “professional leftists” have been left behind.

Overseas, we have, loosely speaking, the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or any number of other fundamentalist Islamic groups who don’t care about citizenship, since they dream of a universal umma , or community. But, like Americans on the extreme right, they want women to stay at home, and they’re fiercely against homosexuals.

Both fundamentalisms believe the commandments of God take precedence over the laws of men, many going so far as wanting the U.S. to be officially declared a Christian nation (which was not in the minds of the founders!).
I sometimes wonder how fundamentalist Christian-American soldiers rationalize killing fundamentalist Muslims who proclaim so many of the same principles? Has anyone looked into that aspect of the psychological toll on our troops? The answer is probably that American soldiers are unaware of the opinions about God, politics and women that they share with the enemy.

Moving on to the 14th Amendment, few Americans know that in the West, there are basically two conceptions of citizenship, based on the Napoleonic Code (I don’t know what goes on in the Orient). According to the most widespread usage, jus soli, (soli meaning the land) a person is automatically a citizen of the country he or she is born in. But there is another possibility, called jus sanguinis, (sanguinis meaning blood) in which either the father, the mother, or both must be a national of the country in which a child is born for the child to be considered a citizen.

Until the year 2000, unlike the rest of Europe, (but like Switzerland), children born in Germany to foreign parents were not entitled to German citizenship. It was only when pressure from Turkish guest workers reached a tipping point, that the ancient law was changed. Children born of immigrant parents are now Germans at birth, but must choose by the age of 23 whether to retain their German citizenship, or be citizens of their parents’ country of origin.

In Germany, there is also a law of return: Germans who had been expelled from Germany during the wars can claim German citizenship if they speak the language. But now, the right-wing government of Hungary, a country that has historically had close ties to Germany, has been inspired by the German law of return, to extend the right of Hungarian citizenship to all ethnic Magyars living beyond the country’s 1918 borders. This includes Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs and Ukrainians, two million people in all.

Although the Hungarian move is in response to events that took place almost a hundred years ago, now, nationalistic legislation is not likely to amount to much in the context of the European Union. But the fact that during what should be a lazy month of August, august American lawmakers fill the airwaves with calls for a repeal of the 14th amendment, that would deny citizenship to children of mainly Mexican immigrants born in the U.S., will, I wager, have long legs, leading ultimately to the creation, as I’ve already suggested, of USCANMEX.

Our political class has chosen to fight yesterday’s battle, instead of those of today and tomorrow: meeting the consequences of climate change that defy governments and their poor human means everywhere, from China, to Pakistan, to Moscow, to the American Gulf Coast.

Fundamentalists both Christian and Muslim may be right after all, to consider that man’s laws cannot compete with those of God/Nature.

A few days ago you sent out an email asking for contributions so that we could have a government ‘by the people, for the people and of the people’.

I find that a bit stiff, given the situation.

Those words were written 200 years ago by white, Protestant men who could no more conceive of a government of, for and by ‘the people’ than you can. There were the only real players. The farmers and crafts-people were nothing more than a – excuse me for mixing my metaphors – Greek chorus.

(Later we had ‘chorus lines’ but now we have only unemployment lines.)

Joe, you don’t seem to understand. (If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one: twenty years ago, when the long-patient Russian people finally got angry, the well-intentioned, intelligent Gorbachev didn’t under-stand that it was too late to reform the Soviet system, so he was swept aside. The Russians lost their free health care and got inflation.)

Now, the American people are angry, but most of them figure they can’t do anything about it because they don’t have a leader. Oh, there are a lot of organizations on the left, but we have no national leader. On the right, it’s a different story: they have the equivalent of a communist party. I say that because the Communist Party was the most famous top-down organization the world had ever seen. Fascist parties were also top-down parties, and they worked pretty well for a while. But they couldn’t hold a candle to the communists because they were mainly into war.

The Communists weren’t interested in war: they wanted…. government of the people, for the people and by the people. They started with local Soviets: people power – in the beginning. Then they got the Supreme Soviet and that was the end of people power/

Here in America we’ve been taught that communism, socialism – any kind of real people power – is bad. It’s all right to be a democract – or even a Democrat. But that doesn’t allow you to talk about people power. The Tea Party talks about taking back ‘our’ government. But when the right goes out for rifle practice, it’s getting ready to take back ‘its’ government.

It’s not gonna be people power. They’re gonna stop paying taxes because taxes benefit welfare moms. They’re gonna do away with social security because folks who’ve been clever with their money shouldn’t need a common pot.

They might actually ‘bring the boys home’ from wherever they’re fighting when the Tea Party comes to power, because they’re gonna need them on the frontier – I mean the border. They’re gonna need them to round up all the immigrants and ship them back to wherever they came from (Hitler shipped ‘inferior’ peoples to concentration camps and gas chambers, but our Tea Partiers are just gonna ship them back to wherever they came from, even if there’s nothing to eat there.)

So Joe – and Barack and Nancy, and John and Howard – quit holding your hands out. It’s unseemly. Money can’t buy spine. And if you don’t get it, hopefully ‘the people’ – who thought you had it – are gonna realize they don’t need more voices in the wilderness, but a top-down organization like a Tea Party – or a Politburo. Before the glaciers melt, the sea rises, the oil and gas wells and electric lines come tumbling down, leaving us without even a fridge to keep a people’s dinner in.

Coincidentally, a former NAACP employee who years ago sent a white farmer to a white lawyer, so he could be “helped by one of his kind” lost her department of agriculture job for doing so after mentioning the incident in a speech. The TV, as CNN says, is ‘all over the story’, and the Tea Party is feeling vindi-cated after the blooper by popular radio host Mark Williams.

Both incidents bring to my mind the Russian Revolution.

“Whhaat?” you’ll say. Not Hitler? “I thought the danger we’re in with the Tea Party and the local militias is fascism!”

True, but I’m referring to how various unde-sirable events, however different they may be, come about. In the early 20th century there was a Russian Social Democratic Party whose majority was referred to as the Bolsheviks (for big) while the minority were called the Men-sheviks, for small, or minority. The latter were more inclined to cooperate with the Liberals at a time when most Russian activists broadly agreed on the need for reform.

BThe Bolsheviks staged a successful revolu-tion in Russia because the Mensheviks failed to stand up to the Liberals.

I’m drawing this picture with a broad stroke, because what’s important here is not the detail – about which some readers will inevitably nitpick – but the gist.

Not so long ago entire populations were cowed by the warning: ‘The Russians are coming!’ Now we’re told: “The terrorists are coming!”

But the Democratic Party’s frantic appeals for help are like closing the barn door after the horse got away: It’s not more money they need, it’s the courage to form a Social Democratic Party that will stand up to the Republicans and deal with terrorism with a cool head.

Before the Tea Party takes over.

A friend in Europe emails me news from various sources, and recently I received a story whose original source was the Near East News Agency (NENA), a collaborative of journalists working in the Near East that publishes in Italian and English. The story was about Israel’s efforts to prevent its neighbor Jordan from building an independent nuclear energy capability.

Israel is one of four countries with known nuclear capabilities not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea. Not- withstanding its own rogue position, Israel has been waging a relentless campaign to persuade the world that Iran is a mortal threat, not only to Israel, but to everyone else.

Now, just in case its campaign against the relatively distant threat should ultimately be unsuccessful, Israel now asserts that an equal threat lies next door, in Jordan, a tiny Muslim country which has been its steadfast ally.

The NENA article emphasized that Israel, with the backing of the U.S., is withholding “acceptance” of its neighbor’s plans to build two nuclear fuel plants, until Jordan promises that it will send its nuclear fuel abroad for reprocessing. (The NENA article also revealed that Jordan possesses 3% of known uranium deposits.)

Curious to know more about this story, I went to the New York Times. A May 2 Times article placed the Israel/Jordan controversy within the larger scope of U.S. efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty during a month-long international conference. It pointed out that diplomats were negotiating agreements for overseas reprocessing with Jordan and Bahrain, and indicated there might also be a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The Times article quoted a participating diplomat saying that these endeavors were part of an attempt to isolate the Iranians, but that Iran and others at the United Nations non-Proliferation Conference, including Egypt, were more interested in forcing the region’s one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal and sign on to the nonproliferation treaty.

Egypt, in particular, wants the Middle East to be nuclear arms free, but the Obama administration only supports this idea within the context of a broad regional peace.
In other words, for Washington, a nuclear-free Middle East is contingent on resolving the situation with Iran, rather than the situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

This is worrisome because Egypt, while lobbying for a conference next year on its proposal for a nuclear-free zone, also plans to build several nuclear reactors. According to The Times, Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak has hinted that if there is no agreement, his country might feel that needs to develop nuclear weapons, too.

Although the Times article has broader thrust, it manages to obscure the fact that the Obama administration accumulates blunders in the most volatile part of the world. Unlike the admittedly partisan NENA story, it fails to mention fthat Washington is threatening Jordan with a loss of 600 million a year in financial support if it goes ahead with a project that makes Israel nervous. Nor does it mention that our close allies, France and South Korea, are planning to help this tiny, resource poor county ensure its future energy needs.

Without several sources for world news, American voters are blindsided, taken totally unawares by major events. Nuclear non-pro-liferation is a major policy goal of President Obama. But alternate news sources reveal not only that in this, as in so many other laudable goals, his policies are counter-productive; they document the fact that a multi-faceted world can pursue laudable goals without us.

If we look at the world from a distance, instead of a series of highly differentiated conflicts, we see one big conflict that pits haves against have-nots, and simultaneously, license against sexual repression.

The buzz today is all about maybe talking to the Taliban. But we do not see the Taliban to, say, the way we saw the Germans during the second world war: essentially people of the same culture who had fallen prey to a national delusion of grandeur. We know the world the Taliban are defending tooth and nail is different in fundamental ways from ours, so how can we talk about leaving the Afghan people to their mercy?

I should say “the Afghan women”. For this is a war about license versus sexual repression. In the West, which is organized for the unlimited growth of capital, everything is a means to that end, and sexuality is tailored accordingly: men and women must constantly be concerned with looking young and if possible beautiful in order to attract a succession of mates. To that end, they purchase beauty products ever improved upon and clothing that will be out of fashion next year. And when women – and men – serve advertising to earn a paycheck, they become full-time sex symbols. The feminists denounced this long ago, but they got nowhere with this aspect of women’s lib because they didn’t realize that we live in a culture whose ultimate purpose is to increase returns on capital. Anything that achieves this is impervious to reform.

This is the nexus between the revolt of the have-nots (the Shiites), against ‘the West’, and the fierce determination of the repressive Sunni Wahabbi, represented by the Taliban, to preserve the sexual slavery of women. The differences between these two groups have us in a state of utter confusion: the greater conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia – which has recently spread to the Horn of Africa – is about the unequal distribution of wealth. In those areas where fundamentalist Sunni Islam holds sway, it is also about maintaining the subjection of women, considered as possessions.

Given that the Taliban fall into this latter category, we could possibly persuade them to abandon the wealth provided by poppies for that which could be extracted from high priced minerals – apparently ’discovered’ in the nick of time, but perhaps in fact the heretofore unavowed reason for the eight-year Afghan war. In that case, the liberation of Afghanistan’s women would have to wait until the influx of wealth from that economic bonanza overwhelms tradition, as is beginning to happen in other Muslim countries.

The fight for equity that is foremost in the Shia dominated areas, (Iran, and recently Iraq, where the long suffering Shia majority are now in power), is not that of equity in the traditional Marxist sense, but as Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah makes clear, in the sense of the Radical Enlightenment about which Princeton’s Jonathan Israel writes.

And so, in reality, our foreign wars mirror our domestic situation: the United States is increasingly polarized between a growing minority of Christian fundamentalists, whose women are expected to remain in the home, often schooling their children to shield them from the secular education system, while workers, blacks, Latinos, single mothers, and those with special needs begin at last to organize events such as the Second US Social Forum recently held in Detroit, where residents are inventing new forms of urban self-sufficiency instead of waiting for government to solve society’s problems. At the very same time, however, Tea Partyers are pushing back against these initiatives, also in the name of not waiting for government to do so.
Monday night Larry King rebroadcast his recent interview with Bill Maher, who in a rare moment of passion, said what American progressives are thinking on this Independence Day: “There is no Tea Party equivalent for us. We have two parties, but only one politics, and while the Tea Party is pushing the Republicans to the far right, no one is pushing the Democrats to the left.”

While Christian fundamentalist women do not cover their heads, they are expected to remain in the home – and to vote for a politics of inequality based on a consumerism that relies heavily on fashion models and wrestling match sex queens.

Talking to the Taliban and Hezbollah, is only likely to be productive if and when “the West” drops the capital W that implies superiority and accepts the inanity of chasing after oil and gas in order to continue a way of life that besides demeaning one of life’s great pleasures, will render the planet inhospitable to humans.

It took the admission by BP that it may ultimately not be able to plug the leak in the Gulf for President Obama to commit major funding for solar power. Energy Secretary Chu fears that we might be reaching a tipping point on climate change, yet he suggested we could save a lot by adopting tougher energy standards for new buildings, implying that the consumer society these represent could continue in the face of a point of no return for the planet.

Replace Allah and Jehovah with nature and it’s clear that our conflict with Islam is importantly about how we live our individual lives. Before we can hope to see them move toward more personal freedom, we have to reconsider what we do with our own.

Katrina was a natural disaster piled on top of Army Corps indifference, which was never to be allowed to happen again.

The more recent worldwide financial debacle really concentrated minds worldwide, so that, two years later, heads of finance from the countries that make things happen (even things that are never supposed to happen again) gathered in Toronto to make sure that this particular event should never happen again. The President returned home with an assignment from the countries that America used to tell what do do, which was to kick domestic opposition into line to create a Consumer Protection Agency (or whatever it’s called, don’t hold me to names) so that at least if this does happen again, it won’t be our fault.

The President was unwise to hold that it would never happen again.  But hardly less wise than BP that has been assuring us that thanks to its good faith and its technical know-how what we could all a “magnitude ten” oil spill would never happen again.

Never?  With more than 3000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, not to mention those we haven’t been told about in other oceans and on other lands.

Or, less spectacularly, the gas rigs whose numbers remain secret, on lands that used to be picture postcard perfect, throughout the country, fracking, or fracturing the soil hundreds of yards down, pumping scarce water laden with chemicals into once fertile land, sending fumes into the water pipes of nearby kitchens, causing them to burn in contact with a match.  At this point, the question becomes: “Never what?”

Never more jobs lost, never more private prisons built, never more men in search of work arrested, never more soldiers turned into invalids – never more what?

I don’t know if it was due to his famous poem “The Raven” that the early nineteenth century writer Edgar Allan Poe is seen as a forerunner  of science fiction, but surely our powerless lives today, would have been considered science-fiction in his time.

The hero of Poe’s poem hallucinates a black raven sitting unruffled over his bedroom door, repeating only one word: ‘Nevermore”.  He mourns the loss of his love Lenore, and asks the raven if there is “balm in Gilead”, to which the answer is also “Nevermore”.
Still not getting it, the poet implores:
‘Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore     But: “Quoth the raven,`Nevermore.’”

Now, with a dramatic gesture the poet orders the beast to:

“Get back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“Take thy form from off my door!…. and leave no black plume as    a token of that lie…!”
Alas:
“The raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming

Unable to accept the finality of death, Poe wanted desperately to bring back the past.  We, very differently, imagine that we can prevent its repetition.   But like Poe’s demon, we are dreaming.

Whatever the reason, this much is certain: Canada is now more than ever an extension of the United States, and while it is probable that the North American Free Trade Agreement has something to do with it, the more deeper reasons are more worrisome. Sooner or later, the conflictive situation with Mexico will make it part of a North American Colossus – a desperate but probably futile effort to meet the challenges of China, India and Brazil.

What should make us take notice is that this is part of a larger conflictive situation: the grass roots of the world (no longer the workers or proletarians of the world), are finally getting it together. As it reports on efforts of the G8 and the G20 in Toronto to save the world economic system, the American media ignores the fact that 15,000 people are camping in tents in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, a predominantly black city that is finding new ways to live with the newly liberated land. Much less are Americans aware of similar experiments going on across their country – and nost others.

Today, in the tight credit market, CNN revealed to its viewers the existence of micro-finance, a concept for which a Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank that makes loans to peasants, mainly women, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Only ten years behind, CNN! Bravo! A few weeks ago your founder, Ted Turner, long ago ousted, was given a tour of the Atlanta headquarters after a remake, and when he was asked by your friendliest anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, whether he had any unfulfilled wishes, he said he had always wished that CNN would cover more foreign news. Alas!

The fact that political junkies can turn to the internet hardly makes up for the failure of the Mainstream Media (or MSM as it is known), to bridge the oceans that have for two hundred years complacently separated Americans from the rest of the messy world. Why? Because even the most highly regarded on-line resources such as Huffington Post, Truth-Digg, Common Dreams, to name but a few, are mainly concerned with who said what to whom on the domestic front.

I’m lucky to receive internet newsletters and blogs in other lan-guages that I read, and although many of these, like their American counterparts, are mainly concerned with national issues, there are a growing number of on-line news publications that have an international focus, and some of them make the effort to publish in several languages.

This is not where I meant to go with this blog, so the names of these multi-lingual newsletters will have to wait for my next blog. I want to get back to the idea of a North American colossus, in which Mexican manpower plays a similar role to that of China’s rural population.

The two sides in the immigration debate are irreconcilable as things now stand: But one could imagine the creation of a political entity similar to the European Union, that would link the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in such a way as to get around that problem and create a more competitive economy. One would have to hope that such an entity would not more closely resemble the authoritarian Chinese regime than the European.