Saturday, July 14, 2018

Who, or what, is the biggest threat to the EU?

Who do you think is the biggest threat to the EU?
Is it Trump?
Is it Merkel?
Is it Putin?

If you said yes to any of those you would be, according to the Chicago Tribune, WRONG. It's Poland. Well, we do know that because of Germany's "smart" military spending Poland now has more tanks than Germany and France combined. But, what really makes Poland so dangerous? It is a desire to clean their courts, including highest courts, of communist judges. Those that sent dissidents and protesters to rot in jail for many, many years.
"In Poland, a nationalist government has systematically dismantled judicial independence. Supreme Court judges have been purged and replaced with government loyalists. The country’s Constitutional Tribunal, which ensures that laws don’t stray from Poland’s constitution, lost its independence in 2015 when the ruling party, the mismonikered Law and Justice Party, stacked the court with its own adherents... How the European Union handles the Polish government’s abandonment of the rule of law will foretell how it handles other populist-nationalist movements coursing through other European nations."

How should the EU deal with that? According to the Chicago Tribune they should simply put crippling financial pressure until Poland sees that EU's way is more "just."
"The EU’s best weapon may be its purse strings. The bloc sends hundreds of millions of dollars in aid payments to member states. Withholding aid to governments that run roughshod over the rule of law would send a strong message that the EU wants Poland and other right-wing administrations to heed the European values that supposedly bind all these countries."

What the geniuses at the Chicago Tribune forgot is that one of "European values" is that judiciary is an internal matter as agreed by all the countries of the Union.