Nebenkanzler is the perfect shadow leader of the fissuring EU, the perfect stern pater familias : a stock character in almost all of European literature. Yet what renders the German political/moral position null is the reports in these pages by Mr. Wolf ,and Ms. Tett’s compelling report on Benjamin Friedman’s speech. The quote from a German Marshall Fund technocrat, a institutional relic of the Old Cold War, originally funded by a gift from the West German government, and another technocrat from the Soros funded European Council on Foreign Relations adds a dash of ideological verisimilitude, indicative of ‘European Values’: perhaps the prerequisite for those ‘values’ is perpetual economic/political amnesia and the chutzpah to pretend that the Dream of Europe is still viable. While the European and American economies are still mired in the watershed of the utter failure of Free Market Delusion. What is holding this decidedly fragile thing together? The ideological infused chatter, indeed apologetics of a servile economic press, and their allies in various think tanks: the itinerant, for hire intellectuals who make the Sophists appear virtuous?

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/09c4ff30-2fb9-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html#axzz3gcrREluL