European People's Party (EPP) is a European political party with Christian-democratic conservative and liberal-conservative member parties. A transnational organisation, it is composed of other political parties. Founded by primarily Christian-democratic parties in 1976, it has since broadened its membership to include liberal-conservative parties and parties with other centre-right political perspectives. (Wiki)
It has 175 seats in the European Parliament.
Manfred Weber, the president of the European People’s Party is shilling for the military-industrial complex.
He is calling for the EU to move to a wartime economy.
“A year after the start of the war, the armaments companies have hardly received any orders,” he said.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists doomsday clock stood at 100 seconds.
It was updated on January 24th 2023. It now stands at ninety seconds to midnight.
George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara posits the war dealers point of view – Undershaft, an arms manufacturer, estranged father of Major Barbara, who is in the Salvation Army, describes his satisfaction in his chosen profession:
Undershaft:. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humour just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.
Lomax Well, the more destructive war becomes, the sooner it will be abolished, eh?
Undershaft. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it.. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality—my religion—must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.
Money matters, morality does not.
“The European Union should move its economy to a wartime footing amid the Ukraine conflict, Manfred Weber, the president of the European People’s Party (EPP), suggested on Thursday. He said that the move is required to ramp up the bloc's own defence potential, and that of Kiev.
Speaking to the newspapers of the Funke media group, Weber called for the reorganization of the EU arms industry. The MEP believes that the bloc needs “a kind of war economy… in order to be able to guarantee stability and security”.
“The European states are currently not in a position to provide the necessary armaments quickly enough, neither for our own defence, nor for Ukraine,” he lamented. To remedy the situation, Weber argued, the EU should “break new ground,” pointing out that complex allocation structures are not working the way they are supposed to.
The MEP pointed out that Germany had established a €100 billion ($109 billion) special defence fund amid the Ukraine conflict, but “hardly anything happens because the bureaucracy is paralysing.” “A year after the start of the war, the armaments companies have hardly received any orders,” he added.
His comments come after both the US and Germany on Wednesday approved the delivery of 31 M1 Abrams and 14 Leopard 2 tanks respectively to Kiev. However, the decision comes amid numerous warnings by EU officials that the bloc’s own arms stockpiles are running low.
Last month, Josep Borrell, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said that the Ukraine conflict had become “a brutal wake-up call” for the bloc’s policymakers and its military industry, which had been underfunded for years.
The military aid for Ukraine comes from army stocks and “everybody agrees that this stockpile has been quickly depleted because they were almost empty,” he admitted at the time.
Russia has repeatedly warned the West against supplying Ukraine with weapons, arguing that this would only prolong the conflict but would not change its outcome. On Wednesday, commenting on the Western tank shipments, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov reiterated that this armour “would burn as [did] the rest of it.”
“They [tanks] are quite expensive, and this will fall and is falling on the shoulders of, first of all, European taxpayers,” the spokesman stated, suggesting that Washington would likely financially benefit from the deliveries.”
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Dave C
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