July 3, 2023
Stiglitz: the EU Is Plundering the East
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate: the EU feeds upon and plunders eastern Europe by bribing its elite.
An absolute “atomic bomb” within neoliberalism has been dropped by the Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz. He has stated that eastern Europe is at least twice as poor as it would have been had it not joined the EU. This strikes brutally at the greatest success of globalism and neoliberalism — the creation of the largest unified economy in the world, made up of twenty-eight separate countries, some of which share a common currency. “Eastern Europe is the great loser of the beginning of the twenty-first century. At present it pays 300 to 400 billion dollars every year to the West, and chiefly to Germany,” Stiglitz explained.
According to his analysis — and this is the man who, besides the prize, is known to have foretold the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the crisis of 2008 — eastern Europe is caught in a “dominion grip”, of the type known since the Roman Empire. This is the model for colonising a country: by bribing its elite. The Romans did not conquer with legions alone. Many other lands joined them in peace. They arrive, they bribe the local chieftains, and those chieftains become governors of Roman provinces. “The Empire stands behind you, and with it you can collect far more taxes than before. It is, in short, an alliance of the elite with the empire, to milk the subjects. The system has worked for centuries. It was applied from England in India, for instance — there they proclaimed maharajas in the queen’s name. And then together they sucked the common people dry,” Stiglitz explained. “The EU is precisely that now. The West — but above all Germany — bribes the local elite with European funds. The elite brings the state into the EU, turning membership into an absolute religion, complete with repression against anyone who opposes it. Leaving becomes heresy. And the imported country is drained through other mechanisms: buying up local monopolies, retail chains, concluding unfavourable long-term contracts that cannot be altered when power changes hands, and so forth,” Stiglitz explains.
Long ago I wrote about a CIA analysis stating that eastern Europe is being brutally absorbed while it applauds, “grateful” for the European funds. The scholar now confirms this. The European funds and the well-paid EU posts for a handful of officials are the “bribe” paid to the elite. In return, the market of the country in question is taken over and milked for the benefit of Western corporations. This happens through electricity, water, heating; through the monopoly of Western goods imposed on the retail chains; through much larger and inaccessible local budgets, through advertising, marketing, media buy-outs and the rest. The ratio between funds received and markets drained is less than one to ten.
“If eastern Europe left the EU and stopped this massive subsidy it pays to the West, it could be twice as rich. At the very least. This would relieve society and considerably reduce the pressure to emigrate — which is another way of sucking it dry. Through higher wages, the West recruits the best specialists from the East, thereby widening the gap,” concluded the Nobel laureate.
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