As Financial Trouble Brews, The EU Brews Coffee

 

I think Nero has been given too hard a time by historians. Did he really play the fiddle while Rome burned? Do we really care? It happened so long ago and I am sure it was nothing more than an innovative way of urban regeneration. Burn and build. The rumour was spread by a contractor who didn’t get the contract to rebuild the brand new forum. No point in accusing Nero of dereliction of duty then, but the present offers us interesting parallels.

 

 

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/10/business/coffee.php

 

The EU commission, already with enough to do with 27 mutually unintelligible members, has an even more vexing problem on its hands. The commission had installed 21 top of the range espresso machines in its famous star-shaped Berlaymont buiding. Each had cost EUR5000, which I am sure you will agree is an excellent use of an artificial currency, to say nothing of the EU budget. And then, back in December, they malfunctioned. Apparently, the coffee started tasting very strange and tests, carried by the aptly named Mr Alexander Just, an archivist in the commission with time on his hands (a predicament suffered by everybody at the Commission, but glossed over in the article) showed abnormally high levels of lead and nickel.

 

 

 

 

Any right-minded commissioner would have read in these high levels of lead and nickel, dangerous and possibly deadly if left and unchecked, a manifestation of the will of the people of Europe wanting to do away with the ineffectual Commission, and its even more obsolete president Barroso, once and for all. But then the description “right-minded commissioner” is an oxymoron and “the will of the people” is a concept that these European Über-bureaucrats do not understand. Self-obsessed as they as are and so taken in by their own spiel, they saw in these highly elevated lead levels a malfunctioning of the machine, rather than an assassination attempt. If you ever needed evidence that the commission had lost touch with the people it represents, this was it.

 

Once again, hidden behind their platitudes and grand theories of enlargement, the commission missed an opportunity to see that trouble was brewing. Instead, they mistook the brew for the trouble.

 

 

 

 

And so it came to pass, because they have loads of time on their hands, that they came down hard on La Cimbali (the Italian espresso machine maker) and asked for explanations. This is extraordinary as the commissioners themselves are chronically unable to give any explanations of their actions to the people of the 27 countries they represent. La Cimbali protested that the problem was not the machines, but the poor cleaning of the machines. Espresso machines need to be cleaned regularly, you see, and it seems that nobody on the Commission cleaned them, because everybody there is SO busy doing really important things that, well, nobody has ever managed to understand till far too late, only to discover that they were not important at all.

 

 

 

Commissioners of the EU,  just like their Commission, are people who do not yield to others or common sense. They are a doctrinaire bunch, who impose their will on others (the people) and take no for an answer. So as you can imagine La Cimbali, just a company, no more, no less, didn’t stand a chance against the commission. And so the commissioners managed to exact a deal out of La Cimbali. First, the company would program all 21 machines so that they clean themselves automatically regularly. This would afford the commissioners and their staff more time to have lunch and frustrate the ambitions of the 27 peoples they represent. And second, staff from each of the 27 commissioners would receive courses on “coffee tasting theory and sensorial techniques”, coffee “recipes and hints”, and finally “ordinary machine maintenance procedures.”

 

The Commission allowed the story to be released, without risking the fear of accusations of profligacy, because it knew it had scored three huge victories:

 

1.       It could stand tall in front of the people of Europe and announce that a bunch of Europeans with no idea of how to drink coffee could bludgeon an Italian espresso maker into submission, proving that good coffee is not the monopoly of Italy. So today an EU Slovak commissioner can tell an Italian how to make coffee. The commission believes in painting everything with the same brush and reducing all to the lowest common denominators. Tomorrow we will have the Finnish commissioner telling a Greek Feta maker how to make cheese, and a Latvian commissioner will tell the Spaniards how to make ham. Everything in Europe will look, taste and feel the same and carry the Commission’s stamp of approval

 

 

 

 

 

 

2.       The Commission can show that it saved money by not paying for the coffee courses, diverting attention from how they paid for the machines in the first place

3.       The Commission can make light of an assassination attempt and turn it into a crusade for manufacturing standards, in so doing once again triumphantly subverting the will of the people. They did the same thing with the European Constitution. When it failed to get its way, the Commission repackaged it as the Reform Treaty, or the Treaty of Lisbon. The Commission is a master of making light of disasters.
If you go to http://forums.ec.europa.eu/debateeurope/viewtopic.php?p=133409&sid=55f6ba3f029288ff7c999b0befd40764 , you will even find that on the EU commission page, there is a forum to discuss the coffee machine issue. The barefaced shamelessness of the EU is such that they can, with total impunity, take the caffeine out of democracy…

 

 

The newly cleaned machines come into operation on 16^th March 2009. The Commission can then claim that decent EU-approved coffee has been properly brewed. Europe, with far weightier things on its mind, can then claim that it has been properly screwed.

 

 

 

 

© Sameh El-Shahat 2009