It’s too bad they don’t speak jive, ebonics or hip-hop at the European Union headquarters in Brussels, home of the European Commission - famous for doling out secret contracts and suing it own members for a 3.7% pay raise while 23 million jobless people (none in the EU’s home) wait in unemployment lines for handouts to buy bread and milk – so someone could tell US President Barack Obama, “Yo, we be axin’ you not to diss on us.” The EU can dress it up any way it wants, Obama  snubbed Europe major-league by refusing to come to the EU-US Summit, scheduled for May 24 in Madrid, but who knows if that will hold because one of the reasons the White House gave for not showing up is that it doesn’t know who is the President of the EU.
It’s really French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Vice-President is his henchwoman, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the Reverend who says grace before dinners of sea bass and truffles while the EU’s poor eat stale  bread) but under the new Lisbon Treaty, the EU added a new President, Herman Van Rompuy, appointed in secret and such a political lightweight he has to wear tie shoes so he won’t fly out of the room. He has the title but European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, the one-time student Maoist rebel who’s the King of Capitalism now, has the power. But don’t tell Spanish Prime Minister Jose Manuel Zapatero, because his country holds the rotating EU Presidency and he thinks HE’s the President of the EU. Confused? So is the US, and a White House spokesman told the EU to call once they figure out who’s running the show.
It shows how far the EU has slipped in the world hierarchy, where it’s a 97-pound weakling and not even punching that weight as it slips almost into irrelevance, a Third World political entity behind the United States, and now lapsing behind the BRICs of Brazil-Russia-India-China on the American radar, where Brussels is a blip on the screen. Obama isn’t coming to Madrid not just because he wants to take care of business at home where he’s in a free fall, but because the EU doesn’t matter anymore, so you have to wonder what Europeans think about their darling new American President now, the one who came to the EU six times last year when it suited him, but dropped it like former US president Bill Clinton sheds women once he’s used them.
After the shutout humiliation of the colossal flop of the Copenhagen Climate No Change Conference in its backyard, it seemed like the EU couldn’t fall any further into obscurity – until Obama said “thanks, but no thanks,” relegating Zapatero, Barroso, Van Rompuy, and the EU’s rookie Foreign Minister, Catherine Ashton, who couldn’t find Haiti even after an earthquake, into the ranks of the immaterial. The only way Obama would come to Brussels is if he were flying over it on his way to a more important destination, such as Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi, or Sydney - because the EU has nothing to offer America anymore apart from wine, perfume and cheese. “Australia’s relationship with the United States of America is our most important international partnership,” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said, rejecting the EU and Australia’s former owner, England. But Obama probably saved the EU from another disgrace. The highest-paid President in the Western world isn’t the American President, who earns the equivalent of 288,000 euros a year, but Van Rompuy, the obscure haiku artist who makes 365,000 euros, who now won’t have to face Obama, who wouldn’t know who he was because no one else does either.
 
  Andy@ NEurope.eu