EU leaders set for crucial budget summit … European Union leaders are due to begin a two-day summit in Brussels to try to strike a deal on the next seven years of EU spending. High EU expenditure at a time of cutbacks and austerity across the continent is the main issue dividing the 27 member states. They failed to reach a compromise at a similar summit last November. The BBC's Europe editor Gavin Hewitt says the summit will almost certainly demand cuts in EU administration. However, whatever is agreed still has to go to the European Parliament and MEPs are big backers of EU spending, he adds. – BBC

Dominant Social Theme: What would we do without these critically important summits? Surely the world would be a far worse place.

Free-Market Analysis: So the EU leaders are getting together once more to determine the fate of the world in what the BBC calls a "crucial budget summit."

What occurs to us when we observe this constant procession of summits is that this is a kind of intentional manipulation. First, the power elite that is intent on consolidating world government sets up artificial crises. Then it creates a political process to solve them.

In the case of the EU, the crisis has gone on for years.

It was SUPPOSED to go on for years so that newspapers could write headlines about it. It is a promotion for the utility of government.

Every day, people pick up newspapers and magazines and read about this summit or that summit and how "leaders" are gathering to mull the fate of the world and to try to stop disaster from striking.

This was perhaps most effective in the past century during the prelude to World War II. With war about to break out, people were desperate for the latest word from "leaders." They were hoping things would be resolved. They weren't.

Imagine how they would have felt if they knew what we know today (and some of them did, of course), that world events were being manipulated by Money Power and that the War was likely pre-determined in order to create facilities for world government.

And that is, of course, exactly what happened.

Today we see the same narrative at work with the EU. But from what we can tell, these endless EU summits are increasingly irritating to people because the stakes are not the same.

It is one thing to have endless summits to avoid war. It is another to have a series of summits about banking defaults and budgets overhangs. Here's more from the BBC:

The EU Commission – the EU's executive body – had originally wanted a budget ceiling of 1.025tn euros (£885bn; $1.4tn) for 2014-2020, a 5% increase. In November that was trimmed back to 973bn euros and later revised down to 943bn euros.

However, with other EU spending commitments included, that would still give an overall budget of 1.011tn euros.

The UK, Germany and other northern European nations want to lower EU spending to mirror the cuts being made by national governments across the continent.

Downing Street said on Wednesday that Prime Minister David Cameron was intent on seeking an agreement to lower EU spending.

"The UK's position is unchanged since the November European Council – spending needs to be reduced further than the proposals on the table," a spokesman said.

You see how dry this is? It is one reason the EU meme is failing. The idea is always to promote government but the EU promotion has gone awry.

The article itself attempts to provide a sense of gravity via its narrative, pointing out that "EU budget negotiations are difficult" and that already there had been "short but intense meetings" between top EU leaders.

We even learn that a European Parliament spokesman warned that "more severe cuts would leave the commission unable to do its job as the EU integrates more deeply in response to the financial crisis."

And then there is this: "Analysts say failure to reach an agreement on its seven-year budget would mean the EU falling back on more expensive annual budgets."

Hmm … When Hitler met with top British officials the headlines spoke of "Peace In Our Time."

Today's headlines read, "EU falling back on more expensive annual budgets."

This is simply not going to get the job done. Nor is the "war on terror" – which is one reason the elites have apparently expanded it. But as we have pointed out in the past, nuclear weapons have made war a difficult tool to use as a means of obtaining world government.

Prior to nuclear weapons, war could be generalized and pursued with full-on brutality. But total war is not an option anymore. And that seems to be the reason that Money Power has created faux wars instead.

Not only is EU consolidation not a great, galvanizing issue. It also, as we pointed out above, is proving increasingly tiresome. The lack of ability to promote a generalized war – a World War – is proving most troublesome to the elites, in our humble view. Combine this with the exposure of elite plans courtesy of the Internet Reformation and you end up with formidable obstacles.

The 21st century is not the 20th. Increasingly, people are not impressed with the EU and certainly not with the euro. The power elite propounds various forms of urgency to impress upon people the need for a centralizing force of government – and yet such a promotion is not so effective as it might have been previously.

These endless meetings are intended to impress upon people the importance of leaders and their deliberations. But we have a feeling that people are tuning out instead.