Deregulation of financial markets serves the top one percent, not the common people. It lays the foundation and sets the course for future crises that put the safety and health of hundreds of millions of people at risk. This is the reality of the so-called “free market,” where there is little or no regulation, and where lobbyists in the service of big business corrupt the legislature to ensure that laws are passed according to their ideas and wishes. It no longer has anything to do with real democracy to the good of society.
What more proof and evidence do clear thinking people need to grasp the truth? It cannot be true that people voted for Trump, who in 2017 not only gave a trillion (i.e., $1,000,000,000,000) in tax breaks to corporations and the top one percent of the wealthiest people instead of “cleaning up the swamp” as he promised before the election – rather, he did the opposite: he appointed mostly billionaires to his cabinet.
Who do you think these billionaires would serve? The interests of the working class, which is the majority of the American people?
The mass of people simply do not learn, but are deceived. How is such a thing possible? Only 15 years after the last bank crash, there are still speculators in the financial institutions who gamble away people’s savings – and not only that: Contrary to all the protestations of politicians like Biden now, they not only go unpunished, but are also rescued as under Obama in 2008/09) with taxpayer funds. In plain terms, those who caused the problem in their criminal greed are being bailed out at the behest of the government.
But no one bails out the working-class families who are losing their jobs, are threatened with eviction, and don’t know how to put food on the table.
Against such a legalized Wall Street criminality no election helps anymore. Only mass movements that revolt against injustice can help.
As a German and believing to be halfway familiar with the history of my country, I can’t trust my own eyes when I read something like the following. Discovered today on CNN:
In supposedly free countries like the USA or Germany, do media still exist that are not addicted to unconditional warmongering – media that do not have in mind to almost uncritically pass on the views of their respective governments to a bleary-eyed population?
Are there any historically literate scribblers or even politicians, called “Western officials”, who still use facts from history to assess today’s situation, even if they only refer to a quotation? How is Ukraine supposed to achieve lasting peace if old mistakes are repeated during the war, possibly also after the war, and the country – which is actually to be feared – continues to be used by the West as a protective shield against Russia?
Didn’t German tanks kill Ukrainians 80 years ago as well? Such an argument to justify German arms deliveries to Ukraine today is not only cynical, but in its naively simplified form it also bears no causal relation to history as it actually happened. Because in reality, by far more ordinary Ukrainians have suffered from a criminal collaboration of German Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists than from German tanks.
Bandera monument in Lviv, western Ukraine, a city which once was called Lemberg.
Of course, from the point of view of those who think they have to use weapons to resolve a conflict that cannot be judged in black and white, it is inevitable to resort to such naive platitudes.
The author of the nonsense at CNN obviously has no knowledge of the fact that when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Ukraine, large parts of the Ukrainian population received the German soldiers as liberators from Stalinism – a mistake for which they were later to pay bitterly. I had former soldiers of the German Wehrmacht in my own relatives who reported about it. It is part of a narrative about a cruel war that brought us (by that I mean: we Germans) too late to the realization: “Whoever picks up a gun again, let his hand fall off.” Unfortunately, the quote does not stem from me, but from Franz-Josef Strauss, an arch-conservative Bavarian politician who himself fought as an officer on the Eastern Front during World War II.
The historical knowledge about the collaboration of Ukrainian extremists with Hitler is linked to an astonishing development, according to which there were and are political forces in Ukraine, which not only strived for a plausible independence of their country, but also wanted to ethnically cleanse it. Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ideologist and national movement leader of the 20th century, with his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) played into the hands of the Holocaust with active assistance. Under their “cooperation” the German occupiers killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles who escaped with their lives were expelled from their ancestral homeland.
All this suited the OUN because its goal was to transform Ukraine into an ethnically homogeneous country. It was clear to the organization that this could only be achieved by means of mass killings. The West, with all its peace-preaching politicians, no longer wants to know anything about all this.
What does that have to do with today?
Some. For to this day, Bandera is revered as a national hero in western-oriented parts of the Ukrainian population. Not only are there several monuments to Bandera in Ukraine, erected after the breakaway from the Soviet Union, but a main street in Kiev was renamed after him in 2016 – much to the dismay of the Russians living in eastern Ukraine, and also, by the way, of Israel.
It is not only the memory of Bandera that is glorified today in large parts of the non-Russian speaking population. The notorious Azov regiment, which today plays a large part in Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia, is infested with Nazi ideology; until recently it was seen with symbols closely associated with the German Waffen SS.
So, when Vladimir Putin blathers about wanting to purge Ukraine of “fascist elements,” the West does not have history on its side at all. The problem is that peace cannot be achieved with such attitudes on either side.
And by the way, even German tanks cannot solve problems that have their multi-layered origins in social spheres. Politicians and media should stop poisoning people’s minds with irresponsible war polemics.
One more remark: A country like the U.S., which for sole interest demonstrably carries out one military aggression and intervention after another or has them carried out by third parties, cannot hold the leadership of a pretended defense alliance like NATO. Europe should take care of itself instead of submitting to American market interests. The idea is realistic if the will to implement it were there – but it is not.
Defense, protection from Russia? France, unlike Germany, is a nuclear power, and together the two countries have a higher military budget than the largest country in the world – Russia.
But none of this seems to play a role in the deliberations of those responsible in my home country. Germany is in a politically neglected state and lets itself be led by the Biden administration on the nose ring through world history. It does not seem to occur to any of those playing with fire today how much the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia endangers Europe in particular. The Americans always wage their wars far enough away from their own country and withdraw as soon as things get dicey, or they run away altogether with their glorious military – see Afghanistan – and are then no longer directly affected for the time being.
Ukraine, however, is barely a two-hour flight from Germany.
As long as I have been in this world, we Germans have been told time and again by our own governments – both in the dictatorial GDR and in the later, reunified Germany – war is not a means of politics and that, because of our history, we should stay out of everything that has to do with militarism.
German Tiger tanks in 1943 shortly before the order to attack near Kursk in the Soviet Union. The Kursk arc was the site of the largest tank battle in military history. – I myself lost several relatives during the war in the Soviet Union; their bones still lie buried somewhere in the vastness of Russian space, and no one knows where exactly.
Those who can think of nothing better than to respond to violence with counter-violence are setting in motion a spiral that ends in nothing other than the death of countless innocent people. How many more examples of this kind have to be added to history before mankind learns something from them? Especially Christian people or those who fancy themselves as such should know this better than someone like me.
Now, sooner or later, the German government will actually deliver “Leopard” tanks to Ukraine; tanks that will then shoot at Russian soldiers with the Iron Cross on their turrets for the first time since Adolf Hitler. Every normal person in Germany should know how wrong this is, especially since Ukraine is so torn apart that even after the war with Russia it is very unlikely to achieve a progressive democracy for the country as a whole.
Ukraine has never been an ethnically unified, nation-state entity. Corrupt politicians have squandered all opportunities to do so since the country’s secession from the Soviet Union in 1991, and instead have gradually bartered away sovereignty to Western economic interests and to NATO, which has had its fingers in the pie from the beginning. It is to be feared that corruption and abuse of authority will not end even after a cease-fire with Russia and instead the country will apply for all kinds of aid from the European Union – aid which in turn will only benefit the corrupt politicians on the scene, but not the simple, suffering people.
Europe, and Germany in general, will bear a responsibility in the coming decades which the Germans in particular, as the (still) strongest economic power in Europe, will not be able to escape. I believe this is deliberate – not only on the part of the USA for reasons of its own economic and military world domination, but also on the part of countries such as Poland, where leading politicians still want to take belated revenge because of the German Reich.
Now and then, and away from the corporate media, one can still find references to facts even in the U.S. that are useful for causal research (see below). It should perhaps be added that the USA installed a missile defense system on NATO’s eastern border in 2016 under the Pentagon’s lie that this system would serve to repel Iranian long-range missiles in an emergency. In reality, it served to intimidate and provoke Russia with the possibility that these American missiles could reach cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow in minutes. Just as a side note, the President at the time was Barack Obama.
The above is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Beinhart, February 7, 2022. Beinhart is a Jewish columnist, journalist and political commentator. He lives in New York City. – Note: William Burns is an American diplomat and currently serving as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Biden Administration.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine revealed in 1992 the unmistakable intention of the Americans to establish themselves as the sole world power. Quote: “Our goal is to prevent the emergence of a new rival, whether on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere ….”
There are still smart people in Washington who are not comfortable with their own country’s aggressive, imperial policies. Unfortunately, a fossilized President Biden doesn’t listen to them for he himself in his entire political life has pushed the great power aspiration of the USA without consideration for others. Instead of reaching out to a former World War II ally, then former Cold War enemy, the USA, in its insatiable greed for world dominance, set its sights on confrontation – with fatal consequences for millions of people not only in Europe, but the entire world.
The leading world power is playing with the possibility of nuclear war because it wants to control fossil fuels and their commercialization, as it is currently doing successfully in Europe, imposing its will on others for reasons of profit and power, and in complete ignorance of the existential threat to the entire human race posed by the climate catastrophe that is more than just in the offing.
On 9 December, 2020, a day when the United States sadly lost more people (3,054) due to the Corona Virus than on the attack on Pearl Harbor (2,403) and during the terror assaults in 2001 (2,977), the dumbest president ever in place arrogantly tweeted the following:
“Germany has consistently been used by my obnoxious critics as the country that we should follow on the way to handle the China Virus. So much for that argument. I love Germany – vaccines are on the way.”
True, Germany had a record number of 590 deaths on one day due to the corona virus. This is a reason for a sitting American president to ridicule via tweet a country where, in contrast to his own, human lives matter and a social, caring system is in place to help the people. There, people can stay home while maintaining a livelihood. For the very same reason Germany can afford to go into another hard lock-down over Christmas.
The German government under an attentive chancellor Angela Merkel – a true leader, by the way – is at least attempting to tackle problems in a responsible and realistic way to protect their people.
In contrast, the self-declared genius from the White House has downplayed the virus from the beginning while millions – many of them bible-thumping folks – kept supporting him. Instead of pointing his finger to others, this so-called president, a loser and psychopath all through, should have cleaned up the countless deficiencies in his own Christian country. Besides, in the US 87 people per 100,000 have died from the virus, in Germany 24.
If they had a conscience combined with sane judgement, those of the holy folks who have voted for Trump and support(ed) him would be ashamed for the rest of their lives. It is not going to happen. So far for a special alignment of Christian morality. People attuned to a bit more authenticity want no part of it.
One can only wish for Trump’s disciples to stay in their propaganda temples for which they have the balls to use the term “churches”, locked up from outside if possible, never come out again and keep praying twenty-four seven. The lunatic still occupying the White House could only become president because of the pathetic failure of millions of brainwashed Americans completely out of touch with reality.
It’s not for Republicans, it’s not for Democrats: Finally a good, inspiring message for all well-disposed Americans after four years of idiocy, chaos, bullying, and elusive stupidity: Former presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama volunteer to promote confidence in a vaccine’s safety. President-elect Joe Biden asks Americans to mask during the first 100 days of his presidency.
I am not American, but I will mask as I did before not only for my wife’s and my own safety, but also for the safety of others – and also to show my support for the new administration.
The new president will face tremendous problems, but it is nevertheless a relief to feel the normalcy coming back through people in charge who are at least trying to lead. And this is a good message for all Americans, regardless if they are aware of the damage done to the country in the past four years or not.
The Wind of Change 