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.
I am ahead of Bernie Sanders in only one thing, if not two, but I do not really know. I actually lived in a socialism, unlike probably him; I was born there and grew up in it, for nearly three decades. Like most folks back then, I despised it.
His latest book: As an eyewitness and observer in three countries, each as different from the next as night and day, I have great difficulty refuting Bernie Sanders’ theses.
However, this was more than likely a different socialism than Sanders is striving for. It was a dictatorial, for especially outwardly inhuman socialism in the former GDR, today widely known as “East Germany.” The Cold War circumstances played a big role. In the fall of 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesting people were able to get rid of this socialism, while Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not send tanks to crush the revolutionary movement. I was 29 years old at that time and, as today, just a sand corn in the process.
Without our rejection of the socialist form of government, the upheaval leading to German reunification, which took place peacefully in 1990, would not have been possible. The discontent did not come out of nowhere; it had been building up among the people for years.
The second thing that distinguishes me from Bernie Sanders – I don’t know exactly – may be the fact that I spent eight years in the U.S. working with ordinary people at a lower level, so to speak. Here, too, I can base my opinion on personal experience.
After immigrating to the United States for family reasons and going through a period of acclimation – including working for an insurance company in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, and attending college in Clearwater – I was eventually employed by Pinellas County government, wrongly concluding that all the social benefits I could enjoy there were part of the general standard in the United States, a country I still believed at the time to be the freest country in the world. For ten years, so to speak, I walked around with half-closed eyes, seeing only what concerned myself. Actually, a not unusual human trait.
Then my wife and I moved to beautiful Blairsville, Georgia, where we still live today, now retired, aided by circumstances that originated not in the United States of America but in my home country. It was here in North Georgia that I first encountered the social issue in my life, through an employer famously named “Walmart.” Never in my life would I have thought such a thing possible; the way the American upper class treats Americans. My whole way of thinking has changed since then.
I am not a friend of socialism. For nothing in the world would I like to live again in a socialism as I had to get to know it from the GDR. But in the USA, there is also a dictatorship – that of big money, which takes away people’s rights or restricts them, such as health insurance or workers’ rights; for example, the right to organize unions.
I was born in the dictatorship of socialism and will most likely die in a dictatorship of big money. Neither dictatorship leaves much for members of the working class, as I have seen with my own eyes. In the GDR, Socialism locked up its own people behind an impenetrable western border. Anyone who did not agree with the political system had to fear repression.
Those who, through no fault of their own, live under financial constraints in a rich country like the U.S. simply because they needed surgery or are not academics are not living free lives. Fundamental rights such as the right to freedom of expression or freedom of religion do not change this. You do not feel free if you have to worry about health care or food, the rent for your apartment or the mortgage for your house. In the USA, 60 percent live from paycheck to paycheck, and I was one of them for eight years in Blairsville, Georgia.
I am a proponent of a social order in which the capitalist economy is controlled by the legislature through regulations and laws to protect the working majority, rather than allowing corporations a free hand in return for billions in campaign contributions – to the detriment of the many and the benefit of the few at the top. A human system that was once called a “Social Market Economy” at the time I left my home country in 1998.
Be clear about it – in Germany, too, a once comparatively exemplary system is disappearing with each passing day.
If I am not mistaken, Social Market Economy is the kind of “socialism” Bernie Sanders is striving for. I don’t care what he calls it. I don’t care what he calls it. All I know is that he’s right, because he stands up for the human side of society.
There is such a nice saying in German: “When two do the same thing, it is far from being the same.”
More than any other country in recent history since World War II, the United States under the leadership of presidents from both parties has instigated wars on more than questionable grounds, interfered, supplied weapons, bombed, killed, actively contributed to the overthrow of disagreeable governments around the world, and, not least, planned, paid and directed the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2014. Each time, it was not about democracy and freedom or humanity, but about maintaining U.S. supremacy in the world and the acquisition of sales markets. Millions of U.S. citizens do not want to believe this; instead, they pay homage to a fabricated patriotism and believe in things that can neither be rationally explained nor proven.
It is the result of what their own country’s media successfully drums into them on a daily basis. Partial truths serve to distract from the truth about one’s own country, which should not even arise in the consciousness of the population. Only what is useful for the purposes of the leading class should be present in the minds of the people.
This is the result of paid journalism – again, as with politics, big money is behind it, because the corporations don’t want the majority of people to realize the facts that have led to the polarization within the US. The social division is deliberate, because nothing is more dangerous to the corporations than a united people who would have the idea of truly exercising power in the sense of “WE THE PEOPLE.” At the same time, media outlets like CNN or Fox News not only engage in politics on behalf of their clientele – they also earn billions from it. It doesn’t bother them to mislead the people through and through.
The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s war against Ukraine have ensured that this no longer applies only to the USA. People are only presented with stories agreeable to Western politics, and the back story is often deliberately completely omitted. The public should not even think about who the profiteers of wars are, while people pay with their lives.
Each time, as today, American defense corporations made billions and wrote their own laws and regulations along the way, which were rubber-stamped by members of Congress because the corporations gave them huge grants for their election campaigns. The Biden administration has not the slightest interest in ending the war in Ukraine through negotiations and therefore let the near Istanbul agreement of last year fail. The fact that the war is causing the U.S. national deficit to take on ever more astronomical forms is of no concern to the politicians, because the taxpayer has to fix the problem that has been put on the back burner.
Now the Biden administration accuses China of trying to supply Russia with weapons.
The West risks new tensions with China over, among other things, spy balloons that Pentagon military strategists apparently could not say with certainty might have been sent into the sky by amateur groups from their own country.
The only reason why large parts of the population of Western countries agree with current policies toward Ukraine is the fact that people are exposed to widespread war propaganda, which makes them draw irrational conclusions and, in any case, hardly allows any different opinion, if one does not want to be put in the corner of the malicious.
Instead, everyone who shares non-governmental opinions about Ukraine is on the side of the Russians – no other option is allowed to the dissenters. This is the state of democracy in the self-proclaimed “value-regulated society” of the West.
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.
When it is claimed on current occasions – in my home country even more vehemently than elsewhere – that Germany has made itself too dependent on Russian natural gas for decades, then these claims do not stand up to historical evidence. All the more so when this is compared to other countries, and here again in particular to the USA.
Friendly handshake with a despot. European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on July 18, 2022, at the signing of the energy agreement in Baku. Azerbaijan has an authoritarian form of government, there are no free and secret elections, political opponents are arrested, and human rights violations are commonplace. – Azerbaijan is only one of several authoritative states with which Germany in particular has reached agreements as a substitute for Russian natural gas and oil.
For about 100 years, America has been obtaining most of its primary source of raw materials – crude oil – from other parts of the world, namely from countries that can be described as politically unstable at the very least and where human rights violations are a daily occurrence. Even wars against international law do not keep the USA and other NATO countries from maintaining friendly economic relations with despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, which has been waging a criminal war in Yemen for years with the support of the Americans.
In contrast to Ukraine, there is no international outcry here, although according to estimates, far more than 100,000 people have died in Yemen so far as a result of the effects of the war. And just last summer, the European Union reached an agreement with Azerbaijani despot Ilham Aliyev, under which the country would double its natural gas supplies to Europe by 2027. The double standard is not only shocking, but shameful.
Doesn’t all this entail the risk of dependency on regimes that are anything but democratic and where it is at least uncertain how they will develop?
But there is an essential difference: Germany, as a country poor in raw materials, must solve its current energy problems diplomatically, while the Americans resort to their intelligence services when things do not go the way of U.S. interests. If it is not enough to establish puppet governments according to their wishes, they then march in with the most highly armed military in the world to ensure “democracy and freedom” appropriate to their own ideas and interests – see Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of American interventions around the world is long – no less than 251 times since 1991, the USA created its own facts using force.
It is a mistake, which can have disastrous effects, to always look at things only from one’s own point of view. The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are on par with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not wanting to admit to this and supporting one, aggressive side while condemning the other is a classic example of double standards. Such an approach certainly does not contribute to an objective assessment of events. But this is the intention of those who set the tone and mislead their own people, for they naturally want to conceal the true motives.
Those who today in all seriousness allege that Germany over the cause of decades had become too dependent on Russia in the energy question are at the same time ignoring a policy of balance and détente that proved successful at the end of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s. It is therefore worthwhile, in the sense of forming a realistic opinion, not to spare the effort of following the chronology of events, at least in broad outline. Nazi Germany’s war in the Soviet Union had cost up to 27 million lives there. In view of the war trauma, it was especially important in the postwar years to conclude economic agreements as part of the reactivation of relations between the two countries in order to create an initial basis for mutual understanding. This purpose was served not least by the natural gas and oil contracts with the then Soviet Union. Both German states profited from this, whereby it is remarkable at what far more favorable conditions an ideological opponent sold its raw materials to Germany and Europe for over 60 years than the great ally USA does today.
It is hard to deny that contrary to all the prophecies of doom at the time – even from me, who was still very young at the time – this policy of dialogue led to a softening of hardened fronts in the middle of the Cold War. And this aspect was not the only important factor: for without this policy of détente, German reunification would hardly have been possible. This is historical evidence of how peaceful negotiations to establish a basis of trust while respecting mutual security interests in the former Soviet-subjugated Eastern Bloc countries ultimately led to freedom and democracy. It was not war and more and more weapons that eventually led to peaceful coexistence, but the will to talk to each other.
In other words, negotiations have been held with the opponent instead of refusing to negotiate.
If you look around today, you are bound to notice the frightening extent to which almost all Western politicians ignore these virtues. The nice Mr. Biden is the highest representative of a supposedly democratic leading power, but he does not want to negotiate with Russia, even for the hope of preventing further senseless victims in Ukraine, as well as a possible horror scenario with nuclear weapons. One has to imagine that. Instead of firmly objecting to its great friend in Washington, the whole of Europe has submitted to the sanctions imposed by the Americans on Russia, simply because the Americans think of nothing else but their own interests.
The damage is being borne by Europeans, while the U.S. and the internationalized corporations it controls are the only ones profiting from the war in Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, especially smart and USA-hawkish German politicians have repeatedly attracted attention with their omniscient remarks that for the first time since Hitler there is war again in Europe. From a historical point of view, this is not true: For in the spring of 1999 – some may still remember – NATO, led by the USA, bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia outside the alliance and without a UN mandate. That, too, was war.
Yugoslavia 1999: Burning Belgrade after NATO Bombing
The way of warfare at that time reminds of the current Russian strategy in Ukraine, with the difference that almost 24 years ago nobody talked about a “turn of times” as in Germany and nobody else had the idea to impose sanctions against participating, war-leading NATO countries in view of the crimes against international law. If there was an outcry of indignation, it was nowhere near as loud as it is today – in the media and elsewhere.
Although the operation, which took place between March 24 and June 10, 1999, was code-named “Allied Forces,” the main actor – I would never have guessed – was the United States. The Americans dropped a total of 28,000 bombs on parts of Serbia and Montenegro, with the death of an estimated 500 uninvolved civilians, including children and women, and “accidentally” also bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people were killed there, all of them Chinese citizens.
The humanitarian justification for the bombings remains controversial to this day, to say the least. Nevertheless, it is always possible to invent reasons to start a war – see George W. Bush. In any case, as air strikes on Yugoslavia proved unexpectedly ineffective, the Americans suddenly had grave misgivings about allowing ground troops to advance.
So, they did exactly the same thing in Yugoslavia that Putin is doing in Ukraine today: the war henceforth focused on civilian infrastructure, targeting power plants, coal-fired power plants, waterworks, rail links, bridges and government facilities. We remember, the US President at that time was Bill Clinton.
Unlike today with regard to Ukraine, hardly any voices of indignation were heard in the West at the time, while rather timid tones came from former pacifists everywhere, such as the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who successfully refused military service in his younger years, but today, in an astonishing change of heart, seems to know his way around any tank model. Like the self-proclaimed “peace politicians” from the Greens, part of the current left-liberal traffic light coalition in Germany, Scholz calls for sending more and more weapons to Ukraine – until Russia is defeated.
A nuclear power like Russia, which has launched a brutal war against Ukraine in violation of international law, is difficult to defeat militarily. Vladimir Putin, provoked to the core by the West, is likely to fight to the end and may not recoil to pull the nuclear card as a last option. Meanwhile, US-controlled corporations are making gigantic profits from the production of war materials and the sale of their dirty fracking natural gas, which hardly anyone overseas wanted before, at a price today that is not only dragging the economy in Europe into the abyss, but from which millions of private households in particular are suffering, not least in Germany.
This is far from the end of the line: The new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives could demand a higher cost-sharing by Europeans in the war in Ukraine, which could drag on for who knows how long. It looks like anything but a good new year for Europe.
A war criminal confesses “by mistake” (see video). Whoever calls Putin a war criminal and not this man, measures with double standards and does not contribute to peace. Here you can see how mendacious the “values” of the West are.
George W. Bush once told the truth.
Those who on the one hand justified Bush’s senseless wars back then (“God told me to go to war”) or still do so today in retrospect are lying to themselves when they condemn Putin today. For all these wars were and are wars of aggression waged by imperial powers, even if Russia’s security interests around Ukraine had been blatantly and probably deliberately disregarded by the Americans and their vassals.
American democracy and freedom were not defended in Afghanistan and Iraq any more than they were in dozens of other countries where the US military bombed and murdered, just as Germany was not defended at Stalingrad or on the Atlantic coast. Propaganda, then as now, was aimed at misleading its own people while maintaining their patriotic willingness.
According to UN estimates, the US-led war in Iraq cost 151,000 lives, most of them civilians, women and children. American bombs did not distinguish between good and evil during the missile attacks on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The war instigated by the USA was justified, among other things, with lies about weapons of mass destruction.
Former US-Defense Secretary Colin Powell (1937-2021) himself later apologized for deliberately misleading the world with his remarks to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. In his later years, Powell spoke of “fabricated evidence” designed to make it credible that the United States was waging a justified war against Saddam Hussein.
Now the USA is waging a proxy war in Ukraine to decisively weaken Russia and expand its own sphere of influence in order to impose its own interests on other countries – as is currently happening in Europe.
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.
A Prince Henry the Thirteenth of Reuss was apparently destined to become the new head of state after a successful coup in Germany. At least, that is the assumption of the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office. After a large-scale raid last week in Germany, Italy and Austria with about 3,000 police officers, the prosecutor is currently investigating at least 53 defendants on suspicion of membership and support of a terrorist organization.
In Germany, as early as August 28, 2020 – a mere four months before the storming of the Capitol in Washington – several hundred right-wingers, Reich Citizens and conspiracy theorists attempted to break into the Reichstag building in Berlin. Police forces managed to force the mob back from the stairs to the seat of parliament, while in Berlin about 40,000 people demonstrated against the federal government’s Corona measures. The storming of the Reichstag failed because the demonstrators were nowhere near as fanatical and militant as the mob in Washington later on. A woman had spoken to the people, announcing that U.S. President Donald Trump had just landed in Berlin and would use American soldiers to depose the German government that very day.
This refers to the so-called “Reich Citizens”, a movement not recognizing today’s German Basic Law and thus also denying the legal existence of the German state, arguing that there was no peace treaty after the end of World War II and the country thus continues to exist in its pre-1939 borders. According to current estimates, the Reich Citizen scene comprises around 21,000 people.
The notion that imperial acolytes of modern times, led by aristocratic specters, not only want to turn political conditions in Germany upside down, but in all seriousness pose a threat to the country and also find broad support in the process, would never have occurred to me in the past. But it is a mistake not to investigate the causes and answer the question of why people feel driven to reject the prevalent political direction – all the more so when they are left with no alternative in the field of democracy.
This is no longer a phenomenon in the USA alone. When people are disappointed or even disgusted with their government and this disappointment then turns into bitterness and frustration, they often become receptive to radical solutions – including those that no longer fall within the realm of rational understanding. A policy that serves the interests of citizens little or not at all, and by which more and more people feel abandoned, prepares the ground for dangerous polarizations and divisions across society.
In contrast to such diffuse beliefs, many people fortunately still have a basic realistic approach. In Germany, a not insignificant part of the population seems to be of the opinion that the sanctions against Russia are more or less imposed on their country by the U.S., as is the military support for Ukraine. How else would one understand the German government’s about-face on these issues from one day to the next? The Americans wanted to consolidate and further expand their world domination with a tougher policy characterized by threats of sanctions, including against China. Yet it was the Americans themselves who, out of greed for profit, moved large parts of their domestic production base to other countries in order to save production costs and circumvent socio-political regulations. China is only one of those countries.
While Germany generally has been accused of becoming overly dependent on Russia for energy supplies, U.S. corporations have themselves made American consumption dependent on others in recent decades, destroying tens of thousands of industrial jobs at home by outsourcing much of the production that used to take place in the United States. While the latter did not arise from any compulsion other than sheer greed for profit, the old Federal Republic of Germany and the former East-German GDR, as countries poor in raw materials, had to look for alternatives. The Soviets and later the Russians sold oil and liquid natural gas at much lower prices than Germany’s great friend today, the USA. The supply agreements remained unaffected by any events during the Cold War period for decades and even beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991.
The Germans must now witness how their left-liberal government fully submits to the USA and has terminals built on the country’s coasts to receive the dirty fracking liquefied gas from overseas, which had previously been so vehemently rejected. In the future, large corporations in the USA will earn 100 million euros with every ship that arrives, while German consumers, despite subsidies, will not only have to pay the highest liquefied gas and electricity prices in Europe, but will also have to reckon with energy shortages in the event of a harsh winter.
In addition, the Biden administration is pursuing a selfish policy, having introduced a $370 billion inflation-reduction bill that subsidizes U.S. companies primarily active in the environmental sector, giving them a competitive advantage over companies from Europe. The fact that this violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules does not bother the Biden administration. More and more, even German companies are already being lured to the U.S. with anti-competitive tax promises. The USA is determining the worldwide economic liberalism once initiated by Thatcher and Reagan, which results in deregulation and social cuts above all in poorer third world countries – and increasingly not only there –, which ultimately leads to upheavals in political systems, while investors rake in huge profits on the stock exchanges. These are the veritable consequences of the so-called globalization, which was supposed to provide more justice in the entire world.
Apparently largely unnoticed by the American public, the Biden administration is following an “America First” policy at least as strict and ruthless as Donald Trump’s before it.
Who is still surprised when the reputation of the USA sinks to the lowest level worldwide and even in European countries politically radical tendencies arise, which do not stop even before a country like Germany and let officials sound the alarm when a mad prince of the thirteenth wants to coup himself to the head of the state?
It is the Biden’s and their ilk, including a Wall Street Girl named Clinton, who have failed the people with their misguided policies in the interest of big business, allowing a disastrous phenomenon like Trump to come to power in the first place. Perhaps the U.S. will soon witness a sequel, for those who called the ghosts will have a hard time getting rid of them. I would not be surprised anymore.
Really? What is CNN, a media funded by neoliberal corporations, alluding to (see image below)? To a part of the left-liberal, young voters who come from wealthy families and have enough time to cheer for a president who could be their spooky great-grandfather? Young people who support neoliberalism in ways not fundamentally different from the view of the Republican Party? Or perhaps more likely young Americans who are far more sympathetic to the progressive wing of the Democrats and don’t care if they are called “socialists” for it? The latter would be a real attempt at change in this country that could provide social justice and greater equality to overcome the abysmal rifts in American society.
Informing instead of agitating: good journalism is about objectively reflecting what is happening, not engaging in politics itself to pull public opinion in a particular direction. But the latter is exactly what networks like Fox News and CNN, bought by the ruling moneyed elite, are doing.
But Joe Biden is not the right President for that.
These elections will not change the aggressive nature of this country either. The leading country in the world stands for an ancient, Manchester-like capitalist economic system with a dazed president who calls himself a capitalist because he is afraid to go down in the history books as some kind of socialist pope otherwise. A president who, even more than his predecessor, pursues the policy of “America First” and takes no account of the allies on the other side of the Atlantic, because own interests, world supremacy and greed for profit have absolute priority for the USA. A president who drags America into everything that will sooner or later hurt the country just as it did under Trump.
For the USA, true friends and partnership have no value. After all, partnership means working together at eye level. The sanctions policy against Russia imposed by the U.S. on the Europeans benefits no one more than the Americans, who on top of that are trying to lure European and especially German companies to their country with economically unilateral measures. If anything, U.S. allies serve only as a means to an end for the moment. The German government, in particular, is too stupid to grasp this fact and continues to believe in the USA as its great friend.
As Henry Kissinger, a Republican, said: “America has no eternal friends and no eternal enemies, only interests.”
These words bear witness to the United States of America.
The Wind of Change 