In our age of cutting-edge technology, where greedy corporations shamelessly exploit the labor of the mass of their employees and leave them to live little more than from payday to payday, no one remembers words like the following. They did, in fact, come from a Republican president:
Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (1890-1969)
“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those – regardless of their political party – who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”
The statement was made in 1952 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II and 34th President of the United States of America. Eisenhower, a Republican socialist; a forerunner of Bernie Sanders, so to speak. Imagine that.
The fools today would be: Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Starbucks …, to name just a few. They all have one thing in common: they suppress workers’ rights by all legal and illegal means and do everything they can to prevent representation of the interests of the weak. They all rake billions into their own pockets and have little more than starvation wages left for their ordinary employees, who can barely make ends meet.
This is what the modern age of the 21st century looks like.
If Eisenhower’s words are anything to go by, then the fools of our day would unfortunately also be those who are sorely informed and believe they must elect Trump, DeSantis or even Biden to represent the interests of the American majority. The exact opposite is the case: for these sorts of politicians use their power and influence in the interests of the billionaire class and ensure that corporations can continue to wallow in their greed.
The latter is obviously not what Eisenhower wanted for the American future. “Ike” would be shocked to hear today’s bullies like Trump and DeSantis talking.
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.
Targeted misrepresentation about my home country in many U.S. media, not just CNN, and also in Germany itself: The truth of the tank issue is rather that the Biden administration, at least in its official presentation, has also changed course, primarily to help Polish demands for the delivery of German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to gain acceptance.
It is downright absurd to speak of “growing German influence” in this context, and the authors of such articles know this very well. The deliberate intention is not to let the USA appear as a profit-hungry, all-determining power on the globe, at least not all the time. Anyone who disagrees should take a look at the US defense budget figures – a budget that does not deserve the name. They are more than double the military spending of China and Russia combined to ensure American military presence and superiority in all parts of the world. A so-called “defense” budget looks different.
A clear-thinking person must ask why a supposedly peace-loving country has to spend so much money on the military, moreover for the strategic orientation to dominate others – with military presence even in the remotest corners of the earth. Russia maintains 20 military bases outside its own country, the U.S. nearly a thousand worldwide. What for?
The whole world had seen and heard who set the pace when US-President Joe Biden gave the answer in the press conference nearly a year ago about how the USA would prevent Nord Stream 1 and 2. A grinning German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood by and had nothing to say in response to the open threat against German infrastructure. Since then, no “transatlantic power dynamic” has changed, because the U.S. doesn’t let anyone tell it anything when it comes to their interests. NATO is essentially them, and the others are mere vassals and performing agents.
From the beginning, the Americans intended to cut off Russian energy supplies to Germany in order to sell their dirty fracked gas to Europe at higher prices while weakening Russian-German relations. There are corresponding documents, including public ones, which prove this, up to the written threat to “destroy the ferry port of Sassnitz” on the Baltic coast, where the last pipelines for the completion of Nord Stream 2 were stored.
The U.S. is the only country to benefit from the end of Russian energy supplies to Europe and especially Germany. In this context, the statement by political scientist George Friedman, after which it has been the goal of U.S. policy for a hundred years to prevent Russian raw materials from coming together with German technology, is highly interesting.
The big losers today are first and foremost the people of Germany, who are now suffering the greatest loss of prosperity since the end of World War II after their own government willingly subjugated itself to the repressive policies of the United States in the form of the imposed sanctions against Russia.
For those still capable of recognizing the facts of our times, it should be a ridiculous staircase joke to speak of a shift in the “transatlantic dynamic.” The reality is a cold power politics of the Biden administration against Europe and in particular against Germany. Most people there are not foolish enough not to notice this.
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.
About 1200 people protested against Germany’s Russia policy in Leipzig yesterday, Saturday, under the slogan “Ami go home”. The demonstrators demanded the restoration of relations with Russia, the withdrawal of American troops from Germany and accused the German left-liberal government of being a puppet of the United States.
A poster displayed in Leipzig, Germany on November 26, 2022.
At the same time, a left-wing counterdemonstration took place with roughly the same number of participants.
Police forces had prepared to protect the U.S. Consulate in Leipzig. But this did not materialize, because the demonstration had already come to a standstill beforehand, allegedly due to a sit-in by the counterdemonstrators.
The German media largely portrayed the anti-American demonstration as an event organized by politically radical right-wing forces.
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.
Aldi in Blairsville (North Georgia) has supposedly been in the planning stages since 2019, long before the energy crisis in Europe began. However, German public TV channels recently reported that the German discounter is reducing the opening hours of its stores in its country of origin due to exorbitant increases in energy costs. Looking at America, however, it is extremely striking to see how many German grocery stores are currently being built in the comparatively poor south of the USA, and I would not like to know how many Aldi’s and Lidl’s are closing their doors forever in Germany in return. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any details on this so far.
Aldi in my hometown Wolmirstedt, federal state Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
It is not only the lower energy prices and taxes that make the USA so popular as an industrial location. Above all, the absence of a balanced collective bargaining system and the widespread absence of trade unions, especially in the southern United States, mean that companies find extremely favorable conditions for maximum profits – not least because they are largely free to determine the welfare of their employees at any time.
In the eight years I worked for Walmart, I was told more than once, “Just to be clear – the word ‘union’ does not exist in our store. We handle our problems internally.” – I didn’t take that very seriously at the time, especially since I had classified unions in Germany as extortionists anyway. That may have been true for Germany 30 years ago – but there, and even more so in the U.S. with its neoliberal economic system, I think unions are indispensable today to ensure workers’ rights.
I literally experienced firsthand how important this is. For a double hernia I contracted while working at Walmart, I had to pay part of the medical bills out of pocket, even though I was covered by health insurance – a higher four-digit sum that would have taken me years to pay under my circumstances in the U.S. at the time. Instead, I was able to pay the bill immediately with funds generated not in the U.S. but in my home country.
Those who have the favor of circumstance on their side are fortunate not to have to earn a living from lower- or middle-income sources in an area like North Georgia. The neighborhood occasionally reminds the outside observer of a Third World country, or someone like me of living conditions experienced in the former Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. This is also something I would not have thought possible in my earlier notions about the USA, long before I moved here. I say this not with condescending intent, but because this is my inevitable assessment after almost 12 years.
So far, every worker in Germany has been spared an experience like mine as a Walmart employee, since such treatment would still be classified illegal in Western Europe – but I don’t want to sign off on that statement much longer. Who knows how things will develop in my home country in these uncertain times. Sanctions against other countries come back as a boomerang, that’s nothing new either. The ongoing neoliberal globalization and the urge of the West, led by the USA, to impose its will on others without paying consideration to their security interests makes me worry about the future. In Germany, too, there are more and more people who do not know how to pay their energy or grocery bills despite government assistance. The state cannot always lend a helping hand, especially in view of the dangerous scale of the current energy crisis in Europe, especially in Germany.
In addition, politicians who are no longer recognizable in their statements, make the horror even greater. Those who, like German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, say that all negotiating options (with Russia) have been exhausted and the peace dividend has been used up for Germany, possibly hope for victory in war. Yet weapons and wars do not create peace in the long run; they are rather the basis for open accounts and feuds to flare up again. To be sure, folks who call themselves Christians understand this even better than I do. The history of the 20th century alone knows countless examples, and today’s Americans should be more aware than others from their recent history of the futility of the wars they have waged against other countries in other parts of the world. And as far as Ukraine is concerned, sooner or later there will be negotiations with Russia – with or without Putin.
My home country has joined the prevailing world opinion that Russia embodies evil. We Germans have already heard this many times in our history, and it has led to nothing good. A less perceived influence leading to misperceptions occasionally came from the opposite side. For anyone who kept their eyes open in Germany in the 1990s and did not hold a very uncritical, very pro-American opinion, as I did, could already see the German future through the images from the USA as if through a burning glass. Almost everything that sooner or later spilled over from America to Europe was euphorically adopted and copied there as the latest trend – from lifestyle, music, clothing, fast food, shrill sounds and drugs to the conspiracy theories and Trumpism that began their triumphal march from the USA.
If Germany’s leaders decide to have their president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, give a completely unscheduled speech to the nation today to get people in the mood for “hard times for the years to come,” it’s a sure sign of how far Germany is still slipping into calamity – and beyond the coming winter.
Almost every sentence he said could be refuted – it is a disgrace how the population is made a fool of. Just one example from his speech:
“We are just leaving the era of fossil industrialization …. We are entering an age increasingly without coal, oil and gas.”
Increasingly without?
The facts paint a different picture:
Coal, a fossil fuel: At the instigation of the Green Minister of Economics, Habeck, the Saarland is currently bringing completely outdated, environmentally harmful coal-fired power plants back to the grid.
Liquefied natural gas, a fossil fuel: LNG terminals are under construction in Wilhelmshaven, Brunsbuettel, Stade and Lubmin to land the dirty fracking gas from the USA. Allegedly, the Americans earn 100 million euros with each arriving ship, paid for by the German consumer.
Oil, a fossil fuel: Chancellor Scholz was recently in Saudi Arabia (a begging US-President Biden was there before him) to ask the Saudis for higher oil production. Here, a brutal war of aggression in Yemen and human rights suddenly no longer play a role, unlike regarding Russia. The German double standards are deplorable. The Saudis, however, have so far given Biden and Scholz the middle finger: they have cut production because this allows them to obtain a higher price for oil.
Steinmeier had not even finished his speech when the news came: The inflation rate in Germany has risen to 10.4 percent.
This is not the result of the war in Ukraine, but of the insane sanctions of the West against Russia.
During the Cold War, oil and natural gas flowed steadily from the Soviet Union to the former Federal Republic and the GDR, despite all international crises, wars and ideological antagonisms. In comparison, today it looks as if the West is virtually conjuring up the discord with Russia and does not miss any opportunity to fuel it further, because this corresponds to the American doctrine of weakening Russia.
Any diplomacy to end the war has been rejected – as already proven by the rapprochement of both belligerents in March under Turkish mediation. In the subsequent negotiations in Istanbul, Kiev had agreed to abandon its aspirations to join NATO and settle for neutral status. Then, without any credible, concrete indication of reasons, the Ukrainian negotiators rejected everything at that time. They had been called off from Washington by Mr. Biden and his minions.
At that point, the Americans had long signaled that they would support Ukraine with whatever it needed against Russia. This is how proxy wars are fought.
The Wind of Change 