The conflict in Ukraine has fundamentally transformed Germany for the better, Berlin’s envoy to Washington has argued, while acknowledging her country has been far more affected by the economic backlash of anti-Russian sanctions than the US.
Emily Haber opened the op-ed, published by the Washington Post on Monday, with a description of “dimly lit” German airports and streets, cold homes and public buildings, rising gas prices and inflation running at 10%. The country also has to deal with over a million displaced Ukrainians, who are entitled to full health insurance, social benefits, housing and education at government expense.
“Increasingly, it is Europe (and not least Germany) that is bearing the brunt of the sanctions, not the United States,” writes Haber, before pivoting to argue that this doesn’t really matter.
German suffering is “almost nothing” compared to the hardships of the Ukrainian people, according to Haber, but more importantly, “our national psychology is undergoing a profound transformation.”
She calls the decades-long assumptions underlying Berlin’s policies, mainly that trade would promote “stability, transparency and, eventually, systemic change” an illusion that has been dispelled by the conflict.
“To be sure, there are dissenting voices, and there is discontent brewing in some parts of the country,” the ambassador notes in passing.
Germany has cut itself off from Russian energy imports, increased the export of weapons – mainly to Ukraine – and amended its constitution to create a 100 billion-euro fund for NATO-mandated “defense spending.”
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to increase military spending in February is the “most significant turning point in decades” for Germany, according to Haber. Even the reunification in 1990 “vindicated past strategic decisions and did not require a break with them,” unlike what’s happening now.
While admitting that all of this may seem irrelevant to Ukraine – whose priorities ought to matter more, she suggests – Haber is still proud of the “real and lasting” change Germany has achieved “in such a short time and at great psychological and material cost.”
“And we are happy to see that it is deepening our already close ties with our allies – first and foremost the United States,” she concludes.
December 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | Germany |
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Upon signing the protocol of the third session of the joint commission for economic cooperation between Iran and Hungary on 16 November, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó expressed support for Iran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
He also wrote on his Facebook page that the Hungarian government intends to integrate Iran into the international cooperation system and that Budapest plans to expand economic cooperation with sanctioned Iran with the aim of “normalizing the situation.”
After regaining power in 2010 and forming a government, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz Party defined its main priority as improving the nation’s economy, creating jobs, and attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Budapest gradually moved to provide the necessary legal platforms through which foreign companies could make investments, especially in the industrial sector.
Arguably, Hungary’s foreign policy is therefore heavily focused on the development of economic relations with foreign partners to maintain and continue economic growth and attract more FDI.
Between 1989 and 2019, Hungary received approximately $97.8 billion in FDI, mainly in the banking, automotive, software development, and life sciences sectors. The EU accounts for 89 percent of all in-bound FDI.
Hungary’s “Eastern Opening” policy
However, the presence of eastern countries and the increase in the volume of trade and investment in Hungary is particularly noteworthy. This presence is due to Hungary’s “Eastern Opening” policy, which has become one of the principles of the country’s foreign policy and economy since 2012.
The global financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 and its impact on the European economy was one of the catalysts for the Hungarian government in launching this initiative. As a result of this policy, China has become Hungary’s fifth most important trade partner with bilateral trade volume in 2020, having increased by more than 25 percent year-on-year.
Regardless of the debatable success of this policy, there are two points which make Hungary willing to continue this policy resolutely:
First, Hungary’s location as the gateway to Western Europe positions Budapest as an important access point to those markets, even potentially a logistics and transportation hub between the EU and Asia.
Second, is Budapest’s assumption that a genuine representation of Hungarian national interests is only possible once the country attains more global visibility and is able to parlay that into support from relevant international and regional players.
Iran and Hungary
Iran-Hungary relations cannot be separated from Budapest’s key “Look to the East” policy. Hungary has a special view of the east, including West Asia, and considers Iran to be an important strategic player in the region.
“The Hungarian government has always supported Iran’s balanced approach in international forums and the further development of bilateral ties,” Péter Szijjártó said in July.
The cooperation between Budapest and Tehran has been prioritized in several fields: energy, trade, migration, student exchanges, and support for Iran’s nuclear negotiations.
In the economic sector, Iran and Hungary have signed three economic cooperation protocols to date. Most of the cooperation is in the field of agriculture, animal husbandry, and healthcare. Moreover, the volume of economic trade between the 2nd and the 3rd Joint Economic Cooperation Commission has increased by 55 percent.
Following a recent meeting in Budapest, Iran’s Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Ehsan Khandouzi announced the two countries’ plans for boosting their annual bilateral trade to €100 million. In addition, Iran and Hungary signed a memorandum of understanding in late 2021 to expand economic cooperation in the fields of water treatment, seeds, power plants, animal feed and building materials, and joint investment opportunities.
“We would like Iran to return to the system of peaceful collaboration within the international community as soon as possible. We believe that economic cooperation may be the first step in this return,” Szijjártó said on his last visit to Iran.
In addition to economic cooperation, there are 2000 Iranian students in Hungary, and the government plans to grant scholarships to 100 Iranian students. Budapest also appreciated Iran’s role in preventing the flow of migrants to Hungary, especially Afghans, and politically supports Iran’s acquisition of peaceful nuclear technology.
Capitalizing on Budapest’s strained EU ties
From Iran’s point of view, Hungary can help it to bypass sanctions, enter global markets, and act as a mediator in easing belligerent European policies against Iran. Budapest’s tension with the EU in adopting policies that, in some cases, violate the EU’s own procedures and regulations, also incentivizes Iran to deepen its strategic partnership with Hungary to help further Tehran’s interests in Europe.
Hungary and the EU have been clashing for years on issues ranging from judicial independence to media freedoms and refugee rights. In September, several EU lawmakers declared that Hungary had become “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
In turn, Budapest has repeatedly accused Brussels of undermining its national interests and meddling in its internal politics. In 2018, Hungary passed a law in that criminalized helping illegal asylum seekers, which punishes violators with up to a year in prison. The EU strongly condemned the new legislation, but Hungary stood firm.
An eastward outlook
The opposition of the EU to Hungary and the adoption of its closer alignment with the east has prompted Budapest to take a positive, more proactive view toward countries like China, Russia, Iran, and to some extent, Turkey.
Currently, Hungary enjoys strong economic and energy relations with Russia. By opposing a visit by the special rapporteur on human rights to Russia, Budapest became the only European capital to take this stance.
While Hungary voted in favor of two 2014 resolutions against Russia over Ukraine, it has also opposed an €18 billion EU aid package to the embattled state.
Budapest is highly dependent on Moscow for energy supplies with 85 percent of the country’s gas and 65 percent of its oil supplied by Russia. Unlike the other energy dependent EU members, Hungarian authorities are strongly and openly opposed to sanctions against Russia, particularly in the energy sector.
In regard to 2022 energy shortages, Hungary’s foreign minister has even encouraged Europe to look to Tehran: “Iran’s stronger entry to the global energy market is in line with the interests of the world’s entire countries and nations.”
On the issue of Sweden and Finland joining NATO, Hungary – like Turkey – has declared its opposition to the plan, which is essentially opposition to the expansion of NATO in Europe or to the east.
Hungary’s common positions with Russia and the eastern bloc inevitably overlaps with some of Iran’s policies. By coordinating with both Europe and West Asia, deepening strategic relations between Budapest and Tehran can become a means to advance their mutual goals and interests.
At the same time, Hungary will be wary of potential western sanctions if it is viewed as growing too close to Iran.
December 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics | European Union, Hungary, Iran, Sanctions against Iran |
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The problem with most Western media’s political analyses is that they generally tend to be short-sighted and focused mostly on variables that are of direct interest to Western governments.
These types of analyses are now being applied to understanding official Arab attitudes towards Russia, China, global politics and conflicts.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares to lead a large delegation to meet with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia on 9 December, Western media conveys a sense of dread.
The Chinese leader’s visit “comes against the backdrop” of the Biden Administration’s “strained ties with both Beijing and Riyadh” over differences, supposedly concerning “human rights and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Reuters reported.
The same line of reasoning was parroted, with little questioning, by many other major Western media sources, falsely suggesting that ‘human rights’, along with other righteous reasons, are the main priority of the US and Western foreign policy agenda.
And, since these analyses are often shaped by Western interests, they tend to be selective in reading the larger context. If one is to rely exclusively or heavily on the Western understanding of the massive geopolitical changes around the world, one is sure to be misled. Western media wants us to believe that the strong political stances taken by Arab countries – neutrality in the case of war, growing closeness to China and Russia, lowering oil output, etc – are done solely to ‘send a message‘ to Washington, or to punish the West for intervening in Arab affairs.
Seen through a wider lens, however, these assumptions are either half-truths or entirely fabricated. For example, the OPEC+ decision to lower oil output on 5 October was the only reasonable strategy to apply when the global market’s demand for energy is low. Additionally, Arab neutrality is an equally reasonable approach considering that Washington and its Western allies are not the only global forces that matter to the Arabs. It is equally untrue that the Middle East’s growing affinity with Asia is borne out of recent dramatic events, but a process that began nearly two decades ago, specifically a year following the US invasion of Iraq.
In 2004, China and the Arab League established the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum.
CASCF officially represented the Chinese government and all 22 members of the Arab League, eventually serving as the main coordination platform between China and the Arabs. This has given China the advantage of investing in a collective strategy to develop trade, economic and political ties with the entirety of the Arab world. On the other hand, Arabs, too, had the leverage of negotiating major economic deals with China that could potentially benefit multiple Arab states simultaneously.
An extremely important caveat is that CASCF was predicated in what is known as the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.” Based on the Westphalian norms of state sovereignty, the five principles seem to be founded on an entirely different paradigm of foreign relations, compared to the West’s approach to the Middle East and the Global South, in general, extending from the colonial periods to the neo-colonialism of post-World War II: mutual respect for “territorial integrity and sovereignty”, “non-aggression”, “non-interference”, and so on.
Chinese-Arab relations continue to follow this model to this day, with very little deviation. This validates the claim that collective Arab political attitudes towards China and Xi’s visit to the Middle East are hardly an outcome of any sudden shift of policies resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war of recent months.
This is not to suggest that Arab and Chinese relations with the US and the West had no impact on the nature of the speed of Chinese-Arab ties. Indeed, the Chinese model of ‘peaceful coexistence’ seems to challenge the henceforth modus operandi at work in the Middle East.
In 2021, China announced projects to build a thousand schools in Iraq, a piece of news that occupied substantial space in Arab media coverage. The same can be said about China’s growing economic – not just trade – influence in Arab countries.
China’s lucrative Belt and Road Initiative, announced in 2013, fits seamlessly into the political infrastructure of Arab-Chinese ties, which were built in previous years. According to the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Riyadh was the largest recipient of Chinese investments within the BRI during the first half of 2022.
Starting in March, Saudi Arabia agreed in principle to sell its oil to China using the Chinese Yuan instead of the US dollar. When implemented, this decision will have irreversible repercussions on the global market but also on the future status of the dollar.
Assuming that such mammoth changes in global geopolitics were an outcome of the immediate need for the Arabs to ‘send a message’ will continue to impair the West’s ability to truly appreciate that the changes underway, not only in the Middle East but worldwide, are part of permanent shifts to the world’s political map. The sooner the West achieves this realisation, the better.
Considering all of this, it would be unfair – in fact, misguided – to suggest that large political entities like China and Arab countries combined are shaping their foreign policy agendas, thus staking their futures, on knee-jerk political reactions to the attitude of a single American President or administration.
December 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics | China, Iraq, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, United States |
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A letter provided by Russian insurer, Ingosstrakh, enabled the first oil tanker to sail through Turkish waters in recent days after tougher regulations were imposed by Turkish authorities, a document showed, Reuters reports.
This has led already at least 20 oil tankers backed up in the Turkish Straits as they do not have the right paperwork.
Turkish authorities introduced new requirements, which came into effect on 1 December, in which every ship must have insurance cover in place for all circumstances when sailing through Turkish waters or when calling at ports.
Ingosstrakh provided the requirements for the Liberia flagged “Vladimir Tikhonov” tanker, which included insurance for pollution risks throughout the period in Turkish waters, according to a letter issued to the authorities on 29 November by the insurer and seen by Reuters.
The world’s leading Western ship insurers say they are unable to provide cover for all circumstances, arguing they cannot be liable for payouts if, for instance, there are sanctions breaches with a ship’s cargo.
“Vladimir Tikhonov” completed sailing through the Bosphorus on 3 December, ship tracking data showed.
The EU and G7 price cap on Russian oil went into effect on Monday, but it’s already causing disruptions in global supply chains. The first manifestation comes from Turkey, where the Financial Times reports that a tanker traffic jam is stacking up in Turkish waters and blocking some 18 million barrels of oil from passage, as the country’s authorities demand proof that the vessels have insurance coverage:
“Around 19 crude oil tankers were waiting to cross Turkish waters on Monday, according to ship brokers, oil traders and satellite tracking services. The vessels had dropped anchor near the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the two straits linking Russia’s Black Sea ports to international markets.”
In a striking demonstration of the price cap’s potential to disrupt markets, most of the oil in the delayed ships isn’t even subject to the sanction regime: It’s from Kazakhstan and has merely transited Russian ports after arriving there via pipeline.
One oil industry insider said Russian shippers have transited with relative ease — it’s shippers covered by western insurers that are anchored and now destined to deliver their cargo late. … Full article
December 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Environmentalism | European Union, Russia, Turkiye |
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Something odd is afoot in Europe. Britain recently has been ‘regime washed’, with a strongly pro-EU Finance Minister (Hunt) paving the passage to an election-free premiership by ‘globalist’ Rishi Sunak. Why so? Well, to impose swingeing cuts to public services, to normalise immigration running at 500,000 per annum and to raise taxes to the highest levels since the 1940s. And to open channels about a new relationship deal with Brussels.
A British Tory Party is content to do that? Slash social support and hike taxes into an already existent worldwide recession? On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Shades of Greece 2008? Greek austerity for Britain — are we missing something? Is this setting the scene for the Remainer Establishment to point to an economy in crisis (blamed on Brexit failure), and to say there is no alternative (TINA) but a return to the EU in some form, (British ‘cap in hand’, and with head bowed)?
Simply put, forces behind the scenes seem to want the UK to resume its former role as US plenipotentiary inside Brussels — pushing the US primacy agenda (as Europe sinks into self-doubt).
Likewise odd — and significant – was that on 15 September, former German Chancellor Schroeder entered unannounced into Scholtz’s office where only the Chancellor, and Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, were present. Schroeder slapped down a long-term gas supply proposal by Gazprom on the desk, directly under Scholtz’s eyes.
The Chancellor and his predecessor held each other’s gaze for a minute – without a word passing. Then Schroeder reached out, took back the unread document, turned his back and exited the office. Nothing was said.
On 26 September (11 days later), the Nordstream pipeline was sabotaged. Surprise (yes, or no)?
Many unanswered questions. The upshot: No gas for Germany. One Nordstream train (2B) however, survived the sabotage and remains pressurised and functional. Yet still no gas arrives in Germany (other than high price liquified gas). There are presently no EU sanctions on gas from Russia. Landing the Nordstream gas requires only a Regulatory go-ahead.
So then: Europe is to have austerity, loss of competitiveness, price and tax hikes? Yes — yet Scholtz did not even glance at the gas offer.
The Green Party of Habeck and Baerbock (and the EU Commission) is in close alignment with those in the Biden team insisting to maintain US hegemony, at all costs. This Euro-coalition is explicitly and viscerally malefic towards Russia; and in contrast, is as viscerally indulgent towards Ukraine.
The big picture? German Foreign Minister Baerbock in a speech in New York on 2 August 2022 sketched out a vision of a world dominated by the US and Germany. In 1989, George Bush famously had offered Germany a “partnership in leadership”, Baerbock claimed. “Now the moment has come when we have to create it: A joint partnership in leadership”. A German bid for explicit EU primacy, snaring US support. (The Anglos will not like that!)
Ensuring no backsliding on Russia sanctions and continuing EU financial support for the Ukraine war is a clear ‘Red Line’ for precisely those in the Biden team likely to be attentive to Baerbock’s Atlanticist bid — and who understand that Ukraine is the spider at the centre of a web. The Greens explicitly are playing this.
Why? Because Ukraine is still the global ‘pivot’: Geopolitics; geo-economics; commodity and energy supply chains — all revolve around where this Ukraine pivot finally settles. A Russian success in Ukraine would bring a new political bloc and monetary system into being, through its allies in the BRICS+, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union.
Is this European austerity binge then just about the German Green Party nailing down EU Russophobia? Or are Washington and its Atlanticist allies now prepping for something more? Prepping for China to get the ‘Russia treatment’ from Europe?
Earlier this week at Mansion House, PM Sunak changed gear. He ‘hat-tipped’ to Washington with the promise to stand by Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’, yet his primary foreign policy focus was firmly on China. The old ‘golden’ era of Sino-British relations ‘is over’: “The authoritarian regime [of China] poses a systemic challenge to our values and interests”, he said — citing the suppression of anti-zero-COVID protests and the arrest and beating of a BBC journalist on Sunday.
Over in the EU — belatedly panicking over unfolding widespread de-industrialisation — President Macron has been signalling that the EU might take a more hard-line China stance, though only were the US were to back-down on the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which entice EU companies to up-anchor, and sail off to America.
Yet, Macron’s ‘play’ is likely to meet a dead end, or at best, a cosmetic gesture — for the Act has already been legislated in the US. And the Brussels political class unsurprisingly already is waving the white flag: Europe has lost Russian energy and now stands to lose China’s tech, finance and market. It’s a ‘triple whammy’ — when taken together with European de-industrialisation.
There you have it — austerity is always the first tool in the US toolbox for exerting political pressure on US proxies: Washington is prepping the EU ruling élites to sever from China as fundamentally Europe has already done from Russia. Europe’s largest economies already are taking a harder line on Beijing. Washington will squeeze the UK and EU ‘til the pips squeak to get full compliance on a China cut-off.
The protests in China over Covid regulations could not have arrived at a more serendipitous time from the US’ ‘China hawks’ perspective: Washington whipped the EU into full propaganda mode on Iranian ‘demonstrations’ — and now the China protests offer the opportunity for Washington to go full court on China demonisation:
The ‘line’ used against Russia (Putin makes mistake after mistake; the system bumbles; the Russian economy is precariously perched on a knife edge and popular disaffection is soaring) – will be ‘cut and pasted’ to Xi and China.
Only, the inevitable EU moral lecturing will antagonise China even further: Hopes to keep a trade foothold in China will vanish, and effectively it will be China ‘washing its hands’ of Europe, rather than vice versa. European leaders have this blind spot — quite some Chinese may deplore the Covid lockdown practice, yet still will remain deeply Chinese and nationalist in sentiment. They will hate EU lecturing: ‘European values speak only for themselves — we have our own’.
Obviously, Europe has dug itself into a deep hole. Its adversaries grow bitter at EU moralising. But what exactly is going on?
Well, firstly, the EU is hugely over-invested in its Ukraine narrative. It seems incapable of reading the direction of travel that events in the war zone are taking. Or, if it does read it correctly (of which there is little sign), it appears incapable of being able to affect a course correction.
Recall that the war at the outset was never seen by Washington as likely ‘being decisive’. The military aspect was viewed as an adjunct — a pressure multiplier — to the political crisis in Moscow that sanctions were expected to unleash. The early concept was that financial war represented the front line — and the military conflict, the secondary front of attack.
It was only with the unexpected shock of sanctions not achieving ‘shock and awe’ in Moscow that priority switched from the financial to the military arena. The reason the ‘military’ was not firstly seen as ‘front-line’ was because Russia clearly had the potential for escalatory dominance (a factor which is now so evident).
So, here we are: The West has been humiliated in the financial war, and unless something changes (ie. dramatic escalation by the US) – it will lose militarily too — with the distinct possibility that Ukraine at some point, simply implodes as a state.
The actual situation on the battlefield today is almost completely at odds with the narrative. Yet, so heavily has the EU invested in its Ukraine narrative that it just doubles-down, rather than draw back, to re-assess the true situation.
And so doing — by doubling-down narratively, (standing by Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’) — the strategic content to the ‘Ukraine’ pivot rotates 180 degrees: Rump ‘Ukraine’ will not be ‘Russia’s Afghan quagmire’. Rather, its’ rump is morphing into Europe’s long-term financial and military ‘quagmire’.
‘As long as it takes’ gives the conflict an indeterminate horizon — yet leaves Russia in control of the timetable. And ‘as long as it takes’ implies ever more exposure to NATO blind spots. The rest-of-world intelligence services will have observed NATO’s air defence and military-industrial lacunae. The pivot will show who is the true ‘paper tiger’.
‘As long as it takes’ — has the EU thought this through?
If Brussels imagines too, that such dogged adherence to narrative will impress the rest-of-the-world and bind these other states closer to the EU ‘ideal’, they will be wrong. Already there is a wide hostility to the notion that Europe’s ‘values’ or squabbles have any wider pertinence, beyond Europe’s borders. ‘Others’ will see the inflexibility as some bizarre compulsion by Europe to self-suicide – at the very moment that the end of ‘everything bubble’ already threatens a major downturn.
Why would Europe double-down on its ‘Ukraine’ project, at the expense of losing its standing abroad?
Perhaps, because the EU political class fears even more losing its domestic narrative. It needs to distract from that — it is a tactic called ‘survival’.
The EU, as with NATO, was always a US political project for the subjugation of Europe. It still is that.
Yet, the meta-EU narrative — for internal EU purposes — posits something diametrically different: that Europe is a strategic player; a political power in its own right; a market colossus, a monopsony with the power to impose its will over whomsoever trades with it.
Simply put, the EU narrative is that it has meaningful political agency. But Washington has just demonstrated it has none. It has trashed that narrative. So, Europe is destined to become an economic backwater. It has ‘lost’ Russia — and soon China. And is finding it has lost its standing in the world, too.
Again, the actual situation on the geo-political ‘battlefield’ is almost completely at odds with the EU narrative of itself as a geo-strategic player.
Its ‘friend’, the Biden Administration, is gone — whilst powerful enemies elsewhere accumulate. The EU political class never had a good grasp of its limitations — it was ‘heresy’ even to suggest there were limitations to EU power. Consequently, the EU has hugely overinvested in this narrative of its agency too.
Hanging EU flags from every official building will not cast a fig leaf over the nakedness, nor hide the disconnect between the Brussels ‘bubble’ and its deprecated European proletariat. French politicians now openly ask what can save Europe from complete vassalage. Good question. What does one do when a hyper-inflated power narrative bursts, at the same time as a financialised one?
December 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | China, European Union, NATO, Russia, UK, United States |
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By Ahmed Adel | December 6, 2022
The price cap imposed by the West on oil from Russia will actually have negative consequences in the long term as it once again reaffirmed to the international community that Western-centric banking and shipping insurance schemes cannot be trusted as reliable partners.
Western oil sanctions went into effect on December 5, with the European Union stopping all shipments of Russian oil arriving by sea. In addition, the EU, as well as G7 countries and Australia, imposed a limit on the price of oil transported by sea at $60/barrel. The West expects that this will cripple the Russian economy and force Moscow to end its special military operation in Ukraine.
However, this will spectacularly fail.
Sanctions have not instigated an end to the military operation, and in fact they have forced financial mechanisms independent of western institutions to be established. Although the world economic system was already slowly heading towards de-Dollarisation, the anti-Russia sanctions have only sped up the process as important economic players like China, India and Egypt have found methods to bypass western sanctions.
It is recalled that Russia had previously introduced the Mir card system as an alternative to Western financial systems, despite there being a lot of scepticism about it. Now, Mir is being adopted all over the world, and the same can certainly be done in the shipping and shipping insurance industry.
The imposition of an oil price cap has made non-Western countries think about how to break free from Western payment systems and shipping channels. Many countries are already pre-emptively establishing these mechanisms to avoid the same teething problems that Russia has experienced since February 2022.
Washington warned the EU on December 1 that the $52 cited recently for Urals crude oil may not reflect the overall level at which Russian oil has been trading. An unnamed US official has said that Urals has been trading at a $17-$23 discount to crude, which would make it higher than the $52 cited by some media. It is for this reason that the EU set the oil price cap $8 above that cited figure.
For their part, Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania have all voiced their opinion that the price cap on Russian crude oil insured and shipped by Western companies should be set at Russia’s production cost – $20-$30 per barrel. Those levels were dismissed as having very little chance of being supported by other EU members.
The introduction of a price cap on Russian seaborne oil at $60 per barrel is already a risky strategy to begin with and has uncertain results. Therefore, the Polish-Baltic proposal was never going to be approved. Oil market participants were already fearing a $60 cap to begin with, forcing Biden administration officials trying to reassure that the newly agreed cap will not lead to supply disruptions and volatility in the price after it went into effect.
None-the-less, experts fear that “over-compliance” on the restrictions could affect pricing.
“One of the big potential issues is going to be over-compliance, intermediaries deciding that the risk is too great and not engaging,” said Adam M. Smith, a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher and a former adviser at Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions. “Banks have historically been very risk-averse — as they should be — in the sanctions space and I think over-compliance in that context can be expected.”
Due to the price cap, many countries may stop any action for a while so that they can analyse all the risks, including decisions which could lead to sanctions from Western countries.
“That’s a real risk,” said Hunter Kornfeind, an oil market analyst at Rapidan Energy Group. “There could be a multi-week lull when some buyers are reluctant to move barrels as they wait and see. It’s not going to be like the whole trade shuts down, but there could be some who take a step back.”
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak pointed out that Russia will not export oil to countries that set price caps. According to him, such restrictions mean that by interfering with the market, Moscow will only interact with buyers willing to work under normal market conditions.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that Moscow will not deliver anything abroad if it is against its interests. He warned that the introduction of oil price caps could have “grave consequences for global energy markets.”
Although the full impact of what the price cap is not yet known, the attempts to further financially and economically isolate Russia are likely to be another spectacular failure.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
December 6, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | European Union, United States |
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By Uriel Araujo | December 5, 2022
While the United States’ European allies are now fighting aggressive American subsidies (a crisis that risks dividing the political West), Taiwan, another US ally, also faces Washington’s protectionism. This fits into the US pattern of hurting close allies in many different ways.
Biden and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook are visiting Arizona on December 6 to launch the $12 billion American plant of chip giant TSMC – it is the company’s first advanced chip in the US. The US $52 billion chip subsidy bill (passed in July) has been described as vital to the construction of the TSMC plant in Arizona. This will basically transfer Taiwan’s productivity and its most advanced technology to the US and such news has not been well received in Taiwan.
Journalist Zhang Zhouxiang has described this new development as TSMC draining itself. According to him, Taiwan is moving “high-end jobs” away, which hurts the Taiwanese economy.
Semiconductors play a key role in cybersecurity and military applications. Since the pandemic, there has been a shortage of chips (semiconductors) and earlier this year the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo described this situation as a “national security” issue.
Regarding chips, national interests and national security concerns are thus often intertwined. The British government has basically imposed a semiconductor blockade on China, by having taken actions to retrospectively block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab (one of the country’s largest semiconductors plants) to Nexperia, a Dutch company owned by China’s Wingtech. Just days before, the German government had blocked the sale of Elmos Semiconductor’s factory to Silex, a Swedish subsidiary of China’s Sai Microelectronics. In both Germany and Britain concerns about security and economic as well as technological sovereignty have been voiced. There are also concerns about the possible outflow of technical know-how.
Likewise, as part of the ongoing New Cold War, the US government, in early October, banned Chinese companies from purchasing (without a license) both chip-making equipment and advanced chips. Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan went so far as to describe the American ban as “all but a declaration of a technology war”. Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has also described the American chip restrictions as a “de facto declaration of economic war” (against China), and added that it is a “disproportionate response”.
Chipmaking has been a new front in American-Chinese tensions, and now, with the aforementioned German and British decision, tensions are also escalating in Europe. Such European decisions are also the result of Washington’s pressure, according to Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo‑technology at Eurasia Group.
In February, amid the escalation of tensions between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, I wrote on how Taiwan stands between the two superpowers in their technological competition. Amid the ongoing chip race, many different countries have introduced incentives to foster the semiconductors’ industry. Taiwan is the planet’s largest chip manufacturer and is also the center of Chinese-US tensions today. This is the ironic context of TSMC’s Arizona move.
It is increasingly difficult today to insulate industries from geopolitical disputes. Beijing aspires to become a tech superpower, something which American political elites will not tolerate. Although the Chinese semiconductor industry has been growing quite quickly, it still remains behind the cutting edge in chips, largely due to American efforts to block Chinese endeavors to acquire the necessary equipment and know-how.
However, the American economic war on Beijing in fact endangers the global microchip industry itself and increases the risk of butterfly effects, China being a key part of the globalized world. Moreover, while the US never had an intensive economic relationship with its Soviet rival during the old Cold War, China today remains the United States’ third largest market for exports. In addition, as historian and foreign-policy analyst Max Boot has remarked, a single factory in China, Foxconn, is reported to produce about half the world’s iPhones, for example. This being so, according to Boot, while Washington does not want to see any Western technology being “transferred” to the Chinese military, it can’t, on the other hand, endanger supply chains for chips and other vital parts.
Moreover, the so-called American “chip war” and its export curbs can in fact bring record losses for Taiwanese, Japanese and South Korean makers (all of these nations being US allies).
Washington’s aggressive subsidies and protectionism have arguably stopped the country from rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement among 12 Asia-Pacific nations). Its Inflation Reduction Act in turn has alienated important allies such as Germany and France – the very states Washington counts on in its plans to counter China.
Harvard professor William Overholt has stated that today the US “wants everybody to join economic alliances” with them, while not giving anything in return. Meanwhile, ironically, Communist-Party ruled China, according to him, has promoted freer trade and investment around the world.
With the Belt and Road Initiative, among others, geoeconomics has been the very core of Beijing’s geostrategic approaches. Washington, in turn, has been dangerously weaponizing its economic and financial policies to “counter” China and Russia, also hurting close allies in the process. The irony is that the more the US employs economic leverage to aggressively coerce other states, the greater the incentive to come up with alternatives against Washington.
To sum it up, currently, the US is overextended and overburdened, trying to simultaneously encircle and contain both Moscow and Beijing. Its aggressive protectionism in turn has been enraging and alienating important allies, such as the EU and Taiwan. All of this signals the decline of the American superpower and of the US-led global order.
December 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | China, European Union, United States |
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In a report on wind farms on Wednesday, the Times wrote: ‘Labour argues that the ban on onshore sites has raised energy bills by £150. Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, said Tories were “dinosaurs” for opposing them.’
It is a claim that has often been bandied around recently. So what is the truth of the matter?
The first point to make is that onshore wind was never banned. What did happen was that in 2016, subsidies were withdrawn from any new construction, while wind farms had to obtain local planning permission. It is quite extraordinary that Labour don’t want communities to make these decisions themselves.
The most recent wind farms built under the subsidy mechanism are paid an index-linked, guaranteed price of £100.31/MWh. For many years until last year the market price for electricity has hovered between £40 and £50/MWh most of the time. In other words, those onshore wind farms were heavily subsidised until last year, when market prices rose. The cost of subsidies is of course passed on to energy bills.
There is no evidence that the construction costs for wind farms have fallen since then. It is therefore evident that if more wind farms had been built since 2016, we would have been paying double the wholesale price until last year when prices began rising.
Of course since then wholesale electricity prices have rocketed because of the rising cost of natural gas. But nobody forecast that this would happen in 2016, and clearly the right decision was made by the government, given the facts at the time.
Over this year, wholesale prices of electricity have averaged £177/MWh. As the guaranteed price under the Contracts for Difference scheme is £100.31, the difference is refunded by generators and subsequently knocked off our bills.
Miliband’s claims of a £150 saving are based on an analysis by Carbon Brief, a lobby group for renewable energy. According to them, based on previous trends, an extra 5.4 GW of onshore wind would have been built if subsidies had not been withdrawn. The lost output works out at 11.8 TWh, and consequently the saving would have amounted to about £900million, which would only have knocked about £10 off household bills, which account for about a quarter of total UK electricity consumption.
In reality, you cannot directly compare the cost of intermittent wind power with other dependable sources. Our bills are much higher because of the costs incurred in grid balancing costs and other items, which directly result from the intermittency of wind and solar power.
But what Ed Miliband conveniently forgot to tell us was the cost of all the renewable subsidies which we have already paid out, and will continue to for years to come. In the last ten years, these have totalled £78billion, and in the next six years will cost a further £56billion, according to data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
All of these costs lie at the door of Ed Miliband, who pushed through the Climate Change Act in 2008. If he really cares about our electricity bills, he would immediately campaign to abolish all subsidies and suspend the carbon tax, which is also responsible for energy bills being much higher than they need be.
He won’t, because of his obsession with climate change.
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | UK |
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Evidence grows by the day that the Net Zero fantasy is a societal and economic disaster waiting to happen. Not only is it based on the giant propaganda lie of ‘settled’ science, but it is almost laughably unaffordable. On just one level around the storage of ‘green’ energy, a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is scathing. Noting a “heads-in-the sand” approach by politicians, it says that “one would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent”.
For just one country alone, Germany, fully replacing natural gas back-up with battery storage “is a multi-trillion dollar project, likely costing a multiple of the country’s GDP, and thus completely infeasible”. Across the globe, existing plans to store energy, vital since wind and solar are highly intermittent, are producing only a “tiny fraction” of the capacity that will be required to avoid electricity blackouts. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the people planning the Net Zero transition “have no idea what they are doing”, states the report.
Political pressure to resist the imposition of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda is being increasingly targeted in the UK and elsewhere at the unrealistic costs involved. In the U.K. Parliament, a Net Zero Scrutiny Committee was recently formed and led by the Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay. For its part, the GWPF has started a Net Zero Watch unit. The GWPF’s battery storage report is the latest in a string of publications asking serious questions about the finances behind Net Zero. It is written by the American lawyer and mathematician Francis Menton, who also runs the Manhattan Contrarian site.
Menton writes that the push to Net Zero without a fully demonstrated and costed solution to the energy storage conundrum “is analogous to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, and assuming that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid-air in time to save you before you hit the ground”. He continues:
“Now, before our advanced economies are destroyed, it is time to demand from our politicians and energy planners that they level with the public about the huge costs and the likely impossible technical requirements of the goals to which they have committed us.”
In a detailed report, the arithmetic behind Net Zero battery costings is laid out in detail. It is explained that no grid based on wind and solar is viable unless it has full back-up from another source. That source needs to provide 100% of power when the wind and sun stop blowing and shining. During calm periods in a cold winter, that could be a week or more. Remarkably, notes the author, none of the jurisdictions implementing crash Net Zero have paid much attention to storage programmes.
Storage demands for Net Zero are enormous. Five days without wind and solar require at least 120 Mega Watt hours (MWh) for each megawatt of average demand. But some calculations based on historical weekly and annual spikes suggest a requirement as high as 1,000 MWh to ensure reliability of a grid over a long time.
Truly scary is the work done by Ken Gregory who calculated that the United States would need an annual energy storage requirement of around 233,000 GWh. It is noted that a current lithium-ion battery installation is currently under construction in Australia for grid back-up with a storage capacity of 150MWh. Menton writes that 150MWh is 15% of one gigawatt hour, and 233,000GWh of storage would require some 1.55 million of these facilities.
Back in the real world, Menton reveals the planned battery storage capacity that will be delivered in many countries is “trivial” – typically from around 0.1% to at most 0.2% of the amount that’s necessary if Net Zero is to be achieved.
The figure is hardly surprising when the costs in battery storage are considered. Menton reviewed recent official cost reports and found that “even on the most optimistic assumptions” the cost could be as high as a country’s GDP. This was said to render the entire Net Zero project “an impossibility”. On less optimistic assumptions, the capital cost alone could be 15 times annual GDP. Even more impractical, it is noted that such batteries provide about four hours of discharge at maximum capacity, but weather patterns mean that grids need batteries that can store as much as a month’s demand, and then discharge that energy over the course of six months or more.
“Such ‘long duration’ batteries have not yet been invented,” he observes.
Last October, the Daily Sceptic reported on the findings of Associate Professor Simon Michaux who told the Finnish Government in no uncertain terms that there were not enough minerals in the world to supply all the batteries required for Net Zero. And this doesn’t even take into account that lithium-ion batteries need replacing every eight to 10 years. Michaux observed that the Net Zero project may not go fully “as planned”.
Those, less charitable, might ask: “what plan?”
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity |
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In July 2022, the Canadian government announced its intention to reduce “emissions from the application of fertilizers by 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030.” In the previous month, the government of the Netherlands publicly stated that it would implement measures designed to lower “nitrogen pollution some areas by up to 70 percent by 2030,” in order to meet the stipulations of the European “Green Deal,” which aims to “make the EU’s climate, energy, transport and taxation policies fit for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.”
In response, Dutch “farm and agriculture organizations said the targets were not realistic and called for a protest,” which led farmers and their supporters to rise up across the country. The artificially designed Green Deal is one of the goals of Agenda 2030, which was adopted by 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) in 2015.
In addition to the UN, Agenda 2030 is also supported by a number of other international organizations and institutions, including the European Union, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bretton Woods Institutions, which consist of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). It is also endorsed by some of the most powerful agrichemical multinational corporations in the world, such as BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Syngenta, which, together, control more than 75 percent of the global market for farm inputs. In recent years, “the acquisition of Syngenta by ChemChina, and the merger of Bayer and Monsanto” have “reshaped the global seed industry.” Additionally, “DuPont de Nemours was formed by the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont in 2017.” However, “within 18 months of the merger the company was split into three publicly traded companies with focuses on the following: agriculture with Corteva, materials science with Dow and specialty products with DuPont.”
In recent years, all of these corporations have issued statements suggesting that the agriculture sector will undergo major changes over the upcoming three decades, and that they are committed to doing their parts to accelerate the transition to so called green policies. Accordingly, they advocate for governments to redirect public finance away from conventional farming and toward regenerative agriculture and alternative protein sources, including insect farming and lab-grown meats.
Moreover, BASF, Syngenta and Bayer are members of “the European Carbon+ Farming Coalition,” which includes a number of “organizations and stakeholders along the food value chain,” such as “COPA-COGECA, Crop In, European Conservation Agriculture Federation (ECAF), European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) Food, HERO, Planet Labs,” “Swiss Re, University of Glasgow, Yara, Zurich and the World Economic Forum.” Originally, this “coalition emerged as a partnership between the World Economic Forum’s 100 Million Farmers platform and its CEO Action Group for the European Green Deal.”
Its objective is to “decarbonise the European food system” by accelerating the transformation of farming and agricultural practices. More specifically, the European Carbon+ Farming Coalition seeks to attain “zero gross expansion in the area of land under cultivation for food production by 2025, reduction in total territories used for livestock of about one-third by 2030, and a consequent freeing up of nearly 500 million hectares of land for natural ecosystem restoration by the same date.” According to the WEF, in addition to benefitting the environment, such changes will also be economically advantageous, as “changing the way we produce and consume food could create USD 4.5 trillion a year in new business opportunities.”
In order to accelerate the transformation of farming over the coming decades, BASF calls for requiring “farmers to decrease their environmental impact” by reducing “CO2 emissions per ton of crop by 30 percent,” and applying “digital technologies to more than 400 million hectares of farmland.” BASF also supports the wide use of a number of new products, including “nitrogen management products,” herbicides, “new crop varieties,” “biological inoculants and innovative digital solutions,” so as to make farmers “more carbon efficient and resilient to volatile weather conditions.” It is estimated that such changes would “contribute significantly to the BASF Group target of €22 billion in sales by 2025.”
Meanwhile, Syngenta, the world’s second-largest agrochemical enterprise (after Bayer), which is owned by a Chinese state-owned company called ChemChina, focuses on “carbon neutral agriculture” under the pretense of “combatting climate change.” More precisely, it supports “providing technologies, services, and training to farmers,” as well as the further development of new gene-edited seeds that would lower the emission of CO2. According to Syngenta, “gene-edited crops” will be widely used and cultivated across the globe “by 2050.”
This company also promotes “a transformation toward regenerative agriculture,” which is claimed to “lead to more food grown on less land; reduced agricultural greenhouse gas emissions; increased biodiversity; and enhanced soil health,” though there is scant scientific evidence or long-term data to back up these assertions. Nonetheless, Syngenta argues that the world needs “governments and media … to encourage widespread adoption” of regenerative practices by as many farmers as possible.
Bayer also advocates for regenerative agriculture to help “farmers significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas their operations emit, while also removing carbon from the atmosphere.” It further claims that it is necessary “to shift to a regenerative approach and make crops more resilient to climate impacts.” Additionally, much like Syngenta, Bayer supports the development of “new gene editing technologies” in order to reduce “the environmental footprint of global agriculture.” Looking ahead, Bayer foresees that, “in agriculture, biotechnology will be a critical enabler” that will be used to “feed the 10 billion people that will be on the planet by 2050 while at the same time fighting the impact of climate change.”
Similar to Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta, DuPont also seeks to contribute to decreasing “dependence on fossil fuels, and protecting life and the environment.” Its response primarily focuses on facilitating the production and consumption of alternative protein sources that can reproduce “the texture and appearance of meat fibers, and can be used to extend or replace meat or fish.” DuPont pointed out that “in 2016, Americans consumed about 26 kg of beef per capita, at least half of which was eaten in the form of a hamburger. Replacing just half of America’s burger meat with SUPRO® MAX protein,” which has a carbon footprint that is up to eighty times lower than dairy and meat proteins, is equivalent to removing “more than 15 million mid-sized cars from the road.”
Some of the world’s most powerful multinational agrichemical corporations have benefitted immensely from international trade agreements that put their interests ahead of those of small – and medium – size farms, as well as the masses, when it comes to transforming the food and agriculture sectors. In particular, the World Trade Organization’s agreement on trade – related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS), which was adopted in 1994, played a major role in destroying the livelihoods of many farmers, while proving lucrative to agrichemical giants like BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Syngenta. This is mainly because TRIPS has allowed for the patenting of seeds and plants.
As a result, native herbs and plants in a number of different countries, many of which had previously been farmed for generations, became the sole properties of powerful agrichemical multinational corporations. After plants and herbs have been patented, local farmers are forbidden from engaging in the traditional and longstanding practices of saving and replanting their own seeds. Instead, they are required to pay the patent holding corporations for the same seeds that they had previously produced, saved, replanted, and exchanged at no cost.
Powerful agrichemical multinational corporations have also furthered their own interests and agendas by exerting unprecedented influence over research and development in the food industry, while ignoring any findings demonstrating that their business practices were harmful to the natural environment. In particular, some of these major agrichemical corporations have focused their efforts and resources on studying “genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the creation of stronger pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and defending the performance of these products.”
They have also supported the expansion of GMO crops with the knowledge that their cultivation involves “the application of larger quantities” of “synthetic fertilizers and pesticides,” which has led to large amounts of toxic chemicals contaminating soil and water sources. Basically, these agrichemical corporations have been largely responsible for creating many of same environmental problems that they now claim need to be urgently solved through Agenda 2030.
There is a real possibility that the radical and large-scale transformations of the entire food industry and human eating habits being pushed by the social engineers of Agenda 2030 are leading the masses toward a dramatic decrease in living standards. Lessons from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century revealed that it is very difficult to fix big mistakes attributed to the large-scale central planning of social engineers, because doing so often requires “major social transformation” or “remodelling the whole of society,” which can result in widespread unforeseen consequences or events, major destructive outcomes, and “inconvenience to many people,” in the words of Karl R. Popper.
The intense and coordinated international effort to facilitate an artificially designed transformation of the global food industry, based on Agenda 2030, is a testimony to the fact that we are witnessing the pendulum of civilization swinging back in many advanced societies, where striving to achieve a comfortable life could rapidly be replaced by a struggle for bare necessities in a lower level of existence, which is not supposed to occur in advanced societies.
The masses need to be made to realize that the social engineers of Agenda 2030 are “false prophets,” who are misguiding them to the point where they will be “haunted by the specter of death from starvation.” This may well lead to the emergence of “irreconcilable dissensions within society,” whereby food riots, conflicts, and violence could inevitably “result in a complete disintegration of all societal bonds,” as Ludwig von Mises put it.
Birsen Filip holds a PhD in philosophy and master’s degrees in economics and philosophy. She has published numerous articles and chapters on a range of topics, including political philosophy, geo-politics, and the history of economic thought, with a focus on the Austrian School of Economics and the German Historical School of Economics. She is the author of the upcoming book The Early History of Economics in the United States: The Influence of the German Historical School of Economics on Teaching and Theory (Routledge, 2022). She is also the author of The Rise of Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
December 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Agenda 2030, European Union, GMOs |
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The EU is pursuing one of the most radical climate change policies of the major CO2 emitters, having committed itself to reducing its net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and to eliminating such emission by 2050. To achieve this, the EU, unlike China, India or Russia, is willing to sacrifice its economy, its industry and its middle classes to advance climate ideology. Reaching zero emissions by 2050 would require a decrease of 1.4 GtCO2 each year, comparable to the fall observed in 2020 emissions because of COVID-19, to achieve which would imply no more and no less than the paralysis of all Western economies.
At this COP27 climate summit, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, once again resorted to his usual apocalyptic discourse to say that “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” With the gall of the best trickster at the carnival, Guterres said that “to avoid that terrible fate, all G-20 countries must accelerate their transition now, in this decade.” The same time span, a decade, in which the apostles of the climate religion went from talking about a new Ice Age to a dangerous warming of the planet, between the 1970s and 1980s.
Unmoved by the serious energy emergency we are experiencing, those attending COP27 did not spend a minute reflecting on the need for abundant and cheap energy to maintain the welfare states in developed countries and to promote economic progress in developing countries. Renewable energies today are neither the cheapest nor do they produce enough to supply the demand of homes and industry. What is urgent today is not to save the planet from a climate change whose origins and consequences are unknown. What is really urgent is to solve general inflation and, in particular, food and energy price rises to avoid a global recession.
Regardless, COP27 went ahead with what is undoubtedly the biggest scam in the history of mankind, declaring an emergency for something that is hardly changing our way of life, nor does it really affect our immediate future. The farce of the climate conference in Egypt has given birth to a pact to create a “loss and damage” fund, to repair the worst effects of extreme weather on the most vulnerable nations, spreading the deception that hurricanes, floods and other catastrophes that have always been recurrent throughout history are the result of man-made climate change.
To refute this fallacy that they make us swallow like fools, remember that the year 2021 was the year with the lowest number of hurricanes worldwide since 1980. However, the stupidity that these catastrophes are the planet’s response to our aggressions against the environment continues to circulate. It doesn’t matter that the prophecies of the climate religion have been unfulfilled for 30 years.
The needs and well-being of Europeans do not matter; they are not a priority, as announced by the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak: “As there are other priorities, we think that the climate can wait, but it can’t. The climate emergency is already here. The climate urgency is already here. We don’t have to wait for tomorrow.” We Europeans are guilty. That’s why we must pay the poorest countries for the damage caused by weather phenomena that climate change caused that is turned caused by our industries. Macron has already said that “we have to stand up and support the poorest countries with 100 billion dollars to fight against the climate crisis.”
The green policies promoted by the globalist elites through indirect carbon taxes and subsidies to things “eco,” to renewable energies and other ecological prohibitions and obstacles, are becoming another way of plundering the wealth of the Western middle classes. But if the climate change business has reached huge proportions in the developed world at the expense of consumers, in the third world it condemns thousands of people to remain in poverty and live a miserable life. When the IMF refuses to provide funds for coal-fired power plants in Africa or forbids the use of synthetic fertilizers in Sri Lanka, the poorest lose access to cheap energy and affordable food production.
After the pandemic, we have seen how science is easily manipulated and its empirical objectivity is easily corrupted to benefit the political and economic elites. When a hypothesis is elaborated by a group of researchers that can serve the purposes of these elites, the doors are opened to the financing of more studies in that direction, more publications, more papers in congresses, and in the end a semblance of scientific consensus. It is more profitable for any university department to focus its studies on the influence of climate change in a given area, than to explore other alternatives. If there is also the backing of supranational organizations and governments, the pressure becomes irresistible. Naturally, the mass media takes it upon itself to reaffirm the official doctrine and ostracize its detractors, while sowing alarm among the population.
The climate-belief apologists serve a more ambitious social engineering strategy, which aims to destroy the social, economic and political model in which we live, in order to replace it with the objectives that, under the label of Agenda 2030, are pursued by the globalist elites. They have given birth to hysterical teenagers like Greta Thunberg, who are followed as a model by brainless ecological activists, such as those who have dedicated themselves in recent weeks to attacking works of art in museums. But above all, they serve the goal of destroying the West as it had been configured up until the end of the Cold War.
The sovereignty of nations has already been considerably reduced with the prominence of supranational organizations and the phenomenon of globalization, which no longer makes it possible to control national financial and economic flows in an interconnected world market. This allowed P. Bobbitt to speak of what he called the “market-State,” referring to a structure whose purpose consists exclusively in its economic functionality. But it is clear that with Agenda 2030, it is being transformed into something different, into another type of State, in which the protagonism of the national community has been replaced by the protagonism of the state bureaucracy—large corporations and globalist elites grouped around conferences, such as the one held in Egypt: the perfect breeding ground for the formation of the new world order.
Mateo Requesens is a judge in Spain. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].
December 3, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | European Union, United Nations |
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Around one million Ukrainians have left their homeland due to the war in recent months and sought refuge in Germany. Among the refugees are tens of thousands of children who are now going to school in Germany. But there are simply too many and the problems are mounting.
Educators responsible for foreign children have given up telling the success story of an integration that doesn’t exist.
So-called “bridging classes” have been set up everywhere for Ukrainian schoolchildren, in which German language skills are taught more intensively. But to no avail – further support and integration have overwhelmed German teaching staff, the chairman of the Bavarian Philologists’ Association, Michael Schwägerl, had to admit.
“We are experts in our subjects. As a rule, however, we are not interpreters for Ukrainian or Russian, we are not trauma experts either, and our time allotment does not allow us to provide psychosocial support in individual cases.” They need additional staff for practically everything.
And there are massive problems: “The bridging classes are not normal German learning classes,” emphasized Dorothee Missy, who is a bridging class teacher at the grammar school in Mering near Augsburg. Lack of motivation, demarcation, aggression, disrespect, breaking the rules and other discipline problems as a reaction to the stressful situation are commonplace. “We also have a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of performance, motivation and willingness to perform.”
In addition, the refugees often keep to themselves even months later. More than half of the teachers (54 percent) rate the integration of the Ukrainian children and young people in the respective school as rather bad, 22 percent even as clearly bad. In addition, four-fifths of the refugees also take part, at least in part, in Ukrainian online courses which is not conducive to integration into a German environment.
The goal is to prepare the Ukrainian students for regular German schooling. But they are still a world away from achieving their goal.
Philologist boss Schwägerl said there was very little hope that it would happen on a large scale by the end of the current school year as planned. He expected that only a low single-digit percentage would switch to the Bavarian regular school system in the fall. Ukrainian parallel societies will therefore also remain in schools for the time being.
No hope of affording integration
Germany’s decline, which was heralded by the red-green “traffic-light” coalition, is now reflected not only in fresh bad news every day, but also in sober economic indicators that the Federal Statistical Office can no longer hide.
German exports to non-EU countries fell by 1,6 percent in October compared to the previous month, hospitality sales in September fell by 0,9 percent compared to the previous month, and building permits fell by a significant 8,1 percent compared to the same month last year. The number of corporate bankruptcies rose by a massive 34 percent in September compared to the same month last year, while 40 percent are expected for November.
Only one parameter is constantly increasing: the producer prices in October were a gigantic 34,5 percent higher than in the same month last year. Because companies are only passing the price explosion on to consumers in bits and pieces, the big surprise is yet to come in supermarkets.
Officially, the inflation rate is 10,4 percent, which sounds moderate, but it is also due to the so-called “shopping basket” used to calculate inflation. The “shopping basket” is full of products and services that do not reflect the real life of ordinary people.
December 2, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics | Germany |
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