Alina Lipp, an independent journalist reporting from Donbass, has had her assets frozen and her father’s assets frozen by the German government as punishment for reporting on Ukrainian misdeeds in Donbass.
She said she has been that she is under a criminal investigation on charges that potentially could result in a three-year prison sentence. She said she was told her own testimony was not wanted.
The video above shows her telling her story. Notice the monument with the children’s toys around it. This is a monument to children killed as a result of Ukrainian bombardment of Donbass, with their names and ages.
Although the video was put up recently, it evidently was made last summer, because that was when she received the notification.
Alina Lipp, who’s 29, is the daughter of a Russian father and a German mother. She is a member of the Green Party and once hoped for a political career.
Lipp studied sustainable governance at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, focusing on environmental studies. She hoped for a political career as a member of the Greens party.
But after the change of government in Ukraine, she went in 2016 to see for herself what was going on. She said she found, among other things, that most of the residents of Crimea considered themselves Russians and were glad to be part of Russia.
I’m not sure of her exact comings and goings. She has evidently gone back and forth between Germany and Crimea, and Germany and Donbass, a number of times, and also spent time in Russia. Her dad has meanwhile moved to Crimea.
She set up her own Telegram channel to report from the region. She said she was the only German journalist reporting from the region.
Not only the German government, but also most of the German press condemned her reporting, she said, without anyone going to see for themselves.
She is being investigated by the Centre for Combating Internet Hate Crimes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lüneburg, Germany.
The Composite Eye newsletter reported she is formally charged with trying “to stir up a psychological climate, also among the population of the Federal Republic of Germany, to cause divisions in society and to destroy social cohesion due to at least distorted and sometimes false ideas.”
The prosecutor referred to Lipp’s statements on her Telegram channel, namely for saying the population of Donbass supported Russia’s “special operation,” and for speaking of a genocide in the Donbass region, where a civil war that has been ongoing for the past eight years.
Correctiv, a network of investigators, alleged that Lipp had ties with the Russian Foreign Ministry. But she rejects the accusation, saying she reports on what she sees.
The following article is from the German Internet magazine Telopolis. It seems as if a number Germans in high places, like their counterparts in the USA, lack understanding of the basic concept of freedom of speech.
The article was forwarded to me by my Internet pen pal Desdemona, who provided the machine translation into English.
GOVERNMENT’S SCATHING TESTIMONY:
CITIZENS WITH DEFICITS
April 23, 2023
By Alexander Horn
With the Democracy Promotion Act, civil society is to become a bulwark against extremism. However, it is an attack on citizens, freedom of expression and democracy. A guest post.
With the planned Democracy Promotion Act, the federal government is issuing a devastating testimony to the citizens. Civil society in Germany is currently not the “bulwark against xenophobic and racist activities” that Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (both SPD) want so much.
“Racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, hostility towards Islam and Muslims, queer hostility, misogyny, sexism, hostility towards the disabled and extremism such as right-wing extremism, Islamic extremism, left-wing extremism as well as hatred and hate speech” are ever-increasing problems, according to the government draft.
In addition, “the spread of conspiracy ideologies, disinformation and denial of science […], but also hate and hate speech on the Internet as well as multiple discrimination and threats are constantly increasing”.
The problem are the citizens?
With the Democracy Promotion Act, the federal government is making it all too clear that it does not trust the citizens to counteract these developments themselves.
On the contrary, the “model of an open, pluralistic and diverse society” that worked some time ago has “come under increasing pressure” in recent years.
The government draft does not show at any point that the “anti-democratic and misanthropic phenomena” addressed have actually increased, nor is an explanation given as to why this could be.
Instead, it is postulated that a situation has arisen “that poses an increasing threat to the free democratic basic order and social cohesion”.
Finally, there is the grave suspicion that the citizens are not only too passive to give social development a positive direction, but that they themselves – or at least a relevant part of them – have become a problem for democracy.
Have the citizens become more susceptible to anti-democratic and misanthropic attitudes, so that, as stated in the draft law, “[a] anti-democratic attitude and a rejection of state institutions is becoming evident in parts of society”?
The following article is copied from the Berliner Zeitung and was forwarded to me by my new friend Desdemona.
.A Bundeswehr soldier in front of Marder armored personnel carriers that have been loaded onto a train for transport.
Antje Vollmers’ legacy of a pacifist:
“What I would still have to say”
The ex-vice president of the Bundestag criticizes the Greens for turning away from pacifism. In the essay, she formulates her political conclusion.
Antje Vollmers
23.02.2023 | updated 26.02.2023
Antje Vollmer was vice president of the German Bundestag and was the first signatory of the peace manifesto of Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer. Vollmer is a pacifist and was an opponent of the wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. As an author, she has worked intensively on the protagonists of July 20, 1944, and the anti-fascist resistance. Antje Vollmer is seriously ill. Her text can be read as a political legacy – it is a great reckoning with the zeitgeist. We publish the guest article in full length. Editorial.
I was standing at the train station in my hometown, waiting for the ICE. Suddenly, a huge convoy approached on the siding, fully loaded with tanks – with martens, cheetahs or leopards. I can’t tell, but I was shocked to read the picture. The transport was going from west to east.
It was not difficult to imagine the opposite image. Somewhere in the east military transports full of Russian battle tanks were rolling from east to west at the same time. They would not meet for a World War I-style tank battle somewhere in Ukraine.
No, this time they would once again mark the arms-locked chasm between two power blocs, where the world might face each other for the last time in a confrontation with a possibly apocalyptic outcome. So we were back in the Cold War and in a spiral of mutual existential threat – with no way out, no perspective. Everything I had fought against politically all my life was present to me at that moment as one huge defeat.
ANTJE VOLLMERS
“…and fight back every day. A Green Diary” (1984) Antje Vollmer was born on May 31, 1943, in Lübbecke, Westphalia. She is a former vice president of the German Bundestag and a Green Party politician. Her awards include the Carl von Ossietzky Medal (1989), the Hannah Arendt Prize (1998) and the 2002 Masaryk Order of the Czech Republic for services to German-Czech reconciliation (awarded by President Vaclav Havel). She has written numerous books, including: “…and Wehret Euch täglich. A Green Diary” (1984), “Hot Peace. On Violence, Power and the Mystery of Civilization” (1995), “Doppelleben. Heinrich and Gottliebe von Lehndorff in the Resistance to Hitler and von Ribbentrop” (2010), “Stauffenberg’s Companions” with Lars Broder-Keil (2013).
With history it is always important from which beginning you tell it
It has become customary, at the beginning of every mention of the immense tragedy surrounding the Ukraine war, to speak like an oath of the “turning point in time”, of Putin’s brutal war of aggression in violation of international law, with the Russian side clearly being solely to blame, and to humbly confess how much one had been mistaken in trusting in a phase of détente and reconciliation with Russia after the great turning point of 1989/90.
By Antje Vollmers
Berlin
14.07.2022
Where exactly did the defeat begin? Where did the error begin? When and how did this renewed deadly escalation of war, violence and bloc confrontation arise from one of the happiest phases in the history of the Eurasian continent, after the almost non-violent end of the Cold War? Who had an interest in the fact that the then possible peaceful coexistence between East and West did not come about, but fell prey to renewed worldwide antagonism?
And then the question of all questions: Why was it that Europe of all places, this continent with all its historical tragedies and power-political aberrations, did not find the strength to become the center of a peaceful vision for the threatened planet?
Pepe Escobar, reporting last week on the Russia-hosted Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, says the world’s center of economic gravity is shifting to Asia, with China as leader and Russia and India as its main partners.
I have my doubts that the Chinese-led new order will be as utopian as Escobar predicts, but the Chinese magnetic pole is a more powerful attractor than the U.S. pole.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China, now includes China, Russia, the Central Asian republics, India, Pakistan and Iran, while 11 more nations, including Turkey, seeking to join.
The reason is not hard to see. China promises benefits to its economic partners; the NATO alliance demands sacrifices. As the old saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz advocates an expanded, militarized European Union with Germany as the dominant force.
It would include all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, plus Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. It would have a common foreign policy, consisting of a permanent Cold War against Russia, and make decisions by majority vote, not by consensus as now.
Germany dominates the smaller Eastern European countries economically. The further east the European Union goes, the greater the influence of Germany, the less the influence of France and the stronger the possibility of a war policy being adopted over French objections.
German Chancellor Olaf Scoltz and French President Emmanuel Macron
Diana Johnstone, a long-time independent reporter of European politics, wrote an interesting article about the differences between Germany and France in economic, environmental and military police.
Germany is confident and expansive. France is defensive and fearful of national decline. Or so she says.
Germany is committed to green energy, feminism, globalization and an anti-Russian “rules-based international order.” France is committed to nuclear energy and a nationalistic industrial policy, and is reluctant to join in a new Cold War against Russia.
Franco-German unity has been the key to European unity since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Union, in 1952. If they can’t stay unified, the EU may not have much of a future.
Germany’s new government is, as she puts it, a “traffic light” coalition. Red represents the Social Democrats, yellow (or gold) represents the pro-business Free Democrats and green represents the Green Party.
A new Ministry of Economic and Climate will be in charge of reducing CO2 emissions. Every governmental measure will have to pass a climate check.
Germany today is heavily dependent on coal as a result of phasing out nuclear energy, and it has delayed certification of the new gas pipeline from Russia. Itt has a goal of generating 80 percent of Germany’s electricity from renewable energy, mainly wind farms, by 2030, sooner than before.
One of the new government’s priorities is to develop an electric car industry for the export market, both inside and outside the EU. Germany’s expectation is that all EU countries will be open to importing the new electric cars without favoring their own industry. The European Commission is considering rules that would require all cars sold in Europe after 2035 to be carbon neutral.
France’s Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, is being pulled to the right, Johnstone wrote. There is a fear that France is losing its national character and also its position in the world. France is not going to shut down its network of nuclear-powered electric power plants any time soon.
The French government wants to build up French manufacturing industry. This might bring it into conflict with EU rules and regulations, which bans government policies to favor domestic industry, except in the military sphere.
There has a strong right-wing, anti-immigrant movement in France, led by Marine Le Pen. But now there’s an even more extreme movement, led by a journalist named Eric Zemmour. His party is called the Reconquest Party; the idea is to reconquer France for the French.
The new German government wants strong ties with the United States, which, according to Johnstone, means dropping objections to storing nuclear weapons on German soil. France hasn’t openly opposed NATO, but is less enthusiastic about the alliance than Germany is.
Macron has floated the idea of an independent European military force, independent of the United States, but hasn’t gotten anywhere with the Germans and other NATO allies. Johnstone said he wouldn’t like Ukraine in NATO, because it would expand German influence and its farm exports would compete with French farmers.
I think it is feasible to provide college education with free or affordable tuition, as Bernie Sanders advocates. Foreign countries do so, and the United States once did, too.
I have long been in favor of free or affordable college education for everybody who has the desire and ability to do college work, but this is different from providing free tuition for everybody.
Ron Unz, the maverick political editor and writer, has proposed that Harvard University offer free tuition. As he says, it can easily afford it because of the tax-free revenues of its huge endowment fund. He also advocates for a fairer admissions process, especially for Asian-American students.
Those are excellent proposals. But they wouldn’t get everybody who wishes into Harvard.
Sanders’ plan is for the federal government to pay for two-thirds of the cost of college education at state universities that offer free tuition and meet other conditions. I expect that many state governors would turn down this generous offer. Most states are cutting the budgets of their state university systems. And after all, many states refused to expand Medicaid even though the Affordable Care Act offered to cover nine-tenths of the cost.
Germany is frequently cited as an example of a country that provides free college tuition for everyone, including foreigners, who can pass an entrance examination.
If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact. ==One of Rumsfeld’s Rules
Why was the United States so successful in building up Germany, Japan and South Korea as independent nations after World War Two, and such a failure in building up South Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan?
Chris Mason, in his book Strategic Lessons, wrote that the reason is that while it is possible to help an existing nation build up a stable government, it is not possible for outsiders to create a national consciousness among a people who lack it.
That is the reason for the failures in South Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—not any lack of valor or professionalism among American troops, but the fact that they were given a mission equivalent to trying to make water flow uphill.
He said the U.S. military is well-suited for carrying out two kinds of missions:
Defending allies from invasion by use of “intense lethality” against the aggressor.
Intervening in a foreign country to protect American lives or interests by striking hard at a military target, and then leaving—preferably within 90 days.
If the American government is considering intervening in a country for an extended length of time, it should summon the best academic experts to assess whether the people of that country have a sense of nationhood. If not, the only unity those people will have is in resisting the invader.
Actually there were people inside the government who understood what would happen in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and said so, but they were ignored, Mason said. Instead decisions were made by people who knew nothing about those countries, but knew what to do and say in order to advance their careers.
Those are harsh words. The fact that the Army War College has published his book shows that there are some people in the military who value intelligent dissent.
Click on America’s Future in Afghanistan for interviews by ARRA News Service giving the opposing viewpoints of Chris Mason and General John R. Allen, USMC-Ret. [added 11/20/2015]
Hyperloop, which is being developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla Motors, would be a series of above-ground pneumatic tubes filled with people that would zip them along at near-supersonic speeds.
It’s being developed by men and women with day jobs at places such as NASA, Boeing and SpaceX who are paid in stock options rather than cash. Two established companies, Aercom, an engineering design firm, and Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum, are helping with the project in return for stock options.
A prototype demonstration of the system is scheduled for 2016.
A big backlash is developing across Europe against refugees and unauthorized immigrants. Cowen favors open borders in principle, but doesn’t think it is politically feasible.
The European Union was supposed to be an association that benefited all its members. Now it has devolved into a mechanism by which Germany, Europe’s richest nation, inflicts economic punishment on Greece, one of its poorest.
A decade ago, looking at the state of the union the Bush administration, it seems to me that it was the European Union, and Germany in particular, had replaced the USA as the last, best hope of earth. As recently as five years ago, I posted an article on Germanyas an Economic Role Model.
Germany had seemingly created an economy based not on cutting costs, but on creating value, investing in people and worker participation in decision-making. The Germans had learned how how to hold their own in international trade and still enjoy high wages, generous social benefits and excellent public services, without sacrificing civil liberties.
Or so I thought at the time. But the Greek debt crisis shows Germany as much in the grip of a financial oligarchy as the USA was.
The German leaders have embraced the idea, very familiar to us Americans, that the purpose of an economic system is not cooperation for mutual benefit, but to reward winners and punish losers.
The best way to help Greece’s creditors is to promote Greece’s economic recovery, so at least a portion of the debt can be repaid. The austerity measures being imposed by the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund are driving Greece deeper into economic depression. They are being imposed as a punishment and a deterrent.
The German leaders also have made the mistake of allowing central banks, rather than the public, to determine economic policy. The problem with this is that bankers have different priorities than the public.
Broadly speaking, bankers want zero inflation and debts to be repaid in full. All other things being equal, these are desirable goals, but not at the cost of rising unemployment, falling wages and non-functioning government services.
Unfortunately the European Central Bank is in charge of European monetary policy, and the public has nothing to say about its policies. It is governed by a committee consisting of 19 national central banks and a six-member executive board appointed by the European Council. I looked up “accountability” on the bank’s web site, and found that this consists of regularly issuing reports.
The best way to enforce accountability for the Greek debt crisis would be to investigate the Greek public officials and their banker advisers who created it, and determined whether they should be charged with malfeasance. Instead the banks have been bailed out, and the public officials escape blame—much the same as in the 2008 financial crisis in the United States.
Historical analogies don’t necessarily hold, but Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, like Greece today, had a dysfunctional democratic government and was saddled with war debts beyond the nation’s ability to pay.
All well-informed people understood the situation, but the demands of the creditor nations on the Wiemar Republic were uncompromising. Then Hitler came to power, and the debt was forgiven.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the fascist Golden Dawn party came to power in Greece, and I wouldn’t be completely surprised if the creditor nations relaxed their demands for debt repayment.
After World War One, the Allies were saddled with war debts to the United States that were beyond their ability to pay.
Herman Josef Abs, center, representing Federal Republic of Germany, signs a 1953 agreement cutting Germany’s debts to foreign creditors in half.
They hoped to get the money out of Germany, which was obligated to make reparations payments beyond that nation’s ability to pay.
Eventually Germany defaulted on its obligations to the Allies, and the Allies defaulted on their obligations to the USA and its bankers—but not in time to prevent the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
After World War Two, the Allies learned their lesson. They allowed the German government [1] to write off half its debts.
If this hadn’t been done, the postwar German economic miracle might not have taken place, and the recovery of Europe as a whole would have been delayed.
Today Greece has more debt than it can repay. Eventually there is going to have to be a write-down of this debt.
The question is whether the Greek population will have to be reduced to poverty and Greek national assets sold off at bargain prices before this happens.
I grew up with a stereotype of the Germans as prisoners of hierarchy, bureaucracy and rules, who would never be a match for us democratic, freedom-loving practical Americans.
But if that ever was true, our two countries have since traded places.
In Germany, Geoghegan wrote, the laws, strong labor unions, worker representatives in management make it difficult to fire anybody. So layoffs are a last resort, not a first resort.
German management is forced to concentrate on figuring out how to get the most out of the work force, not on making workers powerless and replaceable. The result is that German corporations invest in lifelong learning for their workers, on the justified assumption that they’re going to remain with the same employer and become permanent assets to the firm.
An American economist, Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea, gave a talk to members of the German Social Democratic Party on why so-called austerity is a bad idea.
I write “so-called” because the dictionary meaning of austerity is doing without things you don’t really need. Food rationing in the UK and USA during World War Two is an example of austerity. It doesn’t mean prioritizing the requirements of holders of financial assets over the needs of everybody else.
Here’s why Blyth had to say.
Back in the 1970s, a period that now seems quite benign, corporate profits were very low, labor’s share of income was very high, and inflation was rising. We were told that this was unsustainable, and new institutions and policies were constructed to make sure that this particular mix of outcomes would never happen again.
In this regard we were singularly successful. Today, corporate profits have never been higher, labor’s share of national income has almost never been lower, and inflation has given way to deflation. So are we happier for this change?
What we have done over the past thirty years is to build a creditor’s paradise of positive real interest rates, low inflation, open markets, beaten-down unions, and a retreating state — all policed by unelected economic officials in central banks and other unelected institutions that have only one target: to keep such a creditor’s paradise going.
In such a world, why would you, the average worker, ever get a pay rise?
The fundamental fallacy which is committed by almost everyone is this: “A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad.” ==Bertrand Russell
Keith Gessen, an analyst of Russian politics, says Vladimir Putin is definitely not a nice guy. He also says that, even if he were, his goals and policies wouldn’t be that much different from what they are.
Russia will, one hopes, eventually change its leadership, but it is not going to be able to change its geographic location, or its historic associations, or its longstanding wish to keep the West—which hasn’t always crossed the border bearing flowers—at bay. And that holds many lessons for the future.
Let me be clear: The actual Putin is not at all nice. To take just a few examples:
1) between 1999 and 2002 he prosecuted a vicious war in Chechnya, complete with rape, torture, filtration camps and mass graves;
2) in 2003, he jailed his leading rival, the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and, when the initial sentence was almost up, extended it;
3) in 2000-01, shortly after assuming the presidency, he oversaw a government takeover of the country’s main independent television channels, chasing their owners into exile;
4) over time he has enriched his friends to an astonishing degree, such that many of the leading billionaires in Russia owe their riches directly to their proximity to Putin;
5) it is becoming increasingly the consensus view that the September 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk [attributed to Chechen terrorists] were the work of the secret services, and it is hard to imagine that Putin, as the prime minister of Russia and, until just a month before, the head of the FSB, would not have known about them;
6) in his third term he has unleashed the worst aspects of Russian street politics, mobilizing anti-Western, anti-gay and anti-liberal resentment to shore up his domestic popularity; and
7) in 2004, supposedly as an anti-terror measure after the terrible seizure of a school in Beslan by Chechen fighters, he canceled elections for regional governors, replacing them with appointees.
But, as Gessen pointed out, any Russian leader—and certainly any of Putin’s rivals—would have been a Russian nationalist who would have tried to restore Russia to the status of a superpower, who would have cracked down on internal opposition and who, given the experience of Russia and the USSR in the 20th century, would have resisted the expansion of Western military power to Russia’s borders.
A couple of years ago, President Putin proposed an economic partnership between Russia and the European Union, which would have been to Europe’s benefit.
Now, with Germany caught up in the U.S.-lead conflict with Russia over Ukraine, this has been wiped off the blackboard. Now Russia looks to China as its economic partner. If there is any winner in the Ukraine conflict, it is China.
I have misgivings about linking to RT News and Sputnik News. They are as much organs of the Russian government as the Voice of America is an organ of the U.S. government.
But I’ll make an exception in Pepe Escobar’s case, just as I did some years back with Julian Assange’s short-lived interview show. I think Escobar is both intellectually acute and independent.
One of the sidelights of the Ukraine situation is the pivotal role of the wealthy speculator George Soros. A major contributor to the Democratic Party, he has urged a $50 billion loan to Ukraine in order to fight Russia.
Michael Hudson reported that Soros’s funds are drawing up lists of assets they’d like to buy from Ukrainian oligarchs and the Kiev government when the International Monetary Fund demands they be sold by pay down Ukaine’s debts..
It’s not just the federal government that shields wrongdoers while doing after employees that expose them. Wall Street buys its way out of prosecution while blacklisting employees who reveal its misdeeds. A case in point: Countrywide / Voice of America whistleblower Michael Winston.
Harassment of women on the Internet is no joke, as is shown by this woman’s story of doxing (tracking down and publishing home addresses and other personal information), swatting (sending false emergency calls in her name) and death threats.
Out-of-control fanatic militias unwilling to make peace.
An economy in a state of collapse.
Every country is unique, and so is every situation, but this sounds an awful lot like the situations in Iraq and other countries in which the United States has intervened.
In these countries, all factions are willing and able to fight except the faction aligned with the United States.
Also similar is the position of the U.S. government. The President doesn’t want to accept defeat, but neither does he want to send more young Americans to another foreign land to die in a war that probably isn’t winnable.
So he ponders are compromise measures, such as sending defensive weapons that supposedly won’t be used for offense, and technical advisers that supposedly are not actually going to fight themselves.
The best thing that could happen from the standpoint of the United States would be for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to negotiated a compromise peace. This would involve home rule for eastern Ukraine, and a federal system in which the Russian speakers could veto Ukraine joining NATO.
That would leave Ukraine proper in hock to the International Monetary Fund. Paying off the IMF would mean higher prices, higher taxes and sale of Ukrainian national assets at bargain prices. If Washington was truly interested in helping the Ukrainian people, it would try to help free them from IMF debt bondage.
It’s interesting, by the way, that one party in what supposedly is a civil war is absent from the peace negotiations. The negotiating parties are representatives of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, but not of the separatists in east Ukraine. Presumably they will have no choice but to accept whatever Russia agrees to.
The Greek debt crisis is not a conflict between Germany and Greece. It is the European Union acting as a debt collection agency for central bankers.
German working people get no benefit from the demand that the government of Greece impoverish the people of Greece so as to pay interest to the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
They in fact will suffer in the long run, because the more wages and living conditions are driven down in other countries, the harder it will be to maintain them in Germany.
Some five years ago, I wrote a post about how Germany was a good role model for the USA, because its leaders were committed to industrial productivity and a high-wage economy. Unfortunately, the German leaders instead have taken the USA as a role model, and followed our downward path of financialization.
I believe that people who borrow money have a moral obligation to pay it back—if they can. I believe that there are other moral obligations that take precedence, such as the welfare of those who depend on you. That’s why the United States and other nations substituted bankruptcy laws for debtors’ prisons.
The Greek debt problem would have solved itself if Greece had its own currency instead of the Euro. As Greece’s balance of trade worsened, its currency would be devalued and its products and services (including the tourist industry) would become cheaper in terms of dollars and euros.
The great fear of the “troika”–the ECB, IMP and the leaders of the European Union–is that Greece will stop using the euro, and that some of the other 17 countries that use the euro will follow suit. That might be a problem for bond-holders. I don’t see it as a problem for ordinary people in Germany, the USA or any other country.
Adam Tooze in THE DELUGE: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, which I just got finished reading, traced the impact of the emergence of the United States as the world’s dominant superpower and arbiter of world affairs.
He described in great detail the struggles in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and Japan for security and economic stability, and how they all hinged on the action and inaction of the USA.
Leaders of the USA today call our country the “indispensable nation”, and assert the right and the power to be the arbiter of the world. Tooze’s book shows how this self-appointed role began.
The early 20th century USA was a new kind of world power, Tooze wrote. It had a greater area and greater population than any European country except Russia. It was uniquely invulnerable to invasion. It was the world’s leading manufacturing nation, agricultural producer and oil exporter and, as a result of the war, the world’s leading creditor nation. No other country could even come close to matching American power.
Tooze began his history in 1916 because that was when Britain, France and their allies came to realize how much they depended on the United States, not just for supplies, but even more for financing of the war.
Woodrow Wilson’s policy was to use this leverage to dictate a “peace without victory,” a compromise peace based on liberal democracy, international law and—most importantly—a worldwide open door for U.S. commerce.
The United States was not interested in new territorial acquisitions because it didn’t need them. All it wanted was access to other nations’ territories by American business.
Wilson’s neutrality became politically unsustainable because of German attacks on U.S. shipping, and the Zimmerman telegram to Mexico urging reconquest of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, but he still tried to maintain U.S. position as an arbiter above the fray.
His Fourteen Points encouraged liberal democrats around the world. According to Tooze, with better decisions and better luck, there might have been a compromise peace between the pro-democratic Provisional Government of Russia, which came to power in March 1917, and a German government forced to yield to pressure from liberals and socialists in the Reichstag.
But the USA and the other allies pressured Russia’s Provisional Government to go on fighting, and the German army successfully counterattacked. The Russians ceased to hope for peace and the Germans ceased to see a need for peace. Wilsonian liberal movements in China and Japan also received no support, partly because of Wilson’s racism.
Tooze pointed out that the Fourteen Points were all highly consistent with American national interests. The first three points were (1) no secret treaties, (2) freedom of the seas and (3) removal of barriers to equality of trade, all policies that advanced U.S. economic interests.
Some years back I wrote a post holding up Germany as a role model for the United States. I said Germany’s policies showed that a nation can have a strong labor movement and a strong social safety net and yet have a growing economy and success in world markets.
I failed to recognize that Germany was and is following the same path as the United States—high profits, wage stagnation and financialization. Germans are better off than Americans only because their starting point was higher when they started on the road to decline.
The chart shows that German productivity is increasing, just as in the United States, but German wage-earners aren’t getting the benefit of it.
Can you honor veterans for their service, while still thinking that the war they served in was wrong, or even that all wars are wrong? My answer is: Yes.
CIA critic Ray McGovern was arrested for trying to attend a panel discussion in which CIA ex-chief David Patraeus participated. His ticket was bought under somebody else’s name. So how did the police at the door know to be on the lookout for him?
Germans are so outraged by American spying that they distrust the United States about as much as they do Russia.
Some analysts think the U.S.-German alliance is in jeopardy. I grew up with the stereotype of the United States as a freedom-loving country and Germany as an authoritarian country, and it is deeply ironic that Germany may break with the United States because of lack of U.S. respect for civil liberties.
The National Security Agency tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. More recently Germany has demanded the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency station chief after learning that the CIA had recruited a German intelligence officer to turn over, among other things, documents intended for a Bundestag committee investigating NSA activities in Germany.
Why would the NSA and CIA take such risks for trivial gains? Was President Obama told? If not, will there be any consequences to those who didn’t tell him? Does he agree with what the NSA and CIA are doing? Or is he afraid to rein them in and, if so, why?
U.S. intelligence agencies, like Wall Street, are part of a “deep state” beyond the reach of the normal democratic process. But the “deep state” does not appear to have a policy, except to blindly extend the reach of its activities as far as it can.
I don’t claim any expert or inside knowledge of Germany or of U.S.-German relations, but here are my thoughts for whatever they’re worth.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, successive U.S. governments have acted as if they can do as they like, without having to take anybody else’s point of view into consideration. This was bound to backfire, and now it has.
Germany is in many ways a more natural economic partner for Russia than for the USA. Russia supplies Germany with oil and gas, imports German manufactured goods and welcomes German investment.
But Germans still distrust Russia, and are happy to have the United States pay for Germany’s defense. The Germany army would not be a match for the Russian army.
It is in Germany’s interest to have good relations with both the United States and Russia. It is not in the interest of the United States to force German leaders to choose between them.
If China is the main strategic rival of the USA, it is in the U.S. interest to see Russia develop closer ties with Europe rather than become an economic satellite of China.
One measure of the seriousness of the crisis will be whether Germany offers political asylum to Edward Snowden. If it does, the U.S.-German alliance is probably broken.
A woman lights a candle in Kiev in memory of protesters killed in February
I think it is good for us Americans to hear points of view we don’t hear from the so-called mainstream press and broadcasters. Here is Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens, on the right of self-determination, as applied to Ukraine.
Let us accept (as I do) the principle that national minorities have the right to self-determination within lopsided multi-ethnic states; e.g. Croats and Kosovars seceding from Yugoslavia, Scots from the UK, Georgians from the Soviet Union etc.
Awkward question no. 1: On what principle can we deny, once Croatia, Kosovo, Scotland and Georgia have come into being, the right of Krajina Serbs, of Mitrovica Serbs, of Shetland Islanders and of Abkhazians to carve out, if they so wish, their own nation-states within the newly independent nation-states in the areas where they constitute a clear majority?
Awkward question no. 2: On what principle does a western liberal deny the right of Chechens to independence from Russia, but is prepared to defend to the hilt the Georgians’ or the Ukrainians’ right to self-determination?
Awkward question no. 3: On what principle is it justifiable that the West acquiesced to the razing to the ground of Grozny (Chechnya’s capital), not to mention the tens of thousands of civilian deaths, but responded fiercely, threatened with global sanctions, and raised the specter of a major Cold War-like confrontation over the (so far) bloodless deployment of undercover Russian troops in Crimea?
Varoufakis stipulated that Vladimir Putin is a dangerous despot, and that the (relatively) democratic values embodied in the European Union are preferable to the authoritarian values of the Putin-sponsored economic bloc, the Eurasian Union (consisting so far of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan).
Unfortunately, he said, Western leaders don’t necessarily have Ukraine’s interests at heart.
The Ukraine is, and was always going to be, the battleground between Russia’s industrial neo-feudalism, the U.S. State Department’s ambitions, and Germany’s neo-Lebensraum policies.
Various [U.S.] ‘Eurasianists’ see the crisis in Kiev as a great opportunity to promote a program of full confrontation with Russia, one that is reminiscent of Z. Brzezinski’s 1970s anti-Soviet strategy. Importantly, they also see the Ukraine as an excellent excuse to torpedo America’s role in normalizing relations with Iran and minimizing the human cost in Syria.
At the same time, the IMF cannot wait to enter Russia’s underbelly with a view to imposing another ‘stabilization-and-structural-adjustment program’ that will bring that whole part of the former Soviet Union under its purview.
As for Germany, it has its own agenda which pulls it in two different directions at once: securing as much of the former Soviet Union as part of its neo-Lebensraum strategy of expanding its market/industrial space eastwards; while, at the same time, preserving its privileged access to gas supplies from [Russia’s] Gazprom.
He believes that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry understand the limits of American power and the danger of an overly hawkish response to events in Ukraine. I hope he’s right, but I’m not so sure.
Earlier this week the United Nations General Assembly passed a strong general resolution, introduced by the governments of Brazil and Germany, affirming “the right to privacy in the digital age”.
Edward Snowden
It didn’t mention the U.S. National Security Agency, but it was obviously inspired by what Edward Snowden revealed about the extent of the NSA’s worldwide surveillance. I think the governments of Brazil and Germany should show their appreciation by offering Snowden asylum.
Snowden is in a precarious position in Russia. He was granted permission to stay in that country for a year, of which about nine months remain. President Vladimir Putin said in an interview that he wouldn’t tolerate a Russian who revealed information about the secret Russian security agencies, and that the only reason he permits Snowden to remain in Russia is that there is no extradition treaty with the United States. If the United States signed such a treaty, and handed over certain Russian fugitives that Putin wants, he would hand over Snowden without hesitation.
Why are Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Germany’s Angela Merkel and other national leaders unwilling to give Snowden refuge? One obvious reason is that they fear to displease the U.S. government. Another might be that they, too, don’t want to set a precedent that would encourage Snowdens in their own countries.
On Monday, a writer for Der Speigel, the German newsmagazine, offered this view of the U.S. election.
The United States Army is developing a weapon that can reach — and destroy — any location on Earth within an hour. At the same time, power lines held up by wooden poles dangle over the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy ripped them apart there and in communities across the East Coast last week, and many places remain without electricity. That’s America, where high-tech options are available only to the elite, and the rest live under conditions comparable to a those of a developing nation. No country has produced more Nobel Prize winners, yet in New York City hospitals had to be evacuated during the storm because their emergency generators didn’t work properly. ****
Romney, the exceedingly wealthy business man, and Obama, the cultivated civil rights lawyer, are two faces of a political system that no longer has much to do with democracy as we understand it. Democracy is about choice, but Americans don’t really have much of a choice.
Obama proved this. Nearly four years ago, it seemed like a new beginning for America when he took office. But this was a misunderstanding. Obama didn’t close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, nor did he lift immunity for alleged war criminals from the Bush-era, or regulate the financial markets, and climate change was hardly discussed during the current election campaign. The military, the banks, industry — the people are helpless in the face of their power, as is the president.
Not even credit default swaps, the kind of investment that brought down Lehman Brothers and took Western economies to the brink, has been banned or even better regulated.
That’s all too true. If you had asked me 50 years ago which 21st-century nation would have science-fictional technology for surveillance and waging war, while being unable to provide basic services for its people, I would have named the Soviet Union, not the United States. That’s the kind of society you get when you are ruled by an elite group that is unaccountable to the general public. I don’t think the United States ever will become like the Soviet Union under Stalin, but unless something changes, we could wind up very like Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
But the German writer seems a bit complacent about his own society, and especially about calling the United States an example of “total capitalism.” Germany is being governed in the interest of its big banks just as the United States is. The austerity measures that the German government is forcing on the European Union is moving Europe toward the same conditions that the writer doesn’t like in the United States.
Ron Unz, the maverick political editor and writer, has proposed that Harvard University offer free tuition. As he says, it can easily afford it because of the tax-free revenues of its huge endowment fund. He also advocates for a fairer admissions process, especially for Asian-American students.
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