Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.

Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday 13 March, 2024.

Thank you very much, thank you ladies and gentlemen. It is with a deep sense of the obligations and dues we owe to the owners of the land on which we meet today, the Ngunnawal people, that I, too, pay my respects to their elders, past, present and future. I also wish to note and acknowledge the special role played by the women of the first nations, not just because last week we marked International Women’s Day, but because of their leading role as custodians of complex knowledge, as community organisers, and as beacons of wisdom especially for those of us afflicted with a masculine condition.

Ladies and gentlemen, today I look forward to discussing with you some thoughts, concerns and ideas about Europe and Australia with a view to reclaiming a shared future for our two continents in a world where Europe and Australia are increasingly marginal. And to do so not just as a European politician but also as a proud citizen of Australia.

Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.

The three post-war phases that shaped Australia’s and Europe’s habitat

Our present moment in Europe and in Australia has been shaped by three distinct postwar phases.

The first was the Bretton Woods system. America exited the war as the only surplus, creditor country. Bretton Woods, a remarkable recycling mechanism, was, in effect, a dollar zone built on fixed exchange rates, sustained by capital controls, and erected on the back of America’s trade surplus. With quasi-free trade as part of the deal, Washington dollarised Europe, Japan and Australia to generate aggregate demand for the products of its factories – whose productivity had skyrocketed during the war. Subsequently, the US trade surplus sucked the exported dollars back into America. The result was twenty years of high growth, low unemployment, blissfully boring banking and dwindling inequality. Alas, once the United States lost its trade surplus, Bretton Woods was dead in the water.

The second phase was marked by the violent reversal of this recycling mechanism. The United States became the first hegemon to enhance its hegemony by boosting its trade deficit. Operating like a powerful vacuum cleaner, the burgeoning US trade deficit hoovered up the world’s net exports. And how did America pay for them? With dollars which it also hoovered up from the rest of the world as German, Japanese and later Chinese capitalists sent to Wall Street 70% of dollar profits made from their net exports to the US. There, in Wall Street, these foreign capitalists recycled their dollar profits into Treasuries, real estate, shares and derivatives.

This audacious inverted recycling system, built on US deficits, required ever increasing American deficits to remain stable. In the process, it gave rise to even higher growth than the Bretton Woods era, but also to macroeconomic and financial imbalances as well as mind-numbing levels of inequality. The new era came complete with an ideology (neoliberalism), a policy of letting finance rip (financialisation), and a false sense of dynamic equilibrium – the infamous Great Moderation built on hugely immoderate imbalances.
Almost inevitably, on the back of the perpetual tsunami of capital rushing in from the rest-of-the-world to Wall Street, financiers fashioned gigantic pyramids of complex wagers – Warren Buffet’s infamous Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction. When these crashed, to deliver the Global Financial Crisis, two things saved Wall Street and Western capitalism:

• The G7 central banks, that printed a total of $35 trillion on behalf of the financiers from 2009 to last year – a peculiar socialism for bankers. And,
• China, which directed half its national income to investment, thus replacing much of the lost aggregate demand not only domestically but also in Germany, Australia and, of course, in the United States.

The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:

1. It grabs our attention.

2. It manufactures our desires.

3. It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.

4. It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.

5. It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.

6. It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.

Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!

Where did the money for so much cloud capital to accumulate come from, if not from profits? Remember the $35 trillion of central bank monies printed to refloat Western banks? That’s where. For example, 9 out of every 10 dollars that went into creating Facebook came from these central bank monies.

So, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what cloud capital has already done to us. And now a question of immense importance to Europe and to Australia: In which countries is cloud capital, and with it the exorbitant extractive power it grants its owners, concentrated? In the United States and in China. Nowhere else! Hold that thought, while I turn to Europe.

Europe

Most of you will know me as the ejected finance minister of the most bankrupt European state – though I take solace from hearing that several people here in Canberra, including a government minister or two, knew me first as their Sydney University lecturer. Lest we forget, I was elected to that post because of a catastrophic collapse caused by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis, hot on the heels of the Global Financial Crisis – with Greece the canary in that mine.

The reason Europe was damaged permanently by the GFC was our ludicrous monetary architecture: A monetary union that had a central bank but no federal treasury to have its back. And nineteen state treasuries without a central bank to bankroll the bailouts of their nineteen separate banking systems! In short, even if European governments wanted to emulate the sensible response of the Rudd government to the GFC, we lacked the institutions to do it.

The result? Europe’s doom loop between banking losses, stagnation, unpayable public and private debt and an investment strike lasting quarter of a century thus leading, now, to Europe’s and, in particular, Germany’s de-industrialisation. Quarter of a century later, in addition to its deepening North-South divide, Europe now suffers an incurable East-West divide while:

• the essential fiscal and political union is further away from the horizon than ever
• the EU’s Green Deal is honoured in the breach, not in the implementation
• Europe’s industries are falling rapidly behind their competitors in the United States and China in every technological race that matters, in green tech and green energy in particular
• our continent lacks cloud capital in an age of technofeudalism where power stems from cloud capital, that only the United States and China possess in substantial quantities.

Why is there a New Cold War?

In my introduction, I said that Europe and Australia are facing irrelevance and marginalisation. Two are the reasons: One, neither Europe nor Australia possess significant cloud capital – it is a little like trying to make our way during the 19th century without steam engines. The second reason is the New Cold War, which is upending our business models, Europe’s and Australia’s.

Speaking of the New Cold War, almost a year ago Paul Keating, in this prestigious forum, famously lambasted the Albanese government for making the wrong call in allowing Australia to become complicit in Washington’s pursuit of the New Cold War against its own interests. The one question Mr Keating did not ask, however, was: Why is Washington doing this? Why did President Trump kickstart it with a ban on Huawei and ZTE? And why did President Biden turbocharge it with the microchip ban which was meant explicitly as a declaration of economic war on Beijing?

When I ask this question, I get two answers. One is Taiwan. The other is China’s escalating military threat to international trade routes in the South China Sea. Neither will do. Ever since Nixon went to China, and during the long period Washington was pushing Australia to induct China into the WTO and the globalised capitalist world order, the One China policy and Beijing’s determination to maintain sovereignty over Taiwan were, rightly or wrongly, unchallenged givens. As for China’s military threat, on this I am with Malcolm Fraser who opined that nothing short of Chinese navy surveillance ships anchored outside America’s navy bases at San Diego or Norfolk, Virginia can count as provocation. And, please, can someone, anyone, explain why on earth a country so reliant on a trade surplus and imported energy would ever wish to threaten international trade routes? No, the New Cold War is neither due to Taiwan nor to China’s military build-up. The answer lies in cloud capital.

America’s hegemony, built on its trade deficit, relies entirely on its capacity to extra rents from the rest of the world courtesy of its monopoly of international payments. But Chinese cloud capital has already achieved something that the dollar system cannot achieve: a seamless integration of cloud capital with a free digital payments system – for example, WeChat, the private App belonging to Tencent, and the public digital currency already offered by China’s Central Bank.

Why is there no American equivalent seamlessly blending Big Tech and Big Finance? Because Wall Street refuses to share their financial rents with either US cloudalists or with the Fed. And there is the rub: America maintains its dominance over international payments travelling along a rickety dollar highway, one full of potholes but still the highway of choice for global capitalists. Meanwhile, Chinese cloud capital has built an all-singing-all-dancing payments superhighway, denominated in yuan, that few used. But, this superhighway’s very existence is a clear and present danger to the US monopoly of the dollar payment system on which America’s hegemony rests. Especially after the Ukraine war created jitters amongst oligarchs around the world.

In short, the New Cold War has nothing to do with trade routes, Taiwan, or Chinese escalation in the Pacific. It is, rather, the manifestation of a dangerous clash between two technofeudal systems – one denominated in dollars, the other in yuan.

What should Australia do domestically?

So, the question becomes: What should Australia do in this topsy-turvy, increasingly technofeudal world? At the domestic front,

First, ditch the old rentier business model of banking on holes and homes. That’s now a Ponzi scheme whose maintenance will result in a country marred by minimal investment, low productivity, debilitating inequality, high inflation and low wages pushing its talented people into a low innovation sinkhole.

Instead, adopt a Green New Deal for Australia as a necessity, rather than a luxury. Europe is about to impose a border-adjustment carbon tax. America will surely follow. Australia must end its dependence on fossil fuels and unrefined minerals and let rip with solar and wind power that produces green hydrogen, not for export but, for powering new factories that will produce, domestically, green copper, green nickel, green cobalt and green steel for export to South East Asia and to China where they will be used to produce the electric cars and the cloud capital that Europe will then purchase tariff-free. To achieve this, this country needs a massive public investment project, a latter-day version of the 1950s Snowy Scheme.

Second, acknowledge that never before has it been so dismal to be young in Australia.

• Reverse the absurdity of the Australian government collecting more money from HECS than it does from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.
• Tax rents properly to make higher education free again.
• End negative gearing and, especially, the inane capital gains exemption on real estate investments.
• Tax those with concentrated power to set prices and rents through the nose and, instead of inefficient tax cuts that just inflame house prices and consumer price inflation, build social housing that benefit not only those who live in them but suppresses private house price inflation.

Third, since Australian capitalists cannot compete with America’s and China’s cloudalists, it is the role of the Australian government, in the same way it once created the ABC, or the CSIRO, to put at the disposal of Australians important new technologies; to build up public cloud capital – beginning with a digital Australian dollar, essentially a free checking account for every resident using only a tax file number and a pin which would allow for free transactions and pay interest on deposits equal at the Reserve Bank’s overnight rate.

What should Australia do internationally?

What about internationally?

First, Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America into lethal adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and, today, via its active and crucial complicity in Israel’s deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Children are not starving in Gaza today. No, they are being deliberately starved. Without hesitation or remorse. The famine in Gaza is no collateral damage. It is an intentional policy of starving to death thousands until the rest agree to leave their ancestral homeland.

By lending credence to the notion that Israel is exercising the right to self-defence and by de-funding, on the basis of unsubstantiated Israeli accusations, the only agency that can ameliorate the starvation, Australia damaged its already wounded reputation. Reversing this decision is now too-little-too-late for the Australian government to wipe clean its complicity in ethnic cleansing by weaponised, designer-hunger. It will take a great deal more than that.

Just as there was a bipartisan campaign, led by Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, to end South African apartheid when Washington was supporting it, the Australian political class needs to lead a campaign to end apartheid in Israel-Palestine. This is Australia’s duty for another reason: Because of the sorry history of terra nullius, the white settlers’ ideological cover for the genocide of native populations, which has been transferred from Australia to the land of Palestine under the banner of “A Land Without a People for a People Without A Land”.

Second, Australia has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War. To understand that this can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.

Imagine an Australia that helps bring a just Peace in Ukraine, as opposed to a mindless forever war. A non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but, also, not automatically aligned with every warmongering adventure decided in Washington.

Imagine an Australia which, having re-established its credentials as a country that thinks and acts for itself, engages with China in the spirit of peaceful cooperation – a far better way of addressing Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism toward its own peoples than buying useless, hyper-expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing China’s political class to close ranks around a more authoritarian core.

Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister who tells the American President to cease and desist from the slow murder of Julian Assange for the crime of journalism – for exposing American war crimes perpetrated behind the back of US citizens in their name.
In the end, American powerbrokers will appreciate such an Australia better – in the same way you appreciate better a friend who tells you when you are wrong compared to a yes-man who never opposes you directly but whinges behind your back.

Conclusion

To conclude, if Europe and Australia are to escape gross irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated European and Australian Green New Deals. This will prove pie in the sky in a world buffeted by an uncontrollable New Cold War that threatens the green transition necessary to preserve our viability as a species. To have a future, Europe and Australia must end our mindless slide from strategic dependence on the United States to improvised-impulsive-inexpedient servitude to the United States.

DiEM25, our paneuropean movement, is working toward this goal. In the last fortnight, during this visit, I was thrilled to discover that there are talented people and effective organisations dedicated to the same cause. Optimism is perhaps not yet empirically justified. But hope burns strongly.

Thank you.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/reversing-europes-and-australias-slide-into-irrelevance-insecurity/

 

 

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Ukraine has decided to abandon its list of “international sponsors of war” following complaints from foreign countries.

Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention has been hosting a website which lists companies that continue to do business in Russia or “indirectly assist in or contribute to Russia’s war efforts.” 

The list includes major corporations, such as PepsiCo, P&G, Yves Rocher, Unilever, Metro, Nestle, Auchan and Xiaomi.

The project has been part of Kiev’s multi-pronged strategy to pressure companies to cut ties with Moscow in response to the ongoing armed conflict between the neighbors.

The Ukrainian government announced on Tuesday, however, that those wishing to view the list will be redirected to the more neutrally named State Register of Sanctions curated by Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council. The decision was made after a meeting attended by diplomats from more than 10 countries, including the US, China, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as representatives from the EU.

According to the statement on the government’s website, many of Ukraine’s partners raised concerns about “the lack of legal basis for the existence of the ‘international sponsors of war’ list.” Kiev had to consider “the negative impact of this list on the adoption of important decisions to stop the Russian aggression,” the statement read.

Ukraine’s Justice Ministry ultimately agreed that it was “unacceptable to disseminate such information in the state’s name without resolving the legal issues.”

Austria has previously refused to back the 12th round of EU sanctions against Russia, demanding that Kiev remove the Vienna-based Raiffeisen Bank International from the blacklist. Ukraine eventually conceded, paving a way for Austria to give a green light to the sanctions in December 2023.

Last month, Beijing requested that Kiev remove its companies from the list as well. “China firmly opposes the inclusion of Chinese enterprises in the relevant list and demands that Ukraine immediately correct its mistakes and eliminate negative impacts,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told Reuters.

https://www.rt.com/russia/594587-pressured-ukraine-closes-list/

 

MEANWHILE, ANYONE SUPPORTING THE TOTALITARIAN KIEV GOVERNMENT IS A SPONSOR OF FASCISM, NAZISM AND TERRORISM. THE LIST INCLUDE ALL THE COUNTRIES OF THE WEST, STARTING WITH THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — AND CANADA....

 

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Ukraine has lost more than 71,000 soldiers and over 11,000 units of various weapons since the start of the year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday. "In general, the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces during this period, that is, since the beginning of this year, exceeded 71,000 people and 11,000 units of various weapons. This is almost three times higher than the same period last year," Shoigu said at a meeting with senior military.  Ukraine has also lost four Abrams tanks, five Leopard tanks, six HIMARS multiple rocket launcher systems and five Patriot complexes, the minister added. https://sputnikglobe.com/20240320/ukraines-military-losses-amount-to-over-71000-people-since-start-of-2024---shoigu-1117448767.html

 

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

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If Kiev wins, Washington and its allies will be rewarded for their military aid with Russian natural resources, Ukraine’s former infrastructure minister, Vladimir Omelyan, has told Politico. The proposal came in response to rumors that the US might convert its donations to loans instead.

According to the US outlet, Republicans in Congress have suggested converting a fifth of the $60 billion in aid to Ukraine requested by the White House into a loan. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said he had brought up the idea during his recent visit to Kiev.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba told reporters on Tuesday he needed to see details in order to comment on the proposal. An anonymous source close to President Vladimir Zelensky also called for more specifics before any decision could be made.

Omelyan, however, stated that the West would end up receiving Russian natural resources for its efforts. 

“If we win, you will be paid back in Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur,” he told Politico. “If we lose, there will be no issue about money – it will become the issue of how the West can survive.”

Omelyan ran Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry from 2016 to 2019 and is a critic of Zelensky’s government. However, his comments are in line with Kiev’s official “peace formula”that wants Russia to pay reparations, give up all territory claimed by Ukraine, and submit to a war crimes tribunal.

Kuleba and the unnamed aide, however, seemed far more reluctant about the loan idea. Graham had suggested the loan might be forgiven under certain circumstances, the aide said. He added that the notion itself was “somewhat offensive” to Ukrainians, as Kiev felt entitled to US support on account of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine gave up its claims to Soviet nuclear weapons. 

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was likewise pessimistic about Kiev’s prospects on Tuesday, arguing that Ukraine’s very survival was in danger unless Washington and its allies could come up with more cash. American “honor and security” were also on the line, the Pentagon head told the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Ramstein, Germany. 

The $60 billion aid package, originally requested in October, has faced multiple obstacles in Congress. The White House has tried a range of justifications to get the opposition Republicans to unblock the funding, from presenting it as a stimulus for the US economy to arguing that Russia would overrun all of NATO if Ukraine is defeated.

https://www.rt.com/russia/594578-ukraine-repay-west-loan/

 

GUSNOTE: RUSSIA HAS NO INTENTION OF CONQUERING EUROPE AND NEVER HAD... BUT NATO IS FEAR-MONGERING IN ORDER TO RALLY THE TROOPS, AND SHOULD NATO TROOPS LAND IN UKRAINE, THEY WILL BE ERADICATED LIKE VERMIN...

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

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BY Ian DeMartino

 

Over the weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin was reelected for another six years in a record landslide, securing 87.8% of the vote, a figure that largely matched outside polling.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory over the weekend shows that Russia is more united than ever while the West has a “huge problem” unifying a “divided support base,” Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Tuesday.

“I think [the election results] pretty accurately reflect the desires of the Russian people and it’s hard to come up with any evidence to the contrary,” Petro said, adding that in Western media you will find “contrary opinions, but you cannot find any evidence.”

Co-host Garland Nixon noted that Western leaders have comparatively abysmal approval ratings, noting that 76% of French people oppose French President Emmanual Macron’s plan to send troops to Ukraine and that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have incredibly low approval ratings at 25% and 17%, respectively.

 

 

“That’s a huge problem for the West. We have a divided support base in the West, perhaps a more ostensibly unified leadership, but that’s only until an opposition comes into power. Then, we’ve got huge problems for the West, no matter which way you slice it,” Petro explained. “Whereas in Russia, again no matter how you slice it, you have a unified population and political elite. One of the most popular Ukrainian journalists– now in exile– Diana Panchenko, put it very well when she said ‘A united collective West gave us a united collective Russia.’”

 

Co-host Wilmer Leon asked about US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who recently spoke to the Ukrainian parliament, urging them to pass a mobilization bill that would lower the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25. Before the conflict, Ukraine had one of the oldest populations in Europe and the high conscription age was set in an attempt to save younger Ukrainians who would be needed to father the next generation.

“We can [see the difficulty in getting it passed] by the 4,000 or 5,000 amendments that have been submitted to the new mobilization law, in fact, that it’s very difficult going,” Petro explained. “It’s easy for Sen. Graham to sit here and to say, I believe his quote was ‘we need more people on the line.’ Of course, the classic retort is, ‘Who’s ‘we’ Kemo Sabe? I don’t see you anywhere near the front line.’ And, that’s the way a lot of people seem to be reacting to this call.”

 

“I think Russia is, in fact, seeking some sort of negotiated settlement,” Petro added. “[As that becomes] clear, both in Ukraine and in the West, people will inevitably begin asking themselves ‘Well, why don’t we actually negotiate a ceasefire and see how far we can go?’”

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240321/election-and-polls-show-russia-is-united-while-west-fractures-1117460371.html

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

 

 

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkybdgZiRS8

German children ‘must be prepared for war’ – minister
Military officers should visit schools to build “relaxed” relations with students, Bettina Stark-Watzinger has suggested

German children should be made to prepare for war to boost “resilience,”Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger stated on Saturday.

She said kids should be taught what to do in the event of conflict and suggested introducing “civil defense”drills in schools so that youngsters will be prepared for the years ahead.

“Society as a whole must prepare well for crises, from a pandemic to natural disasters to war. Civil defense is immensely important, and it also belongs in schools. The goal must be to strengthen our resilience,” Stark-Watzinger said in an interview with the Funke media group.

She also called for a “relaxed relationship” to be fostered between schoolchildren and the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr), suggesting that military officers should visit schools to explain what “the Bundeswehr does for our security.”

President of the German Teachers’ Association, Stefan Dull, told Bild last week that the minister’s proposal “makes sense.”

“I expect the federal minister to now seek discussions with the education ministers in the federal states,”he said, adding that a “declaration of intent is not enough – politics lessons now have to teach about the war in Ukraine and the pan-European, even global threat situation.”

Stark-Watzinger’s initiative reflects the German government’s policy aimed at making the country “war ready” in the face of a potential Russia-NATO conflict, which could happen within a few years, according to senior German defense officials.

In February, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius claimed in an interview with Bloomberg that Russia may attack NATO “in five to eight years.” 

German chief of defense, General Carsten Breuer, also highlighted the “paramount” importance of making the country’s military ready within the next five years.

“We call this Kriegstuchtigkeit – being ready, capable and willing to fight. We are on the right track,” he declared.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that Russia has never had plans to attack NATO. In December, he described such speculation as “complete nonsense,” adding that fear of a ‘Russian threat’ in the EU was being fueled by the US, as Washington fears losing its dominance on the European continent.

https://www.rt.com/news/594550-germany-chidren-prepare-war/

 

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the US presence in Germany was a stunning 250,000 soldiers with as many civilian employees and family members.  The soldiers and their families worked and lived in one of 47 major military bases, which were made up by some 800 separate sites. The predominance of West Germany in US military planning can be glimpsed from the resources allocated to the bases there. During the Cold War, 70% of US troops in Europe were stationed in West Germany and the country was home to 60% of all U.S. overseas bases. Of the troops stationed in Germany, 45% were combat troops, 45% served as combat support troops, and 10% worked in administrative positions.

Throughout the Cold War, the 250,000 American troops and their family dependents (about the same number) as well as tens of thousands of civilian employees of the Department of Defense were for the most part located in the South and Southwest of Germany, where the American military had taken over existing German Wehrmacht installations. Unlike in the US, where military bases and military communities tend to be highly centralized and concentrated, each US military community in Germany was on average made up of about 17 discrete sites that were often also spread out over more than one German community. While many US military installations were located in larger cities such as West-Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, the overwhelming number of soldiers were (and still are) stationed in more rural areas in the southwestern part of the country. While single soldiers at times lived in military barracks spread across the German host town, large-scale and autarkic “Little Americas” provided the families of married soldiers with all the amenities the US has to offer.

https://www.aacvr-germany.org/us-military-bases-in-germany

 

THERE ARE MORE THAN 40 AMERICAN BASES IN GERMANY..... SEE ALSO: https://josefmuehlbauer.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/american_bases_in_germany_fs.pdf

Ramstein Air Base, the biggest U.S. base in Germany, costs about $1 billion annually — an amount equal to Germany's yearly contribution TO MAINTAIN THE US BASES IN GERMANY.

 

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Occupied Nation: How the CIA Created Modern Germany
By Kit Klarenberg

 

On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.

The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”

In keeping with those meditations on Germany’s ever-worsening woes, The Economist’s bleak diagnosis made no mention of how Western sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2022 created Berlin’s crisis. Scholz was a prominent cheerleader for the Biden administration’s push to “make the Ruble rubble.” Now that effort has so spectacularly backfired that it can no longer be ignored or spun otherwise; Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.

Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any U.S. counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inescapably disastrous.

For this failure, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of U.S. military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.

This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.

“Enormous Presence”

Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of U.S. foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.

After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the U.S., the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to U.S. “commercial interests.”

In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription. 

Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to challenging capitalism in a serious way. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies. 

In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there–which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations—was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing U.S. military occupation.

This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the U.S. military, posing as mere soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. U.S. operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”

Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same organizations. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

“Discredit and Destroy”

Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.

The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG—along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned—and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.

The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of U.S. troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.

While intended to punish Germany for greenlighting the now-destroyed Nord Stream 2, polls indicated most Germans were only too happy to say “auf wiedersehen.” In all, 47% were in favor of them leaving, while a quarter called for the permanent closure of all U.S. bases on their soil. Yet, just two weeks after entering the White House, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s policy, returning 500 soldiers who had departed.

The President also scrapped plans to relocate the Stuttgart-based U.S. Africa Command, which effectively embeds Washington in the armed forces of 53 countries across the continent, elsewhere in Europe. Research shows the Command’s training programs have precipitated a significant rise in the number of military coups in Africa. As Agee attested, U.S. military bases are a hotbed of CIA spies. Berlin therefore must remain “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” within and without the country, whether Germans like it or not.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/04/09/occupied-nation-how-the-cia-created-modern-germany/

 

 

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