How did Germany manage to exist for more than 70 years without a queer commissioner? Many may be forgiven for not having pondered this question, especially during a pandemic which has decimated the civil rights of a third of the population.

Sven Lehmann, Member of the Green Party, has announced that he wants to make Germany a pioneer in the fight against discrimination against transgender, homosexual and other sexual minorities. “Everyone should be able to live freely, safely and with equal rights,” he declared on Wednesday. Except of course the unvaccinated.

The federal government appointed the Green politician as the first commissioner for the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity. The new government will in future “pursue a progressive queer policy and also align family policy with the social reality of different types of families,” Lehmann announced. The SPD, Greens and FDP had already announced this plan in the coalition agreement.

The fact that nothing like this has ever existed, apparently weighed heavily on some.

“The protection of people on the basis of their sexual and gender identity must be ensured in the Basic Law and the fundamental rights of trans, inter and non-binary people must finally be fully enforced.” That is why Lehmann is planning a national action plan to protect “queer” people together with the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs.

In addition to their diets, federal government officials receive an allowance of around 43 000 euros per year. Lehmann sits in the German Bundestag for the Cologne constituency.

Female crash test dummies or just female dummies?

Germany has been busy cancelling itself proactively: In October last year, Hamburg’s deputy mayor called for “gender-neutral mobility”. The Green politician wanted crash tests in the auto industry to be carried out with female dummies in the future. This already raised the question: When will dummies for transgender people, non-binary people and people defining themselves as queer follow?

Deputy mayor Fegebank demanded that “female” dummies be used. Because although women drive almost only half of the average kilometres covered by men, about half of all road accident victims are female, as the Merkur reported.

The reason for this is not bad female drivers but that new cars are tested with “male” crash test dummies that have a standardised height of 1,75 metres and a weight of 78 kilograms.

Cars are less safe for mostly small and less heavy women, who have to push the seat forward to reach the clutch or the brake, for example, than for the “average man”, who is considered the template for the dummy, according to Fegebank, and female crash test dummies are to be introduced in the Hanseatic city to ensure “gender-neutral mobility”.

According to the Green politician, car manufacturing and accident research should address the differentiated requirements of women, men, old and young people as well as people with disabilities. She said dummies that are equal to the “prototype man” should be crashed as soon as possible.

These “protective” measures from a leftwing coalition in power are deemed necessary in a country which experiences more political violence categorized as “left” than comparable acts from the right spectrum. This has emerged from a response by the federal government to a small question from the AfD parliamentary group, which asked about politically motivated acts of violence.

According to the information, from January to September 2021 there were exactly 836 left-wing politically motivated violent crimes, the majority of which were physical, and 715 right-wing political violent crimes.

Some 94 violent crimes are to be assigned to the phenomenon of “foreign ideology” and 40 to the area of ​​”religious ideology”, a further 786 are not to be assigned at all.

A total of 2471 politically motivated acts of violence were counted from January to September. Leftwing violence is clearly on the rise: According to the government, 3 365 acts in this crime area were recorded in 2020 as a whole, while in 2019 there were 2 832 cases registered.

Conspiracy theories?

Unwanted political, historical, philosophical and scientific interpretations are dismissed by German politicians and the mass media fully in the grip of mass formation psychosis as “conspiracy theories”. They seem to come from the “edge of society”, where, according to the semi-official version, all sorts of dubious thoughts are exchanged.

In truth, it’s the other way around: the most powerful conspiracy theories come from above. Hollywood promotes them, the BBC and CNN, and German politicians and media are trotting out the same fantasies as their Anglo-Saxon “diversity” role models.

The fact that Corona will mutate and thus become less dangerous and that the pandemic will end as soon as a less dangerous variant prevails and infects the population, is currently considered a dangerous “conspiracy theory” repeated by incorrigible opponents of vaccination. They are blocked on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

But this is exactly what Isabella Eckerle, the head of the Center for Viral Diseases at Geneva University Hospital – an eminent virologist – said in the first half of December 2021.

According to German Health Minister, a 2G-Plus rule must apply to access to cafes and restaurants. “Gastronomy is a problem area. You often sit for hours without a mask,” said Lauterbach told RTL on Thursday evening. Many people infected each other with the Omicron virus in these establishments, he said.

Omicron is believed to be even less deadly than flu. But according to Lauterbach, “this assessment is a misconception”. He could not resist the temptation to spread more panic adding that “of the unvaccinated, many will die“.

Lauterbach is the most popular politician in Germany. Surveyed by the opinion research institute infratest dimap for ARD, 66 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the fear monger, ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (60 percent).

It is worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and nevertheless suffered significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021.

As The Experts move the goalposts to surgical or N95 masks, it’s worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and reported significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021

They are literally always wrong pic.twitter.com/3jc2nlFOZX

— IM (@ianmSC) January 5, 2022

freewestmedia.com

The new German coalition government headed up by Chancellor Olaf Scholz is only one week in power but already the signals are pointing to Berlin being more amenable to U.S.-led NATO hostility towards Russia.

The “traffic light” coalition (based on party colours) comprises the Social Democrat Party led by Scholz in partnership with the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. Scholz gave an inaugural address to the Bundestag this week as the new chancellor having replaced Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats after her 16 years in power.

Following Merkel’s reign, which was hallmarked by stability and her dominant personal style, all eyes will be on the new government in Berlin and its impact on transatlantic relations. Scholz, who is relatively unknown, and his administration could hardly be met with a more challenging time given the heightened tensions between, on the one hand, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and the European Union, and on the other, Russia.

Berlin’s new foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (who takes over from Heiko Maas) brings to her post a more vociferous, critical position towards Russia. Baerbock, a leading Green lawmaker, announced this week that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany is being put on hold due to alleged Russian aggression towards Ukraine. The pipeline was already being held up since completion in September by an industrial certification process. But now Baerbock has introduced a geopolitical factor to cancel the project. Before her ministerial post, she was known as a trenchant critic of Nord Stream 2, opposing it because she provocatively claimed, it allowed Russia to “blackmail Europe”, and also apparently on environmental grounds. Ironically, the alternative to Russian gas supply would be the import of American shale gas which is more expensive and dirty owing to its environmentally destructive extraction method. In her latest Nord Stream 2 pronouncement, the German foreign minister is sounding remarkably like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in linking the project’s future to tensions over Ukraine and putative Russian invasion plans.

Baerbock has also been a long-standing advocate of expanding NATO eastwards and of closer transatlantic ties with the United States.

This eastward expansion of the military alliance is exactly what has caused apprehension in Moscow which views the bloc as threatening Russia’s national security from the potential for advanced positioning of nuclear missiles on Russian borders. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has urged U.S. President Joe Biden as well as British and French counterparts to implement legal guarantees to safeguard Russia’s security. Those guarantees would include a prohibition on NATO’s further eastward expansion to include membership access for former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia.

With Baerbock as Germany’s top diplomat, it is likely that Russia’s concerns will be given short shrift. As the strongest political force in the European Union, a more hardline German policy will ramify across the entire EU and reinforce the position of Russophobic members like Poland and the Baltic states.

As for the new chancellor, 63-year-old Scholz was formerly the finance minister in Merkel’s last coalition government. That administration was robustly supportive of the Nord Stream 2 partnership with Russia. Under Merkel, Berlin rebuffed Washington’s objections to the pipeline saying that it was a sovereign matter for Germany. Scholz himself had in the past spoken out against American meddling over Germany’s energy policy. The Biden administration appeared to respect Berlin’s independence on the issue by dropping threats of sanctions against participating companies. That background might suggest that the chancellor’s office would hold Baerbock’s foreign ministry in check.

However, the recent escalation of tensions over Ukraine fuelled by Washington’s claims that Russia is planning to invade the country has hardened Germany’s stance towards Moscow, in particular on the issue of expanding economic sanctions as “severe consequences” for alleged Russian aggression. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed the U.S. claims of invasion plans, but disconcertingly Germany and the rest of the EU have gone along with Washington’s narrative, accepting dubious American “intel” as if good coin, reminiscent of the WMD propaganda leading up the war on Iraq. That paradigm shift suggests a premeditated, orchestrated objective for the U.S. The Europeans have been suitably suckered into the ploy. And, at last, the Nord Stream 2 project is within target of Washington’s policy torpedoes.

In his address to the Bundestag this week, Scholz called for “constructive dialogue” with Russia to “stop the spiral of escalation”. He also called for “mutual understanding”. That may sound like an enlightened policy of diplomatic engagement. But then, disappointingly, Scholz vowed that Germany would “speak with one voice with our European partners and transatlantic allies”. That means Berlin is henceforth deferring to the position of Washington and Kiev in terms of determining response to the accepted narrative of “Russian aggression”.

Whatever the shortcomings of Merkel – she was no radical critic of Washington – but she at least was capable at times of exerting a modicum of independence. Her unwavering support for Nord Stream 2, for example, despite American pressure. Also more recently, it has emerged that Merkel reportedly blocked supplies of NATO weapons to Ukraine much to the annoyance of the Kiev regime.

Olaf Scholz does not come across, at least so far, as a strong leader. His mealy-mouthed talk about “sharing one voice” with the U.S. and “partners” like Ukraine, as well as his ready acceptance of spurious allegations about Russian aggression, indicate that the new Berlin government will be a pliable tool for Washington’s policy of hostility towards Russia.

Historically, it is ominous that the first German overseas military action since 1945 occurred in 1999 under an SPD-Green coalition. That was when Germany joined in the NATO bombing of Serbia. These parties are coalition partners again at another crucial time for Europe.

If there is a new traffic light in Berlin it’s showing no stops for further U.S. and NATO aggression in Europe.

By Diana JOHNSTONE

There was no clear winner in Germany’s Sept. 26 elections. No party has a strong majority, no strong leader is in sight. Weak national leadership has become the model for liberal Western democracy. And weak leadership is unlikely to resist powerful established interests.

To put it more clearly, the forthcoming German government, to be formed by a coalition of parties, is not very likely to rebel against the influence of the pro-U.S. Atlanticist institutions that have directed the policy of the German Federal Republic since it was founded in 1949 under Washington’s auspices. The United States exercises direct and daily influence on German policy-makers in NATO, German media, civil society organizations and personal relationships built up through contacts of all kinds. 

Only two of the five parties in the new Bundestag are at all critical of NATO, and they are on the polar margins: the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on the right and Die Linke (The Left) on the left, outside whichever government emerges. They are the only ones in favor of normalized relations with Russia. Both have at times appealed to neglected East Germans but there is animosity between them.

Which Coalition?

Bundestag composition after 2021 election. (Furfur/Wikimedia Commons)

The election marked an unexpected comeback for the SPD, clearly not out of any burst of enthusiasm but from rejection of the others. The CDU lead candidate Armin Laschet ran a pitifully weak campaign, leading his party to an historic low. During the campaign, a video from 2016, at a time when many East Germans were opposing Merkel’s mass immigration policy, showed Laschet displaying total contempt for his East German compatriots by claiming that the German Democratic Republic (socialist East Germany) “permanently destroyed not only the country but also the minds of the people. …whole swaths of the country have not learned that you have respect for other people.”

This contributed to collapsing support for the CDU in the East.

The leading SPD candidate, Olaf Scholz, was not very exciting either. But he looked good compared to Laschet, so voters unexpectedly fell back to voting for the SPD. Logically, Scholz should head the new government. But the SPD has early on spoken out against a renewal of the “Big Coalition” between SPD and CDU (the GroKo) and the CDU would not like to be in second place.

So the odds are on a “traffic light” coalition between the SPD (red), the Greens and the FDP (liberals, gold or yellow) who got 11.5 percent and 92 seats.

Stop and Go Coalition

Annalena Baerbock (Wikimedia Commons)

Last April, the German Greens were dreaming that they would come in first, as opinion polls then suggested, and their young, inexperienced candidate, Annalena Baerbock, would succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor. In those days, she was sycophantishly interviewed for the Atlantic Council by Fareed Zakaria. For a German who had studied in both the U.S. and the U.K., her English was surprisingly awkward, but as she praised eternal U.S.-German collaboration, she helped it along by echoing a trite phrase or two from Joe Biden.

Biden 2019: “The United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge.”

Baerbock 2021: “We urgently need to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of the problems.”

However, as the campaign proceeded, Baerbock’s utter mediocrity became more and more blatant, enforced by revelations that she had hyped her CV, failed to declare party payments and heavily plagiarized equally boring sources for her book, optimistically titled Now: How we renew our country.

Finally, the Greens fell into third place, with 14.8 percent of the vote and 118 seats. That is not enough to form a coalition majority with either of the two big centrist parties, so if the SPD and CDU don’t get together, the FDP must be part of the equation along with the Greens. This promises domestic policy quarrels from the start, as the FDP wants an austere budget with low taxes and the Greens want the opposite. The FDP is after all, fundamentally a free market business party whereas the Greens want to raise taxes on higher incomes. And their differences do not stop there.

Together Against Russia

Merkel and Putin in Moscow, January 2020. (Russian President/Wikimedia Commons)

But there is one area on which these two runner-up parties can agree: hostility toward Russia. The Merkel government, with its belligerent woman defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has already been an enthusiastic participant in NATO military war game gestures of hostility toward Russia, and a “traffic light” coalition threatens to be even worse.

The leading Green candidate has gone farthest in Russia-bashing, even demanding that Germany refuse to purchase natural gas from Russia via the now-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Considering the growing threat of energy shortages resulting from Germany’s simultaneous rejection of nuclear power (basically out of fear of a Fukushima-type accident) and planned rapid phase-out of coal (for reasons of CO2 emissions), rejection of Russian natural gas is a luxury Germany simply can’t afford. Especially since Germany’s large park of windmills have since last year failed to produce the renewable energy expected when the wind refused to blow.

One might think that the pressing need for Russian gas would incite German business interests to impose a normalization of German-Russian relations. But this does not seem to be happening.

U.S.-led sanctions have decreased Russian-German trade in recent years. And somehow, there is a trend in German ruling circles to forgo normal commercial relations with Russia in favor of extending decisive German influence over countries between Germany and Russia, notably the large, mismanaged, potential economic prize that is Ukraine.

Anglo Attitude in Germany

Under U.S. tutelage for decades, much of the present German ruling class seems to have interiorized the peculiar American imperial attitude, an arrogant power projection draped in political self-righteousness. This characteristic Anglo-American attitude, forged in the British Empire, is currently to be found in Germany and northern Europe, and will find expression in the virtual “Summit for Democracy” which President Biden is convening in December. This is intended to solidify a new ideological Cold War between the Good, led by the United States, and the Evil—those who are not allowed in the club.

Joschka Fischer (Wikimedia Commons)

The community of Democracies will proclaim themselves champions of combating authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights. The countries opposed by these paragons of virtue will be condemned for their sins and can be considered fair game for sanctions, subversion and whatever other cybernetic or military means may induce them to repent and take the path of Western virtue.

Nobody is more permeated with this self-righteousness than the Green Party of Germany. This makes it the perfect partner in a German government that wants to overcome its repentance for World War II and wage a “Good War” – as it did bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 with Green Joschka Fischer as foreign minister.

The Story Tellers

After over 75 years of military and political occupation by the United States, Germany and Japan are obvious candidates for a Washington-led reconstitution of the Axis Powers, opposing Russia and China as in the past, but proclaiming an ideology of anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, human rights, not to mention gender variety and equality.

The fascists felt good about themselves in their day, and the anti-authoritarians can feel good about themselves in theirs. They are helped along by the storytellers not only in the mainstream media but also, for policy-makers in Western governments, by the foundations, the think tanks, financed by a “civil society” that includes big investors in the weapons industry.

A recent strategy paper published by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) outlines a more aggressive German foreign policy. Faced with alleged Russian propaganda and “targeted disinformation” by Russia intended to “damage NATO’s reputation,” the paper calls for creation of a “non-governmental rating agency” to evaluate media. By a funny coincidence, YouTube just expelled the Russian German-language news channel RT-de (which can still be viewed on Internet).

But the DGAP also calls for more determined “action against enemies of democracy in Germany and the EU.” Better still, it demands stronger German interference in Russia’s internal affairs to promote change.

Think tank analysis bases its alarm over “the Russian threat” on a far-fetched analysis of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014. To anyone with any knowledge of the historic background and a bit of common sense, Russia’s moves in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev are perfectly clear and rational.

The U.S. installed an anti-Russian puppet government declaring its desire to join NATO. This was an immediate threat to Russia’s principal long-standing naval base in Crimea, so long as Crimea was part of Ukraine. But since the population of Crimea was largely Russian and had never wanted to be part of Ukraine (it was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 without consulting the population when both were part of the Soviet Union), the easy solution for Russia was to sponsor a referendum in which Crimeans predictably voted to return to Russia.

This peaceful return was then willfully interpreted as a signal that Russia was preparing to invade and conquer its neighbors. The Baltic States, Poland and even German leaders all feign alarm at this preposterous interpretation.

However, even the Greens, who excel in verbal Russia-bashing, do not want Germany to spend the 2 percent of economic output on “defense” as demanded by Washington. When the Germans call for a special EU defense force, they are in an ambiguous position. They do not want the same such force as advocated by the French, whose superior arms, including nuclear weapons, would be dominant. Rather, for the Germans any such force must be closely tied to NATO. In fact, nobody seriously imagines the EU defending itself against Russia, and a more or less independent EU force would surely be earmarked for interventions in the global South or the Balkans, in cahoots with the U.S. and NATO.

The Vanishing Left

Sahra Wagenknecht addresses media. (Die Linke/Flickr)

Of the two marginalized opposition parties, the AfD maintained its strength in two East German states, Saxony and Thüringen, winning 10.3 percent of the vote and 83 seats. As for the Left party, Die Linke , with 4.9 percent of the vote it failed to go over the 5 percent hurdle for Bundestag membership, but got 39 members anyway due to a provision in Germany’s complex voting system which lets a party in if three of its candidates come in first in their conscription. Die Linke did so in Berllin and Leipzig and thus has 39 members in the parliament, including its most popular member, Sahra Wagenknecht, whom much of the party had been attacking throughout the campaign.

Wagenknecht led up to the election by publishing a book entitled Die Selbstgerechten (the Self-Righteous) in which she attacked the contemporary identity politics, woke left and called for a return to traditional left defense of the working class and anti-war policies. The exemplary self-righteous are the Greens, but their example had been adopted so thoroughly by Left party leaders that they felt targeted by Wagenknecht and struck back.

The election was a foreseeable disaster for Die Linke, and Wagenknecht had foreseen it clearly. During the campaign, Linke leaders were enchanted by the imaginary prospect of getting into the government as junior partner in a “red-green-red” coalition between the SPD, the Greens and themselves. To facilitate this unlikely outcome, they spent their time expressing their willingness to set aside their principles out of a realism that was anything but realistic.

The mainstream parties demanded that any party entering the government must be in favor of NATO. Die Linke is formally for its abolition, but leaders made clear they would forget about that.

As a pale copy of the Greens, they lost most of their voters. Notably, the Left party got fewer working class votes than any other party.

In its compromise mood, Die Linke in its campaign did not play up its role as the principal anti-war party in Germany. It failed to pound away at exposing anti-Russian propaganda designed to win public support for the NATO military buildup surrounding Russia.

Only the AfD pointedly asked the German government to clarify details of the preposterous Alexei Navalny tall tale sold to the public to arouse self-righteous indignation against Russia. In a parliamentary question, the AfD asked the government whether, as reported, Bellingcat financed Navalny’s expensive stay in the Black Forest where he made a dishonest propaganda film attacking Vladimir Putin. With some delay, the German government claimed to neither know nor care enough to investigate.

The Navalny story is crammed with improbabilities, blatant contradictions and strong indications of being the creation of British intelligence. A left party concerned with preserving peaceful relations should have been leading the challenge to get to the truth. It should have been speaking out against German participation in plans to send military forces to the Pacific to annoy China. But instead, Left leaders yearned to be accepted among the self-righteous.

The next German government will be self-righteous without them.

consortiumnews.com

By Diana JOHNSTONE

The core of the American empire is its domination of Europe, directly through NATO and indirectly through a web of treaties, institutions and elite organizations which develop policy consensus and select upcoming leaders in European countries. Pervasive American influence has caused drastically deteriorating relation between Western European countries and Russia.

Russia is a great nation with an important place in European history and culture. Washington’s policy is to expel Russia from Europe in order to secure its own domination of the rest of the continent.

This policy entails creating hostilities where none exist and disrupting what should be fruitful relations between Russia and the West.

It is quite obvious to all serious observers that trade between resource-rich Russia and highly industrialized Germany is a natural fit, beneficial to both – and not least to Germany. A symbol of that beneficial cooperation is the Nordstream 2 pipeline, now nearing completion, which would provide Germany and other European customers with much-needed natural gas at reasonable prices.

The U.S. is determined to block the completion and operation of Nordstream 2. The obvious motives are to block “Russian influence,” to sell Germany more expensive gas from U.S. fracking and eventually to weaken support for Putin in the hope of replacing him with an American puppet, like the drunken Boris Yeltsin who ruined Russia in the 1990s.

But for those Europeans who prefer to reject Nordstream on the basis of high-sounding moral posturing, an abundance of largely fictional pretexts are available: Crimea’s vote to rejoin Russia, falsely portrayed as a military takeover; the incredible saga of the non-poisoning of Alexei Navalny; and the latest: an obscure 2014 explosion in the Czech Republic which is suddenly attributed to the same two Russian spies who allegedly failed to poison the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018.

According to the liberal doctrine justifying the capitalist “free market,” economic self-interest leads people to make rational choices. It follows that many sensible observers have placed their hopes for effective opposition to Washington’s policy of isolating Russia on the self-interest of German politicians and especially of German business leaders.

German Elections in September: Pragmatism vs. Self-Righteousness

Next September, Germans will hold parliamentary elections which will decide who is to be the next Chancellor, succeeding Angela Merkel. On foreign policy, the choice may be between pragmatism and moral posturing, and it is not now clear which will prevail.

Aggressive self-righteousness has its candidate, Annalena Baerbock, chosen by the Green Party to be the next Chancellor. Baerbock’s virtue signaling starts with scolding Russia.

Baerbock is 40 years old, just about a year younger that the Green Party itself. She is the mother of two small children, a former trampoline champion, who smiles even while speaking – a clean image of happy, innocent fitness. She learned fluent English in Florida in a high school exchange, studied international law at the London School of Economics, and advocates (surprise, surprise) a strong partnership with the Biden administration to save the climate and the world in general.

Right after Baerbock was selected as Green candidate, a Kantar poll showed her leading a wide field of candidates with 28 percent, just ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) at 27 percent. But more surprising was a poll of 1,500 business leaders run by the business weekly Wirtschafts Woche, which found that Annalena Baerbock was by far their favorite.

Poll results:

Annalena Baerbock: 26.5%

Christian Lindner, FDP: 16.2%

  Armin Laschet, CDU: 14.3%

Olaf Scholz, SPD: 10.5%

Undecided: 32.5%

It is natural that the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party) should score well among business executives. Christian Lindner also advocates harsh sanctions against Russia, indicating that business leaders prefer the two most anti-Russian of the lot. Of course, they may be primarily motivated by domestic issues.

The CDU candidate, Armin Laschet, in contrast, is a reasonable moderate, calling for friendlier relations with Russia. But he is said to lack personal charisma.

Two other parties were mentioned in the Kantar poll. Die Linke, or Left Party scored 7 percent. Its best-known members, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar Lafontaine, are outspoken in their criticism of NATO and aggressive U.S. foreign policy. But Linke party leaders who pin their rather frail hopes on being included as junior partner in some theoretical left coalition shy away from such disqualifying positions.

The “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) party favors normalizing relations with Russia, but since it is labeled on the far right, no other party would dare join it in a coalition.

German governments are put together by coalitions. The Greens have positioned themselves to go either left (their origins) or right. The historic decline of the Social Democrats (SPD) and the weakness of the Left Party make the prospects of a Green coalition with the CDU more likely. Such a coalition might include either the SPD or the FDP, depending on the vote.

In one Western country after another, opposition to hostile NATO policy finds opposition on either the left or the right margins of the political spectrum, divided by too many other issues ever to join together. So the conformist center dominates, and as the traditionally dominant CDU and SPD have lost support, the Greens are successfully bidding to occupy that center.

The Green Program: R2P and the Great Reset

Baerbock is a perfect product of transatlantic leader selection. In between jumping up and down on the trampoline, her professional interest has always been international relations from an Anglo-American angle, including her masters degree in international law at the LSE in London.

Her initiation into transatlantic governance includes membership in the German Marshall Fund, the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders Program and the Europe/Transatlantic Board of the Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation.

On that basis, she has risen rapidly to the leadership of the Green Party, with very little political and no administrative experience.

The Greens are in perfect harmony with the Biden administration’s new ideological crusade to remake the world on the American model. Echoing Russiagate, and with no evidence, the Greens accuse Russia of malevolent interference in Europe, while advocating their own beneficent interference in Russian domestic policy on behalf of some theoretical “democratic opposition.”

“Russia has increasingly turned into an authoritarian state and is increasingly undermining democracy and stability in the EU and in the common neighborhood,” their electoral program asserts. At the same time, the Greens “want to support and intensify the exchange” with the democracy movement in Russia, which they claim “is growing stronger for human rights, democracy and the rule of law.”

The Greens favor rigid sanctions against Russia and a complete stop of Nord Stream 2: “The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project is not only harmful in terms of climate and energy policy, but also geostrategically – especially for the situation in Ukraine – and must therefore be stopped.”

The Greens also demand that the Russian government implement its Minsk agreement commitments to end the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, ignoring the fact that it is the Kiev government refusal to carry out the agreements that is preventing a solution.

Baerbock is all for “humanitarian intervention.” The Greens thus propose changing United Nations rules to make it possible to bypass the Great Power veto (held by the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K. and France) in order to use military intervention to “stop genocide.” Her enthusiasm for R2P (the Responsibility to Protect, used so effectively in Libya to destroy the country) should resonate happily in a Biden administration where former U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is on the lookout for victims to rescue.

Needless to say, the Greens have not forgotten the environment, and see “climate neutrality” as the “great opportunity for Germany as an industrial location.” The development of “climate protection technologies” should “provide impetus for new investments.” Their program calls for creation of a “digital euro,” secure mobile “digital identities” and “digital administrative services.”

Indeed, the Green economic program sounds very much like the Great Reset advocated by the World Economic Forum at Davos, with a new economy centered on climate change, artificial intelligence and digitalization of everything. International capitalism needs innovation to stimulate productive investment, and climate change provides the incentive. As a World Economic Forum young leader, Baerbock has surely learned this lesson.

Joschka Fischer Champion Turncoat

Forty years ago, the German Greens called for an end of the Cold War and condemned the “enemy images,” the negative stereotypes applied to Germany’s former enemies. Today, the Greens promote “enemy images” of the Russians and are primary contributors to the new Cold War.

Baerbock has not had to betray Green ideals – they had already been thoroughly betrayed before she even joined the party 22 years ago by Joschka Fischer.

Fischer was a fast-talking former radical who led the “realist” wing of the German Greens. His nomination as German foreign minister in 1998 was enthusiastically welcomed by top U.S. officials despite the fact that he was a high school dropout who had spent his youth as a leftist street fighter in Frankfurt, not far from U.S. bases.

In March 1999, foreign minister Fischer proved his worth by leading Germany and his “pacifist” Green Party into the NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia. A turncoat is especially valuable in such circumstances. Many principled anti-war Greens left the party, but opportunists flooded in. Fischer could strike the appropriate chords: his reason for going to war was “never again Auschwitz!” – completely irrelevant to the problems of Kosovo but morally intimidating.

From his mentor, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Fischer learned the art of the revolving door, and in 2007 went into the consulting business with his own firm, counseling businesses on how to relate to political circumstances in various countries. Opportunism can be an art. He also collected lucrative speaking engagements and honorary doctoral degrees from universities around the world – he who never got his high school diploma. From his youthful squat, he has ascended to a luxury villa in the best part of Berlin, with the fifth of his series of attractive wives.

As he got richer, Fischer took his distance from politics and the Greens, but the Baerbock candidacy seems to have revived his interest. On April 24, Der Spiegel published a joint interview with Fischer and leading FDP politician Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, entitled “We must hit Russia where it really hurts.” Fischer hinted that his meeting with Lambsdorff foreshadowed the possible integration of the FDP into a Green coalition.

Meanwhile, in France

Across the Rhine in France, the French Greens, Europe Ecologie les Verts (EELV), have also been profiting from disenchantment with the established parties, notably the vanishing Socialists and the weakened Republicans. Greens have won several mayors’ offices thanks to poorly attended elections during the pandemic. They have caused some stir by condemning Christmas trees (as victims of being chopped down); by de-sponsoring an aeroclub on the grounds that kids should no longer dream of flying (bad for the environment); and by contributing two and a half million euros of public funds to construction of a giant Mosque in Strasbourg sponsored by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to promote Islam in Europe (Strasbourg already has half a dozen small mosques serving its Turkish immigrant population).

The EELV candidate for French presidential elections in 2022, Yannick Jadot, is inspired by Baerbock’s current popularity to think big. In an April 15 column in Le Monde, Jadot wrote:

“The arrival of the Greens in power in Germany in the fall of 2021, if combined with that of the ecologists in France in 2022, will contribute to creating the conditions for the emergence of [a strong European] policy of foreign affairs and common defense…”

Jadot titled his ed op: “Authoritarian regimes understand nothing but the relationship of force.” “All they understand is force” is the stale cliché forever trotted out by powers that themselves prefer using force.

Jadot complains of “the growing aggressivity of the authoritarian regimes that rule China, Russia and even Turkey” and the fact that they “fragilize our democracies by spreading false news” or “buying up our key enterprises”. (This is a good joke, since the U.S. notoriously intervened against France’s nuclear energy producer Alstom to facilitate its purchase by General Electric. (^See The American Trap, by Frédéric Pierucci.)

One thing the French and German Greens have in common is Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has been in and out of both parties, pushing both of them into the arms of NATO and Washington. But a difference between them is that while the German Greens are in a position to go into a coalition on either the right or the left, the French Greens are still identified with the left, and the left has very slight chances of winning the next French presidential elections, even with a khaki-green front-runner.

Biden has announced that the 21^st century is the century of competition between the United States and China. For the U.S., it must be about competition, never about cooperation. Europe is not in the running; it lost long ago. The role of Europe is to be the follower, so that the United States can be the leader. The European Greens aspire to lead the followers, wherever Washington leads them.

consortiumnews.com

Many people couldn’t help but laugh when Biden told the Boris Johnson on March 26 that the USA and it’s NATO allies should create “an infrastructure plan to rival the Belt and Road Initiative” post haste. What would such a program look like? How would it be funded when the USA is so embarrassingly bankrupt? Who among the nations of the world would ever consider buying a ticket onto such a sinking ship?

It took a few weeks for details to finally emerge, but by the end of the April 22-23 Climate Summit hosted by Biden, John Kerry and Anthony Blinken, it has become abysmally clear what delusions possessed the poor president.

After having announced a 52% carbon reduction policy below 2005 levels by 2050, Biden swiftly committed the USA to what he called the most comprehensive infrastructure plan in history with a $2 trillion Green New Deal-like infrastructure program designed to revive the policy of America’s 32nd president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mirroring FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Biden has even planned a Civilian Climate Corps, along with a Green Climate Bank to parallel FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

The catch? Biden’s version was written by the same financial technocrats that FDR went to war with 80 years ago and unlike FDR’s version, the modern green version of the New Deal will have the effect of destroying the productive industrial powers and living standards of the nation once green grids are built.

A Comparison of Two New Deals

Where FDR’s New Deal was premised the removal of Wall Street’s hegemony over national sovereignty via the Pecora Commission, Glass-Steagall, and SEC, Biden’s Green New Deal is shaped by Central Bankers’ Climate Compacts and green finance strategies authored by the richest oligarchs on the planet like the Bloomberg-Carney Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. In fact, it shouldn’t come as a coincidence that the first legislative effort to establish a Green New Deal, was not American at all, but was submitted by Britain’s Lord Adair Turner in 2009 while he was acting head regulator of the City of London which remains the nerve center of world finance today as it was a century ago. Up until 2019, Lord Turner was the chair of George Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking- an organization devoted to making Huxley’s Brave New World a practical reality and upon which he still serves as Senior Fellow.

Where FDR created large scale infrastructure megaprojects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, Rural Electrification Project, Hoover Dam, Colorado River Basin programs, and St Lawrence Seaway which all had the effect of leap frogging to higher rates of industrial power than at any other time in history, Biden’s Green New Deal professes to do the opposite. Yes, jobs will be created in insulating a few million homes and building windmills and solar panels, however those jobs will be short lived. For once they are built there will be nothing left to do but maintain the solar panels with unionized squeegees in an imaginary world of no change and zero-technological growth that might look good in computer models, but has very little correspondence with humanity’s actual requirements for long term survival.

It appears to be genuinely believed by ivory tower technocrats managing the Biden Administration that financing a green infrastructure program won’t be difficult. The 2020-21 pandemic showed the enlightened elite that money can always just be printed from thin air. The U.S. debt has already risen to 27 trillion, so what’s a few trillion more?

Where that fails, just compensate by imposing Carbon Pricing onto all carbon sinners. Many nations have already gotten onboard that bandwagon with Sweden, Lichtenstein and Canada leading the race charging $129, $96, and $91 per ton of carbon emissions respectively. Coming out of Biden’s Climate Summit, Canada’s Justin Trudeau committed to raising this cost to $170/ton by 2030 while U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy announced will soon rise to $56/ton in the USA (a seven fold increase from the $1-7/ton price under Trump).

Additionally, cap and trade schemes are always there for wealthy polluters to purchase unused carbon quotas from poorer polluters at home or abroad, so revenue can certainly be found that way. If all else fails, just raise taxes.

In case poor nations of the world might feel like avoiding this sinking ship in order to work more closely with Russia and China, Biden was kind enough to announce a new international green finance strategy to assist the developing sector in their decarbonizing aspirations.

The Problem with Green Energy

For those who doubt the idea that the USA can or even should meet those 2035 carbon reduction targets, they might have solid reasons for their assumptions. For one thing, the USA currently relies upon 1,852 coal fired power plants which would mean that 11 plants would need to be shut down every month until 2035. What would compensate for this loss of capacity?

Obviously not nuclear, since that has become politically-radioactive in the minds of most of Biden’s liberal constituency.

Would it be green energy that fills the gap? Considering that green energy is magnitudes more costly, and unreliable relative to fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear power, that is also unlikely. The truth is, as Germany discovered recently, shutting down coal and nuclear at home, simply forces a nation to keep fossil fuel plants running as back up for the unreliable green energy grids while increasing imports of coal/natural gas-driven electricity from other countries. In Germany’s case, imports of nuclear and coal-generated electricity from Poland and the Czech Republic increased by 60% since the nation’s industrial base understood that green energy sources could never meet it’s needs. In the USA’s case, Mexico would most likely be the top supplier. Across the European Union where most nations have entirely submitted to pressure to “decarbonize” by 2050, coal, gas and crude oil imports now make up 2/3rds of all energy imports.

Lest we forget the oft-overlooked fuel source of bioethanol, over 40% of the USA’s corn production currently gets burned in the form of biodiesel and ethanol while billions starve and suffer food shortages around the world. The high cost of being green.

Geopolitical Incompetence 101

You might now be asking: Why would the USA which has admittedly chosen to define itself as an existential rival to Russia and China to the point of risking a full-scale nuclear war, be so intent on subverting its own economic foundations at a moment that both Russia and China (and over 136 nations of the world) have chosen to move on toward a diametrically opposing paradigm of large-scale infrastructure growth and scientific progress?

If we take the old adage “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” as a truism, then signs for a bright future for the Green New Dealing western community poor indeed.

Since Biden’s first days as president of the USA, the entire fabric of U.S. governance from top to bottom was completely overhauled in the form of omnibus executive orders designed to make the global climate emergency the top priority for all branches and levels of government- economic, military, intelligence, health and beyond. Under this green geostrategic paradigm, vast starvation, migration patterns, and wars have much less to do with imperial abuse, and everything to do with global warming.

Biden created new directorates of climate policy with offices in the White House, demanded that the Director of National Intelligence and State Department overhaul their governance around dealing with the climate crisis and even passed executive orders banning all oil and natural gas drilling and exploration projects on land or offshore where government land is held. Biden even went so far as to assert that 30% of the entire surface of the USA would be brought off limits to all development by 2030.

Sustained vs Sustainable Development

Compare this with China which has simultaneously committed to building green energy systems without deluding itself into thinking that fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro could be taken out of their energy baskets.

In fact, the primary fuel sources driving the large-scale development corridors of the New Silk Road are considered “dirty” sources verboten by the west like coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear and hydro. This fact even drove a delusional Biden to attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to speed up their phase out of coal by 2030 to which the Chinese leader responded “no”.

Biden had earlier described China as the primary climate offender of the world saying: “China is far and away the largest emitter of carbon in the world, and through its massive Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is also annually financing billions of dollars of dirty fossil fuel energy projects across Asia and beyond.” He even demanded that leaders of the west “rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects, so that China can’t outsource pollution to other countries.”

In his remarks at the Climate Summit, President Putin re-emphasized to the western puppet heads of state who were busy massaging each other and chanting “build back better” in unison, that “green growth” should not occur at the expense of “sustainable growth”. Simply put, Putin is committed to putting people before ivory tower energy policies that may demand human sacrifices at the alter of Gaia, and emphasized Russia’s commitment to nuclear power, raising its fertility rate, raising average life expectancy which has already grown from 56 years/male and 61/female in the mid-1990s to 70 years today and plans are to increase that to 78 years by 2030.

The irony about all of this is that China and Russia are increasingly adopting a system of political economy which is fundamentally OPEN and driven by scientific and technological progress without any supposed limits on its potential for improvement. This paradigm is fundamentally in harmony with the original New Deal policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt who himself envisioned a post-imperial world of win-win cooperation (in opposition to a dystopic closed-system world envisioned by Winston Churchill). The USA on the other hand, which professes to be the heir to the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt has come to embody the worst aspects of the Malthusian elite managing the British Empire for centuries which FDR devoted his life to stop.

It was this empire that considered it “scientifically necessary” to subjugate India, China, Ireland, Africa and every other rival to lives of poverty, war, famine and stupidification.

This was the empire which the republican revolution of 1776 aimed at overthrowing- not only from the Americas, but internationally. It is this same empire which was nearly destroyed by the Russian-U.S. alliance that shaped much of the 19^th century and which again arose during WW2 as FDR and Stalin recognized they had much more in common with each other than either had with arch-racist Churchill. The British Empire was always run as a “closed system”, scientifically managed intelligence operation following Malthusian principles and adherence to strict mathematical equilibrium. In this formula for domination, military forces have typically been less important than control of nerve centers of finance, narcotics and other levers of corruption mental and spiritual corruption than many people- even among the most educated historians realize.

And so we have come full circle. The gods have certainly made those elites managing the west mad, but whether or not the entire world will have to pay the price of their insanity yet remains to be seen.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has proposed that governments around the world require payment of at least a uniform “global minimum corporate tax.” A motivation for Yellen’s push for a global minimum corporate tax is fear that the Biden administration’s proposed increase in the US corporate tax will cause some American corporations to flee the US for countries with lower corporate taxes.

President Biden wants to increase corporate taxes to help pay for his so-called infrastructure plan. The plan actually spends more on “progressive” priorities, including a down payment on the Green New Deal, than on infrastructure.

Much of the spending will benefit state-favored businesses. For example, the plan provides money to promote manufacturing and electric vehicles. So, the idea is to raise taxes on all corporations and then use some of the received tax payments to subsidize government-favored businesses and industries.

The only way to know the highest valued use of resources is by seeing what goods and services consumers voluntary choose to spend their money on. A system where the allocation of resources is based on the preferences of politicians and bureaucrats — who use force to get their way — will be less efficient than a system where consumers control the allocation of resources.

Thus, the greater role government plays in the economy the less prosperous the people will be — with the possible exception of the governing class and those who make their living currying favor with the rulers.

Yellen’s global corporate tax proposal will no doubt be supported by governments of many European Union (EU) countries, as well as the globalist bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For years, these governments and their power-hungry OECD allies have sought to create a global tax cartel.

The goal of those supporting global minimum taxes enforced by a global tax agency is to prevent countries from lowering their taxes. Lowering corporate and other taxes is one way countries are able to attract new businesses and grow their economies. For example, after Ireland lowered its corporate taxes, it moved from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to having one of the EU’s strongest economies. Also, American workers and investors benefited from the 2017 tax reform’s reduction of corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Yellen and her pro-global tax counterparts deride tax competition between countries as a “race to the bottom.” In fact, tax competition is a race to the top for the countries whose economies benefit from new investments, and for the workers and consumers who benefit from new job opportunities and new products. In contrast, a global minimum corporate tax will raise prices and lower wages, while incentivizing politicians to further increase the minimum.

A global minimum corporate tax will also set a precedent for imposition of other global minimum taxes on individuals. This scheme may even advance the old Keynesian dream of a global currency. The Biden administration is already taking steps toward a global currency by asking the International Monetary Fund to issue more special drawing rights (SDRs).

Global tax and fiat currency systems will only benefit the world’s political and financial elites. In contrast, regular people across the world benefit from limited government, free markets, sound money, and reduced or eliminated taxes.

ronpaulinstitute.org

‘Modernity’ and the Middle East historically have never made for comfortable bed-fellows. Nor has this tense co-habitation been an uplifting experience; far from it – it has been hugely disruptive. It has encompassed enforced population transfers, the disembedding of people from community, from culture and from their land. It has been accompanied by episodes of mandated secularism, even extending to requiring obligatory modes of western dress. It saw the 19C Islamic Renaissance overshadowed by westification, old myths gone and Islam hanging on in the 1920s by its merest finger nails – and with the regions’ youngsters captivated by the lures of an alien socialism.

Today, the western Establishment is implementing a double re-boot to its dilapidating legitimising myth. They call it a ‘Re-set’. It is indeed a subsequent, ‘downloaded’ uprate of its operating system – no longer so much focussed on democracy and freedom across the globe; that narrative is being quietly retired, following the divisive November U.S. elections.

No, an altruistic West today is leading a massed cavalry charge to ‘save our planet’ from climate change. This is updated western ‘modernity’. Moreover, Establishment ‘values’ have been upgraded in line with its new mission. The new, more ‘sensitive’ Establishment operative is fiercely opposed to ‘white supremacy’, to racial and social ‘inequity’, and otherwise wholly committed to the Green Agenda and to enforcing Human (gender and identity) Rights across the board.

This represents a huge shift from the small team at the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) who, in the early 1940s, sought an American imperialism based, not on the discredited British or French literal colonialism, but one rooted in virtue-signalling universal values, and backed by massive fire-power.

A quiet ‘revolution’ amongst the élites – is it not? Yes; and a big shift too from the ethos of those who originally funded the CFR (Financiers Rockefeller and JP Morgan) – ‘Barons’ of rugged, super-sized ‘frontier’ capitalism.

Today, even neoliberal Wall Street is being ‘green-washed’. It is now doing socially, environmentally and financially responsible investing (ESG). And since Green is the narrative, so is the wave of pro-ESG investing which every single bank is pitching to its clients because – well, you know – it’s the socially, environmentally and financially responsible thing to be doing (sarcasm). It turns out that the most popular holdings of all those virtue signalling ESG funds are companies such as. … Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon, for which one would be hard pressed to explain how their actions do anything that is of benefit for the environment.

What might this mindset shift portend for the region? Will much change? Nominally, the American-led order will change, but control will stay. Only it will be a climate-based control through rules on CO₂ emissions; a global framework for health and pandemics; and a Central Bank regulatory framework for a digital monetary system.

Should this ‘Re-set’ succeed – and that is by no means assured – its potential disruption to the Middle East region may rival that of the earlier 19^th century turmoil:

“ … the U.S. has a variety of “tools” at its disposal to enforce its climate goals on the world. Biden already speaks of the use of carbon tariffs, fees or quotas on carbon-intensive goods from countries that are “failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations” …

“Climate would thus provide the Biden administration with an argument to pursue Donald Trump’s protectionist aims by other means. As Biden put it during his campaign: “Countries that fail to meet their climate responsibilities won’t be allowed to erode global progress with cheap, carbon-dirty goods”. A hard line against “carbon-dirty goods” – would thus be a way to “protect American jobs” … But there is much more in the toolbox. Climate goals provide ample justification for strong interventions into the domestic politics of nations, including support for selected parties, social movements and NGOs”.

“ …The simple fact is that developing countries need energy and they are expanding their fossil fuel infrastructure accordingly. This can be seen clearly from the construction of oil and gas pipelines. Will the U.S. under Biden attempt to stop these projects in the name of saving the climate?”.

Alexis de Tocqueville would have well-understood the meaning to this dumb, slow march of incremental global regulation across climate, health and rights. Writing in 1835, he predicted that society would fall into a new kind of servitude which “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules”, which “does not tyrannise but compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the Sheppard”.

Some Middle Eastern states may sit on the side-lines, waiting to see whether a forced return to a continuation of the U.S. hegemonic agenda really is feasible today; and to await too, a coming epic climax to this struggle – as resistance builds. For the reality is that Euro-U.S. authority is wafer-thin; its people deeply divided; its systems decried as rigged; and as multiple crises are easily visible on the horizon.

To re-establish a global imperial class the Biden team would have to force a psychologically climacteric backdown onto the Russia-China-Iran axis – one which (like the Cold War outcome) would seem to vindicate the western update to its ‘operating system’. This, however, does not seem a likely prospect.

Some Gulf States, which already have embraced a western post-modernity, are going down the ‘Davos’ Re-set roadmap: concentrating their economies within a tight, controlling circle; maximising centralised operationality. But above all, they have embraced the Davos mantra of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in which AI, robots and Tech change the world (as a supply-side ‘miracle’).

Let’s just pause there a moment: What is going on?

Well, when U.S. Big Tech started, its platforms were tools that might help humans communicate more easily and more conveniently. Nothing more. Then things changed. Firstly, they found that their surveillance of everything their users watched, or in which they showed any interest (or evidenced an altered emotional state), allowed the platforms to know the individual perfectly – and, then secondly, from that, to predict behaviour. It was only one short step beyond to understanding that if individuals were so predictable, and would unerringly respond to the platform’s psychological cues, they could ‘nudge’ their behaviour and beliefs. They were getting mind control without human intervention and it was done by the algorithms.

The point here is that the process was making the oligarchs fantastically rich through managing complex mind-control that they could sell. In short, the process, the AI, was all. Users were just its fodder.

And now, this Platform AI approach is being extended to the economy. We stand at the very “edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance”, the CEO of the world’s biggest Hedge Fund, Blackrock, asserts. CO₂ emissions are being monetized and a vast financial machinery created, tying asset valuations to parameters such as ‘carbon intensity’, ‘sustainability indices’, and to the new ‘value variables’, such as how many or few LBGTQ are employed. Once costed, they will be traded and futures bought and sold.

In the same way that social platforms of today allow the young to virtue signal to ‘friends’, and through the illusion of likes and thumbs up emojis, to feel to be a part of some ‘real’ community of the like-minded, so concomitantly, the same principles of using AI mind control to shuffle ESG variables will allow Wall Street Funds to present to each investor that particular virtue-image of a company which AI determines he or she would most like to see.

With western economies becoming more and more make-believe, this represents a brilliant hook with which to gin-up investors into believing they are fixing the world by investing in “ESG“, when instead they are just making Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon richer. Maybe this playing of a virtual economic ESG ‘game’ will become as addictive as Fortnite.

“After all, who can possibly be against fixing the climate, even if it costs quadrillions … or rather, especially if it costs quadrillions – because in one fell swoop, central banks assured themselves a carte blanche to print as much money as they would ever need, because who would refuse … if it was to make sure future generations have a better life?

“This week the former chief investment officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, wrote an op-ed in USA Today admitting that Wall Street is greenwashing the financial world, making sustainable investing merely PR – a distraction. “The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it””.

In other words, as existing market bubbles falter, and eventually pop, we will need a new bubble – a ‘green bubble’ of sustainable investing (until that too, crashes). But there is, too, a darker side to this Tech ‘gaming’. It is that algorithms are rapidly becoming the Ends. It is they who determine how to incentivise us, and to ‘nudge us’ towards behaviour that gives financial gain to the platform oligarchs. This metamorphosis is absolutely implicit in the ‘Davos’ agenda. Robots, AI and machine vision and recognition will advance and predominate, with most humans being relegated to paid ‘gardening leave’ (perhaps until dispensed with altogether, as machines assume human qualities and become trans-human).

These aspects may seem far off to those living in the region, and may not unduly worry them. But this should:

Proponents of green policies have long warned (since before the 2016 U.S. elections) that the failure of investors to understand the radical impact of a switch from old (democracy spreading) values to ‘Saving the Planet’ has led to a huge overvaluation of fossil fuel-linked assets – based on investors’ assumptions that growth in worldwide consumption of these latter fuels must continue – and that governments will take only baby-steps to lessen it. Yet, a rapid transition to C02-free energy sources, potentially would leave behind a mountain of ‘stranded fossil fuel assets’, which would have to be written off because their underlying real value has evaporated.

In 2015, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said:

Changes in policy, technology and physical risks could prompt a reassessment of the value of a large range of assets. The speed at which such re-pricing occurs, is uncertain; and could be decisive for financial stability … While a given physical manifestation of climate change – a flood or storm – may not directly affect a corporate bond’s value, policy action to promote the transition towards a low-carbon economy could spark a fundamental reassessment … [A] wholesale reassessment of prospects, especially if it were to occur suddenly – could potentially destabilize markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallization of losses, and a persistent tightening of financial conditions.

In 2019, Carney, while still Bank of England governor, practically called upon investors to drop their financial exposure to fossil fuel-connected assets. In a BBC interview on January 30 that year, he highlighted the threat to pension funds, warning that:

Up to 80% of global coal assets and up to half the world’s proven oil reserves could become stranded assets as the world moves to curb carbon emissions and [as] supplies of clean, renewable energy continue to replace fossil fuels.

Well, Carney is a known Davos devotee; yet nevertheless, the ‘transition towards a low-carbon economy’ has now arrived. Or at least is being promised by Biden et al, as the means by which the U.S. can re-invent itself, and reimpose its global leadership (irrespective of how much sense it makes to understand this one variable, CO₂, as the almost sole determinant for climate change).

Whether or not this transition serves Biden’s leadership ambitions is one thing. The main question is whether it will ‘save’ the global economy, or crash it (as Carney hints, might be a real possibility).

Where California goes today, the rest of the United States and much of the Western world goes tomorrow. But what we are now seeing in America’s most populous state is the complete internal collapse of the entire liberal progressive civilization and the society that has most frantically tried to fulfill it

For well over a hundred years, California, the self-styled “Golden State” has trail-blazed  the future of America especially through the two famously American industries of aerospace and motion pictures. Telecommunications, computers and Artificial Intelligence are now led from Silicon Valley and the state has dominated the national politics of the United States too.

California rapidly grew into the wealthiest and largest population US state. It has produced two two-term presidents (Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan), one of the most important Chief Justices of the Supreme Court (Earl Warren) and the likely next president – current Vice President Kamala Harris if 78-year-old Joe Biden cannot complete his term.

From 1928 to 2004, 14 out of 19 winning presidential election tickets included someone from either California or Texas and Biden’s choice of Harris put California back at the heart of national electoral politics last year.

Politically, California remains rock solid liberal. It has not elected a single Republican to national or statewide office since reelecting incumbent Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. In 2016, then-Governor Jerry Brown notoriously notoriously handed out state accreditation and driving licenses to untold hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, secure in the knowledge that they would all vote Democrat and so it proved. Registered Democrats now hold a 46 percent to 24 percent advantage over registered Republicans statewide.

California also holds a cast-iron grip on the national Democratic leadership in Congress through House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her key allies such as Congressman Adam Schiff, whose farcical bungles in the two impeachments of President Donald Trump did not dent his immutable position as one of Pelosi’s most youthful favored sons (he is merely 60) at all.

Yet now, California is in terminal collapse and crisis. Governor Gavin Newsom, farcically promoted by the national Mainstream Media (MSM) as a heroic White Knight in Shining Armor in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring has been exposed even in his own state as a catastrophic bungler and hypocrite who has never had a clue what he was – or more usually was not – doing. As I write, California’s sick and tired citizens are close to providing the 1.5 million signatures necessary to pull Newsom into what would certainly be a chaotic recall election.

California was also ravaged last year by the worst wild fires in its history. The slavish media – told what to think by the mindless Los Angeles Times (once a great newspaper) and even more infantile San Francisco Chronicle – bent over backwards to avoid acknowledging the real causes but they have been exhaustively documented.

Witless romantic Green environmental policies scrapped the centuries old, wise practices of creating firebreaks in forests between clumps of trees that would limit fire outbreaks in hot weather. Far from “protecting the trees” and wildlife, as the kneejerk Greens demanded, the ending of windbreak spaces instead allowed forest fires to blaze on an unprecedented scale and at record speed.

At the same time, multiple millions of people sweated in even luxury suburbs through the rolling heat waves without any air conditioning relief because the state electric grid -another victim of ignorant Green prejudice falsely masquerading as “science” – repeatedly collapsed, unable to generate the necessary reliable requisite power levels at vital times.

Los Angeles, the state’s largest city and arguably the most populous now in the United States, has become a byword for violent crime and especially the stronghold of the enormous, ultraviolent and rapidly growing MS 13 organization, routinely mislabeled as a mere “gang” in media reports. MS 13 has up to 50,000 members worldwide of whom at least 10,000, officially, and probably twice as many according to the private assessments of many police officers are in LA.

The Trump administration had remarkable success – again unacknowledged in the liberal media – in deporting many thousands of MS 13 members. However, President Joe Biden has already ensured with his initial Executive Orders that the old open border policies of both Democratic presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and Republican ones (Ronald Reagan and both George Bush’s) is being restored so they can flood back in again.

San Francisco – America’s “anything goes” city – is in even worse shape. Its most famous, historically popular and beautiful stylish locations are now swamped with aggressive, unsanitary street people who openly urinate and defecate in the streets. Public services, long superb, are now appalling.

Even the mindless liberal suburban classes who have relentlessly voted for and imposed these catastrophic polices over the past 40 and more years are now fleeing California as property values crash and taxes become too crushing even for them.

If California continues to trail-blaze the future for the rest of the United States, that future is now clear: It is a high taxation society with a huge, impoverished, unemployed and unemployable destitute class where the middle class is annihilated, organized gangs and general chaotic street crime including muggings, rapes and murders metastasize in all major urban areas and gangs more numerous and heavily armed than the police operate openly with impunity.

It is a society where unlimited abortion on demand to and even beyond the point of birth is acclaimed as a “moral” imperative supposedly superior to all the Ten Commandments.

For California now fulfills Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s nightmare vision in his prophetic masterpiece “The Possessed” or “The Devils ” as to what unlimited liberalism must inevitably create – if not stopped in its tracks and rolled back.

As goes California, so goes the rest of the United States: For a hundred years, since the infant silent movie industry entranced the entire world before and during World War I, that simple mantra has held true.

But if America’s future now has no future – what future can the rest of America look forward to?