This is about neoconservatives (advocates for expanding the U.S. empire) and the empire’s billionaires who hire them to increase the market-values of their primary corporate stocks: armaments-producers such as Lockheed Martin, extraction firms such as ExxonMobil, and high-tech firms such as Google. It is about the individuals who control the U.S. Government and the Governments in its colonies such as Germany.
An article on 1 April 2024 by the pre-eminent economist Michael Hudson, titled “Germany as Collateral Damage in America’s New Cold War”, opened:
The dismantling of German industry since 2022 is collateral damage in America’s geopolitical war to isolate China, Russia and allied countries whose rising prosperity and self-sufficiency is viewed as an unacceptable challenge to U.S. hegemony. To prepare for what promises to be a long and costly fight, U.S. strategists made a pre-emptive move in 2022 to turn Europe away from its trade and investment relations with Russia. In effect, they asked Germany to commit industrial suicide and become a U.S. dependency. That made Germany the first and most immediate target in America’s New Cold War.
My 28 September 2022 “How America Is Crushing Europe” documented the start of “The dismantling of German industry since 2022”; and my 24 June 2023 “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” deepened the portrayal of the U.S. regime’s dismantling Germany’s economy, by describing the just-then-signed 20-year contract between Germany’s Government (“SEFE Securing Energy for Europe GmbH (SEFE) is an integrated energy company owned by the Federal Republic of Germany that is active in various stages along the value chain. Headquartered in Berlin”) and the Louisiana-based Venture Global Partners, which “received venture-capital funding of $125M in 2015, then in February 2021 $500M debt-funding from Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Capital, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, and then in January 2023, an additional loan of $1B from an unspecified source,” so that those U.S.-empire private mega-banks and their billionaires would now get vast returns on their start-up investments which were made not only soon after their Government blew up the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines from Russia to Germany, but even (in 2015) before they were blown up. And, of course, German firms own 31% of Nord Stream, with a Russian firm owning 51%; Dutch and French firms own 9% each, so that the two German gas-firms (Wintershall and PEG, each of which owned 15.5%) lost, and now Germans would be spending far more to Venture Global Partners for canned, compressed, trans-Atlantic-shipped, natural gas from America, than for the pipelined-in natural gas from Russia, that had kept Germany economically competitive. How much more expensive is this American gas, than Russia’s pipelined gas? Hudson says:
The result has been to lock Germany, France and other countries into a dependency relationship on the United States. As the Americans euphemistically describe these NATO-sponsored trade and financial sanctions in Orwellian doublespeak, Europe has “freed itself” from dependency on Russian gas by importing U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) at prices three to four times higher, and divesting itself of its business linkages with Russia, and moving some of its major industrial companies to the United States (or even China) to obtain the gas needed to produce their manufactures and chemicals.
These harms to Germans, and benefits to U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and to their agents, such as Olaf Scholz and Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck and Josep Borrel and Ursula von der Leyen and Emmanuel Macron and Georgia Meloni and hundreds of others), aren’t mainly from the blowing-up of the Nord Stream pipelines, but instead from the U.S.-Government-applied secondary sanctions, punishing violations of America’s primary sanctions that are directly against Russia — these secondary sanctions that enforce German and other U.S.-‘allied’ (stooge-controlled) compliance with the American primary sanctions.
Hudson goes on to say:
Joining the war in Ukraine has also led Europe to deplete its military stocks. It is now being pressured to turn to U.S. suppliers to rearm – with equipment that has not performed well in Ukraine. U.S. officials are promoting the fantasy that Russia may invade Western Europe. The hope is not only to rearm Europe with U.S. weapons but that Russia will exhaust itself as it increases its own military spending in response to that of NATO. There is general refusal to see Russia’s policy as defensive against NATO’s threat to perpetuate and even escalate attacks to grab Russia’s Crimea naval base in pursuit of the dream of breaking up Russia.
The reality is that Russia has decided to turn eastward as a long-term policy. The world economy is fracturing into two opposing systems that leaves Germans caught in the middle, with their government having decided to lock the nation into the unipolar U.S. system. The price of its choice to live in the American dream of maintaining a U.S.-centered hegemony is to suffer industrial depression. What Americans call “dependency” on Russia has been replaced by a dependency on more expensive U.S. suppliers while Germany has lost its Russian and Asian markets.
Germany has 231 U.S. military bases on its soil. How can it declare its independence from the U.S. regime so as to regain sovereignty over itself? It cannot happen unless and until Sarah Wagenknecht becomes Chancellor. This will entail repudiating all of the political Parties that oppose her, and re-establishing Germany apart from any cross-Atlantic alliance with the Western Hemisphere, but instead as being a part of EurAsia, which it is and always was and inevitably will again become. The longer that that is delayed, the deeper will be and become Germany’s decline.
Back on 21 December 2019, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation headlined “Germany hits back at US for placing sanctions on critical European gas pipeline”, and reported that when the U.S. regime had just issued sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and:
In response, Germany’s finance minister and vice-chancellor Olaf Scholz told German broadcaster ARD that Berlin “firmly rejected” Washington’s decision.
“Such sanctions are a serious interference in the internal affairs of Germany and Europe and their sovereignty. We firmly reject this,” Mr Scholz said.
“It is clear to us that we will not accept the imposition of such a sanction, and we will make this clear to the American Government.”
However, he did not announce any concrete retaliatory action against the US.
Such chameleons fool the public to believe that the chameleons for whom the public votes represent not America’s billionaires but — in this case Germany’s — sovereign democratic control over the nation’s own land. Such liars must never be trusted again. And this also means that their ‘news’-media, such as Die Zeit and almost all of the others, are allies and propagandists of those very same U.S.-and-allied billionaires against that colony’s ever again becoming independent and free of this vile foreign domination.
Michael Hudson’s article ends by asking the question “Is economic vassalage to the United States worth forfeiting the opportunity for mutual prosperity with the fastest growing world markets?” The U.S.-and-allied answer is “Yes.” Will Germany’s answer ever be “No”? And, if not now, then when? The longer that this decision for radical change in Germany is delayed, the deeper the pain and suffering of the German people will descend. Is it to descend as deep as happened during the Weimar years? Everyone knows what that led into.
For America’s billionaires, the only way forward is to expand their empire even more. Are they now at the point where the only way to do that is to cannibalize its vassal nations? (This is an act of desperation in order to postpone their empire’s final collapse.) If so, then should Germans accept it, or, instead, get rid of their traitors right now?
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