Tag: EU

The EU is Over

Zerohedge contemplates the recent announcement of a meeting between the Presidents of the USA and Russia:

Following the announcement of a trade deal with the EU at his golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, peace talks in the Ukraine conflict with Russian President Vladimir Putin are now scheduled in Alaska.

The venue of a negotiation often predefines the balance of power between opponents. In that sense, it must be read as a clear show of force that both European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer — notably without military fanfare — traveled to Trump’s private resort in Turnberry to be politically “placed” by the American president. Judging by the outcome of those talks, one conclusion is unavoidable: the European Union no longer plays in the league of the great powers. Washington’s interest in intra-European affairs has noticeably cooled, focusing essentially on two things: an orderly withdrawal from military entanglements, and the defense of US corporate interests in the EU single market.

We are witnessing a shift of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It’s hardly a secret: China and the United States will be setting the standards of international politics in the future. Russia, the world’s most resource-rich country, may be labeled by Europeans as a pariah state and a malicious hub of all evil — but that does not change the fact that the age of postcolonial European dominance is ending, and Moscow will have no trouble playing its resource-market cards outside the shrinking European sphere of influence.

He’s correct. The EU was established to serve as a counterweight to the economic and military power of the United States, but as events have demonstrated, it’s nothing more than a democratically-illegitimate, militarily-toothless, economically-fragile, and diplomatically-irrelevant non-governmental organization without sovereignty.

The sooner that the unaligned nations realize this and abandon both the EU and the Euro, the better off they will be. And the sooner the member states follow the British lead and extricate themselves from the moribund supranational morass, the better off they will be.

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Europe’s Coming Lost Decades

Richard Werner, the author of one of the most important books on banking and economic history ever written, Princes of the Yen, explains why Europe is economically stagnant, and in doing so, inadvertently provides a hint at what might be the real reason Shinzo Abe was assassinated three years ago.

Many observers are puzzled by the dismal economic performance in Europe – which is not getting better, although a new rearmament program may create the illusion of growth. It is argued here that there is a link to the puzzling period of two lost decades of stagnation in Japan, which also created world record national debt for an industrialised country. The analysis goes back to first principles: Only if we understand how economies actually function will we be able to tackle such questions and make reliable forecasts about the future.

Degrowth prescribed for Japan, now exported to Europe

With hindsight we now know that the Japanese recession that began in the early1990s lasted twenty years. In the first decade the recession took most Japan-hands by surprise by its depth and length. Then it came to be used to argue that “structural reform” was necessary for a recovery, although this argument wore thin in the second decade. More and more analysts concluded that my assessment of the early 1990s was correct, namely that the recession had been artificially prolonged by the Japanese central bank.

The great Japanese recession was finally ended in 2013, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had won a landslide victory on the unusual election platform of wanting to tackle the too-powerful Bank of Japan – a central bank that had been acting against the interests of the Japanese people for too long. In some speeches Mr Abe was indeed referring to research in my book Princes of the Yen and its policy recommendation to reduce the Bank of Japan’s powers.

Initially, Prime Minister Abe had contemplated a change to the Bank of Japan Law, which had only been changed in 1997 to make the central bank independent and legally de facto barely accountable to anyone. Mr Abe originally joined my recommendation to formally reduce the central bank’s power and independence, and increase its accountability, by revising the Bank of Japan Law again.

This kind of change had earlier been endorsed by a number of (former) fellow LDP politicians and members of the Japanese parliament, including Mr Yoshimi Watanabe, who later became a government minister, Mr Yoichi Masuzoe, who was a member of the Upper House of the Diet, was a government minister later and from 2014 to 2016 was governor of the city of Tokyo, and Mr Kozo Yamamoto, who is a former Ministry of Finance official. They had been readers of Princes of the Yen, which had made a splash in Japan and was widely discussed in the mainstream media in 2001 and 2002. Based on its analysis, they founded the ‘LDP Bank of Japan Law Reform Group’, to which I was formally invited as advisor. Changing the Bank of Japan Law would have been the safest way to permanently derail the reach for ever greater powers that the central planners at the Japanese bank had been working on.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the Prime Minister, who is the grandchild of Nobusuke Kishi, who featured in important chapters of Princes of the Yen, despite his election promises, failed to attempt any change in the Bank of Japan Law.

This is from Werner’s new substack, which I very highly recommend adding to your regular reading. I didn’t realize he even had one until today, when I was reading the transcript of his excellent, two-hour interview by Tucker Carlson, which is the best concise history of money and banking you will find on the Internet.

And while I am tempted to post the entire 30k-word interview here now that it’s been nicely formatted, I’d prefer to see readers here visit Werner’s site; hopefully he will do it himself soon. I have to admit, it’s annoying that when Google has its own AI system, it doesn’t provide an easy, or better yet, automatic means of providing a nice AI-formatted transcript without timestamps on YouTube.

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Europe’s Century of Humiliation

European observers are appalled by the USA’s ability to play hardball with the EU:

If Europeans were paying attention (or being told the truth), they should be beyond appalled by this “deal”. It’s nothing more than one of the most expensive imperial tributes in history. Just a massive one-way transfer of wealth with no reciprocal benefits

The “deal” is:

  • The EU now gets charged 15% tariffs on its exports to the US when they commit to charging zero tariffs on US imports in the EU
  • The EU agrees to invest $600 billion in the US, for no other obvious reason than pleasing “daddy”
  • The EU will “purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of American military equipment”
  • The EU commits to buying 750 billion dollars worth of very expensive US LNG, specifically $250 billion for each of the next 3 years

In exchange for all these concessions and extraction of their wealth they get… nothing. I’m not even exaggerating, that IS the deal: the EU gets nothing.

This does not even remotely ressemble the type of agreements made by two equal sovereign powers. It rather looks like the type of unequal treaties that colonial powers used to impose in the 19th century – except this time, Europe is on the receiving end.

What this signifies is the complete failure of the European Union project. The idea was that it would allow the various nations of Europe to band together and form an economic superpower that would challenge the United States. Instead, it’s broken itself with migration, socialist governance, and economic self-destruction, and seen itself surpassed by China, and soon, Russia.

The sooner more nations follow the lead of Britain and extricate themselves from this monstrosity, the better.

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Neither Will the USA, Mr. President

President Trump tells Europe to crack down on the migrant invasion:

US President Donald Trump said Europe ‘better get your act together’ on immigration as he landed in Scotland.

Mr Trump landed in the country earlier today for a four-day visit to both of his golf clubs in Aberdeen and Ayrshire.

Jetting in at around 8.30pm, the president was greeted by Scottish Secretary Ian Murray before speaking to reporters.

Asked about illegal immigration – which successive UK governments have sought to curb – Mr Trump said: ‘On immigration, you better get your act together. You’re not going to have Europe anymore, you’ve got to get your act together.

‘As you know, last month we had nobody entering our country – nobody, (we) shut it down.’ He added: ‘You’ve got to stop this horrible invasion that’s happening to Europe’ add that immigration was ‘killing Europe’.

Both the USA and Europe are well past the point of stopping immigration, legal or illegal. Large-scale repatriations are necessary if the societies are going to survive. Nations are people, not laws or ideas.

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They Hate Their People

Between Angela Merkel blessing the third world invasion of her country and her current successor in the Chancellorship, Friedrich Merz, promising German-assisted long-range missile strikes on Russia, it’s eminently clear that the German politicians hate the German people.

If Germany provides weapons (Taurus) and material assistance to Ukraine to target inside Russia (The Kiev Dictatorship can’t operate these missiles without German direct input). There is a real possibility that Russia will strike weapons production and transit sites in Germany.

Fortunately, Vladimir Putin is a patient man and he is unlikely to target civilian centers in Germany. Unfortunately, he has shown real restraint in not taking out the enemy political elites that are so willing to sacrifice the masses.

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No Defamation

A French court overturns the convictions of two French women:

Two women convicted of defaming French first lady Brigitte Macron by saying she was ‘born a man’ were today sensationally cleared on appeal.

Judges sitting at the Paris Appeal Court on Thursday ruled that Amandine Roy, a 53-year-old clairvoyant, and Natacha Rey, 49 and a blogger, had every legal right to make the sulphurous allegations.

Both had claimed they were subjected to ‘intimidation by the authorities’ as ‘ultra protected’ members of the Paris establishment tried to cover up a ‘state secret’.

Is it not written: the truth shall set you free?

Frankly, I find Brigitte Macron’s attempt to cry defamation to be more convincing on the subject than whatever arguments or evidence the women might have relied upon. I can’t imagine Melania Trump feeling any need to do so.

Clown World has reached a very strange place where it is a crime to observe that a man who insists he is a woman was born a man, and it is also a crime to observe that a woman who insists she is a woman was born a man.

China Warns EU

For the first time, China has openly sided with Russia and acknowledged that it is in a de facto state of conflict with the USA:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat on Wednesday that Beijing cannot afford a Russian loss in Ukraine because it fears the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

The comment, to the EU’s Kaja Kallas, would confirm what many in Brussels believe to be Beijing’s position but jar with China’s public utterances. The foreign minstry regularly says China is “not a party” to the war. Some EU officials involved were surprised by the frankness of Wang’s remarks.

Wang is said to have rejected, however, the accusation that China was materially supporting Russia’s war effort, financially or militarily, insisting that if it was doing so, the conflict would have ended long ago. During a marathon four-hour debate on a wide range of geopolitical and commercial grievances, Wang was said to have given Kallas – the former Estonian prime minister who only late last year took up her role as the bloc’s de facto foreign affairs chief – several “history lessons and lectures”…

The tone of Wednesday’s dialogue was said to be respectful, if tense. Nonetheless, some insiders were surprised by the harshness of Wang’s message, just three weeks out from an important leaders’ summit in China. Any appearance of a charm offensive is seen to have evaporated.

This is not exactly a surprise. China has been waging asymmetric “unrestricted” warfare against the United States since 1999, although part of that strategy has been assiduously avoiding any direct conflict and any actual military engagement. But it appears that as the NATO-Russian war enters what one hopes will be its final stage before the collapse of the Kiev regime and the subsequent Russian stabilization of the situation, China is preparing itself for the US to turn its attention from Ukraine and the Middle East and toward Asia.

Does this have anything to do with what are still nothing more than rumors of Xi’s weakening hold on power? I doubt it, but it’s important to remember that his successor may not be another Western-influenced liberal, but could be considerably more of a hawk on Taiwan, Japan, and the USA than Xi has been.

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You Just Thought of That NOW?

Remember when the jokers at NATO were telling everyone that Russia would be out of ammunition in two weeks and that it had no allies, so everyone should support the Kiev regime? Now they’re trying to scare everyone with a threat that was always obvious to more serious military analysts.

NATO chief Mark Rutte has chillingly warned that World War III will start with simultaneous invasions from Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Secretary-general Rutte suggested the combined attacks from the Chinese and Russian leaders could trigger a World War nightmare and bring the planet to the brink of Armageddon.

According to the NATO chief, China would start by seeking to grab Taiwan – while ensuring the Kremlin dictator simultaneously attacks NATO territory, amid fears Putin is anyway eyeing the Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, formerly part of the USSR.

Now, suddenly, they’re aware that Russia has allies, that Russia and its allies significantly outnumber the US-EU-Israel alliance in terms of population, military power, and industrial capacity, and that the USA cannot possibly defeat either Russia or China, let alone both at once.

The fascinating thing is that their solution to the danger to which they are so newly awakened is exactly the same as their original call for everyone to support the Kiev regime.

I wouldn’t bet one single dime on these incompetent Clown World puppets. The smarter move would be to bet on their continuing failure.

Israeli media outlet Haaretz has reported that the U.S. military used 93 ‘THAAD’ interceptor missiles in 11 days to defend Israel, revising earlier estimates by others of $800 million to an actual cost of approximately $1.2 billion. With an annual production rate of roughly 36–48 ‘THAAD’ interceptors, the United States used nearly two years’ worth of interceptors during the war.

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NATO is Dead

No one is willing to die to defend modern Europe, especially in the aftermath of the mass invasion by the Third World:

Ukraine’s former foreign minister has starkly warned that British mothers must accept their sons have to die defending Europe, otherwise there is no Nato. Dmytro Kuleba told Metro that Vladimir Putin’s goal was to ‘expose’ the ‘falsehood’ of the Nato alliance, which has a mutual assistance clause that compels its members to fight for each other in the event of an attack of another member.

He said: ‘Putin may invade Nato territory soon – so now what? Is Nato going to send a division to fight back? ‘Many people believe that the real test for Nato is whether the US is going to fight for Europe. The real test will be whether British mothers will actually accept that their sons have to die for Finland or Estonia or Poland. If they don’t, there is no Nato.’

The chilling warning comes after Germany’s spy chief warned that Putin is plotting to attack a Nato territory to test the bloc’s mutual assistance clause.

I doubt there is a single British mother who is willing to accept that her son has to die to defend Finland, Estonia, or Poland. Certainly no American mothers are. The time to defend Europe was when Germany first started importing Gastarbeitern from Turkey. Why would anyone die to defend Europe from Russians when they weren’t even allowed to protest the invasion by Africans and Arabs?

If that is the metric, NATO is already dead.

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Hell No, They Won’t Go

It would appear Ukrainian men are no longer willing to be conscripted and fed into the maw of the Russian military machine:

A senior recruitment officer has reportedly been killed in a car explosion in Ukraine’s Odessa Region on Friday, according to police and local media reports.

Investigators suspect the blast was intentional and may have been triggered remotely. Odessa regional police confirmed one fatality and said an investigation is under way, but did not name the person who was killed when a vehicle exploded in a village in Berezovsky District.

Law enforcement sources cited by local media said that the vehicle belonged to a local draft office. The Southern Courier named the victim as Colonel Oleg Nomerovsky, a top official at a regional military recruitment center.

While it could have been Russian intelligence behind the assassination, the fact that it was a car bomb and not a missile strike tends to indicate disaffected Ukrainians or Novyrussian rebels were responsible. To be honest, I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for the Ukrainian resistance to the draft to become violent, as it’s obviously a lot safer to fight rear-echelon UFA recruiters than frontline Russian troops.

But I suppose it takes an amount of time and a considerable amount of counternarrative information to eliminate the lasting effects of a relentless propaganda campaign, especially in the minds of naturally patriotic young men. I doubt it would take nearly as long for similar resistance to appear if the British or German governments were foolish enough to attempt to impose a draft on the very sort of young nationalists they’ve been persecuting for years in the name of diversity, immigration, and inclusion.

Regardless, this is another sign that the UFA’s will to resist Russia is crumbling, and that the rapid advance phase across the next six provinces expected this summer has likely already begun.

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