Tag: EU

No Confidence in France

The French government collapsed again for the second time in nine months:

Emmanuel Macron has faced humiliation today as his government lost a confidence vote, plunging France into political chaos after Prime Minister Francois Bayrou warned his peers to not make ‘the same mistake as the British’.

The French parliament voted to bring down the government today over its plans to tame its skyrocketing national debt, with the political crisis only deepening as the President now has the task of finding a fifth Prime Minister in under two years.

François Bayrou only became France’s PM nine months ago, but now, he must resign after 364 of 573 of the government’s deputies voted against the vote of confidence.

The 74-year-old centrist pledged to ‘fight like a dog’ to stay in power, but could not prevent the collapse of his government on Monday night.

As Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet announced the result, MPs applauded loudly and Mr Bayrou sat in silence.

‘The National Assembly has not approved the Prime Minister’s general policy statement,’ Ms Braun-Pivet said.

‘The Prime Minister now has to submit the resignation of the government to the President of the republic.’

This will happen on Tuesday, Ms Braun-Pivet added, and the current French administration will immediately dissolve.

The Front National had better not imagine that it can be successful without delivering massive change, and even bigger repatriations, for the French people when it finally comes to power as the very last political alternative.

Liberalism is dead. We’re rapidly approaching the last gasp for any form of democracy in Western Europe.

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France is Going Down Too

Apparently supporting Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, and welcoming an invasion by the Third World is not as economically beneficial as we’ve been told, if the impending collapse of the French government is any guide.

French stocks and bonds continued to fall on Tuesday as a collapse of the country’s minority government looked increasingly likely.

The three main opposition political parties said on Monday they would not back Prime Minister Francois Bayrou in an upcoming confidence vote, amid plans for sweeping budget cuts.

France’s fiscal woes have deepened this year as the country struggles under the weight of high public debt, persistent budget deficits and political fragmentation.

Should Bayrou lose the 8 September National Assembly vote, his government will fall.

The French deserve their recent suffering, though. They had the chance to vote Macron out in the last round of elections, but they stupidly fell for the “anything but racists and Nazis” line again.

If, at this point, you vote for anyone who isn’t called a racist and a Nazi by the Clown World media, you eminently deserve the more of the same societal deconstruction that you will inevitably get.

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Perhaps More Sanctions on Russia Would Help

Both Great Britain and Germany are teetering on the brink of economic crises:

Britain is facing the prospect of a repeat of its crippling 1976 economic crash as soaring debt and borrowing costs raise doubts over Labour’s budget policies, leading economists have warned, according to a Telegraph report.

The crisis nearly fifty years ago saw a Labour government forced to seek an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after deficits and inflation spun out of control. It became one of Britain’s worst postwar crises, with the bailout bringing deep spending cuts and Labour losing power a few years later.

Now Chancellor Rachel Reeves faces similar warnings, with forecasts showing a £50 billion ($68 billion) gap in the public finances and debt interest set to exceed £111 billion. Debt now exceeds 96% of GDP. At around £2.7 trillion, it is one of the heaviest burdens in the developed world. Government borrowing costs have surged, with yields on 30-year bonds climbing above 5.5%, higher than those of the US and Greece.

Losing a proxy war is costly. The insanity of Clown World can be seen in how both the British and German governments are pushing for more of the war and more of the sanctions that is bringing them to the breaking point.

For some reason, the servants of the Black Rider never seem to understand that they’ll be discarded once they’re no longer of use to him.

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The EU is an NGO

Fresh from her diplomatic humiliation in China, the unelected “President of the EU Commission” of the non-governmental organization called the “European Union” was correctly dismissed by President Trump and prevented from taking part in his meeting with European leaders this week for the obvious reason that she isn’t a national leader:

Bundestag Vice President Omid Nouripour said on Tuesday on the TV programme “Frühstart” that Ursula von der Leyen was made to leave the room during Trump’s meeting with European leaders in Washington. “In the middle of yesterday’s meeting … Ms. von der Leyen had to leave because the Americans said: ‘We only want to talk to leaders.’”

According to Nouripour, the EU Commission President was kicked out of the room because the American politicians do not regard her as an elected head of a state.

They shouldn’t. She isn’t a head of a state and she isn’t elected. Ursula von der Leyen has no more international diplomatic legitimacy than Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, or Mads Christensen, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International. She’s the equivalent of a retired member of a state legislature in the USA.

Von der Leyen last won an election in 2003 for the state parliament of Niedersachsen; her entire career since then has been a product of back room deals, internal party pecking orders and Angela Merkel’s patronage. 

It’s good to see at least two of the world’s leading powers recognize that the European Union isn’t anything more than just another Clown World NGO. And I tend to doubt that Vladimir Putin takes it seriously either.

The fact that the EU likes to posture and pretend that it has “democratic values” simply shows what a collection of satanic inverts are running it.

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The Fake Peace Plan

Reuters reports that this is the agreement to which the Russians have concurred and which President Trump will be selling to Zelensky and the Europeans today:

Reuters publishes Putin’s proposals on Ukraine, presented to Trump at the summit:

  • No ceasefire is planned before signing a full agreement.
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine will withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
  • Russia will freeze the front lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
  • Return control of areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to Ukraine.
  • Formal recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea.
  • Cancellation of at least part of the sanctions against Russia.
  • Ukraine will be prohibited from joining NATO.
  • Putin seems to have been open to Ukraine receiving certain security guarantees.
  • Official status of the Russian language in some parts of Ukraine or throughout Ukraine, as well as the rights of the Russian Orthodox Church to operate freely.

But Simplicius is, in my opinion, correct to be very skeptical that this is an accurate report.

This, if true, would obviously be a huge departure from Russia’s earlier demands. It is difficult to believe, however, because Putin already signed both Zaporozhye and Kherson at their administrative borders into the Russian constitution, and thus there is no real mechanism of abandoning those uncaptured portions.

There are a variety of angles to this. Firstly, recall that media ‘reports’ about claimed Russian concessions have been proven fake every previous time. We went through it repeatedly: a media claim is made that Putin is ready to ‘concede’, and soon after a high ranking Russian official states that all previous ‘Istanbul plus’ demands are still in place…

The only logical explanation is the above: that Russia knows no agreement can ever be reached anyway, and is thus playing for time by pretending at concessions to affect the peacemaker and transfer responsibility on Ukraine and Europe. Why can’t it be reached? Zelensky himself again just stated no uncaptured land can be ceded, as it is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution. Previously, he’s stated many times that demilitarization is definitely out, also. Now, European “partners” have again reiterated their intent to immediately station troops on Ukraine’s territory upon the cessation of hostilities.

Personally, I believe that the focus of both the USA and Russia is extricating the former from its obligations to assist Ukraine. Once the US is out of the picture, Russia can easily handle the EU-Ukraine alliance by launching new offensives and forcing the surrender on whatever terms it requires. But in order to get the USA out of the picture, there needs to be an agreement on the table to which the US can agree and to which Ukraine will not.

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The Irrelevant EU

It’s really remarkable to see how the European Union is doubling down on its own irrelevance:

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called for more pressure on Moscow ahead of the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

Foreign ministers of the bloc’s member states held an urgent video-conference on Monday, after it was announced that the Russian and US leaders will meet face-to-face in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukraine conflict and other issues.

Following the discussions, Kallas issued a post on X to offer the bloc’s “support for US steps that will lead to a just peace” between Moscow and Kiev.

“Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine and pressure on Russia is how we will end this war and prevent future Russian aggression in Europe,” she insisted.

Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine, and pressure on Russia has been the entire US-UK-EU strategy since February 2022. It has completely and comprehensively failed. How is more of the same going to do anything but ensure the total destruction of Ukraine, which is absolutely unnecessary given that all Russia really wants is the five regions it has already annexed, plus Odessa?

Words. All these people have is words. Why did anyone ever pay any attention to them?

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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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