German Farmers' Day Of Protest Causes Chaos Nationwide

Farmers' tractor protest blocks the road through the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Germany's government district (picture via DW)

 

As yesterday's Boggart Abroad story predicted Greman farmers today launched a week of protest when hundreds of tractors and agricltural vehicles invaded the city and blocked streets and main roads in protests against proposed cuts to the agricultural budget which would been reduced subsidies to farmers. The farmers piled on the misery for Chancellor Olaf Scholz's fragile coalition coalition as it struggles to hold together a fragile coalition which includes the Green Party who want to abolish farming altogether and go back to a hunter - gatherer economy (that may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one,) and the Free Democrats, a pro - business party which supports market economics and unrestrained capitalism.

The government is also trying to contain the burgeoning popularity of the AfD (Alternatif fur Deutschland,) and anti - open borders and EU sceptic party, having failed to dent AfD's ride by smearing them as 'far right'. The calition's latest move it that they have, somewhat idiotically, put in motion moved to have AfD banned as a danger to democracy, thus identifying the governing coalition itself as a danger to democracy.

Convoys of tractors and trucks today gathered on roads around Berlin and most of the 16 federal states, in sub-zero temperatures in while protesters clashed with police and senior politicians warned that the unrest could encourage extremism.

The protests have so far forced Scholz's deeply unpopular government into promising policy changes to head off further unrest on the unrest while sticking to fiscal discipline after a constitutional court ruling in November threw its spending plans into disarray.

Needless to say these protests have been played down by German mainstream media and hardly reported outside Germany except by the alt_news community

"No beer without farmers," read one protest banner, while another tractor had a poster from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party that read "Our farmers come first."

Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who was prevented from leaving a ferry as he returned from holiday last week when furious farmers tried to storm the vessel he was on, warned in a video message on Monday that farmers' right to protest could be exploited by fringe groups but thus has become a regular theme from EU member state governments facing mass dissent as they try to impose the extremist policies imposed by Brussels.

Farmers called the protests in response to the government's decision to phase out a tax break on agricultural diesel as it tries to bring its 2024 budget over the finish line while complying with the constitutional court ruling.

"For a farm like mine, I would lose about 10,000 euros," said a farmer from Bavaria, Ralf Huber. "For our businesses, it's a catastrophe."

The AfD party, preparing to launch campaigns in a string of federal state elections later this year, is supporting the protests, claiming it proves German voters dissatisfaction with current government and hoping to make enough gains to be able to force the Scholz administration to resign.

Hermann Blinkert at the German Institute for New Social Answers (INSA) said the government was in deep scheiss because will look weak if it u-turns on cutting farm subsidies, but will appear to have lost control if the dispute continues.

"The government has the problem that it has already gambled away the trust of the population," Blinkert said.

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[ Food crisis ] ... [ New World Order ] ... [ Agenda 21 ] ... [ Black hat biotech ]

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It is becoming more clear as the autumn days grow shorter and cooler that NATO / Washington's proxy war in Ukraine is lost. While some reports in war - worshipping, globalist supporting news organs like The Daily Telegraph and the New York Times are sticking to the 'Ukraine is winning, Zelensky has outplayed the Russians,' narrative even those organisations are tentatively starting to admit that Ukraine isn its knees, old men, past retirement age and young boys who should still be in school are being sent to fight on the front lines, the Ukrainian military are trashing western high tech weaponry faster than the US, UK and EU can ship it out to them and the far right government in Kiev are burning through money faster than the central banks can print it.

Yet even though mainstream news is staring to accept that Ukraine is a lost cause, (but still stopping short of admitting the war was deliberately provoked by the USA and NATO actions dating back to the CIA engineered coup of 2014 which put a neo Nazi administration in power in Kiev and then began moves to fast track NATO membership for Ukraine.

 Sane minds must now, belatedly, put a stop to this war, because Zelensky won’t. Trying to talk to Zelensky, is like trying to persuade a mad dog to stop its frenzy. Stop feeding him - and if that doesn't work shoot the fucker. The longer the war goes on the worse the outcome will be for the Ukraine, fighting to the last man is not a good plan. he longer the war goes on the worse it will be for the Ukraine, fighting to the last man is not a good plan. In spite of all this the armchair generals in the west are still calling for more modern and more lethal weapons to be given to Ukraine and the lunatics in Kiev so that, with their ground forces crushed and no longer capable of giving battle, they seek aircraft and long range missiles to enable them to strike deep inside Russian territory. 

The only effect of that would be to brink down a disproportionate blitzkrieg on the unfortunate people of Ukraine, something which so far Russia has declined to do.

It is fashionable among the armchair generals to compare Russia to WW2 Germany, which only shows they are ignorant of history. When asked if they believe the Germans unilaterally withdrew from France, Poland and Belgium, and allowed Sudetenland and Austria to peacefully separate they will ask what that has to do with anything.

TThe answer is that if they do not it shows their comparisons are invalid because that’s what Russia did in 1991. When the Soviet Union disintegrated Russia agreed with the USA and NATO that allow the former Soviet republics to go their own way on condition that those states were not recruited into NATO so that american troops and missiles could be placed on Russia's borders.

That concession and the vrbal undertaking given by President Clinton to abaide by Moscow's condition was followed by a continuous eastward creep by the US / NATO until eventually official moves were made to admit Ukraine to NATO which would have opened the possibility of US missiles and troops along Russia's borders from the Arctic to the Caucasus.

Ukraine is not fighting for its homelandas the armchair generals like to claim – it is fighting for the right to threaten Russia and subjugate the Russian speaking minorities of Donbass who clearly want nothing to do with anti - Russian extremists in Kiev.

Rather than parrotting the worn out British Bulldog circa 1940 tropes from the comfort their sofas and calling for escalation of the conflict so that thy can continue to pontificate about evil Russian and encouraging 'brave little Ukraine' to fight to the last man woman or child while they themselves sit in the confort of their homes fifteen hundred miles drom where the bullets are flying and the artillery shells and missiles are dropping. 

What is noticable about the armchair generals is that they will not or more likely cannot, counter or refute the points raised by those of us who argue for peace and call on our governments to stop arming and funding Zelensky, this forcing his neo - Nazi bosses to the negotiating table.

There is not, nor was there ever, any reasonable prospect for Ukraine, or indeed Europe/NATO, to prevail in a war of attrition with a country that is not only the most self sufficient on the planet, has the lowest external debt in the developed world, has the agricultural and mineral resources and the commercial and industrial base to supply itself and beyond the Europe / North America bloc does not lack friends and trading partners. Russia's economy, despite confident predictions of total collapse by the armchair generals when in their armchair economist role, has withstood the west's sanctions (which backfired on the nations that imposed they, because many were dependent oil and gas imported from Russia,) and now exceeds that of Germany in PPP. The Russian mindset has always been nationalistic to the point of paranoia and feeling itself vulnerable because of its thousand of miles of borders with potentially hostile neighbours, sees the issue of NATO recruiting Ukraine, followed by Georgia and then Kazakhstan as an existential threat and will therefore not – ever – capitulate.

 And yet whatever the politicians and media talking heads in Washington, London and the capital cities of Europe say it is a plain, documented fact that Russia tried to resolve/end the war in Istanbul on terms that, against what unfolded next, seem eminently reasonable and humane. But, no. The West took a bet that Russia and its economy would “fold” if Ukraine was enabled to prolong the war. Many people with a sense of history, warned that this was hubris. They have been proven right – in spades and at the costs of God knows how many Ukrainian and Russian lives. All so preventable.

 NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg recently admitted, after 2 years of denial and prevarication (and publicly to boot), that the trigger for Russia’s decision to start the “SMO” was in fact – and specifically – NATOs rejection of a draft agreement not to follow through with expansion into Ukraine?

The Kremlin wants above all, a neutral, NATO free Ukraine, the Russians do not want to colonise Ukraine, they have more than enough territory already. The security of its southern border is and was the main reason for Russia's direct engagement in a civil war that started in 2014 because America would not listen, rather than acknowledge that Ukraine in NATO was the final straw for RUSSIA, after having pushed NATO into countries along its borders since 1991, they carried on as usual ignoring reality and being arrogant and aggressive.

You only have to look at a map of Europe to see where all those NATO bases are situated: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania. America has NATO bases in 850 locations in the world against something like 80 for Russia. Tell me then who is the aggressor, which country is always seeking conflict somewhere? Where are all the companies that make vast amounts of dollars out of more and more military hardware. You know the answer. It is not Russia.

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Heat pumps epitomise the economic folly of net zero

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/13/heat-pumps-epitomise-the-economic-folly-of-net-zero/

posted with 325 replies showing

Amid the ballyhoo from scaremongers, sciencevangelists, mathematical model merchants and research grant phishing experts about the need to achieve Net Zero if we are to 'save the planet,' there is little concrete evidence that the climate chaos we are seeing is solely the result of a slight increase in levels of Carbon Doioxide (CO) in the atmospehere (240 parts per million to 405 parts per million,) since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Despite this being a very marginal change a constant barrage of propaganda and the 'cancelling' of any scientist or medua commentator who challenged this 'existential threat from human made climate change narrative has made it almost impossible to have a civilised debate on the topic or to present a dissenting case. It has also rendered impossible  a logical analysis of the wider impact on economic and social activities. 

For all the magical thinking and grandiose pledges about green jobs and technologies, the true benefits of reducing CO2 emissions from human activity appear trivial when compared with the massive scale of costs incurred in replacing electricity distribution  grids in developed nations and increasing generating capacity while simultaneously shutting down all industrial activities involving oil, natural gas and coal. The huge destruction of our existing capital stock, from cars to industrial machinery would impose so great a cost as to make 'net zero' unchhievable without destroying industrial civilisation totally.

A good example of the follies spawned by the 'net zero'v policy is the UK government's plan to force households to replace their efficient and relatively cheap to run gas fired heating systems with expensive, inefficient and unreliable heat pumps. Now heat pumps are not a new technology, they have been around for roughly a hundred years, think of a fridge, freezer or air conditioning system in reverse.

OK, now think of a three-bedroom house currently heated by gas. Official figures suggest that installing an air source heat pump, upgrading radiators and improving insulation could cost £15,000 or more. Even after spending that money, many will find the system inadequate and require a gas or mains electricity system as backup.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. That heat pump will require green electricity if it’s to help meet net zero. So we must also allow for building and operating the wind farms, backup storage and grid network needed to replace gas heating with electricity. All those costs must be recovered through higher electricity prices, or direct government subsidies. Even if energy costs revert to “normal” pre-2021 levels, my calculations suggest that electricity prices could well double.

Along with the higher demand, and allowing for a reduction in gas use, this could be equivalent to a net increase in bills of £1,000-£1,200 per year for our hypothetical 3-bedroom house. Moreover, we must allow for the higher costs of servicing and eventually replacing heat pumps.

And the heat pump policy is only the start of our Net Zero capital losses. Schools, hospitals, offices, shops and factories will have to be extensively refurbished or replaced to accommodate electric heating, and will then incur higher operating costs. A significant fraction of buildings and other assets could be abandoned as no longer economic because many older houses, apartment blocks and commercial buildings are totally unsuitabe for installation of heat pump technology. That could have the knock on effect of driving up both residential and commercial rents paid by housing tenants and businesses.

Then, there is transport and the hasty replacement of petrol or diesel vehicles by electric vehicles to consider, not that people would be able to travel far when all the roads are being dug up to facilitate the installation of higher capacity electricity cables. Less obviously we must allow for the reorganisation of urban and suburban areas in the name of Net Zero and “15-minute neighbourhoods”. Our whole social infrastructure – shopping, schools, community facilities – has been built over many decades on the assumption of cheap private and public transport. A large part of this may have to be replaced, at as yet unknown, but certainly prohibitive cost.

 Detailed calculations by the Cambridge engineer Professor Michael Kelly suggest that the investment required for the current Net Zero timetable will exceed £3 trillion, or 1.2 times UK GDP. Either other investment must decline or the burden will fall on household spending. You will not find Prof Kelly's research reported anywhere in mainstream media of course.

In summary, in pursuit of Net Zero by 2050, around a quarter of all UK investment will be devoted to replacing existing assets. The knock-on effect means that what’s left of the UK’s original asset base could well get older and more expensive to operate. Prospects for future improvements in productivity or healthcare or education are at risk of shrivelling in the face of endless demands to fund the energy transition.

So far we have only looked at the green dreams of research grant phishing scientists and environmentalist crusties. Let's now turn our attention to more prosaic matters.

 If you look at a weather forecast for five hours hence it makes its predictions in the form of statistical probabilities but often even those turn out to be substantially wrong. So how can there possibly be a 'climate crisis' based on forecasts of what will be happening decades hence?

The whole carbon story treats the world as a simple system where you take a couple of data points and join them up with a straight line. Already it is clear to any sane observer that it doesn't behave like that at all. Based on the predictions of a couple of decades ago the academics who started this bandwaggon were assuring us that Britain would be a flaming desert by now. How can they keep taking their fat grants and live with themselves? 

Any forecasts based on existing facts (and presumably they do and are not pure fiction) exhibit something called variance and this increases the further ahead in time you push your prediction. By the time you get to 20 years hence the range of possible outcomes covers a huge range. So precise predictions are nonsense, however big the computer is which churns them out. The grounds therefore for economically damaging the country are based on the flimsiest basis. The science is not remotely 'settled' although certain charlatans claim that it is. No-one thinks 'pollution' to be a good thing but impoverishing the nation for one relatively unimportant component of it is rank folly.

Those in power, those in technocratic positions, think tanks and advisory panels are as knowledgeable on climate science, electrical power systems, or large scale industrial engineering and economics as a people of an amazonian rain forest trible  would be on developing computer systems. The sooner there is a great purge of eco zealots and Cultural Marxists from government and senior positions in businesses and media the better. 

The most disappointing thing about this allegely Conservative government is the way they have abandoned  all conservative priniciples which are all about spending wisely and conserving things which work and are effective rather that throwing money at that which is novel, fashionable and unproven. Instead they have jumped on the globalist bandwagon and embraced a system most appropriately named by george Orwell in his novel '1984', Oligarchic Collectivism. Gas boilers ,air travel , old houses and petrol cars have to go because they are old. Never mind that they work, and never mind the evidence stacking up that the proposed alternatives don't. Despite the cost and oddly the ultimate lack of benefit to the climate or indeed our homes we must move with the times, change is saxred, science is God..

At the risk of stating the absolutely effing obvious stating the bleeding obvious  Net zero is all cost and near zero benefit .

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Election Victory For Dutch Farmers Protest Party Should Trigger A Political Earthquake In The EU

Picture: Screen grab from France 24

 

As reported in this blog's news roundup yesterday (and by France 24, which should silence those people always eager to dismiss us a just a bunch of conspiracy theorists,) the Netherlands faced a political earthquake this week as a farmers’ protest party won key elections, throwing the government’s environmental policies into disarray’.

The Farmer-Citizen Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging or BBB) was founded only four years ago as a protest pary for the purpose of drawing attention to the economically and socially damaging effects of 'Green' policies being implemented by the EU and The Netherlands government. Like most protest parties the BBB remained in obscurity until  a wave of protests earlier this year against Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s plans, in line with EU diktat, to cut nitrogen emissions created by livestock numbers and confiscating farms, as we reported last year. Now it is set to become the biggest party in the Dutch upper house of parliament with 16 or 17 seats. 

What makes this development even more significant is the importance of agriculture, and particularly dairy produce, to the national economy. Are angry Dutch farmers spearheading an uprising against the elites? Their determination in face of what amounts to theft of their generations-long livelihoods has proved it is possible. In the face of increasingly dictatorial and borderline tyrannous action by governments in the liberal democracies we can only hope other countries will now follow suit and throw out the traditional two and three party political hegemonies that have for the past fifty years served the wealthy elites of well and the less privileged majorities so badly.

Questions should now be asked about how the EU, and the supine governments of most member states, thuought they could get away with pursuing this action, not only against the Dutch farmers, for there have also been protests against the attack on farming in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Belgium that we know of. 

At the same time the Brussels bureaucrats are ignoring the farming disaster on the Spanish coast, where a large proportion of fertile land is covered in poly tunnels so that the supermarkets of northern Europe can be supplied withfresh, out-of-season vegetables and fruit all the year round. Fertilizer has to be added to enrich the soil because forced production of crops has exhausted the soil. There is now growing consensus that there will be another water crisis in the region this summer, not bleause of climate change but because the aquifers have been drained to irrigate these crops.

The BBB victory is obviously a step in the right direction. But the way this political party is being funded has started to circulate on the interwebs. It is said this party is being funded by a company called ReMarkAble (it is lettered like that). 

It is correct that Remarkable does have connection with a big pharma company, Bayer, which also  also has links with agricultural industries as a major producer of pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers etc.

What is being done by the Dutch government in collabouration with the EU is criminal, but not unique. This kind of out unaccountable tyranny is happening because of the apathy of the general public blinded and misdirected by years of scaremongering propaganda .

This tyranny is visible in the US right now with Biden promising the banks that the US taxpayer will act as lender of last resort in the financial crisis we have reported earlier this week. Because we all pay tax one way or another \Dementia Joe's reaction to the crisis will involve a massive transfer of wealth from the poorest in society to the elites. For those families we read of every day in the news who are struggling to put food on the table it is adding insult to injury.

These people won't be removed from power through the ballot box though. To achieve that people will have to follow the French example and get out in the streets and protest, lawfully but noisily. We must make enough noise and create enough drama to ensure mainstream media cannot ignore what is going on nor Big Tech censor it..

The whole system is one built on tyranny and always has been. Only now, thanks to the internet and alt_news web pages are the general public being allowed to see clearly the contempt the elites have for the people who provide wealth and luxuries for them. Now We The People get to see the reality that has been concealed from them throughout their lives.

 

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Is Germany's Sinking Economy Going To Destroy The EU?

 

Phil T Looker, Tuesday, Oct 11, 2022

Picture: via Zero Hedge

This blog has warned for years that with more than half its member states being economic basket cases, Europe’s dependence on the German industrial powerhouse could only end badly for the former Free trade club that became a wannabe geopolitical superstate. And sure enough it is happpening. The trigger has been an energy crisis brought about by Europe's having made itself dependent for energy needs on natural gas imported from Russia.

Escalating economic, financial and geopolitical crises brought about by arrogant beliefs that nothing could touch the 27 member trade Titan because it was too big, plus foolish and naive adoption of loonytoons energy policies in pursuit of pipe dreams like 'net zero,' exacerbated by the outbreask of war in eastern Europe have put increasing pressure on the whole EU project but on Germany in particular. And since the UK left the Union Germany has been propping up the EU economy.

The parallel crises of high inflation, energy shortages and food supply chain problems have also exposed the myth of “European unity” for the utter farce that it always was. It is becoming clear with the resurgence of nationalism in Italy, Spain, Sweden, France, Poland, Hungary and several other members that like most other things in Brussels' empire of lies, that the much vaunted unity was nothing but propaganda, the war and the perfect storm of crises have revealed the reality of the EU is opposite as allies turn against allies, each basket case state being in it only for what they can get.

Since somebody sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines through which cheap natural gas  flowed from Russia to Germany the German has lost nearly 60% of its industrial production. As Zoltan Pozsar suggested, $2 trillion of German value depended on $20 billion of Russian gas.

Nobody yet knows who was responsible for sabotaging the pipelines,but the most likely suspects are all Germany’s supposed friends and allies: the US, UK, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, with a consensus forming around its being a CIA engineered false flag event using 'Special Ops' military personnel from another country to ensure 'plausible deinability.'

However the eagerness of the USA and its NATO partners to blame Russia (which actually owns the pipelines and earned a big slice of its foreign revenue from the gas that flowed through them,) and some eccentric accusation that Germany was responsible, (as if the Germans, knowing how dependent on Russian gas they were, would shoot themselves in the foot by cutting of their gas supply,suggests that senior figures in NATO are trying to hide something.

 Another possible explanation is that the target of the sabotage was not Russia although any harm done to Putin's regime was a bonus for the U. S. deep state as the Biden administration continues trying to provoke Russia into attacking U. S. interests to give the Americans an excuse to directly intervene in Ukraine, but that it was a deliberate and premeditated attack on Germany.

For years, the US has been pressuring Germany to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to end its dependency on Russian gas . To persuade German leaders, their U.S. counterparts promised to replace Russian gas by buying U. S. gas at sky high prices. 

As we now know, Germany’s “friends and allies” in Washington  took advantage of German's folly in closing down its coal and nuclear power stations to appease the powerful Green lobby in German politics, by delivering natural gas at extortionate prices. According to an energy investment banker Laurent Segalen US gas producers could load a large LNG tanker in the US at a cost of about $60 million per shipment. The cargo could then be sold for up to $275 million in Europe, thanks to the massive price disparity between the US and European markets: in the US, Natural Gas trades at less than $7/mBtu (million British thermal units) while Dutch TTF futures recently traded at over $60/mBtu. So there we have it, to use the vernacular ov television detectives the USA had the means, the opportunity (privided by escalation of the war,) and the motive (to prop up its ailing economy,) for carrying out the sabotage.

Last month one of the key figures in creating Germany's energy and economic catastrophe, the Economy minister in the Social Democrat led ruling coalition, Robert Habeck publicly complained about the situation in an interview to German media. Only yesterday, French economy minister Bruno Le Maire chimed in: “We cannot accept that our American partner sells its LNG four times the price at which it sells it to its own industries.” But these lamentations come far too late to mitigate the extreme damage to European economies. The EU member states chose, almost unanimously, to back Ukraine in the thus pissing off Russian President Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic government thus providing the American deep state with the means to delflect media attention from the obvious conclusion.

Unfortunately whatever the truth might be, Germany is the loser.

Thus, with Poland, in a bid to solve its own economic woes, demanding 1.3 trillion Euros in reparations for WW2, Germany has suddenly found itself shafted in every way imaginable by “friends” and “allies.” Even though the reactions from Germany (apart from that Habeck interview) have been remarkably quiet, it is easy to imagine the panic gripping  Chancellor Scholz‘s government  as German industrialists and labor union leaders demand immediate action though none knows what to do. AHans Peter Wollseifer of the Central Association of German Crafts said to the Rheinische post, “Every day, we receive emergency calls from companies that are about to stop production because they can no longer pay the enormously increased energy bills.”  

The Federation of German Industries (BDI) also warned of a wave of bankruptcies due to energy cost inflation which is now a major challenge for 58% of companies while 34% believe that the crisis jeopardizes their very survival. The German nation is being pushed towards destruction and Putin is winning the economic war hands down. Naturally none of this is being mentioned by mainstream media, according to western corporate media narratives Germany has found itself in the situation where it may have only one partner to rely upon. If you guessed Russia, you guessed correctly. Of course, as a member of the EU and NATO, Germany cannot chart its foreign policy independently, but the pressure to somehow break out of its constraints and reclaim its sovereignty must be growing and it can only be a matter of time until Germany breaks ranks, withdraws its support for the proxy war with Russia the American deep state has yearned for since George W Bush was president. and seeks a treaty with Russia.