The partnership at the center of European integration is unraveling just when Euroskeptic forces are coming together. If French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot start rebuilding the political center, next year's European Parliament election will produce the biggest victory yet for anti-EU populists.…
Conclusion: Merkel and Trump are playing to domestic audiences. We shouldn’t exaggerate the impact their words will have on policy. Moreover, we now have two pragmatists in office in France and Germany. Emmanuel Macron showed his own pragmatism yesterday by inviting Vladimir Putin as the first foreign leader to receive as President in France. I expect Germany to show pragmatism by continuing to work with the US on a wide range of issues including security and intelligence. And I certainly don’t expect a trade war. The Germans are playing the long game, knowing that US Presidents come and go and that Europe is still very much dependent on good relations with the US irrespective of who is in the White House.Credit Writedowns
Trump's approach to Europe and elsewhere has been predicated on the notion that he can singlehandedly defy the rules of the game and extract what he wants. The problem is that he is emboldening Germany to become the superpower of Europe and inevitably it will pursue what it considers its own interests. This is after all the nation that invented the term realpolitik....The National Interest
Forget all the claims and protestations about “families of nations” and a “new Europe” and “the European project.” The European Union, and especially the eurozone, is a German empire.And Germany is a pretty much a vassal of the US.
The new capital of Europe is not Brussels — let alone Strasbourg, the home of the European Parliament — but Berlin. The ultimate power of the EU is not the president of the European Commission, but the chancellor of Germany.…
In other words, the Greeks had to be punished in order to terrify the rest of the continent.
If you can think of any historical parallels for this German behavior in Europe, go right ahead.Just German leaders being German leaders.
On the positive side, it surely means the euro is the deutsche mark in drag, and a harder currency than outsiders credit. Achtung, baby.This is the point of the EZ in the eyes of Germany. The euro is the DM in disguise and Germany gets a discount on its currency.
President-elect Trump is outlining a foreign policy that rejects the interventionist tenets of Washington’s neocon/liberal-hawk establishment and puts U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control at the top of his agenda, writes Gilbert Doctorow.Positive assessment. Liberal interventionism and neocon democracy-spreading is over.
So who are the opponents ranged behind the CIA, yelling encouragement through the ropes? The obvious culprits include the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose corporate bottom line relies on an era of unending war. As justification for extracting billions – even trillions – of dollars from American taxpayers, there was a need for frightening villains, such as Al Qaeda and even more so, the head choppers of ISIS. However, since the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015, those villains no longer packed as scary a punch, so a more enduring villain, like Emmanuel Goldstein, the principal enemy of the state in George Orwell’s 1984, was required. Russia was the obvious new choice, the old favorite from the Cold War playbook.
The Western intelligence agencies have a vested interest in eternal enemies to ensure both eternal funding and eternal power, hence the CIA’s entry into the fight. As former British MP and long-time peace activist George Galloway so eloquently said in a recent interview, an unholy alliance is now being formed between the “war party” in the U.S., the military-industrial-intelligence complex and those who would have previously publicly spurned such accomplices: American progressives and their traditional host, the Democratic Party.
Yet, if the Democratic National Committee had not done its best to rig the primariesin favor of Hillary Clinton, then perhaps we would not be in this position. Bernie Sanders would be the President-elect....Another positive assessment.
“NATO is a war-making machine, it’s an American operation. Why is it doing this? I think there is a real strategic extremism in the US.” And the “prize in this operation” is Russia, he concluded, adding that such a prize was almost won in the times of Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), the first Russian president to serve after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“And what really has been upsetting in the US is that Russia is again independent, and that’s intolerable.”
Pilger called outgoing US leader Barack Obama “one of the most violent presidents.”...RT
Now, Germany is considering imposing a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a “fake news” story up without deleting it. Governments have finally found a vehicle to get citizens to allow them to curtail or chill speech — ironically in the name of facilitating “real news” or “truth.” It is perfectly Orwellian and Merkel’s latest contribution to the erosion of free speech in the West.The "fake news" button is on the way.
Few companies will risk such crippling fines, resulting in self-censorship from the chilling effect of the law. The bill would require companies to flag “fake news” and impose civil liability on companies. Germany’s parliamentary chief of the Social Democrat party, Thomas Oppermann is quoted as saying “If after the relevant checks Facebook does not immediately, within 24 hours, delete the offending post then [it] must reckon with severe penalties of up to 500,000 euros.”
Other lawmakers are reportedly moving toward criminalizing anything the government deems to be “fake news.”
The left appears to be leading this crusade for greater government censorship in both Europe and the United States.
For 100 years, the United States was the leader of the free world. With the election of Donald Trump, America has now abdicated that role. It is time for Europe, and Angela Merkel, to step into the void.Spiegel Online — Opinion
Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, fired shots at Germany’s financial EU hegemony when, during a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, said:“If this non-performing loan problem is worth one, the question of derivatives at other banks, at big banks, is worth one hundred. This is the ratio: one to one hundred.”
Renzi was referring to the massive, trillions of derivatives Deutsche Bank is carrying on its books. According to Renzi, Italy may have issues, but “other” European banks have much bigger problems.…The Duran
… the EU, at least as it has become over the last decade, is best understood as a cabal of three governments, primarily those of the US and Germany, with France treated by the Germans (though not by the US) as a sort of junior partner, which make the decisions in secret that are binding on all the rest.
I appreciate that this description of the EU will meet with strong objections in some quarters, especially as by far the most powerful of these governments is that of the US which is not a member of the EU. However what I say is well known by all the relevant insiders. Indeed the facts speak for themselves and are hardly even concealed. On key issues EU policy is nowadays decided in private bilateral discussions between the US and the Germans, often involving the US President and the German Chancellor, with the Germans then telling the other Europeans what they should do.…
Secret negotiations have been under way for some time between high German and Russian officials, to which Chancellor Angela Merkel has been excluded. Warned by US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and in a recent coded communication from outgoing President Barack Obama that she must act to save her authority, and enforce European Union sanctions against Russia, Merkel has also received an ultimatum from her cabinet and party. This was delivered in the form of a page torn out of an Old German bible in which a large black spot had been inked. Either she step aside in secret, Merkel understood the signal, or she will be forced to resign in public.Hilarious. This is based on leaks, but Helmer is well-positioned in this regard. If true, the house of cards is collapsing unless the US tightens down the screws. But the outcome of US screw tightening would be uncertain, it seems.
For more details of the meaning of the Black Spot, read this.
The details are extremely murky but with Merkel’s position coming under increasing pressure and with growing dissatisfaction with the sanctions in France and southern Europe it is clear a battle of some kind over their pending renewal is underway.…The Duran
President Barack Obama is trying to expand the "Normandy Format" to the benefit of the United States. He made the proposal to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the international industrial fair in Hannover in April. This was reported by the website "ZN.ua" with reference to sources. However, the German leader replied with a polite refusal.Fort Russ
