Below is the latest essay from the inimitable Hans Heckel, this time on the financial shenanigans of the EU elites.
JLH, who translated the piece, includes this note:
This is an analysis of, among other things “European” versus “German,” a rather different view of Macron than we are getting here, and a continental view of educational “mainstreaming” (and fun with politically correct euphemisms).
The translated essay from Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung:
State of Fools
How the sand got into the gears, why we can’t waste time, and why the schools are expected to produce idiots.
The Satirical Week in Review
by Hans Heckel
April 21, 2018Everything used to be simpler. 10, 20 or 30 years ago, when the EU wanted more money from German taxes, it only had express the wish to Bonn — later Berlin. The reply was friendly, and possibly with a solicitous query, “Could you use a little more?” The Bundestag politely stifled any objections. Basta.
Sand first drifted into these well-oiled gears with the save-the-euro shields. Resistance stirred within the Union [CDU/CSU], but even more within the FDP. Nonetheless, the party heads put their agenda through. For the Liberals [FDP], with a deadly result: So many FDP voters defected to the brand new AfD in the 2013 Bundestag elections that the FDP dropped out of parliament. When French President Emmanuel Macron announced his next big fishing expedition in German financial waters a year ago, the FDP remained reserved. Shortly thereafter it returned to the Bundestag with fanfare, while the Union fared badly and, to top it all off, the AfD took over as lead opposition.
That is the situation everyone has to adjust to. Everything mixed up.
Macron wants a European finance minister with an independent budget and a European currency fund. Further on the wish list of the southern European countries led by Paris are a bank union, a debt union and especially a common deposit protection fund through which Germans with savings accounts would help failed Italian banks.
Should the Grand Coalition simply agree to this, as it has done before, AfD and FDP would be the big winners. This calls for skillful handling. CDU/CSU say they want to put on the brakes. The Greens leader Annalena Baerbock sees this as sacrificing European solidarity, and so does the Euro-politician Elmar Brok and his party friend and EU commissioner, Günther Oettinger (“unacceptable”). Even the SPD has a part in the drama: Andrea Nahles is with Macron, while the new minister of finance, Olaf Scholz, on the contrary cites the doubt about what the skeptical voters would perceive and reward as a defense of German interests. To all the theatrics Angela Merkel says nothing, as usual.
From a distance, this looks like a real disagreement. And it is intended to, so that no one who voted for the Grand Coalition parties senses betrayal of his interests as a German taxpayer and savings account holder, and drifts into opposition.
Closer inspection reveals a significant detail. The critics within the Grand Coalition are only asking that satisfying Macron’s appetite, i.e., putting the Paris proposals into effect, should be slowed down. There is no question of a simple “No.”
In other words, the “critics” want to chop this indigestible entree into little bites and offer it to the German mouth piece by piece. That way, it won’t stick in the throat and the Germans will swallow it down. The end result is the same.
It works! So why are Brok, Baerbock and Co, so excited? It is the time problem. There may not be much time left for the bite-size method. Italy’s banks are teetering. Like the “Monte dei Paschi.” Which is said to have loaned an estimated 50 billion euros to people whose names no one knows. The word is, the money is as good as gone. At some point, the time will come when schlepping bankruptcy along will no longer work. Other Italo-banks are said to be deep in the debt morass — as good as done for. When there is a crash, which can happen at any time, someone has to pay the piper. And what does Macron need? He wants to make big reforms, but doesn’t have the money to soften it so his people don’t climb all over him. So he badly needs money, too.
There is no time to waste. Oettinger and Brok know that. They are sitting in Brussels and nervously watching the sweat-covered foreheads of their Italian colleagues.
And these two are Germans, which makes a significant difference. If an Italian politician goes to the EU, he acts as an Italian who wants to get as much from the EU as he can for Italy. If a German politician goes to Brussels, he acts as a “European,” who can get from Germany as much as he wants to for the EU.
As things are now, whenever the failing Italian banks go under, they should be “saved” by Rome or their Italian shareholders. What a scandal that would be! What an uproar! It would be good only for the populists. It would be far more “European” and far more “common-good” to take the money from a security fund made up of rock-solid German savings accounts. Right?
Europe is based, after all, on firm ideals, primary among which is a tried-and-true socialist rule which says: Distribution of wealth shall take place until everyone is equally poor — the lazy and the industrious, the frugal and the spendthrifts. (The only ones who get rich in this process are those who have been able to dig deep tributary canals to the main distribution stream, like the ominous debtors of the “Monte”-bank.[1] Money is never gone — it has just found another place to be.)
To preserve the solidarity of Europe, coming generations must be raised from the cradle in the socialist ideal of equity. Policy is at work with great determination on that ideal, clearing all obstacles from its path. One such obstacle is the director of the Bremen gymnasium. This lady is objecting to intellectually challenged children being mainstreamed in her secondary school (“inclusion”). Unless she is given the resources for the support of the handicapped.[2] If not, all the children will suffer — the handicapped as well as the normal[2]! The school director has made this complaint, because the state of Bremen has no intention of fulfilling these conditions. This impertinence reveals that the educator has failed to understand anything — or is simply malicious.
The children? It has nothing to do with them! The idea is to flatten high schools, so that ultimately only “unity schools” are left. And it is also the goal to lower the educational average to a level that is politically manageable. Anyone infected with math skills above the Simple Simon level tends, among other things, to doubt socialist models.
So it is a clever chess move to attach a class of 19 ordinary students to a contingent of five students who are intellectually handicapped, or, as one says now, students with “original demeanor.”[3]. Instruction will undergo basic change. Normal students and teachers will be so busy refining their “social skills,” that there will hardly be time for old-fashioned “fact learning.”
Students formed in this manner will, as citizens, never be a thorn in the side of their political leadership. They can blithely be plundered through “redistribution,” zero-interest loans or higher and higher taxes. If they should happen to notice, they can be fobbed off with some nonsensical explanation. They don’t see through it and have been taught since they were knee-high that adaptation and compliance on all sides count, and “accomplishment” and “knowledge” do not. Such colorless idiots are a real boon to their leaders.
Notes:
| 1. | ”Mountebank” derives from Italian. | |
| 2. | Social justice warriors please note — I just translated “Behinderten” — I can’t help it if the writer doesn’t know Newspeak. | |
| 3. | Taken from psychological terminology for people whose manner may be out of the ordinary. |
Choice an Idiot to run political and State affairs was characteristic Trade Mark for Communist regimes in ECC..It was call “Negative Selection”
The bigest Idiot and moron in power for a “big guns in shadow” was assurance theirs position won’t be challenge..
Since EU become Lefties Heaven and Spinelli Ideology plus Frankfurt School dogma become a religion,i/m no surprise that Idiots from Negative Selection are running the Show for “Deep Government “
The trouble with Germany being described as the shrewd monetary guardian… is that it is not true.
To understand this you have to look at how the Euro and Target2 are set up. The German surplus account has been generated by the southern countries going into debt, both privately and later publicly.
What does this mean? It means, very simply, that Germany has financed this debt via the Euro system – it is one half of the equation. It did this for profit ( a larger current account, to fund foreign purchase of its manufacturing hence own economic activity, political leverage, financial leverage, industrial monopoly by removing the fx difference occuring at public easing and by leveling price inputs…etc.) . This is all well documented, is known as a purposeful endeavour.
The trouble arises, the media trouble that is, when public financing by nations whose economies after the above became dysfunctional, was projected as devaluing the meaning of German rigour, and all sorts of corrupt or failed enterprise was dragged up as example of the need for Centralised Reform – common issuance of debt, budgetary supervision from Brussels etc.
Ironically Germany ( or its government) make this false show over mutualised debt issuance… the Euro is common debt – its failure ( no centralised lending) is going to cost the Germans their participation ( repayment) and political position ( as creditors) ….but it is the southern nations that are more nationalistic and who wince at outside Centralised Governance… so much so that any intervention has to be disguised.
So maybe you understand now that the whole show is a crock, and that citizens in all countries are being misled by their own leaders, virtually all of whom are well sold into the EU show in one way or another.
To put it another way, the current financial system is capitalism for socialists – it works until it ends up being simply administered by ration because there is no other workable meaning left to be found by a market that is completely saturated and controlled.
“Euro is common debt – its failure ( no centralised lending) is going to cost the Germans their participation ( repayment) and political position ( as creditors)”
…agreed. Let me add just one small thing to the equation: The Visegrad 4, with the exception of the Slovaks, all use their own currencies: Czech Crown, Polish Zloty, and Hungarian Forint.
The funny thing is that the Germans are creditors only so far as the German businesses bought up the Visegrad4 businesses heavily undervalued in the 90’s, so that for example Czechs now work for something like a quarter of standard German wage, but do twice the work. That is the source of German “prosperity” in last 25 years.
But the times, they are changing!
For the last 10 years, The Central Bank of the Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren spends awful lot of money just to keep Czech Crown undervalued to please their German overlords, but this maschine seems to be running out of steam. The word is out that the Czech Crown must go up, for they can hold it down no longer.
You see – its like with China. Dear Germans, yes we worked the works you wouldn’t work, and now we have a job and you don’t. Lazyness is a trap.
The most important point is that these countries own their own currency, it is vital to a nation. I spent most of the last thirty years in Spain and have watched closely the result of the Euro. It was too high for Spain, but the low national debt, private debt, and the speculative construction boom saw money pour into people’s pockets… they were suddenly rich (!) , becoming like the northern countries they felt inferior to in various ways….but as you know that ended, the private debt, then public debt, ballooned to keep the financial system afloat, and the whole country is at the mercy of ECB and EU policy now.
Before, the whole politics of the country was carefully balanced by regional banking – these were local policy and cultural institutions as much as banks. They had to compete into the boom, were often incompetent in that new setting, and have mostly been merged into a few big banks that are better with EU directorate and ECB policy.
No matter what a nation does with its rates, how it pegs its currency, it is still a national affair. That means that ultimately the policy decisions are in the hands of the nation, that responsibility ends in its own parliament. It means that policy makers are not bound by outside financial, and hence political, directive. I cannot underline how important this is in the workings of a nation, in the conscience of its people, in the allocation of political responsibility.
In Spain they walk around big now, but with their pants around their ankles. The political scene is only half a show because they all know they are restricted because of that. It is no good, perverse even – short of civil war or destruction of EU they know that they will not get their own currency and national direction back – and EU holds the power and money now, so it is able to own the political spectrum by simply making opposing directions economically unfeasable, is able to craft the country, more and more so as the traditional framework is destroyed.
Own currency, it is vital.
That is exactly my thinking as well – you see by heavy undervaluing the Czech Crown attracted a lot of “western” investment: Western Germany was much better economy than Czechoslovakia in 1990, but the knowledge base and the industry base was the same, except maybe for computers, Czechoslovakia always made cars, and MiG-21’s, and big turbines and transformators… So, the Czechoslovak economy was in shambles, but the know how wasn’t. Big German corporations smelled a big profit by moving the production to Czechoslovakia, not realising that in the long run they are just outsourcing their work-base. Many people critisized the Czech Central Bank for “stealing from the people’s pockets” – because of the undervaluation of currency, but in the long run – the last will be first and the first will be last.
Spain, on the other hand, got caught in the Euro. So now they have not much to work on: Greeks wanted to sell some islands, I heard. All because they can’t work their own currency, and neither can the financial markets cause their currencies to change values. European Central Bank – by its marxist view “all workers are the same” – simply hurt those who want their siestas in the sun, and don’t hurry to be rich.
The inclusion of idiots to schools was pushed through in the Czech Republic already, and it is a disaster! The lowest common denominator, the weakest link…
I don’t want to boast but I just happen to have had been better in mathematics than my proffessors, and I still remember the long boring classes during which I had to read adventure books or draw pictures of aeroplanes or shoot things around class – all for which I was heavily prosecuted… But I liked mathematics! But why should I listen to the stuff that is “obvious” for hours while the teacher wants to explain to the “weaker links”?
This kind of stuff brewed heavy hatred towards school in me…
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Titus Bouffonius | The Cultch
https://youtu.be/GYwsiZvyKL4