“We can totally cut ourselves off from our main source of cheap energy, it totally won’t have any negative consequences like everyone with a brain predicted it would.”
Western sanctions and embargoes are becoming funnier and funnier as they continually overestimate their power. The west can’t understand the the rest of the world exists.
there’s only two tools in the Western toolkit: sanctions (for bad countries) and austerity (for their own countries). they get extremely confused when neither of them work, and then assume that they haven’t been pressing either hard enough and so just keep mashing them over and over again
When do only the most austere level of business with your ‘enemies’ that is called sanctions, and when you punish the poor with sanctions that is called austerity.
Don’t forget genocide!
nah man, Saturn is just in the wrong position, not their fault
Damn the tankies were right again? Don’t listen to them though the economy is actually great and Russia is totally gonna collapse any day now
The GDR would be doing much better.
It’s kind of funny how Belarus is now doing a lot better than most European countries precisely because they retained their Soviet style economy.
“when you can’t plunder externally, you must plunder internally!”
- Some chinese commentor I saw on a billiblli video talking about western inflation
LMFAO how I recall @[email protected] was ridiculing me last year and telling me that I’m an idiot tankie who doesn’t understand anything about German economy when I was pointing this out.
Tankies always seem to predict the future somehow.
we suffer from success.
What happen
Someone set up them the bomb.
We get signal.
Main screen turn on.
IT’S YOU!
Can anyone who speaks German fill us in on current talking points about this? Are any parties openly acknowledging the US bombing of the nordstream 2 pipeline and the effects it’s having on the German economy or is everyone just pretending that didn’t happen?
I speak German but i’ll be completely honest, i barely even follow any German news anymore, it’s just too infuriating and depressing. Literally everyone seems to be in complete denial and only preoccupied with the most irrelevant, minor local politics and mundane scandals while ignoring the big picture altogether. It’s like they think that by pretending that it’s still 2010 the house will stop burning down around them.
Jup, pretty much this. The most absurd propaganda is on every channel.
My partner really wanted to watch “the news” the other day for whatever reason so we watched the 2 minute Sunday morning Tagesschau. It sounded like the reddit popular feed, compressed into three boomer appropriate sound bites, and I got disproportionately frustrated.
Well at least it’s short. My SO sometimes watches the Heute Show which is almost 45 min of insufferable, smug liberal “satire”. I swear these comedy “news” shows are pound for pound ten times more effective propaganda brainwashing than consuming the same amount of mainstream media news. They pretend to be above partisan politics because they make some cheap jokes about “all sides” when they are in fact nothing but ideologically reinforcing the status quo. Half of the time all they do is ridicule anyone who is outside of the acceptable mainstream, plus a thousand different ways of saying “Putin bad, Russia bad”.
I get roped in to watching Heute Show once in a while as well. Insufferable describes it well… Like the tried and true The Daily Show format the comedy is used to make you take the opinion presented more seriously. It’s really quite insidious.
They pretend to be above partisan politics because they make some cheap jokes about “all sides” when they are in fact nothing but ideologically reinforcing the status quo.
It’s been a while since I watched it, but Oliver Welke (if it’s still him) always struck me as supporting the SPD even if he made fun of it a lot.
Die Anstalt used to be good, but I haven’t heard much good for the last 3 years from them and when I did occasionally tune in since, it was disappointing.
The effect on our economy is that energy got twice to thrice as expensive all of the sudden. And yes, people pretend it didn’t happen. Our government delivered a overspecific dementy when asked about their conclusions. Basically admitting that it was NATO.
Our government delivered a overspecific dementy when asked about their conclusions
Could you explain more or do you have a link to the statement I could try to run through google translate? I’m very curious to know how this information is being presented by the German government. This just feels like one of those historically important moments that gets a special blurb in a history textbook and I want to understand how everyone is responding to it
Can’t find it anymore T_T
Nordstream 2 is fairly irrelevant to the current situation. It was bombed while it was already shut down and all that did was ensure that Germany can’t buy gas from Russia in that way. Were all of the EU resume trading with Russia, then yes, Germany would be at a disadvantage.
The gas price hikes did do major damage at first, but it’s classic old capitalist profiteering that fueled inflation and the sustained rise in prices.
Liberals act as if the malaise of German economy (it’s not a dramatic collapse, but it’s mostly chugging along and slowly worsening) is all Russia’s fault, while the fascists and (the patsocs go “we should return to being friends with Russia to improve the economy”.
Neither solution offers anything but a return to the status quo, even if it is unfortunately an easy answer. At the same time, the 🚦 government and the right wing opposition are all eager to restore capitalist growth via capitalist methods and are as usual at the mercy of the bourgeois’ whims.
Wait a minute, I’ve seen this one before
Germany was bailed out in the 50’s after ww2. The world canceled half their debt and gave them reduced interest rates making it possible for germany to develop a strong economy because they had a lot of coal resources.
My take on this, they got bailed out too generously giving them an advantage over all the other countries who also suffered from the war.
They forgot were they came from and forgot they were once bailed out. Proof of that is when Greece needed a bail out during the recession years ago, it was germany who lead the terms for it asking too much too quickly from Greece. The rest of eu citizens were like “wtf germany, who do you think you are?”. (I explicitly say “citizens” because the eu parlement were just bootlicking mighty germany)
They then tried to boost their image again with their “wir schaffen das” during the migration crisis. The rest of eu citizens again like “wtf germany, who do you think you are?”.
The credibility of germany took a major hit because their interests do not lie with the people but with their image. If you spit in the faces of the people who made you big, you are not to be trusted and bad things will happen.
I might come back and expand on this but the reason is more that Germany is a vassal of the US, and the time has come to make that painfully clear.
Postwar West Germany developed on a combination of US cash infusion and migrant workers from poorer countries, primarily Italy and then Turkiye. The BRD needed to be upheld as a beacon of capitalism in contrast to the socialist DDR just to the east. With the annexation of the DDR there was a cheap and easy way for capital to expand yet again, staving off the worst of neoliberalism in the west for a time. Cheap Russian energy has fueled industry since then as well. Now it’s time for the managers of the hegemony to split Europe and Asia, for a united Eurasia would be too powerful. Thus Russia and Germany must be severed economically.
It’s not that the postwar bailouts were too generous, but that propping up Germany was economically valuable to the US, at least until the last fifteen years or so. It was then that they realized the new capitalist Russia would not be a vassal to the US, and put into motion their plan to destabilize it. Germany is a victim in this, albeit due to its comprador government a willing one.
For more analysis and thoughts on this topic Michael Hudson is really invaluable, both his books and regular articles and interviews on current events.
A decent way of looking at it, was that after ww2, the US intentionally instituted an international division of labor: they’d pump tons of money to create thriving consumer products industries and welfare states in germany and japan, while the US would focus more on the war industry, acting as capitalism’s international cop.
Especially w/ regards to west germany, it’s healthier economy signified to eastern europe the benefits of what capitalism can bring (not US imperialism, which was the real source of value), which had a big ideological impact.
To expand on that, once it was clear that Japan would overtake the US economically, the Japanese economy was gutted.
Now an economically united Germany and Russia would be too powerful, so that relationship must be gutted. Germany pays a heavier price for this than Russia does, as raw materials can generally be sold to other buyers, whereas finished goods cannot be produced without inputs.
It’s called “Schuldenbremse”. Government refused to invest into infrastructure for over a decade even though interest rates were literally negative and now everyone acts surprised when the old infrastructure is outdated and falling apart.
Getting rid of nuclear energy and becoming dependent on Russia’s natural gas is a great way to lose value as a country.
They also angered oil-producing countries in the Middle East and sanctioned Chinese-made solar panels.Maybe they found a way to bypass the Law of conservation of energy
Didn’t Shultz promise a speed up of transition to renewables after 2022, when sanctions began to hit?
*Scholz
Such a transition is not being able to be sped up. Merkels gang sabotaged important noth-south electricity lines, nuked investments in wind energy and solar energy and did fuck all to further develop nuclear energy. The current government puts out hail maries, but the infrastructure to enable those flatout does not exist, because the previous governments did not invest in it. And sometimes actively sabotaged it.
That shit can not be sped up, because there is nothing there.
Sorry, autocorrect did me dirty.
Merkels gang sabotaged important noth-south electricity lines
Could you elaborate on this, please? What’d they do?
They deliberately hindered the development of that connection, the result is that the german coastal regions have a overcapacity of wind energy production (big off-shore wind farms up there) while the south has to import energy from neighbouring countries. Because the northern output can not reach the south. And Guess where much of the german industry is? Not at the coast, or even northern Bundesländer.
I honestly don’t get why they did it, maybe some party members were invested in solar energy and wanted to keep prices high or something.
Amazing. Thanks!
Shoulda never let Germany have an Army after 1989
Greed.
To be more specific, US greed.
Ideal time for sneak attack on Russia, grab a bit of that sweet, sweet lebensraum.
they got disciplined by the hegemon and are begging to be stepped on more, which is pretty german tbh
