Lessons from Europe: What Is at Stake November 8th
A note to readers: this is an old post on the archive website for Promethean PAC. It was written when we were known as LaRouche PAC, before changing our name to Promethean PAC in April 2024. You can find the latest daily news and updates on www.PrometheanAction.com. Additionally, Promethean PAC has a new website at www.PrometheanPAC.com.
September 9 — What is presented below is a sketch of what is now occurring in Europe. It is offered here, not simply to portray the insanity of the European ‟nations,” but to make the point that the collapse and chaos we are now seeing in Europe is our future in America. And it is coming very, very soon. It is driven by the very same policies the Biden collective has imposed on the United States: deliberate shutdowns of modern energy sources, population reduction, a genocidal proxy war with Russia in the heart of Europe, propaganda and censorship mind control, all at the behest of a crazed oligarchy. The challenge—the necessity—confronting American citizens at this moment is that we now have 60 days to secure the victory in the November Congressional elections which can reverse all of this. That victory is not optional. Only the smashing of Washington’s Uniparty by Donald Trump and a citizenry awakened and determined to make America Great—starting with a scientific, technological, and cultural renaissance capable of lifting all boats—will lead us back from the cliff where most citizens know we are presently standing.
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Lessons To Be Drawn from Europe
We are now witnessing a suicide march in Europe. Europe’s physical economy is being ground down, just as Ukraine is sacrificed “to the last Ukrainian.” Energy prices are driven up 1000% and financial markets are bailed out, while families suffer, entire industrial sectors are shut down, inflation rips higher than in the US, and interest rates are increased. The captive nations of Europe, placed under the thumb of the British empire through NATO and the EU Maastricht Treaty, are disintegrating.
On Saturday, September 3, some 100,000 Czech citizens were out in force to protest in Prague’s central square over the sanctions policy against Russia, the soaring cost of energy, and the economic breakdown of the nation. The Czech government has just barely survived a no-confidence vote. Romania’s government had just declared a tax on power generators’ revenues and a cap on prices to small businesses and households.
On Monday, September 5, European natural gas futures jumped by another 30%. As reported in the European financial dailies and elsewhere, politicians now existentially fear hyperinflation, market chaos, and the rage of citizens driven deep into “energy poverty.” The Financial Times (London) reported that Kristian Ruby, secretary general of Eurelectric, which represents 3,500 European utilities, grimly intoned that the ballooning sums that electricity power producers were required to post as collateral, because of extreme price volatility in natural gas wholesale energy markets, had become a “grave concern.” The Euro currency briefly hit a twenty year low against the dollar.
All of this is on top of the ongoing shutdown of European chemical, metals, and manufacturing companies. These shutdowns are being driven by skyrocketing energy prices caused by the shutoff of Russian raw materials and energy to Europe, and the threat of more sanctions to come. Ammonia plants, critical for fertilizer production, began shutting down in September of 2021; and aluminum, steel, and zinc plants have followed the same course in 2022. Some of the world’s largest global chemical plants, such as BASF, are curtailing production. In March of 2022, BASF warned that it would be forced to shut its plants in Germany entirely if gas supplies dropped below 50% of its needs.
This mad scramble within the EU to keep the rotting ship afloat, includes:
Credit lines from European nations to the power utilities. Fearing a paralysis of their power markets and spreading domestic financial crises, over last weekend both Finland and Sweden announced emergency billion Euro credit lines to their electricity generators—before their parliaments could even meet. In July, Germany had already provided Uniper SE, the Germany-based energy generation and energy trading company, with 15 billion Euros to stay afloat. Germany’s Scholtz government scrambled to announce a 65 billion Euro bailout fund to reduce energy prices to German households and small businesses. And it announced that it would impose a “windfall tax” on electricity generators profiting from skyrocketing prices. This tax (a mere fig leaf) would all be used to fund Germany’s bailout. Austria and Switzerland announced similar measures on Monday, September 5.
Emergency credit lines are being made available to commodity trading companies. This was forced by a systemic crisis in the commodity trading markets that is already seeing trading companies go under. The “clearinghouses” that serve as trading floors for oil and gas futures emphasize that they cannot, legally, adjust their algorithms that calculate risk in the now volatile market. That is, trading companies have to fork over more collateral to stay in and hold increasingly risky positions, unless the EU intervenes to “modify” their collateral requirements. So much for “market efficiencies.” On Monday and Tuesday, frenzied market players warned that even mere talk of price caps by European governments was potentially “dangerous” and could trigger a further toppling of dominoes.
Ditto for financial derivatives tied to Euro energy. According to Equinor’s executive vice president, $1.5 trillion was a “conservative” estimate of the margin funds required to stabilize the insane pyramid of side bets that make up this one part of the quadrillion dollar global derivatives market. Equinor is not some fly-by-night; it is the Norwegian government’s state-owned energy trading company.
UK Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss has announced that 150 billion British pounds and more, to be financed by more debt, will be thrown at the self-inflicted energy crisis; this as the UK’s central bank, the Bank of England, has pronounced to its British subjects that they face “recession” through 2023 and stagnation thereafter. Interest rates are being hiked as the entire domestic economy implodes.
Additionally, as the chemical, steel, ammonia, and other industries of Europe shut down, and with inflation rates now officially higher than in the US, the European Central Bank is announcing interest rate increases that will only make everything worse. The EU’s massive money printing comes at the very moment the British Empire’s central banks—including the Fed and the European Central Bank—are raising interest rates to “stop inflation”! How does that work? Where does the money come from?
The winter is just ahead, and it’s almost certain to be a very long and cold winter.
Biden and Europe in a Suicidal Flight Forward Against Russia
All of these developments were triggered by the recent G-7 finance ministers’ meeting. On Friday, September 2, 2022, the G-7 Finance Ministers issued a statement confirming their joint intention to implement a global price cap on Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products. This was cheered by the Biden collective, with Treasury Secretary Yellen saying the administration would move to implement its “preliminary guidance on the implementation of the price cap in September.”
Russia’s President Putin has repeatedly denounced these European and American actions as ‟absolutely stupid.” Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, President Putin stated that, despite the fact that Russia’s natural gas producer, Gazprom, was forced to completely halt pumping on the Nord Stream pipeline due to ‟identified damages,” Russia was prepared to turn on the completed Nord Stream II natural gas pipeline “if necessary.” However, Germany is still insanely refusing to permit the brand new Nord Stream II to send natural gas into Germany.
The European Union’s President Ursula von der Leyen (elected by whom?) stated on September 7th that the European Commission will propose a price cap on remaining EU imports of Russian gas. This will drive up natural gas futures market prices even further. And this will occur alongside the already imposed 15% “voluntary” EU cut in electricity use, initiated for all EU countries in July. Many European leaders are emphatic that yet another cap on Russian fuel—this time on natural gas prices—will prompt Gazprom to cut natural gas supplies to those countries, as their existing contracts would be broken by the EU-imposed “cap.”
According to von der Leyen’s plan, EU non-natural gas electricity generators will now be ordered to pay much of their ‟unexpected profits” into the EU Commission’s bailout fund. However, these ‟solidarity contributions” will cover only a small part of the costs of the EU’s mad bailouts. Meanwhile, von der Leyen and the Brussels bureaucracy—in lockstep with Biden’s agenda in the US—intend to double down on imposing a fascist green “transition” to a post-industrial order fueled by 16th century “renewable” energy, including biomass (chopping wood!), wind, and solar.
The Case of Ursula von der Leyen
Who is this Ursula von der Leyen, née Ursula Albrecht?
Here one can open a window onto the poorly-disguised power of Europe’s feudal oligarchical families, over the culture and political economy of continental Europe. The Albrecht family—for more than 500 years—was among the hübsche Familien (‟lovely families”) of the Electorate and Kingdom of Hanover, and their status placed them in aristocratic positions in German society and politics. (The Kingdom of Hanover was in a state of “personal union”—sharing a monarch—with the United Kingdom, starting with King George I, from 1714 to 1837). Ursula is also a descendant of the notorious Joseph Wragg (1698-1751), one of the largest British slave traders in colonial America. Her Great Grandfather, Carl Albrecht, was a “cotton merchant,” and his wife was the daughter of James H. Ladson, owner of 200 slaves at the time of the Civil War, and an avid supporter of Southern secession. Here we cannot dwell further on her family’s extensive slave trading and—later—Nazi ties.
Ursula's father, Ernst Albrecht, was selected to be one of the European Union’s very first civil servants, and later governor of a German state. When Ursula Albrecht (now Ursula von der Leyen) was in college and a group of radical left-wing terrorists called the Red Army Faction were unleashed in a terrorist crime spree, Ernest Albrecht, concerned that his family would be a target of the RAF, sent his daughter to study abroad. She enrolled at the London School of Economics and lived in London under the protection of Scotland Yard.
In 1986, she married physician Heiko von der Leyen, a member of the von der Leyen family, ennobled in 1786. She was elected to the German parliament as a member of the CDU and held cabinet positions. Ursula von der Leyen became Germany’s Secretary of Defense (2013 to 2019) under Chancellor Merkel. It was French President Emmanuel Macron who then promoted her for the Presidency of the European Union, praising her “profoundly European culture,” and saying that, “she has the DNA of the European community.”
Is it any wonder, then, to see Ursula von der Leyen, today demanding the top-down imposition of a barely disguised feudal and oligarchical “green/brown” fascist perspective? It has not been imposed from outside, it is bred from within. None of this, however, falls in the realm of historical trivia, for in all essentials, what is being done in the EU is the same program that the Biden collective is now determined to force upon the United States.
America is Next
The Biden collective’s trillions of new monetary injections, as with the just-signed, green and destructive “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” combined with Fed central bank interest rate hikes, is designed to save some of the top “1%”, but otherwise will spread “energy poverty” and chaos throughout the land. Equity markets, based on corporations with soaring corporate debt with unsustainable price-earnings ratios, will collapse, even as foreign investors flee into American securities.
The dollar has been rising in relative value in international currency speculation, with rising interest rates and increasing US exports of gas and oil to Europe. However, even now, as Europe implodes and the currencies of virtually every other western or developing sector nation devalue, the inflated US dollar is shrinking the remaining export markets, especially for our US manufacturers. Our entire remaining manufacturing export potential is going up in smoke, striking at the remaining shreds of our productive agro-industrial base. So, the US trade deficit will grow, as “Biden” anti-industry policies, along with rising Fed interest rates, contract US physical production and productive employment, in everything from housing to machine tools. Unless our path is changed radically for the better, real wages and real family incomes will continue to precipitously decline.
Clearly, the British Empire and the leaders of the EU are criminally insane. But inside the Beltway, this is also the state of the DC swamp, and the Biden collective is plunging ahead. What is now required is an Emergency Rescue Program for America, and LPAC will be releasing marching orders on this in the days ahead. We must change our course. This is only possible if we win the upcoming Battle of November 8, 2022.